The chair of the university’s governing board who oversaw almost a decade of chronic wasteful spending and the hiring of Vianne Timmons was appointed to the Senate.
The former provost - the Dead Parrot of Graduate Studies, once - who was a key part of the university administration for much longer got the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador after she retired.
Timmons, too, walked away without penalty just like all the architects of Muskrat Falls, just like all the others at the university in the administration or anywhere else who got fatter paycheques, pensions, promotions, and perqs in exchange for their silent complicity or playing the flying monkey by telling rest of us that the boogie man did it.
Just like all the others across government and throughout society who profited from the waste and corruption and stupidity and kept their mouths shut after 2003 and who now are shocked, shocked, I tell you, in that Reynault way, hat cocked to one side, walking off into the fog of a Casablanca night with Rick to their next grift.
Like Richard LeBlanc’s report on the Falls, the Auditor General’s report on the university’s wasteful management merely documents what we already knew.
The AG’s report lists conclusions from the audit. But the sentences are not in the order of priority, of seriousness, which itself makes plain that the AG .
The Board of Regents does not have a decision-making and directing role in its relationship with the University's five entities, even though Memorial acknowledges it controls them.
A board is supposed to make decisions and direct.
That is its only job.
Literally.
Yet the unversity board failed at its only job.
And this is listed eight or nine items down on the list of conclusions in the AG’s report, behind all the things that flow from that basic failure. That is the only failure really but it is buried.
Talk about back foremost.
The Board of Regents is appointed almost entirely by the Cabinet, to which it is accountable under the Memorial University Act. None of the AG’s recommendations mentions Cabinet at all, either directly or indirectly. None.
As with LeBlanc and his blind-in-one-eye report, Denise Hanrahan deliberately ignores the responsibility of Cabinet both for the failings of the university and for fixing the mess. Thus, we can expect nothing to come of her recommendations. It will change nothing of what is happening, any more than LeBlanc’s report prevented Cabinet from again charging at windmills figurative and literal every day since he typed the last period on the last sentence.
Hanrahan’s report will get people excited about designer chocolates or the idea that the typical vice-president at the university made double what a government assistant deputy minister makes for doing the same sort of job. It’s a distraction. People pay attention to what they understand or can grasp and for whatever reason the AG now focuses or former AG in the House spending scandal focused on these symptoms of corruption rather than the disease itself. It might be deliberate. It might be that this sort of thing is all the AG understands or wants to get into.
In its own way, this behaviour is part of the challenge of getting at the corruption that has taken such deep root in local society and politics since 2003. Well, it’s actually not a challenge so much since few really want to root out the corruption because it brings them benefits. Or getting rid of it brings them pain from all those who benefit more.
Don't get hung up on the money. The go-along-to-get-along attitude includes the naked endorsement of racism, colonialism, and bigotry whether it comes from the political left these days or from the political elites within the past 20 years in rants about “outsiders”, the need to boost the population with homing pigeons, or belief in the Great Laurentian Conspiracy, itself merely a cover for another form of political and social corruption.
Editors can rationalise with the best of them and get as performatively indignant as a university professor when someone points out that they are elites in the local society and the claptrap they are pushing is not at all revolutionary so much as it conforms with the interests they would have themselves and us believe they oppose.
They all cock their hats the same way as they walk off in the fog together not along the tarmac of a Casablanca airport but of the Parkway all the way to the Confederation Building.