Bring on the Newfie Doge
Work in Progress/By Ivan Morgan
No doubt I will again be accused of being a Trump supporter, which I most definitely am not, but I am also not someone who is deaf to what many of his supporters want. More than a few people have told me they want a Newfoundland DOGE, a Department of Government Efficiency, like President Trump has initiated down south.
Is this a good idea? You decide.
Before we look at this, may I remind you that although there are many layers of government, there is only one taxpayer – you.
We pay a lot in taxes, which would be fine, except many don’t feel they are getting much for their money. More than a few think government is using their money to wreck the province.
Who looks over all this? We have an Auditor General. Her office points trouble out every year; no one reads her report. Little is done about her findings. Her office has no real power to clean anything up; she can shame but that’s about it. Her recent report shows 40 per cent of her recommendations from 2016 to 2020 have not been addressed, most of those being ignored for over five years. Which means they won’t be addressed. Which means nobody cares because there’s nothing she can do. No appetite for improvement.
What does government do? Has it helped you with your grocery bills, other than to give you back your own money? Power bills? Gas bills? Housing prices? Why in the name of God do we continue to just fork over so much of our money for nothing – or very little.
Rebates were the best idea government had to help with these problems. In essence the best they and their professional advisors could come up with was to give us back our own money. Is it such a leap of logic to think they shouldn’t take it in the first place?
Serious issues go unaddressed. An easy example. I wrote several months ago about the Centre for Health Information, which costs you and me almost $100 million a year and didn’t protect our health information from being hacked. To add massive insult to injury government won’t tell us how much more of our money they paid in ransom to the hackers – or say who the criminals are. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone. We just keep footing the bill.
I could (and do) go on.
Many think there needs to be a serious cultural change in how we govern ourselves.
Who is going to do it? The Opposition parties are weak, tired and out of ideas. Lacklustre is a good word to describe them. One of them depends completely on taxpayer funding just to survive. Don’t look to them for efficiencies. That’s not a judgement – that’s a fact. Neither party will be making our lives easier any time soon.
As for the governing Liberals? Their latest plan seems to be to give away our hydro resources for a song to try and make it look like they are helping us – and of course, to get re-elected.
Five years ago, the Liberals created an “economic recovery” team headed by Dame Moya Greene. There were bold statements and big words. Disappeared without a trace.
We gave Greene the task of having a good hard look at how our tax dollars are being spent. Nothing happened. Do we give someone the power to do something about it? I’m not holding my breath.
I am not against taxes; I’m against continuing to bankroll a huge bureaucracy that does not seem to help any of us when we need it most. Is it too much to expect results for the $10.3 billion we spend?
Trump’s DOGE is as much about politics as it is about efficiency. That’s always the case when any new administration gains power. It’s called campaigning after they’ve already won. Happens here – happens everywhere. I have stories.
I dream of a political culture where we are not expected to just hand over our hard-earned wages and have no say in how they are spent, or for what. That only happens when people actually start caring.
It’s an election year. Now’s a good time to start caring.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com