Long ago, so long ago no one remembers when, they did away
with Virtue in Newfoundland politics. To be on the safe side, they
slit the throats of her twins, Truth and Justice, and tossed the little corpses
on top of their mother's still-moving body before leaving the three in a
shallow, unmarked grave in the woods.
Newfoundland politics is a daily metaphor of that
Original Sin. This fall, we are seeing the crime repeated everywhere with more
people drawn in than ever before. Such is the power of modern media. Such
is the state of democracy that mortal sin, like political power, is no longer
the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful. Everyone can get their
taste.
There is no monument to Virtue and her murdered children but
if Muskrat Falls is ever finished, we can perhaps use it to remember what
happened, who was involved, and why. That is the only way you can
reconcile, the only way you can sincerely balance the accounts -
financial, historical, political - one with the other.
Des Whalen is president of the St. John’s board of
trade. Des unveiled a debt clock on
Monday. This is the board of trade's new campaign against the provincial
government's staggering debt burden. Des isn’t interested in truth and
reconciliation. This is no time for
pointing fingers, Des told reporters. No need to blame anyone. Let's just
deal with this debt before it bankrupts us all. Let us deal with this
before someone comes and takes our government away from us.
Noise from Muskrat Falls and the current
round of protests drowned Des out in the news lineup. There’s a delicious irony in that since
Muskrat Falls accounts on its own for $15 billion of new public debt. Altogether we are somewhere around $29
billion in liabilities according to the information in the Auditor General’s
reports. The Board of Trade doesn’t include that in their tally, for some silly
reason. Likely it has to do with the truth of Muskrat Falls being a wee bit too
inconvenient for its members to reconcile with their current debt-aware
position.
There are other ironies.
Or are they hypocrisies? Anyhow, Des
is the current chair of the only business association in the developed
world to vote against free markets and free enterprise. They did it in
2012 with their endorsement of Muskrat Falls. A key element of
the project is the monopoly on power wholesaling given to Nalcor. Otherwise
people could find cheaper electricity elsewhere, you see. Cheaper electricity is everywhere and if you
had half a click in 2012 or even in 2010 you could have seen that.
If people found cheaper electricity, Nalcor could not
deliver the guaranteed increase in electricity rates needed both to pay off the
loans and give the government the "revenue stream" Nalcor promised.
The board of trade supported Muskrat Falls because some of
its key members were from Nalcor. Other members thought they could make a fast
buck off the public treasury and well, the rest just went along with the whole
thing because everyone else was backing Muskrat Falls too.
Muskrat Falls is the most expensive source of
electricity for the province that anyone could find. The board of trade
supported the project without noticing what it would do to electricity rates,
how doubling electricity rates in the province would make local business less
competitive and less profitable. We have seen the result already as one ice
cream manufacturer shut it doors to consolidate off the island, where costs
will be cheaper.
You can see why Des and his crowd might not be interested in
truth even as the Great Reconciliation looms over his head. At least, they have
made a nod to the humiliation we would face having lost self-government twice
in a century to financial incompetence. Last time, we were headed for the financial
rocks, the St. John's Board of Trade were among the loudest voices crying for
the British to take away our government. Take a break from democracy is
how they put it. Thinking only of themselves, the little shits thought
that a British-appointed government would just keep the gravy train running for
the local business community and cut off the people outside town who were not
fit for running a government in the first place. Never mind that, in
truth, it had been the little shits and their little shits that had actually
been running the place.
They got a rude surprise. When the government money
stopped flowing to their pockets, the board of trade turned against the
Commission government. The condemned it at every turn. The final straw for
the old townie elites was when the Commission allowed people from Labrador to
vote and, worst of all to some ways of thinking, set the rule that a
member from a district to the National Convention had to live in the district. At
that point they started the nonsense about a conspiracy to deliver the country
to the Canadians.
Basically, they were like Trump now: faced with certain defeat, they did
everything in their power to spread the lie that the whole thing was fixed. You can still hear echoes of that these days. If
you haven't read Greg Malone's account of Confederation, by the way, pick it up
if only to go through the part where he condemns the Commission policy. A
travesty to Greg's way of thinking since it kept the best and brightest of the
country - that is, townies - from controlling the Convention and the country's
agenda once again. Greg could run for public office following in the
footsteps of another television comedian turned politician. You can see
the slogan: Make Newfoundland Great Again.
Anyway, the noise
from Muskrat Falls carried over into Tuesday. Lots of
people involved with the circus that is the protest talk about truth and
reconciliation but that has more to do with political fashion than any reality.
The truth is that the government and protesters agree on most things.
Both want Muskrat Falls to keep going, at all costs.
It is the greatest make-work project in history and there are still lots
of bucks to be made. They are also not that far apart on methylmercury,
either.
The current crisis over Muskrat Falls is like everything
else about that mess and about the public debt:
we got here because the folks behind it did everything but tell the
truth, whether it is about their objectives or - in the case of New Democrats -
what their actual position is or was. The truth is that they never really did
anything to stop it, not when they could have had a chance of success. In the beginning, the local Dippers wouldn’t speak out against
the project because it was popular and because the Dipper government in Nova Scotia
would get free electricity from it. Later
on, they only made out like they opposed because, after all, the thing was
still popular.
On Twitter, folks in the south are playing out their
own agenda, which may only coincidentally have something to do with what the people
of Labrador are concerned about. There are all sorts of self-described
experts on there, each of them as knowledgeable about events
in Labrador as Brad Cabana is an expert on events in the Middle
East. Incidentally, bored reporters turn up all sorts of weird stuff as they
kill time. Finding out that English-language Russian television uses Brad
Cabana as an international affairs
expert has set the bar pretty high on bizarre for the foreseeable
future.
In many respects, the current crisis *is* a crisis because
the provincial government made it so. Dwight Ball's half-assed effort to
resolve the occupation, his half-assed excuses when reporters ambushed
him sneaking back from a quickie trip to Florida, and then the complete
lock-down of the Confederation Building for a simple meeting seem like actions
designed to make a simple situation worse. The heavy-handed security
arrangements, entirely unnecessary in every respect, just confirmed the
perception many hold that Ball is not just weak but frightened.
This post is finished at around 10:00 PM Tuesday night.
The meeting is still going on and thus far there is no sign it will end
soon. There is a possibility the thing can end positively. Indeed, the
longer they talk the more likely it is that the provincial government will cave
in to demands to do more clearing of the reservoir area before final flooding.
No matter what happens, though, we are only a few days or a few
weeks away for another crisis likely related to the budget and likely
exacerbated by political fumbling. This is the political curse that has
followed Newfoundlanders since the original sin.
-srbp-
The original version of this post was a draft that included repetitious
sections that didn’t fit together properly.
It was a raw version and should never have seen the light of day. SRBP apologizes for the error.
This edited version contains all the major elements of the
original and remains the post as intended.
