An idiot's tale: The Wreck of the Fureyzel
NL politics is about power and limiting who can have it
“Long ago, so long ago no one remembers when, they did away with Virtue in Newfoundland politics. To be on the safe side, they slit the throats of her twins, Truth and Justice, and tossed the little corpses on top of their mother's still-moving body before leaving the three in a shallow, unmarked grave in the woods.”
Bond Papers | “Truth and reconciliation” | 26 October 2016
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Incorrectly attributed to George Orwell, who has acted in effect as a beard for Antonio Gramsci whose 1919 comment was that to “tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.”
“I never got into this job for money, for my own benefit…”
That was Premier John Hogan last Thursday in a long, rambling answer to the simple question from CBC’s Rob Antle about when Hogan had first learned about the severance payments for Cabinet and then why it took him three weeks to respond to CBC’s request for comment about it, even though Hogan claimed later on that he’d acted “immediately.”
If “immediately” is three weeks in Hoganland, you’d hate to see John take his own sweet time with something.
Hogan didn’t answer either question, either no matter how many words he crammed into the better part ofd two minutes, without a breath, much less a comma or period. Over-caffeinated squirrel on uppers.
Instead, Hogan went off on a trip that left Truth in the ditch with the answers to those questions. But along the twisty path, Hogan raised the history, as he called it, of how this allowance came to be. Oh dear. Not good for John. Hogan said when the recommendations from commissioner Heather Jacobs on pay and benefits for members of the House of Assembly came to the House, he voted against it.
That’s not true.
It is a lie.
A falsehood told by someone who knows the truth.
There are lots of lies in Hogan’s story in this allowance business. Lie is the only word for them, unless Hogan were an idiot or an amnesiac and he is neither.
The truth is that Hogan - the Government House Leader at the time - brought the severance package recommendation through the House of Assembly Management Commission - and voted in favour of it. That’s the bit that the Cabinet used to model their own policy that covered the portion of their salary not paid by the House of Assembly. The rest was covered off by the House allowance that Hogan and Liberal backbencher Lucy Stoyles voted for. Odds are high, given the history, that Hogan knew all about the Cabinet plan well before he left Cabinet for a few minutes to take the leadership from Andrew Furey in a clearly rigged contest. Those facts about the House in 2024 give the lie to the other bit of Hogan’s claim, namely that the Pea Seas had wanted something he rejected.
Hogan is, in this tale, the Sound to Premier Andrew’s fury, as the pair of them last year rejected the report by commissioner Jacobs who they’d appointed. Quoting her Alberta counterpart from over a decade ago, Jacobs gave them the principles and the values behind her advice in a report she titled How we value democracy:
“Compensation for [Members of the Legislative Assembly] should be generous enough to attract suitably talented and capable individuals from all sectors, yet not so generous as to be the primary motivator for prospective members. Experience has shown that to attract the best people seeking office is to appeal to those primarily motivated by a desire to serve. For some, pursuing politics as a career will involve a financial sacrifice—MLAs’ salaries cannot compete with those offered in the private sector. However, compensation should be crafted so as not to deter desirable candidates from serving due to unreasonable monetary sacrifices.”
Jacobs recommended the first pay hike for politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador since the last century. She also suggested changes to the severance scheme, and a new name for it. Furey and Hogan would allow none of it, values or the pay hike, and blocked the recommendations save for the severance scheme. The Pea Seas wanted the whole report sent to the House. The record is clear. But Hogan and Furey shut them down, preferring instead to lift out the severance bit without any explanation. Hogan voted for that. That’s what makes Hogan’s self-stroking on Thursday - I am not in this for the money but for the good of others - stand out so brazenly against the backdrop of all the other lies he told.
Hogan likened getting fair pay for a fair day’s work with something morally wrong. Talk about getting fair pay was something unsavoury, distasteful, and vulgar. Women, the poor, and any other underclasses make note. Nor did Hogan want to talk about the House of Assembly, the institution in our government that is supposed to be the true bastion of openness and transparency, and its many problems. Instead, he went all in for secrecy, lies, and half-truths even while Hogan proclaimed himself at the same moment the champion of openness and transparency.
Hogan tried to shift everyone back to the set-up announcement and the script someone had prepared for him. I don’t want to talk about the money that my friends and I voted for ourselves, said Hogan in so many words. I want to talk about community centres for people like this single mother blah blah blah. It’s not just a politician caught out squirming on the pike on which he’s impaled himself. It’s the incredibly haughty, aristocratic, elitist attitude that underpins politics here these past two decades that stands out.
Not talking about money is a privilege of the wealthy. In Newfoundland and Labrador, wealthy goes with powerful. Politically powerful not from votes earned but from social position. Hogan’s disdain for talking money is like the line from Danny’s old fanclub about the tone of people’s comments not their substance. It’s the same as the townie historian telling off a reporter last year on the difference between suffragists and suffragettes. Our people were suffragists. Knew their place. Like the woman to whom the historian and others raised a statue. Knew how to behave properly.
They say these things not to deal with political issues openly and honestly but to keep control of everything and everyone in as few hands as possible. People with money and status and position and the power that goes with that. Women in Newfoundland and Labrador got the vote alright. Universal adult suffrage but what the modern cheerleaders for the old order didn’t mention is that those in control - the monied families, doctors, lawyers and the like - kept the restriction that only people with property could run for office. That’s why the first woman who got into the House of Assembly was not some woman one from the bay or a school teacher or a clerk from a store on Water Street but the wife of the Prime Minister. When the place went up on the financial rocks a few years later, the people who’d actually been running the place scapegoated the people who hadn’t for the mess.
It’s unlikely that Hogan or whoever may have written his lines thought about what they were saying in that way but the elitist implication is hard to miss. After all, Jacobs laid out the very simple principles on which to set the salary. Hogan and Furey rejected them flatly. If they wanted qualified people they wouldn’t have left the salary frozen. Nobody would support it, Liberals said as the Pea Seas said before them. But since nobody has heard the full argument that is just a claim without evidence. And what it really is - whether from Hogan or Gerry Byrne earlier last week or anyone else - it is just an excuse. A deflection. A distraction. A misdirection. Another form of deceit.
Keeping the politicians pay as low as it is means that fewer of the sorts of people we’d all like to see in politics even try to run for office. The way politics runs in this province you need money of your own to get in it, even for a short while to get your pension and move on to something else. A minimum of $20,000 at the provincial level for a nomination and then more for the campaign itself. What the salary doesn’t limit the cash requirement does as does the need to be a candidate for months and years before an election.
Of course, you also have to get through the party screen - run by Furey’s and Hogan’s allies or their equals in other parties - since the whole system is now rigged after two decades of changes to make it impossible for someone to get into office the first time without a party banner. Unless they are very unusually well off. With minor variations, the people controlling the party pick the same sorts of people, people like themselves, but most importantly keep out people who won’t fit in, won’t do as they are told, gave other ideas, and who might challenge them for power.
Political power shifted decisively in the late 1990s away from rural Newfoundland and Labrador and back to the townies, in a way not seen in a century and more. Collapse of the cod fishery, mass exodus from towns across the bays, aging population, and the arrival of billions in oil money all worked together. Danny Williams’ victory in 2003 marked the shift clearly and the fight between John Efford - the most popular politician in the province - and Williams - sealed the shift in place.
No coincidence that this is the first time since a century ago that we have had not one but now three townie Premiers all within the last decade.
No coincidence that three of the wealthiest people ever to sit in the Premier’s office since Confederation and arguably in the Prime Minister’s office since Newfoundland and Labrador gained self-government in 1855 have held office in the last 20 years.
No coincidence either that they’ve each reduced the House of Assembly to a mere rubber stamp with the very worst time in the past five years. At the same time, though a series of changes, the political parties in government - supported by the other parties in opposition - have reduced the number of members in the legislature, changed election rules, and generally limited oversight of what goes on in the government itself while running us all billions and billions further in the hole.
No coincidence that over these same two decades, government communications has replaced simple information that would allow people to know what the government is doing with publicity stunts, poll goosing announcements, or the sorts of superficial events Cabinet ministers acted in last week like the one about an automated “assistant.” This is uncommunciation. What Hogan would rather we talked about last week was the trivia of the latest dog and pony show government’s comms people had set up rather than talk about something useful to the people he used as props. Be good and know your place he could have said but that would have been shockingly honest for a politician these days.
There is certainly no coincidence that the one political challenge to the docile political life of Newfoundland and Labrador in the past decade met an overwrought display of the provincial state’s power to inflict violence or in this case threaten violence. A group of fishermen protested at the Confederation Building. Once common. Hardly violent. Rather than attempt to resolve the problem, the Premier’s Chief of Staff provoked a confrontation that led to one of the protesters being injured while another of the Premier’s senior advisors provoked another confrontation for the news cameras. That gave the government the excuse it needed to respond the next day not with the untrained and under-equipped trainees the police had sent the first day but as many officers in full riot uniform as they could find backed by the tactical squad with military-style uniforms and automatic weapons on display for television. If they’d had a tank or two to park in front of the Confederation, they’d have used them.
An over-reaction, it might seem. The result of incompetence and bungling, very likely. But at the same time it is hard to miss the wider political drama on display and the message sent. What used to be a fairly common thing - fisheries protests - now handled as if armed terrorists had stormed Confederation Building and taken literal hostages. Know your place.
What Andrew Furey said publicly about the issues involved didn’t show any sign he understood anything about them. He couldn’t have cared less. His reference to 500 years of strife between poor fisherman and rich merchants was a trite, school-boy caricature at the very best. The protesters were not arse-out-pants fishermen from the 1920s but small business owners with millions in capital and a good business sense. Their ideas deserved more than the response they got. But then again, no political party wanted to represent them before they protested any more than their chronically inept and politically conflicted union did.
In hindsight, Furey’s ignorance or the bungling of his staff are like Hogan’s insistence that his staff kept the media inquiries about the Cabinet severance from him until after the story appeared. Hogan also said he believed personally in transparency and openness, which means by extension he believes in accountability. Yet he has done nothing to remove from his office those advisors who were anything but transparent, open, or accountable and who forced Hogan to be unaccountable as a result.
Some will protest and have protested that Hogan is keeping them out of loyalty. But they were clearly disloyal to him. And not just one person but many, including his Chief of Staff who knew or ought to know what happens in Cabinet and yet who, according to Hogan, kept it from her boss for not just the three weeks after CBC calked about the story but for the months before that.
Talk of loyalty here is an excuse, a rationalization. The story Hogan’s been telling is not true, cannot be true. The facts say otherwise. His staff acted as he wished them to act, otherwise there’d be consequences. Same for Furey’s staff and the protesters. What we got from Furey, too, in this case is self-interest. He passed the allowance through Cabinet but when the time came insisted his old friends make sure everyone knew he had not taken the money. He did not care about how the rest of them looked. That is Andrew Furey’s view of loyalty. And had CBC not gotten the story, the allowance would still be there just as it last for the three weeks that Hogan and his staff ragged the puck rather than act.
None are just self-interested though. John Hogan didn’t take the Premier’s job to make money. Sure. He took it in order to say later on he was Premier. He had no other goal any more than his recent predecessors did. Along the way, though, others made money off the government all of them part of the same local elite the Premiers are from. It happened with Williams and Tom Rideout and Fishery Products International just the same as the Sparkes and Crosbies and Hickmans have, the latter not ironically being the descendents of a former Prime Minister. Albert Hickman held office between the tenth of May and the ninth of June, 1924.
You shall know them by their deeds, as the saying goes. Actions speak louder than words. The words John Hogan used last week were familiar. The sound and fury of self-righteous indignation. A tale told not by an idiot, as Shakespeare had the Scottish king say as his ambitions crumbled around him, but to people John Hogan apparently thinks are idiots. And far from signifying nothing, Hogan’s words reflected politics in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 21st century. It is just the very ugly, corrupt, and anti-democratic things those with power would rather those of us without power remembered: know our place, keep our mouths shut, and do as we are told.
I guess a good AI could sum up your piece saying "the arse is right our of her, hey b'y". But a Newfie 'assistant" AI, soon to be active would be programmed to say " Everything is changed, with the CFs MOU, prosperity starts now"
You mention 1924. The then Prime Minister was Squires and you also mention Albert Hickman. I am reminded of an old lady I had several chats with in the 1980's, as a result of my interest in local history. Her married name Sharpe, her maiden name Lynch. She was a very interesting, witty and entertaining character. Her life and times, told to me :she was born in 1891, at Bishop's Cove, and her stories are among my favourites for detail. I jokingly call them "The Gospel of Aunt Bert". Her name was Alberta Sharpe. She told me of her rum running day in the 1920s (prior to that I associated rum running mostly as a male activity). From that she bought her first car.
Most interesting: she said her best customer were Prime Minister Squires and next best, the Chief Justice, SIr Albert Hickman. This bit of history is not yet in biographies of those honourable officials.