NL in Policy Options

If you have any interest in public policy (and I know readers of Offal are very keen on the subject) then the magazine Policy Options is part of your reading list. As the country's premier public policy magazine, it encourages informed debate on the important current and future public policy issues.

A frequent contributor is MUN political science professor Dr. Christopher Dunn. Anyone who has passed through that department in the last 10 years or so will have been educated by him in the intricacies of public policy formation. He was also a consultant to Justice Green for his report on the House of Assembly spending scandal.

His most recent published article is called The Williams effect: election 2007 in Newfoundland and Labrador. It's a fascinating perspective on the events of the fall and concludes with:

With such a majority, one would think that the future belongs to Williams. In fact, that is what he said: “The future is ours,” read the PC election material, sounding a bit like Germany in the 1930s (“the future belongs to us”). However, it is a vague future. The Premier was the centre of the advertising material, but all it promised of a concrete nature was strategic planning and “greater control of our resources.”

There are many implications of the Williams effect. Megaprojects, schools and roads are likely to preoccupy him for the next four years — the politics of concrete.

But the future should not be taken for granted. Williams is unlikely to pay attention to a significant challenge facing him: support for the regime. What he should do is to establish another review, one that focuses on the quality of democracy in the legislature and in society. Because there is no significant opposition, the public should be encouraged to play this role. A multipurpose legislative amendments committee open to public hearings on most legislation, a committee on federal-provincial relations, a stance on e-democracy and a review of the electoral system should also be considered. Newfoundland’s legislature is under-developed, and democracy has suffered as a result. It doesn’t have to be that way. Despite the imbalance, there is still hope that there can be meaningful reform.

Of interest is another of his recent articles in Policy Options from February 2005 called Why Williams walked, why Martin balked: the Atlantic Accord dispute in perspective. The precis says:

In a province where no premier ever lost votes by standing up to Ottawa, Danny Williams has become the latest in a long line of provincialist champions from Newfoundland and Labrador. When he walked out of a First Ministers’ Meeting last October, he had carefully chosen his fight with Paul Martin over the Atlantic Accord, which allows Newfoundland and Labrador to keep 100 percent of its offshore revenues. Yet 70 percent of those revenues are clawed back by Ottawa under the equalization formula.

In the election campaign, both Stephen Harper and Jack Layton promised to end the clawback. Martin made a similar campaign promise, but balked when federal finance officials turned stingy. From St. John’s, Christopher Dunn appraises the political landscape, and fallout, from the Atlantic Accord disaccord, and finds Martin between the Rock and a hard place.

Both of these articles are available online in PDF form, convenient for downloading, printing and weekend reading.

All NL all the time

An embarrassment of riches today: four pieces in the Globe and Mail this morning on NL and the issues facing it. And who says we get no attention from the national media?

One comes out of the NOIA oil industry conference and covers his speech ('No compromise on Hebron: Williams Newfoundland Premier says he won't yield to pressure and sign 'a deal for the sake of a deal'). Related to that, the national media are responding to Ottawa's release the text of NRCAN Minister Gary Lunn's broadside(?) he was supposed to unleash on Premier Williams until Lunn's plane turned back because of fog.

The third outlines Premier MacDonald's and John Crosbie's appearance in front of the Senate and their opposition to the federal budget do to its Atlantic Accord provisions.

Finally, Jefferey Simpson's column on NL outmigration. It makes for sobering reading. Simpson will be speaking at NOIA today and tomorrow. Here's the text.

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Buffeted by the winds of the great migration
JEFFREY SIMPSON, June 20, 2007

ST. JOHN'S -- Could anybody in Ontario imagine their province losing 1.5-million people in the past 15 years? Could anybody in British Columbia get their mind around their province shrinking by 500,000 people since 1991?

Yet a decline of commensurate size happened in Newfoundland. Since 1991, its population fell by 12 per cent, or about 70,000 people.

The very young and the very old didn't leave. Young and middle-aged adults did - the people who work, pay taxes, raise families, support others. The decline was greatest after the cod moratorium, but it persists today. And it will continue. Today's population is about 510,000. Under the best scenario, it will fall to 495,000 by 2020; under the worst, 460,000.

More difficult still, the population is aging, quickly. The entire Canadian population's demographic profile is getting older, but Newfoundland's is getting older faster. In a generation, Newfoundland has gone from having the country's youngest population profile to its oldest. In the 1970s, Newfoundland had the country's highest birth rate. It now has the lowest, courtesy of people of child-rearing age having left.

For decades, politicians of all stripes, and at both levels of government, have pledged to revive rural Newfoundland. These promises continue. There are pockets of modest revival, sometimes because people who went to Alberta or other places "away" came back with money. These are the exceptions, in fact, if not in rhetoric.

Agencies, task forces, royal commissions, studies, programs and billions of dollars have been thrown at the problem. The political culture of the province requires the suspension of belief, a culture no political figure dares challenge.

Meanwhile, here is what is happening - because people took rational decisions in their own self-interest - and what is projected to occur.

According to provincial statistics, of the province's 20 "economic zones," only two have kept steady populations: the Avalon peninsula that encompasses St. John's, and northern Labrador with its aboriginal peoples. Every other one has lost people in the past 15 years, with the decline ranging from 12 to 30 per cent.

The reporting of the raw numbers of decline doesn't tell the whole story because it misses who is left behind.

Take the southwest corner, Stephenville and Port aux Basques. In 1986, it had 15,200 people aged 1 to 19, but only 3,100 people over 65. The ratio then was five young people to every senior. Today the ratio is 3 to 2, and by 2020 it will be about 1 to 2, or about 4,000 young people for almost 8,000 seniors.

Another example: the Burin peninsula on the south coast. In 1986, it had 11,600 people under 19 and 2,500 seniors, for a ratio of about 4.5 to 1. By 2020 it will be about 3 to 4, with 2,800 young people and 4,300 seniors.

Today's median age is 41. By 2020, it will be about 49, but much higher in the rural areas. In 2006, for the first time, Newfoundland recorded more deaths than births, the only province where that occurred. Said the province's finance department, "there appears to be no relief in the foreseeable future for demographic issues stemming from declining births and rising deaths."

The depopulation of rural Newfoundland, in the face of every policy to arrest it, leaves the province with big delivery and spending problems.

A rapidly aging population means higher health-care costs. Outports, even shrunken ones, still need roads plowed, children educated, police on call, but the economy of scale of providing those services grows worse.

Facing these facts, and they are facts, is politically very hard. It is easier to speak of hope, revival, return, and to offer another plan. It is a completely nefarious myth that Newfoundlanders do not wish to work. Newfoundlanders would not have left, and be leaving, in such great numbers if they were shifters.

The work, however, is not there in large swaths of the province. People know it. But governments cannot admit it, and so maintain policies designed to blow against, rather than with, the winds of the great migration.

He's right this time

It's no secret I've had little patience with the way federal-provincial relations have been conducted by this provincial government over the last few years.

I've never subscribed to the school of thought that says that the ideal NL politician has to come from the mould of the fighting Newfoundlander (and/or Labradorian).

You know the kind. We've had Smallwood and two Brians and now we have Premier Williams. Their defining characteristic is their willingness to drop their gloves at the slightest provocation and to fight fight fight for the people of the province.

They have been the enforcers of the province's rights and privileges in that great national hockey game of federal-provincial relations; political goons with the sharp elbows and the high stick.

But rarely are they able to do what this province really needs - score more goals and win more games.

And that applies to Premier Williams more than most past premiers. We thought we were electing a great negotiator. Instead we elected a showboating scrapper who has politically isolated himself and this province across the country while goosing local polls to stratospheric levels.

I always held the opinion that the best background and education for a NL premier would be a stint at the United Nations. I suspect that a successful diplomat with the negotiating skills to build bridges to other provinces, grease the way with the federal government and pave the way with industry to produce economic developments could accomplish great things.

A diplomat understands that your friend yesterday might be your enemy tomorrow and your ally next week. A negotiator recognizes that a great deal is one where everybody gives some, everybody gains some and everybody goes home happy.

But that just isn't possible with this premier. His enemy yesterday is his enemy today and his enemy next week and forever. And you don't need to take my word for it. I'm sure if you took aside Fabian Manning or Elizabeth Marshall or John Crosbie or any other of a number of good, faithful (Progressive) Conservatives of great integrity and skill, they might tell you the same.

And unless you can accept the idea that any set of negotiations must inevitably result in his win and your total and humiliating loss, then you had best take your business elsewhere. Again, my word for this doesn't count nearly as much as the word from any of the Hebron partners, for example.

In politics, friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

This is a long way to noting that in Premier Williams' latest salvo over the NL-fed equalisation dispute yesterday, Premier Williams called upon federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to resign.

It's worthwhile noting also that so far, in addition to calling on Flaherty's resignation, he's also called for the resignation of regional minister Loyola Hearn. While he hasn't yet called on the other local Conservative MP's , Fabian Manning and Norm Doyle, to resign immediately he has called on them to hang their heads in shame.

Just as well Norm Doyle is declining to run again. As for Manning, since Premier Williams has already promised a goose egg of federal Conservative MPs in the next election, Williams' threat to Manning could be considered a call for deferred involuntary resignation.

As for the federal government itself in toto, he has said that he can't wait until this government falls and another takes it's place.

So Premier Williams has called for the immediate or delayed resignation, or otherwise removal from office, of just about everyone in sight.

What's left for Premier Williams to do to get his point across?

Well, he does have the option of a cross-country speaking campaign. But he's already done that.

He could take out newspaper ads to slag the federal government and put forward the province's point of view. But he's already done that too. And of course there's always an alliance with another province in a similar spot to tag-team the feds into submission.

I think I've heard that he's already tried something like that too.

But here's the real question: after calling down the lightning, thunder and rain onto the heads of the terrible enemies of this province (that evil federal government) over and over again for political disputes of all kinds, will anybody pay attention anymore?

And, is this dispute with the federal government different in kind from the Williams-Ottawa disputes that have gone before?

I believe this dispute is different from the ones that have gone before. Previous fights with Ottawa were about money. And there will always be disputes with Ottawa about money. But this one is different because it now affects fundamental pieces of enabling legislation.

The federal government wants to unilaterally amend the 1985 Atlantic Accord.

The 1985 Atlantic Accord is not like other pieces of federal legislation. This Act was negotiated between the province and the federal government over many years to effectively transfer portions of federal jurisdiction to this province. Once agreement was reached, both levels of governments passed enabling legislation.

We forget that we don't own the oil offshore - we never did, we don't now and we never will. Ownership is in the hands of the federal government and that has been definitively confirmed by the highest provincial and federal courts.

But under this Act we are given the right to control development, to tax and otherwise manage the resource as if it were on land.

In effect, because of the nature and scope of the Atlantic Accord, it has a status above other normal pieces of legislation and falls just below the level of the constitution itself. It has the effect of a bilateral constitutional agreement.

To unilaterally amend this Act, without even informing this province, is unacceptable.

If the federal government can move forward on actions like this then it could unilaterally overturn any previously negotiated federal-provincial agreement at will and shred the fabric of prior negotiated settlements that has knitted this country together.

This is not right and Premier Williams is within his rights to make as much noise and generate as much pressure as he can to overturn this decision.

It's just too bad that Williams has no more diplomatic tools at his disposal when he, and this province, has so much need for them.