Fair, Right, and Realistic in Labrador

What you get depends on what you want

The most striking thing about this shot of the Premier’s Office (looking west) is the garish display on the walls and other flat surfaces. Like a cartoon tin-pot dictator’s military uniform, they are festooned with certificates, plaques, diplomas, statues, and other ephemera. The ego-detritus covers every surface, including both sides of *and* the space over the door to the private washroom and shower, at right, and the sides of every window, on the left. The painting of a partially open can of sardines is oversized for the space yet is obscured visually by the mountain of insecurity around it. (Source: @FureyAndrew on Twitter)

Monday’s assessment of what happened over the past couple of weeks started out from a situational analysis of the two sides.

The SWOT: strengths and weaknesses of one side plus the opportunities and threats from the external environment and what’s coming.

Out of that SWOT you have to have some concrete ideas of what you want to get out of the talks. Goals. Big picture goals. The strategy that follows is how you plan to get from where to are to where you want to be. Francois Legault’s words and actions made the Quebec plans fairly easy to see.

While we have a fairly good idea of both Quebec goals and the plan to attain them, things a lot murkier on the Newfoundland and Labrador side. Andrew Furey’s words and actions could have been a gigantic con job run on Quebec but experience suggests not. Instead, we apparently have a government struggling to figure out what to do.

Look at the announcement Tuesday that - unsurprisingly - three people will lead the provincial negotiating team. Except it isn’t called that. It’s an “expert team”. And they won't be negotiating. Their job will be to “lead high-level preliminary discussions with Hydro-Quebec.”

Preliminary. But that’s the thing you do *before* you sit down with your counterpart. Even in this context, preliminary discussion is what you had with Francois while noshing at The Rooms cafe. This would be the second step.

If this sounds like the invention of new first steps after you were already past first steps to get out of the appearance the whole windy thing was rigged for the Premier’s fishing buddy, you are on the right track.

High-level. Seriously? Like you’d let the janitors do this.

Discussions. Pull the other one, Andy. No talks. There were talks.

Negotiations. No. The are discussions.

And no agreement. But yet there was an agreement.

Lots of vague adjectives is a clue the folks clacking this stuff out are pretending. Making stuff up as they go. Trying not to look like they are already boxed in.

Then there is this line from the quote made up by someone and credited to the Premier. “This team will consider every potential option in front of us…”

The Genius Committee was supposed to do that last year. Then the guvmint crowd was supposed to filter out stuff and look at a set of clear objectives to give their negotiators. Even this year long beyond the deadline they had, but before Legault showed up, Andrew Furey said he was waiting for the Genius Committee to give him options he could pick from.

If Karl, Jennifer, and Denis are going to explore all options at the negotiating table... sorry… the <air quotes fingers> preliminary discussions table </air quotes fingers> that in no way resembles negotiations, they could save a lot of time. Just lean across the table and ask the HQ teams what they want.

Well, let’s see if we can clear away some of the murk and look at the situation that appears in front of us now but from another angle. Let’s look at the sort of options that could have been on the table but are pretty much out of the question now.