The Fly-Overs

The Politics of Class

The social, political, and economic problems we face in Newfoundland and Labrador are directly connected to our dysfunctional social and political culture.

The Gathering Place is one of those wonderful marketing labels that masks what is really going on.

Sounds rather sweet and friendly. Certainly helps get people to open their wallets to keep the thing running. The fancier term for it might be bucolic, as in the tranquility of country life.

Nothing tranquil one day this summer as carloads of police showed up to deal yet again with someone coping with a very serious addiction problem. Stopped traffic long enough that people could get out their phones and take pictures.

The police are in a hard spot. They wind up dealing with people’s health problems, stuff that should have been dealt with by someone else long before they wind up on the streets downtown in any city or town across Newfoundland and Labrador. And it is literally everywhere.

Advocates, as they call themselves, call it homelessness. That’s just another marketing word. None of this is about people without a place to live. It almost always involves - that is, with very, very few exceptions - people with mental health issues or addictions or some combination of the two. People taking a cot at the Gathering Place or one of the other shelters around town may have a place to live but wind up there because they’ve been thrown out (due to their addictions or mental health issues) or are just on a bender and need a quick place to squat.

People call the police. Sometimes, things are so bad they come and arrest someone. Many times, the police do not send out an officer. They are short-staffed for one thing. For another, they know that even though the caller has just had someone walk into their home uninvited only to leave again or has people in their backyard or a neighbouring alley shooting up, turning tricks for cash, or taking a dump, showing up sucks up officers to no good end. Either the people will be gone by the time the car gets there or they’ll be kicked back on the street within a day because our courts aren’t any better able to deal with these issues than the police.

Last summer, it was a downtown problem in St. John’s. This year, it is everywhere. There are attacks. The police do not have the officers to put on patrols of parks or even downtown streets like Water Street. The City and downtown businesses are forced to hire private companies to give people concerned for their safety some comfort.

Usually, the politicians like Danny Breen just smile and say nothing. This year is an election year so Breen says his city has a drug problem. City officials are working with the police on a “security plan” and that the Council will hire private companies to patrol city parks and the downtown because the police cannot. There is a lot of talk, most of it very quiet, and even now Breen could not bring himself to make this a public issue between the City and the provincial government that pays for the provincial police force.

People who call themselves advocates warn Breen that “security [needs to] have appropriate training to make sure that their policies and practices … [are] not targeting certain populations.” That’s another buzzword, like calling them “marginalized and vulnerable populations” that “often can get targeted” as if their behaviour was not the reason people want police or private security or someone to do something that will make them feel safe and bring some comfort to the addicted or ill.

At least Breen now calls the problem what it is - a mental health and addictions crisis - rather than what it isn’t. It is a provincial problem and the provincial government’s chronic failure to deal with it has only made the problems worse. Doesn’t matter if we are talking about Corner Brook and its unaffordable “affordable” homes built by a government that just shrugs about it or the downtown of Sin Jawns, overrun with people coping with addictions and mental health problems, you just get political indifference.

These issues affect people without any political clout, namely the addicted and the ill, and those without enough political clout, namely the ones in whose neighbourhoods the addicted and ill are doing drugs, urinating and defecating, or doing blowjobs in laneways for cash to start the trick-turd-trashed cycle all over again.

An unidentified person cops a squat in Bannerman Park in broad daylight. That was last year. This year, you can see the same thing happening on Kenmount Road and other parts of the City.

That is the problem. That and the politicians. Tuesday morning. Another city councillor from Sin Jawns, this one not even a year on the job and a lawyer who promotes himself as an advocate for others, doing the Bullshit Barbie routine on CBC Radio. Interviewer reads scripted questions to let Ward 3 councilor Greg Noseworthy read his script written by the City’s thought-lacking police, that is the uncommunication crew, about mental health and addictions in town.

Lots of hollow words: collaboration. Reach out. Finish with the drivel that by collaborating, everyone can prosper. Along the way, a bit of blame shifting. People don’t call the police any more, Noseworthy says. They go to social media, instead. This is a problem because then the police do not know what is going on.

Bullshit, Barbie. The police know what is going on. Noseworthy knows, too. People don’t call because the police will not do anything, cannot do anything. All that those calls would bring for most cases is a stat in the cops’ annual report for crimes reported but about which the cops did nothing. Last year, Bernie Davis, ex-townie councillor and ex-justice minister tried this same Bullshit Barbie line on when the news was about Goose Bay, its never-ending problem with people in the woods, and some guy with a history of addictions had apparently set fire to a local club bar. Made no sense then. Makes less sense now.

Seriously. That was the script. Tells you all you need to know about Noseworthy and the people who wrote his lines. The word is not bullshit. It is contempt. Contempt for the voters. Contempt for the people who call police only to get no response from the cops. Meanwhile, the downtown is hollowing out of businesses and people. Graffiti is just an outward and visible sign of a much deeper economic and social disgrace as plain as CBC’s and Noseworthy’s scripts were pathetic. The mostly downtown people but now all over town people, that is the homeowners, business owners, workers, the addicts and the mentally ill, all need action. They need real advocacy but Noseworthy, Breen, the whole Council, the whole provincial government, the advocacy crowd, have nothing.

Meanwhile, the police are chronically understaffed. Not only is there major criminal activity within a block or two of the main police station but this year, the police are so short of staff they cannot police the down pedestrian mall where panhandlers and others are causing a security problem. That is, people don’t feel safe. There’s also a problem with security in city parks caused by the same people - there’s been at least one attack reported - and in both cases downtown business owners and the City have to hire private muscle to fill in for the cops. Councilors like Noseworthy or Mayor Danny Breen don’t talk about that as a problem, as a concern. They just smile, read a script, and move along.

Even as the mental health and addiction problems spread outside of the downtown, the political and bureaucratic response - which is a class-rooted response - is to suppress reality. And if a problem breaks through the layers of denial - like the camp set up around Colonial Building - the political and bureaucratic response, with the collaboration of people calling themselves “advocates” is to shuffle the whole thing out of sight of cameras. The way the politicians and bureaucrats (including advocates) managed that one away fits a wider pattern: the politicians gave money to a major party supporter to create a transition shelter well away from the problem-location. They hired one of the advocates who later tried to get the nomination for the In Party, while the party supporter offloaded the hotel to a new buyer, the hotel no doubt made more valuable by a three year government contract. Meanwhile, it still isn’t running at capacity.

Even the police fit into this general pattern of neglect, since they are outside the very small circle of government issues - health, education, and energy - that take the majority of the budget, that is to say that reflect bureaucratic and political priorities. Public safety should be a core job for government but yet another Auditor General’s report has found the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary is a symptom of a much deeper problem in our provincial government. In 2006, the Auditor General found:

• “The firearms and ammunition inventory system is not accurate because not all required adjustments, including additions, dispositions or internal re-assignments of firearms and ammunition, are made on a timely basis.”

• “Information identified during our review and from inspections performed by the RNC indicated a total of 221 infractions [of the RNC firearms policy] for the period November 2004 to November 2006. Furthermore, we found that not all infractions are being referred to the RNC's Professional Standards Section for investigation as required.”

• “The required monthly inspections of firearms storage lockers were not always performed.”

• The RNC did not complete twice-yearly inspections of personnel and equipment as required by policy.

• Use-of-force “Training [was] not being completed as required and [the training] database not accurate.” The AG found that “The RNC is not complying with its policy for use of force training. For example, a total of 173 members as of 31 December 2005 and 121 members as of 8 November 2006 had not re-qualified in the use of firearms in the required one year time frame.”

• The Use of Force Review Board had not met for four years despite there being *at least* 141 incidents involving a use of force that were supposed to be reviewed by the board.

Two decades later things are no better. The 2025 review found chronic failures involving equipment inventories, “use-of-force” equipment security, and training. That included these results:

• “The RNC had never counted the Explosive and Disposal Unit’s use of force inventory, even though required by policy.”

• “There was no quartermaster inventory tracking performed in the Corner Brook region for our entire audit scope period. All inventory information obtained from this region was manually created for this audit.”

• “The RNC did not have a comprehensive list of all mandatory trainings.”

• “Policies and procedures that pertained to mandatory trainings lacked detail and clarity.”

• “The RNC did not provide all training mandated by its policies.”

• “Nine (15 per cent) trainings had not been offered at all during our audit scope period.”

• “The RNC did not always offer trainings at the frequency outlined in policy. “

• “Thirty-six of 38 (95 per cent) employees sampled were missing at least one mandatory training over our audit scope period.”

• “For officers, the number of mandatory trainings required to complete ranged from nine to 29, with officers missing anywhere from one to 13 mandatory trainings.”

• “For civilian employees, the number of mandatory trainings required to complete ranged from four to six, with them missing anywhere from one to five trainings over our two-year audit scope period.”

• “For the 11 use of force trainings, we found an average non-completion rate of 28 per cent, and an additional 15 per cent could not be verified due to missing documentation.”

• “One officer operating in the Explosives Disposal Unit had expired Police Explosive Technician credentials. We were also not provided evidence of Police Explosive Technician Assistant training for that employee.”

• “Only one of two (50 per cent) officers of the Tactics and Rescue Unit in our sample had completed the required training in the use of chemical agents.”

• “Twenty-seven per cent of the Tactics and Rescue Unit and Explosives Disposal Unit did not attend all mandated monthly two-day and bi-annual four-day training sessions during the audit scope period.”

In the United States, people talk about fly-over states. The country is dominated by issues and people on the east and west coasts. Everything in the middle is the bits of the country the people from the east and west coast fly over on their way from one to the other. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the fly-over would be everything west of Costco. Unimportant. Townies fly to Europe cheap with government cash but Labradorians pay out-of-pocket and even the government’s Labrador fare subsidy is promised but not delivered years later than the Townie bonus. Same as the hospital in Corner Brook. Took almost 20 years to build and even then cannot provide basic services despite needs and demand being well known inside the bureaucracy over the past 20 years.

Even within the government’s Top Three - health care, education, and energy - there is a pecking order. Old people and mental health are not important. They are underfunded, chronically. That’s how you get a new acute and chronic care complex in Corner Brook that cannot deal with known chronic care need. In Sin Jawns, the Premier put replacing his workplace (St. Clare’s) ahead of all other priorities for the department and, to make sure the importance of power, privilege and class bought land from a politically-connected business family *and* increased the value of their adjacent land even though the government had more than enough land nearby for the hospital and more besides.

All of this is about politics and how we as a community set priorities. That’s what politics is: the authoritative allocation of values. It’s how we decide what’s important. In any part of the world, there are infinite demands and finite resources. Politics is the way people collectively decide what demands get what share of the resources.

We think we live in a democracy. In democratic government in a democratic society, people talk openly about what affects them all. They get involved in politics to raise issues and work together on solutions. People known what is happening and they are connected as a community.

If you think about Newfoundland and Labrador between 1972 and 2003, that’s the way things generally were. Not perfect. Not ideal but close. And in that time, the shortage of resources - mostly money - to deal with problems made it hugely important people acted together to decide what was important and what money to spend on it. In this sort of politics, there is open competition for power and a continuous political discussion about common priorities.

What makes that period stand out all the more is the difference in what went before it and the way things are today. In 1949, Newfoundlander sand Labradorians regained self-government but three things affected what politics looked like. First, there were huge demands and while there was some potential discussion about what to do next, there was a pressing need to get on with modernizing. Second, there’d be a 15 year absence of any open politics during the Commission and for the decades before the Commission Government, politics was not the most democratic either. Third, the government had cash from Ottawa and people had cash from Ottawa that Joe Smallwood and the Liberals controlled or could claim credit for. That allowed one party and really just one man to dominate all through the period of great social and economic upheaval.

Once the novelty wore off and people started to think of new ways and new ideas, we started doing politics very differently. Lots more open discussion with lots of reform within political parties after 1972. Lots of public talk about public issues. And, perhaps because the money was tight, lots of discussion about how we’d keep things together in the meantime while we worked towards the common goal of being a wealthy and prosperous place. There was a political consensus about the goal - becoming a prosperous, “have” province - but different ideas about how to get there.

What has happened after 2003 superficially looks like the Smallwood era but both the similarities and differences are important:

• Difference: there had been a period of competitive politics for 30 years.

• Similarity: huge source of government revenue from an external source (oil).

• Difference: that external money also produced wealth in the economy and society and displaced other economic activity (fishing, forestry, mining)

• Similarity: an egocentric political leader with cash to buy silence and at the same time suppress alternate ideas (called “dissent” or likened to treason.)

• Difference: large bureaucracy better able to consolidate its own power and expand to fill power gaps.

• Similarity: social and economic upheaval, this time caused by oil and the cod moratorium, coupled with the collapse of the religiously-influenced social order.

• Difference: In addition to the bureaucracy, large and well-entrenched public sector unions were able to fill political gaps on behalf of their members. In both cases these represented a middle and upper-middle class of managers who simply hadn’t existed before 1949.

The outmigration from the cod moratorium coupled with an aging population weakened the political power of rural Newfoundland and Labrador. At the same time, the end of denominational education signalled the last gasp of the old social order. Oil arrivals and not only shifts economic power more firmly to St. John’s but gives the government - now dominated by urban, middle/upper middle class interests including the bureaucracy - the power to buy off political competitors and start to eliminate open political competition, debate, public information and so on. All the ways that build consensus in normal democratic times, all the ways people identify problems and deal with them if not perfectly than in a way they can accept, all the ways people feel a sense of belonging to a shared community simply vanished. The In Party also silenced the Out Party with the Out Party’s consent and all three political parties oriented themselves to the new Townie-centric reality.

Only in Newfoundland and Labrador after 2003 could the heads of public sector union tell the ordinary taxpayers of the province that how government spent its money was none of their business. That was Jerry Earle about contract talks and it was absolutely Jim Dinn, then the teachers union boss and now Dipper leader, who launched a lawsuit against the public’s right to information under the access to information law.

Only in Newfoundland and Labrador after 2003 could all three political parties support a megaproject despite all the problems and weaknesses clear *from the outset* and a mere 15 years later have three political parties effectively do the same thing again with an even bigger and more obviously bad deal.

Only in Newfoundland and Labrador after 2003 could we have widespread addictions and mental health problems in our streets, right down to people flinging themselves off a parking garage into a Sunday afternoon crowd and bureaucrats claim that reporting facts would only encourage more. The argument seems self-serving since people intent on committing suicide don’t need a news story about people killing themsevles to get the idea. It does, however, protect the people responsible for helping those with mental health and addictions issues who cannot apparently do so.

The widespread social and political problems in Newfoundland and Labrador that aren’t caused by the political dysfunction of the last 20 years are certainly made worse by them. Not talking about them at all - essentially flying over them to get somewhere else - is not just a clever metaphor, it describes exactly what our community leaders do. They do it literally and figuratively.

There are elections this fall for new municipal governments and for a new members of the House of Assembly. But if all the people running are exactly the same as the people who are there now, there’s no reason to expect any change for the better. Unless, that is, the rest of us demand far better than what we have been getting. After all, if the government could abandon its tax grab on low-alcohol content beer with a simple pushback from a couple of people, imagine what would happen if even half the voters at every door step this fall told all the politicians mouthing the same scripts as all the others, they wouldn’t be voting for them.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a thing, though, so don’t hold your breath.

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Postscript: This column was written before the election call. For someone reason long since forgotten, I took it out of the line-up.

When I was writing about Andrea Barbour, I remembered the fly-over line, found it, and pilfered a couple of paragraphs because they fit. On umpteeth reading, especially long after writing it, the piece actually has whatever I felt it lacked. The Barbour piece was more personal. This one links a bunch of things into a pattern.

Here is the whole piece, as originally finished, with a couple of minor editorial tweaks. The election result, completely with a new administration makes this piece still relevant in hindsight since the issues remain. And the Liberal reaction to Andrea Barbour right down to slagging me off personally for supporting her just shows how the unfathomable shallowness of the modern style of partisan has rbought our province to the brink of ruin.

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