Bayman’s Paradox didn’t start in a university office.

It started the day I read a governance article by Kristof Van Assche, Robert Greenwood, and Monica Gruezmacher: “The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador” (Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2022)¹. This was back in April, 2022.

That paper lays out a simple but devastating idea:

Grand policy schemes need local governance to carry them out, yet they so often land in places where local institutions are weak, dependent, or tightly managed. The result is a kind of theatre: consultation that looks participatory on paper, while real control stays somewhere else.

Bayman’s Paradox is what happens when you bolt that abstract Local Paradox directly onto Newfoundland and Labrador:

• the names, dates, and surnames,
• the permits and Crown land maps,
• the old fishery collapse and the new “green” megaprojects,

All laid over the framework Van Assche describes¹.

I have maintained a group since September 2022 which turned into a Facebook Page. In 2025, one of first Bayman’s Paradox pieces — originally tagged under Local Paradox on BaymansParadox.com — is where I started testing that idea in written form publicly. Those early posts are the hinge between theory and place, where I began putting structure and receipts to something I’d been feeling for over 3 years²:

• Outside experts appearing as “help” in communities already under pressure.
• Federal and provincial agendas moving quietly in the background.
• Local resistance being documented, interpreted, and recycled as material for someone else’s story.

Nick Mercer was there from the beginning of that run — not as a distant commentator, but as an embedded actor³⁴.

By the time his media-review article, “Sustainability: Panacea or Local Energy Injustice?” appeared in Sustainability (2025)⁸, Bayman’s Paradox had already mapped the ecosystem he now explains for a wider audience.

This isn’t just about one man.

It’s about what it means when someone who is inside the story from the start is also positioned to explain that story to everyone else.

That is what I mean by a narrative controller.

Bayman’s Paradox Is Bigger Than ABCD — But ABCD Snapped It into Focus

Bayman’s Paradox predates the ABCD project.

The spine of it comes straight out of The Local Paradox¹: grand strategies needing local buy-in and implementation, while simultaneously weakening, bypassing, or managing the very local capacity they depend on. Local councils and committees are asked to participate in ambitions they didn’t design and can’t truly alter.

My work drags that framework down to eye level in Newfoundland².

The ABCD project didn’t create that insight.

It made the pattern impossible to ignore in my own backyard.

In The ABCD Project Exposed, I laid out the basic shape as I experienced it³:

• A federally funded, university-led research project lands in a high-stakes conflict zone to “assess” water, food, and energy security⁴.
• Locals are invited to speak — about wells, freezers, weather, fear, and hope — under the banner of “community-based research.”
• There is no pay, no meaningful co-design, and no real control over what happens to their words afterward.
• The material flows upward: into academic outputs, reports, and future justification for whichever direction policy chooses to take.

On the surface it sounds compassionate: resilience, two-eyed seeing, sustainability, security.

Underneath, it is exactly what Bayman’s Paradox names:

The system comes to harvest the reality of a place so it can rearrange that reality on paper.

ABCD didn’t mark the beginning of my thinking.

It confirmed that the pattern I’d first recognized in The Local Paradox was now standing in my community, clipboard in hand³.

And Nick Mercer was not off to the side.

He was in the middle of it³⁴.

The Translator in the Room

In The Consultant and the Keepers, I wasn’t fixated on one post or one photo. I was tracking how a certain type of figure moves⁵.

Someone like Mercer is valuable to the system because he speaks two dialects fluently:

1. The local dialect
2. The kitchen-table language of wells, roads, moose, fish, power bills, broken promises and family histories.
3. The institutional dialect
4. The language of “energy justice,” “ecosystem services,” “community resilience,” and “island energy transitions” — the vocabulary of research proposals, policy briefs, and journal articles.

He can sit in a community hall and listen to people describe what is happening to them in plain, specific terms, and then walk into a funding application, a boardroom, a classroom, or a peer-reviewed journal and repack those same realities as data points in a broader story.

That is the translator function of a narrative controller.

He doesn’t have to lie about what people said.

He only has to decide:

• how to package it,
• what to emphasise, and
• which elements are allowed to travel.

He’s close enough to locals to borrow their credibility.

He’s close enough to institutions to reassure them that nothing truly uncontrollable is happening.

The details of any one meeting matter less than that structural role.

From the start, Mercer was not simply “in the room.”

He was the person positioned to later say, “Here’s what it all means.”

Fractured Frontlines, Kept Simple

Fractured Frontlines was written to capture one core fact: the resistance landscape was not calm or unified⁶.

What I saw was this:

• Infighting between local actors and organisers.
• Accusations and grudges.
• Groups and pages rising and fading from view over time.

I am not claiming:

• that one specific group neatly re-branded into another, or
• that there was a single, straight-line structure tying every page and name together.

The important point for Bayman’s Paradox is much simpler:

That fragmentation made it easier for outside experts, NGOs, and institutions to choose which “community voices” to highlight — and which to ignore.

That’s the only piece of Fractured Frontlines that matters here.

Character and Historian at the Same Time

It’s tempting to say that Mercer started as a character inside the story and later “became” the historian of it.

The structure is more blunt than that.

He was always positioned to be both:

• Character
• Present in projects, meetings, research collaborations and local spaces. Asking questions. Gathering stories. Building relationships. Becoming part of the landscape he would later describe.
• Historian
• Holding the institutional keys: a university position, grant support, technical vocabulary, and access to journals and conferences. Able to turn that embedded experience into “the literature” on what happened here — including a qualitative media review of six “mega wind-to-hydrogen” projects in Sustainability⁸.

When that article appears, it does not mark a surprising career pivot.

It completes a loop:

The same person who walked through the story with a notebook now steps forward to define the story for audiences who were never there.

And the loop doesn’t end on the page.

Within days of publication, Mercer was on CBC Newfoundland Morning, “thrilled” — his word — to disseminate the findings of some new research and to discuss “six ‘mega wind-to-hydrogen’ projects proposed for Newfoundland and Labrador.” In the Facebook promo he shared, he boiled his message down to a neat line:

“renewable energy projects ≠ sustainable energy projects if they perpetuate local injustices.”¹³

In other words, the same person coding the media narrative in a peer-reviewed article is then invited onto provincial radio to explain to the public what counts as “local injustice,” and what doesn’t.

That is not an accident.

It is how modern governance prefers to work:

Identify someone who can stand with one foot in the community and one foot in the institution, then treat their version as the baseline reality.

Everyone else becomes anecdotal.

What I Saw — and How It Was Treated

In different places, I’ve written that “we” understood how grants, advisory roles, and optics were being woven together.

The more honest phrasing is:

• I understood it and wrote it down.
• A few others recognized pieces of it and nodded quietly.
• In most of the spaces that mattered, that analysis was ignored or actively unwelcome.

People were tired.

They were trying to keep homes, families and sanity intact while being pulled through meetings, hearings, comment periods, and social-media wars.

Zooming out to talk about structure — narrative capture, institutional design, the way “research” and “engagement” serve the same machine — felt, to many, like one layer too many.

So Bayman’s Paradox lived in this strange split:

• Publicly visible, published on my site for anyone to read.
• Practically invisible in the local and provincial discourse that claimed to care about justice, fairness, and participation.

Meanwhile, figures like Mercer — who fit comfortably inside the existing institutional language — were welcomed, platformed, and eventually cited⁷⁸⁹.

That is what narrative control looks like from below.

Not censorship in the obvious sense, but selective amplification:

• Certain framings are repeated until they become “common sense.”
• Other framings, no matter how carefully argued, are treated as too sharp, too inconvenient, or too far outside the accepted script.

Why Name Nick as a Narrative Controller

This isn’t about claiming that Mercer “stole” my ideas, or that he is uniquely evil, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to research and publish.

It’s about naming the structural role he occupies:

• Embedded in a conflict zone as a researcher⁴.
• Moving easily in advisory and academic environments⁷⁸.
• Translating local experience into the language of energy transitions, island studies, and energy justice.
• Now writing — and publicly “disseminating” on CBC — the kind of account that will be treated as an authoritative story of Newfoundland’s hydrogen experiment⁸¹³.

You can already see the same architecture starting to form on the cultural side. Local activist Brenda Kitchen with ProtectNL has mentioned that a filmmaker, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, is now working with her to document what’s happening here, and he has already been out to Port au Port, talking with residents, local groups, and gathering material¹². He also turns up in Memorial University’s orbit as a “participatory” filmmaker speaking about governance, land, privatisation, and climate adaptation¹⁰¹¹. None of that is automatically sinister; people are allowed to make films. But it is worth noticing, gently, how quickly our fights attract outside storytellers who stand with one foot in the community and one foot in an institution — and how easily their version becomes the one that travels.

That combination is not neutral.

If Mercer’s article and media hits become the standard references on “energy justice and the hydrogen boom in Newfoundland and Labrador,” and if filmmakers like Schmidt-Arenales become the preferred interpreters of the conflict on the cultural side, then their vantage points — and their omissions — will shape what future readers think happened here.

Bayman’s Paradox exists to make sure that isn’t the only record.

The first Bayman’s Paradox pieces — originally filed under Local Paradox — are part of that counter-archive:

• The ABCD Project Exposed³
• The Consultant and the Keepers⁵
• Fractured Frontlines⁶

These pieces don’t offer a competing brand of neutrality.

They are openly written from the inside, by someone with skin in the game.

That is the point.

Bayman’s Paradox as Counter-Archive

At its core, Bayman’s Paradox isn’t about one consultant, one grant, or one paper.

It’s about what happens when a place — its land, memory, culture and people — is treated as material for someone else’s story:

• The policy story.
• The funding story.
• The academic story.
• The CBC “public interest” story.
• The festival or “participatory art” story.

Narrative controllers are the people who sit at the junction of those stories and decide what travels.

Mercer’s work will travel that way. Schmidt-Arenales’s work will travel that way. The system is built for them.

Bayman’s Paradox is here so that when future researchers, journalists, or locals go looking for what happened on the West Coast of Newfoundland, they can see that the people inside the story had their own analysis — and that they put it in writing long before the polished autopsies arrived.

I can’t stop the system from preferring its own narrators.

But I can make sure that when somebody someday asks,

“Was there another way to see this?”,

there is a clear, stubborn answer:

Yes.

Here it is.

See also

• The ABCD Project Exposed
• The Consultant and the Keepers
• Fractured Frontlines
• The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes
• The Invisible Playbook
• The Press Release That Proved the Pattern
• The Next Comfort Line

References