A Typically Furey-ous Exit
Furey, the prototype Carney, leaves his Team in a jam
As Furey left, so he was in office. The ending was a metaphor for Furey’s brief administration.
“I had a list of what I wanted to accomplish,” Andrew Furey wrote as he headed back to his family and the operating theatre and out of politics.
If he had a list, Andrew Furey kept it to himself for five years.
The rest of Furey’s four page Dear John letter to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador is a string of single-sentence paragraphs, self-congratulatory cliche, and other people’s ideas like 10 dollar a day care or the MOU for Churchill Falls. None are Furey’s. None.
No one expected the resignation. Even the whole set-up - a stock, funereal pipe and drape kit, a few chairs, and casually dressed politicians scrambling for chairs in the Confederation Building lobby - was so far the opposite of anything well-planned and well-organized that the decision to quit seems to have been as off-the-cuff as Furey’s entire administration was. This was a rush job. Fair enough.
Furey had a chance to tell a simple truth on Tuesday. He didn’t. Furey’s family did not look happy or even slightly relieved. The job is hard, moreso on the family than on the one in the office. Admitting the strain was too much would have been honest and gained him much sympathy. Maybe Furey and his wife decided to quit given the strain, as they implied, but it may not have been as much as two weeks ago. If that is true, one wonders why it took them so long to announce. Furey’s words, that public should expect and demand honesty from their leaders, ring hollow when struck by his actions.
Furey’s official reasons for leaving - spend more time with the family, treating patients - are the most worn out of shop-worn political excuses, a lie as plain as “I’ll respect you in the morning” or “I’m from Ottawa and I’m here to help.” Furey’s comment about not wanting to commit to another full term is also an excuse not a reason. His commitment to honour the fixed election date law is hypocrisy in light of 2021. After all, the longest he’d have to stay after a win would be 12 to 8 months. There is no fixed date election law here let alone a need to call an election within a year of picking a new leader.
If Furey’d called the election last year when he should have, he’d still have been able to quit and look good today. Now Furey looks like he was running from office instead of for it. He did not sound relieved or ready for what's next. This decision leaves the Liberals already struggling to find candidates to now find a leader when the pickings are very slim. They will have to push the election off until at least the fall, if not go to the max, which means they will look more and more like a crowd desperate to hang on to office rather than fresh and capable leaders.
For the federal Liberals and for political observers nationally, Andrew Furey’s quick and troubled tenure as Premier and his sudden run for the door are a warning. Do not expect Mark Carney to be any better, whether he beats the Conservatives or not. The reason is a deeper rot within the party that cannot be papered over with a pretty face and few fluffy words.
Furey always said he was not a career politician. The word “career” was unnecessary. A veteran political observer with experience at the highest levels of Canadian national politics once said Furey had the political instincts of a carton of sour milk. Furey called an election in the middle of winter in the middle of a pandemic in 2021 when he didn’t need to and struggled against two almost non-existent parties to win a mere two seats more than his party had had before. He never got better at the job.
Set to go to the polls a year ago Furey balked for no apparently good reason. That only gave the Pea Seas time to organize and they did. Furey chased unicorns, first hoping that Risley and hydrogen would be his ticket to the history books and then banking on the give-away deal with Francois Legault to overcome four years of scandal after controversy after shag-up, all of which Furey brought himself or made worse by bungling. In the process, Furey avoided the day-to-day decisions, the truly hard decisions, that would have made a real difference to his government’s performance and to public perceptions of it.
Amateurish over-reaction at the cabinet level to unhappy fisherman a year ago made his government look panicked and unsteady and the childishness of two of his senior advisors in forcing an unnecessary confrontation for the cameras during the demonstration revealed much about his dysfunctional office.
To make it worse, Furey presided over the least accountable, least transparent administration in recent history and his anti-democratic tendencies - the House of Assembly was reduced to a pathetic rubber stamp during his time in office - are notorious even for recent times in Newfoundland and Labrador. Financially, the provincial government is in far worse shape after four and a bit years of his leadership than when Furey took office.
Against a supposedly weak opposition, Andrew Furey could have won an easy re-election and then quit in jig time afterwards. His hasty departure suggests that public support for his Legault deal - the ticket to an easy re-election, supposedly - is not merely less than he and his father expected but likely bordering on opposition. The majority of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians may well oppose the deal and since Furey himself has no ability to persuade anyone of anything, he was in a very hard spot.
The prospect of an uphill fight for re-election might well have been the final straw for a guy who never wanted to be Premier anyway and whose only interest in the job was how it could springboard him to something bigger. The prospect of a minority government or even a loss would never have been what he signed on for. Those are as likely reasons for Andrew Furey’s sudden departure as anything else.
In the end, Furey cosplayed Justin Trudeau as usual, right down to the resignation that includes him staying on until the party found a replacement. Unlike the federal Liberals, there is no Mark Carney-like character waiting to replace Andrew Furey. For the Newfoundland and Labrador Liberals, Furey was the Carney prototype: an outsider with no experience in elected politics but who all the inside boys and girls figured voters would think had been sp[rinkled with the magic pixie dust of re-election.Peter Pan could not fly, as it turned out.
For the federal Liberals and for political observers nationally, Andrew Furey’s short and troubled tenure as Premier and his sudden run for the door are a warning. Do not expect Mark Carney to be any better, whether he beats the Conservatives or not. He might be better but don’t count on it. The reason is the same in both parties, namely a deeper rot that cannot be papered over with a pretty face and few fluffy words.
As it is, the House will open on Monday. Do not expect Furey to be in his seat, which would be nothing new. The brief sitting will be testier than usual as the Liberals have much to answer for and the Pea Seas will smell blood. The Liberals will likely pass a quick interim supply bill to cover the first three months or more of the new fiscal year and then shut things down, likely until the fall. In the meantime, they’ll run a leadership and hope they can find the unicorn Furey couldn’t or isn’t.
Attention is already turned to who might replace Furey. John Abbott would be an excellent choice - he was the right choice in 2020 - but Abbott is not a favourite of the backroom cabal controlling these things. As it is he was ready to announce a switch to federal politics. That alone suggests not only that he is ambitious, something every politician must be, but that he saw no future in the provincial Liberals. If Abbott wanted some free advice, it would be to take a run at federal politics and forget any issues that the party insiders who didn’t pick him before and who have worked against him ever since might suddenly see their errors and change.
Fred Hutton - the early odds-on favourite to be the next Furey - has been badly tainted by the two patronage scandals of the past six months and maye be too damaged to be successful. Hutton would have a hard time going for the top job without his former co-workers and they are not likely to be a team to conjure with. Their record speaks for itself.
Other potentially strong candidates, like Andrew Parsons, have already decided to leave politics. His family have already paid a harder price than Furey’s both personally and financially so it’s not likely Parsons will change his mind. John Hogan is far from ready. He would need some success as a cabinet minister first to be ready for a shot at the top job.
There is literally no one else in caucus likely to be on top of anyone’s list. Gerry Byrne might take a run at the job, just for the fun of it. There may be others but they are all more prospects in their own minds than in reality. The only serious potential alternatives are outside the Liberal caucus and there are no names circulating yet in that wide group.
The longer the Liberals delayed an election, the more likely it came for Furey to quit or be pushed. This goes back to something I wrote about the Pea Sea leadership and the implications for the Liberals of a renewed Pea Sea party under an aggressive young leader. Read the whole thing (link above, paywalled) but here are two key paragraphs from almost exactly two years ago. It assumes a Liberal worst case at the front end, namely a revitalized Pea Seas under a young leader but notice how the last paragraph is the real worst case scenario that actually showed up, more by accident than design.
In other words, to give the Liberals time to find a new leader, we are likely already inside the last 12 months of Andrew Furey’s Premiership. If he’s not gone by later this year or early next, then the Liberals would not really have time to run a proper leadership before they go to the polls again. They need an exciting race and some signs of life to fight off a reinvigorated Pea Sea crowd.
Add the timelines for a Churchill Falls deal into this and you get an even bigger set of problems for the Liberals. Properly done, the talks should go well beyond Furey’s personal political deadline. Better to get right something this important. Improperly done, Furey could pull a Danny, cut a hasty and very bad deal purely to serve as a prop for his exit speech. That would leave his successor to face the Pea Seas while holding a flaming paper bag full of dog turd with “Churchill Falls deal” scribbled on the outside. Hilarity would not ensue.
No matter how you look at it time is not on the provincial Liberals’ side.
Jamming them up is Andrew Furey’s parting gift to his own party.