The Simplest Things
If you look after the pennies, the dollars look after themselves.
Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
Whoever can be trusted with small things can be trusted with big things.
All these are well know sayings about the relationship between small things and big things. The first one is commonplace. Emily Dickinson said something similar. The second quote is attributed to Vincent Van Gogh. The third is attributed to Albert Einstein. And the last one is a modern translation of a book of the Bible. Luke 16 to be precise.
Then there is this quote:
This train will say choo-choo. Get on board over here.
That was health minister and attorney general and Government House Leader John Hogan this Tuesday past in the House of Assembly as he and the rest of the crowd currently running this place got another hammering over a raft of issues, most of which come down to some very simple and very small things that have enormous and bad implications.
No idea what Hogan was talking about or what he thought he was talking about so make of it what you will. Maybe he felt like he’d been hit by a train. It sure looked that way.
As a result, we shouldn’t expect the House to stay open beyond Thursday this week even though it is scheduled for one final burst of four days after a thing called constituency week next week. The reason they’d shut down early is that there isn’t much to do, whatever legal business the government needs done is already approved by the House and, frankly, since the Liberals desperately need to win an election in a few months time, they cannot afford to let people see a local version of Mike Tyson getting the crap beaten out of him by some guy from Youtube. Every day.
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Anyway…
Three issues.
First, the scheme or scam in Central Health.
Not just the managers who made money leasing their rental properties to their employer. That’s one thing.
The bigger part of this story are the managers and maybe others all the way up to the Minister’s Office who knew about and approved it and took part in it. At the very least, these are the folks who drew up and signed the contracts and cut the cheques to pay for the rentals for months if not years despite the fact the scam broke both the Conflict of Interest Act and the Public Procurement Act. Hogan told the House of Assembly that last week the contracts were illegal under both Acts, which is why the health authority stopped them supposedly once someone told them they knew about it.
That’s why it’s all more more peculiar that Hogan - also the government’s chief law enforcement officer - hasn’t turned the case over to police just to rule out the prospect of criminal activity on top of breaking the two provincial laws.
Don’t forget: people broke the law and there have been precisely zero consequences for any of them. Sure Hogan sent the thing to the Auditor General but that’s a joke. In the end, the AG investigation will mean as little as her exposure of the incompetence of the Crown Lands office a couple of weeks ago. The government ignored it just like the ignored the other report about the oil and gas corporation.
Hogan’s decision not to call in the cops - and his failure to explain why he didn’t call in the cops - is really unusual because the two laws we know a whole bunch of people broke are at the core of their very important jobs. The laws are designed to prevent corruption but they only work if people honour them and if people like Hogan enforce them. otherwise, corruption runs wild.
The people involved in this scam are supposed to know them inside out. They are supposed to enforce them. So it’s a really big deal when no one holds them to account even after they either knowingly broke the law - which might also point to something criminal - or they had no idea people aren’t allowed to make money from the same government agency you were working for and do it using untendered government contracts that may not have been properly approved.
There is a third possibility. It could be that the top-most executives at the Big Health Authority knew of and approved the scheme. They could do that under the Conflict of Interest Act and the Public Procurement Act legally. But they’d have to make the case for it and document why they were doing it and get it approved at the highest levels.
If that were the case, then may have told the Deputy Minister of the department or the health authority CEO. That’s not very likely for two reasons. First, if they’d done it by the book *that* would have been their first defence. Instead they cancelled the contracts and said they were illegal. Second, you’d think - hope is a better word - people at that high level would understand the political risks of approving the scheme.
That might explain why they stopped it only once the nurses’ union told the minister - Tom Osborne at the time - who, either way, covered up the whole thing himself once he knew. But that idea of approval at the top doesn’t line up with the story Hogan told the House of Assembly. And Hogan’s story doesn’t line up with the very serious implications of the facts as he’s presented them to the public.
Nor has Hogan explained why neither he nor his predecessor told the public about the whole thing, which is why it looks like a huge cover-up of something really bad. Politically, that’s the aspect of this who scandal that really stands out above all. You see, experienced political managers know that it’s better to get in front of a bad story. Cut off the bleeding. Covering it up does nothing but make a bad problem worse.
That’s what we have now: a really big scandal that now appears to involve cabinet ministers covering it up. This mess has been bleeding for a couple of weeks and - with the reference to the Auditor General - it will continue to hang over the government conceivably right up to the election, if not through it. And if by some chance, the AG has a report that makes the government look bad or sends the whole thing to the cops on her own authority just for badness, then the bleeding will start to get really heavy.
So way more questions than answers and the implications of all of them are very bad for one of this administration’s most powerful ministers, not to mention the government as a whole. The only thing we can say for sure is that they longer John Hogan goes without telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on every detail, this story is as damaging to the government politically as any of the equally bad stories - bungled election mess, the Bruce Chaulk scandal, the John Risley scandal, the Brendan Paddick scandal - they’ve had in the four short years of Andrew Furey’s government. Let’s not adding in the mess that was Dwight Ball, which the Liberals also wear.
Second, the Kenmount Crossing Cock-up.
Most governments have a hard time getting themselves into one scandal. The Brain Trust currently running the place have two going full-bore at the same time. This one involves a hospital but this mess sits in the Premier’s Office and in Fred Hutton’s lap. A second powerful cabinet minister is up to his neck in controversy and cannot explain simple things believably.
Like why Fred Hutton and the Premier didn’t include the extra purchase of land in the original announcement even though they apparently knew about it at the time.
Like why the proposed replacement for St. Clare’s - footprint less than 10 acres - suddenly became a project larger than the Health Sciences Centre, which clocks in at 53 acres.
Like what other sites did the government review? One of them was in Galway. Where were the others? Why did they get tossed aside?
Hutton’s repeatedly claims the extra cost went for serviced lots but that’s actually not true. The added 53 acres bought from a Hickman family owned company aren’t serviced at all or are certainly not serviced to maintain what is now a hospital “campus” like the one in Corner Brook with multiple buildings. Why did the government pay more than $400,000 an acre for land the Hickman company bought in 2016 for $84,000 an acre? It had nothing to do with any improvements the Hickmans made.
Even simple things are weird about this: why is the government selling and buying land in acres when the official system of measurement for Canada uses hectares as the unit of land?
Why didn’t they use the 130 acres of Crown land near the site of the proposed mega-hospital?
Since the water tower that has to go in to service the new hospital also benefits the Hickman development, will the Hickmans bear any of *that* cost or is this like the cozy quiet deal cut with Danny Williams on highway access to Galway?.
Lastly, there’s the relationship between the local Liberals and their federal cousins. Lots of talk about picking fights with Ottawa or trying to distance themselves from Justin Trudeau but frankly, they sound an awful lot alike. This one’s not a scandal. It’s just interesting to compare the very similar ways the pair talk about their political futures.
Here’s Justin Trudeau talking about the next election in a clip posted to X/Twitter by the Liberal Party of Canada:
…presenting an ambitious vision for the future that starts with being there to respond to the day-to-day pressures that Canadians are feeling, so they can once again be optimistic about the future.
That’s what we’re focussed on. That’s what we’re stepping up to deliver. These are the things that simple slogans and buzzwords and TikTok videos and YouTube clips can’t solve for.
These are the things that Liberals sign up for. The policy debates. The listening to science [sic]. The following the evidence [sic]. The focus on bringing people together to solve problems rather than dividing them apart to pick fights and vote against.
We’re now facing a moment in the world where everyone has to figure out what kind of world we want to live in in the coming years.
I can tell you very simply: the kind of world world I want to live in, the kind of world I want my kids to grow up in is the kind of world in which Canadians remain open-minded, ambitious, optimistic, and ready to do what generations of this country have done successfully for eons now.
Andrew Furey from the Bored of Trade’s state of the province show in late October:
Celebrating the value of our energy and being positive is what a commitment to leadership and democratic governance is all about because positive energy is truly a mindset.
Now, some spend their time and energy only talking about the negatives. They don’t offer anything that looks like a solution. And here’s the thing: if they did I would welcome it because as I’ve said from Day One, I am not a traditional politician. I’m a surgeon.
And ideas wear no political stripe. Whether it’s health, housing, the cost of living, the problems we face in this province, in this country, they are not Red problems or Blems. There are not Orange or Green problems. These are our problems.
And when we are elected, we are elected to try and solve them.
So their contribution to that should be more than just memes and better than just blame. Too often these days slogans and rhymes dominate the news. The challenge is to rise above the slogans and if they suggest better is needed, don’t just say that in a slogan, do better than just posting childish rhetoric online. Do better than posting fake quotes all in an attempt to score political points and sew discord. Be better than stoking fears with misinformation. These are moves straight out of a Trump playbook and the people of this province see it for what it is.
Trudeau has a better speechwriter than Furey. Way better. Furey’s speeches are really awful piles of cliches and that bit about slogans is laughable given how often - including in that speech - Furey speaks in slogans and cliches. Just count the number of times he uses some version of “Our energy. Our time.” Count how many times in that 40-odd minute performance he reminded everyone he is a surgeon.
Oh yeah, and that “I’m not a traditional politician” claim is - like Dwight Ball’s New Approach - just more of Danny Williams’ playbook recycled yet again, even though it has led us into the deep mess we find ourselves in today. Williams’ was proto-Trump in so many ways, so when Furey condemns the Trump playbook yet he is following the Williams playbook, the whole thing descends into that sort of inadvertent humour.
The thing that is strikingly similar in these wo speeches, though, is the way they pick on the superficial aspects of the Conservatives’ approach, telegraph their frustration with the Conservatives’ success, and condemn it without actually doing better themselves.
Furey carried on with a condemnation of political polarization, something which of course both Trudeau and Furey are doing in their speeches. Yet, Furey mocked people who cannot “hold two ideas in their heads at the same time.” It seems he wanted to call some people stupid in a passive aggressive way. Yet that line is really a reference to DoubleThink, the Orwellian idea of holding two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time and accepting both as equally true at the same time. Another own-goal, so to speak.
In that sense, like the Trudeau speech, Furey was inadvertently contradicting himself. Mocking himself. Parodying himself. Furey added a line about listening and about bringing people together before he finished and put himself firmly in the political centre. That’s exactly what Trudeau is doing as well. Yet they are not in the political centre at all and they certainly do not bring people together.
Furey finishes with a bizarre and fundamentally antidemocratic line that differences of opinion hold us back and divert us from the course we are on, as if that course, unchanged since 2006 is a good one. Democracy is about talking openly about different ideas, about fighting, and arguing, and disagreeing but doing so in a way that doesn;t get sooky, as Furey is prone to do whenever anyone questions him. In that sense, it’s hard to see a clearer example of DoubleThink than in the speech itself.
These are just three examples of how in really small things we can see so much of the bigger picture.
