Newfoundland Politicians–Candidates For the People or For the Waterford

One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are. - Cal Thomas

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation. - James Freeman Clarke

The general election in my ancestral province of Newfoundland and Labrador is just around the corner (November 30, 2015) and as I ponder what type of future the citizens of that great province are contemplating, I can’t help but cast an eye of discernment over the candidates themselves.

As a person who evaluates people using data, I always examine politicians by the things that predict their behavior – things like their ethics, their morals, their values, their character and the people that they associate with.  It is contrary to how many voters evaluate candidates – based on their party, their looks, the selfish needs of the voters themselves or a small subset of the politician’s intentions or beliefs without looking at the larger picture.

It is because of how many voters select their candidates that they don’t foresee where their candidates will take the government and so today’s Leader-of-the-year, can-do-no-wrong hero becomes tomorrow’s despised, have-to-get-them-out-at-any-cost bucket of manure. 

The people leading us into heaven today become the people leading us into the apocalypse tomorrow and yet the funny thing is that they didn’t change and neither did we.  The only thing that changed was the revealing of their character, their motives, their abilities and their intentions.

And so now as I cast an eye of discernment over the candidates in the upcoming general election, some interesting things stand out:

• At least two candidates who are heavily into BDSM.  I don’t care about their personal preferences but their spouses are unaware of their interests since their acts are performed with others.
• At least one candidate who believes that they are one of ten prophets on planet Earth who have been selected to channel a new way of living on the planet, advice which is being sent from beings from another planet or dimension.  One individual tried to convince me that I was one of the ten as well.  Really.
• At least one candidate who makes a living promoting products and services for a company founded by a man who has been fleeing US authorities for years, wanted for fraud, tax evasion and a pile of other things associated with this company.  We are the company that we keep.
• More than one candidate who already has lined up lucrative deals with private corporations and individuals.  Forget the Tendering Act – it is merely a suggestion that is easily circumvented.  Some businesses are smart – they have secured the help of all sides.  The humorous thing is that each candidate is unaware that they are all being used.
• At least one candidate who has spent so much time gathering dirt on other people ala J. Edgar Hoover that the candidate is unaware that dirt is being shared about them amongst others with the belief that this may be leveraged to their advantage some day.  Some people have been waiting for an opportunistic moment to take the person out with litigation – the timing may be right if the candidate is elected since litigation is as much about emotion and leverage as it is about facts.

The list in front of me is long, complex, disturbing and frightening and includes most of the candidates.

Don’t ask me for it – I won’t share it – at least for now.

When I suggested on Twitter that I might share it, eight candidates reached out to me to ask me who I was outing.

Seven of them are on the list.

Oh well.

I’m not expecting candidates to be perfect.

However, I am expecting candidates to be in a position in their Life such that they can’t have their personal interests used against them in order for others to achieve greedy or nefarious objectives.

For some, I would expect the candidates to at least be sane since they are leading the Province legislatively, morally, etc.

And while there are politicians who exist to serve the people and leave the place better and stronger than they found it, they are in the minority.

The rest fall prey to greed, ignorance, ego and opportunism – either their own or someone else’s and it either takes them off the focus of serving the people who elected them or it throws them into disarray as they find themselves serving different masters who use personal information to direct their puppets.

When these things happen, we find them ignoring data at the risk of the Province.  When I wrote the blog post Newfoundland–Should We Just Shoot It And Put It Out Of Its Misery? in March of 2014, where I discussed the concern of the Newfoundland Government projecting $105 / barrel oil while Goldman Sachs was projecting $80 / barrel or worse, I was contacted by the Government and told to stop fear mongering.  As I write this, oil is hovering around $41 / barrel and budgets in the near term do NOT look good.  Ego has a way of not listening, doesn’t it?  Ego’s favorite tool, unfortunately, is intimidation and not education.

When these things happen, we find people using power to promote the unqualified or their own selfish needs.  When I wrote the blog post The Power of the Four-Poster Interview in October of 2013, I created a fuss when I opined on why and how someone with a high school education and no relevant job experience could be appointed to chair the College of the North Atlantic Board of Governors (amongst other appointments).  I suggested that it was possibly related to the reality that the minister who made the appointment and the person who was appointed were dating each other.  No conflict of interest there.

When these things happen, we find people who forget that they exist to serve the interests of the people transparently and honestly.  When they don’t as I mused in the blog post Muskrat Falls–Mastering the Art of Communication Failure in October of 2014, people should rise up in arms.  Instead, they complained a lot in coffee shops, op-eds and call-in programs.  That doesn’t change much.

Such things suggest to me think that despite the quality (or lack of) in people who get elected, the Province relies on the hard work and insight of the bureaucrats to make the Province work at all.  I mused about this in October of 2013 in the blog post The Newfoundland Government–Headed For the Garbage Can.

If the great people of Newfoundland and Labrador dare to demand better of their government, I would suggest that they dare to demand better of their own level of discernment first, to understand why a candidate seeks to be elected and whether that candidate is truly capable, able and worthy of serving the people.

Desire to serve the people is not enough – worthiness, ability, capability and intention matter.

The Bottom Line

Many fine, well-intentioned, capable, intelligent, moral, ethical, character-driven people offer themselves for public office.  We should never forget this or the sacrifices that such people make in order to serve us nor should we become cynical of the great system of democracy that we live in.

Unfortunately, it is rare to find all of these attributes within a single body and so government often elates us during the honeymoon phase only to leave us seeking the divorce lawyer quickly thereafter when the elation of the early romance has worn off.

The interesting thing that voters should always ask is this:

Why is it that when most politicians are voted out of office or leave of their own accord, they often leave the place worse off than it was when they were elected yet magically their personal situation has greatly improved during the same time period, with much additional prosperity (however you measure it) projected for them in the future.

To the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, know your candidate well before casting your vote on election day.

To do otherwise is to subject yourself to something you may not like and which may be less than you deserve.

Or at least less than what you think you deserve, for if you don’t make your choices wisely, you deserve whatever you get.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

PS For those who don’t understand the Waterford reference, it is a facility that is part of the hospital system in the Province. The Waterford facility has at various times contained treatment centers for those suffering from various psychological concerns and so years ago, to suggest that you were sending someone to the Waterford was to suggest that they weren’t terribly well-balanced.

As for what motivates me to write posts like this, I ask you consider this quote from Romans 12:2

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

People complain a lot about politicians but do little, thereby giving them more to complain about.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

Does it make sense to you?

What are you doing about it?

When?

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Addendum – The Courage to Not Conform – November 13, 2015

Many times when my blog posts muse about unethical, immoral, illegal or strange behavior, the people affected or people representing them reach out to me and tell me that I can’t say what I said.

My reply is always “If I have said something not factual or not accurate, then tell me immediately and I will correct it or retract it otherwise the post stands” and I never hear from them again.  Oftentimes, what I have shared is just the tip of the iceberg and they recognize that to pursue their intention is to invite much worse to be revealed.

Unfortunately, many people who have gotten used to bullying and intimidating others into silence fall back on such techniques automatically to defend actions that they know are incorrect.

I don’t know what’s worse … that they find those techniques to be an acceptable form of defense for the indefensible or that people easily fall prey to such tactics, even when the people are in the right.

Are you easily intimidated?

Are you sure?

How do you know?

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The Alberta Budget–Revenue, Spending and …. Productivity?

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort. - Paul J. Meyer

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager. - Peter Drucker

The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization. - Ken Blanchard

As the noise dies down from the Alberta budget, the experts have weighed in for and against and the coffee shops have been filled with opinions (with various degrees of intelligence behind them), there is something missing from the dialog that I think someone needs to have the courage to lay out in the open, expose to the light of analysis and address.

Some say the thing that is missing in the conversation is a lack of diversification of Alberta’s revenue streams and there is some merit to this.  Alberta’s revenue engine could stand for some improvement / diversification / isolation from the boom-and-bust budget cycles that are common with primary dependence on oil as a source of revenue.

Some say spending is out of control and needs to be reigned in or slashed mercilessly but running a government has never been known to be a cheap venture and random or across-the-board budget slashing has rarely been known to produce a positive result of any long-term value.

Meanwhile, public sector unions (whose members, by the way, account for 50% of Alberta’s government spending) say the real issue is not money but the fact that they are overworked and need more people to make government more efficient.

Yeah – right.

Blind hiring has never been known to fix anything in the public or private sector.

There is, however, a four-letter word that people either ignore or in the case of this budget, give lip service to but do little to address.

That four-letter word is productivity.

The mere mention of assessing productivity in the public sector draws a cacophony of protests from the public sector as they attempt to drown out the people who correctly point out that cost is not the issue – the real issue is the nature of the ROI (return on investment) on the money that is spent.

And as a long time observer of human productivity (I cofounded and IPOd a company that specialized in the capture, expression and prediction of human productivity mathematically), I have always been fascinated by the hot potato that is public sector productivity.

Now to be fair, there are a lot of public sector employees who provide exemplary performance and results.  It is that group of people who keep governments moving and who provide the services that citizens require.

However, this high level of dedication, performance and results are not the norm and as someone who has consulted at municipal, provincial / state and federal levels (in multiple countries), I wonder when Alberta’s government will have the gumption to tackle issues around enhancing the ROI of the public sector.

Here are a few examples from my own personal experience (the entire list is too long to include here):

• Senior municipal IT workers who freely admit that they switched from the private sector to the public sector because the pressure to deliver is less, they can work less and they get a better pension.  They are building a complex infrastructure for which no customer has been identified as being interested in it but it looks good on their resume.
• The lady with the Absorbine Jr. addiction (she drinks it) who walks around zonked out of her mind all day but cannot be touched for a variety of politically-loaded (read: union) reasons.
• The lady who had spiders in her office and when facilities management showed up to remove them, blocked their entry to protect the spiders.  The standoff lasted a week, tying up a lot of resources almost full time, until the manager forced her to relent (much to the protest of the spiders, I’m sure).
• The lady in a hospital blood testing center who played solitaire on her computer while two people waited for a blood test.  The phlebotomists wandered around inside waiting for someone to be admitted while she played for a high score.  After an hour, she called a colleague and indicated that she needed to be relieved because she was run off her feet.  The people waiting in the room looked at each other, shrugged and shook their heads.
• An emergency room that shut down for hours and took no patients while staff waited for lab work to come back for a specific patient.  Timbits and the like were brought in as nurses and doctors laughed and cajoled in the back.  When I asked the receptionist if it was normal to take no one from the waiting room while waiting for lab work to return for a particular patient and when I noted that it was insulting for a room packed full of tired, sick people to listen to a party going on behind the door, I was informed that if I asked again, I would be escorted out of the emergency room by security.  The lab work took approximately 6 hours to complete.

While these are extreme examples (and I state again that there are many dedicated, professional, hard-working public sector employees), we have some room for improvement.

Whether we have a little room or a lot of room is matter of perspective, insight and analysis.

When it comes to such analysis, the perfunctory self-analysis often conducted by many groups is of little value as is many of their recommendations.  It is ironic that oftentimes, such analysis either produces extra processes and procedures that hinder people and diminish their productivity even more or it results in a recommendation that more people need to be hired “just because”.

Unfortunately, self analysis has rarely been shown to be effective in any public or private sector scenario.

And in fairness, there is a lot of abuse within the system, both by people who work in it and by the citizens that they serve, and this adversely impacts the productivity of the public sector workers (the good ones and the bad ones).

Are we getting ideal ROI from our public sector employees?

How will we know unless we have the courage to ask?

The Bottom Line

Voters get caught up in the game of analyzing the budget from a spending versus revenue perspective and politicians and unions can skilfully and artfully dodge the equally important (and expensive) issue – the issue of lost or diminished productivity.

The dilemma is that to ignore it is expensive from a financial perspective but to tackle it is expensive from a political / PR perspective.

But if we don’t have the courage to tackle the productivity side of government spending / investment, the fiscal scenario of government will continue to get worse with every budget since spending is guaranteed to increase over the years while revenue will constantly be an unpredictable beast of boom or bust.

Unfortunately, we have a situation where our leaders don’t have the courage to tackle the issue, they don’t have the interest to do so or it serves their one personal interests and purpose not to. 

If it was their money, the sense of urgency would be greater, I’m sure.

In addition, by not addressing productivity issues, we are also ignoring those public sector employees who give their all every day to provide the services that citizens need.

Citizens and private sector businesses cannot survive with infinite borrowing while productivity lags, either marginally or precipitously.

Neither can governments.

Does it matter to you?

Are you sure?

Because if people don’t demand these conversations from politicians, then maybe the people don’t care enough either and would rather merely vent in coffee shops.

If that’s the case, the people get the government they deserve and are as much responsible for difficult times as the people in power that they criticize.

And then the demand for better is merely a wish:

Wishes: If wishes were horses then dreamers would ride. But they're much more like cattle, so best grab a shovel.

What do you think of that?

In service and servanthood,

Harry

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Related Posts

• The Alberta Economic Summit and Tough Decisions
• Alberta Bureaucracy - Spending Versus Productivity

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Addendum – Addressing Some Comments – March 29, 2015

I have received a lot of email from public sector employees who asked me to address specific issues.  Rather than answer them individually, I will respond to all of them in this addendum.

1. Why don’t you address issues in the private sector?

This post was intended to identify concerns in the public sector – concerns that are front and center given the discussions around the Alberta budget.  For those who claimed that this post praised the private sector as being perfect, if they read the post carefully, they will see that it does nothing of the sort.  I have noted concerns in the private sector in other blog posts.  The private sector gets many things wrong as well.  However, in the private sector, when an organization executes its productivity poorly, its reward is diminished profits, diminished market share, a diminished stock price and if it continues for too long, the company ceases to exist.  The public sector has no such worries or concerns – it has a safety net that the private sector does not have (with some exceptions).  The private sector is thus, for the most part and with some exceptions, self-correcting – the public sector is not and has no motivation to be so.  What is important to note is that just in the private sector, it is important to find what works well and find ways to emulate that in areas that need improvement.

2. Don’t forget the management of the public sector workers

A solution for assessing productivity strengths and weaknesses includes all levels, from the lowest level right up to politicians and bureaucrats (and even how citizens consume services).  Everyone contributes to strong or poor productivity and thus no one is exempt from analysis of productivity.

3. You can’t measure ROI for government entities because they don’t earn money

The return on investment is not only measured in dollars returned as is commonly expressed in the formula ROI = (gain – cost) / cost.  While this is a simplified measure for investment or capital spending, a return on investment can also be expressed in other forms, such as quality of service provided, the number of services provided versus what can / should be provided, the number of people providing a service versus how many are needed, the time required to initiate a service request response, the turn-around time required in providing services, etc.  There are a number of ways to measure and express this mathematically (non subjectively).

4. Assessing productivity is not as easy to do as you claim it to be

I never said assessing productivity is easy.  I said it was important.  There is a big difference.

5. Why don’t you offer solutions in your post – that would be more useful?

I don’t offer solutions here for three reasons.

1. The solution for each area may have unique aspects to it.  There is no “one size fits all” solution that can be blindly applied to everyone in ignorance of data / analysis that must be derived first.
2. Any solutions that could be provided would likely be lengthy and too academic for a simple post.
3. The analysis and solution would likely be complex and require considerable time and resources.  Do you work for free?

I appreciate people who send me comments in a constructive or interactive tone. Rants or insults from people that such a blog is meant to disparage public sector employees come from people who resist change and thus resist the opportunity for positive growth.

The former serve the people of Alberta well.

The latter exist to delay change or to serve their own purposes – whatever they are.

We All Answer To Someone .. Or Do We?

In my native province of Newfoundland and Labrador, a filibuster is in progress as the Provincial Government debates Bill 29.  Bill 29 contains amendments in regards to requests for information from non-government entities, including the citizens of the Province.

As I read the bill, there is one section that stands out (emphasis added is mine):

      21. The Act is amended by adding immediately after section 43 the following:
Power of a public body to disregard requests
   43.1 (1) The head of a public body may disregard one or more requests under subsection 8(1) or 35(1) where
            (a)  because of their repetitive or systematic nature, the requests would unreasonably interfere with the operations of the public body or amount to the abuse of the right to make those requests;
             (b)  one or more of the requests is frivolous or vexatious; or
             (c)  one or more of the requests is made in bad faith or is trivial.

Vexatious, according to the Oxford dictionary, is defined as follows:

• causing or tending to cause annoyance, frustration, or worry
  
• Law: denoting an action or the bringer of an action that is brought without sufficient grounds for winning, purely to cause annoyance to the defendant

Back in 2006, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador was rocked by a spending scandal that resulted in bureaucrats and elected officials being responsible for absconding with funds in excess of $2.6 million.

If rumors of such an event  or other inappropriate activity were percolating today within the government and additional information was sought by the media or the Auditor General, such queries could cause significant annoyance to the defendant, whether it be the governing party or the specific individuals who were rumored to be acting in an inappropriate manner.

In fact, such queries could legally be considered to be vexatious and therefore, under the terms of Bill 29, could be rejected.

A slippery slope indeed.

The Master and the Servant

We refer to the people who work in provincial government as public “servants”.

I wonder who the master is and who the servant is when public servants are enabled to act without oversight, protected by legislation that enables them to turn away requests that in their eyes are vexatious or which they can label as frivolous in order to avoid further investigation of a potential wrongdoing.

The people who are empowered to deny requests for information are not even elected officials, being a group of unknown bureaucrats buried within the bowels of the organization and yet enabled with the power to decide what the government will reveal to its citizens.

Justice Minister Felix Collins noted that such legislation enables government to “find a balance in terms of giving people access to information, but also being good stewards of the country's assets and the country's information and records."

In a world where dishonesty doesn’t exist, such interpretations of the bill could be made.

However, people being people and in a legislature that has had, in its storied history, people who have used the system to their advantage, this bill creates a dangerous loophole.

If I were the type of person seeking to make personal gain on the backs of the taxpayer as people have done in the past, I would refer to this loophole as either Project Gravy Train or Project CYA.

Project Gravy Train (aka Project CYA) empowers unelected, unknown individuals to decide what information regarding the thoughts and intentions of the public masters, (oops, public servants)  are revealed.

It also empowers them to hide information that could be politically embarrassing or that which may reveal illegal, unethical or immoral activity.

Consistency

If a privately-held company attempted to withhold information from the public that we deemed was important to know from a legal, ethical or moral perspective, we would demand that the “system” step in and right the wrong.

So why don’t we do the same when the keepers of the “system” are attempting to do the same thing with potential to benefit themselves?

If we were discussing really secret stuff like national security and the like, I would understand protecting the information.

However, this is information that, when revealed, allows us to have some sense of transparency and accountability within the ranks of public servants.

This is especially important when one considers that Premier Dunderdale is always chanting the mantra of transparency.

Such inconsistency of word versus action brings to mind an old joke about how you can tell if a politician is lying.

But I wouldn’t be so crass as to use it here.

Ahhhhh …. public servants.  By definition, they are supposed to work for the people but I think they believe it’s the other way around.

Unfortunately, as long as citizens don’t work harder to demand accountability from public “servants”, this perception actually becomes a fact.

So when we contemplate the need for transparency within government, let us not be convinced that restricting access to information is akin to protecting information being used for something more sensitive such as the war on terror.

However, there does seem to be a war in progress …. a war against accountability, transparency and common sense in government.

And that worries me far more than the war against terror.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

PS In fairness to public servants who actually do good work and are proud of their service to the public, the nebulous nature of this bill makes their job more difficult.

It’s like changing the speed limit of a highway from 60 mph to “whatever you feel is safe”.  Drivers will proceed to drive any speed, making enforcement of safe driving almost impossible (“well officer, you say I was driving too fast but I felt perfectly safe”).

So for those public servants, they run the risk of allowing a request that they felt was safe (but in fact wasn’t) or rejecting a request that they felt was vexatious (but wasn’t). 

This allows blame to be shifted to them should something nasty erupt after the request for information is responded to.  If something hits the fan later, someone else will scream at them or vilify them, informing them that their interpretation of the words vexatious and frivolous was incorrect and they will be punished as a result (potentially deflecting blame and responsibility away from the perpetrator).

The use of words that are relative, vague and open to interpretation produces an environment where someone will inevitably get hurt, either wilfully or accidentally.