An eagle-eyed reader noticed on Monday that the only change to the government website since Fred Hutton became a cabinet minister is the addition of a small picture of Fred with the label “Minister of Housing” next to it on the space that lists all cabinet ministers and their mandate letters.
Fred has no mandate letter. And the one for the minister responsible for the housing corporation - Paul Pike - is actually the one given to John Abbott almost three years ago. No biggie there since the department has the same goals.
But it also means the department hasn’t lost any bits to a new ministry.
Sure enough, a check of the cabinet orders shows no sign of any order-in-council, which would be the legal way that the Premier would create a new department and give the minister specific responsibilities. The very simple thing is laid out in the Executive Council Act.
Hmmm, then.
How odd.
It could be that the Cabinet Secretariat folks are just slow posting the latest OCs. The most recent ones online are from mid-February.
Yes, possibly. Just not up to date.
But that doesn’t explain the absence of a departmental website. Easy to do and since it would be legal, they could do that and catch up on posting the OC thing later on.
Possible but not likely that they have not just gotten around to it yet.
More likely answer is that no one knows whether or not Fred will get a department of any kind with any actual housing responsibilities. Instead, Fred’ll be - as the Premier said at Government House after the swearing-in - the guy they send out to answer media questions about housing.
Which means he will take all the crap, criticism, and the like, when things go off the rails. Kinda like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 3 when - as part of the scam - the pissed-off Gruber brother sends Willis’ character into Harlem with a racist slogan on a sandwich board around Willis’ neck.
That would make Fred less a cabinet minister in charge of a ghetto ministry and more like cabinet’s new Minister of Javelin Catching.
Not a pretty sight.
Now Fred may get more to do.
Eventually.
When someone figures it out.
After all, there is a Housing Corporation Act - responsible to the Children, Seniors, and Social Development minister - and another thing called the Housing Act. Both relate to social housing but the Housing Act dates from the 1950s and allows the government to approve a housing co-operative, among a few other things related to that. Frankly, we haven’t seen housing co-ops in a while plus the ‘ousing corporation actually gets to do lots of things covered by the Housing Act.
But the Housing Act is still there.
And it belongs to… municipal affairs minister John Haggie.
Two related and interlocking bits of legislation, written with the assumption both would belong to the same ministry, and yet now they belong to two different ministers.
Not very sensible, surely, and not any more sensible it would seem to put yet another cabinet minister into the pile of six or seven charged with some aspect of housing and yet here we are.
Maybe someone will eventually give Fred responsibility for both housing laws. Until then, he can just catch javelins.
Still, there's something off about launching something and not knowing simple answers like what your new Minister will actually, you know, do.
It’s all a bit like the health minister, who explained on Monday that all those psychiatric nurses he promised last year won’t be coming before the fall - at the earliest - because someone figured out that the local nursing regulatory college needed some tweaks to its legal powers to let it regulate this new sub-set of nursing.
Seriously?
No one checked on this most obvious of obvious details before now and factored it in to even the quick-fix idea that someone had about psych nurses.
No one realised they had to be … you know… regulated … like other nurses and other professions?
Bit like announcing you would take the oil and gas assets from NALCOR and create a new oil and gas corporation, only to find out you couldn’t take the oil and gas assets from NALCOR because they were part of the financing for Muskrat Falls, so you left them where they were, created a new oil and gas corporation anyway (now you had two corporations), and then went shopping to sell both of them off, assets and all.
Well, maybe sell. Maybe not.
Because you are still thinking about it.
All of that has happened since 2016, by the way.
And it hasn’t stopped yet because they are still thinking it through.
For those whose Liberal sensibilities are offended, understand this is not just a Liberal thing. It started in 2003 and has just carried on. We’ve had laws passed by the House of Assembly, not put into force, then repealed and replaced word for word by *another* law and then the guv’mint crowd finally did something with it. That was under the Pea Seas. And in the case of the Sustainable Development Act, passed in 2007, and just sitting there with no action taken 17 years later.
This is another feature of the current political period we are in, by the way.
It’s a really bizarre one too because it’s like everyone in government has lost track of the laws that are supposed to set down how things get done so that you don’t become either a lawn dart (minister who descends from lofty heights in a jesusbig hurry and smashes his or her career to bits on impact) or a javelin catcher.
Neither does anyone any good, least of all the people inside or outside government actually wanting to get something, you know, done.