When we do not talk about the most vulnerable people in our society – sex workers and people in homeless shelters to name just two groups – we tell the world that our community does not care about them. Last week’s spectacle in the House of Assembly showed the world that the 40 people who Newfoundlanders and Labradorians elected to represent them and run the province do not care about very much at all.
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| Alison Coffin and Ches Crosbie talk to reporters on Friday about Gerry Byrne. (Not exactly as illustrated) |
A 23-year-old man lay on the pavement in downtown St.
John’s last Tuesday night, the life running out of the bullet hole in him and mingling with the
rain on the cold pavement, trickling along the gutter and into the sewer.
He died outside a shelter for homeless people. The community
learned very quickly that it was a shelter, that it was a rental property, and
that police frequently visited the place to deal with disturbances among the
people who came and went from the house with great frequency.
We learned that information because neighbours put it
on social media, where the local conventional media – newspaper, television,
and radio - picked it up and repeated it.
Before anyone knew who the young man was, or what had gone on, they had
decided what the issues were in the story.
That morning, in the House of Assembly, the opposition parties asked for the
Premier’s opinion on the fact that provinces in Canada received transfer
payments from the federal government because they - unlike Newfoundland and Labrador – didn’t
make enough money on their own to meet the national minimum government income
standard. There were questions about
flooding in a district on the west coast, a couple of questions about specific
constituents who needed government money, and about the deaths of a couple of
million salmon in a fish farm a couple of months before.
There was only one question thread - about ferry service to northern Labrador - that stood out for its consistency and seriousness - and the only question about homelessness was about people
with high paying jobs in western Labrador who had to couch surf.
The morning after the death, the few questions related to the murder were
generic: “’What plan does the government
have’ to deal with crime and homeless in
St. John’s?” opposition leader Ches Crosbie
led with. His second
question was about a growth in payments to temporary shelters run by landlords,
not not-for-profits. That story had been
in the local media before and brought back because of the assumed connection in
media reports between the for-profit shelters and the murder.
Attention then turned to a general discussion of
health care. By the time the official
opposition was done, the New Democrat leader Alison Coffin’s question about
homelessness was also generic:
“APEC
reports that despite growth in the oil industry, our province is struggling.
Homelessness, addictions, cost of living, bankruptcies, gangs, unemployment,
electricity rates, out-migration are all on the rise.
“I ask the
Premier: Will Advance 2030 address these pressing issues, or will we
continue to stumble forward?”
That was the
lone NDP question before her colleague got back to the dead salmon.
The next day
the first question was a general request for information about a death at the
provincial penitentiary. The rest of the
questions were about specific constituency problems, a question about Canopy’s
contract with the provincial government to supply cannabis to the government’s
distribution company, dead salmon, and the need farmers had to shoot moose at
night on their land.
On Friday,
opposition leader Ches Crosbie and New Democratic Party leader Alison Coffin
called a news conference to demand that the Premier fire his fisheries minister
over comments he’d made in the House about Jim Lester and Jim Dinn. Gerry Byrne infuriated Lester by suggesting
that Lester had broken the province’s wildlife laws. He pissed Dinn off by accusing him of
standing by as a member of board of directors of a group they both supported
had made dismissive remarks about Indigenous people.
Bullying and
intimidation one claimed, robbing the words of their meaning by
applying them to something ultimately as trivial as the display in the
House. Priggish and prudish would be
better words to describe the party leaders whose members had been played for a
few minutes in the House of Assembly by a more able debater for their ego and
their thin skin and, with the Friday news conference, their arrogance.
Gerry Byrne’s
20-odd years in the federal parliament and lately the provincial Assembly let
him run rings around them. He put them
off their game – whatever they were actually up to - and left them sputtering and
stumbling. The opposition party line on
Friday was about tone and tone is an old code-word in Newfoundland
politics. The Tories used to deploy it
regularly when their critics after 2003 didn’t simply stay quiet in the corner.
Prissy lecturing.
Arrogant and detestable from the government side. Arrogant still, but laughable, from the
opposition. Prissiness about the tone of politics is the code that people who
think they ought to be running things use to dismiss those they think shouldn’t
be. It is the same sentiment as the
people who dominated Newfoundland before 1934 who appeared before the Royal
Commission on the future of the country and told them that the baymen weren’t
fit for democracy.
While the
code-language may be decidedly townie versus bayman in its heritage, on Friday,
Crosbie
and Coffin's – above, not exactly as illustrated - emphasis on tone merely looked weak. “I just want to say,” Ches Crosbie tutted outside
the House on Friday,” [that] Mr. Byrne should get a lecture from the Premier,
which doesn’t seem to be happening.” Had
he put the back of his hand to his forehead and swooned, Crosbie could not have
looked more feeble.
What people
in Newfoundland and Labrador ought to have noticed this past week is that the
three parties in the House are not doing their jobs. Crosbie and Coffin are off put because they
have not been getting the answers they want about the deaths of a few
fish. Local media have been treating it
like Love Canal, complete with a university professor declaring the offal a “spill
event” worse than – presumably a few hundred thousand gallons of petroleum.
Unfortunately
for the hysteria mongers, the fish involved have long-since been turned
to crab crap and yet there have been no obvious signs of difficulty in the
areas beyond an unpleasant smell. It is
hard to portray the deaths of a few million salmon in cages in the ocean as
being more hazardous than the batch of humpback carcasses that blew ashore in
2014, for example. As much as people might
want to make this out as the next Deep Water Horizon, the truth is that Mother
Nature has not co-operated in delivering up the natural disaster.
This is much the same laxness that has crept into the government's treatment of the oil and gas industry offshore. There are hard questions to be asked about this, as well. But the politicians do not wish to ask hard questions. The first day the legislature opened after the largest oil spill in the
province’s history *thus far*, opposition leader Ches Crosbie devoted his
entire pile of questions in the House of Assembly to a cloud of Maryjane smoke that has still - almost two years later - not turned into anything solid. There is a reason why politicians ask weak questions.
We could forgive the opposition if it was just starting out but shirking duty is their stock-in-trade. We could forgive them for being a bit shell-shocked in the summer, right after an election. But they have had months to prepare for *this* sitting.
Yet, in the first
week of a new sitting of the legislature, with an opposition bolstered by
larger numbers, their performance in the
House was as pathetic as it was after the 2007 election when the trio of Liberals
left in the House couldn’t decide which of Danny Williams’ ass cheeks to kiss first.
They gave the Conservatives a free ride on the expropriation of environmental
liabilities that have still not been properly accounted. They let the government breeze through the
creation of Nalcor. And after the 2011
election, led by the arch-Muskrateer Dwight Ball, they play-acted at opposing the financial disaster of Muskrat Falls.
*This* week,
the opposition had a raft of issues they could have asked about. They had a list of themes they could have
pursued. They had deeper and broader
investigations they could have begun on aquaculture or on services to homeless
people just from events last week alone.
Had they
paid attention to the cliched drivel of the Premier’s speech at a $500-a-plate
Liberal fundraising dinner that took place barely a kilometre from where a
young man bled to death, they could have found more. The economy, government finance, rate
mitigation, the threat to the province’s future posed by the Alberta assault on
the federal government, or how to reconcile the government’s plan to boost oil
production with the threat of climate change.
Without
breaking a sweat, a dozen subjects more important than Jim Lester’s question
about farmers and moose. Stuff more important
than the way rookie Jim Dinn went after Gerry Byrne about the salmon mess. And a better way to tackle that than the generic,
amateurish questions in the House from either opposition party about anything
last week.
The thing is
that while there is better day-to-day management of government than we have
seen in some time, the strategic trajectory of the province is the same as it
was when the other crowd were running the place. On the big files, the province is in very
hard shape. There is no sign that any politician sitting in the House of Assembly, or community or business leaders too, for that matter, understands the problems, let alone has an inkling of how to start tackling
them.
So it is that none of
that laundry list of very important subjects was what the politicians cared about last week. Not Dwight Ball, not Ches Crosbie, and not Alison Coffin. Dwight and
Ches vied for the title of who was most out of touch with the province’s financial
reality as they argued about Equalization.
When he was in opposition one could forgive Dwight his ignorance
of federal-provincial fiscal relations. Now that he has been in office four years,
his repeated talk of getting greater handouts from Ottawa is embarrassing. When he tries to claim he will fight harder
than Ches for something he knows he cannot get – Equalization – then it just
looks pathetic.
People speak about and act on things they care
about. It is that simple. They tell the rest of the world what they
care about by what they do and what they say.
When a newspaper invents a phantom conspiracy out of whole cloth, we know they care more for ego and bombast –
which is where the story went – than about either the more complex story that’s
been in public since April or the dispute about public policy revealed by a
handful of emails. When others chased
after the superficial story, they agreed that how the government ought to treat
sex work and sex workers was not something they cared about.
And so when a young man bled to death outside a
government-funded shelter, people
quickly became more concerned with whether the shelter was run by a landlord or
a not-for-profit than ask about the failure of government to provide the crucial
“wrap-around services” to its clients regardless of who owned the room where
they slept.
When we do not talk about the most vulnerable people
in our society – sex workers and people in homeless shelters to name just two groups
– we tell the world our community does not care about them.
Last week’s spectacle in the House of Assembly showed us that the 40
people who Newfoundlanders and Labradorians elected to represent them and run the
province do not care about very much at all.
-srbp-