New brooms are out all over the place From the Rock . . .

An election is due in Newfoundland and Labrador later in the month, and at this stage, polls show the Conservatives under opposition leader Danny Williams with a healthy lead over Premier Roger Grimes’s Liberals.

If the lead holds, it’s likely to be a large Conservative majority in the House of Assembly, marking yet another change of the guard in Canadian provincial politics.

It’s probably a hopeful one, because the Liberal government is wonderful tired, and evidently the electors are wonderful tired of them too. The party has had things much its own way for years, and a change in government should be good for the province.

The New Democrats don’t delude themselves into thinking they are a government-in-waiting in Newfoundland, and even Newfoundlanders who would never think of voting New Democrat give leader Jack Harris credit for his performance in opposition; he has shown that he belongs in the House of Assembly, and, given the degree of personal ire between the two larger parties, it might raise the level of debate there if he had a few more members with him.

Roger Grimes may have been a Brian Tobin apparatchik, but it needs to be said he was the premier that made the deal on the development of the Voisey’s Bay nickel deposit in Labrador. In doing so, he proved himself much more far-sighted than his predecessor.

The mineral industry should keep in mind that in previous scraps in the House of Assembly over the Voisey’s lease, the Conservatives were more anxious to hold the government to Tobin’s promise of “not one drop” of Voisey’s ore going out of the province for processing than to encourage it to get the project on the rails. And their platform explicitly says the requirement for processing “to a finished metal product” inside the province whenever that is economically feasible will stay in the Mineral Act.

Within that frame, though, the Conservatives’ platform does have some sensible plans for encouraging mineral development in Newfoundland. They propose to tie royalty and tax rates to market prices and to include some credit against that for processing activity done in the province. They also are ready to secure preferences for local suppliers, a measure that can have its costs, but also one that creates an economic environment in which, over the long run, it’s easier to do business. Providing better exploration information to prospectors and small companies is part of both parties’ plans — and when was the last time two contending political parties so much as thought about the matter?

We suspect Newfoundland may be in capable hands next month.

Over in the opposite corner of the continent, we note that our erstwhile whipping boy, Gray Davis, has been tossed out of his job as governor of California after a recall vote. Voters replaced him with the likable actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a “socially liberal” Republican.

Davis may have deserved his fate; he was a genuinely disastrous governor. But in the end what sank him was a fiscal crisis that was not of his making. Through the proposition and referendum system dear to Californian politics, the state government has been stuck with the task of spending on a series of programs, mandated by voter propositions, while at the same time fitting everything into a regime of tax-limiting measures that were mandated by other propositions.

The Californian public, having decided that those scoundrels in Sacramento were not to be trusted with the public purse, went on to prove that they themselves couldn’t be trusted with basic budgetary arithmetic. Davis may have been a political insider who rose to become an incompetent governor, but nobody, no matter how competent, can make the propositions add up to anything but a negative number. Spare some sympathy for Davis — and for his successor, who may find the job a headache he scarcely imagined.

When it comes to mining, Davis should not be a particularly tough act to follow, even if the new governor’s only exposure to the mining industry was in Total Recall. The trouble is, the only time the governor is likely to have anything more to do with mining is in using a veto on some of the more foolish measures sent up from the legislature. If California is to become more hospitable to extractive industry, the impetus will have to come from the floor of the assembly or senate.

But as we said before, California can always do without a mining industry, and Californian politicians have shown they’re happy to let mining do without California too.