Choices
and consequences
Every Shoppers within a five kilometre circle around Confederation Building was out of band-aids this week as the crowd on the Eighth Floor found out how hard it is to play political volleyball with a rock made up of their hard decisions.
Hard decisions can leave hard edges when they are made badly and those hard edges scrape and jab and slice fingers mercilessly when you fumble as the Pea Seas did many times this week. Toes too are easy prey when things get dropped and there was lots of fumbling, dropping, and slicing this week over what should have been a very big and very easy political win.
The independent review committee gave Premier Tony Wakeham’s mob a tidy indictment of Andrew Furey’s deal with Quebec, in plain English, so that people who read it could understand. Wakeham gave the review its importance and put it higher on a pedestal with the promises of openness and transparency. Then he made people wait two more weeks beyond its delivery to see it.
The set up was right there. Whoever decides on political stuff for Tony should have made the release of the report the event of the week. Show it off. Have the committee who wrote it go through in detail and leave John Hogan and Fred Hutton and Jim Dinn and Seamus’ and George’s water boy mute with embarrassment.
There are plenty of examples in the report to shut them all up. The most damning bit was about political interference by former Premier Andrew Furey against the advice of hired experts and the crowd at NALCOR. It must have been bad if even they caved in and praised the deal highly in the nonsense session of the House a year ago January. That con job one suckered the New Dimwit Party and they remain suckers so an actual strategy would have taken out all the fools for the price of one smack. Instead, we got Elvis and Lloyd pretending to be Billy Smallwood and John Carter and everyone in the House, Speaker included, but not Ed Joyce, making all of us regret our votes for any of them.
Wakeham’s only announcement this week should have been for a newser sometime soon. Then he could lay out the government’s response to the report. Let the three committee writers walk off the stage and be long gone before Tony dropped the next news, the bigger news, which is the names of the negotiators, their mandate, and a clear message to everyone about what comes next.
We didn’t get that partly because the committee balked, as noted here on Wednesday but mostly because there is no detectable political management from the Eighth Floor on down. Even if the IRC bailed at the last minute that was a hiccup if there had been a strategy worthy of the name.
As for the IRC, if you are gonna shut up, then shut up.
It’s a simple enough rule.
That’s why it made no sense for the IRC to release on Wednesday a vague statement about why they didn't want to speak to anyone this week although we already knew why from the Premier. That statement only made matters worse. A copy of the it arrived in your humble e-scribbler’s mailbox around fivish. “To all media who asked” it started, which was a double mistake off the bat.
First, this, he said, gesturing with both hands at the vastness of his Substack empire, is not “media.” Make the airquotes around that word “media” to really jazz it up for effect.
Second, I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to ask since I can read plain English even the stuff between the lines. The political problems from The Big Announcement were there for all to see, if they wanted. No one did, apparently.
Aside from not shutting up, which includes not explaining why you are shut up, the statement created other problems for the Premier, especially in the middle bit. It prompts inconvenient questions.
“The Committee initially agreed to be present at the report release,” the statement said. “However, the committee subsequently received legal advice that it would be inappropriate for the Committee, commissioned under the Public Inquiries Act, to publicly present or discuss the report because any statements by the Committee could be seen as modifying the official report or could inadvertently disclose commercially sensitive information.”
Whose lawyer? The IRC’s? NALCOR’s? HQ’s? Tony’s? And why did they only discover this after the Premier spoke? And if that really was the advice, then why was it bad advice that they listened to without speaking to anyone in the Premier’s Office or someone else who knew what they were doing?
If this emailed statement is true - I believe it is a string of lies and half-lies - but if this statement is true, then the advice is excrement. There is no other word for it. The idea that the three people who know the subject inside out could modify the original report to any degree with a few spoken words such as to make the written version useless is nakedly ridiculous. That they would not know what is commercially sensitive is also laughably unreal.
There have been countless cases in which commissioners spoke extensively in Canada after delivering major reports. They planned for it. The politicians planned for it. And by the looks of things, the IRC planned to do it as well and something besides this bullshit legal advice caused the change. So either the folks involved in this choice are idiots or they think others are idiots, or both, and regardless of that someone thought a really obvious lie that contradicts what the Premier’s already said publicly was the right answer to a question that had already been answered well enough.
Politically, the opposition had a holiday Wednesday hammering away at the Premier who could only walk barefoot on the shards of the hard but bad choices made by his own crew and by the IRC. All the while, the crowd in Quebec just munched popcorn as the latest cast of the Keystone Kops in the Konfed tried to unshag themselves from their own shaggery.
And yeah, as we pointed out here on Wednesday, the IRC bailed because what Tony and da b’ys are doing about the negotiation and what the IRC recommended are not the same. That makes the line in the Premier’s speaking notes about following the IRC’s recommendation yet another obvious lie.
Now on top of everything else going wrong for him, Tony Wakeham has a credibility gap.
There is a massive gap between what he says and what he does.
People get killed when they fall into a gap as wide as this one.
Tony needs to fill in that gap quickly, if need be with a few bodies of people around him who created this mess for him.
Better them than him and the whole guv’mint crowd.
“You can go back to 1949… we brought the richest fishing grounds in the world with us. We brought forestry. We brought mining. We brought hydro-electricity and we brought oil and yet here we are 76 years later with a huge deficit. I think it’s time for us not to be repeating the mistakes of the past.”
That was Tony Wakeham at Tuesday’s newser. He was talking about the importance of getting a good deal from these talks with Quebec.
Let’s stop the bullshit about our current financial mess coming from bad deals of the past.
Not true.
Not ever true.
Tony’s deficit this year is north of $3 billion because he and his Cabinet made a choice to do what governments here have done for the last 20 years, which is to spend wildly more than the government’s income based mostly on unreliable oil revenues and then to fill in the gaps between money in and money out with more and more debt.
Tony made a choice, just like someone made a choice to give Danny Williams air time on CBC to talk about his emotional state. No one gives a frig about Danny’s sleepless nights but he fills time just like Ron Penney filled time or Lori Turnbull fills time when local media don’t know what else to do, which is too often. Ron wants a referendum and reporters on Tuesday asked the same question - will there be a referendum? - so many times that it was painful when for the umpteenth time Premier Tony said there’s gotta be a friggin’ deal to have a friggin’ referendum about first and we don’t have a friggin’ deal. No one wanted to talk about the deal or the negotiations for a deal, which was the Tuesday news. Everybody wants to talk about anything else because it is easier even though it is not important at all for any reason.
What no one cares about - not Ron or Danny or Danny’s ex- water boy nor anyone else in the media sans airquotes - is that Tony Wakeham is negotiating inside all the assumptions of the original deal, which the IRC had trashed, which means Tony cannot fix the mistakes of it. He is trapped inside it and all its flaws. That is the story. Tony just wants a few tweaks. Literally. Three adjustments. He might get one, if he is lucky. Tony can say he wants to do what’s in the province’s best interests but he cannot or will not say what he thinks those interests are. That is the news.
Tony and da b’ys have a negotiating team but no strategy and no economic plan, as he said this week. Missing those crucial bits - as the IRC pointed out - yet Tony is drooling to get to the table and talk. Problem is that telling people you don’t know what you want and have no strategy and doing it publicly, very badly is a strategy. It is just a very bad strategy because it will only shag you up and help the other side. Telling people there is no plan and no real goal sent a message to the crowd in Montreal that they just have to wait a bit longer and let the Newfies talk themselves into accepting less than they currently have as surely as the Furey crowd did.
These are the choices of the past 20 years repeated. Bad choices. Mistakes as Tony called ‘em. We stopped making mistakes a while before that. That’s the thing people want you to forget. The oil deals signed before 2003 and the Voisey’s Bay agreement learned all the lessons from 1969 and stopped repeating them. All the cash Danny squandered came from deals signed before he was in the Premier’s Office staring at himself in the mirror. The Hebron deal made all of its cash from the pre-2003 royalty regime. Danny give away cash to the oil companies for nothing and wasted years fighting over nothing. The big money came from the big work done before 2003 by people determined not just to avoid past mistakes but do things right.
Then we elected a new crowd who all believed they were smarter and they just started making mistakes again. Big ones. We keep making ‘em. When Danny was fighting with Ottawa over more federal handouts, he said something about it being our last, great chance. That was bullshit. Then there was another great last chance with the oil companies and then another and another and another.
And now we have another Last Great Chance at Salvation, which is really just another way of saying that yet another gaggle of politicians are going to keep making bad choices.
Hard decisions have hard edges.
Bad choices have bad consequences.
We need to get politicians who are better at choices.
The most significant development this week was arguably Premier Wakeham not insisting that he will hold a referendum. This is not shocking in that referendums are typically for constitutional matters or other major changes to democratic institutions - I cannot think of any other referendums about commercial agreements between crown corporations. Nevertheless, the shift is important because it indicates he is serious about wanting a deal and he feels he is in the driver’s seat and does not want to relinquish that position.
Winston is correct in my opinion. A plan followed by a strategy are needed.
There is a major interest of transparency with respect to corporate activities when the public interest is involved, especially when the public may be asked to render a decision. When do commercial interests usually afforded to private companies in a competitive market environment apply to public utilities which often operate under a monopolistic non-competitive environment? Help me out here.