Sound and Furey

Real well-being gets lost in the noise

You look mahvelous.

We are a Well-Being Province.

You know it is important because the words start with capital letters.

There is a government news release and an announcement at the Colonial Building complete with the Premier and some guy who has nothing to do with Well-Being except to serve as a prop.

A Well-Being Province.

The first in Canada.

Or should that be The First In Canada?

Anyway…

We may be the first well-being province in Canada just because Andrew Furey said so but the rest of know we are not a healthy province.

Furey did not use *that* word because he and his deputy health reform leprechaun know it is not true. If they used the word healthy province, then everyone would tell Andrew and Pat Parfrey they are village idiots. Ask Pat about that phrase.

Talking about things is easy.

Furey has been talking a lot for four years.

Doing stuff is hard.

Furey has not been doing much doing.

He’s been talking.

And traveling.

A *lot* of traveling.

And talking.

But the doing thing, the actually making stuff happen part.

No so much.

But included in the news release announcing this latest display of political onanism is a list of the plans launched. Not targets set. Not goals achieved. But words talked about.

And then talked about again.

Which is what that thing at the Colonial Building was all about.

No one should miss the irony that Furey chose the one site in St. John’s to show off his Well-Being Province that has come to symbolise how unwell Newfoundland and Labrador is. Not because it was the site of a political stunt last year or because it is a symbol of colonialism but because in the neighbourhoods around the Colonial Building you can see the unwell people all the time, in the alleyways and laneways and breezeways. Squat behind a bush.

You just have to see.

Looking is like talking.

Seeing is like doing.

There is a lot of looking and talking in government.

Not so much on the seeing and doing.

They really looked well talking about well-being week.

Literally this time last year, we had Andrew Furey in Fort MacMurray, like Danny Williams before him supposedly to lure the pigeons back home while - look at the picture - Parfrey and Tom Osborne looked decidedly unwell as they told us how well we all were.

This year, Furey is here but he let Sarah Stoodley - now in the immigration junketry - take a gaggle of bureaucrats and Craig Tucker from Keyin off to England for an off-season holiday at public expense expedition to lure people not from here to here and catch a footie match with the Barrow equivalent of the Growlers. There was a even a thing at Ben’s Pub so people could watch as Chelsea beat the crap out of Barrow. Not Chelsea Football Club. But some girl named Chelsea. From Ipswich. In an alley.

There is some scam going on with this Barrow thing. Not necessarily a big grift but just one of those little brain farts that someone is pumping up to be more than it is. And now it has spawned a new junket ministry to make it keep looking like a big deal when really all it is doing is giving bureaucrats and politicians more excuses to fly the globe on the public borrowed dime and hand out cash to friends.

Think of it this way. The claim was that putting the logo of the province on a footie jersey from a third tier team would give all this exposure. It’s a marketing con.

Imagine it in reverse. Pretend the Growlers or the Baby Leafs are still on the go. Local companies buy advertising so they can get the local fans of the local team. But Mike does not advertise Mike’s Chippy just off the high street on the Barrow FC jersey’s so that some wankers in Dubai might catch the game on satellite and think they could get a fine feed if they lived in Barrow. Maybe they'll move. Mike wants to get the punters staggering home in Barrow after a match or a pint or six to stagger into his shop for a feed on the way home.

Yet that Dubai angle is exactly what the folks who announced this Barrow thing told us was soooo great. Look at all the people who will see it. That’s the number a no-so-slick marketer will tell you to get you to buy what he’s pushing. He’ll hope you don’t know the real issue is not even the number who these days click a link - most do it out of idle curiosity - but the ones who go the step further than that and actually inquire. In order to do *that* a whole host of other triggers have to go off and without those triggers - we didn't buy those - this Barrow thing is a wank except for the folks making money off it.

Whatever it is, Barrow is not about immigration. Most likely it is about footie - soccer as it is known locally - and if you follow *that* little thread you might find out who in cabinet has kids into soccer big-time and whose friends are into soccer big-time and then start connecting up the dots. No great criminal conspiracy. Just an old-fashioned bit of entitlement and pork.

The numbers are too small, the excuses too lame and pathetic for it to be anything else. If this were serious bullscitte you’d be talking way bigger promises. Way more money. Much more grandiose claims. Ones so big people might actually tip over that point where something is so ludicrous that they start to doubt themselves and believe it is really magically wonderful after all because no one would think we are that stupid. And then once people are sucked in, they cannot walk away and admit they were the victims of some low-level grift, some half-assed con. Their egos stop them from backing away or they are actually making a buck off it so they wink and smile when anyone says the whole thing stinks. Think Trumpian, or closer to home, the forerunner of Trump. Proto-Trump Hisself and stuff like Muskrat Falls.

Proto-Trump, the Man with the Mullet, so in love with the sound of his own voice that the one who introduced us to Government by Fernando managed to get his face on CNN, Larry King Live, picking a fight with Paul McCartney about the seal hunt in between his fights with Ottawa about Equalization and joint management of the fishery and one thing and another. We have been in this government by plans, strategies, junkets, and newsers and debt and nothing else for 20 years now.

What do we have for all the selfies of one kind or another in public? People know we are not the Healthy Province. Not in any sense of the word. Financially. Socially. Politically. Healthily. They know the Liberals have added more debt than Muskrat to a public back already weighted to hear breaking with earlier scams and stupidity. That paying for that debt is now the second or third biggest government expense after health care. They know it takes three years to get an MRI up from two years before Furey and Parfrey and the Health Accord and the massive bloat at the upper end of NL Health that sucks up money we don’t have and gives nothing back.

Nothing that actually makes a good difference in the ordinary lives of ordinary people with the ordinary dreams we all share. The Ordinary hear Furey promise this or that new health thing that doesn’t exist and that can only start if they can find more people to do the work. The latest such thing is a special hip surgery unit, which Furey himself will have to work in because being Premier does not fill up his days apparently and we are chronically short of doctors. Maybe he should go back to the doctor thing full time. Might be an idea. Like the General in Heartbreak Ridge explaining to Major Powers he was better in supply but a clusterf$ck as an infantry leader. Stick to what you are good at, Andrew. Which is not being Premier. Just saying out loud what Ordinary People think when they see his mug on the TV again talking about health care. Maybe go do it full time again.

There is nothing wrong with being ordinary. We are all ordinary. A new Conservative Party commercial speaks to those ordinary people, the ones up before daylight to make our world work. It is a very good political ad with a very strong message. It speaks to people across Canada who feel left out. The real message of this ad is about what the Conservatives see and the Liberals look at in bewilderment.

As it is above in the firmament of federal politics, so too is it below in the aptly-named provincial politics of Newfoundland and Labrador. The difference is that in the provincial politics of Dannystan it is not one party that has ignored these simple truths but all parties, which is why they are huddled together in the same small numbers in the polls, confused as to why the old ju-ju words have no magic left in them. Yet, they just recite them over and over under their breath anyway, gathering gloom around us all and pretending it is life.

After 20 years, the Ordinaries of Newfoundland and Labrador are looking for something other than more of the sound and fury. The sound of Furey. Or Ball or Davis or whoever. They are done with the brief candles. The average premier lasts not even a full four-year term these days. They’ve had their fill of walking shadows, who fret their sagging polls, bid us always be ready for a better tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and then are heard no more, off to a dusty political death on a board somewhere.

These Ordinaries do not want much. They just look for real well-being for themselves and their families and their neighbours. They want that feeling of community again, of belonging, of safety. These are the simple things simple people understood long before anyone with a raft of degrees and certificates plastered on their walls thought of calling them the social determinants of health and then pretended they had discovered fire.

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We are now more than six months beyond when some of you first heard of the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones as a better band name for the Health Accord. There are now two new people licking the cone as last Friday’s update on the Health Accord plan showed us. Since that February newser, Tom Osborne is gone as health minister and there are now two ministers - John Hogan and John Abbott - in his place. It takes two Johns to not do what Tom wasn’t doing, which is fixing health care. You can tell how little has changed by how little the news coverage was of this most recent update, whether via VOCM or the Telly, or simply by counting the number of ministers needed to tell you everything is fine but - as Hogan showed afterwards - not give simple information to show what better looks like. Regular readers will know this as we have already gone through this twice in the week, if not more often.

Andrew Furey told us on Monday that Well-Being was the value that guided all of government’s decisions. If that were true, we’d see some sign of it. There’d be proof so obvious it would knock you over if you had not noticed it before. Truth is, no matter how many ministers it takes to tell us about how well we are all being these days, there would never be enough of them making enough noise at an infinite number of newsers to drown out the reality that does stare us in the face every day. We look and we see even if they don’t do either. No one should forget though that come election day, reality will make its own dreadful noise.

As it is above, so below.

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