The insufferable lightness of being partisan
The insufferable lightness of being partisan
Why NL partisans struggle and ordinary people suffer
The cost of living has been going up faster than people’s incomes.
Quite a bit faster actually.
Some politicians have trouble understanding that’s what is making people so upset.
The federal Conservatives figured it out. They also figured out how to make that work for them.
The federal Liberals meanwhile, not so much.
That’s why last week federal Liberal partisans were angry about a Fraser Institute research report that lined up neatly with the idea that people are paying way more in taxes than they used to. These Liberal partisans didn’t attack the report, though. They went after veteran reporter Bob Fife online for telling people about the report and in the process calling Fraser non-partisan.
Three things about that: First, Fraser *is* non-partisan. It isn’t affiliated with any political party. Same as Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Not tied to any party. Both support a specific set of ideas, which tends to line up with certain political parties but frankly Fraser has supported Dipper-ish governments’ policies and CCPA exposed the $15-bucks-is-a-living-wage fraud the unions were pushing at one point even though unions are one of its key sources of money.
Second, you can critise lots of things they produce. Like all research think-tanks, CCPA and Fraser produce stuff that stands up to scrutiny and they produce stuff that makes you pull a face like you are smelling a dog turd right under your nose and you find something oddly funny at the same time.
In this case, the Fraser one does check out. They use the mean income as average, which puts the average income at just under $130, 000 a year. That works very well in this case since the paper was about the burden of taxes on income and our earn-more, pay-proportionately-more shifts the burden higher up the scale than you’d see if you chose the median income (half of incomes are above and half below the number).
Third, the Liberals went after the messenger and not the message because they cannot handle the message. They don’t get it. Not that they are mentally dim but that - in a basic way - Liberals these days have lost the flexibility that historically either the Conservatives or Liberals had. Dippers have always been more rigid in their thinking so that’s nothing new but for Liberals, not being able to shift at all and get in line with public opinion is really weird.
Federally, the next election will sort it out. Provincially not so much because… well… it’s easier to show you than just tell you.
There’s a by-election going on right now in the hottest month of the short townie summer, which unfortunately for the governing Liberals will not be the winter of public discontent with them. Liberals will likely win the by-election barring any surprises but the deeper problems remain.
Liberals are desperately afraid they will lose this by-election. Desperate. Afraid. They are down two in a row of the last three by-elections. This could be three and if that happens, there's no telling what could happen to the Liberals. They only have a small majority and a loss in the seat held until recently by Tom Osborne would them back where they were in 2019.
Worse, they’d be headed to a general with no advantages of any kind. Try as they might to pretend they are some other party, people know they are Liberals, that the current bunch locally are closely tied to the federal bunch despite the locals pretending to be a Danny-style ego party, and the crowd in the Premier’s Office are generally known to be a lightweight bunch. Not serious people, to borrow a line from Brian Cox the actor and his recent gig. People known what they’re like and that’s deadly.
You can see all of that in the way the Liberals sent deputy premier Siobhan Coady out last week to tell us that everything is lovely financially. Reporters were having none of it. They quizzed Coady on why she was having this financial update for the first time of any government ever on the last day of July and in their reporting, they also didn’t just parrot the Coady lines. They added context in their reports, drew attention to the by-election, and either gave equal time to the Pea Seas and Dippers in the headline or, as ALlNL did, gave us the weirdness and context first and then talked a bit about numbers. Whatever the Liberals thought they'd do, it didn't work.
Even the report at VOCM - once jokingly referred to as Voice of the Cabinet Minister and where the Liberal candidate’s wife flogs advertising - the morning headline on the story the next day read “Finance Minister Dismisses Claims That Summer Economic Update Timed to Coincide With By-Election.” That’s the one most people heard, by the way, the day after the newser. The one the supper-time crowd got the day of the newser was not much better. The first sentence on that one started “The provincial government is singing its own praises….” not what the Brain Trust in Andrew Furey’s office expected.
If you look at the statement Coady released, a couple of things leap out. First, there’s literally nothing in it the provincial government actually caused with its own policies. Even in housing, where they did manage to find a few bucks for a fund, the local Liberals were just riding on what the feds were doing. There is *no* provincial housing program to speak of despite there now being a ghetto department made of it and a need for a policy fir years before that. Second, as far as inflation goes, interest rates are federal and it was the Bank of Canada *not* listening to Andrew Furey that helped turn the corner on inflation. It’s down to 2.3% Coady cheered.
At the same time last week, your electricity prices went up seven percent. Feds brought back lower cost of living increases. Province drove your cost of living higher but Coady would not cheer for that. She’d spin you a yarn about rate mitigation, about how your rates were supposed to go up by a huge amount and instead they are going up by a little amount.
Thing is, the tale from the current Muskrateers like Andrew Furey or Siobhan Coady or Jennifer Williams is like when Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale and Ed Martin told you they’d looked at all the other ways to get you electricity and the cheapest way was to double your rates. It’s a lie. Not true. And they know it’s not true.
Danny and Kathy and Ed never looked at anything except Muskrat Falls. They made up - literally made up - one alternative *after* they decided to push ahead with the Lower Churchill. Exactly the same as when Andy and Siobhan told you about the people on the lowest of low incomes who had 24 hundred bucks thanks to “rate mitigation.” A lie just like t’were a lie that Emera pays for the block of electricity it gets for free.
But a worse lie because the free electricity is just one lie. The *New* Lie does more. It implies people actually got a cheque when they didn’t and that they saved money when they won’t. Electricity will double and more because what Andrew Furey actually delivered is the same farkakte scheme Danny Williams wanted from the start and all the Pea Seas after him wanted, too.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Williams told us all that even after it paid for this year's Muskrat Falls installment, NALCOR had a profit almost as big as the payment and next year will be bigger. Oh yeah, your electricity rates will keep climbing every year regardless and if you are lucky enough to get a cost of living raise it will be two percent Coady cheered about while Coady and her friends will raise your electricity up three times that percentage.
While you let that settle in your stomach, think as well about social support minister Paul Pike. Now that Theresa by-election on *Pike* had a news conference to announce the government was going to do something it steadfastly refused to do for over a decade. Not only did the government announce it would increase the amount available to cover the cost of burying abandoned corpses and those who were without the financial means to cover their own funerals. They announced they’d double the money available.
Now to be honest, the amount of the increase is so small it would be a rounding error on the massive public debt or even the deficit this year, which this year will be a couple of billion dollars. The thing is that Pike and his colleagues could have done this six months ago when they first learned of the problem. Even if they wanted a few minutes to do some sort of research, they could still have announced it in the budget. But they didn’t and in fact, it looked they weren’t going to do anything at all.
Until the by-election came along. The sudden newser and dramatic change of direction was so striking, reporters asked Pike what changed. Not anything to do with the news stories, including the woman who had to go begging to strangers to find enough money to give her daughter a proper burial. Unmoved were the politicians and bureaucrats by the plight of the less fortunate. Blind to the indignity to the corpses stuffed in freezers, one for three years now since she was murdered.
“This [decision] will ensure funeral home operators in Newfoundland and Labrador are able to continue to provide funeral services for income support clients and those in low income [brackets],” Pike told reporters [CBC].
What changed was in our consultations with funeral home operators. [W]e found that, you know, they felt that [the older amount] was low. Needed to be increased. When we looked at our numbers we felt the same way.
Shag mom. The businesses needed the cash so there was Paul lickety-split with money.
The thing to remember in all this is not the contradictions, falsehoods, or the appalling contrast in attitude between the millions spent on the Unknown versus the government’s obvious lack of any concern with the unknowns needing burial. Notice that Pike and the deputy minister sitting beside him or any of the politicians and bureaucrats involved in any of these announcements see nothing amiss. They see no connection between one thing and another. That’s what is most striking.
It’s not an act. They are not pretending, not even aware that the rest of us not merely see the world very differently but experience it differently as well. They not only do not see the real world, they do not live in it. The closer one’s life is to the burden of being on this Earth, the more real and truthful one is as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera put it in his tale of elites in an old-fashioned Soviet state and a revolution. At the same time, those who feel no burden become lighter than air. They take leave of the Earth, soar into heights, become at most only half real and more accurately become totally false.
Nor is it merely the party in government that wanders around in this alternate world, this Upside Down Newfoundland. These days the Pea Seas and New Democrats live in the same darkeness. They can only manage weak criticisms of the other politicians, the most obvious ones, and even then they are afraid of what might happen if they spoke of the world as ordinary people see it. They hold their tongues on more serious stuff.
These attitudes are now so common, the abnormal behaviour of Coast Pijecabd the rest so normal, that none of them can even conceive of an alternative to what is happening. Widespread public ignorance is normal such that, as we have seen, even cabinet ministers find out about things going in in their own givernment from the news sources outside government that supply the rest of us with lies and find and nonsense. The politicians regardless of what team colours they wear are almost at the point where they cannot see themselves changing roles in the legislature and over the years a few have thought of getting rid of elections and choices altogether.
It is not just politicians and political people caught up in this. In society as a whole across Newfoundland and Labrador, people outside the political sphere but adjacent to it - all those with the education, income, and status to be unconnected from the reality the rest of us inhabit - long ago adopted the same ways of thinking as those in the government bit of the political Upside Down. They have learned to have private thoughts which are not the same as their public thoughts, which are lies and other misinformation. After 20 years of this, though, these people who may one day become political people themselves, these folks who are minders of the social and political order in their everyday lives are now so used to seeing only the public face voicing public views that the public and the private are the same. They look into the mirror and cannot tell what they really look like any more.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, though, this replacement of the false public with the real private may not be everywhere. It is not everywhere among the social minder class, either. There are dissidents. That’s what makes this such a fragile time in Newfoundland and Labrador politics. You see, the people in the picture at the top of this column are the most powerful people in our society. They are lightness wandering around in a world that is very heavy for the people in whose doors they stuff their little flyers. Their party does not have widespread public support. Their victory in this by-election is not guaranteed.
As much as they may think the rest of us are asleep or are sheep, they can never be sure about the faces they see at the door as they go looking for votes. Are the faces at the door real or unreal, heavy or light, true or false? Since everyone is practiced at saying one thing and believing or doing another, they cannot know.
In Shea Heights, there are many houses with signs for both Pea Sea and Furey candidates. But most homes in the district give no clue which way they will vote or if they will vote at all. The reason is that they know the game of lightness, of how to say one thing and be or do another but they are also tired of it.
No one knows what might up-end the whole thing and make that private world of the majority to become public, to have the heavy of the world most live in to crush the fluff of the few. Just ask one of the Fureys if they come to your door if they saw the Fogo result coming. What you may see in their eyes for just a flash might be fear but that will be the only sign you will get that they can feel the truth even if they keep it buried deep.