Beth and Expenses #nlpoli #cdnpoli

All this talk of Senator Beth Marshall and her hefty annual stipend for chairing a committee that has met once in two years brings to mind the good senator’s role in the House of Assembly patronage scam, a.k.a. the spending scandal.

Marshall is credited with first sniffing something was amiss when she went hunting for Paul Dick’s expenses in 2001-ish.  She was barred from the House by the legislature’s internal economy commission.  The members were Liberals and Tories and, as accounts have it, they unanimously wanted to keep Beth’s nose out of their files.

But if you go back and look, you’ll have a hard time finding any indication Beth thought something else was on the go.  While we didn’t know it at the time, subsequent information confirmed that members had been handing out public cash pretty generously by that point. Yet Marshall has never, ever indicated she felt something more than a few wine and art purchases might have been amiss.

That’s important because of Marshall’s record once she got into the House herself as a member in 2003.

And the cliche gets it…

Senator Beth Marshall.

Here’s the view from January 19:

Beth Marshall would be too obvious just because all the spec puts her name up right next to the two Loyolas.  She’s at the point now where her name is on everyone’s list of nominees for everything. Watch out if the Pope drops dead tomorrow.  Local spec will have Beth in the running right behind the two Loyolas;  it’s gotten to be that much of a cliche.

An interesting choice if one that is remarkable for how cliche it really is.

Others have already pointed out that Marshall very publicly declined to join the ABC silliness. That obviously stood her in good stead for this plum.

Others, however, have also over-estimated her lack of connections to the local provincial Conservatives and how this might not help improve relations between the federal Connies and their provincial cousins.  Bear in mind she was handed the plum of over-seeing implementation of the Green report and has been a faithful party player on the House of Assembly management committee.

She’s tight enough with both the federal and provincial crews to serve as a bridge. And it’s not like she hasn’t got experience in changing her tune when it serves her partisan purpose as well.

Don’t be surprised if she goes to cabinet in short order or otherwise gets a neat job to facilitate the rapprochement. The anti-Ottawa hysteria that once was the local Connie stock-in-trade will quickly be a thing of the past.

-srbp-

“Feeling queasy”: Is quieter better?

People in Newfoundland and Labrador must surely be looking with some puzzlement on the flap over federal Conservatives handing out government money as if it was their own.

In this province, their provincial Conservative cousins have the thing down to a science. The use of public money for partisan benefit is an old one in Newfoundland and Labrador but this current crowd have raised it to a fine  art. 

The House of Assembly spending scandal was – for the most part – a scam worked up to push free and untraceable cash that politicians could hand out to all and sundry in their district for any purpose the politician could think of approving.

So pervasive was the practice that a review by the auditor general found scarcely a single politician from any political party who sat in the House after the scam started in 1998 who did not use it to some extent. 

The review also revealed that the politicians elected after 2003 used it with an enthusiasm their federal cousins could only envy.  Of the top ten spenders as a percentage of their constituency operations allowance, six were elected after 2003 and all but one was a Tory.

As it turned out, one of the biggest supporters of the public cash for partisan benefit scheme was a former auditor general.  Ironically, she was the one the House management commission blocked from looking at some aspects of the scam while it was first organizing.  Beth Marshall also felt no qualms about handing out cash in small and larger amounts, nor did she feel any difficulty that there was a skimpy audit trail for the cash or that money was going to duplicate  existing government programs in some cases.

The use of public money for partisan purposes was not confined to individual members of the legislature and that’s where the parallel with the federal Conservatives really becomes apparent.  Since 2003, the Provincial Conservatives have worked to make sure that local partisan benefit came from any available pot of public cash:

-  As we found out when Tom Rideout packed it in, road paving and construction is over-seen by a political staffer in the Premier’s office.

Since 2003, it has been consistently managed in a way to maximise the benefit to Conservative districts and to punish those that voted for another party.

-  Fire trucks are a recent favourite for the spending announcement with the local MHA. With the recent by-elections and political upheaval, the fire truck announcements are coming about one a week.

The one they’ve consistently used is the small time cash being handed out by one department or another.  The money is from a legitimate departmental program but when the cash is handed out someone from the government caucus gets the credit.  It is inevitably called a “donation” or a “contribution” to make the free cash sound like anything but what it is.

There’s nothing new about it.  Back in 2007, Bond Papers linked to an old CBC news story that dates from the early 1970s that mentions the same practice dating back three or four decades and more.

But just because something is old is not a reason to think it is okay.  Not all traditions are fine or honorable.

Nor is it any better that it is done quietly in these parts as opposed to brazenly at the federal level.  The quiet nature of the local practice makes it all the more insidious.

Done loudly or quietly, though the practice is enough to make anyone concerned for the state of our democracy feel very queasy indeed.

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Missing bits

From a CBC story in which, among other things, Danny Williams brushes off the NAFTA issue in the Abitibi repo job:

The Newfoundland and Labrador's expropriation does not include the mill itself, although the government will take over a hydroelectric power plant at Star Lake, which sells power to the provincial grid. The government has said it will compensate AbitibiBowater for the Star Lake plant.

People should read more.

The expropriation bill seized all hydro assets AbitibiBowater held in central Newfoundland but they went beyond that.

They seized hydro assets  - way more than Star Lake - belonging to other companies and those companies are named in the expropriation bill:

• Fortis (Exploits River Hydro Partnership involves Central Newfoundland Energy, a subsidiary of Fortis Generation)
• Clarica Life Insurance (now owned by Sun Life)
• Enel North America

All have likely lawyered up pretty tight.  An e-mail inquiry by your humble e-scribbler to Sun Life netted a nil response.  The company’s public affairs department wouldn’t even confirm what involvement the company had in the hydro project in the first place.  As dumb as that kind of response is, that’s how you can tell the lawyers are on the job and bums are really tight:  a company won’t even confirm information that is currently in the public domain. 

There was no hope they’d offer any remarks on the substance of the dispute.

But seriously, people should read more and maybe pursue a bit more of these stories.

Like how does Beth Marshall’s husband Stan, Stan the Fortis Man feel about Danny frigging over his investments? Stan’s been known to have a blunt opinion or two.

Like is Enel – or any other company partnered with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro – reconsidering its investment based on the expropriation? 

Or has anything been expropriated beyond the Abitibi bits, which would be contrary to the law, and which would have the effect of strengthening Abitibi’s case that the expropriation was discriminatory?

Or have they really all lawyered up, which is a sign of a much bigger dispute and much bigger problem than you’d think if you got all your news from, say voice of the cabinet minister.

Maybe if Lorraine Michael and others hadn’t been so flattered that Danny had deigned to let them in on such historic action – “socialist” action, as Lorraine proudly declared it in the legislature – that they turned off their brains, they might have noticed the sweeping nature of the expropriation bits of the bill. 

Nope.  If people paid attention to some of the details other stories might emerge, one’s that have more to do with the current issue than the pap being spewed from all manner of organs and orifices.

Like for instance, they might have found the inadvertent humour in this comment from the Premier:

"You know I'm a lawyer of over 30 years, so blowhard, five-page letters that get sent to everybody in the country mean nothing to me. I know the law."

Sometimes the five page blows only get sent to one party, but the point is still the same.  Knowing the law is something else though.

And that’s where people might want to separate the bluster from the evidence.  You see, for all the praise he gives himself, Danny Williams record in court  - with decisions rendered by judges  - isn’t that good.  Well, not if the two prominent cases that have been adjudicated in the past five years are to be considered. 

In Henley v. Cable Atlantic, the Premier lost badly in a case he didn’t have to even fight.  He elected to dispute a contract with a guy hired to help with the sale of his old cable company to Rogers. The guy  eventually got paid in full but not until Danny Williams shelled out for expensive lawyers to fight the case  - in a losing cause – through two Ontario courts. The bill at the end must have been double what it would have been if Williams hadn’t been so bloody minded at the start.  SO if the guy is will to waste his own cash on a loser, imagine what he’d do when he was playing with other peoples’ money.

Enter Ruelokke v. Newfoundland and Labrador, in which the provincial government – in a brief that surely was approved by the province’s top legal beagle if not written by him – argued that a clause that said the final decision by an appeal tribunal was binding on the parties actually meant that none of it could be reviewed by a court.

That got laughed out of court just on the English comprehension alone.  The rest of the evidence was an unflattering portrait of an administration that was all over the map when it came to the whole business of finding a boss to run the offshore regulatory board.

Then there’s the 2005 offshore deal in which the government started out looking for a federal transfer that doubled offshore revenues forever.

They settled for $2.0 billion in cash.

Then there’s the Hebron deal.  it could be worth $10, $20 or $28 billion depending on which hyper-inflated estimate you wanted to take at the announcement. (Yes, they settled for two billion in cash on the other one)   Guaranteed flat 1% royalties up front for the companies, a higher royalty rate tied to the price of oil (above an amount it flows;  below – nothing),  a give away of historic proportions on the construction side, a deal in which the companies  - alone - have a decade to decide whether or not to build the project.

You get the point.

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Electoral shocks and nots

Shock:  Newspaper editor Craig Westcott's the federal Conservative candidate in St. John's East. If you want an ox gored, then call Craig. He is best known locally for his criticism of Premier Danny Williams. That criticism earned Westcott some notoriety.

Not:  Former auditor general and provincial cabinet minister Beth Marshall is out.

Not:  Former provincial New Democratic Party leader Jack Harris will run for the Orange in St. John's East.

Shock:  Merv Wiseman, current president of the fur breeders association and former president of the provincial agriculture federation, is running for the federal Conservatives and hammering the Green Shift in his first foray into the media.  Wiseman tried for the Provincial Conservative nod in the recent Baie Verte White Bay by-election and lost.

Meanwhile, the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is running for the Liberals.

-srbp-