Three things I’ve been hearing consistently for the past year.
Not all from the same people.
Not all at the same time.
Different political parties.
No political party.
Old. Young.
Consistently over the year.
Different people talking about lots of things but three ideas turned up over and over again consistently.
First was an abiding concern about the state of the provincial government’s finances.
Massive debt.
Huge, unending, deliberate overspending.
When you carried on the conversation a bit deeper and dug a bit more, it wasn’t just about the need to cut back spending.
Nor was it about about priorities in the short-term, like in the next budget.
Not about what got money more than others.
People are pretty much agreed on what things are really important - health care, for example - and that’s never changed in a very long time.
There was more a concern about that we just keep spending rather than shift anything that we can shift, like how care is delivered or whether there were just smarter and easier ways to do everyday things.
Lots of people were also talking about the way the economy was going, which really tied back to the issue of government spending. Develop the economy and there’d be more money in taxes and royalties for government to spend.
Keep digging into what was on their mind though and you’d get the second thing, which is a concern about the lack of local voices talking about problems we have now, potential problems we might have in the future, new ideas, the opportunities for new industries, whatever.
We don’t talk about stuff.
Some of the lack of discussion was about changes in news media.
The decline of newspapers. The cuts and changes in radio and television. The way people wind up talking about local issues - *if* they are talking about local issues at all - but seem to have no sense that this place is not the same as Halifax, or Wolfville, or Toronto, or Alberta or wherever they are talking from for a couple of minutes about a place the name of which they oftentimes cannot even pronounce properly.
A lot of it was the fact there aren’t people talking on behalf of their industry, or their group, or themselves about those issues. Not really much disagreement of any kind.
The university seems to have collectively disappeared so far up its own backside after the Pretendian Scandal that no one does interviews, publishes anything, or - merciful heavens - organizes a public talk of any kind on a current, local topic.
Things pop up. There’s a bit of government reaction and then things are gone. Not fixed or solved just gone from the media line-up.
Poof.
Then there’s no chasing after really obvious things that need follow-up.
Like who really paid for the famous fishing foray.
Just as a f’rinstance.
Was it Premier Andrew Furey himself, as he said when the story broke?
Or was it his wife, which is the story the Furey-appointed commissioner accepted?
Like living inside a big bag of cotton fluff one of my worried souls said of the way we don't talk about things any more.
Plus it's not going on like this anywhere else in North America.
The third thing people talked about was as simple as it was profound.
Hope.
People needed a sense of hope.
Hope is a big word in Newfoundland politics.
In the Before Time, in the days of Danny’s war against reality, he used to talk about how oil and gas was our last, greatest hope or some words like that. Paul Wells came to town and invited a bunch of people out to dinner for a column he was doing for Macleans about The Rock and the Big Fight.
He asked those of us around the table about that.
Oil is the last hope.
Well, sed me, if that’s true, it’s just as well to close ‘er down now because we all know that oil will not last very long even by the best estimates.
Nothing is the last hope.
But there has to be hope.
Thing is you cannot grow hope in a lab or stick a few hope seeds in the ground and water them until they sprout.
There’s no recipe.
No formula.
Hope shows up when other things happen. It’s like the fifth voice the Mamas and the Papas claimed they heard in the recording studio when doing their tight harmonies.
“Hope,” Barack Obama told Democrats after his Iowa caucus victory in 2008, “hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.”
Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
The more I thought about those three things, the more today’s anniversary slid into view. It was 19 years ago today - 03 Jan 2005 - that these words below appeared in a post called “Beginnings” at the Sir Robert Bond Papers. By that time, I’d already sent the Accord paper around to people, got some feedback, did some interviews, and started to get what would become a pretty heavy barrage of abuse from Williams’ Fan Klub.
Those of us who disagree with the government's position run the risk of being labelled as traitors or worse. The Premier has publicly discouraged debate in the House of Assembly. In any thriving democracy, sound public policy can only come through informed debate and discussion. That's what I hope this blog becomes: the basis for informed debate.
Information and discussion.
Those are the key bits right there.
Basic information so we all understand the same things even if we disagree about them. Know what we are talking about, which is often lacking anyway. What drove me in the beginning was the lack of basic information in pretty well every comment and the appalling ignorance among people who should have known better about such an important thing as the oil and gas industry, royalties, and Equalization. Or Churchill Falls.
Then discussion.
Sometimes heated debate: a real difference of opinion.
Then we figure out what to do about what the debate was over.
Doesn’t take too much work to join up the simple idea that information plus discussion with an outcome is… yes, democracy someone yelled from the back of the room. It is democracy… but out of information and discussion we in Newfoundland and Labrador can together hear that voice of hope appear out of the din. Hope of the kind that Barack Obama talked about in the very earliest days of his presidential campaign just as much as the hope all those people kept talking to me about over the past year.
Other people can decide for themselves whether they think 19 years of these scribbles and rants and jeremiads and screeds have made any difference.
I think they have.
More importantly, I think that the basic idea works: information plus discussion leads to what comes next in one area or another.
Enough of that and hope appears.
Hope for the future, which is where we should be looking always.
The future doesn’t look like just more of the past, which is where we have been stuck for a couple of hard decades now.
The future can be different.
That sounds a lot like real hope.
Not hope as in a mere belief.
I am talking about the action to make the hope a reality.
That’s not going to come out of one person tapping a keyboard. There’ll have to be a lot more what with all that very real concern about what’s happening and about the silence.
One person cannot do the job alone
But the 19 years of Bond Papers points in the right direction, to how we can find the future for ourselves and all the hope anyone would ever need.
More to come…