This is a time for leaders.
The threats are real. Our politicians are not.
This no time for ease and comfort. This is a time to dare and endure.
Monday morning’s email brought a rebuke for the column titled “Canadians are gullible.”
Not unusual at all but this one was from one of my oldest and dearest friends. And the rebuke slash rebuttal was exactly as thoughtful and impassioned as I would expect. Spent a bit of time pondering it even after I replied. The difference in the two of us on this point is proximity. That’s all. He’s in the middle of the soup, living in Ontario, and in every way wired into the heart of the central Canadian and national view. I am on the counter, well away from the pot.
Make no mistake. There *is* a threat. Donald Trump and his goons may be gunning to make Canada part of the United States. Or they are incompetent morons, bumbling and bungling their way into the future of a United States that is neither an economic nor military centrepiece to the globe.
Either way, that means Canada cannot keep doing more of the same. Our economic, foreign, and defence policies are built on the Americans as the leaders of a western alliance with a global economy and global military to match. Times changed very quickly last November. Now we need policies in which we are less tied to Americans, do much more for ourselves, grow closer to Europeans, Japanese and Australians, but at the same time recognize the Americans are our neighbours and we are going to be close to them socially, economically, and politically, for a long while to come.
What’s striking is that we are not seeing the changes from any of the Sky Captains federally or provincially that we need in order to face the world of tomorrow, let alone today. The disconnect between what we need and what bungling Premiers like Doug Ford or the federal Liberals are doing is as much about Canadian domestic politics as anything else. The federal Liberals have seized the Trump confrontation to fight off the Conservatives. The polls have shifted dramatically in a few weeks as a result. Mark Carney might get elected as Prime Minister after the next general election. He will be running against Donald Trump, as some sharp observer noted the other day, while Pierre Poilievre is running against Justin Trudeau. Canadian political leaders seem more concerned with their own survival than with the national survival despite or contrary to their rhetoric.
So much of the media commentary, the characterization of Donald Trump and what he wants comes through Canadian media but started in the federal political offices that Justin Trudeau is now leaving. Whispers to David Cochrane over dinner. “Leaks” here or there. It is like Danny Williams in the early oughts telling Cochrane and other reporters what Steve Harper, as childish Williams used to call him, supposedly said in a private meeting.
Reporters and so many others ate up whatever Williams said because it made them look like players and gave them ratings. No one cared that we had no proof, no confirmation Harper said anything so despicable as what Williams had claimed, that what we were told was Williams breaking an importance confidence that normally allowed leaders to say many things, sometimes in the heat of the moment things that are not their real view, so that they can find agreement on what matters once the facts and the emotion get laid bare in private where some stuff is supposed to stay.
No one cared that what Williams said, without any back-up, was nakedly self-serving for Williams. No one admitted that Williams himself was a notoriously unreliable informant, if not a regular teller of whole fibs then a world-class nose-grower by omission and when he wasn’t that he was simply foolishly hysterical. People wanted to believe, so happy to see their conditioned responses confirmed as right that they were willingly led.
A little scepticism is always good when dealing with politicians. “Listen,” the fictional Jeffrey Pelt, senior advisor to the American president told Jack Ryan in Red October, “I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing their lollipops.” Fiction rooted in reality tells a truth that is worth remembering.
Words go here
We need change.
We get more of the same.
Monday afternoon in the House of Assembly, Andrew Furey was back from his adventures in Neverland. Pea Sea Leader Tony Wakeham tossed him a softball, asking for an update - his word - on the Premier’s grand strategy for defeating the giant Trump. Blah, blah, blah, replied Furey or words to that effect. Wakeham tossed another softball on the second question and got more blahs on top of blahs, this time about a mining conference that no Premier has gone to in decades simply because there is no point. Trade shows are not the place to do deals but Furey says he accomplished miracles. People might believe Furey were there not clips of Donald Trump and Bernie Davis sounding equally unbelievable.
Wakeham switched to the boondoggle at the old Airport Inn for another question, which Sarah Stoodley jargoned into incomprehensible submission. Then Wakeham went for a story the Pea Seas brought up last Thursday while Furey was selfie-ing London England into submission. A memo from the head leprechaun at the health authority directed the legion of vice-leprechauns to find somewhere in their bloated budgets a rounding error’s worth of savings.
Last week when the Pea Seas brought this up, fill-in health minister John Haggie told everyone matter-of-factly that the health authority was already running a couple of hundred million over budget this year. This was an attempt to see some of the savings that were supposed to come from the bashing together of all the old health authorities.
…the overcrowding at the Health Science Centre is so bad these days that patients waiting from emerg for a bed on the wards are now spilling out of the corridors and into the recovery area for day surg. ICU will be next and then the cafeteria.
But on Monday, Furey wanked, rattling off how much more spending there’d been since he arrived, as if all that were a good thing in province near broke twice since the Liberals took over. Along the way Furey blamed Wakeham for stuff someone else did, all very John Hickey-like - the former Pea Sea minister from Labrador sued Roger Grimes for something Danny Williams said - which is the silly level at which Furey and his Brain Trust operate.
To be fair, furey’s lines were no brighter than the comment from the Tory benches on Thursday that “any dollar coming out of health care is a dollar too many. You're looking at $50 million of savings. It's impossible for that not to have an affect on the delivery of health care in the province.” Not only is it possible, you could haul ten times $50 million out of health care spending in this province and even then you’d barely touch the outermost layers of the thick new bureaucratic blubber Furey and his lucky-charms pal have added in a couple of years. Such is the bloat that Furey is so proud of.
None of the discussion in the House took notice of the simple truth that the government will spend this year something like $4.5 billion on health care, more than the total provincial budget just 20 years ago and will borrow $3.0 billion to pay for it. There is no cut anyway, as Furey explained they need to move $50 million from one part of the health budget to spend somewhere else, while still running $200 million over.
And no one mentioned with all of Andrew Furey’s boasting of new buildings he cannot staff up on top of existing buildings he cannot staff properly, the overcrowding at the Health Science Centre is so bad these days that patients waiting from emerg for a bed on the wards are now spilling out of the corridors and into the recovery area for day surg. ICU will be next and then the cafeteria. Unheard of before. Now just another day. Andrew Furey’s health care system is a miserable wreck that sucks money the people laying in the beds and their families cannot afford without giving them the care they need when they need it. “This government is just getting started,” Furey shouted across the House on Monday.
That threat is real.
This is a time for leaders.
This is a time for change.
We get more of the same.
John Hogan will replace Andrew Furey as Premier, hand-picked by all the people who picked Andrew Furey, someone with no experience doing anything like the job they picked him to do. Their judgment speaks for itself. People say the same thing about Mark Carney. Never been elected to office before. True, but he has worked at the topmost levels of government in Canada and in Britain, which is more valuable experience than most politicians get.
In the provincial Liberal race, the Brain Trust had John Abbott who, like Carney had bags of experience, but unlike Carney now has four years as a politician and cabinet minister. Abbott would make important, needed changes, maybe clean up some of the clumsy, amateurish and obvious corruption along the way. The Brain Trust will have none of that. While Mark Carney is promising needed change, John Hogan says everything is peachy and promises to keep doing everything that Team Furey has been doing with the overspending and under-delivering but with maybe fewer selfies. He recites lines someone else wrote for him at least as well as Andrew Furey does. he is perfect for them.
This is a time for leaders.
This is a time for change.
We get more of the same, in this case a finance minister who says yet again she cannot cut taxes to help people heat their homes because Uncle Ottawa controls it all. Not true, as she knows, since she has cut the same tax before - right after saying she couldn’t - and her predecessors have cut the same tax and then jacked it up again. We are not as stupid as she hopes.
This is a time for leaders.
This is a time for change.
Not coming provincially any time soon.
Provincial Liberals like Lisa Dempster and Steve Crocker who only a few weeks ago were either leaving politics altogether or staying put, started to look at federal politics once the winds changed. They are not leaders. They are like Tom Osborne, looking for another pension at taxpayer expense now he thinks has a chance to get elected again.
Osborne quit politics as the Furey crowd were sinking last winter. Got a job with the dairy farmers. Not working out in the job after only a few months, as it seems, and so Tom wants back into politics, this time as the Liberal candidate in the new riding called Cape Spear. “We need leaders stepping up to the plate,” Osborne told NTV. We need leaders, yes. Osborne is a wind-sock.
Thankfully, there *are* leaders stepping up.
Victoria Belbin from St. John’s is already running for the Liberal nod in the same seat. She’s successfully running the association that represents defence and aerospace manufacturers in Atlantic Canada. She is bright, articulate, capable. Before her current gig, Belbin ran the homebuilders association in Newfoundland and Labrador, was executive director of the province’s regional economic development association, and worked with the Alberta gaming and liquor commission. Belbin is also on the board of Wonderbolt Circus, the Rideau Hall Foundation, and chairs the board of a coalition of municipalities, industry associations, and manufacturers created during the pandemic to help local industries grow.
She is stepping up to face the threats are real.
This is a time for leaders.
Victoria Belbin is a leader.
When leaders appear, we need to support them, encourage more, and put the more-of-the-same crowd, regardless of party, out to pasture.
