Home Alone
Furey fiddles while fish minister Byrnes
Andrew Furey calling Donald Trump chaotic and erratic is like Dwight Ball saying that Andrew Furey is indecisive.
That came home this week as Andrew Furey made yet another appearance on CBC’s Cochrane and Friends, still working under the self-mocking title of Power and Politics. The lame duck Newfie premier, who his whole adult life has been an orthopedic surgeon and nothing else before becoming Premier in a rigged contest, interrupted his latest self-indulgent swan at public expensive to explain to the other Newf on the screen, who one regular reader calls growed-up Caillou, the intricacies and nuances of international diplomacy, trade negotiations and, at peak absurdity in the interview, the subtleties of what’s known to experts in decision-making as escalation dominance.
When Caillou asked what Canada needed to do to deal with Trump the supposed existential menace to Canada, the literal saw-bones said Canada had to be vewy, vewy strategic, doing nothing much except be all united on one team and at that point, you had to collapse in the giggles because the words are so familiar. Think Siobhan Coady, Furey’s deputy, last November. Defending the sweetheart deal with a politically connected local developer for land the government didn’t need to buy because it already owned way more right next store. Oh, and - shock of shocks - Team Furey lied about the deal. “ We have to be very, very smart about where this location is,” said Coady. “It has to have appropriate infrastructure. It has to have appropriate access to this facility” all of which the nearby Crown land had in spades and for free.
We’ll take a pause and let get the smelling salts for Nan who likely fainted after the bit about Furey’s crowd telling lies. Get her a cuppa tea and a cream cracker, then settle back in.
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The other clue that put the whole Donald - Andrew thing together was Trump’s announcement of tariffs on Monday night, followed on Tuesday by the immediate word from commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that changes were coming and that there’d be a call between Trump and Justin Trudeau. Turns out that making cars involves at least all three countries in the North American free trade deal and so a 25% hike on imports and exports will drive up the cost of cars at least 25%. Maybe more. Even Fox News pounded Trump with a brutal story showing the price of a Dodge Ram that went from $80,000 to $100,000 overnight. automakers.
Pause for 30 days said Trump, just like he’d said “pause for 30 days” at the start. And literally as I typed those words about cars on Thursday, there was a news story that now the tariffs won’t apply for 30 days to anything covered by the existing North American free trade agreement.
Brain farts. You’re talking about brain farts. (Yes, there’s yet another sequel to Blade Runner coming that we didn’t need.) Trump Tariffs are a Trump brain fart. People in Newfoundland and Labrador know all about brain farts. Since 2003. Conflict of interest and brain farts. The two things every Newfie political idea must have to get anywhere. Government policies that make no sense but get going because people who have no idea what they are doing get caught up in their own brilliance or desperation or both. “Massive release of stupid” is how the urban dictionary defines a brain fart. Around here, we’d just use a string of examples: Immigration. Football jerseys. Sugar tax. Navigators. Chief Economic Recovery Officer. Second OilCo. Changing NALCOR’s name. Churchill Falls. Muskrat Falls. Hydrogen.
Hydrogen is a really good example of a brain fart that lines up with tariffs. John Risley sold Andrew Furey on hydrogen and the Premier came back and got the whole thing rolling. We are gonna do it. No plans. No idea what could be involved or even whether the whole thing was just a scam. And if anyone pointed out it was nuts, there was just the Furey pat reply when he did not want to change his mind no matter how wrong he was: make it better. Buff that turd.
Go back and look at what Andrew Parsons said in the beginning about hydrogen. All sorts of contradictions, like they kept saying wind policy when it was really hydrogen. They actually shut down any talk of wind energy for its own sake. Claimed the old ban against wind power was gone when in fact it stayed in place and is still there. And there actually wasn’t a ban at all, ever because government policy both banned wind developments and encouraged them at the same time, dating back to Danny Williams’ turn running the New Newfie circus. Subsidies. No subsidies. And a couple of months in, as companies started looking for land, out comes a whole new process and complex policy where Parsons had said two months earlier the whole thing was super easy with no big changes to anything.
During Trump 45, I used to put Danny Williams quotes and Donald Trump quotes in front of people and asked them - especially Big Danny Fan Klub members - to tell me who said it. Hilarity always ensued. The parallels were so similar sometimes that I started calling Danny proto-Trump. The fore-runner. The Beta test version. The opening act for Rudy Giuliani and Trump. Literally. Now that we’ve got another few years and even more examples, there’s something else going on that gets beyond the individuals and has more to do with personality types and the way politics works in Newfoundland.
The major difference between Murca and Newfoundland and and Labrador is that in the States even under Trump 47, there’s still a gaggle of reporters and functioning political parties that duke it out with each other. Businesses will tell the government when things are going wrong and government will change gears. Congress still works, even if it is off-kilter for a while and some Republicans are still worried about the mid-terms almost two years from now.
By contrast, Newfoundland and Labrador is more than ever a one and a half party state with a set of repeater stations called news media for official statements emailed out. There are ins and there are outs and after an election every now and again, the ins will be out and the outs will be in and the Dippers will stand on the sidelines, taking swans to Europe at taxpayers expense or complaining about what the outs are doing. The House of Assembly is so much a rubber stamp that even the North Koreans would be embarrassed at how fundamentally undemocratic it is.
Normally, the guv’mint crowd can rubber stamp a bill allowing them to spend money in a couple of hours of scripted, predictable speeches. But with Andrew Furey on a swan in Tranna, his office staff back home were too busy strong arming political staff and caucus to get behind a guy with nothing close to the experience needed to be Premier in a rigged election to replace a guy who also had absolutely no relevant experience for the job he’s held for four years. He’d replaced another guy who had no idea what to do with the job, who replaced three others back to 2010 who were just like the lot. There was so much friggin’ with the riggin’ of the new leadership contest that Liberals could not even rubber stamp a simple bill to let them keep spending money in the new year without a full budget. So the House will sit Friday this week and maybe into next week.
The bill to give the government power to spend money from April Fool’s Day onward totals almost $4.0 billion, up over half a billion dollars from the same bill passed last year to get the government into the new fiscal year legally. Last year’s budget spent a record $10 billion, of which $2.0 billion was borrowed. The revised budget from December raised the borrowing to almost $3.0 billion, one of the highest amounts of new debt of *any* government in the province’s history.
The 2025 budget will likely gave spending closer to $12 billion than not, with lots of excuses about needing more money for da tariffs. The thing is, whatever the number is above $10 billion in total, the amount borrowed - money we do not have - will be shockingly huge. Again. There will be money in there to prop up the fishery rather than change it, no matter it is a social blight on top of being an economic basket case.
Fish minister Gerry Byrne was on CBC’s fish cast this week doing a minor league version of Cochrane and Furey. Byrne talked about price elasticity and demand elasticity, blathering until it was clear that Byrne and his friends will use public money to cover the American tariffs on snow crab and keep the industry from changing for the better. Not an unpopular idea. One of the Pea Sea crowd was clipped on the same show asking about what the guv’mint would do for the people in his district who would need a few weeks in a fish plant for slave wages to get enough stamps to get EI. There’s Furey fiddling on the roam talking about how Americans will pay the tariffs and there’s Byrne and the crowd at home setting the matches to the financial house. The Newfies will pay Trump’s tariffs like Byrne and Furey and the rest got ‘em paying for the free electricity going to Nova Scotia and the nearly free stuff going to Quebec under the new deal for Churchill Falls that is exactly like the old one.
Not to be left out, anti-cart-lick John Haggie promised Team Furey/Hogan would replace with stuff made at home almost a half million items ranging from saline in bags to snot rags to pills to PET scanners listed in American software the health system uses as coming from American makers. We did it during the pandemic, said Haggie, even though they didn’t, and we’ll do it again, even though we won’t ‘cause it isn't possible.
Eventually, we’ll have an election where these same people will claim they are head and shoulders the best people to keep running the place. Maybe they are. Scary thought.
The truly absurd thing about what Furey, Byrne, Haggie and the rest of them are getting on with is that it is basically what Trump is trying to do. Buy local. One of Trump’s goons told people this week that if the automakers or any other companies wanted to avoid tariffs, they should build plants in the States and close down their ones in Canada or anywhere else. That whole 51st state thing is essentially the same. Not about annexing Canada. Just a way to shut the whiners up and tell you what they really want, which is to undo all the benefits of free trade and build stuff in Murca even though you cannot do that cheaply or easily. It’s all one big brain fart.
Not surprisingly, the more experienced brain farters in Canada want to do the same thing. The Canadian Buy Local scheme comes from exactly the same mindset as Trump’s tariffs. For a place like Newfoundland and Labrador, where the entire economy *is* trade, tariffs and buy local schemes are beyond stupid. We need to go in the opposite direction. Lower the obstacles to trade, especially between provinces. Look for new markets. Emphasize how much food we get from other places right now, even if we buy it at local franchises of American retailers, or how much Canadian tariffs on imports from the United States like beef and other food is what is driving up Canadian costs, not Trumps tariffs that only hit Americans. Well, with some exceptions like crab. Don’t copy Trump, in other words, but the Premiers and the federal government have all agreed to keep copying Trump on trade barriers within Canada. We are just going to talk about doing something else, maybe eventually.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, support for tariffs, local subsidies, and buy local schemes - all of which have been staples of our politics even during the boom years of freer trade - also shows how little we understand our own history. Before 1949, local business owners who were also local politicians or backers of politicians hid behind tariffs that punished local consumers and forced them to buy more expensive goods made in Newfoundland. The tariff walls hindered innovation, creativity, and efficiency and helped in a very big way, wreck Newfoundland as an independent country. That economic backwardness over many years made the country vulnerable to an economic downturn like the one in 1929 and ultimately led to the collapse of self-government in 1933.
The same walls still hinder us. Hem us in. Rob us all. Make us smaller. The smaller we define ourselves in Newfoundland and Labrador - economically, socially, politically - the more likely we are to disappear.
It is just a matter of time.
