03 February 2007

The serial government slows further

Since Danny Williams took office in 2003 he's tried to manage the provincial government with everything - literally every little thing - flowing across his desk.

He's a micro-manager for micro-managers.

It shows in everything government does.

Or, to be more accurate what it doesn't do.

Micro-managing something as large as government means it doesn't take too long before your list of unaccomplishments - as Alice might say - is considerably long than your list of accomplishments.

There's plenty of meetings and busy-work and people generating "strategies", like the 20 or so Williams claims to have sitting on his desk right at the moment.

Some of the meetings go for hours, like one on the fishery last week that supposed went on for two or three hours. Smart leaders tell you any meeting longer than 30 minutes is useless.

But hey, it's hard to know for sure because Williams is also a definite bullshitter hyperbole addict. He tells fibs through the colourful use of exaggeration.

And he's a micro-manager.

That's why Bond Papers said that Danny Williams runs a serial government.

He takes everything - and we mean everything - one at a time.

He only has so much time available.

And so things pile up.

No surprise then, that Williams admits the latest bit of the House of Assembly money scandal is clogging the wheels of progress in Danny-land.

it's bound to do that.

God knows what else in his life is taking his mind off the business of micro-managing the living daylights out of a giant organization like government.

That's a government that in the next eight weeks has to:

- wage four by-elections;

- deliver a Throne Speech setting out the policy agenda for the next year;

- figure out what the policy agenda will be for the next year;

- write the Throne Speech, or at least edit it into yet another ear-numbing, soul-eating POS like the others so far;

- finish a budget that will call for more than $5.0 billion in spending and include a capital works program the size of the recent federal infrastructure project;

- wage an ongoing war with Big Oil;

- get ready for a war with Ottawa over hand-outs that are only necessary because of the failure of the war with Big Oil; and,

- cope with money scandals, bimbo eruptions or any other typical political crisis that might emerge - unforeseen - from the darkness.

It's enough to tighten even the tightest sphincter.

And as we know, that just makes the crap back up even more.