Enshittification NL
Tell me again how we love strong leaders
Sitting in a Starbucks Monday morning, working remotely, and waiting for my car to come out of its semi-annual servicing and tire changing.
The email and text responses to the column about the politics of appearance ran the gamut from the granular – going door-to-door, voter attention – to the notion that we have never lived in a democracy in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Thing is, as the two women next to me talk about dogs or the young woman to my left reads her novel, and as all the other people of different ages and backgrounds and sexes and ethnicities go about their coffee business, I doubt any of them could name the newly elected Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. Put a gun to their child’s forehead and even if they remembered, Nan or Pop or Mom or Dad would likely have no idea why this guy wanted the job or what he wanted to do now that’s got there.
John Hogan’s own story is obviously a nose-puller. Drawn to politics by Clyde Wells and Meech Lake, he told reporters, and then studying the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in law school. Hogan was born in 1978. Meech Lake was done and in the ground when he was 12 years old. Not likely even the most politically active of us were that inspired, especially since later in his born-in-a-log-cabin-cannot-tell-a-lie stock politician’s bio, Hogan says he never got involved in politics until 2009.
He was 31 years old.
Those of us who were political from birth have trouble remembering political stuff much before we were 10 but we got involved in politics knocking doors, getting coffee,or doing something meaningful longer before we had kids and a steady job than Hogan. The ones who got political at that age or later were not political creatures. They are on the make. Looking to move up socially or financially.
And even those people certainly had a thought about getting into politics. You go for the big job because you want to use it for something important. Right a wrong. Fix a problem. You don’t find people who just said: b’y they put the ad in the paper and thought what the frig. Les give ‘er a shot. Not serious people. By Hogan’s own account he had no interest in getting elected to anything, ever. Andrew Furey had to talk him into it in 2021, which is true, since the Liberals couldn’t find candidates, were so lame they couldn’t beat two parties that didn’t want to win, and the Furey Brain Trust thought they’d target the enemy leaders out of desperation. They picked Hogan because he had a pulse and was one of Furey’s earliest sycophants even though Furey himself had absolutely no idea why he wanted the job except he figured he could win it or his Dad wanted one of them to be Premier and George was beyond his best before date.
Hogan won. Furey put him in cabinet and left him in Justice to rot. Aside from helping cover up a possible criminal conspiracy in the health department last year, Hogan’s only defining moment was making an asshole comment that survivors of sexual assault cannot be traumatised by cross-examination in a courtroom. “Impossible” said Hogan, whose legal career did not involve any experience in criminal law worth speaking of.
Furey gave him a pass on the idiot comment. When lots of people rightly tore him a new one, Hogan took a month to issue a half-hearted, half-assed apology and the stink from Hogan’s own turd never really washed out of his Nikes. Meanwhile, Tim Houston’s justice minister over in Nova Scotia just resigned from cabinet after saying that there was no epidemic of domestic violence among the Bluenoser crowd. Just to show how unbelievably dim he is, ex-minister Brad Johns made the stupid comment on the fourth anniversary of the mass shooting in which 22 people died and that started with a domestic assault.
Andrew Furey had the lowest ethical standards of any recent Premier, not just in Newfoundland and Labrador, so Hogan’s survival was not a surprise, but in Canada the contrast between Brad Johns and John Hogan could not be any more stark or symbolic. Now Hogan has the top political job in the province and, by his own admission, had no designs on the office and comes to the job with absolutely nothing that he wants to do. That is so not Clyde Wells or Joe Smallwood or Brian Peckford or Danny Williams.
But it is one hundred percent all the rest of them, including Frank Moores and it is really Andrew Furey and Dwight Ball and Kathy Dunderdale. Danny’s handpicked successor was only supposed to have the job a few weeks until the party found a permanent replacement. Had a good run, did all I wanted to do in politics, no more ambitions, Kathy told reporters right after Danny ran away. Then Danny and some of his boys decided she’d be a good way to avoid a leadership racket that might split the party wide open like it had in 1989 and for the decade after. Darin Luther King found out the water had changed as he started calling around caucus looking or support for his run to be Premier only to find out that Danny or one of his crowd had already been calling to lock up people behind the Team Kathy scheme.
CBC’s Azzo Rezori did a piece one night for Here and Now after Danny won the first time. We loves our strong leaders was the thrust of it. A very common political belief at the time. Newfies love their strongman, their caudillo. Gotta have one or you are done. Danny was the fulfillment of the tradition, as the Rezori piece went.
The years since show how much that was wrong. In the 50 years between 1949 and 1999, Newfoundland and Labrador had five Premiers, not counting Tom Rideout’s 43 days in 1989. I’ve had hiccups and hangovers that lasted longer.
In the past 25 years, we’ve had 10. That’s roughly two and a half years each, on average. Not even one term. If you look at the individuals, you’ll see Danny survived two elections but the rest barely got elected the one time and most never fought a second election successfully. Arguably Dwight wasn’t successful in 2019 since he almost lost the government. But the one thing the last 10 premiers have in common is that none of them came to office with a clue what they wanted to do, except for Danny.
Someone told me Dwight Ball wanted to finish the hospital in Corner Brook. That was his one thing. Okay. Let’s allow that. His big plan was to finish something Danny had promised and, that in truth was really just a routine bureaucratic decision anyone could have done any time. Western Memorial had been clapped out by the ‘90s and except for the stupid political decision taken in the later nines by Brian Tobin’s crowd to divert the cash to build a new, hospital in Stephenville that was from the start way more hospital than they needed there, Western Memorial would have been replaced 25 years or more before it actually was. As it is, Dwight built the hospital too small for what they knew would be the demand but the thing to remember is that Dwight Ball didn’t really have anything he wanted to do as premier any more than any of the rest of post 2010 crowd have.
To give them all their credit, they were 100% successful, then.
The other thing that turned up Monday was the word “enshittification.” Coined by Cory Doctorow, it means the gradual deterioration of a product or service due to profit-seeking or the prioritization of business interests over user experience. It’s a tech thing and describes the way Google, Facebook, X, and other platforms become less useful to users as the people behind them shift their focus.
Doctorow thinks you can use what he calls the theory of enshittification and apply across more things than the Internet. He’s got a point and since we are talking about politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, let’s just take a Doctorow quote about the Internet platform mess and see if it works.
“I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history’, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.”
Yeah. It works.
Enshittification is one way to look at politics in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past 25 years. Crapification is another word. Same idea. Politics has deteriorated as the people behind the scenes prioritize their own personal profit at the expense of the wider social interest and the interests of voters slash taxpayers. The Hogan coronation was absolutely and completely driven by a handful of people around Andrew Furey who thought it was more important to save their own power and control than to risk reinvigorating the party, drawing in new supporters, and maybe shifting the direction the province is on so we won’t repeat 1934.
Enshittification cuts across party lines, too. In 2015, Paul Davis’ crowd decided their interest in saving their own jobs was more important than political representation of ordinary people in the House of Assembly and the basic functioning of democracy in our province. Someone cooked up the idea to slash eight seats from the House based only the logic the Pea Seas might be able to win 21 seats but they could not in any scenario win 25. Dwight Ball went along with it, like he went along with anything the Pea Seas wanted from Muskrat Falls to Bill 29.
But the enshittification of politics didn’t start with them. You gotta go back to the OS. The original shit: Danny Williams. Reworked voting just because he was pissed off the rules didn’t let him do what he’d wanted. Williams’ friggin’ around left endless confusion in his wake and a political system easier to corrupt financially because Williams didn’t deliver the reforms to campaign finance he promised. The politicians who came after just copied him and the longer we go on, fewer and fewer people will know of let alone remember another time when things were different.
The people in the new Jag auditorium last weekend, dolled up as it was in red lights everywhere to resemble a cross between one of the inner circles of hell and some second-hand Las Vegas whorehouse, those folks have absolutely no idea that they are participating in a farce, a put on. Not only were they personally invested in the whole thing because they get something out of it, they mostly are like Hogan, whose only knowledge of politics really, truthfully, is after Danny was not just in power but in the peak of his egocentric glory. Their understanding, their knowledge, their perspective is limited. And in that sense, they are perfectly normal and ordinary and just like the people sitting in a Starbucks talking about their labradoodles or reading a book or clacking away at a computer keyboard or looking at their phones.
Most of the people in the Starbucks and most of the people in the downtown hotel are observers at a spectacle outside the mundane treasures of our daily lives. They are outside the circle of power even if they think they are inside. The Liberal party people like John Hogan talk about Clyde Wells the same way Republicans talk about Ronald Reagan even though what they believe, what they do, would be nothing like what Clyde or Ron would have done. They are like Kathy Dunderdale, who once dismissed the man who delivered the political deal that transformed the province through oil royalties and who had fought Quebec over hydro-electricity by wondering if Brian Peckford understood anything about energy policy, if he’d ever been involved in anything to do with them.
Tell me again how we love our strong leaders.
What happened to Fred? Tossed aside like an old shoe? Wasn't he one of Andrew's favourites?
Sobering but spot on overview.