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| Sliding b'ys. |
During the
recent emergency in eastern Newfoundland and Labrador, both the provincial
government and the City of St. John’s denied the public access to basic
information about the emergency.
Instead,
they both preferred either self-serving political messages – “all is well. We are doing great job” – or authoritarian edicts
and directives -” stay off the roads”.
The City
news release quoted in last
week’s post typify this.
Supposedly
it was about the lifting of some restrictions on the public.
That’s what the headline said.
But the
first sentence - supposedly the most important information in the release was a
self-serving statement:
City of St. John’s snow clearing crews continue to work
around the clock to clear streets for regular traffic.
The middle bit contained short statements
about what stores could open for a few hours.
And the end was a return to the
prime message, given the City’s chief interest was not in providing
humanitarian support to residents during a state of emergency that had closed
all community supports but conducting the municipal government job of cleaning
city streets of snow:
Please stay in[doors] and off city streets.
The insertion of “please” does
not really soften the strict nature of the message given that it was reinforced
repeatedly by the police as their key message.
There is no surprise in that
given the trend in provincial government public communication over the last 15
years. Basic public information has been
supplanted by an emphasis on superficially positive messages with the political
party in power and the Premier - regardless of the Premier or party - as the
focus. Around these parts, we call it uncommunication because it is the opposite
of communication.
Uncommunication doesn't involve the conveying of facts, data
or knowledge. Quite the opposite. It's not about conveying
information at all. Uncommunication actually leaves the recipient in
worse shape - at least with respect to facts, data and knowledge - than if he
or she knew nothing at all.
Uncommunication is all message but with no underpinning or
supporting background.
You can see the same approach in the annual budget
consultation as they are currently practiced in Newfoundland and Labrador. The one for the upcoming budget started last
week.
One would think – and the
government says – the consultations are about letting people have input into
the upcoming but.
There are two problems with
this. First, all the major budget
decisions are made. There is virtually
nothing that anyone could present in these sessions that could change the
substance of the budget.
Second, and for our purposes
here, there’s no useful information in what
the department has released that would help you make sense of what to do
*next* year. It is all about how
successful the current government’s plan has been in the past. It’s nonsense – of course – since the
government abandoned its 2016 plan in 2017 in the face of huge public
resistance to it and the Premier’s desire to get re-elected.
If the government wanted you to
help with next year, they’d tell you information about next year:
·
How much cash do officials expect to have and
from what sources?
·
What spending have you committed to - like the
raises for public sector employees – that you must do?
·
What extra expenses will we have to bear in the
years after the one coming up for things like Muskrat Falls?
·
What impact will the aging population have on
government spending?
None of this is public although
it could be. Other provinces have
released lots of basic financial information – like revenue projections – as far
back the 1990s when these sorts of consultations first became popular. Newfoundland and Labrador never has, since
the first pre-budget consultation in 1996.
Now put all of this in the
context of democratic reform, which a few people say they want.
Democracy is rule by the people,
most often through elected delegates or representatives. Participatory democracy,
which became very popular an idea throughout the western world in the last century,
is about citizen involvement in decisions through things like meaningful
pre-budget consultations.
You would expect there might be
some complaints, then, about the budget consultations or about the failures
obvious at the time to anyone who was in St. John’s during the blizzard exposed
by a handful of media reports since the City lifted the State of Emergency.
Well, there’s not even cricket
noises about the budget. (There are no
crickets in Newfoundland, anyway).
On the City emergency, where people
in addictions treatment couldn’t get access to methadone and the vulnerable
were left largely to fend for themselves, we’ve seen nothing but praise for the
way that everyone had a great time.
We see an affirmation
of popular Townie myths of resilience and supporting one another. The City released – and the local media duly
recited via Twitter – statistics about the number of truckloads of snow the
City has shifted since the snow stopped falling.
And a couple of weekends after the Big Blizzard, as another winter storm pushed through Halifax on its way to smother the city with snow and rain, we got a picture, via Twitter of the the Mayor and the Bard of Resilience taking a slide down the hill in a City park, without an apparent care in the world.
One could hardly find a more apt metaphor for the attitude of the province's leading lights at such a trying time in our province's history.
-srbp-