By Barry Stagg
June 1999
BRIEFCASE NEWFOUNDLANDERS: THE JOYS OF CENTRAL PLANNING
There are few pleasures more enticing to the Liberal politician than the exquisite joys of central planning. Careerism for the ambitious Liberal depends on taking as much control of the provincial economy as possible without actually declaring the province to be a fiscal suburb of Ottawa.
That is why the provincial Liberals like to have economic success doled out in small measures. Too much of that type of private intoxicant will wean the faithful off the narcotic bliss of state funded security.
What will happen to the Liberal political ethos when the Newfoundland economy flames into bloom on the strength of the increasing economic inertia of the oil business? The time worn principles of transfer payment budgeting will have to give way to the harder tasks of raising taxes from your own taxpayers. Newfoundland Liberals have no experience with this method of governing. Maybe they have no stomach for it either.
Since 1949, Newfoundland has developed a government paid ruling class that has interesting similarities to the 'Nomenclature' class of bureaucrats who managed the satellite republics of the now defunct Soviet Union. Power for both emanates from the control of state resources in tandem with the certainty of employment and salary that goes with having a government job in a place where government runs the show. Prestige, status and economic power are vested in those who make and manage the rules of the state.
The separation between bureaucrat and politician in the New Newfoundland is now quite blurry. Cabinet ministers are in practical terms mere managers of their particular departmental budgets. This is particularly obvious in the Tobin regime, where the terminally ambitious premier has surrounded himself with a cast of acolytic ministers who mostly seem happy to have such prestigious jobs. Careerism has been taken to its political zenith. Commissars in the old USSR did essentially the same things that the New Age Newfoundland cabinet does in this part of the Free World.
One thing that seems to be overlooked in contemporary analysis of post-Confederation Newfoundland is the extent to which Newfoundland is still regulated (not governed) in a style reminiscent of the tight scheme of central control maintained by the federal government during and immediately after World War II. It is as if the spectre of C.D. Howe still hovers in the halls of the Confederation Building. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of a poor economy so patently dependent on federal money.
Central planning with all its socialist trappings has been a fundamental principle of federal governance of both Newfoundland and other dependent federal wards. For instance, the Indian Act has centrally planned the official aboriginal population of Canada into a multitude of First Nations protectorates. These exist sort of like Puerto Rico in the United States version of domestic colonialism.
Whether the federal clients are weak provincial governments or aboriginal bands, the methods are the same. Ottawa hands out the money and commissars regulate its flow to the people. Aboriginal citizens have applied the derisive name 'Briefcase Indians' to those who make white collar careers out of beggaring their common brothers and sisters. In Newfoundland their political counterparts are surely,'Briefcase Newfoundlanders'.