Busy, busy

Some more interesting morsels from the Inquisition Perry Mason exercise:

Elizabeth Matthews: …we get a crisis in our office every week, sometimes several times a week, and it turns out, after the act, upon reflection, with more information, to be significantly diminished. So that's just the nature of how our office works.


Brian Crawley: The office receives, over the run of a year, anywhere from 125,000 to 150,000 contacts, so it's an incredibly busy place to work from the time you get there to the time you leave, and then some.

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In addition to Cabinet Secretariat, the Premier is also very active on a national level in matters of intergovernmental affairs, so he would, I think, last year, have received well in excess of 400 submissions from the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat ; that would be used to prep him for any issue should he decide to participate in on a national level. And he is quite active on that front, so again, that's a fairly busy place.

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Well I'd normally, I mean, the Premier is a busy man, I don't beat down his door every time an issue comes up unless it is something of life safety, you know

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So much information comes into the Premier's office. It's an incredibly busy place to work. The environment there is unlike anywhere that I've ever worked before, and you know, I think most people would be quite shocked by the actual volume of work that goes through there.


Danny Williams: Christine indicated to me that she cleared out that week — not cleared out, cleared the deck that week and was not in that week, which tells me, and she said it to me, I didn't say it to her, that in fact that indicates that that was one of those weeks in the summer when you tried to leave as much open as you could, because during the summer, apart from the Premier's Conference, like I try to spend as much time as I can in Newfoundland and Labrador for obvious reasons, depending on what weeks, what weather weeks you strike.

[What about during the fall, winter, and spring? — ed.]

So I tried to keep some flexibility, and normally what I try to do on a week like that is certainly keep the book ends, which I would say would be Monday and Friday, and then because of demands for things like you see, the Hebron briefing and other appointments, I will book a day in the middle of the week and kind of stack that up and then leave the others open. So that if it happens to be free and the weather happens to be good and I can grab a couple of days in the summer, then I will do that.

I do know, after having talked to her and my staff, that in fact we were preparing for the New England Governors' Conference, which was a big thing for me then. It was in the early stages of being Premier, and that was something that I had to prepare for. The Hebron briefing, as you can see, was there as well. So the only other duty on that particular day, on the Tuesday, which I was committed to was a swearing in ceremony for Clayton Forsey. So that was at 11:00, so assume in the 10:40 to 11:00 range, I would have gone to Government House. That's the best reconstruction of that week. So it's very likely, and I can't say for sure because I don't remember, Monday and Tuesday and perhaps Monday and Thursday and Friday and perhaps Tuesday afternoon, I wasn't even in the office. But that doesn't mean that I was out of contact, because any day that I am not in the office, I am always in constant communication. Either my staff will contact me or I will contact them and the only exception to that rule is once in a blue moon, if I happen to be in a remote area, like a salmon river, for example, that has no contact.