Rick Hillier has been in the news a fair bit lately.
Not plugging a book or anything but giving the world the wisdom of his views on, most recently, the Trudeau government’s foreign policy.
Abandoned Canadian Jews when they needed him the most, according to Rick in the National Post.
“The fear in the eyes of Jewish-Canadians, who have been abandoned by their country in their very darkest hour, is matched only by the fear in the eyes of our government, which abandoned them.”
That’s the first sentence of Hillier’s op-ed.
The sentence is so well put together, so evocative, that Rick could not have written himself without some help.
Rick’s a smart guy but those words don’t come tripping off the tongue of anyone except a writer.
And Rick isn’t a writer.
He’s got a point, too, and it’s aimed so clearly at audiences in Toronto that people have quite rightly started to wonder if this - and a few of his other recent media appearances - mean Rick is finally going to run in the next election after a decade of spec every time a writ drops. This sort of thing is exactly what candidates do before they officially become candidates.
The video at the top of this column is from Andrew Furey’s speech to the Empire Club of Canada this week.
He delivered a speech that in every dimension, every word, every phrase, every sentiment, is one that the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the current members of the Club have heard before.
It was a cliche.
Like Furey’s dark suit, white shirt, and Liberal-red tie.
And after the short speech, complete with a worn out joke about Confederation - Canada joined Newfoundland [roll eyes here] - there was the cliche fireside chat with Tim Powers, yet another cliche host who started with a cliche reference to Bob Cole before handing Furey a softball question about carbon tax.
Furey replied with a pseudo-intellectual discussion of the carbon tax as a policy instrument, how policy ought to work, and why the carbon tax doesn’t work except Andrew shagged up the third and crucial bit. You can call it pseudo-intellectual because while the opening starts out true enough, Furey then talks about a whole bunch of things that are factually wrong since the federal policy does deal with all the things he claims it doesn’t.
For a bonus he sticks in the word “conflation”, which is another clue the speech is less about having a point than trying to impress the audience by sounding smart. An actually smart way to say whatever Furey was trying to say is to use words more people can understand. “Conflate” means to mix up two things, but rather than say that, Furey uses the big word and then scores an own goal when a few seconds into the windy and confused reply to Powers’ softball, Furey refers to “my conflation.”
Not surprisingly, Furey left out his own legendary list of policy failures, ones that go against his accurate description of what good policy looks like. There’s the sugar tax, most obviously. A massive brain fart of all brain farts but still dwarfed by health spending and the so-called reforms of the Health Accord. The costs are skyrocketing and everything Furey is doing is what we know from long and bitter experience does not deliver better care more effectively and at a lower cost, despite Furey’s claims.
Furey claimed in Trana that the Newfoundland and Labrador government is already doing better than the federal one without a carbon tax, which may be true, but we had a huge head start both in energy production and in the relatively few large industrial emitters in the province. What Furey leaves out is as large as one of the load carriers at IOC, which the government *isn’t* helping go green despite what Furey claims. And Furey fails to mention that his government has done nothing to help all the people pissed off about the carbon tax to convert their homes to green heating, has done nothing to support energy efficiency, develop a workable network of electric charging stations for green vehicles, or anything else of the sort.
Danny Williams’ energy warehouse appears under whatever name Furey and his Brain Trust use for it these days, in the form of a hydrogen project crashing forward on Newfoundland’s west coast. Furey does not put this into his policy framework since it would not fit. Truth is it solves no real problem, massively increases the risk to taxpayers already frightened by the looming hit to their electricity bills from Muskrat Falls - another Furey policy failure - and is so risky and expensive it has literally only two guaranteed customers. Both are in Newfoundland, which repeats without a break the incredibly obviously stupid mistake of Muskrat Falls. His audience knows this even if Furey does not.
There’s NALCOR, for one, which has already told the public utilities board than in its plan to replace Holyrood - the original replacement of Muskrat Falls not being workable - the Crown corporation is ignoring widely available, relatively low carbon, and low cost natural gas in favour of the currently non-existent, immensely risky, and most costly option, namely hydrogen. To be clear, this repeats the policy failure of Muskrat Falls, which will only be paid for by ratepayers on the island of Newfoundland, which again confirms Furey mixed up knowing what good policy is and what he is doing as if the two were the same. They are not.
The other customer for the hydrogen is Come By Chance. Furey sat at a heart-stopping good lunch last week to celebrate the new owners of the 100,000 barrel per day refinery than can these days produce only 14,000 barrels per day on average of oil derived from cooking grease and other sludge. Way of the future everyone touted and soon to run on hydrogen.
The *only* market for this stuff is California, according to the refinery owners, literally as far away from Come By Chance as you can get and stay in North America. The economics of this are dodgy at best given that the refinery when it shut down was making a tidy profit turning Saudi and Iraqi crude into a range of products and selling it locally and in the eastern United States.
These guys have to import enormous amounts of literal sludge from all over, refine it into a minuscule output, and ship the refined oil to California in a tanker that likely does not go through the Panama Canal. Get out your globe if you need to. If they run it by truck and train, well, the math on that should be easy even in a place where two thirds cannot do math at a level needed to survive in modern society. Meanwhile, the money going to subsidize all of these ferkakte schemes could be better spent getting that two thirds down to half or less but that’s another issue.
Furey was looking for a softball venue in Trana. He’s been traveling a lot lately, which is what Newfoundland Premiers do when things at home require actual work or the public no longer worships them they way they hoped and wanted. Joey would have bankrupted a frequent flyer plan in his last few years in office if such a thing had existed. Brian The First enjoyed cigars and limos in Boston. Brian the Second loved the Empire Club and other places like it. He was, in his last year in office, second only to Lucien Bouchard in Quebec as the Premier who spent more time out of his own province than in it.
Danny loved Florida, much like Frank. Unlike Frank, Danny’s crowd managed to talk him into coming back. He loved a Toronto speech, too, Danny did. Empire Club in 2005. Canadian Club of Toronto. Canadian Club of Ottawa. And the Economic Club of Canada. That 2005 one is worth going back to, if only to see just how incredibly cliche it is to rattle off a list of Great Newfies The Mainlanders Know. Danny did Seamus, Rick Mercer, and Rick Hillier. And Lower Churchill, which Furey talked up as well as Churchill Falls, without mentioning the fiasco, but with some biotching even implicitly about the French friggers.
None of these guys went to these places to do any real good. Their audiences are generally disinterested in what happens outside of Toronto or Ottawa, which is why the speeches have to mention Newfies they might know from the television as entertainers. Hillier was an exception. He's not an entertainer but saving people from an ice storm gets you noticed in Ontario even before you become Chief of Defence Staff. The repetitive speeches reflect the cliche understanding of the audienced and as long as the Newf-Kings-On-The-Rock don’t come looking for a free meal too often, they can get up to Trana once in a while and entertain the crowd up along. These speeches are like making Newfs fisheries minister. The day it doesn’t happen is when we know there’s something important going on, that times have changed.
We are not there yet nor are we perfectly poised for it in the foreseeable future.
Andrew Furey’s former cosplay muse - Justin Trudeau - turned up recently on four podcasts talking up the budget, which we all should note sank from public view as quickly as Furey’s did. Well, except for the people running the Colonial Building camp-in slash outa conyrol barbecue slash protest who are likely very happy at all the cash both budgets gave them to keep going, even if Furey’s bunch are at the same time threatening to send in the cops to haul them away.
You’d be tempted to add “like a bunch of fishermen” to that last sentence but given how badly *that* worked out for Furey and his crew, all the tough talk from Team Furey-less this week is both popular with a lot of folks in town and at the same time potentially as risky as having another by-election given how the last Police Rodeo and the last by-election worked out for Team Furey-ious.
Back to Justin.
Weird on many levels.
Small audience, for one, as David Herle pointed out on his podcast. Not a vote-shifting or influencing crowd listening either as Kory Teneycke noted. Podcasts are very niched and so PMJT didn’t really speak directly to a large audience. Herle, who has helped out the post-2015 Liberals of Newfoundland and Labrador on occasion- currently d.b.a as Team Furey - got a shout-out from the platform in Trana by Furey, incidentally.
Herle is *not* helping Furey or if he is Furey and the Brain Trust are ignoring him because in another podcast episode Herle and his entire panel correctly sussed out the issues in the carbon tax thing, noted Furey is a good Liberal, and talked up how hard it is to credibly open up any space between Justin and Andrew. Bonus clue Herle isn’t giving Andrew any advice: they all got Furey’s first name right this time out. Didn’t last time and made a joke out of it.
Anyway.
Trudeau.
Right.
Yeah.
Justin.
Podcasts.
And shitty messaging too, as Herle and others on *his* podcast also noted. Not tracking the way they needed to and instead just doubled and tripled down on what isn’t working.
Then they went on down into the details of how the government policies on housing and affordability just don’t track either as good policy *or* as policy aimed at the folks the Liberals need to and want to appeal to.
The Universe brought together Andrew Furey’s self-parodying fluffy speech in a take-down of Justin Trudeau with a set of criticisms that apply equally to the guy who used to openly fanboy Trudeau.
Doesn’t get any plainer than that.
Or worse than that politically for either Trudeau or Furey.
As for Rick, he might be running but he sure looks like the other two, as a politician in search of an audience.
What they are all searching for is future. Hillier maybe as a politician. Trudeau lining up for a post-politics gig like the Obamas had, if you think like National Post people.
Or to *his* post-politics world, in Andrew Furey’s case too.
This week, another writ dropped for a by-election the Liberals will likely lose as badly as they did the one before. Couldn’t even find a candidate without extraordinary coaxing and pressure. In a flash, the political talk has gone from “about to happen” to “not happening any time soon” thanks to a crapload of things that have shredded the illusion even among the Brain Trust that they ever had any control of anything, let alone something important like the province’s political agenda.
The longer we go without an election, the more likely it is Andrew will run for the door instead of a second term. Other politicians will go ahead of him, like Brian Warr, whose resignation triggered the latest by-election. Watch for that.
Furey did not sign on to be Roger Grimes and certainly not to be the guy who lost to Tony Wakeham. So, it is more likely Andrew will try a Tobin - hence the trip to Trana - and leave quickly for federal politics or some other equally good big job up along.
The federal political option only works, though, if Trudeau goes and they get an election soon. Maybe Furey would hope his personal popularity would win over voters in Avalon who’ve already made clear to the incumbent he has no future. Maybe, if the scales are finally fallen from everyone’s eyes, Furey’s included, he knows that too would be a stretch even if Dominic Leblanc became Prime Minister.
But would any boardroom really want a guy who, with his government drowning in debt, and with a string of failed policies to his credit, and who could not defeat a zombie opposition in an election he called at the worst possible time, just delivered a speech to *the* national public speaking audience that literally had no point?