Warning: Elephant Crossing #nlpoli

Lots of people are very worried and some are quite upset about the government's plan to re-open schools next week.

There's more than enough controversy,  way too much noise, and very little useful information to get into here, but there is one aspect of the way people are talking about this that fits with a pattern your humble e-scribbler has noted before.

It's the tendency for local opinion leaders - local elites - to talk about doing things here based on what is happening somewhere else. Back in June, all the enthusiasm for tearing down statues prompt the post called "Mimicry and pantomime" that described several examples of this behaviour that didn't involve racism.  By the way, notice that it was a very popular topic then but has vanished just as surely as it disappeared from CNN.

Anyone on Twitter this weekend would have seen a raft of comments from teachers across the province holding out Ontario government policy as the plan we should follow in this province.  If we were the same as Ontario, doing that would make sense.  But we aren't Ontario and are not likely to become Ontario any time soon.  

Political Mummers’ Parade on Monday #nlpoli

Finance minister Tom Marshall will present his mid-year financial update on Monday.  It is supposed to be a way of bringing everyone up to date on how the annual budget is going. It’s an accountability thing.

Since the government’s fiscal year starts in April, the middle of the year was September.  So December is well past the mid-year.  As we all know, December is the last month of the calendar year so this mid-year report is a bit late there, too.  The only calendar that puts December in the middle of some year or other seems to be the provincial Conservative one.

The whole idea of a mid-year financial up-date winds up being a bit of a farce, then.  It’s much like having a consultation about what to put in the budget after the cabinet has already decided on the budget in secret beforehand.

Farce is not a word you associate with good government.  It’s more the type of word you’ll find to describe something like the annual  Mummer’s Parade.  For those who don’t know, mummering is a bit of Christmas entertainment when people pretend to be something they are not. Mummering is foolishness in a good sense of the word.  In politics these days, as with the Mummers’ Parade,  it seems that foolish is the new normal.

And that is not good.

Significant Digits – health care edition

In 1995, the provincial government spent slightly less than a billion dollars on health care. 

That was 26.4% of the provincial budget that year.

In 2010, a mere 15 years later, the provincial government is spending roughly 43% of the budget (not including capital works) on health care. 

That figure drops slightly – to 38% - if you add capital spending but that's only because of the disproportionate amount of spending on capital works not related to health care. 

In 2008, the provincial government spent 43% of the budget on health care.

That’s on par with spending in Quebec, for example, but the rate of change has been much greater in Newfoundland and Labrador than it has been in Quebec. Health care spending in Newfoundland and Labrador has doubled since 2003; in Quebec, health care spending grew 33% between 2003 and 2007.

Wait.

It gets better.

With health care spending at about $2.7 billion, that works out to be the equivalent of 12% of the value of all goods and services produced in the province  - the gross domestic product or GDP - in 2009.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the Untied States spent 16% of its 2007 gross domestic product on health care.  That’s the most recent year for which the OECD supplies statistics online.

Canada as a whole spent 10% of its GDP on health care.  That was slightly behind Germany and around the same amount as Austria and France. But the majority of countries in the comparison of Europe and North America spent less than 10% of GDP on health care.

Just to be sure, in 1995, Newfoundland and Labrador spent about 10% of its GDP on health spending.  

-srbp-

 

Incidentally, those 1995 figures are from the Strategic Social Plan consultation paper.  It was supposed to have been released in early 1996 but circumstances prevented that from happening. Since copies are scarce – they were rounded up and shredded on orders from on high – your humble e-scribbler will scan his and start posting it very shortly.

Wanted: adults

Former Bank of Canada David Dodge laid it out in stark terms for anyone who wants to listen.

“It” is the challenge facing all Canadians of continuing to provide public services like health care in the face of shifts in the workforce among other things.

But the hard choices for any prime minister go beyond energy. Former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge spelled it out in bleak terms, saying Canadians need to have the courage to engage in an "adult conversation" about what governments can afford at a time of a shrinking workforce, ageing population and slowing economy.

"We kind of are wishing the problem away by assuming that we can curtail expenditures without curtailing the real services that governments are providing to you and me as citizens," he said after addressing 250 convention attendees.

Adult conversation has been missing from what public discussion there has been of major issues in this province for the past seven years.  Around these parts, the challenge of having a substantive discussion is greater given the prevalence of magical thinking throughout society.  Magical thinking in this case would be any suggestion that there are no problems at all or that they will be easily solved.

Let’s see if there is continued magical thinking in Monday’s budget.  Bet the farm on a “yes” and you won’t make much:  everyone who has been paying attention is expecting just that.

They likely won’t be disappointed.

-srbp-

How the mighty have fallen

From David Pugliese, the collapse of the once fine public affairs operation at National Defence:

It’s generally recognized that from 1998 to 2005, the public affairs branch at NDHQ was among the best  in the federal government. There were of course glitches, internal battles, tensions between journalists and public affairs officers and the occasional screw-up (a brief “gag” type order in 2001 that was quickly corrected) but overall the PR system was generally seen to be quite effective by those at NDHQ and many of those journalists who used it.

At the heart of that system was the philosophy that both civilian managers and military personnel --whether they be in charge of equipment programs, policy, or human resources, or whatever - were the best spokespeople to explain things to the news media.

Your humble e-scribbler was a lowly cog in that machine from 1994 to 200 as a reserve public affairs officer. Pugliese’s praise is high indeed and those who worked during that period recognised all the elements he notes. it was something public affairs officers could be proud of and the people who implemented the system has a commitment, as Pugliese notes, to “openness and transparency.”

Not so any more.

How did this happen? Some say that “risk adverse” bureaucrats are firmly in control  while others blame senior military officers for standing impotently on the sidelines and allowing this to happen. The Conservative government, with its information-control agenda, also gets its share of the blame, according to NDHQ insiders.

I continue to watch from the outside with interest.

Some of us watch from the outside with a profound sense of loss and disappointment.  Let’s not even talk about the empathy for the poor benighted professionals forced to work inside such a stupid system.

-srbp-