Something has to give

By Ivan Morgan

There’s a great Newfoundland expression that I have used in this space before but bears repeating: No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
Besides being hilarious, I think it’s a very sage comment, and cuts to the very root of the problem of how we have been governed. In French they have the similar, “plus ca change, plus ca meme chose,” or the more things change the more they stay the same.
But things cannot stay the same. Government cannot get back in.
No doubt ideologues will attack me and write me off for what I am about to say. They have already done their thinking and know what needs to be done. The rest of us less enlightened folks are left to worry and scratch our heads. We need new thinking, new ideas, new solutions. Things that work.
The newly elected crowd volunteered to take on a host of huge problems. After over a decade in power, the old crowd just made things worse, as governments have done for decades, no matter who they were. And you and I have paid for all of it.
A former cabinet minister was in the news recently wondering how the new government is going to do what they promised to do. (I won’t name him, I know him and he’s a good guy). Apart from playing the same old boring political games, he is also admitting that when in government they had no idea what to do. At least that’s what I hear in his statement.
This nonsensical game playing has to stop. Some very serious, difficult, tough measures need to be taken.
There’s so much work to be done, so many solutions to be found. All elected people have to work at solving them.
A case in point. Recently a loved one was in the Health Sciences – the province’s top health centre (I have heard health professionals refer to it as the mothership). We waited in the emergency department for over 16 hours. We saw a lot of our fellow citizens suffer and watched ridiculously overworked health staff cope the best they could. In short, the usual.
Finally admitted to a room upstairs, my loved one saw a mouse (or what she hoped was a mouse) scurrying along her windowsill. Nurses I talked to – terrified of management figuring out who talked to me – quietly told me the place is infested with them. I used public washrooms in that hospital that weren’t fit: the overpowering smell of urine, clogged toilets and filthy floors. Loved one’s shower was stained with human blood.
I couldn’t get past the rodents. It really made me think.
Another sad example?
We are spending $436 million this year on a government department called Children, Seniors and Social Development, yet rents continue to rise out of control, seniors on pensions are getting squeezed and squeezed by rising prices of everything, drug addiction is reaching epic levels, and nothing seems to be getting done about any of it. I bet that budget goes up again in the spring. For what? What are we all paying for?
Are these budget issues or management issues? Are these money problems or leadership problems? I know what I think. More importantly, what do you think?
Wherever you look in government – federal, provincial, municipal – you will find bloated budgets, poor leadership, weak management and worse service. It’s simply unacceptable, as is blaming your opponents for it.
Rather than taking cheap political shots at a government not yet fully