The Rehearsed Truth: How Safe Narratives Keep Newfoundland Stuck

In Newfoundland, truth isn’t just discovered — it’s rehearsed.

Everyone knows their lines. Everyone knows when to clap, when to nod, when to keep their mouth shut. The problem isn’t that the script is good — it isn’t — but that deviating from it feels more dangerous than the collapse happening around us. To speak plainly is to miss your cue. And in this place, missing your cue is worse than being wrong.

The habit runs so deep that whole debates get trimmed down to “safe” versions of themselves. The facts that matter most are the ones most aggressively pushed aside — not because they’re false, but because they’re too disruptive to repeat. Newfoundland’s cycle of megaprojects and consultant-driven schemes survives not only through weak governance or slick operators, but because ordinary people enforce the culture of rehearsal. Everyone keeps the play going, even as the set crumbles.

Interlude: Laughter on Cue

I learned how deep this rehearsal runs while working at Le Gaboteur under Jacinthe Tremblay (2015-2017). We were talking about the atmosphere inside the French organization — how artificial the meetings could seem to anyone not already trained in their controlled filter.

Jacinthe told me about Catherine Fenwick’s brother, Michael, who was hired to do stand-up comedy at one of their AGAs around 2015. The set, she admitted, wasn’t funny at all. Yet everyone in the room laughed anyway. Not because they were amused, but because they knew they were supposed to.

The laughter wasn’t spontaneous; it was scripted. Everyone played their part, keeping the performance intact. And that’s the point: here, you don’t laugh because something’s funny. You laugh because it’s in the script.

Scene One: The Director of Debate

Take Paul Pike — not the politician, not the Native American, but the moderator of the NL’ers Against Wind Energy Facebook group. In the debates over wind energy, he didn’t just participate — he directed traffic. When I raised the connection between Trump’s Paris withdrawal and the contrast to Canada’s local push for green projects in late summer 2024 — Pike cut it off. The point wasn’t whether the connection was true or false. The point was that it wasn’t in the script.

His job was to keep the conversation in the “acceptable” zone, where anger could be vented but never linked to geopolitics or policy structures. Outrage was fine, so long as it stayed in the lines. This wasn’t a slip — it was the role. Pike was rehearsing the “safe” version of the story, and in doing so, he was teaching others to stick to their cues too¹.

Scene Two: Rehearsal at the Doorstep

When dissent surfaced, it wasn’t the whole community that rushed to coordinate — it was the leadership core. I was told of Rae Miller going door to door after 10:30 at night, making sure everyone’s version of events lined up. The point wasn’t to find truth; it was to synchronize the script before daylight.

This wasn’t democracy in action — it was choreography. Opposition itself had to be stage-managed, the lines checked and re-checked before anyone spoke them out loud. Participation became performance, with the community cast as extras while the directors set the scene behind closed doors².

Scene Three: Imported Vetting

The script doesn’t just come from here. It gets imported too. When Catherine Fenwick suddenly ambushed me with “What about Roe v. Wade?” it wasn’t because Newfoundland’s energy projects hinged on U.S. abortion law. It was an ideological loyalty test. A way of asking: do you belong to the “right” team, or are you off-script?

The content didn’t matter. The point was to throw down an American culture-war reference as a litmus test. In that moment, the rehearsal wasn’t about facts at all — it was about reciting the right line on cue, even if the line came from somewhere else entirely².

Scene Four: Drill Sergeant Politics

And then there’s Nadine and Duran Felix. In one protest, Nadine tried to push me to repeat slander loudly, as though volume itself would prove loyalty. Duran approached like a drill sergeant, squaring off to enforce “discipline.” Neither knew me personally, but both recognized the threat of someone speaking outside the script. Their tactic was simple: slander and intimidation as rehearsal drills. Keep people in their lane. Train them in obedience³.

This wasn’t about debate. It was about performance. The protest became less about turbines and more about making sure no one strayed from the lines.

Scene Five: The Vanishing Script

Even the record itself is rehearsed. Selective deletions — Facebook posts quietly scrubbed, websites returning 404s — tidy up the story so the only version left online is the one people are supposed to repeat. In my recent work, I’ve called this the “404 strategy”: a rehearsal of history itself, where inconvenient truths are written out of the script altogether⁴.

When the evidence disappears, all that’s left to recite is the “safe” version of events. And that’s the version people cling to.

The Pattern

What ties all these scenes together is the same reflex: reward conformity, punish deviation. The truth isn’t debated on its own terms — it’s rehearsed until it feels safe, until it fits the script everyone already knows.

This mirrors what economists call the “soft budget constraint.” In a recent Memorial University paper, Xinli Guo explained how Newfoundland municipalities overspend because they expect bailouts⁵. In culture, the same thing happens: people lower their effort and critical thought because they expect someone else to carry the truth. Why take risks when the safe script is already written?

The hazard isn’t just financial. It’s cultural. Communities themselves create the conditions where megaproject cycles and consultant fiefdoms thrive, because they’ve rehearsed the same stories for so long that alternatives feel impossible to imagine.

Why It Matters

This is why Newfoundland keeps falling for the same megaproject pitches, and why consultants like Ali Chaisson keep resurfacing. The culture doesn’t just allow it — it rehearses it. People police each other into staying on cue, making sure the story never breaks, even when the cost of staying in character is collapse.

And so the cycle continues. The consultants keep selling. The politicians keep circling. The locals keep rehearsing. Everyone knows the lines. Everyone fears missing a cue. And the play runs forever, even as the stage itself gives way.

Coda: Rehearsals at the Top

Rehearsal doesn’t stop at the community hall or the protest line. It runs straight to the top. Politicians and leaders follow scripts just as rigid as the rest of us. Andrew Parsons can resign from office and reappear in mining consultancy. Tony Cornect can step back from public life into the safety of the French organization that has long cushioned these transitions. Even Chief Mi’sel Joe of Miawpukek First Nation, long positioned as a cultural authority, now holds a seat inside World Energy GH₂ — endorsing a megaproject that many of his people still question.

At every level, the play is the same: defend the project, defend the process, and then step into the role waiting offstage. The cycle survives because the script survives. And the script survives because, in Newfoundland, truth is never allowed to speak plainly — only to be rehearsed.

Crosslinks

• Fractured Frontlines: infighting as scripted obedience.
• Gatekeepers of Acceptable Outrage: tone policing as rehearsal.
• Vanishing Evidence: deletions as trimming the script.
• Consultant’s Carousel and Locked on the Wrong Track: the structural and operator layers this cultural rehearsal sustains.

References

[1] Bayman’s Paradox. Fractured Frontlines: When Infighting Replaces Strategy in Newfoundland Activism. https://baymansparadox.com/explore/local-paradox/post.php?id=129

[2] Personal field notes, 2022 encounters (Rae Miller late-night coordination; Catherine Fenwick Roe v. Wade ambush).

[3] Bayman’s Paradox. Fractured Frontlines and field notes, 2022 protests. https://baymansparadox.com/explore/local-paradox/post.php?id=129

[4] Bayman’s Paradox. Vanishing Evidence: The 404 Strategy of Selective Activism. https://baymansparadox.com/explore/peer-pressure/post.php?id=150

[5] Guo, Xinli. Optimal Transfer Mechanism for Municipal Soft-Budget Constraints in Newfoundland. Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02171v3 (Local Download)