Do better

... if you can, Andrew Furey.

You have two ideas to pick from:

Elevate the discourse.

or

Do better.

Elevate the discourse is what Premier Andrew Furey thinks the Pea Seas need to do.

No election coming for a while Furey told his annual fluff-fest at the Sin Jawns Bored of Trade. And I’ll have no trouble defending my record but nameless people need to elevate the discourse. Furey then rattled off a bunch of things on social media Furey found troublesome, all superficial, all to do with the Pea Seas and for the childish reason amateur political operatives do these things, he or someone in his tiny inner circle stopped Furey from actually naming the people doing the things that kept him up so many nights he just had to make it the most important issue he talked about publicly, as Premier.

Like the line the unnamed fiends put out there about Furey being more interested in giving money to an English soccer team than burying unfortunate locals. Furey’s upset is about the quotation marks in the original version of the Pea Sea criticism. Made it seem like a quotation. Minor editorial error. I never said it, Furey explained at the time and again on Tuesday with every ounce of pompous indignation he could borrow.

Well okay.

Didn’t say it.

But Furey’s government did it. Gave cash to a soccer team on the most laughable excuses and couldn’t be arsed about bodies stacking up at the province’s major hospital. And if Tony Wakeham wants to keep going, he can do so knowing that Andrew Furey has no defence.

Furey did not deal with the action, you see. The substance of the criticism. He did not even get upset with the truthfulness of the statement made by the group he childishly would not name. He got upset about punctuation. Not content with being a Premier *and* a doctor, Furey thought that being a caricatured primary school grammar teacher of the old school was a good look. Tired of Cosplaying Justin or a Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Andrew cosplayed Dana Carvey as the Church Lady.

Let us be clear. Tone policing is a sign Furey has nothing of his own to offer either of substance generally or in defence of that issue about the dead bodies and the cash to Barrow. It’s in England in case you missed it. Furey cannot deal with the facts of the criticism in the Pea Sea attack and so he attacks the people saying it. It is cheap. It is cowardly. And it is a confession he cannot deal with the issues on substance.

That would make Furey’s scolding all the more hypocritical as well, which seemed to be his real theme for the Bored. Along the way, Furey talked about the Donald Trump playbook, “capitalizing on mistruths”, Dr. Seuss rhymes and the like, all of which he believes “the people of the province can see for what it is.” Well, if that were true, he need not worry but worried he was and so it became a media story.

“I don’t think that’s what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians expect of their leaders.” Well, if it isn;t they’ll know what to do, surely.

The Pea Seas should “do better”, he said, without actually naming them.

Andrew Furey clearly could not.

And that is what everyone really saw.

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In his speech to the Bored of Trade, Furey had the choice between doing better in the speech, of elevating the discourse as he so pompously put it. Instead, he whined. He scolded. He condescended.

People are not stupid. Votes see clearly what people are made of. This speech is why Andrew Furey and the Liberals have the support right now of about 21% of the people eligible to vote in the next provincial election. The August poll by Halifax’s Narrative research company found that when asked which party they’d support, 21% picked Liberals. Ten percent more - 31% - picked no party, refused to say, or said they would not vote. We don’t know what the 31% would do since Narrative never asks them.

And barely more than one in three prefer Furey as Premier to any of the alternatives. Andrew Furey. Super Doctor. Saviour of Haiti. Up against a tired retired teacher who doesn’t want to lead the Dippers at all and a former bureaucrat who is sincere but uninspiring. Up against that, two out of three in the province or there-abouts don’t think Andrew is the right choice for Premier.

This is not new. The Liberals have struggled for the last decade with two incredibly uninspiring front men to do much better than that in any poll, consistently against parties that were substantially finished, and so it is that in 2019 and again in the Furey February Fiasco of 2021, they got roughly the same number of seats in the House as they had in poll percentages. A truly dismal performance by any measure.

Anyone who thinks our system of voting does not accurately reflect the public mood, anyone who thinks that some other form of voting would do better need only look at Newfoundland and Labrador to understand our system of elections delivers a legislature that reflects exactly how people feel about the political parties who offer candidates.

Furey’s words were childish and pathetic at worst or haughty and arrogant at best, even in the AllNL version. The VOCM account did not make it better, nor did the versions from people in the room. Any political operative worth their salt could see in Furey’s speech that he was on the defensive and confirming that whatever the Pea Seas were doing was rattling him to point he wanted to talk about them and not whatever he was doing. Furey is not setting the public agenda and that is why he cannot dare not go to the polls any time soon.

Furey had a friendly audience at the Bored of Trade. It is bought and paid for a dozen times with public money of one kind or another. When the Bored is not letting Furey fluff the members in return for his cash, they give him more brain farts like the Navigators. No small irony that Furey dismissed any talk of red tape problems in his administration. If there is a problem, then call me, Furey told the crowd perhaps so he can cut deals with them like he did with travel nurses. This too is Furey’s ego in place of substance. His job is to make the place run without divine intervention from the 8th Floor yet. This is yet another way Andrew Furey is so unlike Tony Blair.

If you needed to understand why so many in Newfoundland and Labrador are not excited by the most carefully manufactured Image ever to sit in the Premier’s chair, this event was it, live. Rather than actually tell people about what he is doing right now and will do tomorrow, Furey told the throng of salivating sycophants that he would talk about what he’d done in the past sometime later but for now he just wanted to whine about how some people he would not name were being mean to him.

Andrew Furey wants to elevate the discourse because he likes to talk. Talking is easier than doing. Like Kathy Dunderdale and Dwight Ball, Andrew Furey likes to use big words, jargon, and words with lots of syllables because he thinks it makes him seem smarter, more impressive than he fears he really is. And that is only important because running the province is all about him. Always. Andrew Furey likes phrases like “elevate the discourse” because it sounds important. Intimidating. Lots of syllables. He does not want to fix red tape or anything else so he can personally get credit for dealing with it.

On the Gunning Fog Index - a measure of how easy sentences are to understand - the phrase “elevate the discourse” scores 14.53. That puts it firmly at the second year university level, meaning that it is not that easy for most people to understand. These are not words anyone uses very often. “Do better” scores zero point eight. Less than one and the good score on the Fog Index is typically a sixth grade level.

Politically, do better is the better choice between the two in our opening challenge. It is simple. It tells you to act, which is always better than to talk. Actions speak louder than words. And the second of the two words in that simple phrase tells you how you need to do. Do it better. Better than yesterday. Better than before. Better than any comparison. Just do something and do it better.

Do better is accountable to others. “Elevate the discourse” is not. They can understand what you say and they will know if you’ve done it. One of the hardest things for people to grasp is that communication is about the audience, not the speaker. People get all sorts of messages in what you say and how you say it. Speak at a level they can grasp easily and they appreciate it. They feel like there is some connection with you, even if there really isn’t. In politics, you want to connect with people so they will vote for you.

That’s why when you use words like “elevate the discourse” even people with lots of education feel the pretense. The artifice. The put-on. And all the smart people with a lot less education feel left out. Disconnected. Like they are being talked down to. There’s a reason why the Liberals are chronically low in the polls. People hear the put-on words and feel the put-down, like Hillary calling Trump supporters the Deplorables or Justin going after those who disagree with them. People hear “elevate the discourse” and they feel all the negatives about themselves coming from Furey, intentional or not.

That Furey and his Brain Trust thought this was a good idea tells you all you ned to know about why the Liberals are in the mess they are and why they are not in any hurry to let voters have a say in Furey’s future. They are so like Justin Trudeau’s crowd in Ottawa it is painful. Not content just to let Andrew cosplay Justin, they all want to cosplay his staff but like all cosplay it is all cardboard and duct tape and spray paint. One good rain and it crumbles. Andrew Furey wagging his finger at Tony Wakeham and the Pea Seas looks a lot like the federal Liberals so desperate to find anything to lob at Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives that they dredged up abortion the other day and keep pushing an issue literally no one is worried about.

That’s a reminder that even when Furey tried to pick a fight with his federal friends, it was all pretend, all for show, and Andrew Furey could not even keep that up for very long. One cheque and he folded. It was just a put-on. Andrew Furey doesn’t have anything else. That is why Furey won’t go to the polls any faster than Justin will although he must go before Justin or share Justin’s fate. Andrew Furey has wanted to go to the polls for over a year now, maybe longer. But he doesn’t have the stuff needed to win.

Stuff like the deal with Legault that Furey wanted desperately. Not going to happen. Legault cannot give Furey the deal he needs to sell to the Newfs because the Parti Quebecois would étripe Legault at the voting booths. On the other side of the border, Furey cannot take the deal he already accepted from Legault because it looks so far away from redressing the supposed injustice from 1969, that even Tony Wakeham could gut Furey politically with a spoon for a supposed give-away. Plus Furey has so little political cred with voters he could not sell them the Second Coming of Jesus even if Jesus were standing next to Furey showing the wounds and randomly doing miracles like a cheap conjurer as Furey tried to raise the deadweight of his party’s fortunes. That Furey, the real Furey, the actual guy who gutted the Atlantic Accord without a care could not sell any Churchill deal, least of all the sell-out Legault offered and he bought.

As confirmation there is no hope of a Churchill and Gull deal, notice that Furey talked to reporters after the Bored speech about Quebec. We know there is no hope of a deal because Andrew Furey, channeling Donald Trump, told them he had the concepts of a plan - the talks with the Yanks are in the “conceptual stages”, according to AllNL’s account - to sell electricity to the United States through underwater cables. every premier since Joey has said this. Furey’s mentor Danny-boy Williams and his crew talked about underwater cables when no one was buying his concept of a plan to go it alone on the Lower Churchill with partners.

Andrew Furey is not talking to the Lieutenant Governor about an election because he has nothing to take to the polls. Not Quebec. Not hydrogen. Even Risley, the only carpetbagger likely to put up a windmill anywhere in Newfoundland this century, has no contract with the Germans that he needs to get the cash for some version of his less and less grand scheme. The only contract he is likely to get is one from his friend Furey to feed Holyrood 2 so that, in the fashion of Muskrat, the Bluenoser will get the benefit and we will get the bill. That might be Furey’s sort of excuse if he continues to channel proto-Trump in rhetoric and tone.

Nor does Furey have stuff to go to the polls with that ordinary people, the ones he talks down to, are worried about. Narrative tells us that Cost of Living and Health Care are the top issues in the province, identified by 26% and 18% of respondents respectively in a recent poll. Housing, the economy, and inflation all came in at less than 10% each.

That doesn’t give the Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador any hope since they’ve done shag-all of any consequence about the cost of living and health care remains a perennial problem. The solution is a growing economy but since Furey has no interest in making government work properly, we have stagnant development while Nova Scotia thrives. Our economy was expected to grow almost six percent in real terms but the latest budget forecast shows growth will be half that. Nova Scotia produced an eight percent growth in private sector jobs in the past five years, besting even Alberta. Newfoundland and Labrador under Andrew Furey’s crowd managed only 1.2%.

In health care, the most recent shag-up saw the newly opened Western Memorial hospital short of capacity, with the real problem being a lack of beds at the new chronic care facility literally right next door and built as part of the same health care campus development. Known issues over the whole life of this project and the bureaucrats buggered it up. And in Sin Jawns, the Liberals were so desperate for any health-related good news, they announced the new mental health centre is substantially finished. Not the grand opening. Just that it’s almost nearly completely done with an actual opening coming *next* year.

Maybe open. If they can find doctors and nurses and janitors to work there. There are staffing issues - all well known and longstanding problems - so all the new teams for this or that clinic previously announced is way behind schedule. Andrew Furey talks about good news, not actual things done.

Then there have been the departures of key cabinet ministers and the perennial problems recruiting candidates. Hard to go to the polls without people to vote for. If an incumbent government cannot find good candidates - and the Liberals cannot find good candidates - then they are in deep trouble, which is where the Liberals have been since 2016. Tom Osborne - the beigyist man in a beigy government - left quickly this year. The crowd in Furey’s office could not manage it successfully no matter how much lead-time Osborne gave them. Andrew Parsons - another fixer of problems - will not seek re-election. Furey had to bribe long-suffering backbencher Scott Reid to stay by appointing him to Cabinet. John Haggie, literally the elder statesman of the lot, is headed for a well-deserved, well-earned retirement. Furey is struggling to find candidates just as they’ve struggled since 2015. LaPoile is a safe Liberal seat - the Red Ferryland so to speak - and departing Parsons has lined up his Executive Assistant to hold the seat in his place. But otherwise, the Liberals cannot fill the holes in their lineup, at least not easily and not with people to match the ones leaving.

Generally, a bunch who came into office in 2015 sounding and feeling like a crowd at the end of their long time in office are now looking and sounding like a crowd that’s been in office for a decade past their sell-before date. Reality is they have only been there for nine years this December. It just *seems* like a friguva lot longer.

Those nine years were just enough to rack up more new debt for the province than Muskrat Falls, all-in and on Muskrat Falls they have not figured out how to pay for it, at least not beyond 2030. New debt is roughly $18 billion since 2015 thanks to annual cash deficits averaging $2.0 billion each year.

Forget the nonsense of the latest financial update released Wednesday. The actual is much worse than the rosy numbers offered. One way to tell is that “net debt” will be $1.0 billion more than forecast just six months ago. Like the mysterious extra $700 million shortfall last year that no one has explained, something will drive our liabilities up higher than our assets such that the debt we see (not the whole pile) grew that much faster in less than six months. It is not all down to a minor drop in oil production.

Regardless of what is going on with oil so far this year, look ahead to 2025, which contains the back end of the current fiscal year and most of the next. Forecasts are for oil to drop $10 to $15 a barrel between now and the fall of 2025. That kind of drop this year would reduce revenues another few hundred million more than even acknowledged in the current year’s forecast. That would mean a drop next year of close to half a billion dollars - one third less - from the forecast for 2024.

And this year, the deficit was already $2.0 billion with the rosier projections. It would now be closer to $2.2 to 2.5 billion, all in. We are half way through the total borrowing need this year of $2.8 billion, which includes almost a billion dollars to refinance old debt. Tack another couple of hundred million on for the mid-year changes and we are talking record borrowing and near record deficits. Now drop oil for next year and imagine tacking on even more new debt next year going into an election than they added this year.

Andrew Furey can worry about a couple of quotation marks that make him squirm. The rest of us are watching the red ink he is piling up alongside the dead bodies and other signs of no ideas. His actions speak much louder than anything in quotation marks. But if Furey feels so cock-sure of himself, then go see Joan-Marie and ask her to dissolve the House and set a polling date. He can whine all he wants about the tone of criticism but it is what Furey has done that will define him on the next election date. Then he might really have something to whine about.

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Next week:

• Monday: The Provincial Financial Update

• Wednesday: An Election Ballot Question… that no one will touch