Best in Show

There is more to us than jam-jams and overpriced milk.

There may be three or four people looking on for this recent GNL newser who have nothing to do with it. One is Dipper boss Jim Dinn, the local member of the House of Assembly, who stands to the side mouth agape at the grandeur he is witnessing: the unveiling of a sticker.

We are too small and petty in our imagination. We need to rediscover the greatness of Newfoundland and Labrador, of Canada. We need to find our dreams again. We must dare.

Lame duck energy/trade/economic development minister Andrew Parsons handed out cheques for three hundred fifty thousand bucks before Christmas to 10 companies in the province.

Not $350K each.

$350 thousand dollars total.

You want a sign of how well our provincial economy isn’t doing, there it is.

The amounts that went out the door used to be in the millions, which was all bad enough. Now the cash going down the crapper is chump change. Not because the bureaucrats and politicians are better at picking winners, mind you, or there’s lots of private cash floating around. No. It’s because there’s no one looking for the help.

They didn’t stop spending the money either. this is what’s really bad. They just shifted the spending. Tom Marshall, for example funded his last election campaign with a handful of cheques from companies that paved roads in the province and while the Pea Seas ran things there was lots of pavement around to be laid and lots of other construction work. The Liberals promised an inquiry into the apparently dodgy contracts but never delivered because they wanted to keep up the same practices. And they did.

These days most government construction work goes to a company run by a local business guy who at one point bankrolled the Liberal party. Literally the whole party. His name was on a loan that kept the party afloat. The set-up is so notorious other companies don’t even bother competing any more and have said so publicly. One former finance minister was known to complain about all the companies like Pomerleau - based in Quebec - that got business here while the locals, that is, his financing buddy, didn’t get the job.

Things are not economically booming in Newfoundland and Labrador. There are pockets of good news. But on the whole, Newfoundland and Labrador is in the economic doldrums. You can tell because well into one recent fiscal year, the beleaguered Liberals took $35 million from Andrew Parsons’ money to help new businesses and used it instead to subsidize apartment-building. They could do that because no one was starting up a business and needed easy cash. $35 million. Gone begging.

Another sign of the economic doldrums is the fact there’s been a new top bureaucrat in charge of economic development every year that Andrew Furey’s been Premier. Hard to run anything let alone run it properly when the one running the development side of the shop is always someone new. That didn’t get better when Furey hired an academic empire-builder with a love of crackpot theories about islands to be one economic advisor and a retired political scientist who knows nothing about Newfoundland and Labrador or economic development to be another. Neither has produced anything in the years they’ve been hauling down hefty salaries at public expense, in both cases on top of their hefty university pensions.

These are symptoms of the problem. Economic weakness is the problem. This was the problem before Donald Trump and it remains the problem, now magnified by the trade crisis.

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Hard to believe that it was not even two weeks ago that Donald Trump was supposed to add tariffs to all Canadian exports to the United States and then backed off for 30 days. In Canada, we had federal cabinet minister Anita Anan telling us that she and her provincial counterparts would deliver amazing changes in fewer than 30 days. "We are making incredible, fast-paced progress with all of the provinces and territories” Anan said just six days ago, referring to plans to produce free trade among Canadian provinces. Supposedly, it would offset the tariffs, if they came. Really it was just a good idea anyway.

Well, that was then, this is now, and exactly as predicted here, Andrew Furey is now telling us that hacking away all the trade barriers between provinces to produce double digit economic growth won’t happen any time soon, which is to say not at all. Provincial governments have been working on free trade amongst them for 20 years and made all sorts of progress - something the local CBC story missed entirely - but for some reason the rest of the list of stuff to get rid of is sooper complicated even though a lot of it is just like stuff already done. Lawyers can work anywhere in Canada, at least in the Common Law provinces but for some unknown reason, Andrew Furey cannot work in British Columbia on his Newfoundland and Labrador medical licence even though he meets exactly the same licensing standard there as here. Not just like. Exactly the same.

Lowering barriers between provinces needs a “surgical approach,” Furey said, without any self-awareness or explanation of why. The best he could do was this word salad: “It's very difficult. It's historic. It's territorialism to a certain extent. It's not as straightforward as it appears. I think that we should all be, as premiers, looking to eliminate those barriers. But it is certainly not as easy as it sounds.”

That’s Furey on the CBC a couple of days ago. In the Hill Times, also a couple of days ago, Furey was someone else. “My concern is that this president is motivated from an imperialistic agenda and, consequently, appeasement cannot be a strategy that Canada employs,” said Furey. “To have an attack from a foreign source on our sovereignty is much different than that,” Furey add. He called Trump “a bully,” who has “intentionally caused confusion around the border and the potential of tariffs.”

And then came the money quote, which like the money shot in porn, is brought on by masturbation: “Canadians are meeting the moment of the existential threat to our identity.”

You have to wonder who writes this crap for Furey. Mark Critch is a comedian. Critch’s wife is a lawyer who hosted a local, lightweight, cable show before hooking onto Furey’s campaign. These days she’s Furey’s chief of staff. And strangely the guy who lampoons Canadian politicians with devastatingly accurate impressions hasn’t turned his sights on Furey despite the fact Furey begs for lampooning.

Perhaps that’s because Furey is his own self-parody, a self-mocking cartoon unrivalled by anything Critch could write. Maybe Critch is Furey’s closet speechwriter and the whole thing is a glorious international put-on right up there with Python’s fish-slapping dance. Or maybe Furey’s chief of staff comes up with these turns of phrase as serious policy statements but succeeds only in proving in the process that just because you are frigging Funny doesn’t mean you are frigging funny, too.

Either way Furey is the punchline to Donald Trump’s joke. Furey is everywhere talking up the supposed threat, like he is still cosplaying Justin. But he has no solutions. Look. Ukraine faces an existential threat. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the real comedian turned real political leader, and his ministers and regional governors have never gone to Moscow cap in hand, begging for peace, pleading with Putin about what good friends of Moscow they have always been. They are not sunning themselves on Russian beaches or playing whack-shit on Russian golf courses or sending their Odis to compete in the Leningrad dog show. The gap between Furey’s rhetoric and Furey’s actions expose not merely the lie in them but the great joke in his words. There either is no threat and the Premiers are playing us for fools or there is a threat and the Premiers are the fools. There is no middle option.

There is nothing in his government’s response or the national Canadian response for that matter that comes even close to reflecting the Justin Trudeau/Andrew Furey line of an American “imperialistic” agenda. He and his counterparts across Canada are all for appeasement or, as it seems, not really meeting the moment of anything but their own obstinacy and inadequacy. Furey’s rhetoric is as trendily entitled and juvenile as it is divorced from reality. The guy who insisted that in his heart and soul he was the heart and soul of transformative change is the first guy to tell us change is hard if not downright impossible. But historic, either way. It would all be funny were it not so serious.

In this current fracas with Donald Trump, the American goal is not the absorption of Canada. Trump is disruption. Trump is throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and taking advantage of the chaos he is sewing. His goal is more egocentric and local than international and altruistic. Sure, Justin Trudeau told a bunch of Canadian business people he thinks Donald Trump is serious about making Canada the 51st state. So what? Trudeau is not acting like it.

We have seen this before. Donald Trump says lots of lunatic things. He’s like Danny Williams on ‘roids when it comes to saying whatever comes into his head without any filter. His steel tariffs are nutso because when Donald Trump did exactly the same thing in 2018, the result was a thousand new jobs in steel making in the United States but a loss of 75,000 jobs, plus inflation and lots of other costs.

There is nothing new here. There is just business as usual with Trump just as with the Premiers. There’s yet another Premiers’ Trip to Washington, which in no way looks pathetic and weak and desperate less than a month after three Premiers (who even knows what the PEI guy looks like, anyway?) shuffled off to DC to hang around the Canadian embassy to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Furey says it is to get inside Trump’s circle and ultimately Trump’s head. Insulting Trump as Furey is fond of doing publicly is the opposite of what he would need to do to hit that target. That’s his rationalization. you know these junkets and the interviews are about Furey’s image more than anything.

Meanwhile, Canadians get the real message. They are apparently flocking to their usual Florida beaches including, if the rumours are true, a gaggle of provincial politicians from Newfoundland and Labrador including a cabinet minister or two. Does anyone have a picture? And those that aren’t in Florida were busily talking about the Superbowl all friggin’ weekend even as actual Americans weren’t.

The Prime Minister is in Europe this week on a farewell tour, business as usual, that includes a conference on Artificial Intelligence. The Americans have obviously gotten into the self-mocking spirit of the event. Vice President JD Vance is the official American delegate but as if that one man self-parody of intelligence of any kind wasn’t enough his boss also refused to endorse him as the Republican nominee in 2028. For good measure, the steel tariffs Trump and Vance announced Monday will hit Vance’s home state the hardest. Only Andrew Furey can see diabolic genius toward a clear goal in Trump’s actions.

There is no increase in defence spending, no deployment of troops to the border along with the ads pointing out the huge threat to Canada from American drugs and firearms smuggled across the border. There are no export taxes applied to energy shipments to the United States from Canada to give full effect to Trump’s tariffs. Nothing that says there is an existential threat to Canada. This is business as usual, right down to the least democratic, the least substantial, Premier in Canada quoted in a banner-headlined story about the need to defend Canadian democracy from the Trumpian mastermind.

The Hundred Years' War between Newfoundland and Quebec

Donald Trump does not pose an existential threat to Canada. His tariffs and his talk of annexing Canada merely exposed the existentialist crisis in the country, the lack of meaning or purpose shared by Canadians, as Canadians, that has taken hold over the last decade or more across the country and for more than 20 years in Newfoundland and Labrador. Our politicians reflect this. All our elites do. They do not see any real difference between the two countries or anything of special value here and so their reflexive responses to a serious political challenge from the Americans to the Canadian economy and Canadian security are performative. Show the flag. Buy local. Write an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the national anthem and Pierre Burton.

We are too small and petty in our imagination, as I told Arshy Mann recently for a hour-long podcast Mann released this week on the relationship between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. We do not have a plan for economic development or hydro development in Newfoundland and Labrador, unlike Quebec. We do not have a plan because we have no vision of tomorrow. We have no sense of tomorrow because we have lost any meaningful connection with our past. No past. No present. No future. We are alienated from ourselves.

The same is true of Canada, generally, but in that conversation and in general I am concerned chiefly with Newfoundland and Labrador. Our economy is fragile. Our government is teetering on insolvency. The province is directionless and no people who would normally be called leaders seem bothered enough by any of that to do something useful. Like Danny Williams before them, Kathy Dunderdale or Dwight Ball or Andrew Furey reflect in their heart and soul the heart and soul of the nation. Their pretension, posing, meaningless words, indecision, all reflect the malaise that has settled across the whole place and its people over the past couple of decades. They are both sign and cause. Symptom and disorder.

The rest of us accept the poverty of will and of spirit in our public life and embrace greed and dishonesty that are now commonplace because we have lost sight of anything better in not only who we are but who we can be. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians were the generosity and selflessness of Come from away. We have become the cartoon Newfies of a screech-in.

Andrew Furey and Karl Smith and Jennifer Williams can only repeat the disaster of the 1969 agreement because they know nothing of it. They can only lie to the rest of us that their deal is better - when it is obviously not - because they do not care. They only go through the motions knowing their horribly bad deal is unstoppable and they will be immune for its consequences, just as they have held anyone else like them immune from consequences for their misdeeds. Corruption and waste are everywhere and meaningless, all too often truthless, words sink us deeper in what has turned the Happy Province into a swamp of mediocrity.

Right now we are the worst in Canada by any measure of what is good and the best at what is bad. This is not a natural or permanent condition. We came through decades of hardship and poverty and made this into a leading province in a leading country because of a shared dream that endured. In a very short time, all that changed. We are in this pathetic state today because we came to expect too little of ourselves and less of those who we allow to lead our community. We are too small and too petty in our imagination and so we accept smallness and pettiness in our leaders.

We must change. We must go from the best at making a show of ourselves to the best showing imaginable, whatever the contest, whatever the threat. We must find a new shared purpose in Newfoundland and Labrador just as all Canadians must find the same common purpose in Canada. We must rediscover the greatness of this place and the people who live here. We must find new leaders who reflect the very best of us and who will not fail simply because we will not let them fall short. We must create a new and better home for ourselves and invite others who share our values to come from anywhere on the planet help us build not merely more of what is but all of what can be.

We need to find our dreams again.

We must dare.

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