There is an election in Newfoundland on Saturday.  It’s not because the government’s term was up or it lost a confidence vote, or indeed that anyone at all actually wanted a vote.  No, it’s because Newfoundland, a province where party leadership literally changes with the season, has a rule whereby a new Premier, if brought to power by becoming leader of a party which already controls the legislature, must seek an independent mandate within 12 months.  And since Premier Andrew Furey did just that, here we are.  In an election.  In February.  In a pandemic. 

(If you want to know more about Newfoundland politics, do read James MacLeod’s Turmoil As Usual, a 250-page book on Newfoundland provincial politics which, while only covering the years 2013-2015, definitely leaves you with the profound sense that the province’s entire political tradition is something dreamt up in a Jasper Fforde novel).

Anyways, this is a Potemkin election, all for show, absolutely no substance.  All the parties seem to have agreed to pretend that the province is not already borrowing a couple of thousand dollars per resident every year and simply forgotten that the province was a few days away from complete bankruptcy at the start of the pandemic.  In that kind of context, literally nothing anyone promises can be trusted.  And yet, here we are.

Let’s start with the NDP platform, which is based on one thing and one thing only: that money grows on trees.  An ambitious plan to Go Green and increase the scope of the state (particularly in areas of healthcare and the economy), while the state itself is utterly bankrupt and the only conceivable prospect of it is some kind of crisis that sends oil prices to the Lagrange point, if not the Moon itself is not so much “bold and daring” as it is a plea to the Guinness Book to come to St. John’s so they can completely re-write their records on cognitive dissonance.  And at some level, they recognize this themselves, having chosen not to offer costing on their platform. 

However, it does make several notable promises about post-secondary education, including re-instating needs-based grants (good), creating a “grant program supporting graduate and post-doctoral studies and research important to the economic development of the province [which] would be an important part of a provincial retention and recruitment plan to keep young people in the province” (good in the sense that they see these institutions as economic assets), “ensure that Memorial and CNA are properly funded” (meaningless without numbers), and of course the perennial “keep the tuition freeze”.  I am not entirely sure if the NDP understands how much public money it takes to prevent “keep the freeze” from resulting in anything other than “watch Memorial’s infrastructure crumble”, but I guess if you’re not costing your platform that does not matter so much.

Over to the Progressive Conservatives.  One of the challenges of running in a Potemkin election is that they tend to be decided based on leader’s charisma. This put the Tories in a bit of a tricky spot because their leader Ches Crosbie has none.  Now, they have managed to jiu-jitsu their way around this by creating one of the greatest Canadian political ads of all time (watch here, it’s great) which doubles down on Crosbie’s essential dorkiness, but current polls have the Party down about 30 points, so it’s apparently not having quite the desired effect.

But now what is in the (partially, inconsistently) costed Tory platform?  Well, a fair bit, at least indirectly.  Crosbie wants to improve the availability of post-secondary programming in remote parts of the province, ensure more labour-market driven programming, graduate and attract more computer science students, “retrain and attract students by supporting among the most competitive tuition fee and student aid programs” (which I read as code for “we’re going to lift the freeze but not allow tuition to increase too much”) and extend medical coverage by 12 months for international students who graduate in an attempt to encourage them to stay (there is no province where the political link between immigration and post-secondary is as tight as it is in Newfoundland).  And how much will all this cost?  As I said, the costing is only partial, the only thing with an actual price tag attached is a $1 million commitment on training for energy jobs.  So, judge for yourselves how serious the rest of the package is.

So that leaves the ruling Liberal Party which, according to polls, is way out in front.  Premier Furey claims to have the answers for the province all worked out, it’s all there in a report prepared by an Economic Recovery Task Force, but no one is allowed to see the report until after the election.  Seriously, that’s a big chunk of the Liberal platform.  Somehow, this has them at 60% in the polls. 

The Liberals do have a platform, of course.  And it’s sorta, kinda costed.  Of the 49 specific commitments made, only fifteen of them seem to require any money (the remainder is all going to be paid for through reorganization of existing spending or unspecified “savings”, and if you believe that I have a banana plantation in the Burin peninsula to sell you).  Essentially none of it is about post-secondary education –it’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen a Liberal platform so utterly unconcerned with PSE.  There are, though, what I would call a lot of PSE-adjacent policies – initiatives MUN and CNA could certainly be a part of with proper linkages: a clean energy “centre of excellence”, a push on technology excellence, tripling the immigration target, etc.  So maybe there’s an upside here.

But as I said, take all of this with a lot of salt, because I doubt much of it means anything.  Regardless of who wins on Saturday, Newfoundland is in for a few years of rough seas and I sincerely believe any party’s manifesto promises are among the first things that are going to go overboard.  Things will be calmer and better on the other side of the storm, but it’ll take a few years to get there.