As a way of helping this province identify and address its fiscal problems, in their guest column “Imagining Newfoundland and Labrador, post-pandemic — Part 2,” David Vardy and Ron Penney propose the establishment of an external/expert advisory council reporting directly to the premier.
It seems however, and at least in part, the advisory council proposal is built on the limited if not faulty premise that Muskrat Falls was/is “our fault.”
The proposed provincial external advisory council seems to exclude the need for federal participation/buy-in. Accordingly, at the federal level, it is more likely to be dead on arrival.
Would any Newfoundlander or Labradorian argue today that in the 1960s when Ottawa failed to exercise its constitutional authority (and perhaps duty) to allow the transmission of Upper Churchill power through Quebec, that Ottawa was thereby not (at least in part) “at fault” for the travesty that became the Upper Churchill contract?
And here we are today, knowing full well that when the federal government provided billions in loan guarantees to the province, Ottawa became the enabler. Ottawa backstopped “our” Muskrat Falls fiasco largely for the purpose of meeting Ottawa and Nova Scotia’s greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements.
Accordingly, if this province’s fiscal mess is to be cleaned up, any council/committee process from its very conception (planning and organizational structure point of view) has to recognize, reflect and incorporate — both in form and function — meaningful federal and provincial government participation in its design and execution.
A provincial/external/expert/economic-only council will not get the job done.
While the problem may very well be ours, the cause of its failure never was ours alone.
A narrow provincial/external/expert and largely economic-only approach would have process failure built in (e.g. would such an approach be all that different from the early and singe-minded planning approach that Nalcor used to select Muskrat Falls as our energy least-cost option)?
Rational and effective planning, problem identification and solving requires a horizontal, collaborative, federal-provincial, and bottom-up analysis structure, as well as an external advisory component.
The failure of our political structure is perhaps the greater issue — our fiscal problem only a symptom. A provincial and economic-only advisory council would be akin to putting a new coat of paint on our rotten clapboard.
From the very beginning (and from a process perspective) success must be built-in.
Maurice E. Adams
Paradise