Springtime snow job alert

Going outside in Labrador these days, walking the countryside or driving the roads has become a big wet sloppy pain.

Everywhere else in Canada - indeed, everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere - it looks like spring arrived weeks ago after a mild winter. What snow there was is now only a fading memory. In some places, summer is even well underway.

However, here in this part of the Ungava Peninsula, snow still lies two metres or more deep on undisturbed ground and more keeps falling every day. In the warming temperatures, it makes a mess, a wet slushy mess.

After such a long winter, the clouds seem to be making an unnecessarily intensive effort at covering something up that should by now have been revealed - a non-figurative snow job, one might say.

Luckily, here it's only snow and slush - nothing an ordinary private Canadian citizen can't handle. What's worse is the new snow job that exploded from the provincial capital and is hitting the island, spreading towards the Strait of Belle Isle - a job that's as intense an effort to persuade or deceive (to borrow a definition from the Internet) as anyone in this province has had to endure for many years.

The current power-that-is, and the power-that-once-was-but-now-isn't-but-keeps-hanging-around-the-edges-making-big-business-deals, responded to their latest of many Muskrat Falls setbacks, the cleverly critical PUB report they both correctly took as a slap in the face, by denying the inconvenient message and verbally shooting the messenger, mowing down a whole bunch of private citizens in the process.

Apparently, having assumed that the Public Utilities Board would parrot the predetermined conclusions provided by Nalcor (the government's back-pocket energy company) and give the provincial government an enthusiastic endorsement to build another big dam in Labrador, the premier that is and the one that was (Willerdale or Dunderliams, if they're following the current fashion of celebrity couples) have lashed out at the PUB for daring to defy them and dismissed everything about it as flawed.

Stung once again by the oft-heard and oft-demonstrated accusation that the government's energy corporation was keeping detailed, up-to-date information to itself rather than providing it as required to the public officials who needed it - and, for that matter, to the general public who deserve to see it - Premier Kathy Dunderdale criticized the board's members for not accepting without question whatever Nalcor told them.

She said she found the board's lack of trust "frustrating" and accused the members of wasting a couple of million dollars.

Former Premier Danny Williams was likewise baffled and disappointed by the board's audacity in paying more attention to ordinary citizens than to the government's own functionaries.

"I was troubled by the conclusions put forward by the board largely based on opinions of private citizens as opposed to the experts at Nalcor and Manitoba Hydro," the disturbed ex-premier curiously disclosed.

Instead of bowing to reasonable conclusions and finally admitting that their Lower Churchill hydroelectric dream is all wet, not to mention astronomically costly and ultimately impractical, premiers past and present have chosen to inflict the province with a blizzard of frustrated indignation to hide just how big is the mistake they want the province's taxpayers - its private citizens - to make at their behest and to their lonely benefit.

But that's only a localized blizzard.

There's a nationwide snow job coming from Ottawa, and week after week new low fronts fuel the obfuscating tempest. It didn't start with the 2012 budget, but that depressive event quickly became the epicentre for all storms as federal ministers spun off the central vortex to convince taxpaying private citizens that slash-and-burn really means build-and-improve, that less employment means more jobs, that fewer services means better service, that prosperity means less money for the poor, that no protection means safer lives for all and that ignorance, lies and poverty are good for democracy.

It doesn't seem to matter any more what our governments decide to do or not do. If it's against the public interest, they'll pretend it's not and they'll spare no expense or effort to make everyone believe that the emperor is still wearing clothes.

But hopefully everyone knows how that snow job ended.

Michael Johansen is a writer living in Labrador.