Sounds nice, but have you thought it through?

By Ivan Morgan

I was talking with people about the increasing difficulty in buying food and one person blurted out “The government should take over the grocery business!”
Can you even imagine . . .

When I was young, I was passionate about policy. The not particularly flattering term for someone consumed with policy matters is wonk. I was a wonk. I believed the solution to most of society’s problems was to put it in the hands of elected officials who had the best policies.

To a much, much lesser degree I still think that. But having lived a while, and having eyes in my head, I have come to learn other things.

Government can’t be trusted to run much of anything. Political parties currently not in power will agree with me and tell you that under their leadership things will be very different.

Sure.

An example I used earlier this year was our very own Centre for Health Information. Set up decades ago they were responsible for, among other things, protecting our electronic health information. Great idea. Last year their annual report noted that they received over $90.5 million from you and I, a handsome chunk of which is for salaries. Yet despite all that cash they failed to protect… wait for it… our health information.

They were hacked by criminals and government had to pay a ransom and won’t tell us how much. For our own good. Just pay your taxes and mind your own business.

This is just one example. There are so many. Truth is government couldn’t run a candy store. Remember, Muskrat Falls was once thought a good idea.
One of my favourite policies has been a universal basic income. Our country is wealthy enough to provide everyone with the basics. The idea is the federal government would give us all enough income for the basics and we would work for the perks.

It would rid us of the cost of the complicated income support bureaucracy and allow professionals to focus on the folks who really need help, not the rest who might find ourselves down on our luck.

That sort of happened during the pandemic when the federal government gave many people financial aid. I thought it would be an interesting test of the policy. Some economists I trust now suggest corporations such as grocery providers responded by upping their prices to get a bigger slice of that “free” federal cash.
That was not the idea. The policy may have been great, but the implementation may have caused a different outcome.

Take, as another example, government’s talk of banning cell phones in the classroom. Great idea? Sounds good. How will it be enforced? A clever teacher I know asks if he is supposed to enforce it. Is he now to be a cell phone cop on top of his many other duties? He says he was trained to teach, not to police.
It sounds good, and would be a wonderful election issue, but my question is: how will it be done?

With so many elections coming up next year you will hear all manner of high-minded ideas meant to get your vote. But unless they can be properly implemented, they are just words you like the sound of.

I have seen good ideas being watered down by every level of government – from the executive to the person at the front desk.

The further from power a political party is, the more they will promise and the better it will sound. I know. I wrote election platforms for years.
If you are governing, or can reasonably expect to win, your policies have to be more tempered to reality.

My advice is to try and imagine how a policy might work. Privatize the liquor corp? Sounds great. Better selection. Better prices. But the NLC pays close to $200 million a year into the treasury. How long before the private folks figure out ways to help themselves to that moola?

Fix health care? How many more band aids will government trot out for this huge bloated inefficient dying corpse?

Whenever I meet young people excited by policy my advice is always the same.

Think it through.

Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com