General Cluster and the White Man Burden

Lela and Leila on a trip to the Big Lala Land

Minister of Everything Lela Evans sat down last week for an interview with Leila Beaudoin of CBC’s content assembly facility about the general clusterfuck called our provincial government and the only thing she did was slaughter the truth.

You have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to send Andrea Barbour off to France obviously, totally unprepared to be at an internation event let alone read a speech on behalf of the government and people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Painful.

Embarrassing.

You feel nothing but compassion for Barbour.

Well, you should.

Not Barbour’s fault.

Then you look at the Lela-Leila interview and you realize Barbour is just how this crowd rolls.

Evans talked about the kerfuffle with the Innu. That’s the video above. She had another chat about the brilliant idea among the NLHS bureaucrats to declare every 12-year-old in the province a mature minor, by default and then flop the whole idea out there like ‘tw’ern’t nar tang.

Borderline incompetent Evans called it.

But no one will lose their jobs or get time off without pay to consider their sins.

That’s the thing to notice.

Borderline is doing all the work in that phrase. The border excuses all Evans will not do, which is fix the problems at NLHS. Close to incompetence but not enough to matter. Right on the edge, she said holding up her thumb and forefinger so close together you cannot see the atoms-width distance between them. That is enough to save them all. That edge is all it takes to stop Evan’s from doing anything even if the edge is made-up, just like everything Evans said. Just lines cooked up by Evans and the Premier’s Office and the political bureaucrats and actual bureaucrats to distract and avoid.

There are familiar lines. We have heard them before. Think Peg Cameron’s inquiry into the breast cancer deaths and communications disaster caused by the blind incompetence of health bureaucrats. Read the transcripts, which are still available of the testimony, under oath to tell the truth. Truth is, no one talked about what actually happened, even if only as best they could recall. There are days and days of what they would have done or what would have happened. All made up. All not truth.

Evans said “my department was not contacted” in advance about the decision by NLHS to give every 12-year-old in the province complete control of medical decisions for them… which is what access to the records really boils down to. Evans puts it down to someone not following “procedures” and “protocols” to use her words.

Then she pretends that she’d never heard of CorCare before. That is, she has not heard of the single biggest issue that’s been flying around for a couple of years now as NLHS moves all its records to a new electronic system. There’s been a racket with doctors over training for the new system. There are other primary care providers who cannot even get training because the health authority ignored them. Evans missed all of it or so she’d like you to believe.

Lela told Leila that “if my office would have contacted me…” everything would have been right as rain because it turned out to be a mudslide and there’s no way Lela would let mud slide. The logic is circular, like the cabinet it should have been filed in.

Literally everything Evans says in these lengthy interviews is bullshit. We know it’s bullshit because she pretends she’d never heard of CorCare before. It is so obviously not true but Lela says it with conviction as if it were true. Like Pete Hoekstra pretending Canada didn’t pay for the Gordie Howe Bridge. Brazenness so naked it might triumph over whatever truth we have seen with our own eyes. Straight from the George Costanza school of comms. It’s not a lie if you believe it. Or at least pretend convincingly enough that you believe it.

“[My] responsibility would have been [there’s that imaginary-world language again] to say ‘hold on we’re introducing new technology in health information system, the information is not on a file in a hospital or at a clinic. It’s now on your phone. How is this going to impact the policy” on something or other. Evans uses the word “policy” to mean stuff she doesn’t want to talk about or doesn’t understand. She says “policy” the way Kathy Dunderdale used to say word “file” or “due diligence piece.”

Evans babbled a lot during this interview. She talked about the policy and “the legislation around access to healthcare information by youth and the proxy that’s in existence that’s been on the books and has been a part of the health care system uh you know for years. So [I?] would you have said to them I have concerns with the age groups because that was the concern from parents.” Been around for years but now changed by some bureaucrat out of line with what the law and policy. Policy means “if this, do that and now someone bordering on incompetence according to Lela changed the policy. So now the government will change the law to fit the new policy even though the law is right and the new policy is wrong. But notice neither Lela nor Premier Tony Wakeham would just say the bureaucrats got it wrong.

Lela is right it would have been her responsibility to sort out the problem and it was. What Lela doesn’t want to talk about is why she fumbled even if the stumble was because her bureaucrats misled her. In every lie there is a kernel of truth and in this one, the excuse about policy in place for years might well be the lie the bureaucrats told Lela and Tony to slip by them a stinker of a big change. Now that they are caught out, rather than admit they got fooled, Tony and Lela are pretending there was another problem. Promising changes when none are needed and, frankly, by the time we get to the fall there may never be changes. Just like after the ‘21 election we were promised election reforms the Liberals never delivered on. Different clowns. Same circus. Different mouths. Same lies.

Just look at the words. Lela said: “How is this going to impact the policy and the legislation around um access to um healthcare information by youth and the proxy uh that’s in existence that’s been on the books and has been a part of the health care system uh you know for years.”

That’s a line Tony Wakeham dropped as well along with a bunch of other fellow travelers, helping NLHS duck responsibility. Tony said a couple of times that this fiasco highlighted some kind of disconnect between what the law says and what the bureaucrats have been doing. That was his first line when the story broke. Called it a “misalignment.”

“The implementation of the new digital health platform has exposed a fundamental misalignment between existing statutes and the expectations of families in this province. We did not create this policy, but we are going to fix it.”

Absolute nonsense. Public expectations are based on the law in place for decades. What changed was the bureaucratic policy. The truth does not work there so the politicians try something else. Tony Wakeham’s story does the one thing the truth cannot: protect bureaucrats from consequences.

Now Tony and Lela are not on the same page as far as the bureaucrats go. Lela will happily blame them, even if it means nothing, while Tony will not say a word against them. But neither Lela nor Tony will do anything to fix a problem with staff that are - based on the official excuses - not just “borderline” incompetent but the posterchildren for bunglers who do not know their jobs.

The whole story is a string of incompetence from making it up - it is a lie of one form or another from start to finish - to telling it. But in that LaLa land of government, where bungling and incompetence and arrogance killed 300 in the breast cancer fiasco, where bureaucrats pocketed public money illegally helped by the people whose job it was not to spend money illegally, and where more bungling and incompetence and arrogance shut the health system for two and a half months, killed God knows how many and made others needlessly sicker as a result and then lied about it all, forcing parents to beg their elementary school kids for access to the kids’ medical test results is just another Tuesday.

The Innu story is no better and no more true but bits of reality peeked through whatever cloak of invisibility Lela wrapped around herself on television.

Evans starts out by identifying herself as Indigenous, using a Trumpy line - or is it in the shitty Mykoo Cayne impersonations ?- about how a lot of people don’t know she’s a beneficiary of the Nunatsiavut land claim. When a politician says a lot of people don’t know something a lot of people do know, bullshit follows. This time, out of the bullshit comes with some interesting, if inadvertent, admissions of truth.

“Well,” Lela told Leila, “in actual fact for the Premier, he had no background on [the issue and the history]” unlike Evans and her family, supposedly. “Like, you know, we were there, we had been briefed on the display on the Innu disclaimer.” No explanation of when the briefings happened, whether it was before the exhibit opened or whether it was after the controversy. No explanation of the disclaimer either. But it’s pretty clear in the interview that even going into the meeting with Innu once the controversy erupted, Premier Tony Wakeham without background on what was happening. That is astounding but helps to explain why things are as shagged up as they obviously are.

What’s worse, Evans says some truly odd things for someone who supposedly understands what is going on. She said a couple of times this seems to be a case of people she called “the white man” discovering people on a beach and saying they were not there before the “white men” found them. Utter garbage. That’s about as simply as you can put it, even if we look beyond the racism in the it.

Yet that’s where we are, along with an obsession with “timelines.” Evans explained that “we’re starting to look at the facts and the, you know, the research and things like that. And for me is I want to support Innu. I want to make sure that we’re not uh you know, we’re not uh holding them to the white man’s written word of when they actually saw them. Um, you know, I want to look at, well, what can we do to support Innu’s claim.”

Later in the interview, Evans says that “the first thing I did is I wanted to see how this impacts land claims, right? Like the you know like um and I was told that um negotiation doesn’t include the timeline. So, I was a bit more comfortable with that.”

Okay.

This is the key point and clearly Evans doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about.

Decisions on aboriginal claims are based on evidence, which includes Indigenous traditional knowledge. It also involves archeology. Really good example: the Mi’gmaw are not Indigenous to Newfoundland. There’s zero evidence to support the claim, which is why there is no Mi’gmaw land claim to any part of Newfoundland or Labrador.

Sometimes evidence doesn’t matter. Good example: Nunatsiavut. NG claims that southern Labrador is not part of Labrador Inuit traditional territory. There is a mountain of evidence both from archeology and from what white men saw on beaches but NG didn’t want to include to the southern Labrador Inuit Metis in their claim. So they only included the northern Inuit metis, what Lela calls people of mixed heritage, and in the process disowned Inuit traditional knowledge and archeological evidence and European documentary evidence and a whole bunch of people NG now calls pretendians.

All of that means we don’t even have to touch this “white man” 300 years nonsense. After all, Europeans arrived on the coast of Labrador about a thousand years ago and reported seeing people living there. Might have been Inuit or Innu but they saw people there 700 years before whatever foolishness The Rooms bunch are getting on with.

Europeans came and stayed around the middle of the 15th century. That’s 1450, which is almost 600 years ago or twice as long as this whole 300 year number everyone keeps talking about. When Lela says this 300 years doesn’t have to do with the land claim, then she didn’t understand what people told her. After all, if Innu people could only reliably show occupation in Labrador from 300 years after Europeans arrived then they’d be as SOL on land claims as the Mi’gmaw on the island.

But they aren’t. Innu people of Labrador are like the Inuit. They are the only groups in the entire province with recognized rights under the constitution. They have that because they can establish a presence on the land before “white men” walked on a local beach. That’s why this whole business about only present for 300 years is pointless. If Lela had a clue about this, that is the only point she needed to dismiss the rest as nonsense. Since the provincial government accepted the Innu land claim for settlement 30 years ago and the federal government accepted it almost 50 years ago, that means both governments already accept their presence here pre-dates Europeans.

Don’t take my word for it. According to Evans’ own department, the “Innu Nation land claim, accepted by the federal government for negotiation in 1978, covers approximately 70% of Labrador. A framework agreement, signed by Canada, [Newfoundland and Labrador] and the Innu Nation in 1996 sets out the ground rules for negotiations.”

Boom!

Job done.

All of that is why from the start, this entire nonsense at The Rooms makes no sense. The solution is simple and if some folks need to get a record of employment so they can file an EI claim, then so be it.

Evans’ tortured descriptions of all this show that the government at its topmost level is completely adrift. There is no one anywhere with a sense of direction and even if - as we can see with Barbour and Evans and maybe the Premier himself - ministers are out of their personal depth, then it’s the responsibility of both political and civil service folks to get their heads above water before sending them to meetings let alone doing interviews. That the ministers were not better prepared means the whole of the government at the top end is in need of a serious Danny Williams kinda shit-knockin’ to get it back on track. The fact Leila Beaudoin and the folks at the CBC CAF who prepared their new talking head for these interviews know less about these issues than the bureaucrats and politicians just makes the level of misinformation all the worse. Bringing in an American to just make stuff up was the cherry of absurdity on a cake of cream crap.

God help us all.

We are in La La Land and no one can even do a decent song and dance number.

A day of sunshine would be a nice change.

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