If you want to reshape a region without resistance, you don’t need to change the laws—you just need to neuter the locals.

That’s been the real story in Newfoundland and Labrador. For decades, the structure of local government has been deliberately hollowed out, fragmented, and infantilized. And while many residents still believe they're participating in democracy—attending public meetings, electing councils, voicing opinions—the actual systems of power have moved somewhere else entirely.

Welcome to governance without teeth.

What Is Governance—And Why It Matters More Than Government

Governance is not the same thing as government. It's broader, deeper, and more dangerous when hijacked.

Government is the formal apparatus: town councils, provincial departments, elected officials, legal powers.

Governance, by contrast, refers to the entire ecosystem of decision-making: how strategies are formed, who sets the agenda, which actors hold sway, and what knowledge is legitimized. Van Assche et al. describe governance as a combination of cognitive, institutional, and legitimacy resources—the tools a community needs to organize itself around collective goals [1].

Political theorist R.A.W. Rhodes frames it this way: governance is “self-organizing, interorganizational networks characterized by interdependence, resource exchange, rules of the game, and significant autonomy from the state” [5]. In other words, governance happens through influence, relationships, and negotiated authority—not just legal mandate.

Similarly, Pierre and Peters argue that governance is about steering, not just ruling. They describe it as “the capacity of the state to steer society,” often in partnership with business, NGOs, and civil society—actors who may not be elected but increasingly shape political outcomes [6].

And therein lies the paradox: grand schemes like the “Great Reset” require strong local governance to succeed, but strong local governance can also resist, revise, or outright block those top-down ambitions. So what happens? The system is restructured to perform like governance—without actually being it.

Newfoundland’s Case Study in Dysfunction

Newfoundland and Labrador was never set up for success. The very idea of local government arrived late and reluctantly, after centuries of merchant dominance, colonial paternalism, and external dependency.

By the time municipal structures were finally implemented, they were little more than service delivery mechanisms—paper-thin institutions with no fiscal power, no planning authority, and no real link to long-term development strategy.

Worse, every attempt to create meaningful regional governance—from the Rural Development Associations (RDAs) to REDBs—was either co-opted, defunded, or discarded. As Van Assche notes:

“Municipalities have acquired more duties but not more powers and resources... which brings us back to our starting point of weak local governance, non-existent or fragmentary regional governance, missing cognitive, institutional capacities and minimal legitimacy.” (Van Assche et al., 2022 - download)

Meanwhile, those same institutional gaps have made it easy for federal and global actors to insert prepackaged agendas—under the banners of “resilience,” “sustainability,” or “innovation.”

Muskrat Falls and the Absence of a Local Voice

You don’t need to dig far to find examples. The Muskrat Falls hydro project—now recognized as one of the greatest fiscal disasters in Canadian history—was greenlit with almost no local input. Its massive cost overruns, legal controversies, and environmental violations were entirely orchestrated by centralized actors with a closed-loop decision process.

As Van Assche et al. observed, “the failure of checks and balances allowed the mistakes of Churchill Falls to repeat themselves at Muskrat Falls, almost verbatim” (Van Assche et al., 2022 - download)

Local councils weren't consulted—they were bypassed. Local Indigenous leaders weren’t respected—they were overridden.

And yet, to this day, no structural changes have been made to prevent the same pattern from repeating.

The ABCD Project and the Selective Storytellers

The same playbook applies on the softer side of governance: narrative control.

The “ABCD Project” and "Assessing Water, Energy, and Food Security on the Port au Port Peninsula, Newfoundland: A Two-Eyed Seeing Approach." — federally funded initiatives to document the “positive stories” of a rural region—was sold as empowerment. In truth, it was a sterilized PR campaign designed to drown out dissent and cement a policy vision that had already been decided elsewhere.

The faces were local, but the agenda wasn’t.

And when I began questioning the origin of the project’s funding and its role in shaping public perception, the group went silent. They would not admit to the funding source. The project has not continued. Their Facebook ABCD page has been inactive since October 2024. (Personal observation, 2024-July 2025)

The Personal Cost of Speaking Out

I didn’t just study this pattern—I lived it.

In 2022, I was physically walked off the floor of a public meeting by an early leader and member of the ETC—Sherisse Benoit—after attempting to explain a document I had presented titled The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador—a research paper written by Van Assche and his colleagues, which I had found and brought forward [1]. I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t being disruptive. I was presenting their original research—nothing more, nothing less.

But research that questions power doesn’t need to be loud—it just needs to be inconvenient.

Afterward, I was censored, blocked, and smeared across private channels. Not by “the government” directly, but by local actors—some of whom were connected to government contracts, public funding streams, or federally supported organizations. Others were simply trying to protect their place within a system they believed still worked for them. Governance without teeth had grown fangs—not to bite upward, but to bite inward.

A Word That Wasn’t There—Until It Was Everywhere

Let me tell you when I first noticed something was off—not politically, but linguistically.

It was 2015. I’d just been hired as the webmaster and freelance writer for Le Gaboteur, Newfoundland’s French-language newspaper. One night, I found myself sitting in my boss’s basement reading through a French-language document for FFTNL, CSFP, and the province’s major French cultural organizations. It was titled Le rapport sur la gouvernance—a dry-sounding thing, typical of institutional planning documents.

But something about it stopped me cold.

"Gouvernance?"

Why this word? Why now?

I went to high school from 1997 to 2000. I was an active news reader. I worked with ARCO from 2002 to 2003. This word wasn’t part of the public conversation. Not in my education, not in media, and certainly not in the French-speaking institutions I knew growing up.

But here it was, in bold, as if it had always been central. And suddenly, it was showing up everywhere—English and French alike.

The Historical Rise of "Governance"

According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the use of the word governance barely registers before the 1980s. Then, around the time of the 1983 gas crisis, it begins a sharp climb. It spikes again around 1992—the year of the Rio Earth Summit, where Agenda 21 was introduced [4]. The upward trajectory continues after 2001, following the post-9/11 wave of global security integration and international "resilience" frameworks.

Even in French—gouvernance—the trend follows a similar curve. Once rare, it explodes in the early 2000s. By the time I sat reading that report in 2015, the word was fully institutionalized, casually embedded in the language of every nonprofit, school board, and community strategy [3] (Google Ngram Viewer). 1 2 3 4 5 6

What we were seeing wasn’t just a shift in policy—it was a shift in the language that defines power.

George Orwell Saw This Coming

George Orwell once wrote that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In Politics and the English Language, he warned of a creeping political tendency to smother clear meaning with euphemism, abstraction, and obfuscation [2]. Words like pacification, liquidation, or rectification become stand-ins for state violence and oppression. Their purpose isn’t to clarify—it’s to sedate.

The rise of governance as a buzzword follows the same path. It replaces clear, accountable terms like representation, jurisdiction, or decision-making authority with vague frameworks of collaboration, capacity building, and stakeholder input. And just like Orwell warned, the result isn’t empowerment—it’s engineered confusion. If you can’t name what’s happening, you can’t fight it.

Why That Moment Mattered

That basement moment in 2016 became a turning point for me—not because I understood everything yet, but because I realized I was being handed a vocabulary I hadn’t agreed to. A new language was being smuggled into my culture under the banner of inclusion and strategy. And once that language takes hold, it redefines how resistance, participation, and even identity are processed and deflected.

It also explains why, in places like Newfoundland, meaningful local control keeps slipping further out of reach—while well-funded initiatives show up with glossy brochures, smiling consultants, and a language we didn’t choose.

References

[1] Van Assche, Kristof, Greenwood, Robert, & Gruezmacher, Monica. The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 38 (2022). ( Download from here free) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2022.101212

[2] Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. London: Horizon, 1946.

[3] Google Books Ngram Viewer. “Governance” (English and French). https://books.google.com/ngrams

[4] United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Agenda 21. United Nations, 1992.

[5] Rhodes, R.A.W. “The New Governance: Governing without Government.” Political Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 1996, pp. 652–667.

[6] Pierre, Jon & Peters, B. Guy. Governance, Politics and the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

[7] Author’s personal experience (2022–2024), including censorship incident and Le Gaboteur work in 2015-2016.

[8] L’Association de la presse francophone. (2016, December 4). L’APF préoccupée par l’indépendance journalistique à Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador. Le Gaboteur. https://gaboteur.ca/nouvelles-de-nous/2016/12/04/lassociation-de-la-presse-francophone-apf-preoccupee-par-lindependance-journalistique-a-terre-neuve-et-labrador/