Skipper Dickie's Screech-in
Hogan's Heroes and the eventual election
Dried out cod carcass in one hand, a Starbucks in the other, and his Adidas firmly lodged across the windpipe of reality, Skipper Dickie’s lil buddy John Hogan told Canadian premiers and their Prime Minister that he will defend to his last breath the right of Taiwanese to split fish in rural Newfoundland for slave wages.
“We’re happy to do free trade but we have to protect the jobs of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians,” the Newfie premier told local radio station VOCM. “There are carve-outs [in free trade agreements] for a reason. For example, we need to protect our fish processing plants as they are vital to our rural communities.”
So vital that Hogan’s crew running the place these days like every crew back to the last century and before plus the people in the industry couldn’t be arsed to change anything. When someone did try to bring change last year back when Hogan’s buddy had the Premier’s job, Hogan and da b’ys set the cops on the fellows trying to change things. That is, set *more* cops on ‘en after a couple of the Premier’s senior advisors arsed around causing a needless ruckus that left one fellow with a broken hip and the Premier’s comms director with some selfies of an angry protester she deliberately provoked just for the pictures.
This is not a parody.
This is not a joke.
No one has gained control of your television set, seizing the vertical and the horizontal, to show you an alternate dimension, a place not of sight and sound but of mind, a story that makes the enormous social upheavals around us understandable with some metaphor about aliens or people from the future or in the future.
So, no.
Not The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone.
No.
This is reality.
The reality is that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and every politician in the House of Assembly is dead set change of any kind. Take free trade. The guv’ment crowd were agin it 15 years ago, even though the free trade agreement with the Europeans helped diversify the provincial economy at a time when the crowd running the place wanted to become *more* dependent on the undependable Americans. Anudder guv’mint crowd are still agin free trade these days even though freer trade between provinces would boost the local economy by billions and create tens of thousands of new jobs.
That’s a big deal when Newfoundland and Labrador has - according to the Conference Board of Canada - a weak economic outlook and an uncertain economic future. We are suffering from declining oil production, an aging population, and the lingering effects of COVID, apparently. Add to that chronic political weakness. We have had more Premiers in the last 15 years than in the first half century after Confederation and none of the recent bunch did anything useful, except for themselves. No wonder people in town and in the coves and bays and inland are as angry as they are at politics and politicians.
The crowd on The Hill are so obviously against free trade, the up-along tribe have taken notice. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business ranked Newfoundland and Labrador as the most unfriendly to free trade, behind Quebec and ahead of the three territories. CFIB misses some points but that is quibbling. They got the main point. What’s most striking about the freer trade talks though is that the guv’mint of Newfoundland and Labrador has so adamantly and publicly opposed the most obvious ways of lowering unnecessary trade barriers, no matter the good it would do. To make sure there was no slip-up, Newfoundland and Labrador is the only province or territory represented on the interprovincial negotiating committee by the local first minister.
John Hogan has not just one finance minister and not one but two economic development ministers and he will trust neither of them to negotiate. That tells you a lot about the problems inside the Liberal caucus and government, even if the existence of two economic development ministers - neither one of them doing a tap by the way - were not a clue already. Just like every transient in the Premier’s office since Danny left, John Hogan saw an empty chair and took his turn in the seat with no intention of doing anything but hanging onto the armrests if any tries to dislodge him from do his perch. The trade meetings lets him lots of travel rather than do actual work, a trick he picked up from Andrew Furey who in only four years as Premier spent more time out of the province it seemed than in it and all of it doing nothing but collecting selfies and stuff for the I Love Me Wall.
Hogan says he will “do” free trade - whatever the hell that means - but wants to protect fish plants in Newfoundland and Labrador who bring in migrant and foreign workers to earn slave wages in the hardest working conditions because they are the “lifeblood of rural towns.” These are old words. Old political words. So old are the words they’re so long off EI that it was called UI back then and went onto the Old Age and the Supplement well back into the last century. Hogan’s words tell you plainly that neither he nor anyone in the Liberal government elected politician or staffer has a clue what is happening across Newfoundland and Labrador. Not a clue or they don’t care what is happening in Newfoundland and Labrador or hope that you don’t know or care or all of the above.
2003. A provincial government report found the average fishplant worker made only $5,000 a year from working and picked up the other $10,000 of their total income from the federal government’s Employment Insurance program. People, mostly people living east of The Overpass, defended that as “vital to our rural communities, that are the heart and soul of our Newfoundland heritage, culture, and identity” blah blah blah. Little has changed in fish plants except who is doing the scut-work of tiny townie tiny mental empires.
These days, Taiwanese temporary workers or Russians or God knows who else work in the fish plants and the fish plants process crab for a few weeks before the workers head off somewhere else or the plant shifts species. Bad enough that for decades we used to leave locals with no choice but to break their backs for minimum wage so they could earn enough to get the lowest EI stamps on the go. Now we pretend those locals are not gone to Paradise heavenly or earthly just like we pretend other Newfies don’t wetback their way through the Annapolis Valley or in PEI or New Brunswick during the year to stamp up for the winter. And this is what we cannot change, so the politicians have it.
For politicians, rural Newfoundland and Labrador is nothing if not a creation of townie imaginations, the same now as a century ago. The place is the root of us all, they claim. The heart and soul of Newfoundland. The people who live there are noble peasants, living the perfect life as their ancestors did. And when they are not that, the same townies say the baymen are lazy, good-for-nothings who drain the government tills of cash ( better put in their betters’ pockets, they’d add under their breaths). If they protest, as some did in 2024, then beat their heads in.
Come election time, the townies like Hogan - which is to say these days all three parties - will trot out all the old lines and offer to look after the Child People of the Outports if they just vote for Papa John or Papa Tony or Papa Jim, just like the politicians did before them on back to the time of Coaker.
This is the Age of Celebritocracy.
Idiotocracy.
Elites in the Globe with KMs
More people have died of COVID in January 2022 than died in total from the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021.
David Cochrane’s interview with John Hogan after the First Ministers’ meeting in Saskatchewan is fascinating. Watch it if you haven’t already and if you saw it before, watch it again. Hogan is so nervous, so out of place as Premier throughout that he talks like an over-caffeinated squirrel on speed *and* coke. He’s got the talking points memorized and by God the challenge is to get them out as rapidly and incomprehensibly as possible. Hogan talks about his newness to the job, which emphasises his inexperience. There is zero sense of gravitas in this performance. No weight, heft, power, seriousness, presence.
None of this helps Hogan on any level, which means he is no help to the Liberals’ hopes of re-election, nor for the province’s future interests which neither Hogan nor any other Liberal gives two frigs about. There are opportunities all over the place in Mark Carney’s plans but Hogan and the Liberals think there is more for them and their friends in giving away electricity and control to Quebec than doing things for ourselves.
Bigger opportunities like selling electricity to Ontario, which needs loads of our electricity, that has the money to pay proper prices for exports, more money for transmission lines with and without Ottawa. If any electricity goes from Labrador to Ontario, Hydro-Quebec will sell it under the Andrew Furey/John Hogan deal with Quebec and pocket all the profits. Electricity, fishery, mining, manufacturing, all handed over to others or neglected.
Andrew Furey may have fancied himself to be a Newfie Tony Blair but he was more in the mold of Dodgy Dave Cameron, Batshit Boris Johnson, and Loonie Liz Truss. Furey and now Hogan are just the latest version of Kathy Dunderdale and the string of Pea Seas and Dwight Ball after Danny Williams. Got the job because it was open and no one else really wanted it. Engineered into it by other people. No idea what to do with the job and the power.
They surrounded themselves with people who are, like their boss, in over their heads. Lacking life experience as much as political experience and the judgment that comes with both. Unable to be anything but hunt the next campaignish photo-op, and absolutely unable to grasp the world outside their own self-limited and -limiting bubbles. These are the people who think posing with Skipper Dickie and a dead codfish or someone in a green codfish suit or this deal with Quebec or opposing free trade are good things, things that matter, and that you do not care or are too stupid to know better.
What the political crowd all do the bureaucrats do, too, which is why we have corruption and incompetence and bungling everywhere and people who believe - like Kathy Dunderdale - that the only smart people are around them and that no one else knows anything. These people put the Village Idiot - his former students will remember that name all too well - in charge of health care. Pat Parfrey has absolutely no idea what he is doing, having never done anything like this before. It shows. Just look at Parfrey last week as he made a fool of himself deflecting questions about blatant corruption and incompetence and bungling with nakedly stupid lines written by the corrupt incompetent bunglers or their friends.
They are no better than the ones someone wrote for the health minister about the mess at St. Clare’s and how a settlement is imminent in something that has been festering for years and that has come to yet another breaking point thanks to corruption, incompetence, and bungling. A week since Howell’s promise of a speedy solution now makes it look like a copy of Donald Trump’s promises about something coming in two weeks that never shows up.
Andrew Furey’s Brain Trust is now Hogan’s Heroes looking to get renewed for another season of madness and mayhem. They might get the job if they were Hogan, Newkirk, Kinchlo, and LeBeau. These Klink and Schultz clones deserve to be cancelled before they waste more money and cost us more lives. We cannot afford them anymore.
