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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2016
THE PEOPLE’S PAPER
ECONOMY Yearlong Yuletide
St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador
MUST
reads LOCAL
Vol. 138 No. 219
Christmas shopping no longer confined to November and December
B9
n POLITICS
Things will get better: Ball BY JAMES MCLEOD THE TELEGRAM
Huggable Hatchimals Every Christmas time there seems to be that one toy a majority of children of a certain age are asking A4 Santa to bring for them.
COLUMN
Towards the start of the traditional year-end interview with The Telegram, Premier Dwight Ball did a pretty good job of summing up Newfoundland and Labrador politics in 2016. “One of the easiest things for other politicians to do is blame another politician,” he said. Ball was talking about the opposition parties, who have hammered him for the past 12 months for perceived dishonesty, broken promises and dithering. But the observation cuts the other way, too, as Ball explained why he needed to deliver a tough budget and abandon those election promises. “I just compare it to if I was a first responder showing up to an emergency scene: the first thing you’ve got to do is secure the site,” Ball said. “We had to secure this province. It was as simple as that. We could never move on with some of those commitments without making sure
JOE GIBBONS/THE TELEGRAM
Premier Dwight Ball alongside the Christmas tree in the main lobby of the Confederation Building on Tuesday, Dec. 20.
the financial house was in order.” The emergency scene that Ball is describing, of course, is the budget situation left by
the previous Tory government, with a deficit of more than $2 billion, and a hydroelectric megaproject in Labrador that was well on the way to being
officially classified as a “boondoggle.” On the budget, Ball fully admits he could have done better. See LIBERAL, page A3
n Blade runners Internet ills Russell Wangersky: For me, the seeds of the current epidemic of fake news, the so-called post-truth era, starts in the advent of digital media, and with the way the already-existing print media made its way onto the web. In other words, it’s my fault. Well, mine, and, with me, the rest of the ink-stained wretches. And our bosses. B4
THINGS TO
know BOUND FOR BURIN
JOE GIBBONS/THE TELEGRAM
In the summer of 1817, John Lewis, an ordained preacher on behalf of Methodism and a son of England, was directed by the Methodist organization here to leave Port de Grave, travel to St. John’s and there take a boat for Burin A5 to spread the word. $1.86
Despite a chill in the air on Boxing Day, a number of people ventured out to The Loop in Bannerman Park. Nick Sexton and Kathy Mentier, and their children, Jack Sexton, 3 and Ruby Sexton, 7, make their way around The Loop on Monday afternoon. They currently live in Toronto, but made the trek east for this year’s Christmas holidays with the Sexton family. Sexton works on the popular national TV show “The Rick Mercer Report.”
n PETS
Stuck in a lattice Rojo, a cat from Corner Brook, using up his nine lives BY DIANE CROCKER TC MEDIA CORNER BROOK
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If cats really have nine lives, Marlene Barnes figures Rojo has used up a few of his. The cat from Curling has
a way of getting himself into some strange predicaments, the latest occurring during a Dec. 16 snowstorm when Rojo got his head caught in a piece of lattice. Barnes has been caring for Rojo for more than a year. She thinks he’s a feral cat, but no one is really sure where he came from before ending up in Barnes’ neighbourhood at least two years ago. See ‘THERE’S NO,’ page A2
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Rojo the cat found himself in quite a predicament, stuck in a piece of lattice, during a recent storm.
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