The government party closed the House of Assembly last week.
They’ll keep it shut until the budget on March 20. The House will miss a week’s worth of its normal sittings, even allowing that the government shuts down on Monday to mark St. Patrick’s Day.
Officially, the excuse was that the government had done all the work it wanted to do before the budget.
In truth, there are major government bills that no one has seen yet, let alone subject to the pantomime farce that is the House of Assembly these days.
Bills like the reform to election laws Premier Andrew Furey promised in order to calm the public outrage after the disastrous winter election he called for no reason. Promised in 2021. Died on the order paper in 2022 and never resurfaced.
Bills like the Balanced Budget Act, promised in 2021, died on the order paper, resurrected in the fall of 2022 and not mentioned again.
Bills like the changes to NALCOR’s governing legislation, promised long ago and still unseen, yet all the while NALCOR operates as it always has but calling itself the name of one of its subsidiaries. The corporation has specialized in deceit since Danny Williams started it in 2005 and this latest bit of chicanery is very much on brand both for NALCOR and for politics since 2003 in Newfoundland and Labrador. There is no greater fraud than a promise unkept, Danny Williams once said, giving in the process his own political epitaph and the theme of political period he started.
There are other bills of some significance - like the new Pharmacy Act and a new law to govern research on humans - that are lost on someone’s hard drive as well as a raft of amendments to other laws on the management of government information or public access to it that remain secret.
Publicly, the opposition Pea Seas moaned the government was hiding from accountability, which is true in the same way dogs bark or bears scitte amidst nature’s natural pine scents. Privately, Pea Sea knees privately knock at the prospect Furey might call the election before the proto-Cons can cobble together enough cash and candidates to either win the election or not get slaughtered, depending on which clutch of Pea Seas you ask over the marimba-din coming from under their table.
The other Dinn just read a predictable script.
The reality of what the government did on Wednesday is far less dramatic.
Crab harvesters took the House on their backs last week as they did last year over prices for crab in the upcoming season. Some of them want to sell their crab to any buyer in hopes of getting higher prices from competition in the marketplace. The government wants to control who can buy crab so that local fish plants can get work for the dwindling numbers of workers in rural Newfoundland who make a pittance doing the physically and mentally draining work of chopping up and packaging up seafood for a few weeks a year.
The scheme is old and refuses to die. All the people involved in the scheme - government, harvesters, processors, and plant workers - cannot agree on how to change things. The result is misery and a fair bit of hypocrisy. Harvesters operate small businesses some of them with assets worth millions. There are people bankrolling the operations who have never seen the deck of the boat and yet as the coverage of last week’s protests shows, there was lots of talk among harvesters about how the government is siding with the plant owners.
Nothing could be further from the truth, which is that processors, harvesters, and plant workers are locked together in an industry that cannot sustain all of them without controls and without federal and provincial subsidies of one kind or another. At the centre of it all is a union, known locally as FFAW, that represents *both* the harvesters and plant workers and serves the best interests of neither in disputes like this that put the interests of one in direct conflict to the other. This is an old tale and all would be better off in a fishery built sustainably on competition. There’d be fewer people but the whole thing would be able to give workers, harvesters, and plant operators alike a decent living.
The reality for plant workers is scarcely better today than it was 20 years ago when a study showed plant workers made on average $15,000 before taxes. Only $10,000 of that came from a few weeks’ work. The other $5,000 was from federal unemployment insurance. In the past two decades, plants have shut down and there are fewer and fewer local workers. There are now 6,000 plant workers with almost one in ten of them now coming as foreign workers on restricted visas. Young people don’t want to work in those jobs, which means the communities around the plants are dying out. In one town long abandoned but only resettled very recently, all the fish plant workers commuted by ferry to the plant during the processing season from the main part of Newfoundland. Such is the absurdity if not the misery of the fisheries scheme in rural Newfoundland.
As last year and for years before that, the government has no scrum-ready answer to handle the latest annual fishery crisis. The minister catching javelins on the fishery these days told protesters the government was trying to “strike a balance” that was in everyone’s best interest. That’s code for making no changes at all in the fishery and letting whatever happens, happens. With the shift in political power in 2003, there is no interest in the local political class in sorting out the fishery so minister after minister tells protesters and anyone else in the fishery that the Premier is watching out for them, is concerned for them, will look after their best interests.
These Worship Words about what the benevolent father on the 8th Floor may have held some power once, like when the Cloudy Williams personality kult resurrected them from the time of Joe Smallwood, but since Williams left, they are just noise. No one hears them let alone believes them. Politicians say them just like they go to the same news conferences timed when polls are taken for the same reason: because they have nothing else.
The Pea Seas’ complaints were weak because they don’t have no useful ideas for the fishery either. The Liberals are not afraid of Tony Wakeham by any means but rather than let the House descend into a mess that would cause all parties more damage than good, they shut ‘er down for a week. An early Easter vacation.
Andrew Furey did catch Tony Wakeham for a second in the House right before he shut things down when he asked Tony what he’d do to settle the issue. Wakeham ducked, as everyone knew he would - including Tony - but that was a tiny gotcha moment in what is otherwise the Punch and Judy panto of the House without much punching or judying these days.
Furey may have looked good for a second but it was a fleeting second since these sorts of jabs mask the weakness and frustration of the government crowd at seeing The Other Leader and his gang who couldn’t shoot straight gain popular support in the polls while God’s Chosen People get no credit for the miracles they are performing daily udner great strain.
We have seen this before: ask Roger Grimes’ crowd or Paul Davis’ bunch how it felt. The difference is that Grimes and Davis (or arguably from Kathy Dunderdale onward for the Pea Seas) came at the tail end of otherwise successful runs for either party. For the crowd currently running the place, they had a couple of good weeks in late 2015 right after the election but they tanked badly in the winter of 2016 and have never truly recovered.
The Liberals under first Dwight Ball and now Andrew Furey have sounded like tired last defenders of a dying government party rather than the fresh faces they actually were and are. They talk a lot but deliver little to match the words. They have kept the ship from going under just yet and in some areas, they have made some worthwhile changes but the wheel is jammed on the same course we were when Davis and his crowd stood by the lifeboats and let Liberals onto the bridge.
The Liberals who think they’ll have an easy time winning the majority re-election they so desperately want are still as delusional as they were twice before. The conditions they think will produce a victory *this* time - pathetically weak opposition (leader) with no cash or decent candidates - are exactly the same situations they had in 2019 and again in 2021.
In both elections, the Liberals barely hung on to government. The second case was even worse since they’d picked le petit prince de Port au Prince to lead them in the hopes he had the saviour-juice Dwight so blatantly lacked. They thought there’d be a landslide. Instead, it took every ounce of everything the Liberals had to get a measly two extra seats against a bankrupt rabble its own leader had to bankroll out of his personal fortune to keep their Tory snouts above the waves.
This time around, the Liberals have no advantages at all that they could count on the two times before. And they have the extra weight of being known. The Angus Reid poll last week confirmed the trend from September and October last year. Yes the Liberals are still slightly ahead as the party people would vote for in a provincial election - see the most recent Narrative as an example - but the Pea Seas are not far behind.
What’s worse, people have gone from cranky to angry in their view of how the Liberals are running things. And when it comes to handling major issues, voters think the Liberals are doing a bad job at everything, including things voters don’t really care about. Top issues in Angus Reid were cost of living/inflation and health care. 84% picked the first one. 66% the second. Housing/housing affordability and the overall economy were tied for third place at 27%.
Eight out of every ten people (80%) thought the Liberals were doing a poor job with cost of living and inflation.
78% thought Andrew Furey and the Liberals were mucking up health care.
Housing affordability? Three out of four people (76%) said the Liberals sucked at handling it.
57% - almost six out of 10 people - were unhappy with the Liberals and Andrew Furey over creating jobs and the managing the economy.
The Liberals’ only approval score above 50% was in relations with Ottawa where six out 10 thought Andrew Furey was doing a good job. Unfortunately for Furey and the Liberals, people weren’t too concerned about how he gets on with his old friends. And on environment issues, they were healthy at 47% support even if only 11% thought the environment was a big deal.
Odd then that the Liberals have decided to pick a fake fight with Ottawa on carbon taxes. Last week Andrew Furey wrote another letter to the Prime Minister about a hike in carbon tax and released it publicly with the line added “See? I am fighting for you” or words to that effect.
The only effect the letter had was a yawn from most everyone except the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister who diplomatically patted Furey on the head and reminded him that the rebate they included with their carbon tax actually put more cash in the pockets of most Canadians than it took in tax.
Not that it would help Furey and the Liberals any if they did get the PM to postpone the planned tax hike. After all, they did manage to get Trudeau to exempt home heating fuel from the carbon tax a few months ago at the cost of some justified criticism that he’d abandoned his own policy for nothing.
The result of this latest letter is that the provincial Liberals under Andrew Furey looked weak on two issues on which they had high performance ratings. The provincial Liberals got nothing in popular support for all the things just like this letter they’ve done over the past year just like they got nothing for changing the own gasoline tax so that it is the lowest in the country. Neither a nice graphic for social media nor a video of the finance minister at a gas pump she shared on Facebook drove any votes. What’s worse, Furey’s letter to the PM and the mention of gas tax gave the federal Conservatives *and* the provincial Pea Seas the chance to hit them both.
To be fair, what the provincial Liberals are doing is what the Pea Seas did when they were still the government party. They reacted to the mice of social media instead of chasing the political caribou and moose that apex political predators like government parties need to stay alive. The Pea Seas looked at open line shows, Dwight Ball’s people were obsessed with Twitter, and the current mob look at Facebook too much.
The big game to hunt are the issues they can own and show they are winning on. It’s the thing that separates them from others. What the Liberals have lacked consistently since 2015 has been that Big Idea. A gazillion of these little mice-issues don’t add up to much in the public mind, which is why the Liberals have struggled to beat tired parties with poor organization and no money. You can see it plainly in the polls and you don’t have to go back too far to a time when the Pea Seas were chasing political mice and the Liberals were bankrupt.
Some Liberals might think they can wait and call an election when the poll numbers turn. Two problems with that assumption: poll numbers won’t turn without help and the Liberals have nothing to help. Second, against the odds, Tony Wakeham and the Pea Seas got better last week, even if it is only marginally better than they have been. The longer the Liberals wait to go to the polls that count, the more time they offer the Pea Seas to find cash, sort out their internal issues, and be ready for the next election. In the meantime, the Liberals have a by-election to fight very soon in a rural district in which fisheries issues are important, along with access to health care, jobs, and the cost of living. If Brian Warr leaves before the general election, the Liberals will have another rural by-election to fight.
The Liberals need to go to an election sooner rather than later for a few reasons. Unfortunately, they have no reason to go now and, given the poll trends, there’s a risk they could get hammered at an electorate keen to take out their anger on them even if the alternative isn’t that good. Time is not on Andrew Furey’s side.
All things considered, then, next week’s budget will likely be loaded down with spending as the Liberals set up for an election if not this spring, then maybe in the fall. They might even claim to have delivered a balanced budget even if a good look will show a real, hefty deficit yet again). There will almost certainly be promises of imminent economic riches. After all, we are always Ready for a Better Tomorrow.
The fishery has many structural issues that can be resolved if clearer heads would only prevail. The truth of the matter, as it stands today, is that many enterprises do not have the revenues to make their business work. So they are desperately trying various ways to widen the gap between Revenues and Expenses. One way is bringing in more outside competition. In todays structure, that will make very little difference to their bottom line. A few pans of crab sold outside wont cut it.
We need to completely rethink the fishery. We need to move away from this being a Quasi Social Program. We are competing world wide in a very competitive market, yet we are trapped in the "old" way of doing business that does not work in 2024.
They can increase revenues by first allowing more licenses combined onto one enterprise. 112,000 lb of crab may have cut it in 2000. You cant make ends meet with that amount of quota today. The amount of crab you can catch on your enterprise has to be tied to the amount you need to cover expenses and to make a decent living. Otherwise, whats the point of an enterprise??
They need more input/control of the whole system of "water to table", or the fancy word they use in business schools - Vertical Integration. An enterprise should be able to catch it, process it, and ship it to the end user.
Today, if I live in Salt Lake City, I can order my Lobster from a Maine fisherman, and have it delivered to my door for the dinner party I am hosting on Friday. And I can follow it the whole way online. We should have the same option for the Nfld Fishery. If a guy in Southern Harbour has 20,000 lb of Cod to catch today, he gets paid 70 cents a pound, or $14,000. Imagine if he could get $5 per pound selling to a restaurant on Broadway in New York City. Now he has $100,000. And he has a much better chance of running a legit business.
The issue shouldn't really be about quotas. It should be about maximizing revenue and value. Now, it seems like we are chopping up the pie so small that hardly nobody wins.