The “Pandemic Budget,” and Politics at the End of the Line
The truth is even simpler than it was last year. The province, despite seven years of austerity, is even closer to financial ruin that it was in 2019.
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Thinking Outside the Crisis: A Great Big Bag of Hammers
The events triggered by Covid-19 are diagnostic of fragile social arrangements that we have lacked the ability to discuss for decades.
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Moody’s Blues, or: Commission of Government 2.0
Yesterday’s news is not the end of the world. But it’s a small part of a larger process: our control over Newfoundland & Labrador’s future is slipping away.
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The Red and Blue Doors Open the Same Room
As promised in response to the budget/not-a-budget pre-election kick off, I thought it would be useful to take a deeper look at what the Liberals have accomplished in their four years in office. Halfway through the election campaign is as good a time as any. Everything old is new again. As both the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives have now released their “costed” platforms, it’s probably a good idea to think back to where we were when the parties went through this exercise in 2015. Memories of Elections Past In the spring of 2015, Progressive Conservative premier Paul Davis brought down an austerity budget in response to the collapse in oil prices and the sudden realization that the good times of the previous decade had gone bust. Budget ’15 projected staggering deficits and proposed a series of tax increases (including a controversial HST increase) and a public sector attrition plan…
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Budget 2019: Shag It, Let’s Do Magic
I went to the NL Budget Lockup to hear tales of a budget surplus in 2019. Don’t get me wrong; budgets are normally big policy events. Not only do they chart the government’s fiscal plans for the upcoming year and update us on how things went the last one, they also usually involve a myriad of specific policy announcements across sectors. But as communication strategists become more and more important in all aspects of government, budgets have become more of a public relations medium than they once were. There has always been political spectacle on budget days: the finance minister’s new shoes, surprise funding for new paving and the like, but there has usually been an actual budget obscured by the government’s marketing efforts. Budget 2019 in Newfoundland and Labrador takes the communications side of budget days to a new extreme. It’s a pre-election budget, which are usually long on…
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Dwight Turn?: Neoliberalism, Newfoundland-style
Can the province’s new Liberal government deliver a “stronger tomorrow”, or will incoming Premier Dwight Ball build on the dangerous legacy left by Danny Williams and the PCs?
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