While I have been very critical of the Independent in recent weeks, I will say that every now and then something appears which makes the paper worth the buck I spend each Sunday to buy it.
This week, there are two things.
One is the front page story by Stephanie Porter on the Hibernia project. She makes a couple of basic factual errors, but on balance the story accurately describes the financial situation of the Hibernia project. Of course, there are quotes from guys like Ron Penney who was on the Real Accord negotiating team and who, most likely, believed the Peckford government's palaver about eating our oil revenue cake and having it too. But other than that, I'd say give it a read.
The second thing is the regular column by Indy owner Brian Dobbin. He publishes under the title "Publish or perish", which is a phrase the Herald used to use relentlessly in drumming up letters to the editor.
Dobbin makes three comments in the piece that I want to address.
First, he says he learned last week in The Independent something he didn't know, namely that the provincial government is looking at setting up a state-owned oil company to invest in the offshore. Second, he slags a consultant by saying, as Dobbin put it, if the consultant had any insight, he would be "an economic do-er as opposed to being a commentator on other do-ers". Third, Dobbin backs the idea of a Crown-owned oil corporation.
Let's tackle these in order.
1. That's a new one: the Energy Mega-Corp. If Dobbin heard about the energy corporation idea only from reading the Indy, he might want to get out more. The story was reported last year in The Express and this week alone The Express covered it again, before the Indy went to press. Heck, it's even in the Tory Blue Book.
Conrad Black. Lord Thomson of Fleet. Rupert Murdoch. Newspaper owners all, and all renowned for reading more than the ink-blotters they printed. It's one of the things, incidentally that distinguishes entrepreneurs: they thirst for information and analysis. They hunt it out in weird and wonderful places and ponder the gems they find.
Information - or intelligence as the b-school crowd call it now - is the starting point of generating ideas that stand a hope of lasting. Open Line is full of people with ideas. Don't expect that the Moon Man has too many people lining up to give him cash, though. Smart entrepreneurs know that with more information they have a better chance of picking out the gold from the pyrite, or in this case the crude from the canola.
2. Slagging commentators. My self-interest aside, Dobbin should realize that another hallmark of successful entrepreneurs is that they realize one thing: they don't know it all. They employ guys like the expert he slagged to give them more information, ideas and opinions before they make a decision. Then the entrepreneurs do what they do best: take calculated, informed risks.
3. Petro-Newf Reborn. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the column is the bit where Dobbin the Do-er advocates government getting into the private sector realm by buying up big shares in the offshore through an energy Crown corporation. He uses as back-up for his position a meeting he had five years ago with then premier Beaton Tulk and a few senior officials over some proposal by the Taiwanese state-owned oil enterprise to invest in producing gas offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. Without knowing all the background here, let's just leave this little gem off the table for now. If Dobbin wants to expand on that proposal with some, oooh, maybe little things like facts and details, then we can tackle it.
But Dobbin would know, if he read more, that there is a substantial body of opinion out there that opposes state-ownership of what should be private sector businesses. Consider that the World Bank has devoted considerable energy to pointing out just exactly how inefficient state-owned oil companies are in producing anything, let alone wealth. The people who pay for the inefficiency? You and me, the average taxpayer.
For another thing, Dobbin should know from living here for more than five minutes that the provincial government has proven time and again that it simply cannot run anything normally in the private sector as efficiently as that same enterprise would run in the private sector. More often than not these ventures have proven to be massive drains on the public treasury. Who pays? You're catching on fast.
As much as he may tune out the Sprung Greenhouse, Dobbin would take two lessons from it, if he read more than his own paper. He'd learn that it was a colossal failure that cost taxpayers at least $22 million. He'd also know that bureaucrats - the very people he slags unmercifully in his column - warned up, down and sideways that every single claim by cuke proponents The Sprungs was sheer hogfodder. There was a premier who would over-rule them, much to the delight of the proponents, but he did so despite overwhelming evidence and carefully considered opinion that growing cukes in this province in a hydroponic greenhouse was asinine.
And that's really where I depart from Dobbin on a fundamental level. Dobbin marks this all down to fear. It really isn't about fear at all. Dobbin is essentially advocating the kind of carpet-bagging lunacy that we have seen time and again from Shaheens and Doyles and Sprungs. It is about political decision-making that is autocratic - to be generous - of the type offered by Smallwood or Peckford. It is about managing something, in this case government, in a way that one seldom sees in sophisticated modern business. Are there any unemployed Latvians out there Brian thinks need work?
What Dobbin offers is the same old idiocy we have seen time and time again. The only fear involved is the fear that yet another fly-by-night promoter can come here and gain access to my tax dollars by flattering The Boss. Were we to follow Dobbin's model, we would toss aside the expertise of successful local companies like, say Fortis and Rutter, and go back to some other model that has simply never worked. We would abandon common sense and all the progress in developing the economy over the past 15 years and simply repeat the same inane mistakes of the past.
What Dobbin would essentially throw away is the actual sophistication, the genuine expertise of the local business community in favour of some massive, state-owned bureaucracy squandering tax dollars on sluggish administration. Money like that would be better spent on health care and could be better obtained in other ways; like say improving revenue deals for the province from private sector developers, and by encouraging local investment by the private sector in new businesses. These guys will generate real wealth locally and abroad.
If Dobbin was a modern entrepreneur, he'd be running about trying to convince Danny to find a way so that local private sector companies can get into the oil business. That he does exactly the opposite suggests to me that Dobbin really does hearken back to the dark pre-Confederation times. That's when local businesses controlled government and used public money to subsidize the lifestyles of the handful of business owners in St. John's. It was our own piece of the Third World in North America and thankfully it is long gone.
Brian Dobbin: if you want my money either for an oil company or another private sector scheme, better try asking me directly. I don't plan to stand by while you suck cash out of my pocket through your political buddies and flush it away on some goof-ball idea. That's one of things that makes state-owned oil enterprises such appalling bad ideas. It's the kind of thing you find in Zangaro, not Zeebrugge.
The public sector has no place subsidizing let alone operating things that genuine entrepreneurs should be running.
Fear shouldn't stop us from doing anything that is well-founded and carefully thought through, Brian, but maybe thinking should at least give us pause enough to consider how outmoded your ideas actually are.