Today marks SRBP's anniversary. The first post appeared on January 3, 2005.
Events of the past few weeks are a reminder of both how much has changed - we have a new government party - and at the same time, how little has changed. Read on and you will see how little has changed.
Danny Williams and the Conservatives won the 2003 election promising to cure all the province's financial ills by "growing the economy." Danny Williams said time and again that he was all about "jobs, jobs, jobs." They'd attacked the Liberals over their poor financial management and promised to do things better.
In the middle of 2006, CBC updated the world on Williams' progress. "These days,"
SRBP wrote, "the Premier is feeling a bit beleaguered, at least if a piece
that aired recently
on CBC is anything to go by.
The Premier's own take on things doesn't really have any evident shred of
optimism.
Rather the Premier appeared to be speaking defensively: gimme credit
for saving the place from imminent bankruptcy. We have things going on that no
one can control. In the meantime,we are working on planning to plant seeds for
future growth.
Interestingly enough, the province was never facing imminent bankruptcy: that
was the Premier's fiction. The other factors he mentioned [in the interview] were specific to ... some companies in the fishery alone. The same factors - like
Chinese competition and high exchange rates - don't affect other economic
initiatives or don't affect other industries in the same way.
The
segments with the Premier were an interesting clue to Danny Williams' current
state of mind. If March was manic, then June is borderline depressive.
That June 2006 post continued:
What was pretty clear in 2003 was the province could get out of its budget woes
with some careful planning and with the continued economic growth coming from
the offshore and Voisey's Bay. We all knew that growth was coming.
Danny knew it too and that's why he ran the election on the up-note of growth.
What no one knew was that oil would hit US$70 a barrel and the cash would be
pouring in at a rate no one in the province had ever seen before. That allowed
Danny Williams to avoid making a whole bunch of good decisions and to crank up
spending to unprecedented and, and in light of the economic slowdowns, likely
unsustainable heights.
These days, though, there is no mistaking the point that the provincial
government is in a hard spot. There are some factors in the economy that are
beyond Williams' control. The stuff that is within his purview either foundered
for one reason or another or simply have never existed.
And that goes to the core point of this piece from shortly after the 2003
election: government needs to focus on what government does.
In largest measure, since 2003 Danny Williams has focused his considerable
talents in areas where, as Premier, he simply can't have an impact. He has been
trying to run in the business sector rather than applying his managerial skills
to running a government that will in turn create an environment where the
private sector will develop the economy.
If he wanted to create jobs, he should have stayed in the private sector and
put together the deals to create jobs and generate wealth. Instead, we have
wound up with a mismatch between Danny Williams' considerable skills and the
challenges at hand.
Worse still, the centralizing tendency of government bureaucracy
merely reinforces the most pernicious attributes of Williams' own hands-on
leadership style. This has slowed down government's processes such that many
policies are done one at a time rather than in parallel.
Government has slowed to the point where it has taken three
full years to get even the vaguest idea of some policy areas - like widening
Hydro's mandate - and others, like the role and impact of the Business
department or Danny Williams' own economic development seeds still haven't been
seen at all.
...
Running government is like
drinking from a four-inch firehose.
The most important thing for an incoming administration is
having a way of figuring out how much to drink so it can avoid getting drowned.
An incoming administration has a list of the things it definitely wants to
accomplish and sets to work on them right away. For everything else there is a
framework that identifies what is important, what is not important and gives a
guide that helps triage the stuff that pops up along the way.
In a sense, we are looking at a Premier and a government, three years into its
mandate, that is increasingly being driven on some major issues instead of
doing the driving. It's a variation on the idea discussed in another
"Outside the Box" column from early 2004.
Back then, it
looked like those columns were just penetrating insights into the flipping
obvious. In hindsight, the observations seemed to be all too relevant.
2006.
Government spending ramped up to unsustainable heights based on oil at US$70 a barrel.
Now here we are in 2016 with Danny Williams' legacy of unprecedented financial mismanagement staring us plainly in the face.
And just to show how timely a column your humble e-scribbler wrote for the old Independent in late 2003, here's that column again for your anniversary reading pleasure. Note the bit at the end. That isn;t what Dwight Ball talks about when he refers to consultations, but it is the sort of thing that would change the way government operates in this province fundamentally.
---------------------------------
Up the harbour and down the shore
If Danny Williams wants to solve the government deficit problem by producing
new jobs, as he said he would, he will have to create something between 50, 000
and 100, 000 new jobs in the province over the next eight years.
To put that in perspective, there are about 219, 000 full-time equivalent jobs
in the province today according to the Economics and Statistics branch of the
provincial government. Since 1996, the economy produced about 31, 000 new jobs.
To meet his commitments, Danny Williams will have to produce twice or three
times as many jobs in the next eight years as the province could create in the
past eight.
And he will have to do that while providing increased health services to an aging population,
providing education, services, roads, water and sewer and all the other things
people expect from the provincial government. And he can'’t lay off government
employees or increase the deficit.
Sounds impossible?
It is. Just look at our collective experience in the province and you can see
why making promises like "“Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" ” is nothing short of
silly. Politicians seem to forget that whenever government tries to create
jobs, it fails and fails miserably.
Stupidity, someone once said, is doing the same thing over and over and hoping
for a different outcome. To stop being stupid, politicians need to focus not on
creating jobs - something they can'’t do - and focus on politics, something
they can do.
That'’s why, a decade ago, the provincial government decided to get out of the
job-making business. It decided the best it could do is creating a climate
where entrepreneurs - – people with ideas - – could focus on making jobs that
last. There was a bit more to it, though. The regional economic boards were
supposed to be a way to let people in the different areas of the province
decide for themselves what they would do to develop their local economy.
The boards were also part of a wider move toward more regional control over a
number of things, including health care and education. After all, politics is
about who decides. In a province as big as this one, with a very small
population, the "“who"” who decides often shouldn'’t be someone
hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the issue. One major problem is that
it has been hard to wrestle power out of the hands of bureaucrats and
politicians in St. John'’s who want to keep deciding just about everything,
right down to who can and cannot ride the local school bus.
But the logic remains. Take Eastport, for example, or other areas of the
province where local fishermen have had a greater say in how the resources they
depend on are managed. They make sensible decisions based on science, their own
knowledge and their own interests. They virtually eliminate poaching. They
close fishing in areas where it needs to be closed and develop new ways to
improve the price they get for their product.
Maybe it is time to take these ideas a step farther and create a form of regional
government that promotes economic development and administers health care,
municipal services, education and even social welfare programs. New regional
councils, elected regularly, would sort out local priorities and make decisions
on that basis. The provincial government can look after setting broad strategic
goals, much like the federal government set down basic principles for Medicare
and then lets the provinces actually deliver the services. But the decisions on
where hospitals go, or indeed if a new hospital is actually the best way to
deliver health care in that particular region are left to the people who will
be directly affected.
Transferring power for some decisions from St. John'’s
to new regional governments wouldn'’t be a magical solution to job creation or
anything else. It also won'’t guarantee equal success everywhere. What it will
do is involve more people in deciding what the future will look like in Newfoundland
and Labrador. In an odd way, a new approach of regional
government -– a county system - might help people realize that the
issues up the harbour are much the same as the ones down the shore or in the
four distinct regions of Labrador.
For the provincial government, those politicians can look at projects like
Voisey'’s Bay or the offshore for the government revenues they generate, rather
than the number of jobs. The deficit problem might just get sorted out by
thinking outside the box for a change.
-srbp-
