Oh for God’s sake, just get a room #nlpoli

If you want to read a strongly worded condemnation of a provincial politician, take a gander at the Telegram’s editorial on Yvonne Jones from Tuesday’s paper.

Jones told the provincial government last week that her vote in the House of Assembly on Muskrat Falls was up for sale. Word got around the province pretty quickly.  And the Telegram dutifully pointed out that Jones’ pork-barrelling was from another time, a time perhaps best left behind.

The editorial tuts the appropriate tuts at Jones’ style of retail politics, but there are a few other points the Telegram didn’t make about the episode that are worth laying out.

We get the message just fine, Jerome #nlpoli

“No, I don’t think that we have done a great job of communicating this,” natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy told the Telegram editorial board last week.

“I can give you a couple of examples myself that I’ve done. One is, ‘No debate! No debate!’ Then a week later, ‘OK, let’s have a debate now.’ That’s not good communication.”

The Telegram editorial on Wednesday then mentioned the provincial government’s general message to critics of the Muskrat falls project.  The editorial paraphrased it as “You’re all idiots, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re all wrong.”

Okay.

A bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one.

With all due respect to the newer, calmer Jerome Kennedy, the provincial government doesn’t have a communications problem.

The tone at the top - federal version #nlpoli

Marni Soupcoff has got it right about the campaign finance scandal currently swirling around federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue (pronounced Pen-ah-shoe-ay).  People should be concerned about the money Peter Penashue used to get elected:

The part that stands out is the involvement of a federal member of parliament who seems to have, in the absence of an ability to balance his own campaign books, used money that was meant for the Innu community to get himself elected. Not only has he has not been taken to task for this by his Conservative government. He remains a cabinet minister. Now that the media has discovered the loan and Mr. Penashue’s questionable campaign spending, he is finally being asked the sort of questions for which Innu residents surely would like some answers.

As Chief Justice Derek Green reminded us in his report on the the House of Assembly patronage scandal, the way officials and politicians respond to issues such as accountability is set by the tone at the top.

Soupcoff said:

If the Conservatives truly believed in maintaining a government of principle, they would be demanding answers from Mr. Penashue about why money that was meant for a deprived First Nations community ended up in his campaign coffers.

Let’s see what happens.

-srbp-

The Stacked House Filibuster #nlpoli

Democracy is a beautiful thing. 

The people of Newfoundland and Labrador are witnessing its full beauty in the filibuster against the Conservative government’s latest assault on openness, transparency and accountability. 

The Bow-Wow Parliament lacks bark and bite #nlpoli

In the wake of the latest revelations of financial mismanagement in the provincial government, SRBP has been looking at some of the possible contributing developments over the past decade or more.

Last week, SRBP noted that it appears the provincial government broke up the treasury board secretariat around 2007.  They sent some of its bits off to one department and put the rump of its administration  – about the size it had been in 1968 -  under the finance department, as it had been before the 1973 reforms introduced by the Moores administration. 

At around the same time, the provincial cabinet started a series of massive annual increases in public spending that Premier Kathy Dunderdale admits is unsustainable.

And the same cabinet also ballooned the size of the provincial public service. Again, it’s something that Kathy Dunderdale admitted was something she and her colleagues now had to sort out.

These three things are connected. 

Even if the government loosened the constraints of its internal financial controls, there are other agencies that have a role to play in keeping an eye on the public treasury.

Seven Habits of Spectacularly Ineffective Politicians #nlpoli #cdnpoli

“Run government like a business” is an old line. 

Some people use it as a rallying cry for success and innovation. 

Others think of it as a recipe for disaster.

Regardless of which side of that argument you come down on, you can sometimes find value in applying ideas from one sector to the other. 

Take, for example, a list of seven habits attributed to business leaders who screw up published online at forbes.com recently.  It’s a variation on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People except you learn positive lessons from the negative experiences that illustrate the bad habits. 

Included in the forbes.com column are some warning signs as well.  Those are indicators that while your business leader might not have the full-blown bad habit, he or she is headed in that direction.

And bear in kind:  some of the companies cited in the article were successful for a period of time or appeared to be quite successful. Over the longer term, though, things weren’t quite that good.

So what would happen if you took the seven habits of what forbes.com called unsuccessful business executives and applied them to politicians? Let’s have some fun:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment.

Think of this as the idea that they can do no wrong, that everything they think or say is genius and that they crap brilliance every minute of ever day.

Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail to realize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

The rules only apply to other people.  They don’t apply to us.

They live in a bubble.

Sound familiar?

Of course it does. 

Warning Sign  #1:  A lack of respect

You won’t even need to think too hard to come up with an example of a politician who consistently shows an utter lack of respect – and sometimes outright contempt – for other people and their ideas.

While those other links are to a couple of Danny Williams’ defining characteristics, that lack of respect thing is one Kathy Dunderdale leads in.  She loves to claim that her opponents are stupid or incompetent and usually that’s the sum total of her argument.

Habit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests.

Warning Sign #2: A question of character

House of Assembly spending scandal.

And if you want something creepy, you can always go back to the Old Man’s 2007 claim:

I think I represent in my own heart and soul the hearts and souls of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

It’s hard to think of a statement in which someone confuses himself with the whole.

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers.

If anyone can think of a time when Danny Williams ever took advice from someone else and acknowledged it publicly, then by all means share the story with the rest of us.  Did he ever take disagreement with his pronouncements well?

If you want a Dunderdale example, consider her approach to Muskrat Falls.  She  and her team of geniuses  have all the answers. So far Dunderdale hasn’t heard a single criticism of the project that makes her doubt the wisdom of ploughing ahead with the project.

And, in any event, all the critics are picking at little things in their predictably partisan way so what would they know?

Warning Sign for #3:  A leader without followers

Habit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them.

Think about the bizarro need to call people who wrote letters to the editor just to sort them out or blast them as traitors.

Let’s not forget the periodic expressions of concern about the handful of people who didn’t love Hisself unconditionally.  In the Straits after the by-election he sniffed about how much he had done for people and yet they didn’t vote for his hand-picked candidate.

The Old Man may not have relentlessly eliminated anyone but the Yes-Men and Yes-Women but he was overly concerned with dissent.

Warning Sign #4:  Executive departures

Think Beth Marshall in Health,  Florence Delaney or the executive level churn in the public service under Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale. 

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image.

Poll goosing.

Public comments about having to spend 50% of his time dealing with counter-spinning negativity.

Micromanaging an access to information request to withhold copies of his public speeches.

Clinical example of this habit.

Warning Sign #5:  Blatant attention-seeking

This Hour Has 22 Minutes in a Hurricane

Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles.

Muskrat Falls.

Warning Sign #6:  Excessive hype

Pick an example.  There are too many to list since 2003.

Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Danny Williams:  the Ultimate One Trick Pony.. 

Prime Ministers.

Oil Companies.

A lawyer from GFW.

Randy Simms.

If Danny Williams wasn’t lacing into someone for something, he just wasn’t having a good day. 

Warning Sign #7:  Constantly referring to what worked in the past

Anybody recall that offshore oil agreement thingy?

- srbp -

The question of democracy in Newfoundland and Labrador #cdnpoli #nlpoli

“A democracy only works really well,” according to Kathy Dunderdale, “when people are asking questions.”

Opposition Leader Dwight Ball told a Western Star interviewer that “my job is to ask questions with substance…”.

Not to be outdone in the spate of year-end interviews, New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael tied the health of democracy to asking questions:

If our natural resources standing committee ... were operating like a House of Commons committee or like the committees in Nova Scotia, we’d have a fully open discussion on Muskrat Falls.

Not surprisingly, all three party leaders in Newfoundland and Labrador agree on what constitutes democracy in the province.  They lead parties that agree on everything but the fine details. 

Not surprisingly, the three leaders discuss democracy solely in terms of what happens in the provincial legislature.  The only disagreement they have, such as it is, centres on the questions the opposition parties ask.  The NDP want more time to ask questions.  The Liberals want to ask better questions and the Conservatives claim variously that there is enough time for questions as things stand or that the quality of them is low anyway so more time wouldn’t make things better.

In one sense, democracy is about questions.

It is about people who want power – like Kathy Dunderdale, Lorraine Michael and Dwight Ball – asking the rest of us in the community to support them at election time.  We support them with the one thing that we all have in common:  our individual vote. Everyone in the community has exactly the same kind of vote. And it is our individual vote that is the foundation of everything else that happens in our democracy.

In between elections, democracy is about those people who get enough support to form a government asking “May I” when they want to do something. That’s essentially what they do in the House of Assembly.

They pose the question to the other members of the House, whether from their own party or the other parties and individuals who won enough votes to sit in the legislature. 

You’ll find that quite literally in the procedure.  The Speaker will “put the question” on a motion, a resolution or a bill to the House and ask the members to vote.

Ask a question. 

Vote on an answer.

Decision made.

All starting from the fundamental question put to individual voters at an election to chose individuals who will represent those voters in the legislature.

Things weren’t always that way.  But starting almost 800 years ago, in those countries that follow the British parliamentary tradition, people started to place limits on what the government could do without the agreement of the people ruled by the government.

The 1689 Bill of Rights brought together many of the features of our modern democracy that we often assume have always been around and that people have always accepted.  Freedom of speech,  freedom to stand for and to vote in elections to the legislature and the need for the legislature to meet regularly are all contained in the 1689 Bill of Rights. They survive today: some changed, some the same.

At the core of the whole thing is choice.  People chose their representatives to sit in the legislature.  We select those representatives to stand in for each of us every day between elections.

We do not elect a government.  We elect people to the legislature, to the House of Assembly.  Out of those people, we get a group to run the government.  And those people running the government must come back to our direct representatives for approval for what they want to do, especially when it comes to spending public money.

There are two other ideas that go along with choice and who gets to chose.  One of these is that choices must be based on information.  The legislature’s day-to-day business is built around debate and the exchange of information. 

The other idea is that the information and choice must be in public.  The legislature has space for people to sit and watch what happens.  News media and others can report on what happens.  The legislature keeps an official record – Hansard – that people can read.

Seen from that perspective, those political comments about questions and the legislature don’t look all that good or convincing.  Looking at some recent history, one can find a host of examples  – from the spending scandal to the Abitibi expropriation fiasco  - that show the bad things that happen when politicians operate in secret. 

You can also see that the Premier’s excuses for keeping the legislature closed simply don’t make sense.  If she feels that her current job is a “rare privilege”, then Kathy Dunderdale needn’t remind herself of that fact every day, in secret, in her office. 

She can show up in the legislature and demonstrate that she gets the point:  if you want power in this province, the you have to stand up in the legislature and ask “May I?”

The purpose of the House is to subject those with power to public examination and to the test of debate, discussion and disclosure.  The Premier and her colleagues should want the legislature to be open as much as possible.  They should want to tell us about their plans, present their case and convince us all that they have good ideas.

How very odd it is, then, that the Premier admitted at the end of last year that she and her colleagues don’t have any thing ready to present to the House.  This is the case despite the fact they’ve been in office since 2003 and the Premier herself has held her job for more than a year.

At other times, Dunderdale has said that she kept the legislature closed because the House was dysfunctional.  The opposition parties were weak. Who will hold them accountable for what they say, she wondered. 

The answer is simple:  the ordinary people of Newfoundland and Labrador will.  If the opposition political parties are as weak as Dunderdale claims, then they won’t be able to hide away from public scrutiny either.  Exposing yourself to examination works both for those with power and those who want it.

The fact that the Premier and her colleagues avoid the House as they do and denigrate the legislature as the Premier does, she demonstrates nothing less than contempt for the people of the province.

To be fair, though, none of the parties in the House can really escape blame on this point.  All parties have  helped to create the current climate. Dunderdale controls how often the House sits.  But the other parties went along unquestioningly with the special ballot laws that undermine the right of individuals to stand for election.  Some even openly suggested making this a one party state.  Perhaps that explains why they slipped things through the House with a nod and a wink and stood idly by as their colleagues abused the fundamental rights we have enjoyed. Now they may not see it that way. They may believe that what they have done is absolutely right in every respect.

But they were not right.

It is not okay.

The attitude and actions of politicians in the province in recent decades are why the state of democracy in our province is, itself, in question.

- srbp -

Penashue - the third smack #nlpoli

Turns out that his campaign spending was the third smack troubled Tory cabinet Minister Peter Penashue took.

First, there was the story that Penashue porked out his campaign manager with an appointment to the offshore regulatory board, something for which his campaign manager was spectacularly unqualified for.

Then there was the story that Penashue had personally called federal employees in his riding to assure them their jobs were safe from cuts or relocations.

Now it turns out that, during the federal election,  Penashue was the top spender in the province.  He shelled out $115,000 compared to only $37,000 spent by his main opponent, Liberal Todd Russell.

Why is this a smack, you ask?

Well, for starters, Penashue is likely to be a source of continuing political controversy, nay even scandal.  He won the seat by only 79 votes despite spending $60,000 on advertising alone.  That means Penashue is a lot less secure in the seat than he might otherwise seem.  People who are insecure tend to do things like his first two smacks that will leave him open to further political scandal. The more he tries to shore himself up, the more likely he is to shag up.

And then there’s the question people will be wondering about, given the way politics tends to go in the Big Land.  People will wonder how you spend $60,000 on advertising in Labrador.  And for the rest of the cash, people will wonder what else Peter spent his cash on given the way politics goes in the Big Land. 

Three stories in such a short space of time?

Count on more.

- srbp -

Banging around the echo chamber #nlpoli

Last week’s top post was about media coverage of Jim Bennett’s decision to carry on his law practice  - albeit not full-time – while he sits as a member of the legislature:

What’s so striking about this is that it is a complete non-story.  As you’ll see part way down the page, the conflict of interest section of the House of Assembly Act quite rightly exempts ordinary members from the restrictions on carrying on with another job or outside business interests while serving in the legislature.

So why single Bennett out?

The post prompted a few tweets an e-mails, some of which pointed out other Liberal backbenchers who were likely also going to carry on businesses while in the legislature.

But here’s the thing:  the question wasn’t about why media reports singled out a Liberal member of the legislature. That includes the West Coast Morning Show that led into a discussion of the rules of the legislature using Bennett as the lead-in to a story they ran on October 28.  The Western Star ran a story a couple of days later, as did the Star’s sister paper, the Telegram.

The question your humble e-scribbler posed was about why the story picked out any one member of the legislature given that carrying on a business or practicing a profession is commonplace and has been for decades.

The answer is not some great conspiracy.It’s really another aspect of an issue we’ve batted around before at SRBP:  the echo chamber.  Today we have fewer media outlets than we had in the province a couple of decades and those fewer outlets are providing content to more platforms with fewer people. 

The answer to the problem is repackaging.  A few decades ago, you’d only see some of the smaller newsrooms lifting someone else’s news, rewriting it and pushing it out as their own. Now it’s par for the course. The people putting news together are no less intelligent than their predecessors, no less ethical, professional, dedicated, committed or anything else.  They are just coping with the pressures of their business.

You can see the pattern in this case.  One outlet runs a story.  Someone else repackages it, dropping an aspect or changing the emphasis, and runs the thing. That story with a local angle winds up going across the province, but no one else who repeats the story adds anything to the original piece.  They don’t have the time or the inclination. 

Such is the pressure to get stuff out there that tone newsroom just takes what’s there and runs with it.  Eventually it winds up as fodder for the province-wide radio talk shows. And by the time it gets there, the story has taken on a couple of new angles.  The morning show deals with it – and the politician – based on the simple question of what the guy is doing.  The afternoon show maybe puts a bit of spice on it but – and here’s the crucial bit – without the wider context of how many people are doing the same thing.

The original story isn’t wrong.  It’s factually accurate.  The subsequent versions are actually pretty accurate as well.  But because the stories  are missing the depth of information they need, the audience winds up misinformed or with a misleading understanding. All you get is the original ping and the echoes as they bounce around inside the confined space.

The people who have read SRBP have a different perspective.  They know about some of the other MHAs  - from all three parties in the House – who will be working another job besides their one in the legislature.  

But the people who rely on the conventional media have only heard about Jim Bennett.  They haven’t heard – and in all likelihood will never hear – about the others.

This sort of thing happens quite a bit.  Stories tend to stay inside the  lines set by the first version of it.  The House of Assembly spending scandal theme that credits Danny Williams for fixing it all came right out of the first news release.  None of the conventional media ever took a second look at it despite the fairly substantive evidence that piled up that the Conservatives didn’t do anything to correct the problem until the Auditor General’s people stumbled across it.

Fast forward a few years and you can see the same effect in Danny Williams’ claims about “Quebec” and hydro-electric transmission. What the Quebec energy regulator was deciding on – let alone what it actually decided – came from an initial ping from the political spin machine. 

Whether the ping comes from the politicians or the media itself, the echo chamber still functions the same way.

- srbp -

Whom the gods destroy #nlpoli #nlvotes

There's letters seal'd, and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd—
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, an't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.

For the past seven years the Tory political staffers masquerading  online as a variety of real people have liked to push the theme that the New Democrats should form the official opposition in preference to the Liberals.

Danny Williams , you may recall who that is, used to compliment Lorraine Michael on her performance and her questions in a way that was by no means smarmy, condescending and appearing to be insincere.

He and his friends slagged Liberals – especially Yvonne Jones – at the drop of a hat.

The Tories even agreed among themselves, backed by the supposedly impartial Speaker of the House of Assembly, to give extra cash to the NDP caucus and to deny the Liberals of funds recommended by an independent commission.

They did this in the mistaken belief that fostering a fight between the opposition parties would allow their beloved benefactors [and party] to stay in power.

If the trends in this election hold true, their clever little political plot has already come back to roger them in ways they did not see coming.

And they richly deserve both the shock and the shaft. 

“Hoist with his own petard” are the words Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet.  A petard is another word for a bomb intended.

A few centuries later own goal is a word you’ll still hear military engineers talk about them.  Except this time they call them “own goals.”

You’ll find own goals in other places too, like when any crafty plan backfires.

Own goals are the way the universe reacts to over-weaning and undeserved arrogance.

Own goals are Fate’s reward for douchebags.

The New Democrats are giving the Conservatives a hard run in their supposedly safe homes in St. John’s. 

Tom Osborne, of the Osborne-Ridgley dynasty, is fighting hard against a sharp young New Democrat named Keith Dunne in St. John’s South. He is a former health minister.

Ed Buckingham has represented the uber-Tory seat of St. John’s East.  He replaced John  Ottenheimer as the representative for a seat that has previously sent such ardent Townie Tories as Witch0hunt Willie Marshall in to battle with the evil Liberals.  Buckingham’s got a fight on his hands from gasoline guru George Murphy.

Over in St. John’s North,  Bob Ridgley is having a hard time just like his nephew in St. John’s South.  Among other things, Ridgley is apparently facing the ire of public sector pensioners whom the Tories poked needlessly in the eye early on in the campaign.  Bob’s under pressure from New Democrat party president Dale Kirby.

And in St. John’s Centre, New Democrat Gerry Rogers is threatening to cut short the political career of natural resources minister Shawn Skinner.  That struggle contains the stuff of Greek theatre, bringing together, as it would appear, the breast cancer scandal  - the second biggest political controversy since 2003 – with the Conservatives’ entry in the campaign to supplant the 1969 Churchill Falls contract as the public reference point for political disaster.

Since the late 1990s, the Tories have used their old guaranteed seats in St. John’s as the base from which to stage their comeback.  They’ve had an unassailable lock on the seats in the metro area since 2003.  The Tories evidently figured this time would be the same.

But something happened that no one seems to have expected.

Sure the polls showed a marked drop in Tory support starting in early 2010.  The former Tory enthusiasts just seemed to disappear off the political polling landscape.

Where they went didn’t show up until later on.  New Democrat support didn’t really pick up until May 2010.  What appeared to be a temporary bump from the federal election turned out to be something more.

What the provincial Conservatives missed along the way is that in the St. John’s area their supporters bleed to the New Democrats.  So anything that builds the New Democrats weakens the Tories, not the Grits. 

If the Tories imagined the NDP could not organize its way to anything beyond what they had already, then the Tories figured wrongly.

As the Tories talked up the need to keep a member on the government side, they seem to have forgotten that in St. John’s, the old patronage lines don’t work.  They don’t work because they don’t matter.

Townie members of the House of Assembly don’t deliver pork to their constituents.  They have precious little to do with the majority of their constituents whose needs for fire trucks and road paving come from municipal government rather than their provincial politician. 

Townie voters can elect an opposition member to the legislature and not feel a single pang of retribution. 

Townie voters are also public servants in large numbers.  Tom Marshall’s dismissal of retired public servants in the talk of giving them a modest raise in benefits may well have resonated with the majority of public servants who are getting ever closer to retirement age. 

When the Tory platform promises included a set of crossed fingers – we’ll deliver the promises of more cash only if we don’t need to cut spending – that likely sent a second uncomfortable chill up the spines of civil servants everywhere.

Safe to vote for an opposition politician and given plenty of reasons to do so.

Sweet, eh?

Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, regardless of how many seats the New Democrat win and regardless of whether they form the opposition or not,  this election marks a shift in provincial politics.

The Tories got a big scare. 

The New Democrats got a big boost.

What happens next is what matters. 

At age 68, New Democrat leader Lorraine Michael is likely to step down before 2015.  The party’s new energy will drive more interest in the job and the party than usual. They will get lots of media coverage and the chance to showcase their new energy for the entire province.

The new leader and the New Democrats already have genuine new energy.  They will stand in stark contrast to the Conservatives.

The Tories will face a leadership fight delayed from Williams’ departure. Kathy Dunderdale was only supposed to stay for a while.  Now she plans to stick around for two terms.  The oldest person ever elected Premier plans to hang on until she is the second oldest person to retire from the job. 

That may cause tension within the caucus, especially if there are other potential leaders who put their ambitions aside for what they thought was a short time. 

Political pressures coming out of the election or internal divisions from tough governing choices could add other tensions.

The party platform is already starved of new ideas.  It is in autopilot.

And then there are the other Tories who planned to retire but who hung on for the good of the party through one more election.  They will go sooner rather than later.

And so the Tories will face by-elections.

Those by-elections will not be as easy as they used to be.

Political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t good at refreshing themselves while they are in power.  Then tend to coast rather than move off in a genuinely new direction that aligns with voter moods.

The inevitable result is that they get tossed.

The only reason political parties last as long as they do – 17 years for the Tories the first time, 14 years for the Liberals the second time – is that the other guys never get their act together.

That might be changing.

Whom they gods would destroy, they first make proud.

- srbp -

A cause for grave concern #nlpoli

The Office of the Auditor General is an independent and reliable source of the objective, fact-based information that the House of Assembly needs to fulfill one of its most important roles: holding the provincial government accountable for its stewardship of public funds.

That’s a paraphrase of the description of the auditor general’s job found on the federal auditor general’s website.

Let’s add a bit of a twist to that description, though. The Auditor General’s office is not just an officer for the legislature alone; the AG office is one of the officers the public must trust to ensure that government spends your tax dollars and mine properly.

Aside from anything else, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador must have confidence that the person who serves as Auditor General is not a partisan for any political party and is functioning free of any favour or threat from the government itself.

John Noseworthy likely shattered that confidence for a good few people in the province on Tuesday when he became the second Auditor General in a row to leave office and enter politics.

In this case, Noseworthy announced his new political career a mere 16 days after leaving the job that he wants to run as a candidate for the ruling provincial Conservatives in the fall general election.

But that’s not the whole story.

Noseworthy had a year or more left  in his term when he announced last June that he was quitting to pursue “other professional opportunities.”  Asked about political ambitions at the time, Noseworthy merely told reporters he was ruling nothing out.

News reports on Tuesday mentioned his role in uncovering the House of Assembly spending scandal.  In interviews, Noseworthy was quick to call his own reports on government spending “scathing” and noted that he was critical of government.

That’s as maybe. The timing alone creates the impression of an unseemly haste to leave his job early in order to enter politics.   His comments appear self-serving and - in light of some of his actions over the past seven or eight years - dubious.

Noseworthy has been a bit of a media darling since 2006 and the spending scandal.  What that means is that local reporters have not questioned him even when there was good reason to doubt his comments, claims and conclusions.

For starters, Noseworthy has never accounted for millions of dollars of overspending that took place during the scandal period from 1996 to 2006.  Instead, he looked at other issues.

Nor has he explained why his own reports actually ignored the overspending. You’ll only find reference to the actual degree of overspending here at SRBP and in Chief Justice Derek Green’s report on the spending scandal.

In the parts he did report on, your humble e-scribbler raised questions about his public comments at the time and how he was conducting his reviews.  Chief Justice Green even recommended significant changes to sections of the law governing the Auditor General as a result of the inappropriate - and in some instances unfounded – accusations Noseworthy levelled at members of the legislature.

Then there’s the question of how both he and his old boss, now Tory Senator Elizabeth Marshall never made any comment on the level of overspending in the House of assembly accounts until 2006.  They may not have had access to the House books for a part of the scandal period but they did have access to the Comptroller General’s records for the whole time and he wrote all the cheques used to shell out the cash. And they never raised the issue once, except for the one time when Marshall’s attempt to investigate a single cabinet minister – Liberal as it turns out – got shut down.

Noseworthy’s also been known to polish his own knob and that of his future political associates.  In a 2009 report, Noseworthy actually made up a fictitious report recommendation and credited the government with following it.

A 2007 report claimed that the same agency produced a deficit and a surplus at the same time.

Nothing was quite as bizarre, though, as Noseworthy’s sudden decision to try and audit the offshore regulatory board.  At the time, Noseworthy’s office did not include the board in a list of government agencies the Ag felt he had the authority to audit. 

Noseworthy made quite the stink about getting inside the board offices, issuing a special report.

But once he got in, the whole thing vanished.

No subsequent reports.

No updates.

No letters.

Nothing.

Not until your humble e-scribbler brought up the question of the vanished Earth-shattering issue and reporters trotted off to Noseworthy’s office to see what gives.

Access problems, Noseworthy harrumphed.

But no word on his silence on the whole matter for the better part of two and a half years.

There was just a little cock-up in a story on the whole thing by one local radio station.

Funny thing in that little episode as it turns out. Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner wound up reminding everyone of the sweeping changes to provincial laws that wound up effectively shielding so much of Nalcor’s operations from public oversight.

Noseworthy didn’t say boo about any of that as it sailed through the legislature and it didn’t make any reference to it in any of his comments since June when he announced his retirement.

Maybe Noseworthy will be like his predecessor Beth Marshall who, after entering politics, didn’t find any problems with giving politicians access to bags of cash they could hand out to constituents, often without receipts.

Ah yes, old-fashioned patronage politics and the importance of having a member on the government side to dole out the goodies.

And, by gosh, didn’t John Noseworthy mention just that - having someone on the government side  - as he launched his career in politics.

Incompetence?

Normal practices?

Bias?

Whatever the cause, John Noseworthy’s announcement on Tuesday is the finest example yet of why our province desperately needs a fundamental, democratic revolution.

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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.

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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.

AG finishes term with more fumbles

Outgoing auditor general John Noseworthy held to his pattern of making less-than-accurate claims or claims without evidence, this time with respect to the offshore regulatory board.

Noseworthy’s claims and the accurate information from the board are in a story available at the Telegram website.

In his latest accusation, Noseworthy said he did not have full access to the offshore board records.  Fact is, he did.  What Noseworthy couldn’t get was proprietary information belonging to the oil companies.

“We invited him in. He had sent four people in, they were here for four months conducting an audit. He had full access to the board,” [offshore board CEO Max] Ruelokke said.

But Ruelokke said Noseworthy’s staff did not have access to information provided to the board by oil companies — which the companies deem to be proprietory [sic]— and that’s because of section 119 of the Atlantic Accord Act.

The act states companies have to approve the release of the information to any third party.

“When we asked (the companies) to do so, on behalf of the auditor general, they refused to do that. So we couldn’t release it to him,” Ruelokke said.

The distinction is significant.

Your humble e-scribbler has raised questions about Noseworthy’s attack on the board – and that’s what it has been – from the beginning.

The most recent post on the topic raised the question  of why Noseworthy had failed to produce a report or bothered to update the public on it since he launched his public attack on the board in 2008.  Maybe Noseworthy’s most recent unfounded accusation was an effort to deflect attention away from his own shortcomings.

While Noseworthy enjoys local “media cred’ – that is, they will never, ever question any of his pronouncements – the retiring auditor’s record is far from pristine.

Noseworthy missed millions in House of Assembly overspending that continued well into 2006. The accurate figure turned up in some fairly simple analysis done by the Green commission. 

Despite having access to financial records kept by the comptroller general, Noseworthy did not once report on the obvious overspending in some House of Assembly accounts until after his auditors stumbled across irregularities in 2006.

From the rings to spending by individual members of the legislature to the actual rules in place during the period, Noseworthy or his crew simply didn’t do the homework in many cases to know what they were looking at. That didn’t stop him from making claims that were baseless or that lacked evidence.

And to cap it all, Noseworthy still hasn’t completed the tasks set out for him in a 2006 cabinet order.  Instead he substituted his own commentary on individual member’s spending in an incomplete report he issued to wide media coverage.

And on that one Noseworthy also missed one fairly obvious problem in the House scandal: diversion of public money for partisan purposes. It’s obvious wrong and there was way more to it than just the $11,000 he did report.  Three times that turned up during subsequent criminal trials of former members of the House.  And while Noseworthy couldn’t have reported that while the investigations and trials were under way, it was the most fundamentally corrupt practice he should have seen raised in his original audits.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Noseworthy focused on trinkets.  In one news conference, Noseworthy said that he and his staff “did not find” any rings.  That led many to believe initially that the rings did not exist. They quickly turned up, however if one looked. Obviously, Noseworthy and his staff didn’t look.   

In perhaps the most bizarre case, Noseworthy replaced his actual recommendations for a report on government operations and substituted one he never made.  He then reported compliance with his invented recommendation in a review he produce of government compliance with his reports.

The matter gets to be all the more serious when you realise the subject of the original report was an apparent lack of adequate management of public money handed out to private sector companies.

Noseworthy has never explained the discrepancy in what he reported originally and what he claimed happened later on. Nor did Noseworthy report in his self-assessment that one of the companies covered in the original report had gone bankrupt in the intervening two years.

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A room with a view of the pork barrel

The provincial ambassador’s office in Ottawa costs the better part of a half million a year to run, hasn’t had an ambassador in it for the better part of the past two years and so Premier Kathy Dunderdale will keep it open because it is so effective.

The office serves a great purpose when it’s functioning the way that it should,” she told a Telegram editorial board [last] Wednesday. “And it’s important to me that we maintain that.”

The thing is the office hasn’t served any purpose except to demonstrate how completely useless it is or how crap Premier’s have been in finding people to occupy the sinecure.

The first incumbent -  former Liberal cabinet minister, former wannabe Conservative candidate, former Liberal candidate and soon-to-be-former radio talk show host Bill Rowe – stayed in the job for about half a year and accomplished exactly squat before packing it in and coming back home.

Rowe – who left politics in the late 1970s after a political scandal about leaked police reports – wrote about his complete waste of tax money in Ottawa in a book that became a national best seller last year.  The book is a litany of slapstick moments like making taxpayer’s foot the bill for shipping his used snow-tires to the nation’s capital or his inability to get Danny Williams’ political and public service bureaucracy to cough up a Blackberry and a laptop for weeks on end.

Your humble e-scribbler has described the book as an insider’s account of events the author wasn’t inside the room for.

As Rowe documents, Danny Williams offered Rowe a key position in the new administration before the 2003 general election. Rowe stayed in his job on-air during the election and took up his ambassadorial appointment as Williams’ personal representative to Hy’s early in 2004.

The second incumbent  - former Memorial University professor John Fitzgerald  - reportedly spent most of his time not meeting with federal officials, that is when he wasn’t hanging out in the Commons visitors gallery.  His tenure in Ottawa coincided with Danny' Williams’ endless feuds with Ottawa for something or other and after a certain point he reportedly had a hard time getting in to see anyone. Regular readers will recall him as Our Man in a Blue Line Cab.

Fitzgerald quietly left Ottawa when his contract ended.  Williams gave him another contract in St. John’s in the classic patronage holding pen of the protocol office.  His official title is “special advisor.”

Before Bill Rowe, the provincial government never maintained an office in Ottawa.  The job of dealing with the federal government fell to officials and ministers, including the Premier.  And more often than not over the past 30 years there has been an office called Intergovernmental Affairs intended to deal specifically with – you guessed it – relations between and among governments in Canada.

So there you have it.  The office has been vacant for more time than it’s been filled, a point labradore makes succinctly.  And when it has been occupied, the incumbents apparently accomplished nothing.

And yet the current Premier wants to keep spending money on an office that has never worked because it is great when it works.

Says more about Kathy Dunderdale’s judgement than anything else, apparently.

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For the world is hollow…

Okay so a bunch of people are spilling ink or pixels or whatever over a bunch of new members of parliament elected in Quebec as if they were somehow a special breed of politicians significantly different from any others anywhere else in the country.

Bar managers who have never visited their ridings and don’t speak the dominant language of the riding.

Four university students.

All New Democrats elected in Quebec.

You know the story.

And now a bunch of other people are pointing out that they really aren’t such an odd bunch after all.

Lysiane Gagnon has a column in the Globe that Bill Rowe would crib if he was still column-writing.  She rattles off the rather impressive credentials of some of the newly minted politicians.

Susan Delacourt has a blog post over at the Star that is a wee bit more cynical:

Forgive me for dashing any lingering  illusions, but the CV has almost nothing to do with winning and losing elections. And it has even less to do with how well MPs fare once they arrive on Parliament Hill.

Geography and gender are equal, if not more important considerations in choosing cabinet.  Good looks and an ability to repeat party talking points  will score MPs  those  sought-after spots in Question Period and on TV panels. Doing what you're told counts more than talking about what you know.

Gagnon and Delacourt and all the people who are gobsmacked at the greenness of some of the new MPs are each correct, in their own way.

Anyone out there who thought politicians have all been budding Nobel laureates are basically as full of crap as the cynics who dismiss them all as the progeny of several successive generations of first cousin intermarriage.

Hello, Canadians, these are the sorts of people you’ve been electing to represent you since at least 1867.

They are – not surprisingly  - no better than the rest of us. 

Nor are they any worse.

Bit of a shocker, eh?

They also aren’t necessarily any different from the politicians we’ve been electing at the provincial or federal level in the past decade or so, at least.  Since 2003 in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, we’ve had a steady stream of politicians whose previous interest in or knowledge of major issues affecting the province has been a bit sketchy.  Former cabinet minister Paul Oram demonstrated that pretty clearly in a couple of interviews during a trip to Georgia. 

He really isn’t alone.  You can find similar displays of fundamental ignorance from former finance minister Loyola Sullivan talking about Equalization or Danny Williams and Charlene Johnson discussing Abitibi’s history in the province or any of a number of pols talking about hydro-electric development in Labrador.

This is not like missing a question on Jeopardy. Politicians get to vote on the laws that govern our lives. Government spending. Criminal code.  Access to information.  If these politicians don’t really know how things work in the world, then you can figure out that – at least for a while – they are going to make a few mistakes.

Big mistakes, maybe.

Or they’ll be more likely to go with the flow rather than challenge dodgy ideas, like say spending public money without any accountability.

Like in the infamous House of Assembly spending scandal.  How many of the newbie politicians took to the improper spending like ducks to the proverbial water only to claim that the rules they found didn’t say you couldn’t do those sorts of things?  Pretty much all of them.

Now the people just elected to the House of Commons are, for the most part, a clever bunch.  Odds are that they’ll learn.  Odds are that many of them will successful politicians.

And in four years time, many of them will be ex-politicians looking for a new job. 

Just as they reach the point they should have been at when they started.

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Low Turn-out

As the Telegram editorial pointed up on Thursday, the winners in a series of recent by-elections took what is ostensibly one of the province’s most important and prestigious jobs based on the endorsement of the less than 30% of the eligible voters in the districts involved.

The Telegram blames the voters for this problem:

If you couldn’t even get off your backside to vote, you have no right to complain about how lousy, venial or downright pathetic your representation turns out to be. Heck, if they steal from you (as some of our politicians recently did), you hardly have a right to complain; you took no part in picking them, so they hardly betrayed your trust.

With possibly one brief period, politics in Newfoundland and Labrador has never been based on mobilisation of voters around a common goal or agenda based on their fundamental equality and on their shared and equal right to determine the future of the province.

Typically politics in Newfoundland and Labrador is based on the idea that citizens surrender their power to the patron who will deliver such benefits to the district – in the form of jobs and public spending – as he might be able.  Typically that sort of idea is reinforced by the sort of politics we’ve seen in the recent by-election in Humber West. 

In his campaign foray, Danny Williams took pains to remind voters how good he and his colleagues had been to the region.  That’s none-too-subtle coded for “look how much pork we brought” and now pay us back with a vote for my guy.  That’s pretty much the same sort of thing he said after the embarrassing defeat in the Straits.  Williams famously expressed disdain that voters could be so ungrateful to him – perhaps personally – for not electing his candidate after all the money that Williams and his colleagues had delivered to the district.

That basic message in provincial politics is what lay at the heart of the spending scandal.  Individual politicians got to distribute pork to their districts or to withhold it as they saw fit.  No one pretended to distribute the money fairly.  No one, including a former auditor general, thought that government programs – administered impartially by departments – were the right way to handle health and social services assistance of the kind many politicians claimed to be delivering out of money meant to maintain constituency offices and the like.

The current Conservative administration isn’t doing anything radically new in comparison to most of their predecessors. Like poll goosing, they are just doing it more aggressively and much more blatantly.  Fighting public disclosure of information? Discouraging public debate?  Closing and restricting membership in a supposedly open party?  All reflect the basic attitude that the majority of citizens have no role to play in the political system except to obey and acquiesce.

It is hardly surprising in that sort of political environment that people don’t participate in by-elections:  they aren’t supposed to turn out, beyond the identified party faithful.  And beyond the incumbent party, it takes a certain level of courage to swim against the stream.  The shouts of quisling and traitor aren’t designed to encourage discussion and it isn’t surprising that this sort of thuggery and intimidation has been as prominent as it has been during one of the most paternalistic regimes in the province’s history.    

It’s also not surprising that the most recent general election produced one of the lowest participation rates in the province’s history, right in line with the last time a paternalistic and patronage riddled party ruled the province.

So perhaps the next time the telegram editorialist is penning a finger-wagger, he or she might explain how it is the voter’s fault for not being braver when  the local political culture discourages participation.

Well, discourages participation beyond tugging the forelock.

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A rose by any other name would still stink to high heavens

Pity Clayton Forsey.

He’s the Conservative member of the provincial legislature from the district of Exploits. Like many of his colleagues, he visited a town in his district recently and handed out a cheque from the provincial government as a “donation” toward the town’s up-coming tourism festival.

The regional weekly newspaper covered the event and described it this way:

Denise Chippett is the chairperson of the Come Home Year committee. She said the celebrations was enjoyable for all; what also helped were substantial donations from Exploits MHA Clayton Forsey and the town's volunteer fire department.

This week the Telegram picked up that line and started poking into it. The story appeared in the Saturday edition this weekend but sadly it isn’t available on line. The Telegram noted that Chief Justice Derek Green’s report into the House of Assembly spending scandal recommended that members of the legislature not make “donations” from their constituency allowances or with other government money.  If they did so out of their own pockets,  the politician is supposed to make it clear where the money came from.

Forsey is clearly bothered by the Telegram’s questions and, as the Saturday quotes him,  Forsey is quick to distance himself from that scandal.  The money is from a government department, Forsey says.  There’s a small fund in the municipal affairs department to help out with anniversary celebrations, as in this case.

"I've always presented cheques on behalf of departments. Ministers
don't always get out to these districts," Forsey said.

Of course you have to pity Forsey on two counts.  On the the first, he is merely getting nailed publicly for what his fellow government caucus members do on a regular basis.  As Forsey says, he “always” hands out government cheques. it isn’t really fair that he gets singled out in this way.

On the second, you have to pity Forsey for not appreciating that what he and his Tory buds are doing is exactly what the House of Assembly mess was really all about;  they are just using a different means to get there. You see, the main problem with the spending scandal was not that a few fellows defrauded the Crown, although that was bad enough.  The allowances system that existed in the House between 1996 and 2006 allowed individual members to engage in the old political practice of doling out goodies to constituents.

In his report, Green calls it “treating – providing food, drink or entertainment for the purpose of influencing a decision to vote or not to vote.”  That’s not exactly what this is, but the idea is related to the term more people know:  “patronage”.

As George Perlin described it nearly 40 years ago, “the dominant factor in Newfoundland politics has been the use of public resources to make personal allocations or allocations which can be perceived in personal terms….” The objective of this exercise is to connect the politician personally with the distribution of government benefits and garner political support in the process.

Consider that in this example, Forsey holds no government office and therefore has no right to hand out a cheque for government funds in preference to anyone else. Do opposition politicians get the same consideration?  Doubtful.  It’s more likely that a backbencher from the majority party caucus would carry the cheque.

In truth, the money did need to come in a cheque at all.  These days, the money could just as easily have come in a bank transfer from the department to the town.  Nor was there any need for a politician to have anything to do with it.  After all, as Forsey explains, there is a small fund available to any town holding some sort of anniversary celebration.  All the town had to do was fill out a form and wait for the bureaucrats to process it. The same thing should happen no matter where the town is, that is, no matter the political stripe of the person sitting in the legislature for that district.

But there’d be no political value in that, hence Forsey and his colleagues carry right on in the fine old tradition of pork.

The real value – the political value  - of the whole set-up, after all,  can be easily seen in the comment the chairperson of the anniversary committee gave to the paper.  It tied the money to Forsey.  And as Forsey noted he does this sort of thing all the time. Of course he does; so do his colleagues.  The money comes from municipal affairs or from the tourism, culture and recreation department where a bunch of small grant programs keep Tory politicians busy with cheque presentations.

There is absolutely no difference in what Forsey and his colleagues are doing and what virtually all of his predecessors  - leave the convicted criminals out - did with their constituency allowances between 1996 and 2006. All that happened in 2007 was that the pork-barrelling and patronage became the exclusive domain of the majority party in the legislature.

And in the end, that wasn’t really much of a change at all.

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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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2010: The year in review

For the year-end post, you’ll have to wait until Friday to find out what the readers picked as their favourite stories of 2010.

For today, here’s another view.  Your humble e-scribbler has picked one Bond Papers post or topic from each month as a reminder of the year’s events.  I f you take the time to wander back through the archives, you’ll find all sorts of things from the UFO story that ran among last winter to a couple of posts on education.  There are also posts on the fishery that got some public attention – h/t to CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast.

So much more happened in the province than people seem to remember and the stuff they do remember is often not the most important things.

In any event, here’s the Year in Review:

January:  Spending scandal:  when “facts” aren’t true

February:  Three on one topic:  Deep Throat, Deep T’roat and Deep Throats

March:  The Fragile Economy:  staying the course

April:  Jon Lien:  mensch

May: The search for meaning challenge – yet more unfounded news media claims. 

June:  Roger Fitzgerald’s bias – the House of Assembly is at the point where partisan bias openly displayed by the Speaker is now commonplace.

July:  Calamity Kathy’s story doesn’t add up.  The local media are already praising her political genius.  Here’s another example of how short their memories are or how low are their standards.

August:  Good to the last fish

September:  The politicisation of public emergencies

October:  Breasts:  they’re not just for gawking at

November:  Reversing the entrepreneurial drive

December:  How to win without news media – Part 2

- srbp -

The return to “normal”

If you are looking for a good read, take a wander over to cbc.ca/nl and soak up Andrew Button’s observations on a recent visit to the House of Assembly

But, if the days I spent observing the house are any indication, the peanut gallery has more representation than anyone else in our province's legislature. With the non-stop heckling that goes on there, the house of assembly evokes the detention hall more than the hallowed offices of the Queen's own chamber.

Button is right. 

But that’s not what’s worth noting here.

Rather, pay attention to the fact the piece appeared.  The producers and editors at the Ceeb may have had this underway before Danny Williams hightailed it out of here but your humble e-scribbler is willing to bet there’ll be more of these sorts of pieces in the weeks and months ahead.

You see, the House of Assembly didn’t turn into a drool academy in the past couple of days.  Members of the House have been displaying this sort of behaviour for years.  Arguably, things have gotten notably worse in the past decade, as older hands retired and a new crowd took over.

The taunts are audible from the gallery, as Button noticed, even if the official record didn’t contain it. Some of the stuff hurled back and forth has been quite personal and quite savage.  And the bias of the Speaker in dealing with this sort of behaviour is simply unavoidable.

Yet,for some reason, the number of times this issue turned up in local media in the past seven years is one you can count on the fingers of one severely mangled hand.  it’s not like reporters didn’t see and hear the behaviour

Odd is that, especially considering it is a reflection – as much as anything else – of what Chief Justice Green referred to several times in his report on the House of Assembly spending scandal.  It’s called the “tone at the top.”  That new crowd that started flooding the chamber after 2003 learned their attitude toward the legislature and the people in it from their boss. And not surprisingly, the attitude turned out to be a bad one.

It isn’t odd if you connect it up with another piece of information.  According to at least one editor, Danny Williams and his crew used to mention that infamous Craig Westcott e-mail to reporters and editors whenever the opportunity arose over the 20 months between the date Westcott sent the e-mail and when he made it public via Kevin O’Brien.

Blatant breach of the province’s privacy laws.  An effort to attack a reporter’s credibility.  A sign of the intensely personal way Williams used to take everything.  Any of those reasons might have been cause for someone to have reported the fact Williams’ office was talking up the e-mail.

Even just mention the episode, in passing.

But they didn’t.

Not once.

For those who like to remember those days, think of what happened as being a bit like Brian Tobin’s time.  Tobin learned that he could place a decent story on both television newscasts if he fed it to the Telegram for their front page first. 

And coincidentally, the Telegram seemed to lay off the sort of investigative reporting on things like travel expenses that they used to produce regularly.  With a strong leader, it seems some people think it makes more sense to try and be part of the choir.

And then Brian left the province. 

Poof. 

The Telly does a series on how the provincial government did such a piss-poor job of handling access to information requests.  Over in another corner, it took a national CBC program to reveal that Brian Tobin was on track in 2000 to be the highest spending premier in the country. The sort of stuff that normally would have appeared in local media didn’t; well, didn’t appear not until Brian headed back to Ottawa.

Then, as if by magic, all sorts of stuff started to pour out of every media orifice in the province.  Things might be different these days from the immediate aftermath of Tobin’s time, but events of the past few days suggest that old habits are hard to break.

Things seem to be returning to normal, whatever normal is around these parts.

- srbp -