Think of it
as classic political news in Newfoundland and Labrador.
VOCM
headline: “Premier commits to fixing patronage issues in government”.
At the same
time, some
people in Western Labrador are angry
at the Premier for closing a small government office in Wabush.
In the VOCM
news story, Premier Dwight Ball was referring to the controversy appointment he
authorized at The Rooms. Many people consider that patronage because the person
who got the appointment had previously been a political staffer in the
Opposition office while Ball was Opposition leader.
What makes
this a classic political story in Newfoundland and Labrador, though, is that no
one sees the other job – the bureaucratic office in Labrador City – as
patronage even though that’s what it is.
At the turn
of the century, the provincial government relocated departments or bits of
departments from St. John’s to other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador. They called it “regionalization”. The idea was to spread the “benefit” of
government spending around the province instead of concentrating it in St.
John’s.
We are not
talking about putting a snow clearing depot for the west coast on the west
coast. We are talking about shifting the
office of the fire commissioner with seven high paying jobs and putting them in
Deer Lake, along with a bunch of people who run provincial parks. The
aquaculture division of the fisheries department went to the coastal community
of Grand Falls-Windsor, and the medical care commission offices – the folks who
pay doctors for their services – went to GFW as well.
“You can do
the work anywhere” was a common rationalization for the whole scheme and it
certainly is true. You *can* do these
administrative jobs anywhere. But it was
more efficient in many cases to do them in St. John’s, which is, after all, the
capital city and administrative centre of government.
The convenience of face-to-face meetings, of
bumping into people in the corridor and getting a quick answer to a question
disappeared in favour of emails and the delayed responses that went with it,
added long distance phone charges, driving and flying charges as well as hotel accommodations
and meals, and a raft of other new costs that weren’t needed before.
In the whole
relocation process, departments lost senior staff who quit rather than
relocate. They paid travel and
relocation costs that wouldn’t normally have been necessary and in more than a
few cases, public servants who moved with their job lost money on the sale of
their house and the purchase of a new one.
Departments who lost senior, experienced people, with a great deal of
corporate knowledge in their heads, had to deal with an influx of brand new,
less experienced people.
In 2003,
relocation became a standard government approach in places where the local
private sector industry shut down. The government
pumped government jobs into GFW, Stephenville, and Hermitage when the local
paper mill and fish plant closed down. On top of that, they also started to
give ministers a duplicate office in their hometown as well as the cost of
commuting back and forth to St. John’s for meetings.
No one has
ever accounted for the extra costs involved in this scheme. SRBP did raise the issue on occasion and one
case did turn up in local media. The
travel cost for one minister alone – Fairity O’Brien – was upwards of $60,000
one year and 50% more than that again a year.
O’Brien wasn’t alone. Every
minister whose residence was outside St. John’s got to live at home and commute
to work at taxpayer expense.
Purists can
quibble over whether this is patronage
or pork-barreling. In
Newfoundland and Labrador, it is the political norm and it is really the same
thing: public money spent for the
political benefit of the political party in power or the local district
representative.
In the case
of the Labrador Affairs Secretariat, putting its offices in Labrador is nothing
but hollow political symbolism. The main
work of the secretariat is dealing with provincial government departments, all
of which are based in the administrative centre at St. John’s. There’s nothing
that the deputy minister - or anyone else in the Secretariat - can do in Goose
Bay that couldn’t be done more efficiently in St. John’s.
And by the way,
if you check the Secretariat’s annual reports, you will notice that while most
of the staff are in Labrador, the deputy minister *and* the communications
director are in St. John’s. That’s a big
clue that we are dealing here with pork and patronage and not effectiveness
when it comes to delivering services to taxpayers.
Another clue
is the department’s ineffectiveness.
Remember that Perry Trimper audio recording? One of the topics that came up was a bridge
in an area with the
Innu Nation land claim area. The
public works departments had given the bridge a name – by the looks of things
for a guy from the Labrador coast – and had apparently done nothing to consider
involving the Innu Nation. Bear in mind
this happened when the Secretariat had responsibility for *both* Labrador and
Indigenous relations and had the Premier as the minister.
This episode
actually points to a bigger problem, namely the ineffectiveness of these
offices whose job is to have one set of bureaucrats make another set of bureaucrats
aware of things the second set of bureaucrats should know already. In the case of the bridge naming, the public works and transportation department
from the minister on down had to be pretty well unconscious if not dead not to
figure out that the name of a bridge within the land claim area – even if the
claim is not actively being negotiated – might be an issue.
Make no
mistake. There *are* problems across
government in the way it delivers services to Indigenous people, women,
children, the elderly, and francophones.
No matter how many of these offices you create to represent the
interests of Indigenous people, women, children, the elderly, and francophones,
they don’t seem to produce better outcomes for all those people. You just wind up with more bureaucrats involved
in a single job. More people add cost, complicate the management and flow of information, and generally slow things down.
That’s one
of the significant public policy issues tied to this story last week. You can probably pick up a few more,
including the point that this inefficiency and the pork - barrelling inherent in
it contributes to the chronic overspending that led to the relatively minor
step of shifting the office out of Labrador City to somewhere else.
Instead of
discussing all those things, though, we are talking about the supposed
indignity done to the people of western Labrador because this office got
relocated. And in another corner the Premier
is talking about taking “patronage” out of government because he got into a
controversy over a relatively minor issue.
No one is
talking about how they all fit together and what we need to do to tackle the
far bigger and far more important issues facing the province that are staring
us in the face in these minor controversies.
-srbp-
