Sugar Tax and Shingrix

The Big Ideas of Our Small-Time Place

Each year since Andrew Furey became Premier, the Liberals have promised to control spending and balance the books, just as they’d done each year since 2016. Each year they didn’t. Not an accident. Image: Desjardins Economic Studies

Sanewashing may well become the new word for 2025.

You see it everywhere as Trump’s own people, his enablers, his supporters, and pundits tell you that what is happening right now is the result of some otherworldly genius, some mystical unknowable superpower, some plan and purpose rather than admit it is the chaos brought on by Joffrey from Game of Thrones if Emma Peel hadn’t dropped the pellet with the poison in his vessel with the pestle.

What the Trump onlookers do is sanewashing. Sanewashing is gaslighting but slightly different. The sanewasher lives in a make-believe world but a sanewasher is not a liar. Gaslighters are liars. They know the truth but say all of part of something that isn't true.

In last week’s budget, the politicians and bureaucrats behind it were liars. They know what they say is not true. The deficit is only $372 million, they say, calculated with such inhuman and unreal precision, but we are borrowing $2.5 billion for liquidity. Literally true but still a lie since most people don’t understand that liquidity means being able to pay your bills. The $2.5 billion is the real deficit and without it the guv’mint could not pay for half the health care in Newfoundland and Labrador or all of education plus a few more departments besides. Sanewashers delude themselves and others and are not *necessarily* aware of the delusion, the deceit. Gaslighters know.

Genuine smiles come with wrinkles around the eyes. Deceptive smiles don’t.

This is the political Age of Celebritiocracy in Newfoundland and Labrador, ushered in by Danny Williams. The proto-Trump but bigger than The Donald. Donny may claim he could shoot someone dead in the middle of Times Square and get away with it but The Danny at his peak, as Craig Welsh said, could have strangled an infant in the middle of the Avalon Mall parking lot and there’d be people on the Open Line saying the baby had it coming. This is now an age within an age, the Time of Smiling Selfies, which is as much about the pictures themselves as the onanism of the self-praise they are part of. It is also the Generation of Gaslighters, which also means the Season of Sanewashers.

There were so many lies about so many simple things in the budget last week, you cannot pick one that stands out. You can just notice that the lying is so bad, Desjardins’ economic outfit included a chart of the lies in their summary for clients about the budget. They didn’t call it that bluntly but the implication is there. The whole budget released last week is a fraud. A sham. A deception. It is an election budget, confirmed by Siobhan Coady’s denial it was an election budget. In the Celebritocracy Era, the Rule of Opposites always applies to political statements. Not (x) = x. There would be no other reason to deliver this pack of lies except as an election deception. Even the posing and the self-wanking selfies are not enough reason to lie so nakedly.

This is the budget the Liberals will take to the next election - in May or June - with John Hogan, the new avatar. The real budget will come later, with the excuse that the world is a changed place even though it is no different than the moment they showed us the budget already approved months before, back when Hogan was still in Cabinet. That future budget is the one to watch for. That is the budget to fear.

We saw this same play in 2015 when the Liberals made promises of tax cuts knowing the budget Paul Davis’ crowd dropped in the spring was a fraud. They ran a whole campaign of made up numbers and unbelievable promises and then dropped a budget the next year that was a brutal in every sense. Brutally stupid and brutally cynical. Taxing books and closing libraries. Jacking up taxes but cutting nothing meaningful. Pushing off real changes until the third year, knowing they’d never do it the year before an election. Then lying every year after, as they lied this year, that the books would be balanced soon. Maybe next year. Each budget after pushed the year of cuts just one step further off, like this one does, and the cuts never come.

Politicians these days cannot even smile honestly. The two in the picture will tell you John Hogan is the blah blah blah, a blah blah, a blah with great, new, exciting blah blah blah, or words to that effect. His campaign to replace Andrew Furey as Avatar is big on the blah blah and blah blah. Only the finest political marketing minds are at work creating Avatar Hogan out of the swing-a-dead-cat common clay of the New East End lawyer who went to Memorial, as it then was, and Dal.

Hogan will not warn that “they are eating the cats.” No ax the tax for John. Nor will he create a sugar tax like his buddy, Andrew Furey. A transformationally transformative tax modeled on the least successful of all the unsuccessful efforts to tax people out of eating too much sugar. And, it did not work, although no one could have seen that coming, like they could not see tariffs on everything was a stupid idea. That is Andrew Furey’s legacy. A sugar tax that failed, as expected. Second Townie Premier since Confederation. The East End lawyer’s East End kid who went to Memorial, as it then was, and then went to Memorial med school in a common-as-muck story. The marketing team that made the image of Furey out of an illusion will do no better with Hogan, soon to be the third Townie Premier.

None of this “I have a dream” or “we shall fight them on the beaches” bullshit for these brand managers to stuff in the mouths of *their* new meat puppet. “Connecting with residents is key to identifying the unique needs of our communities,” someone on John’s campaign team wrote on his Facebook for him to say. Good words for bureaucrats because they mean nothing and Hogan is surrounded by bureaucrats of one kind or another, or lawyers which is always the same thing. The words push tears up to the eyelids and spill them down the cheeks of ordinary people not because they touch a deeply held truth, like about mothers and sons or the cuteness of babies. They make you cry because the words are like steel bristle brushes shoved in your ears and turned around a few times.

“It was an incredible couple of days in Central Newfoundland, filled with positivity and enthusiasm. A huge shout out to the Status of Women Central for their steadfast support for those who need it most—you truly make a difference!” They are swooning in the bingo halls, for sure. And to keep them on the edge of their seats, not to mention staying awake after the forced five-in-the-friggin’-morning mandatory wake-ups for breakfast at the combo nursing homes and corrections centres across the province, Hogan’s Big Idea, his burning desire for transforming our province into Shangri-La, the result of his connection with unique needs, is to strike down the scourge of shingles. Let loose with a lovely video on da Facebook this weekend for all the Nans and Pops to see and love.

“Under my leadership,” John’s social media director wrote above the video, capturing his vibrant style perfectly, “shingles vaccines will be free for everyone 50 years of age and older.” In the midst of global trade war, as civilization itself melts around us, as people cannot get timely treatment for cancer, heart disease, and hang-nails in the cash-sucking health system Hogan only temporarily left to sit with someone’s Nan for a few picture, John Hogan is on the case of the chickenpox they had as kids coming back to hit The Olds in the golden years the Auditor General told us all about.

Free SHINGRIX for all!

That is not the punchline of the self-mocking comedy routine that is Newfie politics in the Age of Celebritocracy, the Generation of Gaslighters.

No.

Ending the blight of shingles may be John Hogan’s reason for wanting the Premier’s job, but you’ll get the same thing with John Abbott. You see, the 2025 budget includes “$15.7 million for vaccines to protect seniors, including shingles, RSV, and pneumococcal [sic]” in that grammatically challenged line from the budget highlights. Hogan’s little team of gaslighters and sanewashers just want to to think it is his idea.

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Canadian travel to the United States is down by about 70%. European travel to the States is down by about 35%. The charts show the drop from the major countries in Eruope. The horror stories about tourists and others being arrested and deported for no legitimate reason are also spooking travelers from other parts of the world. The situation is so bad that you can expect to see a forecast 9% jump in travel this year to the United States turn into a drop overall of at least five percent. Onew stupid policy. A 14 point swing from growth to loss. The cost will be measured in the tens of billions, at least. “Canadian travelers alone spent $20.5 billion,” US Today reported last week, using old information, “and just a 10% reduction could mean a loss of $2.1 billion.” A 70-ish% drop, as it is now, would be more like a $14.5 billion cut for the Yanks.

Those are all American exports, if you look at it the way economists do. Foreign currency converts to US dollars to purchase American services and goods. Doesn’t matter where the conversion happens. It is an export. And they are down dramatically thanks to Trump, his tariffs and his fascist goon squads. The irony is sweet to the tongue. Trump’s tariffs are not going to end the trade deficits he thinks are bad and other stuff Trump and his sanewashers are doing make the export deficits bigger.

The American decline in tourism has an echo in Newfoundland and Labrador. Government after government in this place has struggled with how to make the place a haven for tourists. The efforts go back almost a century but they grew far more intense after Confederation. There are chronic issues but most of the ones that frequently come up - like how much it costs to get here - are really excuses. If you’ve got a great “product” as the marketing lingo would put it, then those things like costs don’t matter. People don’t go to the top of Kilimanjaro in Africa and bitch about the cost of getting there or that the place is full of Africans. Well some do, but no one does anything about it because the complaints would be trivial and stupid.

Other issues are bigger. F’rinstance, if the government let the economy develop rather than insist that bureaucrats and politicians with no experience picking economic winners should pick economic winners, then we would have a booming economy, the spinoff from which would be a growing population, more flights to the airports around Newfoundland and Labrador, and therefore lower costs for tourists to get to this place everyone raves about.

Or we could make bars and restaurants, and the liquor and food offshoots of tourism businesses more financially stable by ending the insane monopoly that is the provincial government’s liquor corporation. It is both the agency that licenses bars and restaurants, and also the liquor supplier to those same places, and the liquor retailer competing with them.

Putting liquor retail in the private sector and treating wholesale as a wholesaling business - instead of forcing bars and restaurants to buy at *retail* prices - in its own right would not only create jobs and increase government income, it would also fix huge financial problems for bars and restaurants.

That would be the way of looking at things from businesses anywhere else in the democratic world. But in Newfoundland and Labrador, businesses are tugging the forelock and licking the boots of politicians for taking the tax money the government gets from its liquor monopoly and giving a teensy bit back to the liquor monopoly so that it can shave a fraction off the outrageous prices the government charges private businesses for liquor. Out of a profit as large as the fictional deficit - but every bit as real - the Sin Jawns Bored of Trade and thankful this week for a mere million dollars.

The past chair of the same Townie Bored wrote on da Facebook that this was a “‘Great call’ to prevent the ‘last call’ for many operators in this important culture-building industry.” If by culture building he means places where you can get screeched in - 100 percent a marketing gimmick from the liquor corporation - then sure that is culture. Local musician and impressario Bob Hallett also wrote on FB that “after decades of begging, the NLC will increase wholesale discounts to licensees. Almost as important, the government has agreed to create a custom loan program for independent entrepreneurs in this sector.”

Slightly increased discounts *and* a loan program and only after decades of begging, as Hallett described it. And that would be begging in addition to giving way more than a million bucks, all told, from all the businesses for decades to re-elect the politicians who just ignore them. And that’s not considering the airline subsidy to get flights from Sin Jawns to Europe, which some businesses also think is a great way to boost tourism. Nonsense. It’s about people going from here to other places, which is what your humble e-scribbler will be doing a couple of months from now.

This is the connection to Trump and his export problem now that people are not going to the United States for a holiday. We already know what that is really about. Lots of people think that the tariffs are really about getting people to go begging to Trump for exemptions or to negotiate with him personally for a favour. That may not be why he set it up but that certainly is one of the results of it. Just like the local businesses who prefer to pay politicians for the privilege of begging them for something the politicians will not do. If anyone in the business community in Newfoundland and Labrador thinks they are better than Kevin O’Leary, the business fools in Trump’s cabinet, or any of his sanewashers on social media, then those Newfies need to look long and hard in the mirror. Just like The Danny could teach The Donny a few things about being an incompetent despot, O’Leary and da b’ys could learn a thing or two about being suckers from the people running local businesses in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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