By now, Premier-Elect Tony Wakeham is well ensconced in the business of forming a new Government. The important process of forming a Cabinet, replacing key senior personnel, and giving priority to policy changes constitute the first tasks of any new Administration. Each one is inherently important, but Wakeham should know, too, that the first impressions that he creates will be long-lasting.
Most significantly, the Premier-elect’s first initiatives will offer confirmation – or create doubt – that the General Election was greater than the mere process of exchanging the “ins” – the Hogan Liberals – with the “outs” – the Opposition Tories.
Except to confirm his choice of Chief of Staff and the members of the transition team, wittingly or otherwise Wakeham has offered the public no information about the transition process. I would have expected more robust communications, if only to keep the public connected to the central message that the election results prove what they were hearing. This need not be complicated or consume a lot of time.
As Opposition leader, he must have thought deeply about the origins of the Liberals’ second attempt to sell the Churchill River to Hydro-Quebec for une chanson française – a song. It is a deeply disturbing question, one to which the public is owed a serious explanation, even if it must come later. The Churchill Falls MOU is an act of high treason; that is reason enough to give the public some sense of reassurance.
The MOU is not the only issue this province faces, though at least that one can be put to rest with the stroke of a pen. More problematic – because it will require years of determined leadership – is the size of the public debt.
Wakeham must have watched in horror, including as a private citizen, as his Tory predecessors and the Liberals pushed the province into a financial chasm. The fact that the public were contentedly deaf all this time is not proof that they are ungovernable, as some suggest. Rather, the circumstance represents the manifest inability of political leaders to communicate trouble as quickly as they herald their perceived triumphs. The size of the debt and persistent annual deficits only confirm that modern political leadership has become synonymous with ineptitude.
Whether Wakeham perceives his own excessive promises as merely the grist of electioneering or if he thinks them viable – despite our true fiscal position – is also a matter for later assessment.
Elections provide opportunities to differentiate leaders and their policies, but leadership really only begins when the policies they claim to be important are given enactment. It is trite to say that it will be easy for Tony Wakeham to differentiate himself from Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale or from Andrew Furey and John Hogan. The fact remains he won’t until he does.
Poorly understood, too, it is a process that can’t begin too early.
Premier-elect Tony Wakeham
Two initiatives come to mind that Premier-elect Wakeham can announce right away to begin defining his style of leadership, start to differentiate himself, and give continued proof of his preoccupation with the most pressing public policy issues of the day.
Giving substance to the public’s repudiation of the Churchill Falls MOU, he can immediately send a note to Premier Hogan asking him to order the law firm drafting the legal agreements to step away. Why? Because as anyone knows, after a balanced negotiation is concluded – or if no negotiation occurs at all (not a bad outcome either) – the current work is redundant. The public should not be paying just to keep the lawyers busy.
A second request from the Premier-elect will not be onerous either. Wakeham need only ask that the current Government update one exhibit contained in the economic review conducted by Moya Greene called The Big Reset; actually not the whole report, just the exhibit on page 41. It is entitled “Table 4.1: Total liabilities and exposures of Newfoundland and Labrador”.
This initiative is important in part because the Big Reset, prepared in 2021, contained a single truth about the “real” debt – Moya’s word , not mine – about which almost no one retains any memory. Since then, another four Budgets have been brought down, each one containing giant-size deficits – all manifesting the persistent lie that the debt and deficit are manageable and that the Estimates – the Government’s statement of revenues and expenditures – reflect the claims of the Finance Minister’s Budget Speech. Neither of them remotely achieves the status of the truth.
Back then, however, Moya Greene stated:
“In total, the province’s liabilities plus other obligations and exposures stands at $44.5 billion as of March 31, 2020. Adding in borrowings to cover the 2020-21 shortfall of $2.8 billion brings the number to $47.3 billion.”
The “real” debt is a figure that is distinguished by the size of the “lie”, the latter used by Finance Minister Siobhan Coady for all that time. In fact the lie is so ingrained in our psyche that the media, their consultants, other pundits and academics all treat it as definitive.
The total debt figure reported by Moya Greene is now higher by ~ $10 billion. Even then, no one asks how much debt has been accumulated under those well-concealed Public Private Partnerships, known as P3s.
It would be a great tragedy if the Premier remained ignorant of the “real” debt or if his new Finance Minister followed Siobhan Coady’s script. It’s not as if anyone can rely on the Auditor-General to fill in the gaps that the Finance Department so easily omits.
The importance of the abominable MOU and the problem of giving even reasonable exactitude to the public debt is clear enough. The great part is that the two requests from the Premier-elect will demand so little effort from Premier Hogan that he could not possibly refuse.
There you have it: a note from the Premier-elect, a few minutes of engagement with the media and presto….Wakeham is back to contemplating the difficult process of Cabinetmaking. And, of course, the critical process, too, of replacing senior officials, including the NL Hydro CEO and the Clerk of the Executive Council, who also helped negotiate the MOU.
Who would have imagined that Wakeham’s “differentiation” from his predecessors could get off to such an easy start.