Freedom from Information: oil royalties version

After two e-mail requests to the provincial finance department yielded nothing but delays for two weeks, a simple e-mail to the federal natural resources department produced information on the provincial oil royalties the provincial finance department had trouble releasing.

And it only took four working days.

The request on October 21 to the provincial finance department was simple enough:

What is the total offshore royalty received by the provincial government from 01 Apr 09 to 30 September 2009?

The first response (October 23) from the department spokesperson said:

The information you are requesting is provided at the end of the year in the public accounts and can be made available to you at that time.

Of course, the estimates are publicised at the end of the fiscal year but the audited financial statements  - the public accounts -  for 2009 won’t be released until February 2011. 

That seemed like an unusually long and unnecessary wait for information that should be readily available.

Oil royalties are collected each month by the federal natural resources department (NRCAN) under the terms of the 1985 Atlantic Accord.  The amounts collected are set by the provincial government through its own royalty regimes for Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose.  The royalties collected are turned over in their entirety to the provincial finance department monthly.

A second request (October 23) to provincial finance asked for the reason the information was being withheld.   The reply to that inquiry came on November 4, 2009 and gave a new, more curious response:

For the particular timeframe of your request, the department is still receiving the relevant information.  When the data collection is complete, the information will be made available. 

Still receiving information?  Now that’s a bit of an odd idea since the finance department should be in the process of completing a mid-year financial update for public release.  The figures on oil royalties would be sitting right there on someone’s computer, presumably since they form a very big part of the provincial government’s annual revenues. 

If nothing else, finance officials produce monthly statements of account showing revenues and expenditures both for government as a whole and for individual departments.   It would be exceedingly strange if the finance department didn’t have the figures for at least April to August. 

As it is, your humble e-scribbler went looking for the information in October.  It might have been a bit optimistic to get even the September figures.  At this point – early November - provincial officials should have September done and October should be well on the way.

But nothing at all until the whole thing was complete?  Highly unusual, to say the least.

Your humble e-scribbler turned instead to NRCAN.  An e-mail inquiry to the NRCAN manager of media relations on November 5 for the year to date oil royalty figures produced the response on November 9:  the oil royalty figures for April to August 2009.  September is in the pipeline and even October might be available within a few weeks.

It was that simple and that fast.

-srbp-

Math problems at provincial finance

That 60 cycle hum you hear is not the turbines spooling up on the Lower Churchill.

Nope.

That noise would be the intense spin – torque would be a better word – the provincial government is putting on its infrastructure announcement this snowy Wednesday. 

The reason for the announcement:  the provincial pollster – CRA  - is in the field.  With the nurses taking a strike vote and with a certain amount of anxiety out there about how bad the budget will be, the government party must have felt the need to make it appear that something good was happening in the budget to keep those polling numbers high.

Note the word “appear” in that sentence.

This is all about appearance.  If the provincial government actually wanted to do something, then the legislature would be called back and the new budget would be introduced.  They could run with it tomorrow since the thing is settled and has been for weeks. 

If it wasn’t about appearance, a bunch of cabinet ministers wouldn’t be sent to Labrador to announce things already announced.  The hospital in Labrador West is now officially the most announced project that never appears in provincial political history.  The Lower Churchill still holds the record for most costly non-project.

And if they had been really smart, then no one would have been proudly pointing out that all this was just re-cycling old news, as natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale did with CBC last night or one of the political gaggle did at the news conference in Goose Bay.

This budget announcement is apparently not about math.

We are told that infrastructure spending will be about $800 million.

We are told it is a record.

We are told that:

The $800 million the Provincial Government will spend on infrastructure in the 2009-10 fiscal year represents a jump of $285 million – well over 50 per cent – from the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Last year’s “unprecedented” infrastructure spending was valued at $673 million.  An increase of “well over” 50% of that amount would put infrastructure spending this year at $1.009 billion.

If $285 million – the size of the increase – is actually more than 50% of last year’s spending, then we have discovered something very interesting.  Despite announcing $673 million in “unprecedented” capital spending last year, the provincial government may have spent a not altogether unusual amount of somewhere around $500 million. That’s about 25% less than announced.

Based on that precedent, capital spending in 2009 will actually be around $600 million, not the $800 million torqued on Wednesday.

And it’s not like this is the first time something coming from provincial finance didn’t add up. Different figures keep appearing from Jerome Kennedy’s department all the time.  Like Equalization.  Numbers magically appeared all through that fiasco a couple of weeks ago that had never been seen before in public, including in the province’s audited financial statements.

Lucky for the finance crowd and their government publicity machine they can still hypnotise some people with the magic of PowerPoint slides.

-srbp-