The Illusion of Meaningful Action

"It'll be years before anyone knows it's wrong."

There was a moment of clarity in the House of Assembly on Tuesday past.

Not for the politicians talking and shouting.

For me.

It was when Deputy Premier Siobhan Coady jumped to her feet as her cabinet colleague Fred Hutton struggled to crawl out of the crater made by the plan to buy a chunk of land of about 53 acres for $23 million when the government already owned 130 acres right next door to it. And it was getting worse because now in addition to a hospital, Hutton admitted the government was planning to put yet another sports complex on the same site. He had some thin rationalization about how people would want to go to the gym when they were healthy after being fixed up at the hospital.

That new sports/recreation thing is on top of the new rink complex going into Galway where, it should be noted, the guv’mint crowd were planning to put the hospital at one point. Something changed their mind after they’d done a deal with Danny Williams to improve road access to his Galway development from the highway even though part of the original deal was Williams would have to pay for it. And *that* is a rather curious coincidence given the government is now picking up the tab for a new water supply for the hospital, which will also make it much easier for the crowd Hutton is buying land from at a horrendously inflated price to develop the rest of their project at no cost to them. For the Hickmans, this is an amazing deal. For taxpayers, they get the Red Shaft in the fine tradition of Danny’s Blue Shaft at Muskrat Falls. We pay. Others get all the benefit.

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Back to Coady, who is also the finance minister overseeing this fiscal monstrosity.

“The location of the new hospital is incredibly important and we have to be very strategic,” said Coady. That’s because our “great-great-grandchildren” will be using this hospital more than a century from now, just like the hospital this one will replace is more than a century old. It isn’t, by the way. The oldest part of St. Clare’s still in use dates from the ‘50s and the newest part dates from 1973.

But anyway…

Coady used strategic or some version of the word three more times in the space of literally five or six sentences. She said strategy almost as often as Andrew Furey reminds people in speeches that he is a surgeon and with the same impact, which is to say none.

We have to be very, very smart about where this location is. It has to have appropriate infrastructure. It has to have appropriate access to this facility. It also has to be at the apex of multiple communities where the population is: Mount Pearl, St. John’s, and Paradise. It has to be very strategically located. It is unfortunate the Members opposite can’t be as strategic as this government is. [italics and bold added]

Call forth the Rule of Opposites.

If someone tells you something and does it as strenuously as Coady did - not just strategic but “very, very smart” as well - then the truth is the exact opposite.

At the time she was speaking I just thought she sounded like Elmer Fudd, sneaking up on the cagey financial Bugs Bunny and telling us all to be vewwy, vewy stwategic.

Funny if it is a cartoon. Not so funny when it is coming from one of the three most powerful of the Furey cabinet ministers and all of whom were flailing wildly of Tuesday afternoon in November.

T’wasn’t just Coady. Beleaguered Fred Hutton used the word “strategic” again a few minutes later, and claimed the Health Accord was a brilliant reaction to the pandemic. It wasn’t. The Accord was about something else, not getting over the pandemic and given that Hutton was taking pictures of Furey as Furey and Pat Parfrey cooked the thing up, Fred was obviously panicked badly enough on Tuesday to just spit out anything to get away from the torture.

Then a few seconds later, Coady was back, reminding everyone that “this government has been very strategic. We have a Health Accord that outlines exactly the way we’re going to develop health care in this province. I can tell you that many, many provinces in this country are now looking to what we’ve done because of the strategic view that we have taken.”

Danny Williams used to get on with the same foolishness although Old Twitchy Ego shot bigger for the bullscitte by claiming Barak Obama was copying whatever Danny was up to. Nothing was ever further from the truth than what wafted from between Danny boy’s lips half the time.

Coady carried on:

We had Sister Elizabeth Davis and Dr. Pat Parfrey go across this province. We all know that we require a hospital. We know that hospital is going to be around for 100 years. We have to be strategic. We have to be well-timed. We have to be thoughtful. I ask the Opposition to be that.

The evidence says something else, of course, which is why Hutton and Coady are desperately trying to convince us that what we see with our eyes - bungled announcements, information dribbling out willy-nilly, lies, corruption, half-truths, and nose scrunching nonsense, and on and on across a raft of topics - is the most brilliant thing the most brilliant person on the planet ever thought up.

It is not, of course. What we see is real. And it is all too familiar. Danny Williams and his bunch took power in 2003 with no plan for anything and struggled to get even the simplest of things done for a dozen years. To make themselves sound better than they looked, they started talking about strategies for this and that, instead. There was a whole throne speech about strategies and plans and plans for making strategies and strategies for planning.

“We are promised a Strategic Cultural Plan,” SRBP wrote in 2005, “an Energy Plan and an Innovation Plan (both strangely not Strategic), a Rural Development Strategy (which somehow avoided being branded a Strategic Rural Development Plan) and a Northern Strategic Plan exclusively for Labrador.”

There are to be other plans and planning for plans to the point where this government seems in need of an army of bureaucrats devoted solely to planning for the development of plans. This would surely be followed by creation of a new section that would integrate the planning for plan development, followed in turn by the inevitable creation of its cousin secretariat for integrating the actual plans developed by the other planning, planning development and planning integration secretariats.

None of them delivered anything except the illusion that there was some sense to all the nonsense. Oh. And record public debt with nothing else to show for it.

The thing about all these strategies is that they never have any concrete, measurable goals, no timelines for hitting the milestones, no description of the specific strengths, opportunities, weakness, and threats that have to be dealt with or exploited in the coming years. Nor is there ever any explanation how the specific actions (if there are any) relate to the strategic situation described by the list of strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. They are not plans. They are not strategies. They are just words smeared across the page the way toddlers empty their diapers on the walls.

A shrinking, aging population shifting from rural areas to a few major centres remains a well-known strategic weakness for the province more than 30 years after someone identified it cleary and a government took genuinely strategic action to deal with it. The reason is that every subsequent government abandoned the strategy because it was politically inconvenient in the short-term. Leaving people in small communities that are not economically or social sustainable is another huge weakness. Well known weakness.

Yet successive governments since 2003 three have done two things that make those two known weaknesses weakness even bigger problems. First, they made the economy more and more dependent on government spending of money we don’t have. Roughly a third of the economy is now made up of government spending and 40% of *that* comes from oil, federal hand-outs, and new debt. At least 20% of this year’s spending - the amount is likely higher given the mid-year forecast - is covered by new debt. And on top of *that* new debt, the same old people have to pay for the NALCOR and now NALCOR-lite boondoggle of the moment and all the boondoggles from before. Second, they deliberately left people where they are and avoided making any changes to municipal government or economic development to lessen the strategic threats posed by those weaknesses we know of as well as others.

And it’s not like the governments since 2003 didn’t know about it at the time. Government already had strategic forecasts and strategic plans going back to the 1980s and 1990s for the new crowd in 2003 to learn from. They ignored all of it. Even as she and her colleagues were saddling the aging, shrinking population with Muskrat Falls, and giving the benefits away free to others, Kathy Dunderdale actually spoke publicly about another strategic weakness for the province. Out of our small population, only a small portion of them bear most of the tax burden. And she could have easily added, most of them work for government one way or another with their salaries built on money we either don’t have or cannot rely on to be there next year. And despite knowing that, she persisted.

Yet Kathy and Danny and their successors in every mob that’s run the place since do the same things without change. Their thinking is short-term. The next election is always the goal, the only goal. Their planning horizon is this afternoon. The endless string of announcements, all without details or any kind and often without any internal coherence let alone a meaningful relationship to something else, create frenetic activity that is merely an illusion of meaningful action.

There are 60 or more Indian nurses recruited to work in St. John’s but there are no nursing vacancies in St. John’s so they sit and wait. The same day the rest of the province learned that, immigration minister Sarah Stoodley boasted to the House - in defence of one boondoggle or brain fart or another she’s wrapped up in - that even though no one has come here, officials of some federal or provincial government department or other (she was not clear at all about any details) have interviewed 100 people out of almost 900 in the United Kingdom who have in some unknown period of time expressed somehow an interest in coming to Newfoundland and Labrador to do something. It’s all apparently “overwhelming” for Stoodley. “Just swarms of people are interested in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

Stoodley’s breathlessness and the complete lack of any meaningful detail in her comments are in keeping with her own blunder a few days ago of mistaking total visits to a small government website with daily visits and pretending that a small spike on one day added up to anything meaningful. After all, even at its most optimistic tally of 55,000 visits over the 120 days the site had been live by the time Stoodley had her briefing note, the site had only 460 or so visits a day on average, with a one day peak of 9,303, which took place a week before Stoodley witnessed the trouncing her government’s favourite footie team by Chelsea. The team, not the hotel. And in all of it there is a sense of the illusion that seemingly frantic motion has some purposeful direction. It is more like the old joke: Jesus is coming. Look busy.

All the bluster is meant to fool the punters on the outside of government, which it likely does, but the real story is that it also fools the punters inside the government too. There are only punters in Newfoundland and Labrador. There is no one else. And yet, as in Kathy Dunderdale’s day, the crowd currently running the place tell the rest of us, including the opposition, that the guv’mint bunch are the only smart people, doing things brilliantly with lofty goals for generations to come. It is not so. It has never been so. And in their efforts to shut down debate and discussion, whether in the House or in Premier Andrew Furey’s Danny-esque anti-democratic whining about politics, Furey’s mob just helps ensure any other ideas than the nonsense they push never gets a voice let alone the thoughtful consideration they deserve. The attitude is very familiar though. They may be not quite so blunt or as baldly and unjustifiably arrogant as Danny and Kathy and that mob were, but it is just the same thing when Andy and Siobhan and their mob say things about the smartness of their actions and the implicit stupidity of those on the Other Side.

That’s the best they’ve got. When education minister Krista Howell, for example, calls poor, grandfatherly Dipper Jim Dinn “a jerk” for asking about violence in schools, she becomes a latter-day Charlene Johnson and raises the prospect - so far unproven, thankfully - that she too is Nicola Murray made flesh and, as with Johnson lacking the fictional Murray’s gravitas. Then there is Coady. Going after an opposition critic for something muttered and calling it sexism in the midst of Question Period is functionally the same as the witch-hunts and lynch mobs sent after Jim Bennett or Gerry Rogers. Like the daily noise of shouting and cheering and clapping and the flurry of furious but meaningless activity, it is a deliberate distraction.

Andrew Furey likes to reminds people that he is a surgeon.

He does it alot.

Not a traditional politician, he says. A surgeon.

And weirdly enough, none of the parts of his speeches in which he says this relate to the speech or even to a bigger point he’s making.

It’s tell. A sign. A marker. A clue to something else, just like the constant claims that the government is both “smart” and “strategic” is a sign. It tells us what they are most insecure about, the same way the proverbial drunk, staggering home after a night out and desperate not to walk into the lamp post, always heads smack into it.

Same as Furey reminding us he is a surgeon, not a politician of any sort, especially not a traditional one. That is obviously untrue when he offers a tax cut for a couple of months before a planned election, something he’d made fun of when others suggested it. That is exactly what a traditional politician does right down to the hypocrisy. The little scheme is straight out of Trump’s playbook, too, which is what Furey accused unnamed others of copying in his Bored of Trade speech.

There’s a bit more to it, though. For Furey, telling us he is an orthopedic surgeon reminds us he had no experience doing anything close to the job he now holds before he took the job four years ago. None. Like his predecessor Dwight Ball, someone who had a little experience in elected politics on taking office, Furey always wants to move any conversation back onto ground he is most familiar with. That is where he feels most secure. Think of the pandemic, a key moment for both and the way Furey is functionally the health minister, complete with his own deputy minister. But when he is talking of anything else, Furey goes fluffy and vague and prone to spout catch-phrases and jargon.

When Furey tells us he is a particular kind of surgeon, Furey also reminds us of how the years of training and work have shaped his personality and framed the way he thinks not just about his profession but generally. He is not used to genuine collaboration. He is not used to working with people who have more knowledge of more things than he does. He is not fond of debate especially on subjects he knows little about. His experience of work is transactional. Transient. One-and-done. He does not naturally think of the whole of anything, which is why he never talks about the way events and ideas interact. That would take a strategic bent. Same thing was true for Dwight Ball, the pharmacist, who loved rote and procedures to the point he often invented them as if it would be better to follow the checklist and crash the plane rather than be a pilot and actually fly the damn thing safely to the ground.

Furey’s a fan of buzzwords and the bumpf pushed by management gurus. They are out to make a buck, not enlighten. He fell for “nudging” for example. His talk of game-changing this or transformational that is about making it sound like he understands things at an expert level - Kathy Dunderdale used to talk about managing files or working a file - even if deep down he is not. This is insecurity. Leaders used to working with others who have more advanced but specific expertise do not need to puff and pose and remind you of their own expertise.

This fluffery and puffery is all part of the illusion.

Most of politics and government in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 is illusion. We have gone from Dannyland to NeverLand in so short a time.

But sometimes, as happened last Tuesday, you can see the Big Illusion and immediately see the illusion behind *that* for what it all is.

It would be unsettling had I not had the experience before.

If this is *your* first time, try not to be scared.

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