Unaffordable

Axe the Tax of Incompetence

HMV: One of John Hogan’s first calls from the Premier’s office was a Zoom to Francois Legault, soon to be the de facto owner of Churchill Falls and Gull Island.

First day back in the House on Monday and the newly reshuffled Liberals were all about the next election, whenever it comes.

No matter the question, they were talking about how the people’s priorities were their priorities. Families and Affordability. Money for health. Money for oil and gas companies. Money for restaurants.

Tony Wakeham got around to asking about the sugary beverages tax. Will you get rid of it? although Wakeham was way more wordy with a simple question.

“We will deliver vaccines to everybody over the age of 50 for shingles,” said Hogan. Literally. Word-for-word the first answer out of his mouth to a question about something else. Hogan and the crowd behind him were just rattling off stuff they’d memorized.

Obviously.

Then he answered the question: “As I said, affordability is a very important issue to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and I've already written a letter to the Finance Minister to ask her to repeal the sugar tax to deal with affordability issues in the province.

“So those are commitments, Speaker, and we will do what we are committed to doing, because that's what's important to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”

Liberals said some variation of “commit” 30 times on Monday during Question Time alone. Affordability, a dozen times. Three of that dozen were *not* talking about anything Hogan is doing for Labradorians to make it easier for them to get cheaper food or flights to get out of Labrador. Money for people to go back and forth on the island. Money for people to get off the island to Europe. A loopy deal with a Liberal-connected airline to fly between the well-served airports on the island - Gander, Deer Lake, and Sin Jawns - but nothing for Labrador.

Nothing.

Hogan “realizes” this is important, as he told the House. He “heard” about it during the leadership. So now he was ready for “conversations.” Newfoundland gets action and money. Labrador gets more talking, which means no action at all.

Not unlike the Pea Seas in 2007 who screamed and bawled blue murder at the Liberal idea of committing a mere $100 million a year on Labrador. Oh Jesus, sure you’ll bankrupt da place da Blue Fanboys screamed in unison anywhere they could scream. The Liberals are just more passive-aggressive in their attitude to Labrador.

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First reactions.

Low-rent Carney. Low-rent carney. Both senses of the words. On the one hand, the Liberal Party since 2015 and just being a cheap knock-off of the federal party. Carney ditches carbon tax. Hogan dumps the sugar tax. On the other hand, a bunch of raggedy amusement park hucksters the way they just recite pitches and lines to lure in suckers and rubes.

John Hogan’s two Big Commitments - ditching the sugar tax and free Shingrix for all - are two things the Pea Seas have been pounding away at.

Hogan and the crowd behind him have no ideas. So obvious it is not news. Hallmark managed to have one plot, for frig sake. The Liberals should do better.

Still first reactions but words others might not hear the same way.

I wrote Siobhan and asked her to repeal the sugar tax.

Do they not have text messaging and telephones in government? What about fax machines? As Premier, did he not just tell her cut the friggin’ tax? As a more realistic Premier, did he not meet with key players and decide to do this after some consideration of the ups and downs?

Were Hogan and his recycled Brain Trust so busy they couldn’t get the Cabinet together for a minute to approve a change to regulations lowering the tax to zero or better still draft a simple one sentence bill that abolishes the sugar tax law they could have passed on Monday given the House rubber stamps everything with no debate?

This stuff is not that hard and since the Liberals have been around for a decade now they should be able to handle simple stuff like this.

But they can’t.

Wrote and asked.

Hogan also sounds like these people are not one team.

Wrote and asked her sounds like Hogan is not the Premier.

There’s a fucked up bunch of relationships implicit in those handful of words Hogan said.

Seriously fucked up.

Including Hogan’s relationship to the job he just got handed to him.

Still first reactions.

The bit where Hogan says he wrote and asked her and now they’ll figure out how to make it happen.

Again, not rocket science so a really weird thing to say.

Weird but not unusual.

The free shingles vaccine is coming but they don’t know how it will roll out. They have to pay for it somehow and since this vaccine is part of some national buying scheme, we have to stand in a line and wait our turn.

When might this happen? someone in the media asked the new health minister Krista Howell.

No friggin’ idea, says Howell, but more politely.

“I wouldn’t be able to say because I don’t honestly know how long it’ll take for us to get the medication.”

Weird for normal places. Weird for the way things used to be here. Another Monday for GNL these days.

Like the day Andrew Parsons jumps up in the House and announces a new policy on wind energy - he was really talking about hydrogen, not wind, but that’s another story - and that the whole thing would happen lickety split, no biggy. Too easy. Already done, shur.

And then it wasn’t already done.

Still isn’t done.

Still isn’t started.

Years later. Biggest proponent, Furey’s fishing buddy, bailed out on the whole scheme - now pronounced scam, by the way - and the others now only one form of grift or another, some griftier than others.

But in between Parsons crowing and now a whole new process, continued ban on wind development, despite the claim it was actually gone, and generally more of the same confusion that has been all over energy policy since 2003.

So not easy.

Not all done with no problems.

Not usual.

Another one: separate the NALCOR oil and gas company off on its own.

Easy peasy. No biggy.

Then a year later, cannot be done, it turns out. So they set up a separate company, leave the original there with the oil assets attached and then make the second company responsible for managing the first, with all the ex-NALCOR types who moved over to the new company still collecting all their exorbitant pay and all their outrageous bonuses, which the politicians let them keep on with even after the Auditor General blew a big whistle and pointed to the whole scheme, which you recall is now pronounced scam, which means it pronounces like what it is, not how it spells.

There have been lots of these brain fart announcements of the we’ll-figure-it-out-later variety, more once Furey was the avatar for the Liberals than before. Whole committees put to work and then ignored. Moya Greene’s outfit. Arguably the Health Accord, too, which quickly became just a bigger Borg Empire assimilating more and more public cash, more and more layers of bureaucracy sucking in money and giving back no better care.

But in there, in the Health Accord the idea that we are not healthy in Newfoundland and Labrador because of piss-poor diets, not much exercise.

Tuesday morning, the day after the end of the sugar tax made the news, a couple of people interested in nutrition and diet in Newfoundland and Labrador turned up on Sin Jawns CBC to tell us that this tax was at least an attempt to shift people’s diets away from stuff that we consume too much of. The word obesity got dropped in there somewhere, which produces all sorts of health problems.

We’ll come back to that.

“…affordability is a big issue and we're not new to the game on this.”

That’s Lisa Dempster. Still in Cabinet. From Labrador. Maybe not running again.

And in that response to Leila Evans accidentally self-mocking since the Liberals seem like they are perpetually new to the game, making-it-up-as-they-go, shagging up the simple stuff all the time, even as they give off this vibe of being worn out and ready for the ash heap of history.

There’s no sign any government in Newfoundland and Labrador in a very long while has had joined-up-thinking. Understanding how one thing affects another. One government after another like a one-celled organism. Stimulus-response. That’s all they can manage. But less than a glob of goo because the one-cellers learn from mistakes. The gov goo in NL just does the same thing over and over and over.

Take affordability.

It’s about inflation. The price of everything goes up.

It’s about paying too much for stuff.

It’s about wages and such not keeping pace.

It’s about things that stop people from making money, from starting new businesses to make money, employ new people, pay more taxes.

Cutting gas tax doesn’t improve affordability. Getting rid of a stupid sugar stupid tax, stupid because it couldn’t possibly do what they claimed, stupid because it was the original version which evidence showed would never work, getting rid of a stupid tax that should never have been doesn’t make stuff affordable. That’s doing the same thing over and over without learning. No joined-up thoughts.

You see, there are not even 250,000 households in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Half of them run on less than $70,000 bucks a year before taxes.

Milk costs more than sugary soft drinks.

None of this is a secret. None of it is new.

Just like the link between obesity and income isn’t new. In the 30 years between the 1980s and the 2010s, “childhood overweight … increased by 28% and obesity by 175%. Nearly 80% of middle-school and high school children in the province do not get enough exercise, and it is estimated that only a quarter of children and adolescents are physically active at all in their spare time,” according to a 2009 study at Memorial. Yes, folks, Sister Liz did not discover the social determinants of health one night after supper up to the nunnery, hidden under a bunch of old papers. We’ve known about it for a long time.

So, as the two on the Ceeb said, making it cheaper to buy soft drinks doesn’t do anything for health.

Here’s another thing that doesn’t help: supply managed milk which means no free trade in milk among Canadian provinces. Means we pay way more for milk than we should.

You want to make healthy food cheaper and easier to get in Newfoundland and Labrador? Drop the trade barriers between provinces, starting with milk.

Newfoundland is an island. Most of Labrador is remote from major centres. It costs money to ship stuff but not outrageously so. There are ways to lower costs. We could try some, like allowing people on the coast of Labrador to ship in bulk like they do in the Far North.

But here’s a better one. We know there’s a connection between having more money and buying better food. The solution is *not* hiking up the minimum wage. The Liberals did that a few times and there’s been exactly zero impact on poverty or anything else. They got suckered into the political trap of listening to the unions and their front groups, who have precisely zero interest in poverty, health care, education, or anything else except how they can use those issues to advance their members’ interest in more money in their pockets.

The path to better health, lower costs, and all the rest is creating more jobs and more jobs that pay better wages. More free trade between provinces would be an excellent start to that. Even lowering the barriers to liquor sales across provincial borders would create huge numbers of new jobs in retail and manufacturing, which also means more money for the provincial government’s bank accounts. It also means more stuff shipped to the Mainland which would mean more traffic on Marine Atlantic which means they make more money and don’t need to drive up fares.

Hogan’s crowd are 100% against that. They are against freer trade across provincial lines, full stop. They do not want reform of the fishery although that would give people decent wages and more stuff to ship over the ferries. If they were for freer trade they wouldn’t talk nonsense about Marine Atlantic because more traffic on the Gulf would bring down prices. They wouldn’t be subsidizing restaurants either or any other businesses because those businesses would survive on their own. There’d be more business for them, they’d make more money and they wouldn’t need handouts.

Overall, get government out of the Soviet-era economic development business they’ve been trapped in since the ‘70s. We need fewer junkets, trade shows, and give-aways and more of government just getting the frig out of the way. Leadership. You get three choices: Lead. Follow. Get out of the way. Newfie politicians only think they can lead and they only follow fads and the wind. That leaves you with the best option, which is getting out of the way of people who know what they are doing.

Well, more jobs is half of the challenge. The other half is better access to education, showing the value of education, and making sure what’s available in schools and in all the stuff out there for people after they are finished school is what the economy needs and what those students need to get ahead. we are not talking about the tuition freeze. That is 100% a fraud that only benefits people who could already afford a university education.

Instead, convert from loans and a subsidy to the university to a free grant for a first degree or certificate. We don’t need a Premier’s Advisory Council on Sports. There are enough jock things out there. Create a Nerd Alliance. Make it a good thing to do well in school.

While we are talking about it, those fewer than 250,000 households with less than $70,000 to spend could *never* afford Muskrat Falls so the whole scheme the old Pea Seas and then the Dwight and Andy and John Liberals cooked up to pay for it won’t work. Never made sense. The answer is not a subsidy, either. It was don’t do it in the first place. Now it is find a way to make someone else pay.

And as for the give-away to Legault, scrap it. We’d make more money selling electricity to Ontario and the States after 2041 than we’d ever get from the current deal, which over its whole life will not make the government enough money to pay for Muskrat Falls.

John Hogan and the Brain Trust behind him have no ideas. They think that axing the sugar tax will win them the next election.

It won’t.

It will take more than that to axe the real tax.

The Liberals would have to axe the Tax of Political Incompetence, which is why they have struggled to stay in office for 10 years. The same Tax could come with the Pea Seas, too so they need to smarten up as well.

That’s the real problem in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Tax of Incompetence.

Fat heads.

Leads to fat bodies, which will kill us and cost us all too, which leads to fat debt, too, which will kill us all another way, and which the Liberals are growing all the time, at record levels considering 25% of what the government will spend this year to buy your vote is borrowed.

Instead, put down the Big Mary and go for a walk.

You’ll be healthier.

Instead, vote for any politician who doesn’t want to keep things like they are.

We’ll all be healthier.

The change is up to you.

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