The Walking Dead Duck

This evening Liberals will elect a new leader.

And about two weeks from now – likely Friday, August 14 – the new leader will take the oath of office and become the 38^th first minister of Newfoundland and Labrador since it became self-governing (May 5, 1855) and the 14^th Premier since Confederation in 1949.

Dwight Ball survived 1704 days.

That’s four years, seven months and 30 days.

55 months, 30 days.

Or barely more than a single term.

It is hard to remember a day of that very short tenure that Dwight Ball was not embroiled in a controversy.  The ones he did not make, he bungled, which made them far worse than they were.  The provincial government’s financial state is no better now that Ball is leaving than when he took office.  Arguably, it is worse.  

The House of Assembly is diminished in every respect compared to even the low point it was at when he took office and Ball leaves the Office of Premier itself diminished.  His was a spectacularly dysfunctional office from the start and it never got better.  Even single-celled organisms can learn but the relentless repetition of the same blunders in everything from staffing to how Ball and his office responded to events are the hallmark of Dwight Ball’s political career. Ball has been a zombie Premier, of sorts, one of the political walking dead.

The challenge of change #nlpoli

Change is hard.

 It's even harder when no one wants to change.

Our Former
Dear Premier

Some people outside the Liberal Party have been obsessed lately with the leadership contest currently going on.  They seem to think that one person can make all the difference in how the provincial government will tackle its considerable financial problems.

Well, the belief that the Premier is the strong man or woman responsible for everything is part of our post-Confederation political culture. The strongman myth – a local version of the Latin American caudillo or the Soviet/Russian personality cults - has only grown in strength since 2003 despite the ample evidence it simply isn’t true.  There are many factors that determine what the government does and those will affect the choices the next premier and the administration he leads will make.

Rather than look at the individuals who might wind up as Premier next month, let’s take a look at those other factors.

Trends #nlpoli

How do you keep in place the very necessary and successful restrictions on public life needed to combat the spread of CVD19 when the success of those measures reduces the local daily number of active cases either to zero or to a handful and hence the threat appears to have passed?

In the 15 years I’ve been writing SRBP, the one enduring feature of public discussion about my writing happened again this week, in spades.

People come at me on social media about what is going on in their own heads and attribute that to me.

They don’t deal with the point I was actually making.  They deal with whatever they imagine I said.  And no amount of explanation will dissuade them from their crusade to shut me up or take me down or do whatever it is they are hell-bent on doing besides understanding my point and then having a productive conversation.

On Monday and Tuesday, I wrote about the very real political dilemma facing the current government.  It’s the one spelled out in the first sentence of this post.  I thought it would come in a couple weeks.  It appears to have arrived Tuesday.

So much for forecasts.

John Haggie is already frustrated that people are not listening.  On Tuesday, I told him the government need to ditch the current daily briefing format and messaging for something else that was less patronizing.  In the Tuesday briefing, Haggie delivered his stock message but did it for merely 53-odd seconds before taking questions.

Not really the point, but if the current trends continue, as they seem likely to do, then we will likely also see the mounting public pressure to ease restrictions on life in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The federal government is already talking to the provinces about the return to something approaching normal with the mention of re-opening the economy.  The economy never shut so what they are using is a code word for easing up the limitations on the public.  Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island and some others will undoubtedly do so by the end of this month or early next month.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, though we will have to think twice about that.  Our two bordering provinces – Nova Scotia and Quebec – are still fighting a hot war against the spread of the disease.  The risk of infection across the border is real.  New Brunswick will face the same challenge.

The challenge for the - quite literally – two or three people effectively running the government in Newfoundland and Labrador will be holding off that political pressure and sustaining restrictions because the threat of disease will remain.  The situation of needing to do something unpopular will not be unprecedented.  We have lots of experience recently with it. Every time, the politicians have failed.

Will the trend continue?

Time will tell.

-srbp-

The indelicate art of cabin-making #nlpoli

1. If Ross Wiseman is the new Speaker because Tom Osborne withdrew, that’s because Osborne knows he’s going back into cabinet.
2. Tom should send a thank you note to Gerry Rogers, the Skinner-skinner. 
3. Steve Kent will get a cabinet post, most likely something light and fluffy. Think intergovernmental affairs and the voluntary sector.  There are lots of made-up cabinet posts and plenty of light and fluffy caucus bodies competing for them but Kent’s been around since 2007 and Mount Pearl usually gets a minister. 
4. As much as you could run the place with about a third fewer ministers than the current cabinet has, Dunderdale likely won’t cut many posts, if any.  She needs to keep the ambitious crowd on her benches under control for a while, especially in light of the serious kick in the stones the party took in St. John’s.
5. The huge upset along the Burin peninsula will mean that both Darin and Clyde will get cabinet jobs. What cabinet jobs they get is another matter. Jackman might not get fish back considering he made a balls of it already.
6. If Dunderdale is serious about restructuring the fishery, she’ll need someone with a titanium spine and nothing to lose politically to take the job. Her only caucus member with those criteria  - Jerome! - is already busy and would be better deployed in another portfolio.
7. Marshall will likely stay on in finance. Dunderdale’s choices are limited. if you didn’t leave him there, where else could Tom go?
8. Education needs a shake-up. Unfortunately, there are few choices to shake it up and lots of resistance from the school board mafia led by Darin King to any substantive changes for the better in the province’s education system.
9. Natural resources is a plum job even though Dunderdale will likely keep her fingers in most of the major issues. As much as someone like Jerome! could deliver a major shakeup to a department is long overdue for a gutting, odds are this little plum will be kept for close friends of the Boss.  Due rewards for their service to the Dunderdale cause:  Joan Burke and Susan Sullivan. Take yer pick.
10. Fairity O’Brien could get left on the benches as a thank you for his loyalty to the Old Man.  The only more fitting political reward would be fisheries minister with a mandate to overhaul the industry at no cost to the treasury.
11. Whoever gets tourism, culture and recreation will be Dunderdale’s new pork and patronage czar.  Terry French did that job so admirably during the Old Man’s second term that he is due a promotion. 

- srbp -

Why should anyone care? #nlpoli

We can often see things more clearly when we compare one item  to something that is supposed to be similar to it.  It's one of the simplest ways we can learn. Babies learn to do it at an early age and comparing is at the heart of the old Sesame Street song about One of these things.... 

You can do it with objects, or, as in this post, with political parties and people.

Let's look at the Liberals and the New Democrats in this province. 

This week the New Democrats and their leader Lorraine Michael did a couple of things worth noting.  On the front page of Tuesday's Telegram, underneath a picture of singularly the most incompetent and nakedly-biased Speaker the legislature has had since Confederation (except for the guy who had the job right before him), there's another story about a protest in front of the Confederation Building. There’s a picture of a bunch of people who want the House of Assembly to open this fall for a regular session. 

The guy shown in the picture holding a megaphone has been camped out on the Hill since last week. it’s a great sign of free speech in a province where speaking your mind publicly has been known to get you attacked by friends of the incompetent Speaker.

And right there in front of the crowd listening to the guy with the microphone are NDP leader Lorraine Michael and newly elected Skinner-skinner Gerry Rogers, also a New Democrat member of the legislature.

Basic political issue:  House of Assembly ought to be open so the politicians can debate and discuss important issues.  NDP right there.

One of the issues the NDP would like to discuss is how the provincial government builds ships for the provincial ferry fleet.  The New Democrats would like to see a long-term policy that lays out the plans for maintaining the fleet and building new and replacement ships.  The New Democrats think this could lay the foundation for the shipyards around the province. With some guaranteed local business, the companies could plan for the future and take on steady work from elsewhere.

The ferry contract is an issue on the Burin peninsula, especially in Burin-Placentia West where the Marystown Shipyard just finished building two ferries but can't get started on the third and fourth because of some unspecified problems.  With no other work at the yard, the provincial government work is important.  The New Democrats don't hold that district in the House, although they came close in the recent general election. But the shipyard policy has implications that reach beyond one district.  The policy will affect provincial budgets just as surely as it can affect the smaller shipyards in the province, subcontractors who do work for the shipyards and  - it almost goes without saying - the people who ride the ferries daily in order to live their daily lives.

Compare that to the provincial Liberals.  By virtue of the fact they have one more seat than the Dippers, the Grits are the official opposition party in the legislature.  They get a bigger budget and their leader gets some extra money to have an office and staff comparable to what a cabinet minister would have.

That reflects the importance of the position in our system of government.  The leader of the opposition, after all, should be someone the lieutenant governor is supposed to be able to call on to form an administration in the event the current one fell. People tend to forget that, but it is the way our system is supposed to work.  It is one of the ways we could avoid having elections every five minutes during a minority parliament, but that's another issue.

Last week, the Liberals got together for the first time since the election.  They called the media together for scrum about the House being closed until the spring.

The media - not surprisingly - wanted to talk about the Liberal leadership.  Fill-in leader Kevin Aylward has been invisible since the election.  He didn't win his seat.  People are wondering what Kevin plans to do and how the Liberals plan to handle the House.  The grim-faced gang stood in front of the reports and Yvonne Jones - the person who, in effect, never stopped being Leader of the Opposition, answered questions about the leadership question.

And then they got around to talking about the House.  Scrum over, all but one of them headed back to their districts.  They'll come to town again to be sworn in later this week and then, if the usual pattern holds,  they'll head back to their districts as fast as they can.

In the scrum, one of the reporters asked Jones about prospective leader Dean MacDonald and his support for Muskrat Falls. The caucus is basically holding the leader's job for Dean, when and if he wants it, incidentally. Whether this is the arrangement they cooked up before Jones "stepped back" from the leader's job  - Dean and Yvonne didn't have a lengthy meeting to talk finances - or if it is a post-election plan or even a desperate caucus hope, the job is Dean's.

And on the controversial project, Jones answered that until someone could show the benefits to the province and since Muskrat Falls brought no benefit to Labrador she was opposed to it regardless who was backing it.

The contrast in the two parties could not be any more stark.  On the one hand, you have a party that is active on the local political scene demonstrating their position on an issue and garnering some coverage on their stand in the meantime.  The Dipper leader spoke out about an issue  that doesn't affect her district directly.  The Dippers took a position about shipbuilding based on the wider provincial impact.

Contrast that with the Liberals and Jones' position on Muskrat.  Her opposition to the project is framed not on the numerous policy problems with it but on the absence of apparent benefits to a specific part of the province.  She noted that the project didn't deliver benefits for one particular spot.

In truth, that last bit is the key bit about the post-2003 Liberals.  It's all very local, and very much about individual districts.  And if you take Jones' comments to their logical conclusion, you can see pretty quickly that her opposition would melt away once someone delivers some pork to address her concerns.  String a couple of power lines into Jones' district, talk about making power available for local industry in Labrador and she'll be standing by ready to wave flags and cheer for the mega-debt disaster.

Now to be fair, the NDP is backing Muskrat Falls whole-hog.  Their conditional endorsement  - if it is viable - is so lame as to be laughable.

But look at the difference in how the Liberals tackle an issue and how the NDP does.  For the Liberals, there is no provincial perspective, at all.  Everything starts and ends in the specific districts the party members hold.  Yvonne Jones  - and hence the Liberal Party - won't be speaking about shipbuilding generally because it doesn't bother anyone in her district.  She would talk about one ferry boat, though, because it does affect her district.  Jones will even talk about a wildly, insanely ludicrous idea like the Stunnel because - you guessed it - the end point would be in her district.

And as for everywhere else, who gives a flying frack?

It isn't just Jones who operates this way.

It isn't just Danny Dumaresque.  The only difference between Danny D and the rest of the Liberals running in the last election was that he just said it out loud.

It's all of them.

And that difference between the Liberals and the NDP is why one is on the rise in the province and the other is pretty much irrelevant to the political future of the province.

Liberals these days will talk about all the work that the party needs to do to rebuild.  The party's ersatz Danny-in-Waiting said it last week, too, using the Danny-esque hockey metaphor.

But what the Liberals seem to be missing is that the party is way beyond the point where a few meetings and a couple of warm bodies will put them back on the road to power. 

Even if Dean MacDonald comes back and rolls up his sleeves as passionately as any passionate windbag politician ever did, people in the province will need a reason to get involved with the party.  They will need to have a reason to give money or offer up as candidates or even to take the simple step of giving Liberals a vote in 2015.

Right now, the party has spent eight years telling more and more voters in the province that they aren't interested in anything about them.

53% of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians listed health care as a top concern during the last election.  The Liberals held out fisheries ideas from the 1970s as their major policy statement.

Disconnect.

The result is a party that is at a record low in the polls and - despite having one more seat than the NDP - is not a viable alternative to the ruling Conservatives. 

Take a look at the chart, just to make sure the message is plain.  This ain’t 1985, Toto. 

The inevitable message the Liberals have been sending for the past six or seven years is that the Liberal Party doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody outside the few districts they currently hold. 

An active Liberal made a few comments on a post from Monday.  He finished up by asking your humble e-scribbler:

So in your opinion the work starts with making good policy, and then building from there. I don't disagree. As i said, there is lots of work to be done. I'm not one of the Liberals you refer to as waiting for a savior. That is not how I see the Party getting out of this.

Curious on your thoughts: who should be doing the policy work that you see as the first step? Caucus? The leader? The executive? A committee of the board?

The comments from your humble e-scribbler weren’t about  policy, incidentally, but those questions go to the heart of the Liberal problem.

To get at the Liberal problem, you’ve got to get even more basic.  When people say the Liberal Party doesn’t speak to people any more what that means is that the party no longer gives people a reason to support it. 

If they want their party to survive in the future, Liberals have to figure out why anyone should care about the Liberal Party.  It's a simple enough thing to state. The answer isn't implicit in it.  And it goes to the heart of what any political party is about:

Why should anyone care?

People need a reason to get involved with a political party.  Usually it’s the chance to fulfill some personal ambition or to take part in a campaign that will accomplish some sort of bigger purpose. People will need to know that the Liberals are the ticket to something other than political obscurity.  That’s for the political activist types.

For voters, it’s not much different.  Some will want to be part of something, even if it is just the winning side.  Others will latch onto specific people or specific ideas.  And still others will respond to the notion of getting some tax breaks or some such..

But at the very least, the party needs to offer something no one else does.  They’ve got to look like they are going places and that they have the stuff needed to form a government.

Right now, the Liberals have none of that.  They also have no plan to get any of it.  If the Liberals wait around until Dean shows up – and it is a question of if Dean shows up – they will have what they have right now, plus Dean.

What they’ll be missing is what they are missing now:  credibility. 

And they still won’t have the answer to the simple question of why anyone in the province should care about the Liberal Party.

Working out the answer to that question will unlock all the other answers to all the other questions.

Let's see if anyone tries.

- srbp -

The NDP Rise #nlpoli

On Sunday, the always provocative labradore dissected the NDP performance in the last general election.

The NDP gains in votes, and seats, came almost entirely at the expense of the Tories. The Liberals stubbornly refused to believe their own obituaries.

According to the script, this wasn't supposed to happen.
And it's not just a matter of raw vote- and seat-counts. Straits and White Bay North released itself from the Liberal clutches it fell into in the late by-election, but did so without rushing back to the Tory fold. Clyde Jackman saw his political career flash before his eyes, and the NDP was strong enough to be competitive in several of the St. John's area seats it didn't win. Apart from raw margins, another indicium of the potential winnability or convertability of a district is whether the second-place party is strong enough to win polls within the district. The NDP did so in at least four Tory-held St. John's seats Tuesday night, and enough of them that it was leading in suburban Cape St. Francis in the first hour of the count.

Whence the source of the nervous-nelliness.

Labradore’s colourful charts don’t convey the full sense of the shock on the ground. 

Your humble e-scribbler has had way too many direct and indirect accounts over the past week of good Tories who watched the telly gobsmacked on Tuesday last as the NDP ate Shawn and Ed and Bob.

They never saw it coming.

The shock is profound.

They really didn’t see the NDP second-place strength in the other metro seats otherwise they’d be flinging themselves out the nearby windows.

The Tories will have a very hard time dealing with the NDP insurgency.  The NDP policies are the same ones the Tories have been pushing since 2003.

Since the NDP voters are apparently former Tory voters – for the most part – the old Tory scare tactic of NDP financial irresponsibility just won’t find any purchase with those who will likely be looking to change votes and parties next time out.

- srbp -

Whither the Liberals #nlpoli

[revised and edited 4:45 PM]

The tale is not told in the view of columnists  - Stephen Maher, Chantal Hebert and Susan Delacourt - who try to link a series of different events into one explanation.

The tale is told in the comment of one long-time Liberal who bumped into another in St. John’s recently.

The Liberal Party doesn’t speak to me any more, said one.

Exactly, exclaimed the other.

The Liberal Party may have won six seats in last Tuesday’s general election but it stands at an historic low.  Only 11% of the electorate in Newfoundland and Labrador voted Liberal on Tuesday.

Voters in Newfoundland and Labrador looking for something other than the ruling Conservatives opted for the New Democrats last Tuesday and they did so in record numbers.

They did it in St. John’s for the most part but also in Burin-Placentia West,  Labrador West and The Straits-White Bay North. 

While the New Democrat resurgence is a subject for another day, the key thing for this post is which party voters chose last Tuesday and it was not the party that dominated politics in this province for so much of the post-Confederation period.

The reason is simple:  the Liberal Party does not speak to them any more.

A decade or so ago, the dominant voices in the party shifted to an increasingly rural focus on the party.  The Blame Canada commission with its pile of old axes reground was symptomatic of the shift.  So too was the resurgence of make-work as a core government policy for rural parts of the province and the transfer of government offices to major centres outside Capital City.

In this most recent election, ruralism took centre stage in the party’s platform.  And the leader the party executive chose overwhelming was not just committed to the ruralist agenda: he started out the election by loudly proclaiming his fierce “nationalist” sentiment.

Some may blame the Liberal fortunes on the last-minute change of leadership.  Others will focus on the impact of what appeared to be the most ineptly run campaign in provincial political history. 

Both had their part to play but both the campaign and the focus were already in train before the executive board picked Kevin Aylward.  And, if anything, Aylward did not apparently want to shift the dominant internal party trends so much as reinforce them. 

Aylward is scarcely any different from Yvonne Jones who fixated on the idea that building a Stunnel to Labrador was the winning party policy.  Party insiders fought to keep it out of her convention speech and her Facebook posting during the campaign was nothing more than a last-ditch effort to push the stunnedest of stunned ideas.

Beyond the ruralist core, the Liberal Party simply does not know what it stands for. 

In the last election, the party became the nothing more than a political sideshow.  There were plenty of contortionists: cast-offs from other parties abounded.  There was a star of the open line shows.  A perennial favourite of the political fringes stage-mothered a couple of her current charges through their political appearances on the ballot rather than run herself.  A few students came along for good measure as did staffers hounded relentlessly until they agreed to be names on ballots at their own expense.

The only thing missing was the sword swallower.

The Liberal party does not speak to anyone, anymore.

The people running the party seem to have no desire to speak to anyone other than themselves out there on the tattered edges of the provincial political landscape.

They are so far out in the political woods, they’d have to come in to hunt.

What’s worse, though, is that they seem to have lost the desire to hunt.

You can see that in the party after the election.

The leader disappeared.

The party president popped up to do a couple of interviews about the latest leadership crisis.

But while political life carried on, and issues and targets abounded, the party fell completely silent.  Shameful comments by the Premier about the legislature went unchallenged by Liberals. 

They said nothing about anything that truly mattered in the province and in the stuff that mattered only to the people involved in the party, they said little.

The Liberal party no longer speaks to the people of the province.

And, as it seems, the party doesn’t even speak to itself any more either.  Maybe the few of them still out in the political woods need to take heed of that. 

The rest of us [in the province] already have.

- srbp -

Townies and Baymen #nlpoli #nlvotes

Some people were surprised the other night when Danny Dumaresque told the very small audience at a Board of Trade economic forum that:

I would have to say to the mayor of this great city that there are a hell of a lot more priorities outside the overpass that need to be addressed before we start forking more money over to the City of St. John's.

Some people thought his remarks were stupid.

Danny is anything but.

What Danny Dumaresque said won’t hurt him one bit in the Isles of Notre Dame and Danny knows it.

What’s more, what Danny said is true, at least for the people who currently dominate the Liberal Party.  About 12 years ago, they started shifting the party focus away from the province as a whole to one that idealises an imaginary one.

Ruralism started to bloom in the brief period Beaton Tulk served as Premier.  It’s not surprising that Kevin Aylward brought Tulk back to play a key role in the current campaign.

Ruralists believe – as the Liberals’ centrepiece policy for the current campaign states – that:

The fishery is our province’s defining narrative…Our fishery has been our past and the Liberal Party believes it will be our future.

It is not just the fishery, though.  Ruralism, for all its romantic, reactionary beliefs, holds the fishery as the foundation of an entire culture with social and economic components.

The Ruralists flourished after 2003 and their philosophy was firmly entrenched after 2007.  Despite Kevin Aylward’s fervent efforts to pretend otherwise during the debate Wednesday night,  the party he now leads has written off anything east of Goobies.

To be fair, the Liberals aren’t alone in their Ruralist beliefs.  The provincial Conservatives carried on with the Liberals’ Ruralist agenda.  They kept the Rural Secretariat and married its assumptions with Danny Williams’ peculiar version of nationalism.

Again, not surprisingly,  Kevin Aylward proudly declared himself a staunch nationalist shortly after he took over as Liberal leader.  

At its miserable heart, though, Ruralism is really nothing more than old fashioned paternalism and patronage.  Grit or Tory, all the Ruralists really want to do is use public money to keep people in some parts of the province dependent on political hand-outs and therefore firmly under political control.  It’s a miserable, cynical ploy.

To make it clear that patronage isn’t just a favourite ploy for one party, consider that Conservative candidate Keith Russell made it plain enough on Thursday when he said to voters in central Labrador (via the Telegram) that

we have to be on government’s side to access government coffers…

Conservative leader Kathy Dunderdale repeated basically the same line while campaigning on the south eastern coast of Labrador on Thursday.  CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates tweeted it:

Abandoning the Avalon Peninsula doesn’t mean the Liberals are doomed as a political party.  They can still win plenty of seats and could well pick up a few this time around.  They’ll likely stay as the Official Opposition. What they can’t do, of course if form a government.  The Liberal strategy is as short-sighted in that respect as it is simplistic. 

Its narrow focus means the Ruralist Party, as it should now be named,  has had way more trouble than an opposition party normally would getting candidates in the last three elections.  In 2011, they’ve had to turn, once again, to dragooning political staffers to fill out the last remaining slots in the candidate roster.  The only thing Beaton Tulk didn’t do in his mad search for names for the ballots on the Avalon was hold a séance.

The Ruralist Party’s focus doesn’t mean they haven’t turned up some good candidates in the process.  George Joyce in St. John’s West is the best of the three candidates running in St. John’s West by a long way. 

In St. John’s Centre, newcomer Carly Bigelow has been kicking Shawn Skinner around. 

During an appearance on Out of the Fog, she popped Skinner’s eyes a bit when she reminded him that Tory policy is to keep public service pensioners on fixed incomes with no increases and then double their electricity rates.  He flipped but that pretty much sums up Skinner’s position. The truth really does hurt, as it turns out.

George and Carly could be easy choices St. John’s voters.  After all, a vindictive, patronage-addled Conservative administration can hardly shag the district for funds in retribution for voting the “wrong way”.  They don’t push pork into townie districts anyway, at least not like the do outside the capital city, so Sin Jawns voters have the opportunity to pick candidates on merit, rather than by party colour.

The Liberal Ruralists aren’t the only ones with problems in Capital City.

In St. John’s North, both the Conservative and New Democrat candidates  are running headlong into the problems with their platforms. 

An NTV profile of the district on Thursday evening’s news noted that the district has a very large percentage of people on fixed and low incomes.  Plenty of public service pensioners live there so incumbent Bob Ridgley must be having a hard time explaining Tom Marshall’s cavalier dismissal of their demands for a modest increase in pension payments now that the government has $4.0 billion in cash laying about.

Add to that the Tory plan to use the cash to double electricity rates instead and you have a very tough pill to shove down voters throats.  If you are a Tory that is.,

Meanwhile, Sin Jawns New Dem Dale Kirby is having an equally hard time.  His party backs the Dunderdale plan to force the people of St. John’s North to pay to ship discount electricity to Nova Scotians.

And then there’s the public sector pensions.

Not a peep in the NDP platform about it at all.

Kirby must be having a devil of a time explaining how the NDP party president and his colleagues didn’t think those pensions might be an issue. Talk about treating seniors with the respect they deserve.

Pensioners can take some cold comfort with the knowledge they weren’t the only thing Kirby and his colleagues didn’t know about.  They missed entirely the contracts that prevent them from introducing their new crude oil tax that was supposed to pay for some other campaign promises.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was another glaring Dipper gaffe in St. John’s.

Liberal Drew Brown is running an uphill fight in Signal Hill-Quidi Vidi  against  an entrenched NDP campaign that knows which way every blade of grass votes in the district. He’s another candidate who’d be far better than the incumbent.

But facing all that didn’t stop Brown from picking up on a glaring oversight in the NDP policy book: the party of supposed social responsibility has no platform plank on replacing the Dickensian-era HMP that happens to sit in Lorraine Michaels’ district:

“The existing infrastructure at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary is still abysmal, despite the findings of the 2008 ‘Decades of Darkness’ report on the state of the provincial corrections system,” Brown explained. “I find it really surprising that no one is talking about it in this election, especially considering the federal Conservatives’ forthcoming crime legislation is likely going to result in an increased number of prisoners going through the system.”

The Liberals plan to begin work on replacing the prison – and aggressively lobbying the federal government to cost-share the project – within weeks of forming the government.

“Without safe and effective prisons, our system of justice here in Newfoundland and Labrador is seriously weakened. Better conditions for the prisoners aside, the facility workers themselves deserve a safer workplace than the one they currently have,” Brown added. “It’s a government facility – the working conditions for employees at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary should be held to the same standard as any other government institution.”

Wowsers.

So at about the half-way point in the general election, one party  - the Liberals – have voluntarily surrendered  a huge chunk of the voting population to the other parties.  They’ve left some very good candidates to fend for themselves.

Another party has just missed the boat entirely on core issues in the one region of the province where they are supposed to have such amazing support and affinity.

this is not a townie versus bayman thing, as much as some people might like to paint it that way.

It’s really about political parties that operate with limited political vision.

- srbp -

Welcome to the Echo Chamber #nlpoli #nlvotes

Pretty simple idea, really.

Opinions, beliefs and ideas move around among like minded people in what is an essentially closed space. 

The effect can be amazingly powerful just as it can be amazingly deceptive and distorting.

President Barack Obama talked about the echo chamber in American political coverage in early 2010 during a meeting with Senate Democrats:

"Do you know what I think would actually make a difference.... If everybody here — excuse all the members of the press who are here — if everybody turned off your CNN, your Fox, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics. The topic is politics."

In the United States, the problem Obama is pointing out is not just the idea of people from different political perspectives focusing on politics exclusively all the time. 

This isn’t the Permanent Campaign* as all-consuming.

It’s about political polarization in the 100 channel universe. People chose what they want to pay attention to and, increasingly, that seems to be a matter of picking only the information  - websites, radio stations and television news programs  - that reinforce their existing beliefs.

Princeton University professor Cass Sunstein describes it this way in the 2001 digital book Echo Chambers:  Bush v Gore, Impeachment and Beyond,

Many of these vices involve the risk of fragmentation, as the increased power of individual choice allows people to sort themselves into innumerable homogeneous groups, which often results in amplifying their pre[-]existing views. Although millions of people are using the Internet to expand their horizons, many people are doing the opposite, creating a Daily Me that is specifically tailored to their own interests and prejudices. Whatever the exact numbers, it is important to realize that a well-functioning democracy—a republic—depends not just on freedom from censorship, but also on a set of common experiences and on unsought, unanticipated, and even unwanted exposures to diverse topics, people, and ideas. A system of “gated communities” is as unhealthy for cyberspace as it is for the real world.

Slightly north of the great republic, and in a much smaller place, there’s another kind of echo chamber.  The way it works may be slightly different but the concept is still the same.

The provincial government makes the noise.  Other provincial opinion leaders – other politicians, key interest groups and news media – reflect the noise back. 

The political parties themselves are semi-closed organizations dominated by self-selecting elites. The rules on who can get into the elites and how aren’t written down.  Sure both the Conservative and Liberal parties have constitutions that set out rules about how they are supposed to work.

But as first the Conservatives and the Liberals showed in 2011, their constitutions are fictions.  First the Conservatives twisted and turned before finally rejecting as illegitimate a candidate for leader of the party who followed exactly the same rules the party bosses themselves used.  Then the Liberals switched leaders.  The party executive may have created the process that ended with Kevin Aylward as leader, but what happened in the five weeks before that – secret offers to this one and that one – could only take place in a group where the written rules and the real rules are two different things.

And lest anyone thing the NDP is different consider the special role given to unions in its constitution.  A party with the word “democratic” in its name was hardly democratic at all.

To see how all this works, consider a couple of examples.

Start with the fishery in the current election to see insiders talking among themselves.

Earlier this year, CBC released the results of an opinion poll they commissioned from Corporate Research Associates. CBC found that:

… 60 per cent of the province believes the fishery should be concentrated in fewer locations to be more efficient.

Only 23 per cent say it is well managed and doesn't need change.

The majority opinion is that a smaller leaner fishery would be more profitable.

That isn’t as surprising as it would have been even five years ago. Times have really changed in the industry. And such a poll result isn’t surprising given that the industry leaders themselves agreed that they have to reduce the number of people and plants in the province.

What is surprising is that – even though a clear majority of people in the province support downsizing and the industry representatives themselves seem to agree - both the provincial Conservatives and Liberals want to create a new version of the Fisheries Loan Board in order to get more people into the industry. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives mentioned that this idea came from the union that represents plant workers and fishermen, incidentally.

Amazing, though, this fisheries policy might be, Muskrat Falls remains the finest example of the echo chamber of local politics and the interconnections among the groups inside the chamber that help to reinforce the messages.

Over the past 18 months, poll after poll done for the provincial government showed that only three or four percent of respondents thought it was the most urgent issue for the province.

Health care was at the top of peoples’ list of major issues, across the province hands down.  The economy and jobs came in second.

Nonetheless, Muskrat Falls has dominated provincial politics since Danny Williams announced his retirement deal in November 2010.

Muskrat Falls is the centre piece of the Conservatives’ re-election campaign.

The Liberals have a section of their platform devoted to hydro-electric development issues.

The New Democrats include it as well, although their comments are much more vague that the other two parties’ commitments.

A St. John’s Board of Trade panel selected the Lower Churchill overwhelmingly as the major issue for the election.

And lastly, a poll released last week shows that Muskrat Falls was a major issue for 13% of respondents.

But hang on a second.

As it turns out, the poll came from the firm that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation. 

And that Board of Trade thingy.  Well, the panel had only four people on it.  While the BOT didn’t release the names of the panel members, M5 was so proud that Craig Tucker had made the cut, they tweeted about his work on the Board’s panel that put together some comments for the election.

Yes, gang, that Craig Tucker.  Co-chair of the 2003 Tory election campaign, former Tory-appointed director of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro after 2003 and now the guy whose advertising firm is the agency of record for Nalcor.

Meanwhile, the CBC uses Nalcor’s lobbyist as an election commentator alongside their own provincial affairs reporter, as if the two were the same sort of independent political observers.  They didn’t even bother mention that the guy is Nalcor’s lobbyist in Ottawa.

What’s most amazing about CBC and those who reported the poll last week without noticing the Nalcor connections is that they didn’t feel the need to notice the Nalcor connections.

For people inside the echo chamber, that sort of detail might be so well known they didn’t feel like it was an issue.

But outside the circle of au courante types, out among the audience?

Not so much information that they’d readily have those details or even that they’d feel the need to go check. They trust the news media to give their all the relevant information, after all.

More than two decades ago, political scientist Susan McCorquodale wrote about the relationship between the media and politicians in this province.  She described it as '”symbiotic”, a close and long-term relationship that works to the benefit of both.

“News originates with the press release, the press conference or the daily sitting of the House of Assembly,” she wrote.  These days she might have added twitter, e-mail or the Blackberry message from a political source feeding tidbits to reporters.

McCorquodale noted the lack of investigative reporting, something else that remains little change these days.   And she also noted the “tendency of reporters to end up in comfortable PR jobs with government.”

What she could not have foreseen was the day when the president of the major commercial radio broadcasting firm would sit as a political appointee on the board of one of the provincial government’s energy companies.

Nor could McCorquodale have expected that this same fellow, so tight with the pols the could receive a patronage appointment, would call his own station to complain about media coverage of his patron’s health problems.

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador occurs inside a large echo chamber.  While in the United States, there are separate political echo chambers for people with differing political views, in newfoundland and Labrador, the echo chamber tends to separates the opinion elites from the majority of society.

To see it work, you only have to look at the general election campaign.

 

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• Permanent Campaign: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The Politics of Perpetual Panic

Danny Williams’ legacy in Newfoundland and Labrador will be one thing:  the politics of panic. The old drama queen was always in a panic over something or other that was the gravest threat to something or other since the time of the last great upset to end all tirades.

Just like their role-model who seemed to spend almost every second of his seven years in office pissed-off, ticked-off or just plain old angry, the gaggle of politicians who came to office around him can’t function without something bunching their undies in the cracks of their arses.

His chosen successor, Kathy Dunderdale, is due the title of Chief Knicker Knotter.  Evidently running the Telly 10 caused the spandex to ride up Premier Kathy Dunderdale.  She could not wait to catch her breath after the race to let the world know that privatizing search and rescue service is just “not on.”

As the Telegram reported, Dunderdale told reporters that:

“As soon as I heard the speculation Ottawa might be considering that, we contacted the Prime Minister’s Office immediately and said again to them the health and safety is the number one priority in this province. It’s an issue to which we’re highly sensitive, we’re still very, very upset over the Marine Sub-Centre, and we’re not letting that go. So please do not exacerbate this any further.  And, before you have any consideration at all about changing the way you do this business, you come to Newfoundland and Labrador and you talk to the government of Newfoundland and Labrador and you talk to the people involved in this industry before you take any moves whatsoever.”

Leaping is not confined to one particular political stripe.

Liberal member of parliament Scott Simms spent a bunch of time late last week telling any reporter who would listen that any move to privatize search and rescue would mean the death of gander and the squadron there.

Not to be outdone, Bloc NDP defence critic Jack Harris said that search and rescue is a core defence function.  He would defend the virtue of the sainted men and women of the Canadian Forces.  Too bad that Harris spent time after the Cougar 491 tragedy trying to pin responsibility for the deaths on 103 Squadron in Gander.  “Off-station” they were, according to Harris even though that – even at the time – completely false. 

And when most people caught onto his initial bullshite, Harris shifted to another bunch of foolishness about response times.

By now, savvy readers picked up the key word in Dunderdale’s warning. 

Go back and read it again if you need to.

Right there at the beginning.

“Speculation.”

Yes.

Speculation.

You see, this all started from a story about the federal government’s ongoing struggle to find a replacement for the 40 year old Buffalo aircraft that fly in western Canada long after they should have been retired. In that context, National Defence wants to discuss all options, including contracting out instead of purchasing and operating the aircraft themselves:

The Conservative plan to purchase new fixed-wing search-and-rescue planes has been stalled for years. The government is now trying to kick-start the program, which is estimated to cost $3 billion.

On Wednesday, the government informed companies that it would hold consultations on the project.

The session will include discussion on potential procurement approaches for a fixed-wing search-and-rescue project, including Alternate Service Delivery options, the government noted in its message to companies.

All we have is speculation.

Supposition.

Imagination.

There’s nothing concrete.

And yes politicians from Kathy Dunderdale to Jack Harris are attacking the speculation with everything they’ve got.

Only morons react to speculation.  That used to be one of the first things they taught you in politician school. 

After all, if people like Jack Harris knew anything about search and rescue themselves (Hint:  he knows jack], they would at least consider the possibility that contracting out for fixed wing search and rescue support could actually improve search and rescue service in the country.

Maybe contracted fixed-wing SAR flights coupled with military SAR helicopters would give better coverage at the same overall cost. Maybe, contracting out a bit of the work would let the federal government expand the number of fixed wing SAR aircraft such that the east coast would get dedicated SAR aircraft.  Right now, Hercules based on Greenwood do SAR in addition to doing transport duties.  That’s far from ideal.

Incidentally, your humble e-scribbler discussed some ideas for improving SAR in 2009 when the ghouls and panic puppies were working themselves into a lather about this on another occasion.

But notice that in that sentence about considering, your humble e-scribbler used the “could”.  Conditional language.  That’s because without knowing for sure what the cost and other implications might be,  there’s no way of knowing whether contracting out search and rescue would be good or bad.

And maybe, as the Ottawa Citizen story notes, the air force folks will raise enough of a stink themselves that this idea will die quietly. The again , they might go along with it.

After all a whole bunch of people got their knickers in a bunch almost 30 years ago when the Canadian Forces retired the old Tracker aircraft.  The federal fisheries department contracted out the surveillance flights and got better coverage with a new aircraft.  Meanwhile, the Canadian Forces continued to patrol offshore.  The two work quite well together with the military concentrating on Canada’s military security needs while fisheries looks after the civilian things.

SAR is a lot like that, actually.  It’s a civilian thing that should be handled, at the very least,  by the coast guard not the military. Farming it out to the private sector might not be a bad idea, if it improves the service  - shorter launch  times there Jack Harris? - without increasing costs.

Might even be better if the service came from a company based in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Maybe Jack Harris should check with the folks at Provincial Aerospace.  After all, they operate from his own riding.

Of course, folks like defence critic Jack Harris should know that.

He and his ilk don’t care about those sorts of issues because, like other politicians of the Danny Williams era, it is more important to be in a perpetual panic than to know what is actually going on.

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The disease spreads

Scott Reid’s dissection of national politics could equally be a commentary on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003.

Here’s a taste:

We can begin with a Parliamentary Press Gallery that, increasingly, is dazzled by political tactics, bored by substance and disinterested in the awkward obligation of challenging authority. With too few exceptions — and one fewer with the sad passing of the Star's Jim Travers — reporters seem more interested in sounding like in-the-know party strategists than detached observers.

It is they, in particular, who tell us repeatedly that "no one cares." And all too frequently, there is little, if any, suggestion that part of the media's function is to serve as a check on abuse of authority. Put another way, if Woodward and Bernstein had followed the same method we sometimes witness in Ottawa, they would surely have shrugged off Deep Throat, explaining that no one cares about such a technical, complicated story and that, in any event, Nixon's triumph over McGovern rendered the matter moot.

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Sign of the future?

The opposition leader makes a splash with a simple call for earlier breast cancer screening for women.

The cabinet minister issues a long-winded news release reciting all the stuff his department is doing about breast cancer.

And it predictably finishes with a recitation of how much money the current administration has spent.

Which one was more effective?

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