The Imaginarium of Doctor Preposterous
Enlightenment or self-gratrification?
Andrew Furey is a figment of someone else's imagination.
One of the little perks of being Premier is that you get hunting and fishing licences automatically as part of the job.
Yet, in the four years Andrew Furey has been able to get his moose, there’s never been a picture of him hunting or even a mention on his social media before now that suggested he knew the business end of a rifle let alone know that he revelled in the fall moose hunt.
Until this fall, that is, as he heads to an election and his political support beyond the Sin Jawns border let alone beyond the Overpass is nothing to get excited about, d’ere’s da b’y what killed the moose. On Facebook, too. And only Facebook. Not X/Twitter on either of his accounts. Not on Instagram, either, which is tied to Facebook.
Just on Facebook. The only social media platform the nans and pops of Newfoundland and Labrador know as the way to stay in touch with the grandkids on the Mainland.
Andrew Furey.
Just one of da b’ys.
And then a couple of weeks later a video of Andrew lugging a Coleman’s cooler into a local charity to give some of the meat away to the Single Parents Association. There’s even a music bed of Deck the Halls played on guitar so it sounds Newfie.
It’s like the picture of Andrew and da missus and da girls at the recent Taylor Swift concerts in Toronto - the guy spends serious time at the gym, obviously - or the picture of Furey with the puppet from NL Now along with the bizarre combination of books stacked on the otherwise clean desk in the front of them or the pictures of Furey meeting with the backs of people’s heads to talk about tariffs or just about any other picture on his social media not just the past five years but forever.
It’s all posed.
Calculated.
About the image, the illusion, the message, the con.
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The House of Assembly closed last week after a very short sitting in which they got very little real work done. There were plenty of examples of how shagged up they are, though, right down to the questions put to public safety minister Bernie Davis about changes to the elections law promised almost four years ago but since disappeared. Now to be honest, these were really questions for the government House leader and its chief legal advisor, one John Hogan, but for some reason folks went to Davis for answers. Gonna consider the results of the consultation and get back to you on that, said Davis, or words to that effect.
The consultations were so long ago that no one could remember when they were done. Not sure Davis could either, just like he had no idea what happened to the $150 million shifted from Ottawa to Sin Jawns to build a new prison. The money has disappeared in the meantime, likely spent already, which is why no one in the guv’mint bothered to tell the rest of us about it until someone figured it out and asked Davis the question.
Davis tripped over himself trying to answer, the same way Hogan and public works minister Fred Hutton and finance minister Siobhan Coady alternated between chewing up the scenery with their grandstanding or fall over each other like the comic relief in a variety show over serious questions about squickie quickie deals done with local developers for land the government didn’t need to buy or cutting taxes or a massive scam like ArriveCan that health managers were running in Central.
The tax one was a classic like Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” is classic comedy. The Dippers used their private members motion day a couple or three Wednesday’s ago to debate the idea of removing the provincial and federal sales taxes from home heating fuel as a way to give people a break on the cost of living.
Tax cuts to deal with a cost of living problem are politically easy but financially stupid. They look easy, which is why politicians like them, but there are way better ways to help with the cost of living. And the cuts approach is especially stupid in a place where the population is rapidly ageing and we are already either on the cusp or already beyond the event horizon when there are more people in the dependent part of the population - that is, not working - than in the other bit, the people who pay the bulk of taxes.
I am confused, deputy Premier and finance minister Siobhan Coady told the House of Assembly during debate on the Dipper scheme. She was confused because the Dipper plan would help rich people more than poor people. But more importantly for our purposes, Coady said that “we cannot [remove the provincial portion of the tax] because it is under the federal excise tax.”
That's nonsense but Coady rattled off all the supposedly wonderful things her crowd are doing otherwise to help the poor people get along with this cost of living thing. Then, towards the end of her brief speech said that “putting a carte blanche tax decrease of removing the HST completely is really just giving a tax break to those that can well afford it, while not giving the supports that are really required to those that are most vulnerable.”
This is true, of course. Tax cuts like an HST cut help folks who don’t need it more than the people who do. Coady knows this just like the Dippers do. They all know it is idiotic for just that reason but it never stopped them from backing the scheme to freeze tuition at the local university. One hundred percent a wealth transfer to the middle class and nothing to do with helping da eggheads from poor families.
We know this because despite 20 years of freeze, the University of Canada in Sin Jawns has one of the lowest enrolments of people from low and fixed incomes despite frozen tuition. And it’s been a wealth transfer to not only local middle and upper middle class but also gangs of them from Nova Scotia and China and Africa and what have you. Da university is still cheaper to the out-of-towners than the alternatives in Canada, which is why they come here in droves and would still be coming here if the feds hadn’t slashed the foreign visa program that propped up the scam.
The university now has a money problem and so has decided to freeze hiring of all the people who do actual work. Not turf or slash any of the incredible number of vice presidents of this or that all at inflated pay and all from the Mainland. No. In fact, this past week, we learned from AllNL that the president - filling in after the Board of Regents quietly got rid of his wild-spending, rule-abusing, entitled apparent fraud with full pay and perks and with no consequences for *anyone* involved in that fiasco - well the fill-in just created a job for a buddy of his and hired him as a *new* very expensive overseas vice president based in London and all of it without any job competition of any kind.
The story originated with Matt Barter who’d been trying to get the contract under the provincial access laws. The university screwed him, just like they screwed with him while he was an undergraduate who challenged the fiasco of a president who left quietly, her pockets full so that we now have this fill-in guy. Barter appealed to the privacy commissioner, who sided with him.
But don’t count on that happening again. One of the last things that happened in the House last week was a government motion to appoint a new privacy commissioner to fill the vacancy left by a resignation. The new commissioner is a lawyer, sister-in-law of the former health minister Tom Osbirne - the guy now managing the local milk marketing board - and herself an employee before now of the same health authority that had a raft of managers and other senior officials run a scam involving 51 illegal contracts between managers at the health authority and the health authority itself for rental properties. No one will ever be held to account, least of all the officials like the finance officers and possibly legal counsel who signed off on the contracts and paid them for God knows how long until someone blew the whistle about them to - you guessed it - Tom Osborne while he was still health minister.
This contracts scam is new but the kind of corruption it shows is not. Nor is it new for government folks caught in one bad act or another to escape any consequences. Just shy of 20 years ago, the health authority killed a few hundred people through blind incompetence and the only one who suffered was a lab manager who got the boot the day after he testified at a public inquiry into the scandal. Some of the folks involved in that scandal left the health authority on their own accord and recently got hired back into higher-paying jobs doing the same work.
Same as Muskrat Falls, where everyone involved in the monumental fiasco walked off with bonuses intact. Somr of the little darlings managed to get themselves hove off into a new oil and gas corporation to protect their bloated bonuses from the chop that came to the others who stayed behind. The *new* oil and gas corporation does not do very much other than contract their old employer to manage the oil and gas assets the new corporation nominally owns but cannot actually take with them because they are used to finance Muskrat Falls.
Then there’s education. Not so long ago the Auditor General uncovered flagrant negligence, corruption, and fraud at the English school district involving dozens of people inside and outside government and millions in stolen money, equipment, and just flat out waste. Three and a half years later, the school district had been slow to act on the worst of the abuses and the police had not laid charges of any kind despite some fairly obvious skeety goings on. We are now two years beyond that update and no one has spent a minute in court facing charges over an audit that only covered a sample of $20 million in procurement between 2011 and 2016.
Back to Coady and taxes.
So yes, she’s right about the stunnedness of tax cuts but what was especially laughable about her speech in November was that the Furey crowd are proud of cutting taxes on gasoline to help people with the cost of living. And not three weeks after those words about stunnedness and cuts being legally impossible left Coady’s lips, she and Andrew Furey were proudly joining a federal Liberal tax-cut scheme that has been rightly getting shat on from ever greater heights for being stunned. By the way, Coady was the energy minister who created the second oil and gas corporation, too.
"We were one of the first out of the gate to mirror the federal government's changes with respect to the GST on certain items over the holiday season," Furey told CBC for the obligatory end-of-sitting story for a legislative session that is now two years old.
“Affordability remains a top of mind for us,” Furey said with no sense of concern for the rampant scams and skeetishness he's done nothing to stop.
According to the CBC story, “Furey highlighted $10-a-day child care and the GST/HST tax break set to start on Dec. 15 — two programs aligned with Trudeau government policies. ... Looking ahead to the New Year and an upcoming provincial election, Furey said, residents of Newfoundland and Labrador can start to see the changes the province is making.”
"I know that the job is not done, but we do have a plan, and we are enacting it," he said, without explaining what job he meant was still not finished.
Furey’s been saying that for four years now. Got a plan. Sure, and Donald Trump has the concepts of a plan. Thing is, there’s no sign of it. Furey’s been in office since August 2020. The current sitting of the legislature started in 2022. Furey set a panel of experts to give him advice about fixing the government’s financial problems. He ignored their advice. He promised election reform but that died before the current sitting started. Still no sign of it. Furey also promised a new balanced budget law. Talked about since October 2022, there’s no sign of it, either.
There’s also no sign of - in sequential order - the
Management of Information (Amendment) Act and House of Assembly Accountability, Integrity and Administration (Amendment) Act,
Bill 45, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 2015 (Amdt.) from March 4, 2024', and the curiously sequenced
Bill 46 Water Resources Act (Amdt.) from five months earlier,
the supposedly important Proceedings Against the Crown Act (Amdt.),
the likely controversial Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Newfoundland and Labrador Act (Amdt.),
and four bills introduced at the end of the very short fall 2024 sitting knowing there'd be no time to finish them:
United Church of Canada Act (Amdt.),
Revenue Administration Act (Amdt.) No. 6,
Law Enforcement Oversight Commission Act, and lastly,
House of Assembly Accountability, Intregity [sic] and Administration Act (Amdt.) No. 2
A government with a plan does not leave legislation laying about. Nor does a government with a clue promise their most important bills - the election reform law was promised as Bill Number 1 after the Furey fiasco election of 2021 during the pandemic - and then abandon them. The balanced budget law is even funnier because it dates from the same post-election sitting as the election reform bill that never was. The Furey crowd actually re-upped the balanced budget bill only to let it sit untended for two years now.
Furey’s proud of the 10 buck a day daycare but it isn’t his. It’s federal, just like his housing actions are federal and the tax cut is federal. Almost everything he does is federal.
Well, except for the scheme involving a hotel owned by a Liberal backer that the government paid almost $30 million to rent for three years - not including salaries of new staff and related expenses - as part of the magic solution to a mental health and addictions crisis and that sits now half empty all the time.
When we say these ideas like the 10 buck daycare are federal, it’s because both the idea and the money for it came from Ottawa. They show us the provincial government has no ideas on these important issues and no plans to deal with them even though they are 100% provincial and should be 100% part of any plan to develop the province sensibly. Any government that had a plan wouldn’t wait for the feds to cough up the ideas and the cash. There is no Furey plan for anything except more selfies.
What’s worse, the feds are notorious for starting a project, pouring cash in, building up expectations, and then hauling ass out of it so the province is left holding the bag. Furey's been big on this stuff even though we know collectively from bitter experience how stunned it is to get wrapped up in these familiar federal schemes and scams.
Like the crowd before them, the current crowd running this place has no plan. None. Not for enlightenment and progress for themselves or the province as a whole and actually not even for much else given the self-gratification that comes from these little Furey ego-strokes seems to be spasmodic. Reactive.
These little brain farts don’t seriously change the risk the Liberals face of losing the upcoming election, just as their lack of a plan almost cost them two previous elections. Lots may happen in the meantime that could change whatever direction everything is headed now or - to be more accurate - like a lot of Liberals *think* it is headed.
Look at the Russians in Syria. Most would have guessed a short time ago the war would continue to bog everyone down but few of us who aren’t watching events closely would have thought the Assad forces in Syria would collapse. Not just collapse but evaporate in a week. Same thing here for Furey's fortunes or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Things can go sour quickly. The Syrian or Russian kleptocracy is really not all that different from what happens in Newfoundland and Labrador if you think about. We're just small time.
All of that should make the election in 2025 way more interesting than you might expect. The Imaginarium of Doctor Preposterous should keep our social media full of stuff to giggle about in the meantime.
Does anyone take that stuff seriously besides the people posing for it?
Does anyone still believe Furey has a plan that isn't his own escape route to the Mainland after the next election?
Looking forward to your parsing of today’s announcement. I truly hope this is not just another monorail a la The Simpsons