Dwight and Tom's legacy: more of the same #nlpoli

Herb Kitchen died last week.

He was the minister of finance in the early 1990s who brought down the difficult budgets, starting in 1991 that were part of a plan that turned the provincial government around.

The deficit at the time was about $300 million and the total budget called for spending of around $3.2 billion. 

Finance minister Tom Osborne announced on Friday that he will need to borrow $3.2 billion to close the gap between what the government will spend (about $8.9 billion, plus more money for Muskrat Falls) and its income.

Officially, Tom Osborne’s deficit of $2.1 billion for 2020 will be 25% of spending compared to less than 10 percent back in Herb’s day.  But if you wanted to compare apples to apples, then we should use that $3.2 billion cash figure, which works out to a deficit three and a half times the size of the one Herb Kitchen brought to the House of Assembly 29 years ago.

Thank God Herb didn't live to see what a mess the provincial deficit will actually be.

Bursting bureaucratic bullshit bubbles #nlpoli

The daily average for new CVD cases
has been declining since late March.

In one of the provinces hardest hit by COVID-19,  Ontarians got a roadmap on Monday on how the provincial government will loosen restrictions on their daily lives.

One of the indicators used to make the judgment will be two to four weeks of lowering daily numbers of infections.  Not zero cases, mind you, but a clear downward trend that was about half of the current rate, according to Ontario's chief medical officer of health last week.

Two other key indicators will a decrease in cases not traced to a source and a decrease in new hospitalizations.

In one of the provinces least affected by COVID-19, people in Newfoundland and Labrador found out on Monday that they could be locked down for weeks and potentially months more before provincial government bureaucrats and politicians will consider easing any of the restrictions imposed on them in mid-March.

That chilly outlook came from politicians Monday afternoon after a presentation by one of the government’s key advisors that confirmed:

• we are now in the fourth week of declining and lately low numbers of new cases per day,
• only two percent of cases across the province cannot be traced to a source, 
• that there have been no new hospital admissions for COVID-19 for more than a week (it's actually two weeks), and 
• no deaths for more than two weeks.

In Ontario, a decision to loosen restrictions will also depend on available capacity in the health care system to handle a surge of new cases.  In Newfoundland and Labrador, health managers emptied half the beds across the province by halting elective and non-urgent surgeries and postponing treatment for a wide variety of other conditions.

Balancing the Economy #nlpoli

Both Delia Warren and Dwight Ball believe that we need to diversify the provincial economy and reduce our dependence on oil.

They both believe that our future should lie with more renewable energy.  Delia thinks there is room for things like wind farms.  Dwight, an original and enthusiastic Muskrateer, thinks we need to develop Gull Island as quickly as possible.

Both Delia and Dwight are wrong.

Cannabis and culture #nlpoli

Politics and policy are much more complicated things than they appear to many people. Change is possible, but effective change can only come if we see the world as it is, not as some people imagine it might be.

Canada’s legal cannabis policy in most Canadian provinces is a failure.

There are not enough legal cannabis stores to meet demand.  The gap in price between legal and illegal cannabis is growing.  The supply of legal cannabis is spotty and there are still complaints about the quality of what stores have on their shelves. By contrast, the illicit market is apparently thriving. 

The reason that the policy failed is that it was driven by established bureaucratic interests from law enforcement and health and addictions who opposed legalization in the first place.  That led to a policy that placed the maximum emphasis on restriction and limitation of access.

What most governments in Canada ignored is the highly developed, private sector alternative that had been delivering cannabis to retail customers across the country for decades.  The industry survived despite the most severe restrictions that Canadian law could impose.  It *was* illegal to possess cannabis, after all, under any circumstances, for most of the last 60 years or more.

Governments just don’t do “business” very well.  They aren’t organized for it and – what’s more important – the people inside the organizations don’t think about problems the same way people in business do.  In fact, they don’t think about most things the way people outside government do. 

Banning plastic bags and public policy in Newfoundland and Labrador #nlpoli

Effective public policy must be based on a clear understanding of the problem and its relation to other issues, as well as public needs and behaviour.

"...almost 50% of all wind borne litter escaping from landfills in Newfoundland and Labrador is plastic, much of it single-use plastic bags....

There's the problem, defined neatly.

The quote is from Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador's campaign against plastic shopping bags.

Put the quote in a search engine on the Internet and you will turn up all sorts of places, including news stories, that use that phrase or a slight variation on it in coverage of the popular campaign to ban plastic bags from the province.  Here's an example from The Telegram in 2017 and another a couple of days later that went province-wide.

One small question:  what's the source for the statistic?

The Stunnel report and public policy in Newfoundland and Labrador politics #nlpoli

The "pre-feasibility study update" released on Wednesday into a fixed link across the Straits to Labrador (a.k.a The Stunnel) is a really good example of how the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador tackles policy problems and why it keeps making bad decisions.

One way to think about "policy" is problem-solving. We have a problem and the policy is how we are going to solve it. We can look at it as the way of changing a situation that is causing an issue or may cause an issue.

There are some sensible steps to figuring out the right "policy" and they all start with figuring out what the problem is. Once you know what the problem is, you can figure out what your goal is. Now that you have a start point and an end point, you can figure out the policy, which is the way you get from where you are to where you want to be.

Delivery #nlpoli

Michael Barber headed a group of officials for then-Prime Minister Tony Blair that was responsible for getting Blair's major commitments through the government bureaucracy and into practice.

They called it the delivery unit and Barber has become a prophet of what he calls the science of delivery. In many ways, delivery is just a restatement of some very well-known ideas about planning and project management.  What Barber has done, though, is put those ideas into a new package that has captured the imagination of people who have been facing the same problem of getting a huge bureaucracy to implement a simple idea.  From outside, you'd think that's what government does.  The reality is  - more often than not - very different.  And that's why people interested in politics and public policy have been taken with Barber's ideas.

Barber's just been able to garner lots of attention around the world.  Dalton McGuinty's staff were big advocates of Barber's philosophy and they have carried that belief with them to Ottawa for Justin Trudeau.

Closer to home there's never been any such creature.  There's also no talk of creating one.  Go a step further.  There's never really been the equivalent here of the policy unit that British Prime Ministers have used since around 1970s to come up with ideas in the first place.  The closest anyone came was the Economic recovery Commission in the 1990s.  Usually, the task of handling policy from the political side of government has come  - if at all - from one or two people in the Premier's Office in among a bunch of other things. Some staffers carry the title of "policy advisor" but that hasn't always been occupied by someone providing policy analysis and support to the political side of things advice. More often than not,  the job of evaluating whether or not something is worthwhile gets done by the bureaucrats.

The Politics of Menses #nlpoli

Until now, we had no idea how our governments valued menstruation.

Some of you might be surprised to think this was a question but now we have an answer.

Both the federal and provincial governments decided last month to remove the harmonised sales tax from tampons, napkins, and other feminine sanitary products.  In Newfoundland and Labrador, that added 13% on every purchase.

The government in Newfoundland and Labrador refused to put a value on the tax, but your humble e-scribbler is willing to take a shot at it.

Brain Farts #nlpoli

Some people have a hard time with the idea that a great many political decisions are not the product of deep thinking, extensive research, and agonizing debate.

They come from brain farts.

You can hear that pretty clearly in the most recent episode of On Point. The political panel talked about a couple of cock-ups by the Conservatives last week.

 In among the few nose-pullers the panel tossed out, the basic elements of the story were there.

Needed: a local think-tank #nlpoli

Anyone who was paying attention to these things has known for about 25 years that the province would face a demographic crunch starting ‘round about now.

Anyone who has been reading Bond Papers for any length of time will know that demographics have been a big issue your humble e-scribbler has been banging on about pretty much since the beginning in January 2005. Go over to labradore and you will find what is known in the professional analyst trade as a shitload of posts, graphs and other sorts of information about demographics.

Collectively, we’ve got a good handle on both the magnitude of the problem and the implications. The problems are already here and the deliberate lack action by successive provincial governments means we are substantially behind where we need to be to cope with the consequences of a rapidly aging population.

So it is that after studying all the stuff that people have already produced about the problems the province is facing, the good folks at the Harris Centre at Memorial University have concluded that we need – brace yourself – “additional research” in order to “get ahead” of these changes.

Ye frackin’ gods.

Free Tampons #nlpoli

Jessica Valenti, a columnist at the Guardian newspaper argued in her column in early August, that women should get free feminine hygiene products.

Consider these points from Valenti’s column:

• “UNICEF estimates 10% of African girls don’t attend school during their periods”
• “One study showed that in Bangladesh, 73% of female factory workers miss an average of six days – and six days of pay – every month because of their periods.”
• “In the United States, access to tampons and pads for low-income women is a real problem, too: food stamps don’t cover feminine hygiene products, so some women resort to selling their food stamps in order to pay for “luxuries” like tampons.”

Valenti doesn’t make her argument on cost, but on basic health care policy.

Amanda Marcotte at slate.com took a more blunt approach: 

Valenti is asking audiences to really think about how the right to move about in public without bleeding all over yourself, a no-brainer for men, is a privilege for women that depends all too much on their ability to afford sanitary products.

It boils down to the same basic idea, though.

Take that idea. 

Kick it around in your own mind.

We’ll come back to it another day and work it through as a potential public policy issue.

-srbp-

The Bicycle Roads to Nowhere #nlpoli

Frecker Drive is a well-designed residential street in the west end of St. John’s.  The street is wide:  you can park cars on either side and still have space left for two cars to pass abreast easily along its entire length.

This is a residential street.  As you might imagine, it has its fair share of cars and trucks as well as the odd bicycle.  They’ve been able to live together safely on the street because it is wide and the traffic flow is relatively light.

When the city planners decided to bring bicycle lanes to the City of St. John’s a couple of years ago, they settled on Frecker Drive.  They banned parking from one side of the street.  And on both sides of the street they marked out two bi-directional bicycle lanes for the full length of the avenue.

Inertia #nlpoli

In a letter last May to his federal counterpart, economic development minister Keith Hutchings described minimum processing requirements as the “only policy instrument within provincial jurisdiction that ensures fisheries resources adjacent to the province result in processing jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

For those who do not know what they are,  minimum processing requirements are a condition that the provincial government sets on the licenses it gives to companies that process fish in the province.  The name says it all:  the companies have to process a certain amount of the fish in order to create jobs in fish plants around Newfoundland and Labrador.

There’s been a fairly steady row about processing rules over the past decade as the companies struggle to stay financially viable.  There are way too many plants for the amount of fish available and there are way too many people in the province drawing pathetically small wages slicing up the fish that comes ashore.  Companies can’t process fish profitably here and yet the provincial government insists they keep at bit.

The provincial politicians and bureaucrats know perfectly well that they need to change their ways. The politicians knew about it when they set about to destroy the only truly globally competitive fish company in the province.  They’ve known about it as the fought over exactly the same issue with the company the government’s policy favoured over exactly the same issue.

And yet the politicians persist with their bankrupt idea.

Some inconvenient truths: goring some educational sacred cows #nlpoli

Friday turned out to be Post-Secondary Education Day with a post here on the impact of the freeze on tuition fees and a fascinating Telegram article on the Conservatives’ 2011 campaign pledge to replace student loans with needs-based grants.

Tuition was a bit of an issue in the 2011 provincial general election.  The Tory pledge is basically a variation on the New Democrat campaign platform plank in the same election to make wipe out tuition altogether. 

Supporters of the low or free tuition argument claim that by charging a tuition fee at all, “we are basically discriminating against poor people and the middle class.”  The Canadian Federation of Students likes the current tuition freeze and is loving up the idea of grants that would make tuition even cheaper or free.

The local rep commented in the Friday story in the Telegram that the current system “is the envy of people across the country.”

Really? 

Wanted: a good row #nlpoli

One of the unreserved joys that comes from writing these scribbles is the moment when a post sparks something.

Like on Monday, when a simple post looking at change in the provincial gross domestic product prompted an exchange among a few of the provincial Twitterati (Twitteratini?) on the whole business.  Was it useful?  What did it mean?  Wonderful stuff considering that the post was intended to provoke thought of just that sort, not reach any hard-and-fast conclusions.

The Perfect Storm #nlpoli

“In the fishery of the very near future,” SRBP wrote in February, “fishing subsidies like federal employment insurance wage subsidies,  state-sponsored marketing schemes and the stalinist political control of the economy… will all go by the wayside. International trade talks are already laying the groundwork for massive change.”

The very near future arrived this week.

Paying attention #nlpoli

In order to understand what is going on in the world around you, then you just need to pay attention.

Paul Wells makes plain the value of careful reading – i.e. paying attention – in a post at macleans.ca on the letter from the federal health minister to her counterparts in the provinces about health funding.

Go on.

Read the post.

The reward is what you’ll learn.

Wells does a simple dissection of an official statement by an important person. You can learn an awful lot by considering what words mean.

Too bad more of that doesn’t go on locally.

You can learn an awful lot by looking at what people say.

- srbp -