Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts

24 February 2020

On the need for politics #nlpoli

Politics [is] the art of pursuing common interests through... active listening, advocacy, public persuasion, compromise and negotiation.

William Ford Coaker,
the father of the Commission
The people from Newfoundland and Labrador quoted in the Globe and Mail on Friday described the problem facing the province today.

We are not talking about chronic overspending, an aging population that will need more health care, or the impact of Muskrat Falls.

The problem is the shared attitude among the province’s opinion leaders  - the ones quoted by the Globe and many more besides - that *any* solutions to the province's financial problems are bleak and politically unacceptable.

Here are the bits from the Globe and Mail piece, ironically by some guy named Greg Mercer, a name he shares with the current Premier’s chief of staff:
  • Political science professor Amanda Bittner: “You’re going to be making some tough choices that nobody is going to be happy with, and it’s probably going to be miserable.”
  • Lawyer and cable television show host Melissa Royle Critch described the problems as “daunting” and said the debt problem was “insurmountable.”
  • Progressive Conservative leader Ches Crosbie: “We are in a death spiral.”
  • Outgoing Premier Dwight Ball said that borrowing to cover continued deficits will be the major challenge facing his successor.
  • Economics professor Scott Lynch said,” [Dealing with the financial problem is] going to be a nasty situation. These cuts will be extremely painful.”
We can add to that finance minister Tom Osborne who recently dismissed out of hand a proposal to put the government’s liquor corporation in the private sector, like Alberta did more than 20 years ago.  The result would create jobs,  preserve provincial tax revenues, and bring in a couple of billion dollars in the sale.

But Osborne, like all the others leading the province will brook no change in anything.

They simply want someone else to pay the bills.

15 October 2019

No change in the weather? No change in we. #nlpoli

The problem we have is not a lack of options and opportunities to sort out the government finances ourselves.  The problem facing Newfoundland and Labrador is that the leading people of the province, not just the politicians but all the leading people,  don't have the stomach for making the kinds of decisions needed. They don't even want to talk about sensible things. They talk about foolishness like Equalization or fight against imaginary "austerity" instead.
SRBP, "Sovereignty",  January 2017

Lately, Alberta economist Jack Mintz likes to remind Canadians that Alberta is pissed off with the federal government.  The Alberta government is running massive deficits but Mintz thinks Ottawa is to blame, not, you know, the provincial politicians who actually made the decision to spend more provincial tax money than the provincial government takes in.

Mintz turned up in the Toronto Star and CBC Radio last week pushing Ottawa to bail out  Newfoundland and Labrador.  He’s hooked up with a shadowy new outfit calling itself the Schroeder Institute that also launched itself last week with a campaign to get Ottawa to funnel money to Newfoundland - as Schroeder’s Twitter feed keeps calling it – to stave off financial catastrophe in the province.

Then local musician and business owner Bob Hallett took 2,000 words on CBC’s local website to deliver the same message:  Newfoundland’s financial mess is Ottawa’s responsibility to clean up.

That’s a wonderful sentiment sure to get lots of support from people in Newfoundland and Labrador who are worried about their future.  Sadly for those people, Schroeder, Mintz, and Hallett rely on a string of old fairy tales that have been long debunked – not to mention stuff that is just wrong – to make their case. They also are a reminder that wisps of air and pixie dust are a piss-poor foundation for successful policy against very real problems.   That is, after all, how Newfoundland *and* Labrador got into its current mess in the first place.

07 March 2018

No room for dissent? No time for silence. #nlpoli

The controversy about The Rooms' recent request for proposals is not about Muskrat Falls.

Maybe someone at The Rooms or within the provincial government thought that was the problem when Des Sullivan raised concerns about it.  After all, Des is well known as a critic of Muskrat Falls.  That might explain why Dean Brinton, The Rooms' chief executive,  issued a very short statement that apologized for using Muskrat Falls as an example when explaining the Crown corporation's policy about conflict of interest for advertising agencies responding to the proposal request.

Let us assume that Brinton made a really superficial mistake because otherwise  his response is insulting and condescending.  Any reasonable personal understood our ought to have understood that Sullivan was concerned about the implication that critics of the provincial government could not bid on government work.

Brinton didn't deal with that at all.

01 November 2016

Building higher walls #nlpoli

A new government security policy does everything short of banning people from Confederation Building altogether.  Visitors to the main government building in St. John's now have to enter through a single entrance in the basement of the building at the back.  There's no parking available and the whole thing is so congested that on busy days people will have to line up out through the door into the parking lot to get into the building.

The real reason for the change is budgetary.  The politicians can save a few bucks by cutting off public access to the Confederation Building through one or two doors. Tight behind that as a reason for the new policy was a poop-in-the-shorts over-reaction to the recent protests.

So out-to-lunch are the folks behind this scheme that they forced toddlers from the staff daycare to make the trek outdoors to the entrance on the other side of the building when they tried to go on a parade through the building to show off their Hallowe'en costumes on Monday.

Just to show you how crazy the Poopy-Pants Brigade are about this security stuff,  take a look at the hastily scribbled sketch at the right. Confederation Building day care is located behind the East Block in a space that used to be occupied by the roads testing crowd from motor vehicle licencing.

To get in the main building,  the kids have been traipsing for years along the short route to where the X is.  This year the urchins had to take the other red line around to the only way visitors are now allowed in the building.

Mind you, the official reason for the policy is - as James McLeod reported in the Telegram on Saturday - concern about the safety of our politicians.  "Multiple sources also indicated that government MHAs have recently been receiving death threats,"  McLeod wrote.
"The number of threats that are coming in to MHAs is really, really ramping up. There is a significant risk threat,” one source said.
And, at that point,  you should smell a rat.

16 May 2016

Responsible Government #nlpoli

Many of you may not have heard of Jerry Dean until this past week.

Jerry is from Botwood. Last fall the people on Exploits district elected him as their member in the House of Assembly.  He's been a around the block a bit.  His official biography says he worked for Abitibi for 30 years and since 1997 he's been active on his town council and in some volunteer groups.

Last week Jerry said something in the House of Assembly that got some folks upset on Twitter. That helped get him some media attention  - here's the TransCon and CBC versions - and so the fellow has been getting a bit of a rough ride.

23 April 2014

Strategically Unwise and other political own-goals #nlpoli

Depending on which interview you listened to on Tuesday,  Tom Marshall would be hanging around as Premier until the end of the summer.

At least.

That’s the VOCM story.

Marshall will run the place for two full months after the Conservative convention in early July while Coleman runs around the province attending all sorts of summer festivals.

Meanwhile, on CBC,  Peter Cowan said in his report on Tuesday evening that Marshall expects to hand over the Premier’s job shortly after the Conservative party meeting in early July.

Which is it?

That’s a good question, but there’s no clear answer.

03 January 2013

Bravery and Democracy #nlpoli

“It is easy to be an armchair critic, tweeted natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy before Christmas, “but It takes real courage to stand for election.”

In another context, John Steele offered this opinion about your humble e-scribbler.:
“One thing that I respect about Ed is, he’s got balls enough to put his name to stuff. He’s not anonymous, so I respect that.”
The word “democracy” derives from the Greek words for people and power.  Democracy is a form of government in which everyone may participate equally and fully in making decisions that will affect them.
 

14 August 2012

Suppressing Dissent #nlpoli

One of the hallmarks of the Conservative political method since 2003 has been the suppression of public dissent.

Anyone who wants to raise a problem for public discussion is attacked for being “negative.”  It is part of the aggressive campaign the Tories have waged to eliminate political opposition and stifle anything that was not approved by the Premier’s Office.

No surprise, then, that Bonavista mayor Betty Fitzgerald went to her local MHA to get a letter she could sign attacking one of her councillors who had violated the iron Conservative law against dissent.

15 June 2012

When rights are annoying #nlpoli

There’s something about this frivolous and vexatious thing that caught people’s attention right from the start.

Under the provincial Conservatives’ new secrecy laws, a cabinet minister can refuse to disclose information if he or she thinks the request is “frivolous or vexatious”. (sec. 43.1)

Leave aside the idea that a politician gets to decide on who gets information and who doesn’t.  As we learned from the Cameron Inquiry, Danny Williams and his political staff vetted access to information requests and blocked stuff they didn’t want to hand over or blocked people they didn’t want to give stuff to.  The law didn’t matter.  They refused.  They stonewalled.  They used every other trick in the book.

But that’s a whole other issue.

Let’s just look at this curious choice of words and see what they reveal.

14 June 2012

More oil, less democracy #nlpoli

“Oil and democracy do not easily mix,” wrote political scientist Michael Ross in The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations, his 2012 study of the impact that income from oil development has on governments around the world.

Regular readers will recall this idea from an earlier post.

Countries that are rich in petroleum generally have lower economic growth and less democracy that countries that don’t have oil revenues. Ross puts this down, in part, to a relationship that citizens see between government revenue and government spending. 

Citizens in oil-producing countries, though, cannot directly observe how much their government collects in oil revenues.  They must rely on the government and the media for their information.  If they live in a democracy, the information is probably available. 

Probably available.

That assumes, of course, that the media in those democracies can find out the information and publish it.

12 June 2012

The Stacked House Filibuster #nlpoli

Democracy is a beautiful thing. 

bill29The people of Newfoundland and Labrador are witnessing its full beauty in the filibuster against the Conservative government’s latest assault on openness, transparency and accountability. 

16 April 2012

Our failed state #nlpoli

The always sharp labradore has posted links to a report by the Foundation for Democratic Advancement on election finance laws across Canada.

You can find the full report here.  The Newfoundland and Labrador section starts on page 34.

The analysis (p. 38) reads, in part:

Based on the FDA scoring scale (see Conclusion section), Newfoundland and Labrador received an unsatisfactory score of 51.3 percent. This score means that Newfoundland and Labrador has numerous deficiencies in its electoral finance legislation and borders on a failed democratic state. The FDA believes that this legislation is not working in the interests of the majority in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Borders on a failed democratic state.

Doesn’t get much plainer than that.

-srbp-

16 March 2012

Demanding what is just #nlpoli

For if it is to establish an order that citizens will agree to support, the state must go further than merely investigating their needs;  it must also encourage them to demand what they consider just.  In this way democracy becomes a system in which all citizens participate in government…

Pierre Trudeau,  Approaches to politics, p. 78

- srbp -

13 March 2012

Discussion is healthy, indeed #nlpoli

From the Telegram a former chief of staff in the Premier’s Office puts it as eloquently as only he could:

If public discussion, questions and debate on any issue should be dropped because “the people who have the political and corporate power to make it happen want it to happen,”  then logically there should be no talk of improving search and rescue operations, fisheries mismanagement, deficiencies in health care, industrial safety, workers’ rights, robocalls or any government or corporate action.

Indeed, why would we need public opinion vehicles like letters to the editor and open-line shows?

Why indeed?

Edsel Bonnell gives the answer:

It may be a tiresome process to some, especially those who deal with it every day in government and media, but it’s the price we pay for democracy. The pragmatic alternative is unacceptable.

Amen, brother. 

Amen.

- srbp -

23 December 2011

Amen, brother, amen #nlpoli #cdnpoli

nottawa asks a good question about politicians, university professors and journalists and discovery of a fairly obvious point about public life in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003.

- srbp -

10 November 2011

A step in the right democratic direction #nlpoli

One New Democrat is fighting the re-count in Burin-Placentia West on grounds that the special ballot provisions of the provincial Elections Act are unconstitutional.

Let this be the first measure to turn back the anti-democratic current of the past eight years.

Now fighting against the anti-democratic tide is familiar stuff to SRBP readers. 

September 11, 2007.

Note the date.

That’s when your humble e-scribbler first raised questions about the changes the House of Assembly made to the Elections Act the previous spring.  The amendments sailed through the legislature in of its typical speedy sessions with no debate beyond the bare minimum needed to make the amendment bill into law.

Others  - notably Mark Watton – saw the same thing around the same time, bit into the issue with their considerable knowledge and gusto.As Mark wrote in 2008:

In the lead-up to a by-election, when there are no candidates in the running, these provisions are just plain silly. But in the weeks preceding a general election, they afford a tremendous advantage to incumbents. It is hard to imagine a greater democratic injustice than rules permitting incumbent candidates to campaign (and do so free from electoral-spending scrutiny) and collect votes while their potential opponents cannot even register. It's no wonder the amendments passed through the House of Assembly with no opposition.

Over a decade ago, a unanimous Supreme Court of Canada stated: "Elections are fair and equitable only if all citizens are reasonably informed of all the possible choices and if parties and candidates are given a reasonable opportunity to present their positions. ... "

More recently, this court ruled the provisions of Canada's Elections Act, which effectively ensured "that voters are better informed of the political platform of some candidates than they are of others," violated Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and struck them down.

In the words of the Supreme Court of Canada, our rights under the charter go beyond the "bare right to place a ballot in a box"; they "grant every citizen a meaningful role in the selection of elected candidates."

In the three years since Mark published those words, nothing has changed.  The special ballot provisions still smell to the high heavens and generally the people who ought to be raising concerns about this have been silent.  One call-in radio host today left the impression he’d never heard of this issue before. Let’s hope he misspoke in the rush of the moment.

Well, nothing until one candidate and her lawyer decided to take a simple judicial re-count and strike a blow to restore fair elections to the province. The New Democrats did include changes to the House of Assembly as one section of their election platform last month but special balloting and the other changes the NDP supported in 2007 got not so much as a whispered mention.

Fair elections are a basic democratic right.

It is such a basic right in our society that we often take for granted what it means.  But we need look no farther back than 2007 to see just exactly how fragile our most basic democratic principles are. 

They are so fragile that the very group  - the members of the House of Assembly  - we expect to protect our democratic rights are the ones who happily and blindly violated them.

Of course, no one is surprised by this given the sustained assault on our fundamental democratic principles the past eight years have brought.

Just to give you a sense of what we are talking about here, let’s look at those democratic principles as laid out in the Bill of Rights (1689) and the examples of the attack on those principles.

And make note of that date:  1689.

  • “That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;”   - the special ballot provisions as well as the other changes made to the Elections Act since 2003.
  • “That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;: – Danny Williams’ public statements in 2007 that he favoured ending free speech in the provincial legislature and his efforts to chill free speech through personal, verbal attacks and threats of law suits.
  • “… that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.”  The House of Assembly last sat in the spring and will not sit again until next spring.  Under the Conservatives since 2003, the House of Assembly sits the least number of days of any legislature in the country.

To be sure, the fundamental contempt displayed by the government for the legislature continues unabated with the the change in Premier.

What is encouraging, what is different is that for the first time in eight years, more people are starting to argue against the Conservatives’ contempt for democracy.

This court case over a simple re-count could prove to be one of the most important legal decisions in the province’s history.

- srbp -

05 September 2011

Democracy Watch: Duff’s guff #nlpoli

Let’s get it simply stated up front:  Democracy Watch is the most inappropriately named organization on the planet, bar none.

They don’t watch for one thing.

And on the specific issue of fixed election dates in some provinces, they are bitching about something, for some unexplained reason but it evidently has frig all to do with democracy.

Here’s the quote you’ll find in a CBC story on the Prince Edward island election.  it’s Duff Conacher, the guy who founded Democracy Watch:

"There's no good reason to have it so early in the fall. It also gives an advantage to the ruling party because it allows the ruling party to, sort of, come off a summer when people aren't really paying attention and get right into a campaign and have it over before people really have a chance to determine whether they want to question the ruling party's ongoing governing."

The Canadian Press story elaborates a bit:

The group says the elections should be set back to the last Monday in October or even early November.

It says parents busy getting children settled in school in September have little time to participate in election campaigns or even pay them much attention.

University students are also tied up in September and may have difficulty establishing residency at their school location until later in October, which keeps them from voting.

Voter turn-out and people getting involved in campaigns has been a problem for years.  Long before fixed election dates.

And the idea that Mom can’t think about anything as important  as an election in October because the kids are back in school the first week of September is just laughably silly.

Establishing residency ain’t a problem either.  Elections offices in the country have had rules in place for decades to handle the thousands of people who move in between elections, fixed date or moveable feast.

If Duff Conacher has a problem with fixed election dates, he needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out what the real problem is.

One of the real problems he might consider is that Duff doesn’t actually talk about problems with democracy across Canada.  Take a look at the Democracy Watch website.  Search for “newfoundland and labrador” or any combination of the words.  Duff’s taken a few e-mails about the shenanigans going on in these quarters over the past decade so he ought to know what’s been going on.

Not a peep from D-watch.

You can hear the crickets chirping and there are no crickets in Newfoundland and Labrador, at least on the island.

No Duff Conacher either.

Not a peep about the ludicrous changes to the provincial election laws in 2004 that created, among other things, a situation where people can vote when there is no election and where independent candidates are disenfranchised.

Not even a whisper when the premier of the province muses aloud about the need to wipe out free speech in the province’s legislatures.

Nothing that Duff Conacher moaned about to the media this weekend is an issue caused by or made worse by having a fixed election in October.

Duff’s out there about fixed election dates, but basically all he is saying is pure guff.

And maybe if he spoke up about real problems affecting democracy across the country, people might take this more seriously.

- srbp -

04 January 2011

Leadership by fiat

The Telegram editorial last Friday took issue with the upcoming coronation of Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the provincial Conservatives and, by default, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Check it out. 

You won’t be disappointed, right down to what appears to be the date code buried the editorial’s URL – 1969-12-31.

December 31, 1969.

There is, however, one small issue that deserves some comment:

There is an unwritten code of leadership campaigns in governing parties: a departing premier will seek a capable senior caretaker who is not interested in the leadership, so that no advantage will be conferred on the person holding the office in the upcoming leadership race.

Since 1949, there’s only been one case in which an incumbent Premier resigned and left behind a caretaker leader in his place.

Brian Tobin high-tailed it back to federal politics in October 2000.  he left with such speed that the Liberals had no choice but get someone in the job while they organized a party leadership fight.

In 1978-79, Frank Moores stayed in the job until his party found a successor.  As it turned out, that was Brian Peckford.  In 1988-89, Peckford did the same thing.  The Conservatives turned up Tom Rideout.

On December 28, 1995 – 15 years ago last month – Clyde Wells announced he’d be leaving politics.  He’d stay on only as long as it took the party to sort out the leadership.  By the end of January, Wells handed over the reins to Brian Tobin.

And that’s it.

Look across the country and you’ll see the same pattern.  Go back into the pre-Confederation history of this place and you’ll find Premier handing off to replacement, not to some sort of stand-in.

There’s another part to this, as well.  The outgoing leader left it to his or her party to figure out who would replace him. And in each instance, the party leadership did their job.  

In some respects it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a guy who wanted to abolish free speech in the province’s legislature took it upon himself to anoint his replacement. 

Through all of this, there is a thread that runs very deep.  It is the thread the Telegram’s editors found:  it’s the thread of democracy, of the fundamental belief that ordinary people pick who gets to lead. Ordinary members of political parties should get to pick the leader from choices at a contest.

And then later on, in a general election, ordinary voters who may not belong to that political party get to make a choice about who runs the whole place.

There’s more to this than just a nod to some mouldering and out-dated idea:  a party leadership contest helps to sort out the poseurs from the people with the gravitas to do the job of representing the entire province and all its people as the head of government.

Kathy Dunderdale’s coronation continues a tradition alright, the sad tradition begun in 2003 that undermines the province’s democratic institutions.

- srbp -

23 December 2010

The horrors of democracy

From a recent Telegram editorial:
Those same Republicans are now saying these heroes, many of whom suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, must stand aside until the country’s fattest fat cats get to keep their three per cent tax holiday. 

One could hardly imagine any greater depth of moral bankruptcy.
And from the news:
The US Senate on Wednesday approved a long-awaited multi-billion-dollar health package for emergency responders to the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001.

The legislation was to be passed later Wednesday by the House of Representatives and sent to President Barack Obama's desk for signature. The approval by both chambers of Congress would come on the last day before lawmakers head home for a holiday recess.
Moral bankruptcy indeed.

Democracy is a messy business but as this bill demonstrates, in a healthy democracy parties can reconcile their contending points of view in a compromise that works for all.  In the end, the health care bill passed the Senate unanimously.

The Congress also passed a bill repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that discriminates against homosexuals serving in the American military. And those are just some of the measures passed as the members head off to a Christmas break.  The legislators will be back in January, incidentally, hard at work passing laws and keeping the current administration accountable to the people whose money the government spends.

All that noise  that hurt the ears of the Telegram editorial board is, in fact, an essential feature of any democracy worthy of the name.  It is, to be sure, a very necessary and very natural expression of a thriving society where people can argue about ideas,  have strong disagreements and then find a middle ground that allows everyone to move forward.

Compare to the current goings on in Newfoundland and Labrador.  The legislature sits for a handful of days a year.  When it does sit, as in the eight day wonder just completed, the members spoke about a handful of pathetic bills that did little more than change the punctuation is some straight-forward bills.  They spoke about those bills – debate is hardly the word for it -  with some of the most incoherent speeches delivered in this or any other legislature on the planet.

At the same time, the governing Conservatives are busily working to avoid having any sort of open political competition within their own party for the Premier’s job recently vacated in an unseemly haste by Danny Williams.   These denizens of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms and politicians like Jerome Kennedy and Darin King are afraid. 

They are afraid not only of debate, perhaps, but of their own inability, ultimately, to bring people together.

They seem to be genuinely distrustful of politics itself.  After all, debate and reconciliation, are core features of politics in a democratic society.

Seriously.

The problem in 2001 that Tories are pointing to was not that the Liberal leadership produced differences of opinion.  Those differences exist as a matter of course in every group of human beings. The political problem for Liberals came from the fact that Roger Grimes hard trouble bringing people together on his own team in a common cause.

The Conservative effort to deliver a leader without an open competition will do nothing except point out that the Conservatives not only lack a suitable replacement for Danny Williams, they are desperate not to risk their hold on power.  What’s more, Jerome or Darin or Kathy know that they lack the leadership skills to reconcile the factions within their own party.  Otherwise they wouldn’t stand for a back-room fix.

And in the process, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians should be highly suspicious of whomever the back-rooms boys settle on to run the Conservative Party.  After all, how can the people of Newfoundland and Labrador trust them to bring people together in much larger causes than who gets to head the Tory tribe?

Politics is supposed to be adversarial and the more open the differences the easier it is for people to consider the various aspects of difficult ideas.  Consider what might have happened, for example, had the legislature done what it is supposed to do and forced the cabinet to explain and fully justify something like the Abitibi expropriation.

The job of holding government accountable is not just for the opposition. Government members have a role to play as members of the House.

Newspapers and other media also have a role to play in a healthy democracy.  Usually, the role is to question and to criticise those in power.  Yet instead of showing any enthusiasm for democracy, the Telegram editorial board is slipping into the same anti-democratic way of thinking it offered in March and April 1931.  At that time, the country supposedly needed a break from democracy and the Telegram was all in favour of it.

Simply put:  just as one could not be a democrat and support the imposition of an unelected government in 1931, one cannot support democracy and hold out the recent session of the legislature as anything other than the embarrassment that it is.
 
If, as the Telegram editorial board contends,  the most recent session of the United States Congress is a sign of moral bankruptcy and if  the House of Assembly is a repository of nobility and virtue by comparison, then let us all hope the province is very soon beset by every form of political debauchery the human mind can imagine.

There is, after all, something much more horrible than democracy.

- srbp -

15 June 2010

Eventually the other guys will lose…

A couple of weeks ago, your humble e-scribbler picked up a story at the political science reunion.  It was about a bunch of university types who met with a political leader looking for some advice.

Do some polling, find out what people are looking for and develop a platform came the advice.  Then go out and work hard to persuade people to join you and vote for you.

No way, came the response.  We don’t need to do that: eventually the other guys will lose.

Telegram editorial page editor Russell Wangersky offered a thoughtful commentary on local politics last week:

Sitting on the government side has been a free ticket to talking down to whatever party's in opposition and just generally acting like God's gift to politics.

It also means a fundamental weakness in opposition - and never forget that the opposition has a crucial role in good government. The weakness is that no one runs to be a member of a strong opposition - instead, potentially strong candidates sit on their hands and wait for the right time to throw their hats in the ring. That time only comes when it looks like they can take the government - and until then, we tend to get leaders of the opposition who are seat-warmers, at best.

Wangersky hit on a major problem in local politics, but it isn’t one of majorities.  Nor is it the case that people don’t run to to be part of a strong opposition:  not a single politician has ever run in order to sit on the side of the House that doesn’t have power.

Rather, the problem has to do with the local political culture. 

For starters, politics is seen by many as nothing more than a game.  Voters don’t necessarily weigh policies;  they just make a guess early on which side is going to win and then park their vote with the winner.  That’s where this whole idea comes from about losing one’s vote. Being on the winning side is the most important thing for many voters.

Second, consider that parties don’t divide up along any really well-founded ideological lines either. Take a look at the 1996 Tory platform, for example, and you’ll see basically policies that are similar to the Liberal platform at the time.  In 2003, Danny Williams’ platform included an entire chapter that was nothing more than a précis of the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan

On some issues in that election – like say the idea of a state-owned oil company – all three parties had exactly the same idea.  Just to give a sense of the absence of any ideological divide consider that the New Democrats look on it as if it was actually some kind of public ownership.  Lorraine Michael praises the hell out of NALCOR because it looks like something her peeps would like.

In practice, NALCOR is something the local New Democrats should be opposing vehemently.  It runs without adequate public oversight and can hide most of its financial workings from legislative scrutiny. NALCOR has received bags of public cash but produces no identifiable public benefit.

Even if all that weren’t true, somewhere along the line Lorraine missed the biggie clue that should tell her Danny is no advocate of public ownership of the kind New Democrats as social democrats would understand:  Williams has said in the legislature right in front of her that he’d flip the whole deal if the price was right.  New Democrats don’t usually advocate converting principles to cash.

To be sure, the current Williams crowd are viciously partisan in a way locals have seldom seen.  The truly hard core Danny-ites approach politics with the sort of closed-minded zeal that would make your average Fox News watcher green if only with envy.  But still,  what we are referring to in Newfoundland today is not an ideological division,  that is unless Chris Crocker-style hysterical celebrity worship is now a political belief system. 

And through it all, there’s the simple fact that since the Great Sectarian Accommodation of the mid-19th century, the Newfoundland establishment culture does accept open political debate and discussion as being legitimate.  To the contrary, local political culture explicitly divides the world into acceptable views and those which are treasonous, to use the popular freshie-gulper language.

You’ll see a fine example of this time-honoured approach in the comments on a post from 2009.  There’s a back and forth between your humble e-scribbler and a chap who wanted to offer some free advice.  part of the exchange included this::

Complaining about the tone of my comments or saying I am negative (there's a popular one) is really a code for identifying someone who is outside the range of accepted belief. It identifies someone who must conform or be ostracised.

It is a way of suppressing ideas and views which run contrary to that of the dominant authorities. Remember a couple of years ago when DW referred to some people in Stephenville as "dissidents"? Bit of an odd choice of words but, if you appreciate the wider context, it made perfect sense. How about the constant refrain that different ideas are "negative"?

As a last point, I will note that there is one thing I have seen fairly consistent[ly] over the past four or five years. The only people who criticise my tone (even with the little bit of sugar about it being a "nice" blog) or who suggested I am merely a partisan hack advancing something called "Liberal dogma", whatever the hell that is, come from a very particular ideological or partisan background themselves.

They are, in effect, using coded language in another way: to avoid dealing with conflict. They want to suppress some sort of conflict either between their ideas and ones they don't agree with or can't accept or - more typically with the person. In the latter case the sublimation comes from misperception that criticism of an idea is criticism of the person suggesting the idea. Either way it is unhealthy.

This isn’t just an abstraction or a left-over fear from another age. 

Once in power, political parties have been known to use their considerable economic might to punish those who speak publicly even if it simply doesn’t conform to the exact government line. Whether it is that economic punishment or merely the phone call asking if someone had actually meant to say something quoted in the news media, the message of suppression and the need for conformity gets through loudly and clearly.

No one should be surprised that, in such a culture, aspiring politicians often wait around hoping for the day the other guys lose.  Nor is it surprising given such a repressed political environment that in the 60-odd years since Confederation, there have been only three changes of governing political party in Newfoundland and Labrador:  1972, 1989 and 2003.

A healthy democracy requires more than a strong opposition in the legislature.  It requires a strong party system that accepts as legitimate both differences of view and the right to express those differences without fear of reprisal. That strong party system cannot take root in a place where conformity is demanded, where differences are actively suppressed and where politics is reduced to nothing more than a game.

-srbp-