Choices
We can only avoid them for so long
Give Andrew Furey credit for one thing from last week.
Furey showed the world that he is so not a leader.
Canada is facing a threat to its very existence, the threat being Donald Trump. Furey said this over and over since Trump’s election and last week he got a lot of national attention calling Trump names.
You hear all the time about people who head into a burning building or towards gunfire when everyone around them is going the opposite way, away from danger. Those folks facing the threat are leaders. They know what needs to be done and they do it not because they like but because they know someone has to and well, there they are.
When the going got tough, Furey got out.
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That’s literally all you need to know about Furey. He’s gone. Good luck to him.
Furey’s real importance is not Furey but what he tells us about our time and about us.
February 20th, the week before Furey bailed, he and his colleagues in cabinet approved a new health policy that will let people between the ages of 40 and 49 demand a screen for breast cancer even though they do not meet *any* risk factors found by evidence to make them a candidate for screening. None. It is on demand, based on nothing but desire. The policy is so new and so poorly thought through, the massive bureaucracy that runs health services these days still offers the old screening criteria to patients even though they literally no longer matter.
The official news release from the government’s uncommunication division gives lots of little tidbits about how wonderful all this is but it deliberately left out all important things. To confirm they are posers in the world of progressive thinking and actual, you know, information, CBC’s story was ignorant and sexist, headlining this as a story about women. Men have breasts and men get breast cancer and they can self-refer as well. Oh yeah and folks should remember the cancer screening scandal at the health authority that killed hundreds of people, simply because CBC editors obviously don’t.
What everyone is downplaying - except the union that represents the people doing breast cancer screening - is that the existing system doesn’t have enough equipment and people to deal with the existing demand. Since the shiny new equipment is years away and the shinier people to make it all run are in short supply now and likely will never exist, making this a drive-through service makes no sense. None.
It makes no sense but it fits exactly with what’s been happening in health care since 2003 and only more obviously irresponsible and absurd since 2020. More buildings, more equipment, more services promised, all needing more people when we cannot hire enough people or afford what we are spending. Any public whim indulged. Breast cancer screening on demand. A PET scanner in Corner Brook. Urgi-centres. FCTs or whatever they are calling them today. Cost no matter. The lack of people to work in the buildings, no matter either.
As proof cost is no issue, the Auditor General announced last week that her office will be looking at the three-year old bonus scheme for doctors and nurses the Furey Crowd started. The cost of individual bonuses more than doubled in one year going from just over $41,000 to more than $95,000. The use of expensive contract nurses hasn’t slackened either. New beds in Corner Brook will need more contract nurses despite the government’s promises to cut down on them. Don't forget the housing scam that turned up last year and which the current Attorney General slash health minister slash maybe Furey replacement has been helping cover up with health authority officials.
The AG is no real help, either. She wants to do away with cash-based accounting - the one thing that lets ordinary folks see the government’s true financial mess - just because it slows up her chance to give the government a clean audit. She delivered a “clean audit” last week despite the obvious things that are not clean in any sense of the word with the government’s books.
Like other statutory officers, the AG is compromised by both her past work within the very government she audits as well as the excessive control the provincial cabinet - the people she is supposed to watch - have over her appointment and budget. One of the AG’s colleagues, the Child and Youth Advocate has been quietly replaced (AllNL reported it last week) in the midst of another controversial investigation ordered by the now-lame-duck Premier last year into sex-trafficking of young people in care of the provincial government. You get the picture.
In Germany last week, the Alternative For Germany - Alternative fur Deutschland or AfD - won about 20% of the seats in the federal German parliament, right behind the Christian Democrats or CDU, a party that has traditionally control of the federal Parliament since the rebirth of post-war Germany. Western and other commentators classify it as “far right” and “populist” although its original leaders had roots in the CDU.
There have been lots of superficial, simplistic comments about the result including that brilliant nonsense the AfD’s strong support in the former East Germany is because all those people are used to dictatorship. What’s particularly interesting as a rebuttal to that argument is Katja Hoyer’s observation recently that almost 40% of working class Germans generally, including across the former West Germany, support the AfD.
What Hoyer lays out in the link above is a detailed and convincing assessment backed by evidence that suggests the political climate in Germany mirrors the disconnection of working class Americans, for example, from the Democratic Party or equally in Canada the massive shift away from the Liberals and New Democrats by their former supporters. What people in recent Canadian polls have been missing is that not only has support for the CPC not collapsed entirely but the move to Mark Carney’s version of the Liberals comes with an apparent shift away from many of the policies that have been turning people off about Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Some alienated Liberals feel it is safe to go home again. Nothing is settled yet.
The same disconnect between voters and parties exists in spades in Newfoundland and Labrador. It just shows up differently from what happens in democracies, among the list of which Newfoundland and Labrador no longer really counts. In democracies, voters have choices and parties try sincerely to connect with voters because if they don’t someone else will. No such fear in Newfoundland and Labrador where all three parties represent the same narrow set of class interests.
Here, you see the disconnection between voters’ interests and those of the people controlling the parties through things like lower turnout, historically trending downward for a long while but especially since 2007. You can see it in the intense over-reaction to the fisheries protest a year ago not just by the Liberals as well as the fact it happened at all and neither of the three parties saw it coming.
The disconnect’s also there in the Churchill Falls deal, which the Liberals think will mimic the Pea Sea success in 2011. Liberals these days won’t actually say that but it is exactly what they are doing, whether they know it or not. The difference is that in 2011, the Pea Seas were able to connect a project that was going to happen anyway simply because Danny and his pals wanted it with the second biggest concern people had at the time, which was the economy.
Andrew Furey’s continuation of the 1969 CF contract doesn’t come with those real jobs but the Liberals will say it does anyway, just like they copy all the other elements of the post-2003 political world and the distorted idea of what Newfoundland and Labrador is that goes with it. That includes the popular myth that half the population lives on the northeast Avalon. When your party gets 70% of its cash within an hour’s drive of the Confederation Building, it’s easy to think that way.
And really that post-2003 world has worked because the townie elites use public money to buy off the opposition while effectively limiting the ability of any point of view but theirs to find a public voice. Watch what happens in the Liberal leadership. Watch what happens in the House this week as Team Used-to-be-Furey gets the House to rubber stamp a massive cash dump to get government into its new financial year. The Pea Seas and Dippers will make noise but do as they are told. They are basenji. The interim supply bill as it is called will be a massive number, as much as whole budgets not that long ago. There’ll be a lot more spending of all sorts coming between now and voting day.
What there won’t be is discussion of issues that matter, including the gigantic public debt and continued massive deficits, all of which are really Andrew Furey’s legacy as Premier. Frankly, the most plausible explanation for Furey’s sudden departure is that he knows the reckoning is coming, one day very soon, and like Danny Williams in 2010, Andy doesn’t want to be here when the bill for his bungling comes due.
Remember, we’ve had three financial crises that could have wrecked the government in the last decade. It's not clear we could survive another economic storm. The Ottawa cash cow Andrew and the Liberals used to get elected is not so full of cash as it was nor is there any other pile of cash left to bail us out. That’s why the Furey crowd are so desperate for this Quebec deal. It comes with a few extra bucks up front, far less than they claim but a tiny bit extra.
In 1927, desperate Newfie politicians would have sold Labrador to Quebec for $100 million, the total national debt, rather than actually take responsibility for changing things for the better. Quebec (and Canada) weren’t interested. Now another crowd of Newfies have sold Labrador Hydro to Quebec for - literally - not enough to pay off Muskrat Falls all to keep themselves where they are and avoid changes that might knock them out of their privileged spots across society. And the Quebec firesale is on top of the other resource firesales in the offshore to Ottawa for cash.
In democracies, politics can deliver needed change without violence and bloodshed. It’s happening in Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada federally, and in the United States. But in Newfoundland and Labrador, where we’ve basically shut down politics, there’s no way of knowing how the people who are disconnected from politics will react when things change and they will pay. A new political party or a real leader might show up then it in the meantime. International events might trigger another financial crisis, one that cannot be hidden or ignored. What happens after that is genuinely unknown. Unpredictable.
That doesn’t have to happen. We can change. We just have to make a choice instead of making the same choice we’ve been making for the past 20 years not to change.
It’s up to you what happens next.
Choose wisely.
Just choose.
Since NL has been through this before, I raised the point that we can actually deal with this ourselves, unlike the last time when the solution to the problem was thrust upon us.
We don't have to follow the same pattern although the cynic in me knows full well that history repeats first as tragedy, then as farce.
This province's needed changes will only occur when they are imposed by creditors.
Furey may have resigned because he saw what was coming down the pipe, and didn't have the stomach to stick around for the fallout. If thats the case, maybe the day of reckoning is coming in the next 2 or 3 years. Maybe it will be a day when payroll doesn't get met. On that day, reality may set in.