Democracy Watch: Newfoundland and Labrador edition

Think of it as another type of mother’s day:

"The reality is that a friendly dictatorship definitely applies in this case."

Resulting legislative dysfunction is "quite shocking," [Memorial University political science professor Alex Marland] said.

"A number of the parliamentary principles that are supposed to occur don't occur here. The biggest problem is the lack of opposition and the lack of scrutiny of government operations."

Three things:

One:  there’s nothing friendly about the sort of nasty, mean-spirited, vicious, petty, personal digs quoted in this Canadian Press piece running across Canada this weekend. They may not be friendly but they have been very much par for the course since 2001.

Two:  Marland ought to know how dysfunctional politics is these days in Newfoundland and Labrador.  He used to be a comms director in Williams’ administration.

Three:  Irony is referring to a Quebec judge making palpable errors in the context of the Abitibi expropriation TARFU.

-srbp-

Head Shaker Update: The Globe headline on this CP story makes it sound like the Old Man just dropped the writ:  “Williams seeks third term as Newfoundland’s premier”.

The next election isn’t due until October 2011.  A lot can change in the time between now and then.

Leading the nation…

in a lamentable trend.

Via nottawa, here’s a link to Jim Travers’ excellent column on the decline of democratic institutions in Canada.

Regular readers of these humble e-scribbles will know that the local legislature and the government which has taken complete control of it in every respect is way ahead of the crowd in eroding the function of democratic institutions.

Everything Jim says about Ottawa applies equally in St. John’s.

The phenomenon is not a partisan one.  The current Conservative crowds in Ottawa and St. John’s have merely taken to the whole trend started under respectively – Chretien and Tobin - with an unnatural lust.

The root of the problem is easy to identify.

The cure, as Jim lays it out, is the same thing:

If war is too serious to leave to generals, then surely democracy is too important to delegate to politicians.

We – the voters – let the politicians carry on the way they do.

We - the voters – can change things.

You just gotta wanna.

-srbp-

...and I'll respect you in the morning.

Remember the three great statements people said but no one believed?

Well, add a new one to that:  the "we don't have a quorum" excuse for cancelling a meeting that every single member knew about weeks ago and committed to attend.

We know they committed to attend because the news release announcing the meeting was issued just this past Monday.

The problem seems to be on the government side.  The last meeting turned into a political fiasco  - a national political fiasco - with the three Provincial Conservatives following orders and playing the pettiest of petty politics with funding for the official opposition.

That bit of nastiness happened when the official government pollster - Corporate Research Associates  - was doing other things so maybe given that CRA is in the field as we speak, the government members don't want anything but the happiest of happy news out there to upset the polling.

We should at least we should be grateful they used the quorum nonsense.  They might have said they couldn't have a meeting because Trevor had to wash his hair that afternoon.

-srbp-

The promise of a shift in political perceptions

Cabinet shuffles are often unremarkable events that make news simply because they occur.

Today's federal shuffle would be one of those occasions.  Yes, the people in the jobs deserve some recognition, but beyond noting that Gary Lunn received a royal demotion or that Bev Oda is still in cabinet in the same job - Heavens knows why - there isn't much in the news to deserve much thought.

From a Newfoundland and Labrador perspective, it may well be that the best news in many years to come from a federal cabinet is that there isn't a regional minister for this province who actually comes from this province.

The local cult of personality over the past five years has tended to personalize everything, including the importance of having a single individual to "fight for Newfoundland and Labrador."  That perspective led to first John Efford and Loyola Hearn being targeted for attack by a particular political faction largely because they offered a potential challenge to the existing self-described embodiment as an alternate locus of political power. [continued below]

"Some obstacles to democracy..."

In all important aspects of national politics, guile, compromise and a subtle kind of blackmail decided their course and determined their alliances. They appeared to discount all political or social ideologies, save nationalism. For the mass of the people the words Tory and Grit, Conservative and Liberal, referred neither to political ideologies nor to administrative techniques. They were regarded only as meaningless labels, affixed to alternatives which permitted the auctioneering of one's support; they had no more meaning than bleu or rouge, which eventually replaced them in popular speech. [They] on the whole never voted for political or economic ideologies, but only for the man or group which stood for their ethnic rights... In such a mental climate, sound democratic politics could hardly be expected to prevail, even in strictly provincial or local affairs where racial issues were not involved....

That political frame resurrected an old collective perception of Ottawa solely as a source of dole that came from the Smallwood years.  Our expectation that political success is defined solely on a politicians ability to bring home pork for the federal larder comes from the way Newfoundlanders and Labradorians received their orientation to federal politics after 1949. The Smallwood legacy in that regard is not merely lingering, it has become once more the official view.

Now to be fair, there is a tradition of some rather powerful figures from this province, including the likes of Don Jamieson and John Crosbie.  But to be really fair, their power came from their ability to discharge their responsibilities to the country as a whole as well as their inherent political and managerial skills.

People who head off to Ottawa as provincialist representatives for their own corner of the universe, and who ceaselessly work only for that patch tend to wind up - to a greater or lesser degree - like individual Blocheads:  pretty much incapable of influencing things to any significant degree.

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can look to their federal representatives to represent their interests in dealing with the Government of Canada and in reflecting their views on national issues debated in the national parliament.

As for provincial government issues - revealed in the begging letters to Ottawa during the last election - the job now falls to the individual provincial ministers to work with their federal counterparts as needed.  The standard for judging their performance just shot up dramatically.  They don't have that convenient scapegoat anymore and high-pitched bitching will no longer be a convincing substitute for making the case and getting the job done.

On the municipal level, the effect of the last federal election might also be sorely felt.  The folly of electing inexperienced municipal representatives, particularly ones with a tendency to play petty political games or work their partisan connections, may show itself to be useless.

The end result at the provincial and municipal level may be that the job specs get boosted up a fair bit beyond where they've been for the past number of years.

At the same time, the potential exists for a fundamental shift in how Newfoundlanders and Labradorians - individually and collectively - look at federal politics.

Maybe, just maybe, some 60 years after Confederation, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will shuck off the frame used by generations of provincialist politicians and finally participate fully in the nation's political system as they should.

We must be masters of our own house, but our house is all of Canada.

-srbp-

The Blue Shaft

Narrow partisan considerations reared their ugly head in a meeting of the legislature's management committee.

An independent study commissioned by the House of Assembly management commission recommends an increase in budgets for the Provincial Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic causes in the House of Assembly.

MR. SPEAKER: Okay. Provide base funding for the Government Members’ Caucus of $100,000 annually.

The Chair is ready for discussion.

Ms Burke.

MS BURKE: That is one recommendation that I support.

Joan Burke, education minister and government house leader may have enthusiastically voted money for her political friends but in the end, the Provincial Conservative members of the legislature's internal management commission support every single recommendation, except one. 

That one allocated $162,000 to the Official Opposition office to ensure a well-funded opposition that would have appropriate resources to carry out its important legislative function in a modern democracy.  The study reviewed legislature budgets across Canada and in several foreign parliaments.

The report included a set of general principles on democratic legislatures and caucus funding. They included, among others:

3. The legislature must be strong vis-à-vis the executive in order for democratic government to be effective.

...

5. In adversarial systems, the Opposition and other parties play important roles and need institutionalized protections.

...

One cannot imagine a more straightforward set of principles.  In order to drive home their point on the importance of a legislature with a properly funded opposition, the authors included an observation on events in several provinces where opposition benches were depleted after an election:

The crucial thing is that there has to be informed opposition, and that takes resources. However, one other consideration is germane here. That is that in first-past-the-post (single member plurality) systems such as those that exist in Canada, there is a danger of opposition shut-outs or quasi shut-outs as the electoral system exaggerates the winner’s share of seats. This has been seen in general elections in the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, PEI, New Brunswick, Alberta and British Columbia. There needs to be a kind of “Opposition Bill of Rights” to deal with such anomalies, since Westminster systems
depend on adversarialism.

The Provincial Conservative members took a decidedly different view. Innovation minister Trevor Taylor put it this way:

MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, I don’t need to reiterate everything that Ms Burke just said, but I think if you just look at it from a perspective, a base allocation, one would think that a base allocation would be a base for all caucuses. Why the principles of Metrics EFG would differentiate is hard for me to follow, to be honest about it. [Emphasis added]

That last statement could not be more painfully obvious or true.

The extent to which the Provincial Conservative members also picked at petty issues is evident in the transcript of the session.  Education minister Joan Burke seemed concerned either to micromanage issues - as with Memorial University - or to ensure that no one got a few dollars more in his or her budget than she had available in hers:

MS BURKE: I have a question on that, and I think it may be just a clarification.

It says that the assistant to the Opposition House Leader is $49,000 and the assistant to the Government House Leader is $43,000. So, is this simply a case where there is a step progression but it would be the same job?

Okay, I just wanted to clarify that because in the report it kind of stands out as to why and I thought that would have been the explanation.

MR. SPEAKER: Yes. My understanding is that the assistant to the Leader of the Opposition has gone through the step progression to reflect that salary, and the assistant to the Government House Leader will do the incremental steps to get up to that particular salary as well.

MS BURKE: In essence what we are saying is, instead of it being, say, $49,000 there, that would depend, I guess – that is only an indication of where an individual would be on a step. If that position changed tomorrow, that $49,000 could potentially be, I do not know, $38,000 or $39,000.

Outside the meeting the Provincial Conservatives defended their actions as being about responsible management of public spending. 

-srbp-

Power, politics and change

People should not be afraid of their governments.

Governments should be afraid of their people.

'Tis that time of the year once more, dear friends, when the political origins of an ancient commemoration once more slips a wee bit more from the popular view. This is a shame since in the events marked by bonfires in many parts of the Commonwealth we may find a timely inspiration.

The Gunpowder Plot was an attempt at violent political change and the book and movie from which the opening quote is taken contained its share of violence. Yet, violence is not as sure a means of effecting political change as knowledge and words.

Discovery of the Plot set back the cause of Roman Catholic emancipation in Britain for some two centuries, yet experts will equally argue that had the plot succeeded in killing the King and the Protestant members of parliament, it may well have led to a period of even greater repression of Roman Catholicism throughout the United Kingdom.

Compare that experience with events in India before 1947 or in the United States when the power of non-violence coupled with information produced far more dramatic and positive social and political changes.

The truth is that governments in the past century of human civilization do fear their people. They fear not so much the potential for violent revolution, although that has occurred. Rather if we look to Pakistan of just the past few days, we see the actions of a government declaring martial law because it feared the prospect of a change in government administration through legal, i.e. peaceful means. The pretext for martial law is a particular decision of the country's Supreme Court, but the struggle between the courts and General Pervez Musharraf go back many months. The rule of law has been frustrating the General's plans and, in some respects, it may only have been a matter of time before Musharraf or another member of the armed forces that has ruled the country for too many years seized power.

Closer to home we may also see evidence of a government that fears its people. The Prime Minister recently ruled out the prospect of an inquiry into allegations against one of his predecessors, not because the allegations have already been reviewed, but because such an inquiry would be "dangerous".

Yet neither the Prime Minister nor his predecessor found the prospect of public inquiries into other matters to be "politically driven", or in the case of Paul Martin sufficiently dangerous to his own political fortunes to serve as an excuse for not appointing an investigation.

The Prime Minister, we would contend might be afraid of the implications such an inquiry might have for his own administration. He is almost certainly afraid of undermining his own politically driven use of past misdeeds.

Closer to home, we find another government and another first minister seemingly afraid of the people. The struggle in this instance is waged with words that are effectively stripped of any real meaning. The legislature is kept closed while the evidence makes plain that the excuses offered by the cabinet are nonsense.

People are warned against demanding increased public spending on one or another cause they consider good because of "the debt." Never mind that the debt has increased and that public spending under the current administration has kept pace with the flow of petro-dollars; the spending of course, is on things which the government considers important. People should scarcely need reminding that this same administration has refused to tell the people what they will actually be charging developers for the right to develop public natural resources and fought for the longest time to prevent an inquiry into spending on fibreoptic cables. These are actions, we are reminded of an open, accountable and transparent government.

Therein lies the clearest example of how governments show their fear of the people who they would rule. Culture and history are malleable and the very meaning of common words may be altered to the point where even reasonable people cannot grasp the inherent contradictions in what they claim.

I like the fact that our current premier seems intent on appealing to the strengths and skills of the people of this place. I like the fact that his government beefed up the rules for MHAs in the wake of the constituency-allowance spending scandal, based on Chief Justice Derek Green’s recommendations.

or from the earlier column:

He preaches that the solution lies not with him, but with us.

How "he" alone accomplishes this we do not know, especially when the political program is designed to increase government control over resources rather than creating an environment in which enterprising individuals may flourish. How "he" should be credited with introducing those rules when, as anyone may well see, "he" allowed the inappropriate spending - the allowances not the alleged criminal activity - to flourish until discovery of the latter revealed the former; let us not forget either that implementing those rules was delayed, as the columnist's own paper reported, while people were led to believe something else. The "solution" - no problem is defined - cannot rest with "us" when the entire premise of the administration is founded on "him" being in charge; "us" should dutifully follow and offer only positive suggestions in support of whatever is decided by "him" and "his" ministers.

Words can have no meaning in a world where they are changed at whim, where information is withheld from the public and where, as it turns out, even editors have let slip the mooring lines of fact.

I remember how the meaning of words began to change. How unfamiliar words like "collateral" and "rendition" became frightening, while things like Norsefire and the Articles of Allegiance became powerful. I remember how "different" became dangerous.

Another writer called it Newspeak, but in other works, George Orwell demonstrated his clear appreciation of how language may be perverted to obscure meaning and thereby frustrate public understanding. In some countries, governments show their fear of people with violence. In others, they show fear by doing violence to language and history.

Both fears are rooted in the understanding that power rests ultimately the individuals within a society. Yet in any democracy worthy of the name, there is no legitimate reason for fear nor for the response it seems to engender from the governors toward the governed.

In Pakistan, the country has taken a step backward from democracy and only time will tell how the Pakistani people will respond.

In Canada, we may continue to work for change and to exercise our power as citizens in a democracy in the country as a whole or within the province. We must reject the debasement of language and history.

True power, after all, does not come from the barrel of a gun. It comes from the exercise of basic freedoms, despite what some governors may ponder.

As individuals in a free society, we should remember that true power comes from the mind.

-srbp-

Summer fiction

On the day after the last instalment in one of the most popular works of fiction in written times, comes this endorsement of one of the great works of local fiction: the rigged Confederation referendum.

Yep.

It had to be rigged.

After all, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians could never decide the fate of their country on their own. After all, as some of the townies told Lord Amulree, the ordinary Newfoundlander just wasn't fit for democracy.

In his own way, former CBC producer Bob Wakeham turned Telegram columnist repeats the townie nationalist fairy tale that is, after all, the only salve they can apply to their wounds from a half century and more ago.

There's no way they lost the referendum fight because they were politically inept, disorganized and that their fellow countrymen and women had brains enough to think for themselves - no matter how they voted.

Good heavens no.

Democracy? They weren't fit for it.

Why is it that it is only the local nationalists who tell Newfoundlanders how stunned they are? Sure they accuse everyone else of doing it but who was the last person who told you that Newfoundlanders always sign bad deals?

Anyway, here's Wakeham's version of conspiracy:

There’s no doubt that the Brits and the Canucks decided, without consulting the people who just happened to live here, that, by nook or by crook, the "Newfoundland problem," as described by officials in both countries, would be resolved by having Newfoundland become part of Canada; that Confederation was added to the ballot of the first referendum at the insistence of Britain (after all, how could the conspiracy to unite Newfoundland and Canada run its course if Confederation wasn’t a voting option?); and that Canada heavily funded the pro-Confederate, Smallwood side, making the process improper and decidedly unfair.

Confederation was added to the ballot after a popular outpouring of support, not by some underhanded practice. Apparently having choice is a bad thing, if one takes the logical conclusion of Wakeham's comment.

The Confederates raised money on the mainland from many sources, including ex-pats. (Confederation didn't produce outmigration) The Confederates raised cash at home as well

The anti-Confederates had plenty of potential sources of cash on the mainland and elsewhere as well. They just didn't tap into them. They were disorganized, not just badly organized.

And in the end, after all the propaganda and all the argumentation across the country for two years, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians voted.

They voted.

They chose.

They exercised their fundamental democratic right.

In the case of Labradorians, for the first time ever in a Newfoundland vote.

And for some reason, Wakeham and a handful of others others just can't get over it.

-srbp-

The eastern banana republic

When the cabinet seizes control of what is supposed to be a parliamentary democracy, you get an announcement that the government is appointing a "staunch Tory" to be chief electoral officer.

The root of the current problem goes back to the House of Assembly scandal when the Premier, not the Speaker, seized control of the issue and started to manage the whole thing from the Premier's Office. Contrary to his public protestations, the Premier has been running the show ever since.

In the current situation, if for some reason the House doesn't approve him, the staunch Tory will continue to serve in an acting capacity.

Why wasn't this supposedly non-partisan position recruited through a non-partisan process through the House of Assembly?

And by what authority will the "staunch Tory" get to keep his job even if the legislature finds him unsuitable?

Chuck Furey's appointment was bad enough.

This announcement completely destroys any pretense that the government is accountable to the House of Assembly in any manner whatsoever.

What's say we just skip the fall election and save a bundle of cash using the Yeltsin solution.

After all, when a "staunch Tory" is appointed by a Tory government to a supposedly non-partisan position overseeing an election, it really doesn't take much imagination to figure out that the whole democracy thing has become a sick joke.