Paternalism on display

Members of Danny Williams’ personality cult tend to infantilise themselves and those around them. It’s an expression of paternalism, one of the hallmarks of the past seven years in local politics.

Take for example, this comment on a post by Nalcor lobbyist Tim Powers over at the Globe and Mail:

Cullihall

2:12 PM on November 27, 2010

I know we have to believe there are strong leaders out there who will step forward and continue the work of Danny Williams. Quite frankly, with the news of his departure, I felt somewhat orphaned, a sense of being left alone surrounded by those who will, again, try and rob us of what we have achieved. You are correct: we cannot take a step back. Danny has set the bar high enough that no politician will dare settle for less and survive the people's wrath. Deceitful people, like the PM and other provincial people will continually try to impede us as they have always done. Thankfully, we now have the confidence and pride to stand up to them.

The basic construction here is that a group of people were childish and incapable of properly looking after themselves until a strongman political leader stepped into protect them.  This strongman then gifted the child-like people with self-esteem.

The same sort of ideas have cropped up in several online comments by different people.  They all have variations on the same idea:  he gave us pride.

Take a look at the words “I felt like an orphan”.  The idea behind it, though, seems to be paternalism, although your humble e-scribbler has rendered it a little differently.  Individuals are supposedly incapable of governing themselves and must be cared for by an authority figure. While it is usually referred to as paternalism, having someone who is apparently not part of a ruling elite advance the idea seems to be more a case of reducing oneself to a child-like state of incompetence, i.e. infantilizing.

You can see here the victim mythology that is prevalent in certain segments of political culture in Newfoundland and Labrador.  According to this view, outsiders take advantage of the place and its people, sometimes helped by locals.

surrounded by those who will, again, try and rob us of what we have achieved

And that’s a related and very intense part of Williams’ political message:  fear of outsiders with the corollary that only Father Dan  - or some comparable parental figure - could protect his children.

Is it any wonder how many of Danny’s loyal followers have used Brad Cabana’s birthplace as a reason to suspect him and his motives?

Minnie on Night Line proposing all sorts of conspiracies including that Cabana is a Harperite plant sent to cause strife among the Danny faithful?

Or Ross Wiseman in a scrum with reporters noting, almost as a throw-away line, that Cabana hasn’t been in the province very long.

Talk about dog-whistling Ross.

But it all fits the pattern.

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Kathy Dunderdale: The New Paternalism

Dunderdale has sought to continue key points of the Williams government, including development of the Lower Churchill megaproject, but she has already shown a different approach on labour relations.

She ordered ministers to settle a 13-month strike involving a small group of support workers on the Burin Peninsula, and later asked ministers to end a nearly two-year negotiation with physicians that concluded last week with ratification of a new pay package.

That’s the way cbc.ca/nl described Kathy Dunderdale on a story Wednesday that did everything but explain that the Conservative caucus met on Wednesday to endorse the deal that had already been cooked up in order to avoid a leadership contest.

Note that last paragraph, though.  It shows how readily conventional news media are already absorbing the new Conservative Party political narrative about the kind of leader Kathy Dunderdale will be.

It’s right in line with a comment by Conservative parliamentary assistant Steve Kent, as reported by VOCM:

Kent describes Dunderdale as a compassionate, thoughtful, and principle-centered leader.

The new premier may well be all those wonderful things but the point to notice here is that in the construction of the whole idea Dunderdale personally directed that ministers clear up not one but two embarrassing situations.  She has the positive qualities.  She personally bestowed benefits.

Incidentally, this is exactly how Dunderdale described her role at the news conference in which she announced the deal with doctors.  There’s no accident to this:  lines like that are worked out in advance and comments don’t wind up on the page in some sort of arbitrary fashion.  They are selected to convey very particular ideas.

Dunderdale’s prepared statement describes opening the lines of communication with doctors as “my first priority…”. According to Dunderdale’s prepared remarks, the two ministers directly involved in the negotiations merely played a role.

This is essentially the same construction used by Danny Williams:  he did things or directed them, especially when they were beneficially. Ministers took orders in a clearly subordinate role.

You can see the same sort of construction in the way his most ardent supporters describe Williams:  he personally bestowed pride, courage and so forth on the poor benighted people of Newfoundland (and Labrador). Take as an example this comment on a post by Nalcor lobbyist Tim Powers over at the Globe and Mail:

2:12 PM on November 27, 2010

I know we have to believe there are strong leaders out there who will step forward and continue the work of Danny Williams. Quite frankly, with the news of his departure, I felt somewhat orphaned, a sense of being left alone surrounded by those who will, again, try and rob us of what we have achieved. …

Williams is a father figure, in the classic paternalist sense.  His departure orphaned his children.

What this political line ignores, of course, is the role that Kathy Dunderdale played in the Williams administration,  She was Williams’ hand-picked Number Two and his hand-picked successor. Like Tom Rideout before her, she represented a direct link to the older Conservative Party and its supporters who predated Williams.

Had she felt strongly about the doctor’s dispute or about the Burin situation she was in a position to change the government’s position. She didn’t. She supported it consistently. Similarly, both Tom Marshall and Jerome Kennedy held ministerial portfolios that gave them both legal and political power to resolve the matters long before the government finally settled both. The truth is that cabinet changed its approach to these two issues for reasons other than the arrival of a new leader who is compassionate.

In other words, the reality of how political decisions get made is considerably more complicated.  It’s also not something politicians really want people to know about, let alone discuss.

Instead, politicians fall back on time-worn attitudes to politics that people quite readily accept without even realising what the words actually mean.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale is no change from the resurgence of paternalism in Newfoundland and Labrador politics.

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Chainsaw Earle keeps austerity on the table #nlpoli

NDP leader Earle McCurdy called the province’s major open line show on Thursday and by the sounds of things he hasn’t backed off the position that the size of the government’s financial problems will mean more cuts.

Sure he said he was opposed to austerity,  but what Earle did say was that the government will have to cut jobs, lay people off and slash spending to cope with its financial problems. 

Potato, potato, Earle.

Sliding a sheet of paper, NDP version

The New Democrats announced a couple of policy planks last week for the general election campaign.

Well,  sort of announced.  The party’s news release says that leader Lorraine Michael announced something but part of it sure doesn’t look like much of a clear, verifiable commitment:

“Government should have done more to ensure that this province would play a role in the federal government shipbuilding plans.”

In contrast, the NDP leader said, an NDP government will help its province’s own shipyards secure contracts with outside buyers, …

So what does that mean exactly?

Good question.

What Michael is talking about in that first sentence is the decision by a private sector company to withdraw from a federal government tender competition. She doesn’t explain what more the provincial government was supposed to do nor does she give any idea of what some mythical New Democrat government of the future might do to change the situation she doesn’t really describe in the first place.

We just get the comment that the provincial government should have done “more” and that a New Democrat government will “help”.

In the second part of the shipbuilding “policy”, Michael said that the New Democrats would “commit to building Newfoundland and Labrador ferries within the province.”  Of course that is actually nothing new:  the current Conservative administration committed to the same thing in 2003.  While it took them four or five years to sort it out, they have managed to build a couple of ferries at shipyards inside the province.

Now while the release said Michael talked about two policies, there’s no way to be sure if the two policies were about shipbuilding or if this counts as the second plank:

“The provincial government has to work with all the players – industry, the municipalities, the workers – to ensure that the fishery can diversify and thrive,…”

That’s not really a policy so much as a general statement. Unfortunately for voters, it doesn’t actually mean anything. One might wonder, for example, how a municipality could help top restore fish stocks since there isn’t a town in the country that has any responsibility for any part of the fishery.

Maybe Michael meant something else.

Maybe she did not know what she means.

Voters will likely have a hard time knowing what Michael and the New Democrats mean either.

But readers of these e-scribbles will know what it means:

Of course, that’s pretty much consistent with political parties that aren’t interested in drawing in new supporters based on a platform aimed at voter interests.  As your humble e-scribbler noted for NTV, you are going to have a hard time sliding a sheet of paper between the parties on major issues. The one thing they will all have in common is a commitment to spend gobs of public cash:  pork is the priority. Likewise, for all parties – but especially the current incumbent Tories, it will be yet more  paternalism.

Local political parties all practice a form of defensive politics that involves a combination of preaching to the people they already have while repeating whatever it is the other guys have been doing that worked before.

Expect more of the same.

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The persistence of patronage politics

Former auditor general Elizabeth Marshall made the news this past week in her new capacity as a Conservative senator from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Senator Marshall racked up $51,000 in airfares in a three month period, making her the senator from the province with the highest spending on travel.  According to Marshall’s staff the whole thing was for business class travel between St. John’s and Ottawa.  It’s really expensive to commute to work these days, especially when you live the better part of half a continent from the office.

Some people might credit Senator Marshall with uncovering what became known as the House of Assembly spending scandal.  She was trying to audit one member of the legislature almost a decade ago when the committee overseeing the legislature barred her from finishing the job.

When the scandal finally erupted into public view in 2006, the scandal shook the province’s political system.  Four politicians went to jail, along with the legislature’s former chief financial officer.  Millions of dollars of public money remain unaccounted for, despite an extensive police investigation, supposedly detailed reviews by Marshall’s former deputy and an investigation by the province’s top judge.

In one of those great cosmic coincidences, a local businessman involved in the scandal found out this week he’d be going to jail for upwards of three years. John Hand pleaded guilty to defrauding the public of almost half a million dollars.

Marshall didn’t actually uncover the spending scandal. She was focused on a particular member of the legislature whom she felt was using public money to purchase win and artwork for himself. A subsequent review by Marshall’s successor didn’t add significantly to what others had already found.

The more significant story, though, lay somewhere else.

Between 1996 and 2006, members of the legislature gave themselves the power to take money set aside to help them do their jobs as members of the legislature and to spend it on just about anything each of them deemed appropriate.  While some enriched themselves, and a few spent public money on women’s clothes, season hockey tickets or perfume, virtually all members of the legislature in that decade gave money to their own constituents.

In his lengthy report on the scandal, Chief Justice Derek Green described the practice  - and the problem - as eloquently as anyone might:

“First and foremost, the practice of making financial contributions and spending in this way supports the unacceptable notion that the politician’s success is tied to buying support with favours. Such things, especially the buying of drinks, tickets and other items at events, has overtones of the old practice of treating - providing food, drink or entertainment for the purpose of influencing a decision to vote or not to vote. As I wrote in Chapter 9, it demeans the role of the elected representative and reinforces the view that the standards of the politician are not grounded in principle. In fact, I would go further. The old practice of treating was usually undertaken using the politician’s own funds or his or her campaign funds. To the extent that the current practice involves the use of public funds, it is doubly objectionable.

Related to the notion of using public funds to ingratiate oneself with voters is the unfair advantage that the ability to do that gives to the incumbent politician over other contenders in the next election.”

For his part, former Speaker Harvey Hodder made plain his own attachment to the system this way:

"Some members, myself included, paid some of my constituency expenses out of my own pocket so I would have more money to give to the school breakfast program ... I don't apologize for that."

And former auditor general Elizabeth Marshall saw nothing wrong with the practice of handing out cash, often without receipt, with no established rules and for purposes which duplicated existing government programs.

What Chief Justice Green called “treating” is actually the old practice of patronage.  That isn’t just about giving party workers government jobs.  It’s basically one element of a system in which citizens trade their status as citizens for that of being the client of a particular patron.  The patron gets political power and the ability to dispense benefits of some kind.  In exchange, the client gives the patron support.  Explicitly or implicitly, as the Chief Justice stated, there's a connection between the favour and support.

In a model government bureaucracy, the rules that govern how a particular program works are well known.  Everyone in the society who meets the requirements would typically get the benefit of the program. 

But in a patronage system, the rules are hidden or there are difference between the formal rules and the ones that are actually used to hand out the benefit. The patrons and their associates control access to the benefits and so can reward people who comply with their wishes or punish those who do not.

There are as many variations on the patronage idea as there are societies.  The notion is well known in Newfoundland and Labrador politics. As political scientist George Perlin put it in 1971:

“Historically, the dominant factor in the Newfoundland context has been the use of public resources to make personal allocations or allocations which can be made in personal terms, in return for the delivery of votes.”

More recently, political scientist Alex Marland had this to say about the House of Assembly:

A final, but perhaps most critical, theme is the politics of deference towards charismatic power-hungry men and an outdated paternalistic ethos. Backbenchers, bureaucrats and journalists are scared to be on the wrong side of the executive for fear of harsh repercussions that can harm their careers. A massive spending scandal  occurred because, unlike Peter Cashin had done years before, nobody in the legislature had the courage or whistleblower protections to speak up about questionable expenses.  Political participation is sufficiently limited that interest groups prefer to meet behind closed doors and family networks continue to hold considerable sway within party politics. There is a historical pattern of democratic fragility and of  Newfoundlanders and Labradorians trusting elites to represent their interests.

Marland is understandably scathing in his criticism of politics in the province in the early years of the 21st century.  His assessment of the contributing factors  - way more than the paternalism mentioned above - is thorough and accurate even if his conclusion is a bit pollyannaish.

What’s more interesting is the way that seemingly unconnected events can relate to each other.  Those relationships explain much about the state of politics in the province.  Next, we'll add another element to the picture and discuss the Conservative leadership fiasco.*

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*  In the original version this sentence read "Tomorrow" instead of "Next".  The second installment of this mini-series on patronage and local politics is going to take a bit longer to complete since so many rich examples can be found in current events.

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Plastic, packaged and preaching to the choir

While some people may be excited about the fact that all three party leaders in the province are on Da Twitter, a close look at how political parties in newfoundland and Labrador are using, or not using social media, shows that there is a lot less here than meets the eye.

NTV aired two stories last week about social media and the upcoming provincial election.  Your humble e-scribbler is in both, along with local blogger and former candidate Stephen Eli Harris.  The first piece – here – started from the news that Kathy Dunderdale is the first Premier to use Twitter. The second one – here – built off the fact that the provincial government’s energy corporation is also using Twitter as part of its campaign to gain support for its Muskrat Falls megadebt project.

Do a quick Internet search and you will find plenty of commentary and analysis on the Obama campaign and social media.  Some of the more interesting assessments compare how the republican and Democrat campaigns in 2008 differed.  The Republicans preached to the choir.  That is they used social media as a way of speaking to people who were already committed Republicans or who were leaning heavily that way.

The Democrats used social media as a way of tapping into a large pool of swing voters, alienated voters and independents. The used social media to draw potential voters to core materials and give them plenty of options to take action in support of the campaign.

Both strategies are built around the basic point that social media offer some pretty potent ways to reach voters who are now tuned in a great many places besides television, radio and the local newspaper.

In the upcoming provincial election, you will see that the Conservatives have a heavy Twitter presence. The New Democrats are using it and some Liberals have discovered that it exists.

The more important thing to notice is the content.  The Conservatives tend to spout their talking points or spit out meaningless pap about getting a haircut. The New Democrats tend to retweet campaign news from the party president or leader.  In short, they are packaged, plastic and preaching to the choir. 

One exception that stands out: Jerome Kennedy, with this tweet:

"the harmonies of new floods", "the thunder of insentient seas", "eternal pathways of fire"- E.J. Pratt's "Newfoundland". Required reading.

The dunderdale2011.ca website doesn’t have any sign of an effort to attract supporters, engage them and turn them into activists.  Sure, there’s a “Get Involved” button but it takes you to some sterile text:

There are many ways you can get involved in our Party.

In the lead-up to the general election campaign in October 2011, you may choose to volunteer with your local district association in support of your Progressive Conservative candidate.

You may wish to serve with Young Progressive Conservatives, the Progressive Conservative Women’s Caucus or the provincial campaign.

If you wish to get involved as a volunteer, please contact our Party office:  blah blah blah

This is not about pulling people in and turning them into activists.  This is a website about pushing information out, most likely to people who are already converts.  And if you think about it in light of the leadership controversy earlier this year,  that’s basically the way the party runs.

Ditto for  the NDP website.  For starters it’s just a sub-page from the national NDP site.  The buttons that look like ways to get involved are just e-mail forms to fill out so somebody can contact you later.  The Twitter button takes you to the leader’s feed.  As this is written on Monday evening, the last update was 24 hours earlier.

They’ve got a map of where they have candidates for the election.  That’s right above a list of nominated candidates:  14 as of July 25. The individual candidate web pages are pretty bare.  There’s not much there beyond some basic biographical information.

Ditto ditto the Liberal website.  it hasn’t been updated in a couple of months.  if you click the “where we stand” button you will find the party constitution.  No sign of a platform or policies. The news page is up-to-date with releases as recently as Monday. 

That’s the one clue on this website that there’s an election on.  There is a link to something called candidate nominations but it is a pdf of candidate profiles and pictures.  It’s out of date, to boot.

Of course, that’s pretty much consistent with political parties that aren’t interested in drawing in new supporters based on a platform aimed at voter interests.  As your humble e-scribbler noted for NTV, you are going to have a hard time sliding a sheet of paper between the parties on major issues. The one thing they will all have in common is a commitment to spend gobs of public cash:  pork is the priority. Likewise, for all parties – but especially the current incumbent Tories, it will be yet more  paternalism.

Local political parties all practice a form of defensive politics that involves a combination of preaching to the people they already have while repeating whatever it is the other guys have been doing that worked before.  The more aggressive forms of the defence – like the Tories in 2007 – also use heavy doses of Republican-style attack politics to suppress the opponents.  It can work spectacularly well.

Well, sort of.  The 2007 Tories won a landslide of seats but they actually didn’t get any more votes.  What they managed to do was demoralise the Liberals whose lacklustre campaign couldn’t draw anyone out.  The Liberal vote collapsed and that made it easy for the Tories to pick up seats.

But the Tories actually got fewer votes in 2007 than they did in 2003.

That isn’t what you may think if you only listened to the superficial media reports that did nothing more than repeat the intensive hype coming from the Tory camp.

The current Tory strategy is essentially a pledge for more of the same. For the campaign, that seems to mean yet more of the same but without the small-minded, vicious personal attacks that were Danny Williams’ stock in trade.

Other than that, there’s nothing really new in their campaign at all. Social media could let voters see real people and let that personality energise the campaign. Instead, they get some cross between Max Headroom and Johnny Cab.

Don’t be surprised if the parties have to struggle to get their voters to the polls.  The Tories are almost certain to face that problem. The other two parties don’t stand much of a chance at pulling new voters to their cause and they too will work to get the same people to the polls again.  Some individual campaigns might stand out but at the provincial level, the campaigns are pretty much brain dead.

And growth isn’t really what they are doing even if, as with the New Democrats, they are claiming that miracles are about to happen.  Consider that for all the hype, the Dippers only have 14 candidates in place.  That’s roughly the same number as the Liberals. None of them has a name or a profile outside of their own community or in some cases outside their own household.

For parties trying to take down an incumbent government, social media should be the tool of choice. What’s so interesting about the current election campaign and social media is that neither political party in the province is doing anything but using the new, revolutionary tools, to spit out more of the same old anti-revolutionary crap.

At this point, that’s the story of social media and the 2011 election.

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Pater knows best

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky has some suggestions for the provincial Conservatives now that Danny is gone:

• “Reform the province’s access to information legislation so that citizens of the province actually have a right to information, rather than depending on the divine right of cabinet ministers to release what they deign fit. …”
• “Whistleblower legislation….”
• House of Assembly sittings….”  More of ‘em, says Russell.
• “Provide more information on just what is happening with Muskrat Falls, the single largest project on this province’s horizon and one that could topple us into Irish-style superdebt.”

Wonderful ideas.

Great ones, in fact.

There’s only one teensy problem.

The Conservatives didn’t get to their awesome standing in the province by letting these sorts of pesky things like transparency and accountability get in their way.

And what’s more, Russell said that was cool:

“I voted for him, and, truth be told, I would have voted for him again. Premier Danny Williams, that is.”

…

“That being said, for the last seven years, Danny Williams has been the right choice to run this province, and, regardless of any number of complaints, he’s done it well.”

You see, the same guy who Russell thinks was just neat-o had no time for all those things Russell writes about.

He didn’t.

He said he was all about accountability and transparency. 

But as we all know,  his actions spoke volumes louder than any words he ever uttered.

You just can’t endorse political strong-men on the one hand and then wonder where the democracy went on the other.

And as for the gang who held Danny aloft and who now run the place in his stead?  Well, just expect more of the same.  Politicians go with what works and, as Russell so ably demonstrated, nothing succeeds around these parts like old-fashioned paternalism.

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Connie Leadership 2011: Brad and circuses

Conservative Party insiders are so desperate to block any leadership contest that they are willing to creatively reinterpret the party constitution so that only people they chose get to be members for the purposes of deciding who gets to lead the party.

CBC’s David Cochrane reported on Monday that the Conservatives evaluating Cabana’s nomination forms have decided that “members” are only the members of district associations and other similar people described in one subsection of Article 5 of the party constitution:

ARTICLE 5 MEMBERSHIP

1. All persons who are residents or domiciled in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador and who support the principles and aims of the Party are eligible to become members of the Party.

2. Subjects to Article 5-1 all individual members of affiliated associations and groups who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party.

3. Notwithstanding Article 5-1 and Article 5-2, all members of the Provincial Executive Council as defined in Article 7-1 who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party. Any member of the Provincial Executive Council who ceases to support the principles and aims of the Party will automatically cease to be a member of the Provincial Executive Council and forfeit all rights and privileges associated therewith.

Now that’s not really ambiguous except to anyone lacking basic English language skills.  The sub-section da byes are relying on is the third one but that only makes sure that the district and provincial executive people get counted as members and that resigning from such a position has a price.

The main bits of the section define membership pretty broadly.

But if the back-room boys succeed in disqualifying Brad Cabana because he doesn’t have any Sub-section 3 “members” on his nomination form, that might not be the only problem they cause.  Cabana is reportedly planning a legal challenge to this bit of  legal tomfoolery, and that would normally be enough of a problem.

The Conservative insiders who are trying to dictate who gets to be Premier may also cause themselves some other embarrassment if not real legal difficulties.

You see, membership also affects who can be candidates in elections.  Plus, under Article 12 of the Conservative party constitution the definition of membership also determines who may vote in a candidate selection process:

Eligible voters entitled to vote for a person to be elected as the Party Candidate are those persons who are members of the District Association, ordinarily resident in the Electoral District at the date of the Nominating Meeting and who are not less than eighteen (18) years of age either at the date of the nominating meeting or at the date of the election, if the date of the election has been set.

So it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that if “members” are only people currently serving on a district executive, then the party will pretty quickly cease to exist.  The only people they can nominate as a candidate to replace Danny for example are one of the people currently sitting on the Humber west executive.

Underneath it all, though, what people across Canada  are really seeing here is the attitude some people have to political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador.  The attitude is consistent with the sort of patronage-riddled, paternalism that has defined the past decade or so of provincial politics.

Under that model, the party is merely the handful of back-room brokers who rule over everyone and everything else. They are accountable to no one except themselves.

Listen to how many people who have said already that if the caucus is decided then Cabana doesn’t stand a chance. That reflects the old-fashioned view of a party and ignores the fact that even under the Conservative constitution, a significant chunk of the delegates to a leadership convention are supposed to be elected in each of the districts.

You can also see the old-fashioned notions contained in this if you look at the complete lunacy of the Conservative position.  Danny Williams argued that Roger Grimes, elected by a convention of elected delegates couldn’t stay on as premier.  To make sure that couldn’t happen again – supposedly – Williams and his colleagues set new rules with changes to the province’s Elections Act that would require a general election under certain circumstances.

Yet, under the Conservative Party’s own constitution, the caucus gets to appoint an interim leader. If by some chance Cabana’s nomination stands, the Conservative caucus will select not one but two caretaker Premiers in as many months. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have not seen such transient premierships since the 1920s when premiers came and went with the shifting coalitions within the legislature.

Politics in this province is in a parlous state.  The fundamental rot of the whole structure could not be more clearly seen than in the circus that is the once-proud Conservative Party struggling to find someone who actually wants the job while fighting to exclude someone who apparently does.

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Change and Challenge: a strategic economic plan for Newfoundland and Labrador, Introduction

When it was released 16 years ago this month, Change and Challenge marked a departure in the provincial government's approach to economic development and diversification. The document subtitled "a strategic economic plan for Newfoundland and Labrador" laid out a long term approach to diversifying the provincial economy. It called for a transformation of culture, away from a dependence on government initiatives and government control and toward one based on individual initiative and private-sector entrepreneurship.

The plan did not promise easy answers, nor did it fixate on one sector of the economy or on large megaprojects. Change and Challenge represented the result of a long development process that was itself crucial. The long period of discussion and consultation both inside and outside government helped to develop a consensus among those who took part in the discussions.

Development of the plan lay with a economic planning group, appointed by cabinet in the summer of 1990 under the chairmanship of the premier's chief of staff, Edsel Bonnell. The group brought together a diverse set of individuals with an equally diverse set of ideas. There were within the group contending ideas, as former chairman of the Economic Recovery Commission Doug House describes in his book Against the tide.

The process was not an easy one but the fruits of the group's labour proved substantial. It's echoes can be seen in government policy four administrations after it first appeared, even if the old fixation on resource megaprojects and government paternalism in all spheres has come to fill the vision of policy makers once again.

Unfortunately Change and Challenge has not been available online before now. When it first appeared the Internet was in its infancy locally and so no electronic version was produced.

To overcome that problem and to mark the anniversary of this historic achievement, Bond Papers will present the strategic economic plan, chapter by chapter, over the next several days. The original document contains charts and graphs, all of which were printed in black and white as a cost-saving measure. They are recreated here in colour, where possible. Other than that there have been no changes to the content.

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Change and Challenge:
a strategic economic plan for Newfoundland and Labrador
June 1992

A Living Document

Foreword by Premier Clyde K. Wells

On behalf of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, I am pleased to present the Strategic Economic Plan which will determine the focus and direction of the Province's future economic development activity.

This document is the result of nearly two years of research, analysis and public consultation by Government. On behalf of my colleagues in Cabinet, I wish to express our gratitude to the Advisory Council on the Economy for conducting and evaluating the public consultation process; to the 261 organizations and individuals who submitted formal briefs and to the many hundreds of people who participated in regional discussions; to the private sector working groups from specific industries who provided valuable background information and recommendations; to the Economic Recovery Commission and Enterprise Newfoundland and Labrador for their significant participation in the entire planning process; and to the many Government officials from various departments and agencies who worked diligently and effectively in the research, evaluation, and compilation of an enormous amount of economic data.

The Strategic Economic Plan, in its final form, is the synthesis of hundreds of other documents, including statistical reference works, reports, working papers, studies, and briefs. The objective of the Cabinet working group of senior officials (the Economic Planning Group) was to produce a final document that would be as succinct as possible without sacrificing essential supporting data or background material.

This is an Action Plan. The 134 action items in this document are not merely philosophical observations or even statements of intent; they are commitments by Government based on specific decisions of Cabinet. These decisions were made carefully, taking into account the representations made by special interest groups and the general public, and always in the light of our fiscal capacity to support desired economic initiatives. They are presented here in the context and sequence of the plan itself, and not in any particular order of priority.

Implementation of the Strategic Economic Plan has already begun. Many initiatives were undertaken during the process of preparing the document. Others will start with the announcement and release of the Plan, but there are some programs which cannot be ready for implementation for months or even years to come. The Plan does not promise overnight miracles, but establishes the basis for economic recovery through sound, effective, and focused long-term planning. This is the only approach that can have credibility, because the people of Newfoundland and Labrador indicated clearly in the public consultation process that they would not take seriously any schemes that promised "quick fixes" or band-aid solutions to our structural problems. Indeed, in the pages which follow it will be shown that even if the province's growth doubled the national rate every year, it would take 20 years of such economic performance simply to reach the Canadian average.

Finally, this document is not the end of the strategic planning process for Newfoundland and Labrador; rather, it is just the beginning. We live in a constantly changing global economic environment, and every day brings new challenges and new opportunities. Our economic strategy must always be flexible enough to accommodate change and to accept challenge.

Change & Challenge is, therefore, a living document for the Newfoundland and Labrador economy in the latter years of the 20th century and beyond 2000. It is a plan prepared not just by government and business, but by the people of every region of the Province. That is what gives it the best prospect of success in charting the course for economic recovery and future prosperity.

-srbp-

Chapter One - The Changes

The Hard Road Ahead #nlpoli

If the provincial government can actually get control on its spending and head down the road to management reform along the lines that Eastern Health’s Vicki Kaminski talked about on Tuesday, then they are headed down the right road.

The Traffic Week-ender for December 27-31, 2010

1. Is Gerry Byrne completely nuts or what?
2. Kathy Dunderdale:  the New Paternalism
3. Pop Drop 2010 continues
4. Williams to head Rogers sports empire?
5. Media trends:  the technical term is “suckass”
6. For the love of three oranges
7. Counting your chickens
8. The politics of history  - editorial version
9. The World the Old Man lives in
10. Court docket now online – Lawyers:  update your bookmarks:
    Provincial Court  and Supreme Court (Trial Division)

 

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Not fit for it #nlpoli

It’s not surprising that the provincial Conservatives and their supporters want to reduce the representations the people of the province have in the House of Assembly.

After all, the plan to cut 10 seats from the House of Assembly and make other changes in the interest of “modernisation” fits their pattern of behaviour over the past decade.

But there’s a bit more to it.

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 -

The Traffic: 25–29 July 2011

1. Turd buffing
2. Politicians and illness
3. Nalcor ignores natural gas, local studies back cheaper alternative to Muskrat Falls
4. An endorsement that rings a little hollow
5. Follow the money
6. Paternalism in pictures
7. Nutbar Factor 6 and The Politics of Perpetual Panic
8. Where isn’t the democracy in that?
9. Plastic, packaged and preaching to the choir
10. The Politics of Public Spending

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The value of nothing or Pater knows best, redux #nlpoli

Talk show host Randy Simms has a fine column in the most recent Saturday edition of the Telegram.

Our House of Assembly needs fixing, writes Simms.

It hardly sits.

It has no functioning committees.

Laws receive cursory discussion at best.

Simms quotes from an article by Memorial University professor Alex Marland that you can find in the latest issue of the Canadian Parliamentary Review.

Simms quotes:

The House is closed for 88 per cent of the year and talk radio has effectively replaced it as the people’s voice. Legislation is not sufficiently scrutinized. The committee of the whole is greatly overused, there are too few opposition MHAs to assess bills sufficiently and standing committees are embarrassingly underused to the point of being dysfunctional.

Simms notes in another spot that the last time a piece of legislation went off to a House committee for specific review was 2001. Note the date.

All true.

Russell Wangersky adds a couple of other details in a column of his own but  regular SRBP readers are familiar with these issues:

• 2006:  the half-time legislature
• 2007:  Danny Williams muses about taking freedom of speech from the House of Assembly
• 2010:  The Biased Speaker
• 2010:  Paternalism
• 2011:  The Persistence of Patronage Politics

The problem with the current state of the legislature is not just that the members aren’t working as hard as those in other places or that they are among the highest paid in the country.

The problems now are the same one your humble e-scribbler has been raising all these years:

• No one is holding the government to account in public as it should, and,
• The government is making decisions that will affect the province for decades to come without disclosing what they are doing and why.

The most glaring example of the sort of mess the dysfunctional House can produce is the Abitibi expropriation.  But you can equally add the unsustainable growth in public spending since 2003, the Conservatives’ love affair with secrecy, dismantling of the access to information laws,  and the ongoing management problems that have beset the Williams and Dunderdale administrations.

The answer to the problem in Newfoundland and Labrador’s political culture is not to shut down the legislature and have a committee run around to see what others are doing.

The first step would be to acknowledge what the problem is, exactly.  if you missed it, read back a couple of paragraphs.

The second step would be for people to acknowledge it isn’t a problem with the legislature alone.  It’s much bigger and goes into the issues Wangersky points out.

The third step would be perhaps the hardest.  For that one, people would have to recognise that the legislature got the way it is because they placed a higher value on conformity or cheerleading than on democracy.

Danny didn’t do. 

Kathy didn’t do it.

Other people, including the two columnists now calling for reform,  allowed them to do it with comments like this:

“That being said, for the last seven years, Danny Williams has been the right choice to run this province, and, regardless of any number of complaints, he’s done it well.”

Rooting for Danny and/or and otherwise staying silent – even when what he was saying or doing was truly appalling in a civilised society – basically gave Williams and his associates free reign to dismantle the legislature and the rules by which we are all governed.

Kathy Dunderdale is just carrying on with the same approach.

Pater didn’t know best, after all.

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Worshipping at the Trough

Patronage politics of the worst old-fashioned sort is alive and well in Newfoundland and Labrador.

VOCM posted a story online within the past 24 hours (hopefully it won’t be disappeared too soon) that makes it pretty clear:

A cabinet minister is unapologetic for the rash of pre-election spending announcements coming from the government. The MHA for Grand Bank, Darin King, announced some money for health care recently. There has been a steady stream of news releases, most announcing money that had already been allocated in the budget, over the past several months.

On VOCM Open Line with Randy Simms, King said he is dedicated to bringing in as much money as he can to his district.

Where patronage thrives, paternalism can’t be too far away.

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When rights are annoying #nlpoli

There’s something about this frivolous and vexatious thing that caught people’s attention right from the start.

Under the provincial Conservatives’ new secrecy laws, a cabinet minister can refuse to disclose information if he or she thinks the request is “frivolous or vexatious”. (sec. 43.1)

Leave aside the idea that a politician gets to decide on who gets information and who doesn’t.  As we learned from the Cameron Inquiry, Danny Williams and his political staff vetted access to information requests and blocked stuff they didn’t want to hand over or blocked people they didn’t want to give stuff to.  The law didn’t matter.  They refused.  They stonewalled.  They used every other trick in the book.

But that’s a whole other issue.

Let’s just look at this curious choice of words and see what they reveal.

Paternalism in Pictures

People are talking about fire trucks, paving and other forms of patronage doled out by the provincial Conservatives for Election 2011.

The always acidic labradore has it in pictures, over time.

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Nurturing a democratic revolution

Public life in Newfoundland and Labrador remains as fundamentally undemocratic as it ever was.

Paternalism remains the order of the day.  As three sitting members of the House revealed, they they are the face of government in their districts. 

Never mind that neither of them is actually in government.  As members of the legislature, each member has but one job:  to hold the government to account for its actions.  They do so on behalf of their constituents. Doesn’t matter if they sit on the government back benches or the opposition benches.  Their job is to serve the people of the province and the House.

By that measure, none of the current members do their jobs very well. 

The House of Assembly sits  - on average - the least number of days of any legislature in the country.  Members have little time to study any legislation the government proposes.  From the government side, members usually read prepared speeches full of officially sanctioned drivel.

The opposition members of the legislature are no better.  Liberal and New Democrat alike, they tend to rely heavily on official government statements for what they know and say about a bill.  Their comments in an afternoon sitting of the House are often laughable paraphrases of what officials told them in a morning “briefing”.   One need only look at the Hansard record of speeches by Lorraine Michael and Yvonne Jones on the day their rolled over and helped the government in the Abitibi expropriation fiasco to see this situation plainly.

The House has no functioning committees to review legislation. The Committee of the Whole remains nothing more than a hollow exercise in form over substance. The public accounts committee – once the means by which the legislature reviewed all public spending – remains as dead as it was during the darkest days of the recent patronage and corruption scandal. 

As amazing as it is to say, the House of Assembly in the early 21st century has reverted back almost to what it was before the collapse of Responsible Government in 1934.

The House of Assembly is reduced to a form of Punch and Judy show. And to compliment it, recent changes to the provincial access to information laws have systematically reduced public knowledge of government actions when the legislature is not sitting.

The people of Newfoundland and Labrador have turned their backs on politics in increasing numbers.  Voter turn-out in recent general elections and by-elections is at historic low levels.  They know that they have little control so there is no incentive to take part. 

Even the appointed House officers – the Speaker, and the watchdogs of privacy, children’s interests, elections and public accounts – are bumbling and useless. Some offices have been or are filled by political hacks who do not even pretend to be impartial.

A modern, prosperous province deserves a healthy thriving democracy.  Nothing short of a spiritual revolution can reform public life in Newfoundland and Labrador and raise it to the standards that the ordinary men and women of the province deserve.

Here are some ways to do that.

For starters, we need election finance reform:

• Ban corporate and union donations.
• Only individuals should be able to contribute to political parties to a maximum of $5,000 a year.
• Ban “in kind” contributions to parties and candidates.
• Limit election, by-election and leadership campaign fundraising and spending.
• Limit spending by political parties and third parties during elections and during the years between general elections.
• Require full disclosure of donations when they occur, with additional monthly updates on the Chief Electoral Officer’s website.

Piece-meal and largely unnecessary changes to elections in the province from 2004 onward have produced an electoral system that is an embarrassment in a democracy worthy of the name. Electoral reform should include the following measures to break the influence of money and to restore some power to the backbenchers and opposition members:

• Remove the provision that the resignation of a premier triggers a general election.  Overbearing ego created it and it serves no useful purpose.
• Eliminate mail-in ballots and the current system that allows voting before an election writ is actually issued.
• Restore the mandatory 90 day period in which a by-election must be called to fill a vacancy.  The 2004 change to 60 days proved unnecessary and, as in 2007, produced the laughable case of a by-election that was called but never actually held.
• Cut off incumbent expense charges, cell phones and other perks of office 45 days in advance of a fixed election date. This will discourage campaigning at public expense by incumbents.
• Compel members not seeking re-election to vacate their offices and cut off their expense accounts 45 days before a fixed election date or 30 days after they announce their intentions publicly, whichever saves the public more money.
• Introduce amendments to the House of Assembly Act that set mandatory sitting days (for example 50 days in the spring and 40 in the fall) for the House of Assembly with cash penalties for each member if the House does not sit the prescribed number of days.
• Introduce amendments to the House of Assembly Act to establish legislative committees, set the number of hearing days they must sit.
• Make the membership on the committee a function of House seniority regardless of whether a member is on the opposition benches or government back benches.
• Give the committees research and administrative staff to be hired by the Speaker.
• Update:  To go along with this, some other changes to funding would follow:  the office of the leader of the opposition would get funding for administrative positions such as chief of staff, executive assistant and communications director.  Caucuses would no longer get funding for staff and research positions.  Instead, every member would get a standard allotment for a constituency assistant, a travel budget etc. to support individual work as members.
• Update:  The Public Accounts Committee should be the only one with an opposition majority and an opposition chair. 
• Cabinet minister would only be allowed to serve on the House of Assembly management committee.
• Introduce legislation to limit the size of cabinet and the number of government party members who may draw extra payments for government duties.  Exclude those members drawing extra pay from committee work.
• Strengthen the conflict of interest rules for politicians to limit their business and other interests while serving in the House. 
• Add charities to the list of prohibited interests that members may have, especially once they sit in cabinet.
• Extend the prohibited period for doing business with government after leaving office to five years for all politicians and political staff.
• Former cabinet ministers should be barred from any dealings with all government departments, not just the one for which they last served as minister.

To restore the integrity of the House of Assembly officer appointments, nominees should be vetted during public hearings by a House of Assembly committee on appointments.  Nominees should come from a publicly advertised competition, although the list of potential candidates may include recommended nominees from cabinet.

Existing legislation should be amended to allow that officers can only be removed by the Speaker with the concurrence of the committee.  Any suspension or removal from office while the House is not in session must be the subject of a public hearing at the next sitting of the House.

And that’s just the start of it.

In future posts in the series, we’ll look at changes to the province’s access to information laws and reforms to senior appointments.

There are more than 15 good ideas for a stronger Newfoundland and Labrador.

- srbp -

People unfamiliar with the legislature might not understand how some of these changes could produce a dramatic difference in the House.  Let’s see if this helps:

• Banning corporate and union donations breaks the influence of big money on party policy and shifts power back toward individuals.
• Adding charities to the conflict of interest guidelines closes a gigantic loophole in the current conflict guidelines that has proven to be a major problem in the United States. 
• The new committee structure is intended to restore some power to the legislature and to individual members of the House and help break the centralization of power in the first minister. Among other things, it breaks the patronage hold that Premiers have on perks and bonuses that are often held out as a way of influencing members unduly. 
• Individual members should be able to develop a profile, reputation and a power base that would make them contenders for cabinet based on merit rather than obsequiousness and pliability.
• Funding committees instead of caucuses prevents majority parties coupled with a biased Speaker from doing as the Conservatives did in the current legislature with funding for the official opposition.
• Cutting off expenses before a fixed election levels the playing field between incumbents and challengers at the district level.

Kathy Dunderdale, give-aways, and the resource curse #nlpoli

Ontario has been interested in Gull Island since at least the 1990s.  We didn’t need Kathy Dunderdale to say that again as part of the advertising show she is mounting before finally admitting Muskrat Falls is a done deal.

As recently as 2005, Dunderdale and her friends turned up their noses at Ontario’s offer to help develop the Lower Churchill at no cost to local taxpayers.  The result: No development.

Instead of building the Lower Churchill for export  - profit for taxpayers -Dunderdale and her friends are forcing taxpayers to empty out their public bank accounts of billions in oil savings and then borrowing billions more in order to give cheap electricity to multi-billion dollar mining companies. Then those same taxpayers will pay themselves back through their electricity rates over the course of 50 years.

Whoever could imagine such a ridiculous idea?  Especially in a province where the overwhelming majority of the population pays very little, if any, tax.