TikTok Toodle-ooo

As expected, Siobhan Coady gives up.

The news Monday was not that Siobhan Coady, deputy premier in Andrew Furey’s disastrously incompetent administration, the architect of record overspending in a province whose recent governments have competed with one another to bring the place to the age of bankruptcy, has decided to pack it in after just a decade in provincial politics.

No. Not the news.

The news is the video Coady released to tell the world how splendiferously wonderful it has all been, how proud she is, and how fantastic it has been to meet all the amazing people she met.

An elegantly simple statement was not good enough. No couple of minutes taking questions from reporters or anything else appropriate for any politician leaving office. For Siobhan there was a social media sayonara, a Facebook farewell, a TikTok toodle-ooo. Two and a half minutes of public masturbation that makes Danny Williams - the biggest Onanist to sit in the Premier’s Office ever, bar none - and his self-stroking rival Andrew Furey come off like a pair of chastity-marms.

The effect on viewers of Coady’s ego-addled good-bye was likely the same as if someone held a small turd under their noses. A wrinkling of nose. A demi-cringe. Coady’s video suffers from a surplus of ego and a deficit of judgment every bit the size of the cash deficits that were Coady’s signature as finance minister. The video is poor. Coady looks sweaty in a nervous, uncomfortable way. Her delivery comes across as plastic and artificial. The smile and gaze are robotic. Think Andrew Furey and the TelePrompTer, ‘round about COVID and ‘21 election then strip away all the sincerity. The script she reads is overwrought.

No one around Coady either thought this was a bad idea or could convince Coady it was a bad idea, which it obviously is. This fundamental flaw of poor leadership and staff work has been not just Furey’s or Coady’s chronic problem in politics but the Liberals’ problem since 2015. John Hogan is not exempt given he has kept around him the staff who failed repeatedly, some of them going back to Dwight Ball’s troubled time.

The video is all about Siobhan, even as she talks about the province and its people, That sense comes through clearly even as she promises to be forever a strong voice for whatever pile of overloaded adjectives she and her knob-polishing team used to describe Newfoundland and Labrador.

At one point in her political career, she mimicked Jason Nesmith from Galaxy Quest (Never give up. Never Surrender.) with a political tagline only slightly different (Never give up. Never give in.) Now Siobhan is giving up. She is giving in, as she did with the government’s finances. She is surrendering, as she did to Quebec. Her video just continues the same course of cliche words like the cliche policies of her predecessors in this century.

None of that comes as a surprise to anyone who is paying attention to politics. Most people aren’t. That’s the Liberals’ problem since 2016. That is why the Liberals are sliding to likely defeat in the next election for the third time in a row after a mere decade in office. Most people are indifferent to the Liberals even more than all the other politicians. People don’t care about them enough to either love or hate them. The ones who love the Liberals were never the majority of any group and since 2016, the Liberals have struggled to get enough people willing even to tolerate them a bit longer through two elections, now stumbling into a third. The people who still love the Liberals are even fewer in number these days than they were 10 years ago.

From the start, the 2015 Liberals have done nothing to make people care or even want to care about them. They have given voters many reasons to be indifferent to them. The contrast between the provincial Liberals now with John Hogan as their front man as their federal cousins after Justin Trudeau is stark. There is no sign of change, refreshment, and renewal a decade after voters picked what they thought was a new team with new ideas and a new course. John Hogan is no Mark Carney, not that he is even trying to be, nor did the local backroom pick Hogan for his willingness to change tone and direction. There’s just been more of the same tedious, insincere self-indulgence that has dominated provincial politics relentlessly for 20 years now. John Hogan took the Premier’s job now just because it was available, which is the same reason every one of his predecessors back to Kathy Dunderdale had, with the results we have all seen.

Coady’s departure goes with Tom Osborne’s, Andrew Parsons’, and John Abbotts’. They are all symptomatic of the fundamental problems inside the Liberal cabinet, carried over from the Pea Seas after 2003. Only in a government in which the Premier’s Office lacks any leadership or direction could ministers get away with these sorts of departures with no overarching political message that emphasizes strength and continuity and competence.

Osborne’s exit in particular shows how utterly incompetent the whole of Andrew Furey’s office was from the top down. Four months’ notice and the Premier’s Office did nothing, not a tap of work to shuffle cabinet and gear for an election until Osborne forced his way past them out the door on his own timetable. The way Andrew Parsons went - told Furey’s crowd before Osborne told them of his departure, then hung on and hung on apparently at the 8th Floor’s request, only to dash at the last minute - was no better.

The Premier’s job is to keep the whole government together and moving in generally the same direction. Since 2003, more so since 2010, and much more so since 2015, the Premier has barely been first among equals, as the old saying goes. One Government of Newfoundland and Labrador after another for 25 years now have been more like the old joke about old airplanes: a collection of nuts and bolts flying in loose formation.

Politicians in all cabinets and all caucuses any place, any time form into factions and cabals that disagree and fight among themselves. They may be ideologically or ethically at odds with other factions and cabals they sit alongside. It is impossible to keep them all happy at the one time. At the best of times, it is a daily struggle for the Premier and his or her political staff to keep them from tripping over one another or blowing up the whole crowd (with any luck by accident) as the whole heaving mass of bureaucrats and politicians lurches along, On a bad day, it is an hourly struggle. This is another enduring feature of politics few talk about at all. That’s what makes the first minister’s job difficult politically 90 percent of the time in any day while the other 90 percent of the daily work involves keeping the equally fractious and loosely co-ordinated government departments working together to a common purpose.

Pat Parfrey’s observation to Adam Walsh on CBC radio lunchtime Monday about bureaucrats working in silos lines up with this point but from Parfrey’s lips, it is as true as it is dishonest since Parfrey’s only interest has been in defending the rampant incompetence, theft, and bungling inside the silos he now runs. It is as true as the lie one of Pat’s bureaucrats gave John Hogan to say the other day when he finally came out of witness protection on the nurses. We always make sure the money goes to care, or words to that effect, said Hogan from a script, even as the Auditor General’s report he was commenting on showed that was absolutely not true. Hogan’s role last year in covering up the first hint of theft is now made worse by the Auditor’s investigation that reveals much more outright theft as well as all the other sordidness of the whole scam.

The Premier’s Office is supposed to supply the common purpose in any government and that’s where the Premiers of Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 have been sadly lacking. Danny Williams’ egocentric obsessions (Muskrat Falls was his precious, an American rocket launch just one of many idiocies) and anti-democratic, sometimes violent ravings (they ought to be shot!) do not count any more than Donald Trump’s do as a substitute for knowing why you are there, collectively, and why you are working to a generally shared goal beyond staying alive politically of in Trump’s case filling his pockets.

Williams and Trump, like every Premier in between Williams and now Hogan share that common flaw, which is government fighting among themselves or working sometimes at cross-purposes or sometimes spinning off to do as they please not just from the natural tendency of government to be that way but as a result of the amateurism and incompetence that comes out of the top-most office’s serial ineptness.

These are not new things. British cabinet ministers in the 19th century sometimes found out by surprise that Cabinet had decided some issue by reading the newspapers when the actual discussion at the table had been, at best, unsettled and indecisive with no consensus at all. As the excellent Gary Oldman film Their Finest Hour shows, even very good cabinets with superlative leaders in and around them can be divided over how to handle issues that are not at all black-and-white obvious for what they mean.

They are very bad things. Cabinet government is collective government and one of the Prime Minister’s many jobs to find a consensus on how to tackle an issue. Williams, Kathy Dunderdale, Dwight Ball, and Andrew Furey did the same things as those troubled and not very good British Prime Ministers did to their own cabinets or Donald Trump has made a signature of his two administrations. They’ve gone bald-headed at things which is to say they’ve done things on the fly with no thought or care just their own egocentric arrogance. What’s worse, in Newfoundland and Labrador the Prime Ministers of late have sometimes been told quite wrongly - that is, unconstitutionally - as well as politically stupidly by Cabinet officers that it was okay for the Prime Minister to do anything he or she wanted so long as they told Cabinet about it later on. It isn’t. It never was. Amateurism and ignorance abound in Newfoundland and Labrador politics and government in the 21st century and it shows, all the time.

Wendy told us Monday she’s off like her Peter Pan, away from politics. Second star on the right and straight on ‘til morning. She could not help herself even at the end of her political life in showing - as with the stolen movie lines from an earlier campaign - how utterly large the gap is between the Neverland in which Wendy and her Peter lived politically and the world the rest of us live in. In the real world, flinging yourself off a roof top - racking up inconceivably large deficits every year as Coady did and pretending they didn’t exist - leads not to a delightful fantasy world but to a very ugly end. Eventually, for those of us fallen on harder than usual times, you’d end up in a freezer in the parking garage under the Health Sciences Complex because Coady and her friends at the Cabinet table could not find a few bucks to put you in the ground with some human dignity.

Common Words. Common Meaning. Common Sense.