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.

Public policy, partisan and personal

Premier Williams' latest foray onto the national stage provides some insight into the mind of the Premier and some light on his strategy in dealing with the rest of Canada.

You could read the full text of his speech to the Economic Club of Toronto but it's more interesting to check this link to about 7 minutes of the presentation.

Before you listen, ensure you are in a good mood to start and with ready access immediately afterwards to sunny children, cute furry pets, a loving spouse or a fine sweet chocolate dessert.

With the exception of one brief and bizarre moment, this clip is unrelentingly grim, dark, venomous, depressing, negative and spitefully sarcastic.

The one single moment of any levity is a weak-hearted joke about ending his life with a bullet. It's hard to tell whether he means a shot by a detractor or by his own gun but with his stratospheric approval ratings, it's hard to believe that there are any substantial detractors left to take the shot.

In the dull, flat and affectless tone of his voice, you hear the same kind of driving will to live that you hear in men who have come home after being fired just to find out that their wife has cleared out the bank accounts and have run away with your best friend in your carefully restored antique auto.

While he claims a message of hope, his tone has a bleakness that belies his words.

And just as unnerving as his tone is the content: it is extreme and simplistic. He trots out a series of unconnected and unrepresentative examples to prove his "case" that everything anyone has ever said about him or his government is wrong.

For example, he uses a kind and face-saving quote from Husky president John Lau to shield himself from the charge that he is unreasonable in oil negotiations.

But the best example is his "proof" that the latest provincial budget was the best ever because long-time provincial bureaucrats said so. But the irony never occurs to him that it's that kind of political frankness that has ensured they are long-serving bureaucrats.

It's hard to escape the impression of a well-developed kind of political paranoia combined with a persecution complex. To refer to Canada's attitude towards this province with a term as strident as "xenophobic" is, frankly, a gross misinterpretation of reality usually associated with the ingestion of small mushrooms after a spring rain.

Stranger still is his confusion of provincial respect with provincial self-respect. While he argues that we as a province deserve respect from the nation, he can't help but trip over the term "self-respect" instead.

While respect comes from others, self-respect has to come from within.

It's not unusual for governments in this country to have policy differences with each other. In fact, it would be remarkable if provinces didn't have policy difference with each other or with the federal government. It is the tension of these differences that has led to creative ties between and among levels of governments.

It's not unusual to see political or partisan differences between first ministers. But these kinds of differences are left to the backrooms, rarely leaking out. The goal among professional politicians is to put their personal and political differences aside in order to promote the common good.

So even when politicians go on national speaking tours to slag one another, it is cloaked in policy differences with the personal antagonisms relegated to the back burner. Not this time. This time the personal and political antagonisms are front and center.

Before, it was personal between Premier Williams and Liberal Prime Minister Martin. It was personal between Premier Williams and then-regional minister John Efford who was called a sell-out, a traitor and a quisling by this government.

And this time it's personal between Premier Williams and Conservative Prime Minister Harper. It's so personal that Williams will go out of his way to disrespect and denigrate the nation's First Minister just because he can.

Clearly the needs of the personal trumps the partisan and the public policy. This is amateur politics.

There's an old saying that when elephants fight, grass gets trampled. While these fights go on, the blades of grass are hightailing it westward in search of more fertile ground to take root.