The 2025 Tied Election

If we don't stop, we'll be worse than blind.

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador a quarter of a way into the 21st century will be remembered for the tied election that year.

No.

Not Terra Nova - The Peninsulas, when the bumbling political reporting at CBC declared Anthony Germain the winner minutes after the lawyers on both sides gave their clients the actual result from the judicial recount, namely that Conservative Jonathan Rowe was the new member of Parliament for the riding.

The original winner, Germain overcame a late start, the wreckage left by the negligent Liberal predecessor in the seat, and pettiness on one of the peninsulas to win a hot race by just enough votes to trigger an automatic judicial recount. He worked hard as did the team Germain cobbled together around him. He deserved to win.

The new winner - Jonathan Rowe - won the old-fashioned way, too. He out-hustled everyone else. Out-organized them. He frightened the crap out of Darin Luther King for the nomination such that King announced and then bailed right away. Rowe kept fighting and fighting. He deserved to win.

There can only be one winner in a riding and either way the people in Terra Nova - The Peninsulas would have gotten a solid representative with strong character to speak for them in Ottawa. People talk about the end result being exactly the same gap of 12 votes but flipped around. They talk as if that were suspicious. Rowe’s victory comes after a recount run by a judge who applied the rules and the precedent to review over a thousand ballots one party or the other disputed.

In the end, the total for either candidate doesn’t matter so much as that when counted carefully the first time by people who worked hard to get it right and both could accept it and when counted just as carefully the second time by people committed to get it right, watched over by a judge this time, they come up with a result both could respect. That’s democracy in action.

Now Rowe joins a caucus of three Conservatives from Newfoundland, something unseen in almost 20 years, just as the idea of the Liberals dominating the east of the island federally has not been true for even longer. In Labrador,m an exceptional candidate eked out a small Liberal win. It doesn’t bode well for the Grits in the Big Land.

But none of that is the election that will make the year memorable in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Terra Nova was close, dramatic, agonising, but decisive.

The one for memory will not be so clear.

The one for history has not happened yet.

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The historic election will happen in the fall.

Or maybe the winter, which is as long as the Liberals can put it off but it off they will.

Someone in the Brain Trust either misunderstood the election law or said they did so they could avoid an election as long as possible. The Liberals are in serious political trouble. Don;t be fooled. They are directionless, with lousy political instincts or much else that matters except cash. The election was supposed to be last year, either by the real calculation, the cold political one of best advantage to the governing crowd, or by by anyone who actually read and understood the words from Danny Williams’ time, which is more than anyone could say for the drooler who pushed for it and the others wrote it down.

The fixed election foolishness is Danny Williams’ legacy as Premier, a model of his tenure repeated over and over, just as all who came afterward have been copies of his contempt for democracy and his unnaturally strong love of only himself but nothing more, just paler and paler copies. Andrew Furey’s is a more naked contempt for democracy, shown by his empty seat, occupied in the House by Lucy Stoyles purse. Let the empty chair be the symbol of his thankfully brief time as Premier since he produced nothing. The empty purse is his legacy. Three billion in deficit this year, no world financial meltdown to cause it as before.

This time the cupboard is bare by Furey’s choice. Furey and the crowd behind him. “You can hate me all you want, but someone has to deal with this,” Furey said about the province’s financial problems and the very sensible recipe from Moya Green’s crowd Furey had in his hands to guide him. Then he tossed the report away and made everything worse. Furey’s own BS Barbie even tweeted that this “is exactly why I left a job and coworkers I loved - because it's not about politics or background, it's about the province we love and the opportunities ahead.” By their actions Furey and his Brain Trust meant opportunities for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. They did nothing else.

The crowd Furey left behind him will stagger along for a few more months, behind a different Image posing as Premier. With this loss in The Peninsulas, they cannot ignore that everything from Conception Bay westward, the foundation of their 2015 win, is now solidly Blue. Any Liberal sitting in the House with a pension already vested will likely not run again, which is almost all of caucus and John Hogan’s bloated Cabinet. There will be candidates to replace the ones following Furey out the door but a crowd that could not find decent candidates when they were strong and the other parties almost non-existent will likely have to go back to threatening staffers to flesh out a slate, like they did in opposition in the depths of the Danny years. Seances are not out of the question.

The Liberals’ political epitaph is a section of Confederation 75th Anniversary Recognition Act passed last year and - unlike the supposedly more important Fair Registration Practices Act, which is still not law two and a half years later - put into force right away. It is a Steve-Kentish bit of self-excitement if ever there was one, which is fitting since Steve Kent is the buffoon who twigged the rest of us to what the Furey-ious Fappers had done.

Anyone in the Cabinet when the Confederation 75 Act became law and anyone who is in Cabinet after will be able to call themselves “Honorable” until they drop dead and put the letters ECNL - for Executive Council of Newfoundland and Labrador - after their name. The law says they will be honorary members of the Executive Council, which is nonsense legally and constitutionally, once they leave office but (quite obviously) with none of the powers, rights, or privileges of a member of Council except to call themselves by a name to which they are not entitled.

Let us be clear: anyone who does this is a self-interested waste of space with no regard for anything and anyone but themselves. It is Donald Trumpian ego gone wild. To be even more clear, no one has to call Jamie Korab the Honorable anything next year, after the election when he is out of office and looking for a paycheque. There is no requirement that any of the rest of us call her the Honorable Pam Parsons, soon-to-be former minister of something or other.

The law simply allows them to call themselves that, which tells you it is all bullshit. Call themselves honorable, like self-spankin’ Steve Kent does on his LinkedIn profile and anywhere else he can whack, even though he has no legal right to do so even under this moronic Furey law. No one has stopped him and no one can stop him really since Furey and the other people in the House who showed up to give themselves this gift have trashed the offices they hold figuratively if not literally, in Furey’s case. Anything goes, there are no ethical standards, as Furey himself showed.

You see, we call the members of Cabinet “the Honorable” so-and-so because of the high office of government they hold for a very short time, not because of the person in it. Nothing of that highness rubs off on the person even if as many of their arses have rubbed the lustre from the office itself. They are Premier or Minister for a short time and then, when they are done, constitutionally and in every other sense, they become just another meatsack like the rest of us. The office carries on. The paths of glory lead but to the grave, and all that.

This is democracy as it should be. They hold the office - the job - in trust to the rest of us for the brief time they are there. Even before Confederation, before the end of self-government in 1933, no Newfoundland and Labrador Prime Minister or Cabinet minister carried around a title of office after they left it and someone else took the job.

The differences were politicians and others who had other titles that came with the privilege of honorifics, as they are called, that carried on for life. Robert Bond was sworn to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in 1902 and so held that office and honorific, the same as members of the Canadian Privy Council, until he died in 1927. Gerry Byrne is “the Honorable” for his time in the federal Cabinet because all federal Cabinet ministers are members of the Privy Council. Brian Peckford was sworn to the Privy Council as were all the Premiers in office when the Constitution came home in 1982. Others like Rick Cashin, were, like Peckford, never in a federal Cabinet but sworn to the Privy Council to recognize great service to the country.

This ECNL business is nothing of that sort. It is trash. Garbage. Provincial Premier foolish, not surprisingly pushed by no less a light than he of the embarrassing Washington fiascos Doug Ford. It cheapens the province as a whole and in Newfoundland and Labrador will inevitably be confused with the ECMA or some other East Coast this or that. But it is vintage Fureyite Liberals, from now on no longer called Grits but by the more fitting name of Fappers or Wankers.

The next election - fall of ‘25 or winter of ‘26 - will not likely end in a majority for either the Pea Seas or the Fappers. We will see a minority for one or the other party, barring some wild change. Since Confederation, minorities in Newfoundland and Labrador have been rare. The Fappers pulled one off in 2019 and the 2021 election was as close to a minority as anyone could get.

We aren’t likely to see that sort of thing this time since the Fappers are clearly on the decline and the Pea Seas are relatively stronger. The Blue Bunch have a raft of candidates already in place, the latest being Kristina Ennis to run in Sin Jawns West. She is like Rowe, which is to say determined and with organization behind her. Fappers will miss this, focusing instead on the fact that The Son of The Name who ran before and almost killed off Siobhan Coady is not running again. That Son has the disease of many entitled, in that he will not run if he has to work for it. Think Darin Luther King or any of the other Big Names who were supposed to run for the Conservatives but who never showed up simply because there would not be a coronation. First sign of sweat on anything but a wine glass or beer bottle and they are gone.

That said, the Pea Seas under Tony Wakeham are weaselly, soft, and indecisive, which is why they are not likely to win a majority. They had a couple of excellent chances handed to them just this month and fumbled both badly. They caught Siobhan Coady hiding a half billion in non-existent money and let her wriggle out of it. They never even mentioned the size of the real deficit, which is more than we used to spend on health alone. They could have used a line on Liberal budgets they’ve had in front of them for years - bungling, mismanagement, waste, and likely criminal action covered up by politicians and bureaucrats - and never developed the simple line that the Liberals are just wasting money. They are incompetent. Useless. Need to be tossed out.

Instead, Wakeham and his crew are so knee-knocking scared of any hint they might cut spending by a penny that they all avoid any talk of money unless it is to demand the government spend more of it that we don’t have. They protest a little about something and then, like the budget, vote for it.

Other than that they focus on trivia, like the sugar tax. Hogan and the Liberals easily stole whatever anger there was left in Wakeham’s relentless fight against the sugar tax no one really gave a toss about and just got rid of the tax. The line against it from the start was that it was a waste of time, ineffective, incompetent, and a dodge such that when the Liberals inevitably killed it off, Wakeham would still have something to talk about. Now he has nothing. Literally.

In politics, you need to make yourself different from the other parties. You need to line up with voters who already think like you and lure others who are persuadable. But Wakeham and the Pea Seas are doing what the Fappers did in 2015. They try to be just like the party in power because they think they are “popular.” They onl;y do enough to *seem* different. More of the same but not the same. Like the old Fapper line under Dwight Ball that the only thing wrong with Muskrat Falls was management, not that the thing was idiotic from the start. They liked all the pork in it so it was good to buy votes and just shoved off the rest to later. In the end, more of the same was no change at all and will be no change when Premier Tony Wakeham says something like we have to keep the Churchill Falls deal using the same lines the Fappers did.

That greyness, that indecision, that lack of any meaningful difference between the Fappers and the Pea Seas is why we could easily see another election like 1908 or 1971. People don’t like the wankers in office now but cannot see enough in the opposition jerk-offs to make a switch. The result will likely be a minority either way, with neither party able to form a government and find a Speaker all can agree on. They can stagger on like that for the better part of a year, only to collapse and send us back to the polls again in ‘26 or even early ‘27.

Meanwhile, the state of the world and the state of the country, let alone the state of the province made worse by yet another decade of political palmistry, would make the chronic political weakness in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 an even deadlier than normal risk to run. We do not need this sort of weakness, now more than ever. we should not be taking the chance we could win the insolvency lottery. There is so much public debt, so much overspending, waste, and naked fraud inside government that another economic downturn like ‘09, ‘13, ‘15, or ‘20 could finally wreck the place financially, as in the 1930s,but worse. The first two this century the politicians hid with oil cash but that cash was gone by 2015 and 2020 and so we felt it. One payroll day away from defaulting.

If we don;t change, if we don’t stop, we will be far worse than blind.

We are already that.

We’ll be dead as a self-governing people, for the second time in less than a century.

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