Talk:Tim Houston

Premier Designate

Houston is not yet premier-designate, that title is specifically used for when he has been officially invited to form Government. This was specifically stated when Doug ford was invited to form government in Ontario in 2018. "whom she invited to form a new government, which he accepted to do. Mr. Ford may now be referred to as Premier-designate." WanukeX (talk) 02:04, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Just adding on here, adding premier-designate also goes against WP:CRYSTAL, we put people in offices when they take office, not when the media says so or when it is a near certainty they WILL take office.

CBC news has already called the election for the NS PC party & has already declared Houston to be the premier-designate. It's always been the practice to go by CBC news as a source, in these situations. Why change that practice, now? GoodDay (talk) 02:35, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm mostly referring back to the situation around the 2021 Federal Election Name Change Discussion on that Talk page. In that one CBC Stated something but we opted to wait under WP:CRYSTAL and WP:NORUSH, in this case, there are clear precedents for what officially makes someone Premier Designate, that aren't reliant on the CBC Stating anything. WanukeX (talk) 02:43, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I suspect the same practice will take place on September 20, 2021 concerning election results. The example you're giving, if when an election date is set. GoodDay (talk) 03:14, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I've also removed that text, as the CBC article referenced [1] didn't seem to use the "premier-designate" term anywhere. I expect the article can be updated and easily cited in the next day or so. SECProto (talk) 04:09, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

No doubt it will be, so removing premier-designate will prove a waste of time, IMHO. GoodDay (talk) 04:56, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Just to be clear, while it's true that we don't denote him as the incumbent premier until he takes office, there is most certainly not a rule that the winner of the election cannot even be denoted as a -designate or -elect in the interim — in fact, we essentially have to do that, precisely because anonymous IPs who don't know how any of this works will swoop in and prematurely denote him as the incumbent if we don't beat them to the punch by already having a designate field in place. Bearcat (talk) 16:21, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

He is Formally Premier-Designate Now, https://twitter.com/LtGovNS/status/1428375282587742208?s=20 "His Honour invited Mr. Houston to form a Government, at which point he became Premier-Designate", for future provincial/federal elections, as I said at the top of this section, being Premier/PM-Designate Relies on being invited to Form Government. WanukeX (talk) 03:57, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

But, if you wait those two or three days? You have IPs & less informed editors trying to put Premier of X into the infobox, before the person is appointed to the office. GoodDay (talk) 04:59, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Not all that difficult, there are mechanisms in place you can use to tell people things and if they ignore it you can just hit undo. EG, things like <.!-- Please see talk page before changing this--.>.WanukeX (talk) 05:13, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Which used to be exactly what we did, and which completely, utterly failed to ever prevent the problem because anonymous nincompoops either ignored or disregarded them and turned it into one to three full weeks of constant reversion-warring anywhere up to 100 times per day, and it is not acceptable or reasonable to expect Wikipedia editors to put up with that. The only thing that has ever prevented the problem has been the use of a temporary "first minister-designate" entry in the infobox as soon as the winner of the election was apparent, regardless of whether the person was "officially" entitled to use that title yet. Wikipedia is not governed, incidentally, by any responsibility to sit on officialism for the sake of officialism — for example, we do not sweep through every electoral district article to mark the seat as "vacant" during an election campaign, even though it is vacant in the legal sense: we change them only when the election results are in, because the amount of work involved in being officialese about it is not manageable and thus not reasonable for anybody to expect us to take on. So until such time as you can show a genuinely serious prospect of the LG potentially calling on somebody other than Tim Houston to become the new premier-designate, the question of whether he's officially the premier-designate or just presumptively the premier-designate has absolutely no bearing on how we should or shouldn't handle it here. Bearcat (talk) 21:08, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

References