What's up, Docs?

Furey and O'Keefe, that is.

WTF, Andrew Furey?

He’s a smart guy. Accomplished professional. And he’s the Premier.

So what’s with the costume change in Corner Brook at the opening of the new hospital?

For the ribbon cutting, there was Furey in a sharp looking suit, white shirt, yellow tie. Looking like the Premier, which is what he is.

Yet, in the scrum with reporters, he was in a set of blue scrubs.

Did he pull a quick shift?

Was he treating a patient?

If he was opening a courthouse would he dress in robes and tabs and cosplay being a lawyer?

At the ribbon cutting for Risley’s hydrogen plant will Furey have a pinwheel sticking out of his head so he can be a wind turbine?

How about at the circus: floppy shoes and big nose and give Gerry Byrne a cream pie in the puss?

It’s one of those head-scratcher moments that make you wonder - yet again - if Furey or the people around him have any sense at all.

He’s the Premier. He was announcing a brand new hospital he’d delivered, not a baby. The scrubs added nothing to Furey’s image at all and - as I can attest - the picture angered more than a few health care professionals who felt he was play-acting in what is for all of them working clothes… when they are working. Disrespectful was one word they used for it.

Furey was working too in Corner Brook but not as a medical doctor. It wasn’t on his time or his dime.

So the scrubs looked fake, pretentious, anything but good and they distracted hugely from Furey’s message unless he meant to look ridiculous or insulting.

Totally the wrong image for Andrew Furey personally or as Premier. And it’s not the first time he’s done it. The vaccination stunt in Goose Bay was worse because there he disrupted the clinic for a few glamour shots rather than letting the professionals do the work they were supposed to be doing. The whole thing screams shagged up priorities and after four years, Furey and his people should be way beyond this newbie stuff that distracts and detracts from Furey himself, the office he holds, and what he has and is trying to accomplish.

Four years of work got Furey and his party to where they are in the polls.

It took a lot of hard work to suck this badly.

And it’s not Justin Trudeau’s fault.

The poll placement is the result of *this* sort of foolishness.

Bottom line, Andrew Furey: if you want to be a doctor, resign and go back to the operating rooms at the hospital. God knows we could use a capable pair of hands doing surgery.

But if you want to be Premier, be the Premier. Full time. Shake up your office. Find new advisors ‘cause the one’s you’ve got aren’t working out. If you cannot make the simple choice to fix your own problems, voters will do it for you. That’s the brutal truth of politics. People who tell you anything but that brutal truth are not your friends and they don’t have *your* best interest at heart.

Frankly, Andrew should leave the wacky doctor schtick to an actual wacky doctor. Like Doc O’Keefe. Dennis, that is. Former mayor of Sin Jawns. King of the cruise ships and the guy who was pushing crackpot conspiracy theories about gas prices long before the Internet took off.

Doc used to moan about gasoline prices and claimed there was a giant conspiracy among the oil companies and retailers that kept making the prices go up when they didn’t need to. Not a stain of evidence for any of it ever but you can never reason people out of ideas they never reasoned themselves into in the first place. Get it under under government control Doc and his buddies argued and a bunch of desperate politicians foolishly listened to them.

That’s how we got the fraud of gas price “regulation,” which at the very best merely mirrors the price changes in the marketplace due to changes in supply and demand and gives us exactly what we’d have gotten anyway without the PUB. At it’s worst, “regulation” forces us to pay higher prices than we otherwise would or in the other worst case, sells off scarce, irreplaceable resources for a lot less than their true value in the market. It encourages over-consumption. If you want to protect the environment or get the most for the provincial treasury for roads, schools, hospitals, and the like, you’d never, ever suggest we just give away our resources but there’s Doc arguing for his version of “fairity.”

Doc’s back on the traditional media thanks to suggestions that would change the way Doc’s scam at the PUB sets prices. People who live in remote places where the cost of getting fuel to them is higher would see prices increase. Not fair to consumers, Doc claims, without explaining why. Cut taxes, too.

Doc long ago lost touch with reality in a province that is facing crushing public debt from overspending and the Muskrat Falls project, both of which Doc stayed silent about while they were happening. And like many of the Muskrateers - especially of the Pea Sea variety like Doc - they don’t want to pay the bills for their (idiotic) choices. Well, that’s not fair to anyone, especially consumers.

If you want to understand just exactly how little sense there is in Doc’s words, read this quote and try to make sense of it:

There's not a lot the PUB can do to control the price. All they can do is given all the conditions, oversee [and] have a mechanism that is fair to the oil companies and fair to the retailers and fair to consumers.

There’s not a lot the Public Utilities Board can do to control prices.

But Doc’s whole scam is based on the belief the government *can* control prices. So if Doc admits he’s been pushing a fraud all this time, that should pretty much end the discussion right there.

But it won’t.

Sadly.

---