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23 January 2021
03 January 2021
Time for a change #nlpoli
We’ve moved.
Starting Monday, you’ll find SRBP at edhollett.substack.com.
It’s January, the start of a new year.
And it’s also the 16th anniversary of The
Sir Robert Bond Papers.
There’s a lot happening or about to happen in politics
in Newfoundland and Labrador.
So there’s no better time to shake things up.
As in 2005, Bond Papers will still fill a niche on the
local political scene, one that has grown to a chasm in some respects.
Someone said the other day that I was blogging before
people knew what blogging was. A blog fit the need of the times. New demands or
larger demands means finding a new way to fill the gaps in the political
landscape. And so the new approach will
allow me to use new ways to deliver fresh information and fresh perspectives on
local politics.
There’ll still be at least one new post a week, at
7:00 AM every Monday. Some Monday posts will be available to anyone each month.
Through a subscription, you can support Bond Papers and
see the new content you will help develop.
There’ll be fresh analysis and commentary from me and
from guest writers.
There’ll be a podcast,
periodic at first and then more regularly as things get rolling.
Substack makes it easy to offer live q and a sessions,
so I’ll be adding that to the mix for subscribers. With an election looming and
then a series of major announcements and a budget due over the next three
months, there’ll be plenty of fuel for real-time discussions between a panel
and the audience as we all try to figure out where things are going.
I’ll be exploring ways to add video to the mix as well,
whether via Substack or through another platform like Facebook.
As with the blog, I’ll try things to see what works
best.
“In any
thriving democracy,” the first SRBP post said 16 years ago, “sound public
policy can only come through informed debate and discussion.”
That remains
the philosophy around here even though we are far from a thriving democracy. By
the way, Monday’s first Substack post - the working title is “Process” - will
touch on the state of political affairs in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Whatever the
format, Bond Papers will continue to be about stirring you up with information. Challenging. Provocative. Saucy. Put your own word on it.
That’s still
what Bond Papers will be.
Just from a
new location on the Internet, with your continued support.
30 December 2020
Top 15 of Year 15
This is the 15th year of Bond Papers.
This Sunday marks the 16th anniversary and there's a big announcement coming.
Check back.
In the meantime, enjoy the top 15 posts from this past year.
- The facts of the case
- Cleaning up the mess of Muskrat Falls
- Interesting news buried under bullshit
- Number of active COVID cases in NL drops dramatically
- Troubling travel ban may be illegal
- Dr. 'aggies H'answer
- On the need for politics
- John Crosbie
- All the news the mob will let us print
- Three Covid Pressures GNL will Face
- Mimicry and Pantomime
- How much is Churchill Falls worth?
- The Bow-Wow Parliament Creates a Kangaroo Kourt
- Bursting bureaucratic bullshit bubbles
- Policy confusion does no one any good
Bonus:
Two posts this year inadvertently wound up with the same title:
-srbp-
28 December 2020
Mind the Gap #nlpoli
There is no shortage of gaps in politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Regular readers will be familiar with the Credibility Gap. That’s the space between what a
politician says and what the politician does.
Marketers forget that when it comes to reputation and
hence lasting, reliable political support, actions speak far louder than words.
They talk about brands and branding. If
you spend any time digging into brands and branding you will find really vague
definitions that quickly lead you to the revelation that brands are for
marketing what dependency theory and neo-liberalism are for left-wing
academics.
True in civilian marketing.
Doubly true in political marketing.
The gap between words and actions may not turn up
right away but it does have an impact.
So take a look at the end of four months of Andrew Furey’s
premiership at the number of times he has talked about “big, bold ideas”.
Now looked at his actions.
Nothing big or bold about them.
And the ideas are very familiar. Pour government money into this hole or
that. Hold a government-issue dog and
pony show to watch the politicians pouring public money into the hole.
Rinse. Repeat.
21 December 2020
An evidence-based Alert system #nlpoli
As regular readers of these e-scribbles know, that
means it is really a management problem.
Government officials have a hard time explaining
things clearly because they do not have a clear idea of what they are
doing.
You can see this problem most clearly in the “Alert”
system announced last spring. Many countries,
states, and even cities use alert systems like this for emergencies. They are easy to understand – when they are
properly put together – and all the people who need to act can know what to do,
when to do it, and why they are doing it.
In the case of a pandemic alert system, people reading
it should be able to see what types of restrictions went with what level of
risk. There’s an internal logic to the system:
a low risk goes with very low restrictions or rules.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Alert system fails all the basics of a functional Alert system. That’s because it was never intended to be a proper staged system for easing or increasing restrictions in responses to changes in the risk of COVID. The Chief Medical Officer cobbled it together in response to a political demand.
18 December 2020
All around in circles 2 #nlpoli
That was the date
in 2012 when Kathy Dunderdale stood in front of a group of cheering
supporters of the ludicrous megaproject and proclaimed that the government had
formally approved its construction.
“It all
begins here!” she shouted to the overjoyed throng. ““It all begins now!”
It didn’t start
there of course.
Kathy had
stood with Danny Williams two years earlier - 18 November to be precise - and
announced a deal to build Muskrat Falls, the project the media hailed as the
fulfillment of a dream to build the Lower Churchill and break the stranglehold
Quebec had over our province.
That was a lie, to be sure.
But still the reporters parroted
Williams’ and Dunderdale’s lines just as they had 18 months before that - in
April 2009 - when Williams said a deal to sell Churchill Falls electricity to
Emera through Quebec had broken the stranglehold.
Arguably, though, Muskrat Falls started in May 2006 when
Williams announced the province would go it alone to build the Lower Churchill.
The Clerk of the Executive Council at the time emailed
the finance deputy minister and asked if anyone had checked with the deputy to
see if the province could afford it. He
got no reply.
In April 2010, when a gaggle of politicians,
bureaucrats, and Nalcor thugs decided to go ahead with Muskrat Falls first,
they figured the local ratepayers and taxpayers would foot the entire bill out
of their electricity rates.
By November 2010, when Williams announced the crowning
achievement of his career, the cost of the project had grown to the point that
the impact on electricity prices would make people unhappy. SRBP
pointed out at the time the price would double from what it then was.
And so the Muskrateers started to figure ways to lower
the sticker shock – mitigate the initial rates.
Every single Premier since Danny Williams has promised
to mitigate the project’s impact on rates.
On December 17, 2020, eight years to the day after Dunderdale whooped it up, Premier Andrew Furey became the latest one to promise rate mitigation.
07 December 2020
The Good Old Days #nlpoli
 |
Williams
was locked in a battle with St. John’s city hall over whether or not Williams
could put a big Christmas tree in a round-about in his development at Galway.
No one in
the local news media noticed, though, that Thursday was the 10th
anniversary of Williams departure from the Premier’s Office.
Back then, they couldn’t say enough good about him.
The Telegram praised Williams as “The Fighter” – the title of the
paper’s editorial the day after he announced he’d be leaving office – “a man of
the people” whose popularity rating “hovered around 80%.”
That was true.
Williams
*was* an incredibly popular politician.
No question.
30 November 2020
Worry, fear, and the Zero Risk Bias #nlpoli
Accepting that life is all about risk is the first cognitive step.
Mark Kingwell, On Risk (2020)
The question at last Monday’s news conference
was simple enough.
It’s a figure
the Chief Medical Officer’s staff releases every day when they update the
government’s COVID 19 page.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald chuckled.
She didn’t know.
And what’s more, it’s not a number people in public
health pay attention to, according to Fitzgerald.
People talk about it publicly, Fitzgerald said, but what
public health is “worried about” are “the cases we don’t know about.”
She said the same thing a couple of days later at
the next news conference that started with her rattling off the total number of
cases since March, the number recovered, and the number of active cases.
So if Fitzgerald worries - her word - about unknown cases and things like active cases don’t bother her, then why does she talk about them?
24 November 2020
Did Breen bungle federal bus cash offer? #nlpoli
There was another chunk earmarked for municipal transit systems.
Buses.
CBC reported at the time that "Newfoundland and Labrador did not apply for that [transit] money". Apparently, "... the City of St. John's said any transit losses it experienced were minimal compared with larger cities."
"We wouldn't have a significant enough loss to make value of that," said [Mayor Danny] Breen.
Fast forward to November.
The city slashed the Metrobus budget by $800,000. As a result, the bus service will run through the winter on a reduced schedule and cut shifts for drivers. Some will get papers to allow them to file for unemployment insurance.
Neither Breen nor any other councilors would do media interviews about the cuts. The city spokesperson sent out to shoo the media away offered no explanation for the politicians' sudden silence.
Maybe it had to do with the cash they turned down last summer.
-srbp-
23 November 2020
A pandemic of fear #nlpoli
In Newfoundland and Labrador, politicians and public health bureaucrats are dealing more with a pandemic of fear than of disease. It is one they helped create. It is one they sustain in the way they talk and act. Let us hope that Monday’s news conference is not another of their super-spreader events.
 |
Former
Premier Dwight Ball tweeted a message from the town council Saturday evening
(right).
There have
been five
new cases of COVID-19 in western Newfoundland, presumably Deer Lake. They are all in the same household as the
initial case, who brought the illness back from outside the province where he
works.
The people of Deer Lake are afraid. In that fear, they are like so many people across Newfoundland and Labrador. Their fear is not, as one might expect, the healthy respect of people who know a deadly disease when they see it. Rather, their fear – like all fear - is borne of ignorance and suckled by misinformation, the most pernicious form of which comes from the provincial government on a steady basis.
16 November 2020
Policy Pixelation #nlpoli
The motion started out with a few reasons why the
members thought it was a good idea: people
across Canada didn’t all have the same income, people were getting such a
cheque already from the federal government to cope with COVID, some people – no
one indicated who they were – thought this was a good idea, and when people had
more money they were generally better off.
When it came time to explain those things in greater
detail, Jordan Brown, the New Democrat member who led the debate didn’t give a
single bit of extra detail that showed he and his staff had done any research
on it at all.
He just made flat, generic statements, including:
“There are a
lot of geographical differences in regions throughout this country, too.”
“we do have
very unique geographical challenges, we have a unique population. We have a lot
of unique needs that make this province what it is.”
“A lot of
the research that we've come across was actually Canadian research, Canadian
led. As Canadians, we should be proud that we are actually looking at these
things within our own country. We have a lot of the research and legwork
already done here.”
“Just my
observation of this province, we're a very societal province. We're very adapt.
We're very caring. We seem to be a province that cares so deeply about
everybody in it.
He mentioned
five groups that signed a letter in favour of what they called a “basic
income.” Brown also added that a “Tory
senator wrote a book on why we should do this as a country.”
No
details. No evidence. No specific information.
And most tellingly of all, not a single description of just what this universal basic income might look like.
13 November 2020
Sod off, Norm Doyle #nlpoli
 |
| Ex-Harper fart catcher Norm Doyle |
Attention
spans are so short in local politics these days that most people don't remember
his stint as a fart catcher for Stephen Harper let alone his long time in
provincial politics.
So let's refresh memories with a couple of examples.
Anyone who wants to get a more fullsome account of Norm's shallow and self-serving political career can use the search function in the upper left corner of these e-scribbles and enter "Norm Doyle".
Lazy readers can click that link on Norm's name.
In his
memoir published a few years ago, Doyle whined about that time in 1989
when he and his crowd were turfed by voters into a batch of shitty offices in
the Confederation Building.
Your humble
e-scribbler told the story more honestly than Norm ever would:
Doyle and his mates wound up in the western wing of the fifth floor in a part of the building they had not renovated since it was built in the 1950s. Sometimes water poured in when it rained. That’s the spot the Conservatives gave the Liberal opposition when, in their arrogance, the Conservatives figured that these offices were only ever going to occupied the Liberals or the New Democrats. Doyle had never worked in the Opposition office - despite the implication of one sentence in his book - and most of his colleagues couldn’t remember the time before 1972 when the Tories had won power from Smallwood and the Liberals.
By contrast, Doyle and his colleagues made sure their offices were well-appointed. They spared no public expense to fit themselves out in fine style. Bear in mind that Doyle was part of a provincial government that was in very tough financial shape. Among the Tories, only the Speaker worked in a place decorated in a style best described as a cross between a Turkish whorehouse and a set from Good Fells or Married to the Mob. The rest were lavish as lavish could be in a 1980s way. Doyle doesn’t get into any of that but clearly, from the way Doyle describes the election episode, he still finds the whole thing painful a quarter of a century later.
10 November 2020
Bank of Canada ends provincial short-term debt backstop #nlpoli
The move
reflects "the continued improvement in the functioning of short-term
funding markets and financial markets more generally,” according to the
announcement.
The last
operation for the Provincial
Money Market Purchase program will be 13 November 2020.
Under the
PMMP, the Bank of Canada would purchase up to a set percentage of short-term
debt (maturity less than 12 months) offered by any Canadian province. The program began in March 2020 with a
maximum purchase of 40%. The Bank of
Canada revised the limit to 20%
in July and 10%
in September.
The Bank
introduced a similar program to purchase provincial
bonds in May. Under the Provincial
Bond Purchase Program, the Bank of Canada will purchase up to 20% of an issuing province’s “eligible assets
outstanding” on the secondary bond market.
“The Bank’s
purchases will aim to reflect a reference portfolio based in equal weight on
each province or territory’s share of eligible bonds outstanding and their share
of Canadian GDP.”
“Each
issuer’s eligible share will be recalculated on a monthly basis. Actual
purchases will depend on what is offered through the tender offer process and
may differ from the reference portfolio.”
“The program
will hold up to a total of $50 billion par value of eligible assets.”
The PBPP
will end on May 6, 2021.
-srbp-
09 November 2020
Paging Dr. Freud #nlpoli
Weird.
She said the government spent 25% of its budget on
health care. VOCM
reported it: “Greene
says healthcare is about 25 per cent of the province’s total expenditures, and
that it is a conversation we have to have.”
The actual share in 2019 was 42% and the forecast
share in 2020 in 37%. You can find the figures in the budget tabled in the
House of Assembly at the end
of September.
This is a really bizarro comment since Greene is
already well into her job
of sorting out both government overspending and re-organizing the economy. She should have a handle on all numbers.
After all, Greene and her provincial recovery team will
deliver a preliminary report by the end of February. Sure she’s not due to have
the whole thing finished until April, but the first deadline of February is really
only about three months away, if you allow an interruption for Christmas.
But that’s not the only weirdness.
03 November 2020
Reality Control #nlpoli
 |
| The Memory Hole |
People think that the ideas in the book like the
memory hole are modeled on communist or fascist dictatorships from the early
part of the last century.
What those people forget is that George Orwell worked at the BBC during the Second World War. As Dorian Lynskey noted in his recent history of the novel, Orwell thought that “radio, as it existed in the 1940s, [was] ‘inherently totalitarian.’”
In Spain during the Civil War, he saw his first
newspapers that “did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship
which is implied by an ordinary lie.” But it was in his exposure to radio
during the Second World War that Orwell heard in all the propaganda on all
sides very similar distortions of reality.
“This kind
of thing is frightening to me," Orwell wrote in his 1943 essay Looking back
on the Spanish war, “because it often gives me the feeling that the
very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”
“After all,
the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into
history… Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and
after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally
accepted. So, for all practical purposes the lie will have become the truth”.
This is only a small step to the slogan of the Party in Nineteen eighty-four: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
02 November 2020
The hard truth of reconciliation #nlpoli
Reconciliation is a very popular word these days.
Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
It comes out of the commission appointed to investigate what
happened to Indigenous people in Canada in residential schools run by the
federal government. The commission
produced a lengthy
list of actions needed to “advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”
Leave aside the 94 specific actions the commission
recommended. There are really three key
things that must form the basis of successful reconciliation.
The first is a willingness of the people involved to
come to a mutual understanding. Explicitly,
they are going to be involved in something doesn’t just happen instantly. It will take time. The people involved in
reconciliation will need must *want* to reconcile if it is going to be
successful.
The second is a desire to find truth. That’s conveniently mentioned in the name of
the commission: truth and
reconciliation. But it is also important
for people interested in reconciliation to come with the understanding that the
truth to be found isn’t going to sit wholly on one side or the other.
Third, reconciliation is going to take
discussion. Dialogue. Communication.
On all three of those counts, events in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past few months have shown just how far we are – collectively - from starting successful reconciliation.
27 October 2020
The importance of what we talk about #nlpoli
Nalcor
discovered the fault during two incidents at Soldier’s Pond in August that
caused the link to shut down on both occasions.
The public
found out about the two incidents last week in a news report by
allNewfoundlandLabrador.com on 21 October 2020. They discovered the
information in a report by Liberty Consulting to
the Public Utilities Board filed 28 September 2020.
Nalcor chief
Executive Stan Marshall - knowing about Liberty’s disclosure – held a news
conference the same day to announce that the company had successfully generated
power from the first turbine at Muskrat Falls. The news release, that is
the thing most reporters relied on for their subsequent stories, Nalcor talked
up the achievement of first power.
In his slide
presentation, Marshall told reporters that there was no capital cost allowance
for “replacement
of fiberglass beams at SOP/MF (GE Grid’s responsibility)” along with three
other items.
But there was no context.
And so conventional media – like NTV – never
mentioned the spectacular story.
So, you’d expect that a story about another
management problem at Muskrat Falls combined with the failure of Nalcor to
disclose it would give politicians something to talk about.
Opposition leader Ches Crosbie’s first question in
the House of Assembly that
day was about a young man who had gone missing in Vancouver. His father
is Crosbie’s constituent.
“Concerns have been raised, Crosbie began with the
wonderful passive sentence that says nothing about who is raising concerns,
“that the search was called off too soon and that clues have surfaced” about
the young man’s disappearance.
“I’d ask the minister if he’s spoken to his
colleague in British Columbia to make the case for resumption of the search?”
His second question was about pushing the government to bail out the West White Rose project.
26 October 2020
Husky and Come by Chance Updates #nlpoli
There is no good reason for governments to intervene in the oil sector even as much as they have. It has nothing to do with the gibberish of "decarbonization" or whatever the greenies will yell down next to the peasants from the ivory tower.
It's just bad business.
And bad business is the same as bad policy.
_________________________________________
When Husky shut down the West White Rose expansion, that should have been a clue the company was in serious financial difficulty.
SRBP pointed it out plainly. Husky's financial statements confirm it. Announcement of the sale of Husky to Cenovus came as no surprise.
It was also no surprise that the current owners of North Atlantic Refining are exploring the idea of turning the refinery into a tank farm. Rumour around town was that Irving was more interest in the storage potential than in using the refinery for anything more than a tank farm.
Neither of these stories will lessen demands from the local oil patch, from companies, and from the politicians for the federal and provincial governments to prop up this company or that project.
19 October 2020
Come by Chance and the Politics of Inertia #nlpoli
 |
| Is *this* the real El Dorado? |
And they want provincial taxpayers to pay.
According to Saltwire, “Glen Nolan, president of the United Steel Workers Local 9316 union, said that in recent conference calls officials of the province’s energy department indicated Silverpeak had floated” the idea that the provincial government would pay to keep the plant in hot idle mode.
Between 150 and 175 workers have been laid
off from the facility since February.
Another 60 or so are working to keep the plant ready to run.
A deal with Irving – reported by Canadian Press
and others
as a done deal in late May – came apart for reasons that aren’t clear.
So while they are trying to sell the refinery Silverpeak wants the
provincial government to pay to keep the refinery idled in a state where it could
get back into production very quickly.
The alternative will be to mothball the refinery and lay off the
remaining workers at the refinery.
The only company interested in buying the refinery – Origin International –
doesn’t want to run it as a refinery.
But that hasn’t stopped the provincial government from talking it up and
for representatives of the union at Come by Chance from being excited at the
prospect.
It’s hard to imagine the provincial government won’t put up the cash.
14 October 2020
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