More on Rule by Decree... and the weekly Reading (and Listening) List

The Reading List for 16 Dec 22

It’s good to be the King.

Monday’s column was about the way the provincial Cabinet has taken over the House of Assembly and reduced it to a rubber stamp.

We live in a province where rule by decree is the new normal.

It’s like the Commission Government is back but without the sound management and concern for the public interest.

And on Monday there were no fewer than *two confirmations of what that column was about:

• Cabinet confirmed that it would not reappoint Bruce Chaulk but would wait for the consultant - appointed according to some unknown authority - to get his six-week-long-hobble done, and

• There was a public notice - not a news release - about the House of Assembly committee that would look at the idea of a universal basic. Except it wasn’t a House committee. It was a *government* committee.

Strictly speaking the advisory did not actually call it a House of Assembly committee. They just call it the “All-Party Committee on Basic Income” and note that the House of Assembly had voted on not one but two resolutions. The first called on the House to set up the committee. So did the second, until the Liberals hoisted the resolution with an amendment the rest of the House went along with.

In the year - yes, it took a year - to organize the committee, the thing went from having a couple of government members to be chaired by a cabinet minister, with another cabinet minister on the committee, a third Liberal former cabinet minister, a Pea Sea, and a Dipper.

The committee’s got a mandate that came from somewhere and they are off and running. But the thing won’t be run by the House to explore the issue, engage the public in discussions, let controversy develop, resolve differences, and build a broad public consensus, all at arms length from Cabinet. This one will be completely controlled by Cabinet, which means absolutely nothing will come of it.

There’s more to the problem than that. The bureaucracy lacks the capacity to do the kind of joined-up-thinking across departmental lines that a policy like basic income needs. And if such a capacity miraculously developed overnight, there’s no one interested in it who matters. That’s because doing serious work takes time and those at the heart of the Cabinet bureaucracy don’t want to put in the time on anything.

That’s been a key part of the way the House *and* Cabinet have worked over the past 20 years or so. The politicians make secret deals behind closed doors, downplay any controversy, except for a bit of amateur, staged theatrics that are more noise and show than substance. All of it is short-term stuff.

This is why this sort of rigged arrangement is called managed democracy. It has all the appearance of a functioning political system. In practice it doesn’t work at all, except in the sense that the people with power - Cabinet and the bureaucracy - can manage what happens. Ordinary people have a devil of time finding out about things until it is too late. They certainly can have little meaningful influence on what Cabinet is doing.

While it’s popular and easy to imagine a small group of rich people are running things, the reality is different. Those who influence Cabinet represent corporate interests. Not just business corporations but large bureaucratic groups like public sector union and big government agencies like the university or NALCOR-Hydro. Like political parties, who don’t really represent ordinary voters either, they cut their deals behind closed doors, too.

This is politics in Newfoundland and Labrador today.

*sigh*

On to the weekly reading list…