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30 September 2019

Disconnects and Infection #nlpoli


The handful of people who pay close attention to politics in Newfoundland and Labrador are probably scratching the barely-healed-over scabs on their head in the latest round of bewilderment.

Tory leader Ches Crosbie announced last week he had named a philosophy professor at Memorial University to head up a task force of people he didn’t name - because he hasn’t figured out who they are - to develop a strategy to combat climate change.  Philosophers are widely known for their skills at developing effective public policy, by the way.

Anyway, Crosbie announced his latest policy brainstorm the week of a global protest for action against climate change so Ches’ finally honed political nerves were probably jangling hard enough to make him spit out a hasty announcement.

If that wasn’t obviously funny enough, the punch line to this own-goal of a joke was delivered, appropriately enough, by Crosbie himself.

You see Ches has spent his time as leader of the local blue team viciously fighting *against*a measure that would help fight climate change. Not only that, but Crosbie started out his tirade against the fight against climate change by encouraging the Premier to join with Doug Ford in the philosophical fight against those people Ches has now decided to cuddle up with.

Not once.  Not twice.  But 13 times. 
  • Ball Government Should Join Challenge of Federal Carbon Tax, Says Crosbie  
  • Ball Liberals Consent to Carbon Tax Will Hurt Consumers Without Helping the Environment: Petten  
  • Time to Halt Secret Carbon-Tax Plans: Petten  
  • Ball Liberals Standing by Job-Killing Carbon Tax 
  • HONESTY ON JOB-KILLING LIBERAL CARBON TAX 
  • New Carbon Tax Coming – But No Answers 
  • Liberals for Carbon Tax   Majority Oppose Carbon Tax; Where's the Plan?     
  • Premier Fueling Uncertainty in Oil Industry, Providing No Answers on Carbon Tax
  • Did the Liberals Saddle Taxpayers with the Burden of Paying Husky’s Carbon Tax on the West White Rose Extension?
  • Federal and Atlantic Canadian Official Opposition Leaders Oppose Trudeau's Carbon Tax
  • Liberals' Talk of Making Gas Tax Permanent to Meet Carbon Tax Obligations is Concerning
  • Liberals' Carbon Tax a Factor as North Atlantic Cuts Jobs 
Thirteen. 

Lucky 13.

Doesn’t count all the other times Crosbie slammed the fight against climate change in interviews, speeches, and visits to coffee shops during the recent provincial election campaign.

But you see the disconnect there, right?

Ches wasn’t the only politician who left people scratching heads recently.

The politicians running the Innu Nation made one of the most serious accusations they could against any person.  They said that Perry Trimper - a cabinet minister at the time - was a racist. They released an audio tape of Trimper talking to someone about a request by an official of the Innu Nation organization that the government pay for translation services for Innu people dealing with the government. 

Trimper hasn’t been very popular among the Sheshatshiu Innu but you’d think that something as serious as being a racist might have prompted a bit of publicity before now.  Maybe even a call to the Premier.

But this was a message left for a guy who about driving licences.  The government provides translation for other services, like health care, but driving licences was important enough for the Innu Nation to attack Trimper directly with arguably one of the most if not the most serious charge they could make short of something criminal.

But if they were waiting for something big enough and they thought the tape did it, they still didn’t actually say what they were upset about besides the accusation that Trimper was a racist.  Once Trimper resigned from cabinet, they stopped short of looking for his resignation.  So being a racist was a disqualification from cabinet but not the House of Assembly.

And when the Premier walked out of a meeting last Monday with the Innu Grand Chief, he waved a piece of paper that committed government to set up a committee and to move a little faster on some 
issues related to the Innu land claim.

Problem solved.

Except that aside from the fact it doesn’t appear Innu leaders had a purpose in going after Trimper beyond going after Trimper, they had a chance to get just about anything they wanted.

So they settled for a committee and a promise to do something that wasn’t really defined.

Now a committee is what government does when it wants to make it look like something is going on when it isn’t. Setting up a committee is literally the very least thing government can do short of doing nothing at all.

And a pledge to move a file a little faster on something as complex as land claims is almost laughable.  Innu leaders may be rightly frustrated with the delay in negotiating their claim. The federal government accepted the Innu claim for negotiation in 1978.  The Innu Nation signed a framework agreement for land claims talks in 1996 and by 2011, there was an agreement-in-principle among the federal and provincial governments and the Innu Nation.  

So, that might be frustrating.  Yeah.

But they didn’t get a pledge for an immediate resumption of talks, a target date for the next round of meetings or anything of the sorts.

They didn’t even get a commitment to have the government pay Dominick Riche for translating driving tests for Innu people looking for a driving licence.

The Innu leadership called Perry Trimper a racist,  every reporter in sight and all their editors substituted assumptions and trite comparisons for facts,  Trimper went out the door of cabinet as the new Newfoundland and Labrador synonym for George Wallace,  and all the Innu leadership got in exchange was a committee and a weak-assed promise. 

And if, as SRBP suggested a couple of weeks ago, the whole thing was really about land claims and the NunatuKavut Community Council, Dwight Ball didn’t promise to do anything of any consequence about the Innu land claim in exchange for destroying Perry Trimper.

You see the disconnect there.

If you don’t, just read this post again until you start to see it.

And whatever you do, stop scratching your head and let it heal because, God knows, the disconnects don’t stop in Newfoundland and Labrador politics and the cut on your head is just gonna get infected.

-srbp-