People who don’t know anything about politics might think that last week’s surprise Cabinet shuffle from Tony Wakeham will create “synergies” so that ministers loaded with several departments can see connections between them all and come up with better ideas, or that the shuffle makes sense because some of the titles go together, or that some of the titles could turn into great things if only they were “resourced” properly.
Reality is something else.
To see what’s happening and to understand it, you have to get some basics.
First, people who know what’s up will understand that, as noted here before about former Health minister Lela Evans, Tony Wakeham gives people lots of titles but those titles don’t actually involve real work. Like being the Registrar General. Or being the “minister responsible for” for the liquor corporation or the can and bottle recycling corporation. Those are just something that the law requires to make sure that Crown corporations have some minister to whom they are notionally responsible.
There’s no work involved and in some cases no actual awareness of what’s going on. Literally none. During a political crisis, Tom Osborne as minister responsible for the liquor corporation, sent over a trusted political ally to take up a job that the chief executive had eliminated. Osborne had no idea the job was gone even though that fact had been reported publicly. None. Totally unaware until the appointed person showed up for work.
If you understand that, some of these titles don’t make sense given the other ministerial duties. Deputy Premier, municipal affairs minister, and transportation minister Barry Petten is the Registrar General, for example. That means he is legally in charge of collecting statistics on births, marriages, and deaths. Normally, it’s housed within Government Services - it used to be a health department thing, d’uh - but responsibility for that hockey-sock of functions like inspectors of one kind or another is with Lloyd Parrott, whose job is also to be the energy minister. The separation of Registrar General from Government Services makes no sense. But there it is in search of “synergy” or some other nonsense word.
This is the same as making the forests and lands minister responsible for emergency response, instead of putting emergency response under public safety with the police, which is really where it belongs. By the way, if you want to understand how much sheer bullshit there is in these Cabinet shuffles, check the guv’mint website.
Pleaman Forsey is listed as the Minister Responsible for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Management. But when you search for that title on the government’s website run by the OCIO, you get a page in the department run by Helen Conway-Ottenheimer, the public safety minister. This is synergy only for people who know how to say the word but not what it means.
Second, there are a lot of ghetto ministries like Women and Gender Equality - no programs to deliver - or fake ministries like “Community Engagement” - the EngageNL folks who just run budget consultations and the website that asks people to give an opinion on this or that new legislation or changes to old legislation.
The ghettos need to go back to being what they were: a handful of bureaucrats in the Executive Council working on policy ideas for the whole government. That’s what they were until a government with a crisis made up a department with a minister, deputy, assistant deputies and other elephant trappings to make the flea look like they had some idea what to. It’s the Pam Parsons Solution.
Community engagement is really another policy ghetto but it’s worse because there is no subject for the policy, like say francophones or women. It’s just a function. Something the government needs in order to function. The Minister of EngageNL is like creating a Minister of the Cash Office or Mail Room or Minister of Computers, which is what someone did when they made the Office of the Chief Information Officer more than another central government functional department looking after computers and software networks and jumped it up so people inside the bureaucracy can make more money.
We’ve had the same thing before, this rank inflation with no change of goal. Way back in the last century, when they first put all the different hospitals and nursing homes together as government run outfits, there was a committee to figure out how to make all their computers talk to each other. Simple. Practical. That committee grew. Then it became a Crown Corporation under Brian Tobin and today it is the Centre for Health Information, an outfit that took decades to get even close to a single integrated computer system. Even now some 30 years later, we are sort of there and as with OCIO, NLCHI didn’t make the computers government uses any safer, more modern, or more efficient. But their budgets grew and the people working there grew busily doing busy things without delivering what they were supposed to. Ask the folks hit by the cyber attack a couple of years ago how effective NLCHI and OCIO are.
To understand why making something out of nothing is popular inside government, just follow the money. You see, Ministers don’t get paid more for six titles, but bureaucrats do. Ministerial departments need a deputy minister, even if the deputy is already DM of a real department. You get paid more at that level for more responsibilities. So a DM of six titles gets more in the pay packet than a DM of one. Then there have to be other bureaucrats in the daisy-chain of command either collecting extras for a tack-on or taking a whole new job created just because a department must have a bunch of titles even if they don’t really need them to function.
Tony Wakeham's Cabinet
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October 30, 2025
Tony Wakeham is among the top two or three best qualified Premiers of Newfoundland and Labrador in the 21st century.
Third, this shuffle was mostly about fixing two huge political problems - Andrea Barbour and Lela Evans - but Tony Wakeham’s crowd don’t have the option of just firing both, which is typically what would happen. For appearances, they need women in Cabinet even if the caucus doesn’t have enough. This is another version of the Pam Parsons Effect. In Evans’ case and maybe Barbour’s too, kicking them out of Cabinet might also trigger them into crossing the floor.
So instead, Barbour becomes a minister of a quiet department with little chance she will ever appear in public again. And Evans gets an absolutely soul-crushing demotion, a failure of epic proportions but gets to run a Team Labrador with two goofs from caucus otherwise doing nothing serious and in the process pretend to be doing stuff that is someone else’s responsibility.
Evans’ fall is spectacular. She went from being obviously a key minister to being in charge of nothing at all, for all practical purposes. Her three titles are all ghetto ministries. Her job as Indigenous relations minister - with all the nakedly racist Canadian thinking it reflects - is as meaningless as it has always been since dealing directly with Indigenous leaders is and always has been the Premier’s job. Her other job running this Labrador Jobs committee is also completely made up to give three people a bit of extra pay or some look of importance. In reality, economic development anywhere in the province falls under Lin Paddock and in the case of Labrador hydro, energy minister Lloyd Parrott.
The bigger tell about the shallowness of Wakeham’s talent pool is the fact he has loaded down Three Pees - Craig Pardy, Lloyd Parrott, and Barry Petten - with not just titles but actual departments that - as in Petten’s example - have nothing to do with each other. He had the works and transportation job. Now he has municipal affairs. Zero connection between the two. Parrott picked up a new creation - red tape reduction - although logically, that properly belongs in finance and treasury board with Craig Pardy since it is about government internal management. It doesn’t fit with anything else Parrott is doing.
And as if to reinforce the lack of both strategic direction generally and strategic communications, the Cabinet shuffle and the MOU announcement included details that actually should have been separate announcements to give them greater impact on their own. The electricity rebate is not about Churchill Falls really, but about cost-of-living relief. The MOU tie-in is just a rationalization. A separate newser would have given it great oomph. Same with Red Tape Reduction. Lumping them with other stuff just tells us they are not very important. A Freudian slip, of sorts. There are no efficiencies here or effectiveness either. It’s just weak, lazy and ultimately damaging since it skips out a chance to make it clear to people with repeated examples of actual things - not just flashy noise-maker stunts - that the Wakeham crowd are doing something useful for and meaningful to ordinary people’s ordinary lives.
Joedy Wall gets a huge promotion to now run the single largest expense in the government. Politically, it is hugely sensitive and contains a herd of sacred cows that cannot be touched. But Wall is like Evans and John Hogan or Tom Osborne. Not really in charge. Ex-health bureaucrat Tony Wakeham is really making all health decisions, carrying on the Andrew Furey and Dwight Ball practice of having a figurehead while the Premier actually directs things. Same thing happened with Danny Williams and energy minister Kathy Dunderdale. Danny was in charge. Kathy just got the title.
In other words, there’s lots of more of the same in this latest Cabinet shuffle, with changes only in minor, meaningless details. Lela Evans may well continue to be a political worry for Tony Wakeham given her own personality as well as the heat under Indigenous and energy issues tied to economic development. Andrea Barbour is now out of the spotlight. And if you are not one of the Three Pees in Cabinet, you can collect your paycheque, get a second business card just for your titles, and stick ECNL after your name without having much real work to do.
Lots of people will be fooled into thinking you are way more important than you are, though, including some who you’d think should know better.
Editorial Note: There’ll be no new column Friday this week. We’ll pick up again next Monday with a look at some details of the latest draft of the Labrador MOU.
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