Just when I think I’m stuck for a blog idea, Shawn Graham, bless his little heart, comes out with another gem. On Thursday, what should come on the radio but a story about how New Brunswick’s premier is finding himself under a little bit of media pressure. He feels that the media is giving him a hard time, henpecking him and ignoring the opposition. He’s feeling bruised and battered, and he’d like all those reporters to be a little bit more accommodating.

Mr. Graham has been on a bit of a tear since his government took office, and he now finds himself the least popular premier in Canada. One recent survey put his popularity at 15%, and we are now only seven months away from what might be the most eagerly awaited provincial election in New Brunswick history. In his short time in office, Mr. Graham has managed to tamper with post-secondary education, the health care system, and French immersion. The biggest gaffe, though, was when he broke a major election promise by attempting to sell the provincial power utility. It is this – the proposed sale of NB Power to Hydro Quebec – that might be the final nail in the popularity coffin.

The NB Power sale is a wildly unpopular plan that was cooked up behind the scenes with no public input or media scrutiny. After the deal was announced, the public uproar was so deafening that Mr. Graham was forced to partially re-negotiate it, even though what he initially presented to the electorate was billed as a “final” deal. The Graham government, however, is no stranger to flip-flopping. Nearly every initiative his government has proposed has provoked public outrage and forced him to backtrack or modify his plan. It isn’t surprising that he might feel a little bit beat up, but if you’re going to stand in the middle of the road, you have to expect that, eventually, you might be hit by a car.

Lately, I’ve been reading up on the role of the media in a democracy, so Mr. Graham’s lament that he is getting too much journalistic attention piqued my interest. On one hand, his comment might be fair. Some statistics show the media often are ideologically biased, which I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone. The thing is, they are biased to the left – sometimes hard left. If Mr. Graham were a conservative, he would have better odds with his media bias argument. The media is eating him alive because that seems to be the only way to get any information out of him. Someone has to worry about the public’s right to know.

Mr. Graham’s complaint is that the opposition doesn’t have an alternative plan to address NB Power’s massive debt, and the media is ignoring that. I have argued in the past that Canada is plagued with weak opposition parties and complained that the federal Liberals need to do better than just torment the Conservatives all day: they need to show some vision of their own. In response to one of those posts, someone (fairly) pointed out that it is impractical for the opposition to have a fully formed plan to counter every government action. I agree. Their main job is to criticize the party in power. So, newsflash for Mr. Graham: the media are paying attention to you because your party is in power and you are making extremely unpopular decisions, ignoring the will of the people.

If Mr. Graham wanted the opposition to have a detailed counter-proposal (which I somehow doubt), he should have informed them of his interest in selling NB Power last June, when he first started sniffing around Jean Charest’s stoop. I’m sure the public, the media, and the opposition would have appreciated being included in the process from the beginning. Since no one but Mr. Graham was privy to the plan (even his own cabinet didn’t seem to know much about it) it is hardly reasonable for him to object to criticism now. People rightly distrust secrecy in their governments. Even now, several months after the decision to sell, the government refuses to release the full plan. The closest they have come to public consultation is to plan a series of belated public meetings that are supposed to give citizens an opportunity to vent. What makes those pointless is that Mr. Graham has said that no matter what the outcome of the meetings is, nothing in the plan is going to change.

One of the reasons NB Power is a debt-laden slug of a utility is that successive governments from each side of the political divide have interfered with its operations for their own partisan gain. While they did this, they continued to tell New Brunswickers a happy story about how great their utility is and how well it was being run. Positive points to Shawn for finally pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, negative points for deciding the people of his province weren’t bright enough to deserve a say in the solution.

Shawn Graham’s major goal for New Brunswick is self-sufficiency. He wants to see us off the federal dole, but no one is sure how selling NB Power plays into that. If Quebec has control over the lights and the heat, it doesn’t seem like we’re in charge of our own destiny. People are leery of handing over control of our only source of electricity to a province that (occasionally) desperately wants to get away from Canada. We are especially nervous of doing it in exchange for a five-year freeze on residential power rates. Ask a Newfoundlander about the whole Churchill Falls thing and you’ll get an understanding of why some of us are a bit nervous about shacking up long-term with Hydro Quebec.

There are several major obstacles on the road to New Brunswick’s self-sufficiency. The first is that we really have no clear way to make money. New Brunswick has little to offer in the way of natural resources, other than rocks and trees. There are some petroleum resources, but anyone who thinks we’re going to be the next Alberta or Newfoundland is just delusional. Tourism is never going to sustain us unless people develop an interest in seeing our rocks and trees. Our best asset is our geography, which puts us right next door to the booming New England energy market. Surely there are better ways to leverage this opportunity than selling out to Hydro-Quebec. I guess we’ll never know, since Mr. Graham didn’t solicit any other proposals.

The second major obstacle to self-sufficiency is the province’s sad literacy rates, which are among the lowest in Canada. We are staggeringly ill-prepared to take part in the knowledge economy, the only thing that might have gotten us around the “nothing but rocks and trees” thing. Mr. Graham and other NB Power sale supporters are probably correct when they say that the average citizen isn’t capable of understanding the deal. I suppose it makes life easier for politicians if they keep the population dumb. Don’t educate them, let literacy rates stagnate, and then tell people they are too uneducated and unintelligent to have a say in government decisions. If the New Brunswick government (and NB’ers) were serious about the province being competitive and looking after itself, it would start with making sure everyone knows how to read. Since Mr. Graham has a background in education, I expect him to understand that.

The last major obstacle to New Brunswick’s self-sufficiency is the complete lack of vision shown by its leadership. Mr. Graham ran on a platform of change and we certainly got that, but change for the sake of change is useless. It has to be guided by some sort of coherent vision and has to take into account the actual resources at hand. You can’t just say that you want a pony and then trust that it will show up. This province continues to be run by “leaders” that are guided and manipulated by corporate interests and men who long ago gave up their elected positions but continue to feel they have a right to influence public policy. Until New Brunswickers are willing to give up on nepotism and favoritism once and for all, nothing in this province is ever going to change.

This is why we need the media to keep an eye on Mr. Graham and his government. As imperfect as they may be, the media are the only way we have of inflicting any discomfort at all on the premier and his government. What so many governments seem to forget is that democracy doesn’t just happen every four years. When we elected the government to represent our interests, that’s really what we meant – represent, not dictate. The media are doing their job, Mr. Graham, so how about you leave them alone and start doing yours?

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Provincial Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.