Cabinet Swishing

Hogan's Friday Barrel Scrape

“The influence of rum on Newfoundland public policy” - the unwritten doctoral thesis - is greater than many imagine.

To make swish, pour “eight litres of water … through a hole in the barrel, according to CBC in 1981, then plug the old rum barrel and given it a swish daily. “After about a week and a half, the water had undergone a transformation,” a word dear to the Fureyish Liberals, even if Furey and the rest of ‘en were unable to transform anything.

The Liberals took office in 2015 looking and sounding like they’d been there for a couple of decades already. Tired, clumsy, worn out. Bereft, to use an Edward Roberts word, of thoughts or talent. On Friday, the latest of the Liberal placeholder Premiers, the latest in a line of placeholders stretching back two decades, gave the political rum barrel another swish and got back flavourless dun water with an odor of must on it.

John Hogan’s only innovation in the Cabinet was to change the names on departments that will do exactly what they’d been doing before, which for the most part is precious little. There are couple of new rump departments that add more policy ghettos. Between that and a couple of cases of giving two people responsibility for the same thing with no way of knowing which of them is doing what with it, the only thing noticeable about John Hogan’s cabinet is that every breathing Liberal in caucus got extra pay.

Two exceptions: Perry Trimper who is quitting when the election is called and Andrew Furey, who will be forced to stay on in the House until the House passes the spring budget. They are warming seats on the back benches. Lucy Stoyles has no extra paying coming to her but the Liberals will likely find something for her to do to earn an extra copper. Derek Bennett remains the Speaker, drawing a Cabinet minister’s level pay while being as incompetent as as ever and as most of his predecessors have been.

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Furey’s departure and Hogan’s re-working of Cabinet does create a curious problem and it isn’t clear how the Government crowd will get over it. Cabinet ministers cannot sit on House committees, especially ones that are examining government budgets. Unless Andrew Furey is suddenly added to the two standing committees of the House reviewing the budget, then the Liberals will be the minority on each committee. That would let the Pea Seas and Dippers control the passage of the budget or at least have enough muscle to cause problems with whatever scheme the Furey Brain Trust has come up with. Even with Furey, the committee would likely be tied on most votes, at least and that would still be a problem.

Nothing surprising in this since the Liberals don’t give a toss about the House and Furey has had the most naked contempt for parliamentary democracy of any Premier since the turn of the century, Danny Williams included. And this little fiasco is entirely his making since he quit at the absolute worst time.

There’s an added twist, as if the Liberals is a functional minority were not bad enough. Adding Furey to a House committee would raise a procedural issue since it is *his* budget the committee would examine. He’d be in a conflict of interest were he to examine witnesses from departments whom he appointed in most cases.

What’s worse, since the new structure of Cabinet doesn’t line up with the budget, the House should really have a new budget for the House to approve. At the very least, the committees should call a whole set of new witness since the people running different bits of the old departments may have different ideas about how to run things. Plus, there are whole new departments with new ministers and deputy ministers neither of whom has actually had to defend a budget before. There’d also be the ridiculous experience of having Jamie Korab and Sherry Gambin-Walsh - turfed from Cabinet for breaching her oath of secrecy and confidentiality, don’t forget - going from being a committee member to appearing before the committee.

They could think they’d get around this by appointing both independent members to the committees but here’s the thing. While Ed Joyce is basically still a Liberal at heart and will side with the government, Paul Lane is a pickle. If he faithfully votes with the government, he’d look like he’d be bought off by the Liberals with a promise of something, especially given the obvious mess of re-organizing the government in the middle of a budget.

Bottom line: we could see a circus in the House no matter what they do.

As for who is in Cabinet, in the tradition of Dwight Ball and Andrew Furey, Hogan shagged over the most capable minister he has - John Abbott - by giving him two essentially meaningless portfolios: “seniors” and housing corporation. Meanwhile, the social services side of the department Paul Pike was completely unable to handle will go to Jamie Korab. It is hard to imagine the department was so unwieldy they had to split it in two so this is clearly an excuse to get Korab a few extra bucks.

Hogan’s second most capable minister got a promotion from education to health., Krista Lynn Howell can do nothing, though. She is not the minister. Pat Parfrey is in charge of health care in the province and so we will see continued extravagant spending for no improvement in care anyone receives. Parfrey will single-handedly bankrupt the province if he is left to run wild as he has been. There is no one in the Cabinet with the big girl pants to do what needs to be done - put the leprechaun on his bike and send him off to retirement - and there is certainly no one with the guts to tell him the village would be idiots if they left him in place. We cannot afford his uncontrolled spending spree, particularly since he has not produced any meaningful improvement in health care.

And just to make sure spending is out of control throughout government, Hogan left Siobhan Coady in finance.

Gerry Byrne is headed back to his old department of immigration and stuff but now someone the word “jobs” in the department name to make it look like that’s important. To confirm that neither economic development or job creation will actually happen, there is also a minister of labour who is also in charge of “rural” economic development: Pam Parsons, inexplicably promoted out of one job she couldn’t handle and now into a much bigger one. Expect lots of executive shuffles around Parsons as public servants look to get away from her, since that is quite literally the only thing she did in the do-nothing portfolio she occupied before now.

Meanwhile, Steve Crocker got a lovely promotion from subsidies, give-aways, and junkets (tourism, recreation, and culture) into Andrew Parsons’ old job. Supposedly an economic development department - he can compete with Pam Parsons for what is “rural” - Crocker will basically carry on with the subsidies, give-aways, and junkets. He will be matched by Fred Hutton who apparently shat the bed and is now getting his turn and Crocker’s frequent flyer account at what is nor called tourism, culture *arts*, and recreation in case anyone didn’t know culture and arts went together.

But here’s the thing. You have two people in two different departments doing jobs and labour, which are the same thing basically, and you have two people doing economic development. And arguably since jobs and economic development all go together as the same thing, you have three people - none of whom plays well with others - all in charge of the same thing through three different departments. This is just nuts.

Sarah Stoodley - a competent manager - got shuffled out of government services and into immigration in one of Furey’s swishes and is now going back to the same department but with the words Government Modernization in place of Digital Government. No reason why and the name change will not suddenly produce what the whole government didn’t manage in four years of Transformational Fureyism, which means they couldn’t change anything, including people’s poor opinion of the Liberals.

If all that wasn’t sad, the government’s chief legal advisor for the next few weeks will be a retired surgeon. John Haggie - the only sitting member of the House without an active biography on the House of Assembly website - is looking after both justice and the attorney general position. Haggie may not run again, which leads us to wonder - as reporters did on Friday - which of the Liberals sitting in Cabinet now will not be there after the next election. Could be all of them, truthfully, but the real question is which of them will simply not be running again. I’d say a few of them are getting a few months of glory for the resume before packing it in.

Hogan put a brave face on the coming election, saying he ran into lots of people interested in running for the Liberals. Were that true, there’d have been an election last year rather than the embarrassment of two by-election losses - one of which involved the Liberals nominating a federal Conservative a to hold their banner - and Jamie Korab who, in his announcement did not make it clear which party he was running for. He was also the only candidate the Liberals could find for *that* seat. As it is, no one expects Hogan to go to an election before the fall unless the Dippers and Pea Seas want to defeat the budget.

Bottom Line: This Cabinet is only supposed to survive until the fall. It’s a mess ands reflects the complete lack of any ideas anywhere inside the Liberal government.

They will stumble through the budget - if they can get it passed - and then go all-out to get a Churchill Falls deal done so work can start and they can buy votes with the give-away come the fall.

There’s nothing else for them.

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