Lost in the weeds

Reading List for 05 Jan 24

Who arranges their books by colour? Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Welcome aboard all the new subscribers, even the people who rushed on just to get the regular emails.

This time of year is always a flurry as original subscribers renew and as new ones jump on the moving ship. Train. Sled. Merry-go-round. Use whatever analogy you want. But it’s a great sign of growth and an encouragement to me personally.

Start the New Year of suggested readings, listenings and watchings by checking out the NTV version of Premier Andrew Furey’s year-end interviews. Then look at the CBC version, which is broken up into short chunks online.

As a learning tool the NTV interview is a wonderful one for people being interviewed and for the people posing the questions. Here are some of the things you’ll see. Michael Connors asks pointed questions and doesn’t let Furey get away with reciting pat answers he’d rehearsed ahead of time. Peter Cowan debates a bit more on the details in his interview but Connors quite clearly rattles Furey badly.

Andrew Furey still doesn’t look comfortable in the job. Four years later. He sometimes looks awkward in these interviews and the year-enders were no exception. The visual busy-ness of the office walls (easily seen on the wide shots) and the packaged setting for Furey (done by *his* people) just adds to the unreal nature of the whole thing.

There’s nothing that conveys weightiness and gravitas, which is what you expect from the Premier’s Office, and therefore Furey doesn’t come across well despite being a bright and sincere guy. It’s not clear what the wall-mess is for but insecurity seems to be the most likely answer, no matter if the walls are covered to make the room less intimidating to its occupant or to distract from the guy behind the desk.

As a rule: less is more. And conversely more is less.

Turn off the sound and just watch the NTV interview for a while. You’ll see the staring. Unblinking stares. Lots of them. Almost cringy in places. Definitely Mechanical. Then turn the sound on and watch it again. You’ll hear those rehearsed lines as clearly as if someone flagged the start and end of them. Plus in the replies a lot of tension. Tautness.

Furey winds up telegraphing a lack of experience on his part or a personal discomfort in being in the position. Could be either. That comes across very clearly in the way Furey reacts to Connors’ questions about housing. Connors slipped in a reference to the fact the face of the whole thing hasn’t been the housing minister. Furey decides to argue. He says that he is “rejecting the premise of the question,” which is fine but you don’t say that out loud. It’s like reading the stage directions in your script. You do it.

Instead, Furey is just defensive about his decision to put John Abbott in front of the project instead of Paul Pike rather than telling us what a great job the government is doing to solve the housing crisis. In the Cowan interview, Furey tries to debate Halifax versus St. John’s and plays up that we are keeping immigrants because our cost of living is low compared to elsewhere. Ok. But that’s because *they* are booking and implicitly we are not, plus the whole idea that it’s so cheap to live here contradicts the Furey claim that the rising cost of living is the biggest issue here. .

Better response would have been to ignore what Connors may or may not have been implying and just talk about the government’s housing initiatives, note that the issues cover many departments, and that Abbott’s got the lead role because he is the most experienced minister in the right position to deal with the file given his long career in the public service before getting to cabinet. Debating whether or not it’s a tent city misses every real point.

In the bit on Equalization, Furey really falls to pieces. Equalization is simple. Furey makes it needlessly complicated because he tries to wade in the weeds, as he describes where he lives, instead of understanding what matters, which would be more sensible. After all unless you are the clerk in some office building in Gatineau who has to work out the details, you don’t need to live in the depths of the technical swamp of calculating Equalization entitlements.

Regular readers know Equalization is an income top-up scheme for provincial governments. It’s run entirely by the federal government so there’s no need to consult provincial Premiers at all. Federal officials work out what provinces make on average from taxation per person. Then they look individually at provinces and see where they fall against that average line. Get enough on your own to be above the line, you get no top-up. Fall below and you get a bit of a hand. The total a province has to spend is its own income plus the top-up, which should make everyone about the same in the end. That’s one reason why there is a cap on payments.

That’s why Furey scores a painful own-goal when he says there’s something wrong with a province that cannot run a surplus if it gets its own revenue and then enough more to bring it up to the same standard as everyone else. Big problem, then if, like Furey you consistently had *more* than the provinces that get Equalization and you still cannot balance the books. He won’t do it in 2023 and guaranteed he will not balance the books in 2024. Yet Furey whines.

And when he falls back on the old Danny Williams line about Stephen Harper targeting Newfoundland and Labrador with the fiscal capacity cap, he is just spreading more nonsense. The story wasn’t true then. Isn’t true now. Four years in the weeds and Furey is still thrashing around.

The only saving grace for Furey is that so few people will likely ever watch these things. Still, when he goes to the polls this year, what will dog the Liberal is his awkwardness or ill-ease that pervades the year-enders. That’s why so many people wonder when the next election is coming. Furey *is* right when he wants to brush away the obsession among the political class about an election. The thing is, people can obsess about that or about trivia like his campaign lawn signs because Furey has offered them nothing else of substance to keep their attention.

That’s the problem with living in the weeds. You lose sight of what matters.