The motion started out with a few reasons why the
members thought it was a good idea: people
across Canada didn’t all have the same income, people were getting such a
cheque already from the federal government to cope with COVID, some people – no
one indicated who they were – thought this was a good idea, and when people had
more money they were generally better off.
When it came time to explain those things in greater
detail, Jordan Brown, the New Democrat member who led the debate didn’t give a
single bit of extra detail that showed he and his staff had done any research
on it at all.
He just made flat, generic statements, including:
“There are a
lot of geographical differences in regions throughout this country, too.”
“we do have
very unique geographical challenges, we have a unique population. We have a lot
of unique needs that make this province what it is.”
“A lot of
the research that we've come across was actually Canadian research, Canadian
led. As Canadians, we should be proud that we are actually looking at these
things within our own country. We have a lot of the research and legwork
already done here.”
“Just my
observation of this province, we're a very societal province. We're very adapt.
We're very caring. We seem to be a province that cares so deeply about
everybody in it.
He mentioned
five groups that signed a letter in favour of what they called a “basic
income.” Brown also added that a “Tory
senator wrote a book on why we should do this as a country.”
No
details. No evidence. No specific information.
And most tellingly of all, not a single description of just what this universal basic income might look like.
A CBC reporter who covered this resolution put her own
description on it. In the video version, she suggested every person would receive a cheque of maybe as much as $2,000
a month. That would work out to $24,000
a year. People who didn’t need the money
– whoever they might be – would give it back to the government through income
tax. Everyone else would just be better
off.
When the
reporter asked people on the street if they’d like free money from the
government, they all agreed it was a wonderful idea.
No one
bothered with a bit of simple math.
There are about 250,000 working people in the province. Give them all $24,000 a year.
The cost
would be $6.0 billion a year.
Roughly all
the provincial government’s own-source income from taxes and resource royalties.
All of it.
Ok.
So, give
them only $12,000 a month.
That’s still
roughly all of what the government currently spends on health care.
How about if
we just limited it to the 33,000 people – roughly speaking – who get income
support from the provincial government right now?
$792
million.
That would
be roughly double what government spends on income support alone right now.
In those few
sentences, you have read more detailed, factual information than any member of
the House of Assembly considered when voting to send a group of colleagues on
the way to set up a test project on a universal basic income.
No one
talked about how much it would cost, how it would affect existing programs, or
even where the money would come from.
It’s not
rocket science and it doesn’t take very much time.
But no one
bothered.
They don’t
need to bother because the politicians were mainly concerned with whether the
idea would be popular.
And – as
anyone knows – free money is always popular.
That’s the
way policy goes these days.
No one
bothers with details like cost, the knock-on effects, or any of those concerns.
When Tony Blair was Prime Minister of Great Britain, he championed what some
people called joined-up government. The idea was to break down divisions between
departments especially on major issues that were complicated.
Well, in
Newfoundland and Labrador, we’d need to start with the idea of joined-up
thinking. You’d have to realise what you
do with one project has implications for others first before thinking about
getting people co-ordinated.
The sceptics
among you are thinking this is all nonsense.
There is a long way from a private members’ motion in the House of
Assembly and a major government commitment.
Well, that
would be true except that record of the past 15 years shows how much government
does is short-term, isolated, disconnected, or otherwise separated one from the
other.
People don’t
think things through.
Like in 2008,
all three parties supported the expropriation of property from three companies,
along with enormous environmental liabilities even though the problems were
painfully obvious.
Then all the
painfully obvious problems turned out to be real.
Or consider
an email sent by the top public servant in the provincial government to the
deputy minister of finance in 2006.
“Have you
been consulted,” Robert Thompson wrote to Terry Paddon, “on the financial
capacity of the govt to finance the Lower Churchill project in some fashion
should we decide to go it alone[?] The govt is planning to make an announcement
on Monday, and I need to know whether you have any issues.”
The email
came from Thompson on the Thursday as cabinet approved an announcement for following
Monday that the government would green light the Lower Churchill project.
Paddon
testified at the recent inquiry about Muskrat falls. This is a crucial date since it was – for all
meaningful purposes – the start of the Lower Churchill project in the form that
has proven to be such a disaster. It’s
also an important email since it shows that at the very moment the government
decided to go ahead with the project, the Clerk of the Executive Council
clearly didn’t know whether anyone had asked and answered this basic question: can we afford it?
Of course,
Thompson was also just covering his ass.
Both he and Paddon knew full-well that if – as Thompson wondered –
Paddon had any concerns, it was too late to voice them t that point. And both knew that it was pointless to voice
them about a project the Premier personally wanted to go with.
Paddon’s answers to commission counsel Barry
Learmonth tell the rest of the story:
MR.
LEARMONTH: Do you remember receiving
that email?
MR. PADDON:
I don’t remember specifically, no.
MR.
LEARMONTH: Okay, and did you provide any response, to your knowledge, to Mr.
Thompson’s request?
MR. PADDON:
I likely would have. Whether it was a response – an email response or whether I
called him –
MR.
LEARMONTH: Yeah.
MR. PADDON:
– one way or the other, I would have responded. It’s –
MR.
LEARMONTH: Do you know what your answer – response would have been?
MR. PADDON:
(Inaudible.)
MR.
LEARMONTH: No idea?
MR. PADDON:
No, idea. No.
MR.
LEARMONTH: Yeah, all right. Well, that’s going back 12 years –
Off
Learmonth went after something else, as if the email meant nothing.
But what Learmonth
had right there was the proof that the largest project in the history of the
provincial government came without so much as anyone thinking about whether we
could afford it.
No one ever
did.
What’s the
difference between universal basic income and Muskrat Falls?
Nothing.
The root of
this behaviour is in how politicians and their special advisors – the Brits
call them SpAds – think about what they are doing. Once, not so very long ago, there was
campaigning and then there was governing.
One was short-term and the other was, implicitly, long-term, and more
complicated. While campaigning is
entirely a political activity that tended to last a couple of weeks every few
years, governing was the field dominated by career public servants. It involved issues that lasted years either
to develop or to resolve.
After 2003,
politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador simply ignored the governing
part. They never stop campaigning or thinking in
campaign terms. Political considerations and political advisors – the latter
often lacking in meaningful experience - tend to dominate on most decisions.
They think
mostly about popularity. They are tuned
to what they believe is public opinion. Politicians
and their staff used to judge public opinion by polls that took days or weeks
to gather. These days Twitter and Facebook dominate political calculations even
though neither of those is a reliable indicator of public opinion. Twitter
storms happen in seconds and political responses often come just as fast and
with very little understanding of the implications.
Because
opposition parties in Newfoundland and Labrador tend to ape the party in power,
the same obsession with the short-term spread. That’s fundamentally why the
parties sound so much alike on so many issues. Well that and the fact that, as
in most western countries, the needs of the urban middle and upper middle
classes dominate political discussions.
All parties
agreeing with one another most of the time is so normal that have even
forgotten how to appear to differ. Not
so long ago, the opposition would vote against the budget. If they didn’t want to trigger an election in
a minority parliament, enough of their members would have to change the air in
their car tires at the crucial moment so that the government budget passed. By
contrast, in the most recent session of the legislature in Newfoundland and
Labrador, all parties voted for the government budget despite opposition party
claims they had issues with it.
All three
parties support the government, even though some might claim they don’t. The reason the politicians all want to appear
to work together, by the way, is that this is a very popular idea on the bits
of twitter that deal with local politics.
The fixation
on the short-term or local is mirrored in other parts of the political system
as well. Parties chose candidates who
can win a local seat with local support.
As one party advised prospective candidates recently, they had better
come with their own volunteers and money because the main party had shag-all to
give them. Parties don’t exist like they
used to. These days they are closer to
franchise deals where local wannabes can buy into a brand and central campaign
organization to get through the election in exchange for going along with the party
program. Party organizers don’t care
about recruiting potential cabinet ministers. They just want to win seats so
any local luminary will do, regardless of what their other experience or sills
might be. That’s all.
When the
politician doesn’t go along with the program or looks like they will cause a
problem on Twitter, the political instinct is to get rid of them. Every member of caucus – regardless of party
- is expendable. Every member could be the subject of a Twitter-storm of
controversy, real or, frequently, contrived.
Since the go-to response from the political masters in any party is to
cut first and think later, if at all, politicians do everything they can to
stay in line with the rest and out of the line of fire. The result is, as in a campaign, all the
people on the same team say the same thing.
Discussion and disagreement – the stuff that fuels smart policy –
disappears.
The political
approach pioneered under Danny Williams lives on in other ways. Government news releases don’t contain
information. They meet bureaucratic
schedules for good news that will make the government popular. Ministers learn quickly to recite only prepared
lines – commonly called a KM (kay em), short for key message. KMs seldom contain useful information or
anything that sounds like a logical argument. This is the age of unformation
and uncommunication
after all.
Industry and energy minister Andrew Parsons is
fond of responding to questions with the cliché start “What I can say is…”. That’s not a joke. It’s the reality and ministers
like Parsons may frequently not be the person who decides what is or is not
allowed in their KMs. The person may not
be familiar with the issues at all, let alone appreciate the wider
implications.
Opposition
parties copy the same approach. It’s so virulent
a method that it has spread to municipal government, like the one in St. John’s. City councillors now act like their
provincial cousins. They don’t disagree
in public. They act as spokespeople for
the bureaucracy even though they have no managerial responsibilities for the
bureaucrats. Communications policy
controls and cleanses their public statements of anything controversial or
unsupportive of the city’s direction.
The recent
controversy in St. John’s over paving walking trails so bicycle users can speed
down them is a case in point. The project
is a massive change to the existing trail system. The people who will benefit most from the
changes are a small and relatively affluent segment of the population. Council bought into their proposal early on
and the communications about it, as a result, including the highly structured “consultation”
process are, designed to manage and marginalize discontent. Council is putting the checks in the boxes of
a process, but the outcome is already decided, just as it is all too frequently
in the provincial government as well.
Former
finance minister Ross Wiseman has said several times in public speeches that the
reason we have problems with government finances is that the government has a
one year budget cycle and a four year election cycle. The mismatch between the two forces
politicians to always think about the next election.
The only
problem with Wiseman’s theory is that the same is true of every Canadian
province, the federal government, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Yet none of them are teetering on the edge of
bankruptcy for the second time in less than a century.
What’s going
on in Newfoundland and Labrador has some similarities to what happens in other
places, but for the most part it comes from what people in Newfoundland and
Labrador believe about politics. What they believe drives how they act.
Taken
altogether, it’s a set of beliefs and actions that sees pixels, not
pictures. That pixilation is what allows
a group of politicians in a province that still cannot pay for Muskrat Falls or
reduce its massive budget deficits to think of ways to spend billions more that
it doesn’t have.
And no one thinks
that’s a problem.
-srbp-