The provincial government has been on its current course
since about 2007.
There were three elements to the Conservatives agenda under Danny
Williams. They changed somewhat over
time but these are the elements that dominated from 2003 to 2015.
Above all else, Williams’ goal was to build the Lower
Churchill. That was to be his one,
lasting accomplishment. Williams would
build what no one else had been able to build.
While it was rationalised as a provincial project with lasting
significance, the way it finally rolled out confirmed the extent to which the
Lower Churchill was intensely personal.
To build the Lower Churchill, Williams would turn
Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro into an energy corporation to rival
Hydro-Quebec. And to help fund it, Williams would acquire so-called equity
stakes in offshore projects.
The second element of Williams’ agenda was political
hegemony. It would take him three years
to get rid of his internal rivals or neutralise them. His external rivals disappeared in the 2007
general election. Williams and the
Conservatives accomplished this goal several ways, not the least of which was
his effort to control information from government. That’s poll goosing and his restrictions on
public access to government information.
For our purposes, though, the key element of hegemony was
the roll played by public spending. Spending was a means to secure political
support. The message was reinforced by
the way the Conservatives made announcements in public and quiet openly tied
spending to political support in a return to a very open yet very old-fashioned
system of patronage.
Spending also became a substitute for other policies. While the Conservatives had a fairly
well-developed section of their 2003 platform committed to economic development
and diversification, in power, the Conservatives spent money. The Conservatives
spent money to the extent they had it initially to buy back public support lost
in 2004’s cuts and freeze. They spent
public money to substitute for loss of private sector jobs in the fishery in
places like Hermitage or in forestry in places like Stephenville.
After Williams secured internal hegemony, that is, within
his party, Williams and his close associates like Tom Marshall spent money to
secure political dominance externally by winning all the seats in the House of
Assembly in the 2007 general election.
They didn’t achieve that goal but they achieved the goal of silencing
any political opposition to their agenda.
The third element provided the fuel for the second element
of the agenda, namely spending. Oil
money became the fuel for the spending program once prices climbed to insane
heights coinciding very fortunately for the Conservatives with peak oil
production in the local offshore.
But oil wasn’t always going to be the rocket fuel that took
Danny Williams’ popularity to stellar levels.
The Conservative agenda was originally driven by more federal
money. The closer Newfoundland and Labrador
got to being a financially self-reliant province, the more some policy
advocates tried to find new ways of keeping the province dependent on federal
transfers. They created the fiction that the federal government was taking
provincial oil royalties, effectively breaking the 1984 Atlantic Accord. The fiction was a key part of Vic Young’s
Blame Canada commission appointed by the Liberals under Roger Grimes but used
by Danny Williams and the Conservatives as an integral part of their
platform. It offered a litany of all the
old nationalist grievances and Williams’ long experience as an n accident
injury lawyer taught him how to exploit victimhood for financial gain. It was a match made in heaven.
Except for one small problem.
The federal government isn’t an insurance company. Neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats
were truly susceptible to Williams’ tactic of trying to cause the maximum
amount of superficial pain so that the insurer will offer a sufficiently hefty “frig-off”
payment.
Williams famously said that every principle converts to
cash. It was his core operating principle in politics. And that was certainly
true. He sold his principle on the
offshore for a tiny fraction of what it would have been worth. The thing is, Williams’ cynical statement
really admitted that there were no principles.
There was only cash.
Williams lost badly in his first effort to extort money from
the federal government. He convinced the
punters in his own province he’d won but the record is clear. The federal government offered him a fixed
pot of cash for a limited period. The
federal government did not waiver in its position. Williams grew increasingly
hysterical in his words and actions in public but continued to negotiate on the
basis of the federal offer he initially rejected in May 2004.
Ultimately, Williams failed.
He took what the federal government offered. There were two key differences in the deal
Williams rejected in October and the one he signed in January 2005. The most important one is that he lost the
possibility of a renewal of the agreement after eight years. The other was that the federal one-time
cheque increased slightly. The
difference in the cash value was based solely on what price of oil they used to
calculate the value of the deal from 2005 until the point they expected the
province would no longer qualify for Equalization.
That didn’t stop Williams from persisting with efforts to
get more money from Ottawa. He carried
on through the subsequent Equalization talks but even his celebrated promise to
campaign across Canada to defeat Stephen Harper turned out to be a lot less
than promised. Williams limited his
efforts to Newfoundland and Labrador, as the federal Conservatives went on to
win re-election and, subsequently, a majority government.
The failure to get extra federal cash didn’t affect the Conservative
spending agenda, though. Through to
2015, the Conservatives nearly doubled public spending. They increased the size of the public service
by 33% between 2005 and 2011. They
financed it initially with oil money but later resorted to larger and larger rounds
of borrowing, whether for core government operations or for Muskrat Falls.
Danny Williams left the premier’s job in 2010 but the
Conservatives continued on the same policy trajectory. That’s because both Williams and the group
around him continued to dominate the party until the end. There were some signs of change. New politicians elected in 2011 championed a
different approach to European trade talks, for example. Some of their dispute with Kathy Dunderdale
and the Old Hands spilled out into public, but ultimately the Hold Man and his
ways triumphed.
The Coleman Fiasco confirmed that Williams was still in control of the party, though. Even Paul Davis, newly elected leader in the wake of Williams’ Coleman fiasco, couldn't escape the inertia of a decade and Williams. Davis tried the same ham-fisted negotiating tactics on the European trade deal Danny Williams had worn out a decade earlier.
Davis failed just as Williams had failed. Davis’ failure might even have been worse
because even as he lost strategically, Williams at least at a couple of billion
dollars to soothe his bruised ego. It was a fitting end to the Conservative
term since it confirmed that a decade later ideas that hadn’t worked before
still didn’t work.
Some respects, though, the faint glimmers of a spark of life
in the Conservative party under Paul Davis were like the signs of life in the
party under Danny Williams before Williams got rid of any sources of new
ideas. The government put Doug
House to work in 2006, for example, with the task of creating a new
economic development scheme for the province.
He and his work simply vanished, just as the Sustainable Development Act
disappeared the following year. Danny Williams was only interested in one thing. Everything else - like the fishery or economic development policy - just carried on the same stagnant course.
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