Navigators to Nowhere
Anatomy of a brain fart
If no one else pays it any attention, the bureaucrats in the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador sure notice the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’ annual red tape report.
The one that dropped in January 2024 put Newfoundland and Labrador firmly in last place with the worst scores by far of any provincial government or the Government of Canada. The only score they did well in was the political priority for reform. British Columbia scored lower but if you look at the scores, red tape reform is not a priority there because they’ve got a good system.
GNL scored low because no bureaucrat or politician gives two flying frigs about whether or not a business can start up or even keep running despite the cesspit of old, outdated, unnecessary regulation and stunning indifference of the people shuffling the files around to look busy. The only people who care less about the climate for business in this province is the Sin Jawns Bored of Trade, the only so-called business advocacy group in North America to vote against free enterprise and in favour of crushing public debt and bureaucracy and - when that wasn’t enough - got out of the business of advocating for business all together and went instead for sucking up to politicians at every possible chance.
That all comes together in the story of Business Navigators.
Naturally, if one took the need to support business development seriously, this crappy score GNL got from CFIB would move the politicians to change everything right down to the people in the jobs not just the jobs themselves. The crowd currently running the place would make this the best place in Canada to do business. That is, *if* they cared about anything more than how bad the truthful CFIB scores made them look.
Imagine what they would do if someone in GNL read - and understood - the latest report from the Parliamentary Budget Office in Ottawa on the purchasing power of ordinary Canadians since 2019. Newfoundland and Labrador is at the bottom of the pile. Over the past five years, purchasing power of ordinary Newfoundlanders and Labradorians has dropped by eight percent, twice as much as the drop in Nova Scotia and four times the drop in Alberta. Everyone else grew. British Columbia saw a growth of six percent, which is more than double Newfoundland and Labrador’s performance in the opposite flipping direction.
All of this points to fundamental problems in the provincial economy, which means you can lay responsibility for it squarely at the feet of the provincial government. Disposable income in this province grew by only seven percent over the past five years compared to 16 percent in Alberta, 19 percent in Nova Scotia and 20 percent or more in every other province. Disposable income grew by 25% in Quebec and 29% in British Columbia.
So anyone looking that and in a position to do anything about it would get pretty fired up. You’d be like Nova Scotia, for example. You’d put a team together, make them answerable directly to the Premier, and you’d tell them not to make regulations lighter or less. You’d tell ‘em to get it right. Make sure we are regulating properly in the public interest. Stop pissing around.
And by the gods of CFIB, you can see the results for Nova Scotia. Top scores in everything including political priority. They call it the Office of Regulatory Affairs and Service Excellence. Service Excellence. Tells you right there what the Nova Scotians are all about. About 15 people in Halifax whose priorities are:
“assessing the business impact of proposed regulations and estimating costs and savings
“identifying regulatory improvements that help support economic recovery and help businesses grow
“supporting government priorities (like healthcare and housing) by helping reduce regulatory [burden?]
“working with federal, provincial and municipal governments to bring different levels of regulations in line with each other
“helping new businesses find, understand, and comply with municipal, provincial and federal regulations.”
The thing has caught on with municipalities. And the crowd in the Service Excellence office are so good at what they do, they are about to head over to health and shake that lot from the foundations to the rafters. The Nova Scotia health bureaucrats are already spinning in their wheelie chairs and the office reform crowd haven’t even hit them yet like a hurricane ploughing the Gulf to a froth on the way for Florida.
But this in Newfoundland and Labrador. Back in January the best the GNL gnomes could come up with initially was a set of talking points prepared by the department responsible for most government regulations. The talking points criticised the report as supposedly being unhelpful for businesses (no explanation of how), patted themselves on the back for coming third of four Atlantic provinces for “total number of regulatory restrictions” (whatever that meaningless string of words means), and crowed that reducing regulatory burden is a top priority for government.
This sounds like when a bunch of bridges on the old railway line disappeared almost 20 years ago. Literally vanished and the provincial government had no idea until a federal inspection of rivers and other bodies of water you can navigate on noticed the blank spots between the two banks along the trail in a couple of spots. Public safety is our top priority someone wrote for then-cabinet minister Charlene Johnson to tell everyone. Yes, love, so much a priority it was that you weren’t doing anything to make the public safe as five big steel bridges went poof.
Anyway, back to the business regulation thing. The assistant deputy minister of industry and economic development in Industry, Energy, and Technology organized a meeting involving her minister - Andrew Parsons - and, for some unknown reason, chief executive officer AnneMarie Boudreau of the Sin Jawns Bored of Trade.
This is the bunch who, you may recall, arsed up their own merger with the Employers Council and a name change to Newfoundland and Labrador Board of Trade. They quietly abandoned the whole name part of the scam once a few cabinet ministers and pretty well every chamber of commerce outside the St. John’s municipal boundary tore Boudreau and her Board of Directors a new one.
A few days after the meeting, Boudreau cobbled together a sparse, poorly written memo on February 5, thanking Parsons and Mansour for the meeting about the CFIB report, which Boudreau said was “concerning” because “it prohibits growth and discourages investment.” There’s no explanation of how the report discourages growth and investment - the red tape does that - but Boudreau welcomed the chance to help “build a healthier regulatory environment.” Boudreau attached a summary of the recommendations she brought to the earlier meeting.
There were only two.
Two.
And they were very small.
First, and without any sense of self-awareness let alone irony, Boudreau suggested improving the red tape for reporting red tape. Change the online form GNL used to let businesses report red tape to look like the Nova Scotia one. There were lots of screen grabs of the Nova Scotia government’s website in the memo with sentences from Boudreau in between the pictures to make things look bigger than they were.
Boudreau even offered to help set up a panel of business leaders to help sort out those reported problems, too, which would be yet more bureaucracy and delays for things the Board of Trade used to have at their fingertips. When the Board hired Boudreau four years ago, they fired their policy staff, scrapped all of its policy committees, and ditched advocating for business as a core job for the Board.
Second, Boudreau noted that bits of the government website didn’t work - lots more screen grabs - and that the CFIB report scored Newfoundland and Labrador a zero on support for business because of these sorts of things. She recommended hiring Navigators like they did in Nova Scotia. Just fixing the website and hiring navigators would change the CFIB score. Not actually “building a healthier regulatory environment.” Just change the CFIB score.
Annnnnd… that was it.
There are a bunch of emails back and forth between Mansour and Parsons in a package released under the access to information law as the idea of the Navigators took shape. Other bureaucrats got pulled into the exchanges and at some point Parsons went to finance minister Siobhan Coady for the money. Chunks of the emails are blacked out in the access request that netted these documents but while there are notes that report on what the other provinces in Atlantic Canada do, there’s nothing in the pile that shows anyone thought of anything beyond hiring a couple of people to help applicants splash around in the muck of the undrained bureaucratic swamp.
The back and forth turned up one curiosity: another memo from three years earlier within Service NL that had some details on the Navigators. It apparently hadn’t gone anywhere outside Digital Government and Service NL until February 2024 and there’s no sign anyone asked why not. From February 5 until April 5, government folks spent their time contacting other provinces, particularly Prince Edward island about their Navigator project. In the meantime, Navigators for Newfies made it into the budget as a signature move by government to help business.
Coady told the Board of Trade about it at a luncheon on March 22. Pure coincidence. She told reporters:
You need assistance with, in terms of a program, or if something is not moving fast enough within government — 'cause God knows that happens — or gets lost on somebody's desk, you can phone up the navigator and they'll chase it down for and with you.
Stuff doesn’t move fast within government ‘cause God knows *that* happens.
Oh yeah. There’s a revelation.
And Boudreau predictably said nice things to the media about Coady’s new scheme mostly because this brain fart was Boudreau’s, as we now know.
But you’ll notice nothing in the bureaucracy actually changed. No reappraisal of rules. No meaningful change at all. Not even the hint of it to come. Even Boudreau’s other brain fart - use a different form - didn’t rate anyone’s attention.
As of this week, there are no Navigators working for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and there’s no sign when they might get hired. They’ve been in Nova Scotia since 2017.
There’s also no Assistant Deputy Minister for economic development in Andrew Parsons’ department and no sign of when they’ll get around to appointing the new one, who will be, by the way just the latest in a string who each year for the past five have headed off to a new job somewhere else. ADM Riham Mansour left Parsons’ department after only six months into her appointment to work for the National Research Council.
And in the trade policy section of Intergovernmental Affairs - Andrew Furey MD, Minister - the department Mansour worked in the last year *before* she took a six month position in Parsons’ department? IGA still shows on its website:
As Siobhan Coady said, “you need assistance with, in terms of a program, or if something is not moving fast enough within government — 'cause God knows that happens — or gets lost on somebody's desk, you can phone up the navigator and they'll chase it down for and with you.”
So true in fact that Siobhan needs to call someone to sort out the red tape of hiring Navigators so the Navigators can help people find their way into the endless government bureaucracy. Into. Not out of a tangle do deep it even eats the people sent to hire people to find their way through it.
B’ys, you could not make this stuff up if you tried.
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