Disconnects and Infection #nlpoli

The handful of people who pay close attention to politics in Newfoundland and Labrador are probably scratching the barely-healed-over scabs on their head in the latest round of bewilderment.

Tory leader Ches Crosbie announced last week he had named a philosophy professor at Memorial University to head up a task force of people he didn’t name - because he hasn’t figured out who they are - to develop a strategy to combat climate change.  Philosophers are widely known for their skills at developing effective public policy, by the way.

Anyway, Crosbie announced his latest policy brainstorm the week of a global protest for action against climate change so Ches’ finally honed political nerves were probably jangling hard enough to make him spit out a hasty announcement.

If that wasn’t obviously funny enough, the punch line to this own-goal of a joke was delivered, appropriately enough, by Crosbie himself.

You see Ches has spent his time as leader of the local blue team viciously fighting *against*a measure that would help fight climate change. Not only that, but Crosbie started out his tirade against the fight against climate change by encouraging the Premier to join with Doug Ford in the philosophical fight against those people Ches has now decided to cuddle up with.

Not once.  Not twice.  But 13 times. 

Women in elected politics: is it a choice? #nlpoli

The number of women in elected office in Newfoundland and Labrador remains below the numbers one would expect based on changes in society over the past 40 years.  

Why is that? 

Maybe, it's a choice.

Luana Maroja is a biology professor at Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts.

Maroja wrote recently in The Atlantic that for most of the decade that she’s taught evolutionary biology and genetics, “the only complaints I got from students were about grades. But that all changed after Donald Trump’s election as president. At that moment, political tensions were running high on our campus. And well-established scientific ideas that I’d been teaching for years suddenly met with stiff ideological resistance.”

The resistance she is getting is not from MAGA-hat wearing Trumpians. On the contrary, the criticism Maroja takes has come from those who would fancy themselves progressives. They reject evidence of the biological basis of some differences among humans but they do so based on ideological assumptions. 

When confronted with evidence that contradicts their assumptions, some “students push back against these phenomena not by using scientific arguments, but by employing an a priori moral commitment to equality, anti-racism, and anti-sexism. They resort to denialism to protect themselves from having to confront a worldview they reject—that certain differences between groups may be based partly on biology.” 

An example of the type of evidence to which Maroja pointed was a study published in Psychological Science.  It compared the percentage of women STEM graduates in a country with its Global Gender Gap Index.  Countries with the highest gender equality scores also had the lowest percentage of female graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Voter Turn-out and Popular Vote Shares of Parties, 1949 - 2019 #nlpoli

Election turn-out has been declining steadily for provincial elections since the mid-1990s.  The 2019 general election is on track to show a record low turn-out at 44% of eligible voters.

Party share of eligible vote had declined in the same period.  The Liberal victory in 2015 went against the pattern since Confederation of an increased turn-out in an election in which the government changes hands.

In the 70 years since Confederation, provincial voter turn-out has varied in each election.

Turnout tended to be highest when there was a well-contested election such as on three occasions when the government changed hands.  The exception to this rule was 2015 when turn-out dropped from the previous election.

Click to enlarge

In 1989, turn-out was higher than the previous election but, curiously enough, in the hotly contested election of 1993,  turn-out actually went up.  That was the third-highest turn-out since Confederation, falling only five percentage points behind the 1971 general election that effectively ended Joe Smallwood’s reign as Premier.

There was a slight uptick in turn-out in 2003, but what is unmistakable is the steady trend downward of turn-out since the peak in 1993 (the green arrow).  The 2019 projection – based on MQO’s last poll for NTV  - would put turn-out in the general election at 44%.  Turn-out might be higher than that, but the signs are pointing toward a record low turn-out even if it does not reach below 50% of eligible voters.

Where do elections come from? #nlpoli

From fixed election dates to the number of candidates that run in an election,  what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians believe about one of the basic institutions of their democracy is as much myth and rumour as reality. 

Here are some facts to help you navigate the world of post-Confederation elections in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Crown Prerogative, exercised with the advice of the Premier

Newfoundland and Labrador does not have a fixed election date.

The changes to the House of Assembly Act in 2004 that supposedly set the election date for a day in October every four years starts with a simple clause that supersedes the fixed date bit:

3. (1) Notwithstanding another provision of this section, the Lieutenant-Governor may, by proclamation in Her Majesty's name, prorogue or dissolve the House of Assembly when the Lieutenant-Governor sees fit.

To understand how that works, we need to recall some basic constitutional points first.  Except in some very rare – but important – instances, the Lieutenant-Governor may only act with the advice of the Executive Council.

Trends: corpse kicking after a lost decade of delusion #nlpoli

Don Mills is the latest fan of the provincial Conservatives to turn on them savagely.

The St. John’s Board of Trade had Don back to deliver a luncheon speech this week.  According to CBC,  Mills said:

"The downside of Danny Williams, and I have a lot of respect for him, is that he doubled the provincial budget within that timeframe too," …  "He left the province with a structural budget problem that is going to be difficult to fix."

Mills also endorsed the private sector as the engine of economic growth, something Williams firmly opposed.

A decade ago, Mills couldn’t say enough about Williams the Wonderful.  Now,  Mills cannot distance himself enough from Old Twitchy and his legacy of what Mills calls “a structural budget problem.”

Fearful Symmetry #nlpoli

There are a couple of constables in an office over in the basement of the old Memorial College building at Fort Townshend, right next to where the USO building used to be.  They handle all the mysterious calls about weird goings on,  sort of like a local version of the X-Files.

So the scuttlebutt has it at the nearby Timmies,  the boys got a call Thursday afternoon about the time Ross Wiseman was reading his budget speech.  The workers over a Colonial Building said they saw two fellows come out of the old House of Assembly Chamber,  arm-in-arm. 

There was one older fellow, a bit on the round side,  who walked with a limp.  The other fellow walked very straight and had a really high collar on his shirt.  Sorta like Don Cherry would wear one of the workers said.

The two fellows went out the front door of the building, the workers inside said.  The only problem was they didn’t open the door.  They just walked through it.

The theory of everything #nlpoli

People are talking about the budget.

People are talking about Bill 42, the politicians’ decision to cut public representation in the House.

People are talking about the recent polls.

People are talking about the next election.

People have predictions about how this one or that one will play out.

But they are not looking at everything.

They are not looking at the whole board.

And you gotta look at the whole board, Sam.

Government by Committee #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador (2015) – Part 5

In the fifth and final  instalment in this series on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, SRBP looks at the latest move in continuing efforts by politicians in the province to make the House of Assembly irrelevant.
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If you want to understand politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, look no further than Bill 42.  That’s the plan to cut eight seats from the House of Assembly before the next election.

Don’t look at the reasons the politicians offered for the cuts. Just look at who did it, what they did, and how they did it. After all, actions speak a lot louder than words.

Elections and Voting #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador (2015) – Part 4

The politicians in the province share a lot of common views and tend to agree on most things despite being organized into political parties that are – theoretically  - supposed to have some sharp differences among them.  The House of Assembly itself is organized to minimise the chances that the government won;t get its way, quickly.  

In the fourth instalment in this series on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, SRBP looks how elections work.
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Yvonne Jones was the first woman leader of the Liberal Party. 

She was the first woman to serve as leader of the official opposition and, more recently, she became the first women to represent Labrador in the House of Commons.

Yvonne Jones will go down in history for another accomplishment, though.  That one has nothing to do with chromosomes.

Yvonne Jones was the last person to be elected to the House of Assembly as an independent candidate.*

The Dysfunctional House of Assembly #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador (2015) – Part 3

In the third instalment in the series,  SRBP looks at the way the House of Assembly operates.
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Liberal finance critic Cathy Bennett’s recent op-ed piece in the Telegram said that the provincial government’s current financial mess is about more than unexpected changes in the price of oil.
She’s absolutely right.

Bennett pointed to the Equalization offset transfers under the 1985 Atlantic Accord as the root.  The provincial government got about $4.6 billion under the deal.  “The province collected $4.6 billion in federal funding under the Atlantic Accord,”  wrote Bennett.  “A long-term financial plan should have been put in place to account for the future loss of those revenues.

Equalization transfers.

Sounds a wee bit familiar, doesn’t it?

One Big Party #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador – Part 2

The plan to cut public representation in the House of Assembly has drawn public attention to more than just the plan to reduce the number of elected representatives in the legislature by eight. 

In this new series, SRBP will examine politics in Newfoundland over the last 15 to 20 years The first instalment - “Making the rich richer” – and the second – “One Big Party” - look at the curious agreement among the parties on major public issues.

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Cast your mind back.

Go back to 2008. Yvonne Jones was the leader of the Liberal Party. She was one of three members, sitting right next to Kelvin Parsons and Roland Butler, the sole Liberal survivors of a near sweep of the province by the Conservatives in the 2007 general election.

Jones turned up in the Telegram with what is, in hindsight,  a fascinating suggestion.

I always say that we're such a small province, when you've got three political parties, there's always a lot of energy and time and expertise spent in, I guess, staking out everybody's turf in the political arena...

I used to say to myself, "maybe we're expending it in the wrong direction? [sic]"...Maybe if a lot of that was just put into strengthening policy for people, we might end up with a lot better result at the end of the day.

Jones didn’t see any differences at all among the political parties. The members all believed exactly the same things. They wasted time and money “staking out everybody’s turf”, whatever that means. So Jones thought aloud that maybe it would be better if there were no parties, just a bunch of like-minded people, all working hard “strengthening policy for people.”

Making the rich richer #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador – Part 1

The plan to cut public representation in the House of Assembly has drawn public attention to more than just the plan to reduce the number of elected representatives in the legislature by eight.   

In this new series,  SRBP will examine politics in Newfoundland over the last 15 to 20 years  The first  instalment  - “Making the rich richer” – and the second – “One Big Party” - look at the curious agreement among the parties on major public issues. 
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The provincial government subsidises tuition fees at Memorial University for Canadian undergraduate students. They go to school for fees far less than the cost of providing the buildings, technology, and instructors need to educate them.

The annual cost of the tuition subsidy is about $40 million, according to the most recent report by the province’s auditor general.  That’s part of about $388 million the provincial government provides to the university to fund its operations.

All three political parties support the subsidy. The Liberals started it and the Conservatives continued it. The New Democrats back it enthusiastically.

The tuition subsidy benefits Newfoundlanders and Labradorians primarily.  Over the past five years or so,  Memorial has been able to attract growing numbers of students from outside the province.  They come for the cheap education, not the quality of the education, although there’s no reason to believe that Memorial University provides a substandard education to anyone.  So lots of people benefit from the subsidy, many of them from outside Newfoundland and Labrador.

The tuition subsidy costs about 20 times what the cuts to the House of Assembly will theoretically save annually.