The Squid Game, Newfie edition
Andy, Gemma, Dwight, Yvonne, and Newt
This has nothing to do with the Netflix series from South Korea that people talk about more often than former provincial Liberal leader Yvonne Jones used to talk about Honey Boo Boo from an unreal reality show on television years ago.
This is about the answer I now give most often to people who ask when the next provincial election will be. It sums things up neatly.
Who knows the mind of a squid?
If you know squid, you know.
Few people in Newfoundland and Labrador have any trouble understanding exactly what that phrase means.
The rest of you will get it after this example of the squiddishness of Newfoundland and Labrador society these days.
Wednesday morning. CBC’s Sin Jawns morning show had a couple of local LGBTQ+ activists on to talk about the impact in Newfoundland and Labrador of Donald Trump’s Executive Order titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. There’s an excellent explainer about it via the Free Press.
The Morning Show guests had likely not read the order but they were worried, especially Gemma Hickey, the Team Furey Liberal Party political activist who wondered how the Order might affect their ability to travel back and forth across the American-Canadian border. It’s a legit question and a legit concern. What’s important here, though is that Gemma was not the activist who slammed Andrew Furey during the interview for heading off to Washington alongside Danielle Smith of Alberta to hang around the Canadian embassy with a bunch of Canadian business and union leaders who also did nothing useful for their organizations by going but who had a nice junket at someone else’s expense and got to feel important.
Hickey stayed silent on Furey, as did host Jen White who had teased up Andrew Furey’s visit to the same show in the following half hour to talk about his trip. Not like they didn’t know what was coming. Not like that little tidbit about how few people went to this junket made it into the online CBC story either. “[Furey] was one of many Canadian premiers, government officials and industry leaders who attended the inauguration.”
Many Canadian Premiers? Try two. Danielle Smith and your man Furey. That’s it. There were a couple of minor federal cabinet ministers, Quebec’s external affairs minister (serious provinces have one), a couple of Ontario ministers, and one backbencher from the Commons in Ottawa. Plus a gaggle of assorted hangers-on and minor Canadian oligarchs, a.k.a union bosses. C’est tout as they say in Quebec. Lots of actual news escapes the CBC crowd locally these days, a symptom of the decline of the Toronto-controlled branch plant, and these CBC NL offerings are typical.
Rejecting the fine old CBC tradition of interviews that feel like a cross-examination of the guilty accused in a rape and murder trial, when the time came, White didn’t ask Furey about anything that could be mistaken for actual news, either. White just stuck to the list of prepared questions, all of which merely gave Furey the chance to recite his well-rehearsed talking points. None of Furey’s scripted lines explained why he went to Washington when everyone else like him bailed, how he did anything useful in the bigger issue of Trump and the threat of tariffs, or - as you well know by now - told us what Donald Trump is really after, because these tariffs are 100% not the goal. They are just a threat.
This is important because even Furey’s buddy Justin Trudeau is now dismissing Trump threats as just part of the negotiations leading to the renewal of the North American free trade deal in 2026. All Furey talked about was the threat of tariffs and the need for all good Canucks and Newfies to rally around the flag. It’s a tired old line from the local oligarchs and autocrats facing an election of which Furey is merely the latest and least ept version. We have been stuck in the perpetual hell of pre-election mode ever since Furey took office in 2020 and there is no sign it will end soon.
Hence, who knows the mind of the squid? Furey’s only example of who he had met with in Washington - briefly in a chat over drinks at the embassy most likely - was Newt Gingrich, who is not to be dismissed lightly but who has not been at the centre of American power since 1999. Furey was in medical school at the time. Gingrich was Speaker of the House of Representatives, which put him third in line to replace the President, after the Vice-President (who is also the formal Speaker of the Senate) should anything bad happen to the other two.
Newt was big then. Not so much these days. And certainly not anyone with real pull among Trump’s second administration. Besides, Furey is the temporary leader of a small outpost of a place that most of these American types have never heard of, could not pronounce the name of, and couldn’t care less about even if you paid them. Furey would never get on the list to meet anyone that mattered and Furey tells his story about meeting Newt Gingrich in the way posers would: to sound important to people they regard as punters. The uninformed. The people who don’t matter. The way Newt looked at Furey, in other words. Think of it this way. How many people in Newfoundland and Labrador today know off the top of their head without looking it up who the American House Speaker is today let alone who it was 25 and more years ago. Furey's story was not to help people understand. It was to impress.
Gingrich’s opinion, as Furey relayed it, was that Trump was serious about tariffs. All fine and good and the stuff some far lesser consultant outside the beltway could have guessed. But that does not tell us what Trump really wants - it isn’t tariffs - which Furey certainly is not talking about either, if he even has a clue of what it might be. Furey wants the crisis not the resolution since the crisis gives him an excuse. An excuse to pose. An excuse to speak to reporters. An excuse to appear influential. An excuse to organize a group of people, call them Team Newfoundland and Labrador, and then look busy as if Jesus were coming back real soon.
It could also serve as a pretext for an election as Ontario Premier Doug Ford is doing, but here the ejection would put Furey’s squidish team - soft and slippery and prone to squirting clouds of foggish ink to confuse others - against the equally squidish Pea Seas. It could. Or it could not. Like Schrödinger’s Cat who is alive and dead at the same time, Squid Furey is going to the polls or not going all at the same time and what’s worse, neither those inside the box with the squid in it or outside trying to peer inside know for sure, one way or the other which it is. The Squid Hisself may not know his own mind.
Know who Newt Gingrich is. More importantly, know why he doesn’t matter.
Who knows the mind of a squid?
That could also be the answer to any of the other questions that pop up about the crowd currently running the place.
“The premier says a local IVF clinic, promised for more than 4 years, could be set up within the year. Do you think that will happen?” As we stagger towards another election - possibly another winter election - Andrew Furey is promising that help for couples with fertility problems he promised out of the blue in the last election as something he could do quickly and easily. It is still a top priority, sez Furey, but anywhere up to a year from absolutely definitely maybe possibly being done. VOCM’s online poll - that’s the bit in quotes at the start of this paragraph - asks whether people believe Furey’s promise *this* time. A polite way of asking whether or not people think Furey is lying. This is subtle wording but hugely important.
Furey promised other things last time out, during his fiasco election of 2021 and they haven’t appeared yet either. Election reform is probably the biggest and arguably also the easiest to deliver. That one has vanished entirely. A law to force a balanced budget, promised in 2020 and revived in 2021 and in 2022 is still nowhere to be seen. Even a draft is non existent. As you read this, the House is in the longest continuous session since Confederation, another sign of squidish cloudiness.
The last throne speech outlining government’s priorities for the next year was in the fall of 2022. The link is actually a loop bringing you back to the start page on the government website without giving you the speeches. Another symptom of squidism. You have to hunt for this most basic of documents in which the government tells people what it will do. A basic of accountability and the most unaccountable administration in decades if not a century hides it away. 05 October 2022, if you want to read it.
The world has changed so much in each of the years since and the government remains on the same agenda. Out of date. Out of touch. Chasing this whim or that fad or fancy. Unaccountable and indecisive, well unless the project is from John Risley or Francois Legault. Then it’s pull out all the stops. Bound up or flowing wildly. Political constipation alternating with policy diarrhea. Symptoms of the same disorder: political indecision. No leadership.
Andrew Furey told audiences in a few interviews the day after he got back from his junket to Washington to hobnob with Canadians that the province needs leadership to deal with Donald Trump. Furey's right but opens the question of whether he is the answer to his own question. Lots of people will wonder if he is. The Premier so wishy-washy that even Dwight Ball thinks he is indecisive plans to fight the next provincial election on the need for strong leadership in Newfoundland and Labrador to face the supposed threat posed by Donald Trump.
Take a moment and let that sink in.
The OM, the Original Muskrateer, Danny Williams reappeared a few weeks ago to tell us all he thought Furey’s 1969 deal was a mistake. A bad deal. More Muskrateers turned up last week, but much more quietly, to tell us how they felt about this last fiasco. Dwight Ball, Yvonne Jones, and Lorraine Michael all backed Muskrat Falls from the start, as did their parties locally and federally. They still do just as they support the Furey Folly, the Largesse pour Legault, as the three explained in the Telly.
“It’s three different projects with three different processes,” said Dwight Ball, “and I think this is the highest amount of accountability and transparency that we’ve seen in any of the three.”
Three things to know about Dwight Ball. First thing is he has a fetish for processes. He’ll talk about them even if, as in this case, there are not three process and processes aren’t an issue even if they existed. The second thing is he always hangs with the cool kids even though he will never be allowed in the club, himself. He backed Bill-29, slashing the House in 2015, Ed Martin’s severance, and Muskrat Falls because the cool kids backed it. Ball even wanted Ed Martin to stay in charge of NALCOR and kept the Danny-Board in place even though NALCOR was obviously an incompetent mess.
Ball remains an ardent Muskrateer even if - as during the 2019 debate - he lied about it. Even now, despite admitting it badly affected everything the government did and knowing all the evidence it was abysmally managed - including by him - he still believes “that, eventually, Muskrat Falls will provide dividends to the province, but it will take a long time for those to be realized.” Literally the only people who think that and say it out loud are the OM and his band of dedicated co-conspirators in Muskrat Falls, just as the only people who call what Furey and his crowd are doing now accountable and transparent are the people who back Furey and his mob.
Otherwise, Ball sings the New Cool Kids’ song about accountability, and transparency, and experts, just as in 2012 he was thankful at the end of a debate on a couple of Muskrat-related bills. “MF has dominated my life since election 2011,” He tweeted. “Could always support the principles of MF. It’s been a fantastic week.” In the House, he told the story of how he’d pulled his car off the road to listen to the original announcement and backed it enthusiastically. He’s never stopped backing it, even in 2015 when he said - as Lorraine Michael had said before him in 2012 - that “we” cannot afford to let it fail.
As for Yvonne Jones, the only thing you need ever know about her is that if it had to do with Labrador she was for it. And if it was about anywhere else in the province, Jones did not care about it at all. Not surprising then that she backs this fiasco about Labrador. In fact, at the announcement, Jones had all her glowing lines ready and no one asked her for her opinion about it. The media ignored her and she was rotted.
As for Muskrat, while she may have asked a lot of questions in the House, Jones claims that at the time, “it was still difficult to get the answers needed to know with confidence if the Muskrat Falls deal was a good one or a bad one.” There was no shortage of information against the deal, against the government’s mismanagement of it, and just their blinding incompetence. Jones’ claim is a common one among closet Muskrateers and that she still says so is just more evidence she's one of the OM crowd trying to hide.
Lorraine Michael and the provincial Dippers also supported the fiasco project then as they do now. The House of Assembly is the only independent oversight body in our political system and yet in 2025 as in 2012, the Dippers went along with the government’s charade in the House instead of doing their job. This time they went a bit further with the put-on, the deception, and helped create a three person group that is not independent of the government to call independent and to look at only the things about the Furey deal the government will let it see. More squid clouds of confusion.
Newt Gingrich helped turn politics in the United States into the political and social cesspit that helped create Donald Trump and, for that matter, Joe Biden. Along the way, Newt screwed his way out of two marriages through affairs with political staffers. His third wife, Calista, described unironically by some as a devout Roman Catholic, was the political staffer Newt was sleeping with while married to his second wife. At the same time, Gingrich was chasing Bill Clinton politically over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Gingrich is a notorious Trump-enabler who has profited from his support for the second-term Republican president. But while Gingrich’s third wife served as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican and is the nominee to be American ambassador to Switzerland, Gingrich’s affiliation with Trump Version 1.0 was as much as anything else a function of the surprising Trump win in 2016 that no one expected. It is less a sign Newt has any real political clout.
An ambassadorial appointment is no small thing in American patronage circles but having a Hi-my-name’s-Andy-what’s-yours kinda chat with an old Republican warhorse is a long way from having a connection that offsets both the miserable optics domestically of Furey's junket. It offers no insight into the ongoing clash between the United States and Canada over free trade, either. Andy will not be a Bobby back-channel to the enemy if Furey has some delusions of being a Kennedy during a crisis, as in 1961 and Cuber.
But it does give you a story for your celbritocracy friends and a nice photo for the I-love-me walls in your office, if there’s any room left.
And in the Newfie version of The Squid Game, that’s all that matters.
Always interesting to see the book titles on another man’s shelves.
Perhaps you should start to use oilygarchs like my friend Ian.
Keep at it Ed, Young Andrew will buckle sooner or later.