Introduction – The Illusion of Ground-Up Governance
In Newfoundland, the meetings are held, the minutes are taken, and the motions are passed — but the real decisions are made long before anyone sits down at the table. What looks like democracy is often just a well-rehearsed performance. As recent technocracy research shows, this “performance” is not accidental — it’s engineered to preserve the form of public input while stripping away its capacity to alter the outcome⁹. Consultation becomes an act of legitimization, not decision-making.The script is set elsewhere. The role of the local council or committee is to nod along and sign the paperwork.
This is what I call the Technocracy of the Base: a system where local governance exists mostly as an administrative layer — capable of enforcing dog bans and ATV restrictions overnight, but structurally incapable of challenging the province, a federal mandate, or a global contract dressed up as “opportunity.”
It’s not just a shortage of resources or training. It’s a culture. A culture where questioning the plan is seen as disruptive, where saying “no” can get you frozen out of meetings (Hi Mayor Stella Cornect!), and where the social cost of dissent is far greater than the financial cost of a bad deal. In that environment, grand agendas don’t have to win hearts and minds. They just have to show up with a tidy proposal and wait for the stamp.
The Local Paradox in Practice (Governance / Local Paradox)
Van Assche calls it the “local paradox” — that grand policy schemes depend on strong, legitimate local governance to succeed, yet they often take root in places where that governance doesn’t exist¹. Newfoundland is a textbook case.
From Muskrat Falls³ to the Big Reset² to the current wave of wind and hydrogen MOUs⁵, the pattern is the same: decisions framed as bold solutions land in a vacuum. Municipalities and service districts, often without a full-time administrator, have no in-house expertise to evaluate megaproject impacts. Strategy is something that happens to them, not with them.
Time and again, councils fall in line with provincial and federal timelines, leaving long-term implications unexamined. Agreement isn’t the driver — it’s the ingrained belief that the plan is already made and resistance is futile.
Social Glue and Social Gags (Peer Pressure / Asch Conformity)
In the absence of strategic capacity, social pressure takes over⁶. People start to conflate “getting along” with “getting ahead.” You don’t stand up in the meeting to challenge the proposal — not because you agree, but because you know the look you’ll get afterward.
The Asch Conformity experiments⁷ showed that people will publicly agree with a wrong answer just to avoid being the odd one out. In Newfoundland’s governance culture, the stakes are higher: you risk being frozen out of the next discussion, your credibility undermined in quiet conversations, your name whispered in a way that warns others to keep their distance.
I’ve documented it over and over:
- Paul Pike shutting down the Trump/Paris Agreement link⁴ in the wind project debate — not with a counterargument, but with a warning to keep certain topics off the table.
- Rae Miller steering a petition away from government submission, ensuring the “opposition” remained palatable.
- The Roe v. Wade ambush, used as an ideological loyalty test minutes before I was walked off the floor.
In a technocratic frame, dissent isn’t just inconvenient — it’s rebranded as irrational, uninformed, or disruptive. The goal isn’t to disprove your point, but to disqualify you from making it in the first place. Political scientists describe this as a self-reinforcing legitimacy gap: weak governance invites technocratic substitution, and each substitution further weakens local capacity. Over time, the role of the local body is reduced to administering and defending decisions it had no real hand in making — a choreography of compliance that looks like authority from the outside, but functions as a relay for authority from above.
This is governance by groupthink. It’s not that people can’t see the problem — it’s that saying so out loud carries too high a social price.
The Mechanics of the Technocracy of the Base
The irony is that these councils and committees can be extremely efficient — at the wrong things. They can pass new fire fines or enforce an ATV ban in record time⁶. The most recent example came in August 2025, when the province of Newfoundland issued a sudden, province-wide ban on all off-road vehicles in forested areas due to wildfire risk. It was announced, enforced, and socially absorbed within hours. No prolonged consultation, no feasibility study — just a swift decree backed by the language of safety. In a technocratic frame, this is low-hanging fruit: visible, immediate action that reinforces the system’s capacity to regulate behavior, while leaving the deeper governance deficits untouched.But when it comes to energy contracts, land use policy, or federal MOUs, the pace slows to a polite shuffle.
It works like this:
- Weak governance limits the ability to produce or defend an independent local strategy¹.
- That weakness drives reliance on outside “experts” and funding sources².
- Those sources bring their own priorities, framed as unavoidable or beneficial⁴.
- Locals defend the arrangement socially, not just politically — shaming dissent as unhelpful or divisive⁶.
- The governance capacity remains weak, and the cycle repeats.
On paper, the system looks functional. In practice, it’s a holding pen — keeping communities docile while bigger players move the real pieces.
Why Grand Agendas Love This Environment (Governance / Paris Agreement tie-in)
As the recent fire ban shows, rapid behavioral controls are possible when they align with top-down priorities. Yet this agility vanishes when the stakes involve land use sovereignty, long-term contracts, or questioning global alignments. The technocracy of the base thrives on this asymmetry — decisive in the small, deferential in the large — because it keeps the machinery of compliance well-oiled without ever challenging the higher order of decision-making.
For global policy pushes — whether it’s the 30x30 conservation agenda, Paris Agreement-aligned renewables⁴, or ESG-driven finance⁸ — this is the ideal landing zone. They don’t have to persuade locals that the plan is perfect. They just have to make sure no one locally has the authority, resources, or social space to mount a real objection (the hyperfocus on Brenda Lee Kitchen's source of funding is a great example of this).
Consultation becomes a performance: an open house with maps on easels, a comment form no one reads, and a polite thank-you for “your input.” The real decisions are locked in by the time the muffins are served.
That’s how Muskrat Falls³ was greenlit despite clear warnings, and it’s how the World Energy GH₂⁵ wind-to-hydrogen project moves forward even as key geopolitical and economic questions go unasked. In the Technocracy of the Base, “no” is not a word the system is designed to hear.
Breaking the Cycle – Building Real Local Capacity
Escaping this trap means more than updating bylaws or electing a different council slate. It means changing the culture so that dissent is not treated as betrayal, and so that strategy is something communities do, not something that’s done to them.
- Second-order observation – seeing your own governance through an outsider’s lens¹, as in the old Fogo Island experiment, where people watched footage of themselves discussing their community. In the 1960s, the Fogo Island experiment used film to let residents watch themselves discuss local issues, creating a rare moment of collective self-awareness that helped them resist government resettlement plans.
- Link projects to strategy – stop treating each initiative as an isolated win; start asking how it fits into a 10–20 year plan².
- Challenge narrative controllers – when someone says “don’t bring that up,” that’s exactly when it needs to be brought up⁶.
None of this happens if the social reflex is to keep things smooth. Smooth seas don’t build strong ships, and in Newfoundland, we’ve had enough shipwrecks to know that smoothness is not the same as safety.
Conclusion – The Cost of Compliance
In the Technocracy of the Base, governance failure isn’t just structural — it’s cultural. As long as the social cost of dissent outweighs the cost of a bad decision, the cycle holds.
If our councils and committees can’t imagine saying no, who exactly are they governing for?
References
[1] Van Assche, K., Greenwood, R., & Gruezmacher, M. (2022). The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2022.101212 (local download)
[2] Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. (2021). The Big Reset: Report of the Premier’s Economic Recovery Team. https://thebigresetnl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PERT-FullReport.pdf
[3] Flyvbjerg, B., & Budzier, A. (2019). Report for the Commission of Inquiry Respecting the Muskrat Falls Project. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330382358_Report_for_the_Commission_of_Inquiry_Respecting_the_Muskrat_Falls_Project
[4] United Nations. (2015). Paris Agreement. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf
[5] World Energy GH₂. (2023). Project Overview. https://worldenergygh2.com
[6] Bayman’s Paradox. (2025). The Gatekeepers of Acceptable Outrage. https://baymansparadox.com/explore/peer-pressure/post.php?id=135
[7] Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure. Scientific American, 193(5), 31–35. https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/docs/others/everything/asch1955a.pdf
[8] Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). (2021). Our Approach to Net Zero. https://www.gfanzero.com/our-work/net-zero-public-policy/
[9] Xinli Guo . Optimal Transfer Mechanism for Municipal Soft Budget Constraints in Newfoundland - 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02171 (local download)