We were liars
Not YA fiction. Just NL political amateurism.
There’s no version of the story about Premier John Hogan and severance for Cabinet ministers that doesn’t involve:
amateurism, bungling, or incompetence,
lies (knowing falsehoods), and/or
some combination of the two.
For background, you can read:
the original CBC story by Rob Antle and Terry Roberts that broke the news about a new severance payment for Cabinet ministers [Friday morning], and
the follow-up story about the cancellation of the new severance payments [Friday afternoon].
Also for background, you need to understand:
The Liberals got rid of severance for public servants (including politicians) in 2018 as a budget cutting measure,
The Liberals recreated new severance payments - now called a “transitional allowance” - for members of the House of Assembly in 2024 based on a report by a commissioner appointed regularly to review compensation for politicians. This money helps the politicians transition if they leave their job for any reason, including death. No shit. They list transition due to death as one of the reasons for the benefit. Money will help you ease into the Great Beyond.
The Liberals didn’t disclose any of this publicly until caught even as Andrew Furey and now a string of Cabinet ministers quit politics and thus qualify for the new payment.
Transition to more information.
Let’s dive right in, starting with the three sentence statement Hogan issued on Friday while vacationing in Europe. You can see it in the picture at the head of this column.
The first sentence says that Hogan convened a cabinet meeting at some point *after* CBC broke the story Friday morning so Cabinet could rescinded the payments.
The second sentence repeats the official line from the day before the story broke (see the original CBC story) that Hogan wasn’t in Cabinet when it approved the money.
The third sentence says Hogan only became aware of the payments when the media contacted his office and that he “acted quickly” to put a stop to them. That’s actually a refinement of the position the day before in the original CBC story and adds the self-congratulations of acting “quickly.”
That’s the official story of what happened.
On the face of it, if we accept the official story, then Hogan is weak and his administration is in tatters. After all, we have to believe that Hogan heard about the payments on Thursday (in the most generous version for him), never batted an eye that everyone had kept it from him - his own Chief of Staff, his entire Cabinet, his old buddy Andrew, his Deputy Premier and the whole of Cabinet Secretariat - and then had no more to say except that his office must tell people it happened while he wasn’t around.
That means he approved of the payments. Had he disapproved, then Hogan as Premier could easily have put a stop to things immediately. *That* would have been the story Friday morning: Hogan stops secret payments. There might have been another story about all the people he fired for keeping secrets from him.
Instead, Hogan and whoever he talked to in his office and Cabinet decided only on Friday morning to kill this policy once people found out about it and reacted very badly. That’s not what a Leader would do. That’s pretty much the definition of chickenshit. Had Hogan approved the policy on Thursday - as he obviously did - there’d be no reason to backtrack. Yet that’s what he did.
Let’s put together a more likely version of the story, the one that Hogan and his office avoided in favour of one that relied on lies in order to make them look incompetent and weak.
Three details make Hogan’s official story unbelievable.
First, we know that the House of Assembly approved an identical “transitional allowance” for the members of the House in 2024 and back-dated it to April 1 that year. John Hogan was the Government House Leader at the time. Hogan was also the lead government member on the House of Assembly Management Commission, the group that approved the House transitional allowance.
We know this because the records of the House Management Commission show they discussed the draft version in July last year and approved it after some discussion about several members of the House who’d been covered under the old severance policy but had not been paid out under the new one. One name that springs out is Tom Osborne who quit in July 2024 and who would be covered 100% by the new severance allowance.
Second, we know that nothing happens in the House of Assembly without the Cabinet signing off on it. That’s especially true of money issues. If this new severance scheme got through the House then it had already gone through Cabinet and John Hogan knew all about it.
Third, nothing happens in Cabinet - especially spending money - without preparation and a paper trail. Cabinet cannot spend any money without approval and without the appropriate legal authority. The timelines of the severance for both the House and then the top-up for Cabinet members suggest Cabibet bit has been on the go within government as part of the reappearance of severance last year. Even if Cabinet didn’t get around to its portion of the allowance until the 2025 budget preparation, that means the first talk of it happened possibly as early as last September. It still takes some time to get a Cabinet paper drafted, put aside the money in the budget, send it from and then back to the appropriate Cabinet committee, before it goes to the full Cabinet for final sign-off.
That final sign-off may have happened while Hogan was temporarily out of Cabinet but there’s very little doubt that Hogan knew - he certainly ought to have known - about the decision well in advance.
Notice that in the House policy everyone was getting nice extras. Both the Speaker and the Leader of the Opposition are paid on par with Cabinet. Their added severance came under the House. Without this new government severance package, the only ones denied the full amount would have been Cabinet. That’s actually the logic of the Cabinet severance: it makes sure everyone is treated fairly. It actually makes sense that if you have brought back severance for all politicians, then you’d treat them all fairly.
That logic and those facts explain why Hogan and his staff weren’t concerned with anything other than saying he didn’t know about it until it happened. They could be blindingly stupid but let’s give them some credit. All the same, backtrack on Friday was cowardice pure and simple and politically it was dumb as a bag of hammers.
Bag of hammers dumb also explains why they said nothing about it all along and tried to fluff their way through the CBC story. After all, while Hogan was out of the province, they had the Deputy Premier and minister of finance who could have explained simply and factually to everyone what had happened as we've just outlined. Even if people weren’t happy then at least the story Siobhan Coady would have told would have been undeniably true. Plus, she would have had the added bonus of shutting Tony Wakeham and Jim Dinn up since they already knew about the severance scheme. Were they dumb enough to criticize the Cabinet bit, the government line would easily point out their hypocrisy. Why should Tony Wakeham get a fat severance cheque when he loses but any Premier get less? Tony would look self-serving and greedy and politically, the Liberals could have turned the tables on the Opposition.
But that’s not what they did.
To explain why they went for a politically stupid story instead of the truth, we just have to go back to what really is the Liberal trademark since 2015. There is no story they have not made worse by having - as one politically keen wit once put it - the political instincts of a carton of sour milk.
Here are just four examples of many and two of these are gold because they involve severance:
2016: Dwight Ball claimed he didn’t know anything about Ed Martin’s severance yet documents his office released proved he approved the pay-out even if he didn’t know the amounts. Plus, there were background details that also revealed how poorly run Ball’s office was. Ball went into a key meeting with Martin unprepared (no briefing notes) and alone (no winessesto what happened).
2018: More controversy over severance for the head of the provincial liquor monopoly who left the corporation making accusations about governance at the corporation although a subsequent Auditor General’s review showed problems while he was in charge. Tom Osborne’s response - sending over a financial officer into an eliminated position - just added to the Keystone Kops quality of it all.
2019: During the election, Pea Sea leader Ches Crosbie nails Dwight Ball between the eyes with his own words endorsing Muskrat Falls in 2010 right after Ball claimed live on air that he’d always opposed the project. Ball had been telling the fairy tale for years and when finally caught flatfooted, started to invent a rationale. Dwight loved Muskrat in principle but it had been badly managed by the Pea Seas. That isn’t what’d he said that night during the debate on television and countless times before but there you have it.
2022: When news broke of Andrew Furey’s trip to John Risley’s Labrador fishing camp, he told three different versions of the story. First, it was none of our business because he was on his own time. Second, Furey said he’d paid for it. Third, Furey turned up receipts that his wife had paid for the trip.
That’s when someone said he had the political sense of a carton of sour milk. Well, he wasn’t alone. Politically dumb is the Liberal brand.
In any Premier’s Office that’s working properly, any response to a media question like the one about a new severance payment should take a whole-of-government perspective. There’s an element to the work that involves the Premier personally, but the political staff in the office are not there just for the politician the way a Cabinent minister’s staff is. The Premier’s Office runs the whole political show.
That’s another reason why the fumbled response by John Hogan and his staff to the severance story is bungled. Incompetent. He only wanted to distance himself from it. The information in the CBC story from the Premier’s Office talked solely about what Hogan knew and when he knew it. No one cares when Hogan knew. There was no consideration in Hogan’s reply of the bigger picture. The factual information came from the Cabinet Secretariat rather than the Premier’s Office. That suggests a disjointed and bureaucratic approach - as opposed to a unified, political response - to what is obviously a story with major political implications. The Premier’s Office simply didn’t understand the story or how to handle it.
That might surprise some people but the truth is John Hogan’s office carried over most of the staff from Andrew Furey who carried over staff from Dwight Ball. No one gets a credit for being a rookie, then. The whole office, including folks who should know better, frigged this one up badly. This is typical of the Liberals, generally since 2015. To be fair, the Pea Seas before them were no better back to 2010 and only marginally better on some political issues during the Danny years. Danny Williams had some political instincts but far too many of the stories from his administration started with Danny’s Trump-like tendency to go off at the mouth.
The Age of Celebritocracy has also been the Age of Political Amateurism in Newfoundland and Labrador in this century. We prize putting inexperienced, naive people often with no relevant experience of governing in the biggest political jobs on the go. What’s worse, no party has gone into government in this century prepared for the job they got, which is to run the government. It’s now an organization with a $20 billion dollar cash flow. None of the politicians elected since 2003 have anything close to the experience of running an organization vaguely like that and none have hired political staff with enough experience to offset the deficit in the elections side. In fact, young and green is all too common for staff at all levels. Some - like the Liberals in 2015 - deliberately ignored experience initially. The Liberals only started pulling in a handful of people with a clue after a year of self-inflicted, very deep political wounds and even then the cock-ups continued.
The bureaucracy can and has run circles around them (look at health care) but truthfully no one politically has challenged the public service since 2003, either in the sense of stopping them from doing something nonsensical or pushing them to excel, to stretch, and try new useful things. To the contrary, Muskrat Falls was the alignment of political incompetence and bureaucratic obsession with ego as the wedding band that tied both of them together.
It’s not just the implication within the government itself of this cult of amateurism. You can easily tie any of the string of major policy disasters of the past 20 or so years to governments that were simply not up to the job on any level. Others can and did easily run circles around them, as Francois Legault and Hydro-Quebec are doing as you read this on an even bigger mess than Muskrat Falls.
In this next election, we may well change the political party running the government for the second time in less than 25 years. That’s more than we did in the first 25 years after Confederation. Yet, we must wonder, though, if voters will again reward laziness and amateurism (no matter who wins) as they have consistently in this century or will we finally get a government that did not - to borrow the Swedish saying - slide into office on a shrimp sandwich like Danny Williams or Dwight Ball and all the rest?
We should not hold our breath waiting for the answer.
We should expect better of all politicians today.
