29 August 2012

The Great Liberal PIFO Roadshow #nlpoli

On the front page of Tuesday’s Telegram was a story on the provincial Liberal Party’s renewal process. it isn’t available online unless you have a subscription to the paper.

this renewal thing has been going on for a while.  Dean MacDonald, Siobhan Coady, and Kevin Aylward are travelling around the province meeting with people and talking about the future of the provincial Liberals.

28 August 2012

The Muskrat Falls Debate (on Twitter) #nlpoli

Over at the Telegram, you’ll find two blog posts that are well worth your time if you want to get more insights into the ongoing discussion about Muskrat Falls.

Political reporter James McLeod goes through the tone of the public discussion about the project.  Geoff Meeker has a post featuring some observations by former premier Roger Grimes.

The two posts wind up complimenting each other and both raise some worthwhile issues.

The Return of the Public Accounts Committee #nlpoli

Supporters of the current governing party like to talk about how theirs is the most open, accountable and transparent government of all time.

Problem for them is that they cannot prove it.

Those of us who don’t believe that claim have a distinct advantage:  we can offer solid evidence about the the current lack of openness, accountability and transparency.

27 August 2012

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

A profile of the first human to walk on the moon, from 60 Minutes:

-srbp-

25 August 2012

No deal likely on Hebron 3rd module #nlpoli

CBC’s got the story:

ExxonMobil will be able to move work related to the Hebron oil project out of Newfoundland within days, as the possibility fades for an agreement to use local fabrication facilities.

“We’re not making any real progress, and it doesn’t appear that mediation will solve the issue,” Natural Resources Minister Jerome Kennedy told CBC News late this week.

Kennedy can rattle on all he wants about what a great case he believes the provincial government had.

Talk, as SRBP noted in June, is exceedingly cheap.  When the provincial government signed the Hebron agreement in 2008 they were not concerned about local benefits at all.  They took what the companies had on the table and nothing more.  Ed Martin’s view as head of Nalcor seems to be the same view of local industrial benefits he held when he worked for Big Oil.

-srbp-

24 August 2012

If they don’t stop it, we’ll go blind #nlpoli

You have to wonder sometimes how far Tory politicians will go to issue a good news comment of some kind during the time when the government pollster is in the field.

They are the only ones who do this, apparently, as part of the Tories’ organized effort to skew public opinion polls and then crow about the adulterated results.

Anyway, this is a two part example of the lengths to which the quarterly orgy of public onanism goes sometimes.

Williams prepared to wrap arms around Quebec #nlpoli

There’s something just too funny for words about former Premier Danny Williams sometimes.

It’s the kind of “too funny” where you don’t know whether he gets the joke and is just having a laugh at his own expense or is so completely blind to how asinine his own words make him look.

You see it is absolutely ridiculous for Danny Williams to deride his predecessor, Roger Grimes, for supposedly wanting to “wrap his arms” around Quebec in order to develop the Lower Churchill when Williams himself spent five years doing just that.

Of course it was only after Williams’ suck-job failed that he started in with the anti-Quebec crap.

Too friggin’ funny, Danny.

So funny in fact that SRBP even made a big map to help people make some kind of sense out of Williams’ foolishness.

-srbp-

Tense Problems #nlpoli

“As a lawyer,” natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy told reporters on Thursday,” you’d often hear the phrase that the best predictor of past behaviour is future behaviour.”

This is not just a slip of the tongue.  The minister is confused.   Obviously confused. 

You can see that confusion in Kennedy’s other comments. He called reporters together around 12:30 and gave them some of his thoughts on a letter by former premier Roger Grimes that appeared in the Thursday Telegram.  Kennedy was a bit tense, it seems, and so it isn’t surprising that in his remarks, Jerome confused his tenses.

Verb tenses.

And that, as they say, made all the difference in the world.

23 August 2012

Dunderdale: Hydro-Quebec equity in Lower Churchill and no ‘69 redress part of ‘win-win’ for HQ #nlpoli

For five years, the provincial Conservatives secretly tried to interest Quebec in part ownership of the Lower Churchill, according to Premier Kathy Dunderdale.

Dunderdale: September 2009

In September 2009, she told Open Line host Randy Simms (audio at right) about the secret efforts made by then-Premier Danny Williams, Dunderdale and Nalcor boss Ed Martin to sell Hydro-Quebec an equity share.

Dunderdale said that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador was prepared to leave aside any question of redress on the Lower Churchill.  The Conservatives previously committed that a deal on the Lower Churchill with Quebec would have to include redress for the disastrous 1969 contract between Brinco and Hydro-Quebec.

Two views of Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

In Nova Scotia, energy minister Charlie Parker touted the benefits of the Muskrat falls deal for his province in a letter to the Chronicle Herald, published on Wednesday.

Parker flipped the bird to opposition politician Andrew Younger, taking issue with Younger’s claim that the deal would lead to increase electricity prices for Nova Scotians:

The cost of this electricity will be virtually the same in Year 35 as it is in Year 1 of the agreement. This is the principal benefit of the project and it’s why this government has worked so hard to ensure it goes ahead.

He’s absolutely right.

22 August 2012

The Politics of Oil and Budgets #nlpoli

When any country or province depends heavily on the money that comes from resource extraction, it affects politics there.

Political scientist Michael Ross is probably the most recent author on the subject. Terry Karl has also written extensively on the resource curse.  She wrote of the best known books on the subject:  The paradox of plenty:  oil booms and petro-states.  You can also find some of Karl’s further thoughts on the issue in an article she wrote in 2007  and revised in 2009.

These studies focus on the developing world, for the most part, but what academics observe about those countries can cause you to think again about politics in other places.

Like say, Newfoundland and Labrador.

21 August 2012

The Permanent Echo Chamber of Horrors #nlpoli

To borrow a phrase from Quebec Premier Jean Charest the other day, Twitter is a conversation between apparatchiks and journalists.  That’s pretty much it, although in Newfoundland and Labrador as elsewhere a few other people weigh into the exchanges.

The political Twitter world is a variation of the echo chamber.  That’s what Charest meant:  a small group of people discuss or argue among themselves, sometimes without much concern for the outside world. 

You can really see how that plays out in Newfoundland and Labrador again this week in the aftermath of the Tories’  orchestrated attack on the five lawyers who went public  - again – with their criticisms of Muskrat Falls.

Kremlinology 41: All politics is personal #nlpoli

On Friday, the Conservatives sent Mount Pearl North MHA Steve Kent out as the designated hitter in a deliberate, orchestrated personal attack on the five lawyers who oppose Muskrat Falls.

He turned up on CBC’s On Point and repeated much of the same innuendo on Twitter.

Kent got a lot of negative feedback on Twitter and likely elsewhere about his comments.  On Monday, Kent and his colleagues had dropped the personal crap.

Not exactly, there, Tom, b’y #nlpoli

As part of the orchestrated campaign to attack the people making the comments instead of the comments themselves , finance minister Tom Marshall trotted out in front of the news media on Friday to lace into a group of five lawyers.

Marshall said comments by five lawyers opposed to Muskrat Falls were “nothing new” and had been addressed before. All true.

At the same time, though, Marshall quickly read through an obviously prepared diatribe in which he said that the “use of such inflammatory language in my view is irresponsible and borders on fear mongering.”

People should pay attention to Marshall’s comments, but not because of Tom’s laughable hypocrisy.

20 August 2012

Fourth time a charm: Kennedy changes MF “key point” …again #nlpoli

How many times should anyone need to change the key point in any discussion?

Well, this past weekend, natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy signalled what is the latest shift in strategic messaging on the Lower Churchill project since October 2010.

Hydro-Quebec to get Muskrat Falls electricity #nlpoli

Under a complex arrangement, Nalcor will send electricity from Muskrat Falls to Quebec in place of electricity from Churchill Falls during some months of the year. 

Nalcor hasn’t disclosed any other details of the arrangement. It appears Nalcor’s Muskrat Falls company will swap the electricity  - possibly free of charge - with its affiliate Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation, which will send it to Quebec under the terms of the 1969 contract at 1969 prices.

And rather than getting electricity from Muskrat Falls, Nova Scotians could receive electricity from Churchill Falls or any of Nalcor’s other hydro-electric generating stations on the island

You can find aspects of the arrangement in a clip from NTV.

There’s more to it, though.

17 August 2012

They love going sleaze ball #nlpoli #connieplaybook

One enduring characteristic of Conservative political comments since 2003 is the resort to personal attacks.

It must be Rule Number One in the Connie political playbook:  Go sleaze ball. Don’t deal with the issue. 

This past week the public got a good example of that from a provincial Conservative politician.

Radio Free Nalcor #nlpoli

Talk about putting on the full court press to try and squeeze out every favourable bit of commentary for a project that remains mired in controversy and doubt.

Nalcor is running a couple of days of media trips – free of charge – to the falls itself where Nalcor has already started working on a project it claims they haven’t got approval to start work on yet.

And if that wasn’t enough, and surely purely by total coincidence Conservative strategist Tim Powers is a co-host on VOCM’s Back Talk.  The station is owned by Steele Communications, incidentally, whose boss sits  - by complete happenstance - on the board of directors of Nalcor’s oil and gas corporation.

The politics of gas price fixing #nlpoli

Gas prices used to be a hot political topic in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

A lot of people thought that the provincial government could do a lot about them and, in the process, protect consumers.  Others thought that the government should do something about prices and make it easier for people to get cheap gas.

Yeah, well it didn’t quite work out that way.

Navigator Online #nlpoli

Turn your browser to a new blog from The Navigator

For those who don’t know it, The Navigator is a monthly magazine about the fishery for people in the industry in Atlantic Canada and the northeastern United States.

The Skipper’s Blog is written by managing editor Jaime Baker, late of the Telegram and the Fish, Food and Allied Workers’ Union. The subject matter for blog posts will likely be some aspect of the fishery but as Jaime told SRBP on Thursday, it could include other issues.  One post this week was about the young boy who offered his soccer medal to the Canadian men’s relay team.

Jamie’s most recent post is about a story this week about a resurgence in cod stocks:

While many outside the fishery may not have moved on from cod after the moratorium, the fishermen and the industry certainly did.

Last year’s $1 billion fishery was built largely on crab and shrimp. Believe it or not, a resurgence in cod right now to historic levels would actually throw a bit of a monkey-wrench into that industry.

How? Two ways.

One, cod are voracious predators and they tend to eat things like shrimp and juvenile crab (and anything else that is around). Most fishermen will tell you, in places where the cod are scarce, the shellfish tend to do well; and in places where the cod are plenty, the shellfish tend to not do well at all. And we should note there was very little in the way of crab or shrimp in this part of the world when the cod fishery was rocking out like The Who on speedballs. In fact, some scientists will tell you the fact that we have had crab and shrimp in these numbers is an anomaly.

His second point is that the local industry has re-oriented away from cod to the point where they’d have a hard time handling any sizable landings.

Other than maybe on the fisheries broadcast, that likely isn’t the sort of stuff you’ve been hearing.  Check out Jaime’s blog:  the opinions are both frank and well-informed.

-srbp-

16 August 2012

Three of a kind #nlpoli

A series of posts at The Monkey Cage describe Martin Gilens research on the connection between public policy and personal income.

Part 1:

These findings suggest that political representation functions reasonably well for the affluent. But the middle-class and the poor are essentially unrepresented (unless they happen to share the preferences of the well-off). In a second post tomorrow, I’ll discuss my more hopeful findings that reveal the (less typical) conditions under which government responsiveness to public preferences is stronger and more equal.

Part 2:

In my previous post I discussed the lack of government responsiveness to the middle-class and the poor, when their policy preferences diverge from those of the affluent. This inequality is pervasive: I found no circumstances during the decades I examined in which the middle-class had as much influence as the well-off, or the poor as much influence as the middle-class. Although pervasive, representational inequality does fluctuate. When the balance of power between the two major parties is close and when presidential elections loom, policy corresponds more closely to the preferences of the public, and more equally to the preferences of the more- and less-advantaged.

Part 3:

Can anything be done to make policymakers more equally responsive to the preferences of all Americans? Campaign finance reforms that reduce the role of large donors are one avenue to pursue. The current climate does not seem auspicious, but Citizens United was a five-to-four decision and perhaps a future Court will be friendlier to campaign finance reform efforts. In addition, competition-enhancing reforms like non-partisan districting might produce more competitive elections and induce policymakers to attend more closely to the public’s preferences. Finally, advocates can focus on those policies that are supported by the affluent and poor alike. Majorities of affluent Americans support increases in the minimum wage, spending for education, job training programs, Social Security, and Medicare (albeit with somewhat less enthusiasm than the less well-off).

A distinction that makes a difference #nlpoli

As part of the commemoration events for the War of 1812, the part of the Department of National Defence responsible for ceremony has decided to give seven Canadian Army units including the Royal Newfoundland Regiment the right to carry the battle honour DETROIT.

A battle honour marks a significant event in the regiment’s history. Infantry regiments display their battle honours on the regimental colours.

The picture at right is of the regimental colours of the 1st battalion, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.  Its honours until now all dated from the First World War.

This is an important announcement and the members of the regiment should be very proud.

15 August 2012

Any similarity is purely coincidental #nlpoli

Two announcements.

The one in February consisted of three paragraphs, 10 lines, and 111 words.

The obligatory quote from the minister:

“Ms. Goulding and Ms. Mennie have a wealth of legal expertise which has made them well-suited to the duties of a Provincial Court judge,” said Minister Collins. “They join the bench with a great deal of legal experience and knowledge. I welcome and congratulate them on their new positions.”

The one from August consisted of three paragraphs, 10 lines and 107 words.

The obligatory quote from the minister:

Ms. Marshall and Mr. Walsh bring a great deal of legal expertise as they begin their new careers as Provincial Court judges,” said Minister Collins. “Their experience will serve them well in their new roles and I welcome and congratulate them on their new positions.”

-srbp-

Muskrat Falls: the revised cost for consumers #nlpoli

If, as Shawn Skinner suggests, the cost of Muskrat Falls is going to jump by a third or more by the time we find out what the Decision Gate 3 numbers are, then it follows logically that Nalcor is going to have to figure out how to pay for that.

What might that look like for the ordinary consumer in Newfoundland and Labrador?

14 August 2012

Suppressing Dissent #nlpoli

One of the hallmarks of the Conservative political method since 2003 has been the suppression of public dissent.

Anyone who wants to raise a problem for public discussion is attacked for being “negative.”  It is part of the aggressive campaign the Tories have waged to eliminate political opposition and stifle anything that was not approved by the Premier’s Office.

No surprise, then, that Bonavista mayor Betty Fitzgerald went to her local MHA to get a letter she could sign attacking one of her councillors who had violated the iron Conservative law against dissent.

Marshall’s release doesn’t match DBRS public statements #nlpoli

Simply put, Tom Marshall’s most recent news release about the report by Dominion Bond Rating Service doesn’t match what the bond rating agency said in a news release about the provincial government’s finances.

You can see that pretty clearly if you read the whole release from DBRS.

13 August 2012

Muskrat Falls Cost Estimates: the Skinner Numbers #nlpoli

Former natural resources minister Shawn Skinner said this past weekend that he expected the next cost estimate for Muskrat Falls will be around $8.0 to $8.5 billion. [video; Skinner comments are at about 14:00]

Assuming that is for the dam, line to St. John’s, and the line to Nova Scotia, Skinner’s estimate would mean that Nalcor’s cost estimate in 2010 was between 29% and 37% out.

Sadly for proponents of the Muskrat Falls megaproject, those cost increases won’t be the end of it.

10 August 2012

The politics of table salt #nlpoli

Tom Hedderson would probably like a do-over.  Responding to an opposition call for a ban on road-side pesticide use by Hedderson’s department, the minister compared the toxicity of the chemical defoliant his people use to table salt.

And table salt was worse!

In politics, that sort of comment can be demonstrably true but it can also be one of those moments where that truth doesn’t matter as much as other truths.

Thinking about Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

People in Nova Scotia are doing a lot of thinking about Muskrat Falls, so it seems.  Here’s part of an opinion piece by Brendan Halley that appeared in the Thursday, August 9 edition:

We should exercise caution in placing too much faith in supply/demand forecasts (Bill Black, Aug. 1). The only certainty is that these forecasts will be wrong. It will take at least until 2017 to build this project. The relevant question is really if the project will make sense in the context of the challenges Nova Scotia will be facing in 2017 or 2020. At that time, will Nova Scotia be pleased to have access to a renewable, flexible source of energy with more import/export capability? Will we want to use the hydro resource and trading capability to complement development of electric vehicles, wind, tidal and solar energy? Or perhaps energy efficiency, smart grid and alternative energy storage technologies will be more attractive?

-srbp-

That would be so cool… #nlpoli

All that stuff about peak oil, oil shortages and ever increasing oil prices?

You know, the sort of stuff that some people claim justifies Muskrat Falls.

Yeah, well maybe they spoke a wee bit too soon.

Bench Mark #nlpoli

The names of two lawyers who might appear in an upcoming news release:

  • James Walsh
  • Lori Marshall

-srbp-

09 August 2012

Take Tom with a grain of salt #nlpoli

Apparently, a herbicide used by the provincial government is about as toxic as table salt.

For those who missed it, here’s transportation minister Tom Hedderson explaining why the herbicide is safe as safe can be.

August Muskrat Round-up #nlpoli

First up, there are lots of ways to make bad decisions.

The Telegram’s Russell Wangersky did a fine job on Tuesday of pointing out that natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy is basically out to lunch when he claims that the Muskrat Falls project won’t likely experience any cost over-runs.

But that’s not the only way Kennedy’s interview On Point With Jonathan Crowe [video] was surreal.

08 August 2012

Williams sides with Quebec on energy #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Danny Williams always likes someone who stands up for his or her province.

Well, likes them as long as the someone doing the standing up standing in the way of something Danny wants. .

Anyone who wondered why Williams turned up in the Globe praising British Columbia Premier Christy Clark can now make sense of it all.

07 August 2012

The Multiple Muskrat Falsehoods #nlpoli

Zack: Check it out, all about planets this month.

Leonard: That’s an atom.

Zack: Agree to disagree. That’s what I love about science, there’s no one right answer.

Ya gotta love Tory MHA Keith Russell.

Well, not really, love him unless you enjoy a politician who just keeps putting his foot in his mouth all the way up to the hip.

Russell called VOCM’s Back Talk last week to correct supposedly false statements by others.  But in the process, Russell spouted not one, not true but a raft of completely false statements about Muskrat Falls.

06 August 2012

The Farce just goes on and on… #nlpoli

The farce that is the provincial government’s effort to sell the Muskrat Falls project continues to roll along.

There are no timelines, the Telegram tells us, or at least none that Nalcor and its political backers will tell the people who will pay the bills for all this mess.

But still, here’s what we can tell from the weekend Telegram:

03 August 2012

A change might be as good as a rest #nlpoli

A sign of the problems plaguing Kathy Dunderdale’s aging Conservative administration and their dramatic fall in the polls:  she’s punted her communications director and hired a new one.

Lynn Hammond has the key job in the administration and it will fall on her shoulders to right the communications mess the Dunderdale Tories have been mired in since last year.

Dunderdale’s old comms director – Glenda Powers – got a new job. It looks like a promotion to the top communications job in government.  Under the Tories, though, it has always played second fiddle to the Premier’s Office. 

The real strategic heavy lifting doesn’t get done by the person with the big title. That job -  the real head of government communications  - is now Lynn Hammond.

What’s more noticeable about Powers’ new title is that she has the job in an acting capacity. Odd they haven’t filled it permanently even though the head hunters have been trying to staff the job since well before Josephine Cheeseman left. Is there anyone in town they haven’t spoken to about it?

-srbp-

02 August 2012

The cut-throat world of economics #nlpoli

Anyone who attended Wade Locke’s presentation on Muskrat Falls got a tiny glimpse of the vicious world that is modern academics.  it came in the unusually large bit where Locke sliced into his colleague Jim Feehan.  Locke even made a strawman and set fire to it – figuratively of course – just to make sure he had a really persuasive argument. (<--- sarcasm)

Well, it turns out that the field of economics is just seething with this sort of stuff.  Statistics and political science prof Andrew Gelman writes:

Some attitudes surprise me. For example, on his blog, journal editor Steven Levitt wrote, “Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? . . . Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other.” See my discussion here.

Academics work behind the scenes to undermine each other.

Wow.

Read the link.  The whole discussion is way more interesting than just that bit.

-srbp-

If Ontarians jumped off the wharf… #nlpoli

Ontarians subsidized electricity exports from their province to the tune of about $2.50 a kilowatt hour according to a recent report by the Council for Clean and Reliable Energy and covered by thestar.com.

The total works out to about $1.2 billion annually.

About 80% of Ontario’s electricity generation comes from contracts with producers that exceed the current market price for electricity.  Ontario consumers pay a surcharge to make up the difference.  Customers outside Ontario don;t pay the charge even though the electric comes from generators inside Ontario.

01 August 2012

Kathy’s Experts #nlpoli

Would you take advice on a megaproject from a company whose own megaproject is 86% over budget and 26 months behind schedule – and counting?

ladies and gentleman:  Manitoba Hydro International

-srbp-

31 July 2012

A Big Tell on Muskrat Falls Exports #nlpoli

A meeting of the Eastern Canadian premiers and all the New England Governors and the provincial government here sends Keith Hutchings.

Who?

A finalized term sheet? #nlpoli

Nalcor and Emera signed a finalised term sheet to develop Muskrat Falls in November 2010.

The next step was supposed to be negotiation of a final agreement between Nalcor and Emera.

Oddly enough, Canadian Press reported on Monday evening that “[s]ources say a deal to finalize a term sheet to develop the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project in Labrador has been reached.” 

CBC’s David Cochrane tweeted:

CBC has confirmed CP report that NS and NL will sign Muskrat Falls term sheet tomorrow. Multiple sources. Its [sic] final legal text.

“A deal to finalize a term sheet” and “will sign Muskrat Falls term sheet” when they already finalized the term sheet in 2010?

That’s a very odd way of putting it.  Now this could just be media inaccuracy.  If they had a “final legal text”, as Cochrane’s tweet said, then they’d do what they did in 2010 only even bigger because a final deal is…well… even bigger.  

Instead, Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is in Vermont at a regular meeting of government leaders from eastern Canada and the northeastern United States.  Kathy Dunderdale is MIA.

Instead, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador issued a media advisory on Monday that natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy will hold a news conference on an “energy-related” subject at 9:45 AM Tuesday after a technical briefing for news media. The event will take place at the provincial government media centre.

The Nova Scotia government is reportedly planning a similar briefing in Halifax. There was no word on whether or not the companies that are supposed to be working out the deal would participate in either event.

The government media centre is not the venue for signing a major deal. Compare that to what happened in 2010.  It was a huge show for much less than the “final legal text” and  - incidentally - what they announced in 2010 was the final legal text of the term sheet. 

Just so that you know what a big deal they had a couple of years ago, here’s an official photo of the event:

The local Conservatives don’t screw around when it comes to major announcements.

In August 2008, the provincial government held a major show when they reached a final deal to develop Hebron. It was bigger than the announcement the previous August of a memorandum of understanding to develop Hebron.

And in August 2005, the provincial government announced a major decision on the Lower Churchill. Big show.

Funny how all these really big announcements come in August, isn’t it?

And funny how a supposedly bigger deal is being announced with a small show.

-srbp-

30 July 2012

The Art of Budget Forecasting #nlpoli

The provincial government set its budget this year based on an oil price forecast of US$124 a barrel in 2012.

As we move up on the midway point in the fiscal year (it starts on April 1), oil is well below that.  The result is that the provincial government could wind up with a deficit of nearly three quarters of a billion dollars, according to the Premier.

Some people are amazed by this.

They shouldn’t be.

This fits a pattern.

Those friggers from [insert name of province] #nlpoli

Anyone steeped in the whole Quebec-Newfoundland fight over hydro-electricity exports will look at the whole Alberta-British Columbia fight over oil exports and see the connections.

Sure, they are there.

The most obvious:  one province wants to get somewhere to export its energy product and there’s another province standing in the way.

What else could there be?

Well, lots actually.

27 July 2012

The Magic Number #nlpoli

“Nalcor’s position”, wrote the joint federal-provincial review panel on the Lower Churchill project, “was that up to 800 MW of energy from the Project would be required to meet provincial demand,…”.

And there are Nalcor’s forecasts that support the claim that out of the 3,000 megawatts potentially available from the Lower Churchill project, the province will need 800 megawatts.

There’s something about that number, 800.

Hmmm.

Demand Forecasts #nlpoli

Yesterday’s offhand reference to Nalcor’s electricity demand forecasts brought home a couple of points to your humble e-scribbler. 

The biggest one is that a great many people still do not know a lot of the basic information on this project despite the fact the provincial government announced it the better part of two years ago.

Well, never let it be said that this wasn’t a space where information was hard to find.

26 July 2012

NL wheeling power through Quebec #nlpoli #cdnpoli

From April 2009, here’s Kathy Dunderdale – then the province’s natural resources minister – quoted in a news release on an historic agreement that saw Nalcor wheeling electricity from Churchill Falls through Quebec to the United States:

“This is a significant development for us to share our excess green renewable energy with the rest of North America through our transmission access through Quebec and our subsequent arrangement directly with Emera Energy,” said the Honourable Kathy Dunderdale, Minister of Natural Resources. “These markets are seeking clean, reliable energy, which we have in abundance. The recall block availability and this arrangement allows us to build our reputation and experience as a reliable supplier of clean energy now and into the future.”

Anything else you’ve been hearing is simply not true.

In the same news release, Danny Williams said the agreement was “free of the geographic stranglehold of Quebec”.

False information is pretty persistent, though.

-srbp-

There’s no greater yada than a yada yada #nlpoli

The Nunatukavut are a group of aboriginal people living in Labrador.  They used to be known as the Labrador Metis.

In October 2003, Danny Williams told them – in writing – that his Conservative administration “will involve the Labrador Metis Nation, as we will representatives of all residents of Labrador, in the process of negotiating a Lower Churchill Development Agreement.”

Almost a decade later, the provincial Conservatives under Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale have decided to take a different view:

“They don’t have established land claims in our province,” she said. “We have land claims with the Innu people and we have an agreement in principle with the Innu.”

Dunderdale said she would consult with the group, but as for any new negotiations: “We’re not getting into those kinds of discussions at this point.”

-srbp-

Managing Electricity Demand #nlpoli

Nalcor’s forecast for electricity demand on the island of Newfoundland doesn’t really show a massive increase over the next couple of decades.

Earlier this year, Memorial University economist Jim Feehan suggested that one alternative to Muskrat Falls was demand management.  That is, he suggested that Nalcor try some ways of getting people to use less electricity.

Wade Locke, Feehan’s colleague, and staunch supporter of Muskrat Falls, laced into Feehan. He dismissed Feehan at the time and, by extension, the role conservation might have as part of a comprehensive energy policy in the province.  Locke did change his mind.

Equally dismissive of demand management, Nalcor boss Ed Martin tried on some pretty vicious rhetoric about old people and freezing in response to Feehan.

Gander at the goosing #nlpoli

Apparently, your humble e-scribbler got on Steve Kent’s nerves.

The Conservative politician and his friends have been bombarding Twitter and Open Line shows since the middle of July will all sorts of their old poll-goosing tactics.  So yours truly has been re-tweeting some of the little comments with an added remark like “Gee, you’d swear a poll was coming.”

Small stuff.

But apparently enough to go right up Kent’s nose in a bad way.

25 July 2012

Some help for the St. John’s Board of Trade #nlpoli

…who have suddenly discovered that the provincial economy is in serious need of diversification: a 2010 series called the Fragile Economy.

If they really want to get a handle on economic diversification, BOT chair Steve Power and his colleagues could start by reading the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan.  What the Board of Trade has been slavishly been supporting since 2003 is diametrically opposite to the 1992 SEP and its call for diversification based on  – gasp! – entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and innovation.

Frankly, it’s been pretty bizarre since 2003 to have a bunch of business owners who endorsed excessive public sector spending and clammed up about entrepreneurship, competitiveness and other subversive ideas.  In November 2010, here’s what the chair at the time said:

Chairman of the Board of Trade, Derek Sullivan said government contracts give a competitive advantage for local businesses and “can be a very powerful and reliable revenue stream.”

-srbp-

Repsol may sell New Brunswick LNG port #nlpoli

Spanish oil and gas company Repsol may be  looking to sell its  interest in the Saint John New Brunswick liquefied natural gas facility.  The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal reported the news on July 21:

On Thursday, the Spanish oil and gas giant told shareholders it was considering the idea of getting rid of some of its liquefied natural gas business to help shore up its finances.

This includes the potential sale of the Canaport terminal in east Saint John, in which it has a 75 per cent stake. Irving Oil, Limited, owns the other 25 per cent.

The move comes on the heels of the expropriation of Repsol’s majority interest in Argentinian oil and gas company YPF by the Argentinian government.  The government did not pay Repsol compensation for the seized assets.

Repsol is reportedly taking legal action and is looking at options to raise cash in the meantime.  One of those options includes divesting of North American natural gas assets.

-srbp-

The tone at the top - federal version #nlpoli

Marni Soupcoff has got it right about the campaign finance scandal currently swirling around federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue (pronounced Pen-ah-shoe-ay).  People should be concerned about the money Peter Penashue used to get elected:

The part that stands out is the involvement of a federal member of parliament who seems to have, in the absence of an ability to balance his own campaign books, used money that was meant for the Innu community to get himself elected. Not only has he has not been taken to task for this by his Conservative government. He remains a cabinet minister. Now that the media has discovered the loan and Mr. Penashue’s questionable campaign spending, he is finally being asked the sort of questions for which Innu residents surely would like some answers.

As Chief Justice Derek Green reminded us in his report on the the House of Assembly patronage scandal, the way officials and politicians respond to issues such as accountability is set by the tone at the top.

Soupcoff said:

If the Conservatives truly believed in maintaining a government of principle, they would be demanding answers from Mr. Penashue about why money that was meant for a deprived First Nations community ended up in his campaign coffers.

Let’s see what happens.

-srbp-

24 July 2012

There’s reality and … #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale decided to talk about reality on Monday.

A reality check she called it:

“Everybody sees what’s happening with the price of oil, and I see every day what that’s doing to our budget,” the premier said.  [CBC online story]

Dunderdale warned that the provincial government’s deficit this year might reach $700 million. her forecast in the spring was $250 million.  Next year it could be a billion, she ventured.

Now that is on an accrual basis, of course.  On a cash basis, the current provincial government will face a deficit of more than $1.06 billion if oil actually manages to average US$124 a barrel.

Reality Check: drops and buckets version #nlpoli

Via labradore, a chart that plots Conservative unsustainable public spending since 2003 with recently announced controls on discretionary spending.

-srbp-

Magical Thinking and the Muskrat Falls Tax #nlpoli

Muskrat Falls seems to be intimately connected to magic, at least in some people’s minds.

For a while there, the gang at Nalcor sounded like they had found a way to make electricity and then ship it back upstream to Churchill Falls where it would be converted back to water. Sort of a water to wine to water miracle.

Not surprisingly, it turned out to be crap.

23 July 2012

More Muskrat Falls Sunk Cost #nlpoli

That $350 million in sunk costs from Monday morning’s post wasn’t the whole story, of course. 

You’ll find more detail – and lots more cash – documented in the public utilities board’s final report on Muskrat Falls.

Rae backs Muskrat…sort of #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Big screaming CBC headline:

Federal Liberals support Muskrat Falls project:  Rae

Then you read the story.

Sunk Cost – Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

The chart below is taken from a Nalcor information hand-out describing the project’s capital expenditures to the end of March 2011.

What that covers are the various costs for engineering, staff, advertising and communications and anything else that the Labrador project office has spent getting ready to build the project.

The pre-2003 figures include $57 million spent between 1998 and the end of September 2004, the details of which the provincial government released in 2004.

sunk costs

-srbp-

21 July 2012

Ya wanna know what stupid is? #nlpoli #cdnpoli

According to information supplied to the news media – and widely reported already – the helicopter from 444 Squadron used for a training flight than ended with a bit of fishing for the crew six weeks ago was available for search and rescue missions.

And if that re-tasking wouldn’t have been enough, the squadron had another aircraft on stand-by anyway to meet any call for civilian search and rescue service, which, by the way, is not the squadron’s primary job.

None of that stopped CBC from turning a photo of the trip into a scandal.  But to complain about that though would be to complain about dogs barking:  that’s the shit they do especially when it comes to a potential ratings driver like a controversy spun entirely out of the imaginations of people in a newsroom. 

Dazed and Confused: Swinimer version #nlpoli

You know things are bad when even the people who back Muskrat Falls without question start challenging stuff that has long ago been proven correct.

The heir to the Moon Man’s crown got some things right.  If you consider that the cost for Emera of building the Nova Scotia line is a trade for electricity, then they will get it for about 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour.

And then everything went horribly wrong for Jack.

Emera will get the power for 35 years, not 20 like Jack claimed.  They will never see a price increase for it ever. That’s because they are getting the electricity for free, in effect.

Meanwhile, the people who own the river making the electricity will see their electricity go up regularly for those 35 years.

Around the 2:00 mark, Jack claims the line for the electricity will be more expensive than the dam itself.  Nalcor’s figures put the cost for the dam at around $2.9 billion and the line to Soldier’s Pond at around $2.1 billion.  Those figures are not correct but let’s go with them for now.

He claims it will only cost two or three cents a kilowatt hour to make the electricity.  As Nalcor explained to the public utilities board, Muskrat falls electricity would cost about seven times that if you used the conventional way of pricing it.  By spreading the cost over more than fifty years, Nalcor can get the price to consumers down to a mere two and a half times Jack’s number.

As things keep going, Jack just gets worse.  By the time he’s done he claims that electricity for export will cost less than the electricity for people in St. John’s.  He gets on with some malarkey about water otherwise spilling over the dam.  The only reason Nalcor can give power to Nova Scotia for free under the proposed deal and think about selling it anywhere outside this province for less than it costs to make it is because the people of this province are going to pay for everything at Muskrat Falls, in full, plus profit.  They will only use about 40% of the juice but they will pay for 100% of the project’s output.

Jack finishes with a flourish.  Something about Internet bloggers or other.  Seems he doesn’t like those people.

Then he adds that there are none so blind as those who will not see.

That is true.

Unfortunately for Jack, that is just another one of his “own goal” efforts.  You see, Jack is sadly misinformed but thinks everyone else is wrong.  What’s worse he fights with people like randy who try and correct him. You can’t get any more blind than that, Jack.

His best one to date, though, was at the public utilities board hearings.  Swinimer finished off his presentation by admonishing the board to ignore ex-politicians, bloggers and…you guessed it …the people who call open lines shows.

Come to think of it, that last bit turns out to be good advice.

-srbp-

20 July 2012

New Page: The Ghost in the Turbines #nlpoli

Look up and you’ll see a new page:  The Ghost in the Turbines.

You’ll eventually find there all the major SRBP posts on Labrador hydroelectric development from the earliest days to the latest ones. 

We’ve started out with the recent series that – for want of a better title – is just going down in history as the July 2012 series. The rest will be grouped by series title (if appropriate) or by topic such as “Financial”. 

There are a lot of posts on this topic, especially since November 2010, so it will take a while to get the links in place.  Keep checking back, though because it will be done before too long. 

-srbp-

The Stuff We Don’t Know #nlpoli

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know.

And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld will likely be best remembered for the 30 seconds or so that it took those words to come out of his mouth during a media briefing on the lack of evidence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction.

As tortured as the words seem to be, Rumsfeld actually describes the fundamental problem that bedevils all of us who are trying to do anything. 

It is called uncertainty.

19 July 2012

Community Values, Part Deux #nlpoli

Political science grad student John Samms’ has lengthy post on the antics of local politicians on Twitter.

To complain about the asinine behaviour of local politicians these days is like complaining that monkeys in the zoo sit around their cage masturbating and flinging their poo at each other.

It’s what they do.

Don’t criticise them because they can’t do anything more than jerk off and toss crap. If you want more, look somewhere else.

And if you really want a change, then vote for someone else when you get the chance.

It’s that simple.

-srbp-

Felix Collins: laughingstock #nlpoli

labradore takes issue with a letter to the editor by justice minister Felix Collins.

He systematically demonstrates that Collins’ claim about the “frivolous and vexatious” provisions in Bill 29 are wrong.

labradore calls it a convenient omission on Collins’ part.

To be fair to Collins, you cannot omit what you likely did not know in the first place.

-srbp-

Going down by the front end #nlpoli

In the late 1980s, the Progressive Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador committed more than $11 million  - ultimately $22 million -  to a plan to grow cucumbers and tomatoes using hydroponic technology developed by Philip Sprung.

Sprung predicted his technology would grow almost seven million pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes in its first year of operation and upwards of nine million by the end of five years.  Sprung had little evidence to back the claim from his test facility in Alberta.

An assessment by provincial officials concluded that the Sprung’s projections were impossible to attain.  Aside from any technological miracles, the Sprung predictions would need the average daily sunlight of Cairo to stand a chance of coming true.  Mount Pearl  - the site chosen for the greenhouses – didn’t even come close to those light levels in the very best years.

Still, the government persisted.

18 July 2012

Executive Politics and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

In this series, we are not concerned with whether or not the Muskrat Falls project is good or bad. That is a separate issue.

Nor are we presenting information you shouldn’t already have.  Very little of what you will read should come as a surprise, especially if you  read SRBP regularly.

Rather this series is an effort to develop some explanations about why the provincial government’s energy company has been working on the Lower Churchill Project continuously for 15 years and yet has produced nothing.

17 July 2012

High Politics and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

“[M]ega-projects”, writes political scientist Will Jennings,” exhibit a ‘performance paradox’ …being prevalent and popular among planners despite suffering from extremely poor track records in terms of completion times, cost escalations and shortfalls in projected revenues and economic benefits.”

Jennings looked at several projects to see why the projects tended to take a long time to finish or experienced huge cost over-runs or generally didn’t live up to expectations.

This week SRBP is looking at Muskrat Falls using Jennings’ four categories of factors that affect project performance.  The first of these is “high politics”.

16 July 2012

Cost Over-Runs and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

When announced in November 2010, the Muskrat Falls dam, the line to the island the connection to Nova Scotia were supposed to cost $6.2 billion.

The dam and the line to the island were priced at $5.0 billion.  The Nova Scotia line was supposed to cost $1.2 billion.

As it turned out, those numbers were wrong. 

Here’s what we have learned since then.

The Inevitable Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

One reporter tweeted his impression of the attitude toward Muskrat Falls that seems to come from the provincial governments in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia. While the content was one thing,  he felt people should note the tone:
The attitude towards Muskrat is increasingly one of both NL and NS being locked in. A course change would be prohibitively expensive.
A similar comment turned up in his story for the Friday edition of the Telegram, illustrated by a quote from Premier Kathy Dunderdale at her scrum after meeting with Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter:
“What’s the alternative? To either ration energy or sit up in the dark. We have to pay for energy.  Where’s the least-cost alternative?” Dunderdale said.
Dunderdale’s comments are preposterous, of course.  There are plenty of alternatives, some of them considerably less costly than the one she has fixated on.  That fixation is cause for concern about the way the provincial government is barreling ahead with this project.

SRBP talked about this in May - here, here, and here  - in posts on making bad decisions. What’s more interesting these days is looking at Dunderdale and Muskrat Falls in light of a recent analysis of megaprojects and decision-making.

14 July 2012

Hebron Dispute: No more give-aways, indeed #nlpoli

When it comes to the Hebron project, Premier Kathy Dunderdale should know exactly what went wrong with the development deal between the province and the companies.

She should know every give-away in it.  After all, she was natural resources minister at the time.

Share it maybe

-srbp-

13 July 2012

Provincial government working Hebron dispute outside terms of benefits agreement #nlpoli

Lots of words came from Premier Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy in their dispute over construction of a major module for the Hebron project.

What became pretty clear – if you listen -  is that the provincial government is trying to squeeze some resolution to the dispute outside the provisions of the Hebron Benefits Agreement.

Muskrat Falls Money Quote 3 #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Muskrat Falls lover, from a scrum on Thursday:

Dunderdale said due diligence is more important than artificial timelines but that the two sides are "considerably closer" to an agreement. A deal will be done before her government debates Muskrat Falls this fall, she said, "sometime before November, I hope."

November, hopefully.

For the debate or the deal.

Whatever.

That would be a deal that was supposedly so close last winter that they didn’t need to set a new deadline after they blew through the first two.

-srbp-

Innu Controversy Widens #nlpoli

The controversy at the Innu Development Limited Partnership developed some political overtones on Thursday.

CBC reported that federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue borrowed $25,000 from the partnership to finance his campaign in 2011. 

Muskrat Falls Money Quote 2 #nlpoli

Darrell Dexter, Nova Scotia Premier:

"We've already looked at that and we've done studies that look at the delivery of power to Nova Scotians," he said in Halifax."And the most effective way of doing that is through a project like the Lower Churchill."

Like the Lower Churchill.

So if it turned out that a hydroelectric project in Quebec could meet the need, Darrell could go with that option and still be correct.

-srbp-

Muskrat Falls Money Quote 1 #nlpoli

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter, in a scrum after meeting with Premier Kathy Dunderdale about cost over-runs on Muskrat Falls:

"Here is this project that we have that can provide stability because we're going to know what the input costs are upfront. And that will provide stability for many, many years."

For 35 years, Nova Scotians will get free electricity from Muskrat Falls.

Any cost over-runs on the project are solely the burden of taxpayers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

That is stability any Nova Scotia premier would love.

-srbp-

Phake Photos Make Come Back #nlpoli

The Mighty Ceeb ran a story on Thursday about a block of three houses in downtown St. John’s.  Tourists and some residents are upset by a set of wires that one of the local phone companies has installed in front of the houses.

They quoted Les Cuff, who lives in one of the houses.

"Instead of having the three houses nicely unbroken, now you have three houses with a big bundle of wires in the middle, he said. "It just looks unsightly."

The guy lives there and he never noticed this stuff before?

12 July 2012

Muskrat Falls carts, horses, chickens and eggs #nlpoli

All the Twitter commentary on Thursday about Muskrat Falls and mining prompted your humble e-scribbler to go back and do some checking about who said what when.

Sure enough, the initial announcement did mention that any electricity from Muskrat Falls that wasn’t used in the province would go off to any place that Nalcor might sell it.  Still, it would be available to call back for “industrial development” in Labrador.

But that wasn’t really the focus of the discussion about Muskrat Falls.

The Ground Game Counts #nlpoli

Two posts, quite a distance apart touch on the same basic political (science) issue:  the role of the local, get-out-the-vote effort in any political campaign.

The latest bit of drama #nlpoli

For the record, your humble e-scribbler will refrain from making any comment on the substance of the statements of claim filed by Danny Williams and Alderon against the Sierra Club and Bruno Marcocchio on the one hand and Brad Cabana on the other.

CBC has posted pdf versions of both, linked below:

In general, your humble e-scribbler would humbly suggest that SRBP readers keep the following observations in mind.

11 July 2012

What’s missing? #nlpoli

While the case before the Supreme Court of Canada on Tuesday was about the federal Elections Act, two provincial chief elections officers have intervener status in the case.

Neither of them have court cases currently underway that challenge the results of an election.

What other province might you think would have sought intervener status on a case about a potentially controverted election?

What other province could that be?

-srbp-

Autonomy and Legitimate Aspirations #nlpoli

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is ringing the bells, trying to alarm Canadians to the fact the federal government is trying to withdraw funding from areas that are generally provincial responsibility under the Constitution.

You can see a lengthy interview Dexter gave to Evan Solomon of CBC’s Power and Politics on the Mother Corp’s website.  “They are pursuing what some people call a disentangled federalism,” Dexter warned.  Dexter described the country in a curious way, where the federal government pays for things and the provincial governments do them.

It’s curious because that isn’t what the people who wrote the constitution had in mind.

10 July 2012

What Falls was that, again? #nlpoli

Tim Powers is a local boy who has done good for himself as a lobbyist in Ottawa. Powers is a sharp guy who is very well-connected in Tory circles.

The provincial energy corporation employed Powers to lobby the federal Conservatives on behalf of their Lower Churchill project.  While he has passed that contract off to a couple of other colleagues at Summa Strategies, Powers remains an ardent supporter of the Muskrat Falls project.

Powers delivered a keynote at the recent Expo Labrador mining conference. The title was Mining and Lower Churchill Falls.

Weird, huh?

Brand Failure #nlpoli

In another great service to Newfoundland and Labrador, the country’s leading shit-disturber has translated poll results by Abacus Data into a nice table.

It shows the results for each province across a range of topics.

Maybe it’s just you, Kathy #nlpoli

Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with Alberta Premier Alison Redford when the Pm dropped in for the Calgary Stampede.

As the Globe reported:

Carl Vallée, a PMO spokesman who was travelling with Mr. Harper during his Stampede stopover, wouldn’t talk about what was discussed during the Prime Minister’s meeting with Ms. Redford.

“He meets with premiers across the country when he travels out East, out West, everywhere,” Mr. Vallée said. “And he does do that, but we don’t comment on the content of the meeting.”

09 July 2012

When Johnny Cab breaks #nlpoli

Last week’s Environics poll caused more than a few people in the province to have a few sleepless nights trying to find a way to prove it was a crock or nothing to sweat.

Those were the Tories.

The NDP wasted no time getting a fund-raising e-mail on the go.

Oddly enough, and as an aside, a couple of prominent Dippers – Jack Harris and Lana Payne – both joined the Tories in trying to dismiss the poll as a one-off.  Maybe their love of Muskrat Falls is clouding their judgment.

Anyway, and meanwhile…

The Liberals were wondering if the poll was good (they were up overall) or bad (they were still polling frig-all of any consequence in the province’s vote-rich capital region.

For the rest of you, here are some further ruminations to help you sort it all out.

Everything old is not new again #nlpoli

Trying to blow off the implications of last week’s Environics poll, former natural resources minister Shawn Skinner trotted out another line in this week’s edition of On Point with David Cochrane: it’s still early days. People don’t know Kathy Dunderdale yet. Give her another year and a half or two years for people to know her, or words to that effect.

Nice try Shawn, but Kathy has been Premier since December 2010. She’s been deputy premier since around 2008 and she’s been in cabinet since 2003.

Kathy Dunderdale is not new. In fact, Kathy has been around so long she was ready to quit politics back in December 2010. She’d done her thing.

If Kathy Dunderdale is having trouble making herself known to voters after a high-profile decade in politics, including winning an election as Premier after being in the job for the better part of a year, then imagine how much worse things will be 18 months from now.

Maybe the real answer, Shawn, is that people know Kathy too well already.

-srbp-

Selective Perception and Strange Bedfellows #nlpoli

strange bedfellowsLabour federation president Lana Payne tweeted last week about the latest labour force figures in the province.

And that’s true.  According to Statistics Canada, the province recorded the highest ever participation rate in June: 62%.

Two Conservative supporters retweeted Payne’s comments, apparently because they fit the Conservative mantra that everything is wonderful under the Tories.  Conservative policies produce results, which is why the Tories enjoy such huge support in the province.

Anyway, Tories and Dippers cheering the same thing isn’t really as odd a situation as it might seem.

08 July 2012

Frankenstein – Final

A bit more work on Sunday morning and Frankenstein’s monster is done.

frankfinal2

The colouring is unconventional.  The instructions call for black or dark brown for the jacket and pants.  A pre-painted figure, approved by Universal, in a slightly smaller scaled, appeared a few years ago with a colour scheme similar to this one.  It works.

The figure is stock, from the box with one exception.  The one hand that is turned incorrectly is fixed to imitate the original pose.  Here’s a publicity still from the 1931 movie just to give you an idea of where the pose came from.

Karloff Frankenstein Doorway

-srbp-

Work in progress: Moebius’ Frankenstein #nlpoli

Here’s a close-up of Moebius’ Frankenstein, the project currently on the old modeller’s workbench.  The detail is a little fuzzy because the picture is via a cellphone not a real camera.

Moebius based the model on the scene in the 1931 Universal movie when you first see the monster. It’s stock from the box.

frankencropcolour

The base, door and back wall are finished, as is the body (jacket and pants). The latest work has been trying to get the face and hands right.  The choice for the face is very light grey for the deathly pallor, with some splashes of pink and red. 

Check online and you can find as many choices for the face and hands as there are people who have built this kit.  In the movie, Karloff wore a pale green make-up because it gave the right colouring for the black and white movie. Somehow, it just didn’t seem right to make the monster a part Vulcan.

Incidentally, for those who might be curious, the jacket is Model Master Dark Green (FS34079) and the pants are Testors’ Dark Brown (in the small bottle).

Here’s the same shot adjusted to make it black and white.

frankenblack(2)

-srbp-

07 July 2012

The Happiness Index #nlpoli

Leave it to labradore to come up with a new way to look at poll results.

He took the results of “satisfaction” questions in polls going back about a decade.  he netted them out, meaning he subtracted the dis-satisfieds from the satisfieds.

What he got is very interesting.

06 July 2012

Minister to attend play #nlpoli

Telling the world that tourism Derrick Dalley will attend a play – no matter what play it is – would not be considered news and it sure as hell would not be worthy of a full-on media advisory by any organization on the planet, including a benighted, backward-ass dictatorship in a movie starring Richard Dreyfus.

And yet on a Friday afternoon that is exactly what the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador spit out.

More Hole Spotting #nlpoli

After the shock that evidently settled into the local Tories, the next most obvious thing about Thursday was the complete absence of any official provincial Tory anywhere saying anything about anything.  The usual clan of Tory Twitter Spam Spitters – Sandy Collins, Steve Kent, Vaughan Granter, and Paul lane  - were nowhere to be seen.

Normally these guys are everywhere spewing whatever bullshit talking point they have to spew.

Thursday?

Crickets.

or was it knobby knees knocking?

05 July 2012

Hole-spotting: the Environics Poll Results #nlpoli

By now you have likely heard it all.

remaincalm-01In one corner are the raft of people trying to dismiss the Environics poll as an outlier, an aberration, the logical result of a tough political month. 

Nothing to sweat.

Real Chip Diller kinda stuff.

In the other corner, there are the New Democrats who are so effercited they are like the dog who caught the car.

Well, here’s another take for you.

A latent political bomb #nlpoli

A few employers have noticed changes to the province’s Labour Relations Act that slipped quietly through the House at the end of the last session.

A story in the Telegram on Wednesday focuses on the construction business but some others are quietly pissed off and trying to figure out what they can do about the bill.

04 July 2012

Environics latest national poll #nlpoli

As the country comes out of the long-weekend stupor, a few people noticed a poll released on June 29 by Environics.  Nationally, it shows a very small lead for the New Democrats over the Conservatives. That’s a modest change from May when the Tories were slightly in front of the New Democrats.

What caught some local Twitter attention was the post by threehundredeight.com and the headline “Majority support for federal NDP in Newfoundland & Labrador?”

The question mark is there for a reason, as you will see in a moment.

Beaumont Hamel and the Newfoundland nation #nlpoli

Mark Humphries is an historian at Memorial University.  He spoke with CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates on July 1 about the impact of Beaumont Hamel on Newfoundland and Labrador.

Humphries does an interesting job of putting the 700 dead and wounded on that day into a larger context.  He likened it to 161,000 Canadian males between 19 and 45 years of age dying in 20 minutes today.


Then in response to a question from Chris, Humphries turned it into a unifying event for the country.

03 July 2012

What the cod moratorium wrought #nlpoli

The cod might be gone these 20 years but there are no shortage of people making a fine dollar telling us what it all means.

Surely the one making the most cash is Ryan Cleary, pulling down a pay cheque as a member of parliament partly on the pledge to have an inquiry into why there are no cod.  Hint:  a whole bunch of people, including Cleary’s friend Gus Etchegary, killed just about all of them.

If he had been around a century and a half ago, Cleary would have been campaigning to find out where all the Great Auks went.  Hint:  we killed them all.