St. John's Land Prices 1997 - 2015

An argy-bargy erupted on Twitter Wednesday involving a bunch of Danny Williams Fan Klubbers on the one side and a couple of people who have a few issues with the recent plan by some folks at St. John’s city council to buy land from Danny Williams that Williams had purchased over the years from the provincial government at pretty cheap prices.

One of the Klubbers raised the issue of the change in land prices since Williams first started the land assembly for what became Glencrest and then Galway.  The idea – apparently  - was that Williams’ asking price for the land was justified since prices had climbed a lot since 1997.

That leaves out a whole whack of details that we’ll return to in another post.  For now, let’s take a look at the change in land prices since 1997.  The source for the information is Statistics Canada’s monthly report of house prices, that breaks down the price for the house and land in a typical parcel.

Hyping the stock, yet again #nlpoli

Any oil company seriously interested in bidding on an exploration license offshore Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t likely to need the hyped presentation by the provincial government Thursday.

Exploring offshore is expensive.

Always has been.

Always will be.

Exploring beyond the 200 mile exclusive economic zone, in upwards of two kilometres of water, just makes the oil and gas all that much more costly. to find and more costly to produce.

Event Horizon

From December 2:

Well, in all likelihood,  he and his accomplishments will go the way of other politicians’, including those long-ago strongmen in whose ranks he clearly belongs. There is an inky abyss, a vacuum that awaits them all.  It is a cross between Limbo and Purgatory, a living death for the egotistical and the once-mighty.  Where once throngs sang their praises, there is only silence.

Five days after Williams announced his resignation, people still cry for his departure.  Five weeks from now, they’ll be more concerned about Christmas credit card bills and if politics excites them, they’ll be watching the race to replace him.  Five months from now and the province’s election campaign will be well under way.

Five years from now, people will struggle to remember that guy who parted his hair down the centre of his head.  The collective amnesia on which Danny Williams built his cult of personality will swallow him as surely as it swallowed his predecessors.

Who the gods would destroy, they would first make proud.

And as we near the end of September the following year, we are nearing the edge of the abyss.

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Danny, Gary and Steve: old inconsistencies die hard

Apparently your humble e-scribbler isn’t the only one who found it amusing that an anti-Harper former premier is campaigning in pro-Harper country for a Conservative who doesn’t share the Old Man’s animosity toward the prime minister.

Well amusing here, but out there apparently it struck one Tory leadership candidate as politically stunned-arsed:

PC party leadership candidate Ted Morton says his friendship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper will soothe the relationship between Ottawa and Alberta, while saying rival Gary Mar’s political alliance with outspoken former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams won’t do the province any good.

“I don’t think what Gary’s done in the last couple of days of palling around with Danny Williams is the right step,” Morton told the Herald’s editorial board on Tuesday.

As for Williams, this is the same guy who tried to secretly interest Hydro-Quebec in buying an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill, putting redress for the Upper Churchill to one side, while at the same time publicly lashing their collective perfidious Franco-hides.

Of course, two years after Kathy Dunderdale pissed Danny and his crowd off by letting the secret slip, the local media have still not reported on the five years of secret talks with Hydro-Quebec.

Two years later.

Not a peep.

Apparently the facts don’t fit the official narrative.

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Chumba-dumba

Leave to the ever charming labradore to remind everyone that the financial mess Danny Williams left behind is actually something he made clear he would do in 2008.

The quote is one your humble e-scribbler completely forgot about but reading now three years later it is the kind of thing that makes chills run up and down your spine:

As you pay down the debt it also gives you the ability then to bring it back up. It’s no different than if you paid down your line of credit at the bank or pay off your car loan, it gives you the ability to go borrow a little more, take a little more if you need it. So, that money will be used, for example, that, that surplus that’s actually going on the debt, though, will also be used to fund, you know, the settlements with the unions. I think the public sector settlements are going to cost us in the range of a half-billion dollars a year forever. So, that money will sort of go, go towards the public sector workers, which is, which is good, though, from an economic perspective because now we have this whole new infusion of eight percent and then four, four, and four into the economy and that’ll help drive our own economy, as well.

You pay debt down and then rack it up again.  You’re never gonna pay it down.  That riff is shamelessly pirated from labradore but you have to acknowledge humour and genius wrapped into one.

But while he stayed on the debt thingy and noted that the public sector union’s benefits would only be a third of the total $37 billion Wade Locke talked about, there’s another angle to that which you can see if you want to open your eyes to it.

So much of what is driving the economy in the St. John’s region over the past seven years has been public sector spending.  That what an integral part of Williams’ political plan and one of the ways he helped create the illusion of some sort of economic miracle.

As we’ve seen this past week, these financial chickens are coming home to roost.  The fundamental political fraud that lay as the foundation of Williams’ political fortune is crumbling.

No wonder he practically ran from the Premier’s Office last Christmas talking about how it was important to know when to leave.

Instead of running the province into the ground he can now have someone organize rallies of school children at a local hockey rink so they can chant his name just like the old days of local politics.

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NB Tories and NL politics

Corporate Research Associates president Don Mills thinks that the Conservatives should break whatever promises and do whatever else it takes to get the province’s financial mess under control.

He thinks they can get away with it since it is early in their mandate.

“They shouldn't worry about their performance numbers or their voter support in the first year and a half of their mandate," Mills said.
"They should just make the decisions that need to be made, apologize for it, say it wasn't their fault, and just get it done.
"Two or three years later when things are looking much brighter they can take credit for taking tough action when it was needed to be taken.”

That’s interesting advice if for no other reason than it is exactly the opposite of what Mills’ favourite client did when ostensibly faced with the same situation.

Danny Williams never ever stopped worrying about his performance numbers of voter support.  When the numbers fell after Williams’ first six months in office, he abandoned the whole plan announced in the spring of 2004 to get the province’s finances under control.

And he never apologised for anything.

That’s not the only difference between the two provinces and CRA.  In New Brunswick, CRA’s latest news release on their quarterly poll included figures from the recent New Brunswick election.  Let’s just say that CRA’s polling is actually close to the election result.  In 2007,  Mills missed the provincial election here by a country mile.

As you scan the chart, get a load of the party support numbers on which Mills is offering his advice.  Conservative support is at 42% of respondents. 31% of respondent’s were undecided.  The Liberals and the New Democrats together didn’t add up to the UND number but that doesn’t matter.  If you look at CRA’s numbers over time in New Brunswick and you can see that it doesn’t take much to piss people off and keep them pissed off.

Ask Shawn Graham.

Just to be sure, look at CRA’s satisfaction numbers.  The New Brunswick  Conservatives are exactly where Shawn Grahams’ Liberals were before the election.  The only difference is that 33% of the population think it’s too soon to judge the Conservatives’ performance.

With Graham, they were somewhat dissatisfied.  CRA seems to misreport the question they asked on that one, incidentally.  Might be that the 33% of respondents who aren’t ready to give the Conservatives either a thumbs up or thumbs down just yet are the same crew who turned away from Graham over ideas like selling the provincial power company to Hydro-Quebec.

That could make things interesting if the Conservatives took Mills’ advice.

For a second, let’s just suppose they took Mills’ advice and voters didn’t plan a neck-tie party for the provincial government.  Frankly, if they got things under control, voters would be more likely to reward them even if it meant nice cheap electricity came from Quebec.  Mills’ advice is reasonable enough even if it isn’t based for a fraction of a second on his polling.

Nice for the New Brunswick Conservatives.

Not so nice for their cousins across the water in the former Republic of Dannystan. If nothing else, Danny Williams helped stir up anti-Quebec sentiment among the New Brunswick anglophone Conservative voters because he needed to keep open the appearance of an option of selling his very expensive Lower Churchill power to them. When Williams said on October 29, 2009 that he feared being stranded, what he apparently meant was that the last potential markets for his super-expensive juice would be gone.

It worked.

Just remember though that Danny Williams was shit-baked, to use an accurate term for it, over the prospect that not only New Brunswick but Emera would fall under the spell of the hydro seductress with the French accent.

Things appear to have changed in the year since Williams voiced his fears.  There’s a new deal on the table and with it comes the possibility of shipping that expensive Muskrat Falls power to New Brunswickers.

But if the New Brunswick government decided to listen to Don Mills?  Well, let’s just say if they did consider a new deal to offload New Brunswick Power to Hydro-Quebec, regional politics in 2011 could get even more interesting than they are shaping up to be already.

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Hubris

On Friday, Danny Williams will head to Government House and resign as Premier, just as eight others have done before him.

Danny Williams was a superlative tactical politician, the likes of which one seldom sees anywhere in Canada and certainly one has seen very rarely in this province.

That was his singular strength and for seven years he campaigned relentlessly to sustain his cult of personality. That cult then gave him license to pursue his own political agenda free of any interference by a thriving, healthy democracy.

Craig Welsh, the townie bastard,  put it aptly:

And what I mean by "he can get away with doing it" is that the premier's popularity is such that he could strangle a baby in the middle of the Avalon Mall parking lot with the assembled provincial media in attendance and there would be people that would say the baby had it coming.

It’s a graphic image.

It is a disturbing image.

But it is an accurate description of Williams’ political influence.  He could say things that were patently,  demonstrably false and people would accept it unquestioningly. Supposedly cynical and sceptical media types were not immune from his powers of persuasion, despite what Danny liked to pretend. Some were known to leap to  defend him.

Danny Williams was right because he was popular and popular because he was right. That he could create and sustain that preposterous notion and have it accepted by so many people is the sum of his political genius.

That was no mean accomplishment.  Danny Williams ranks with the likes of Joe Smallwood, W.A.C. Bennett and Maurice Duplessis.  Anyone who looks on that accomplishment  - cultist worship 40 years after the last of the old demagogues held power – cannot fail to be impressed.  That Williams was able to spread that cult of absurdity to the national level amongst business, academic, editorial and political leaders in a G-8 country at the start of the 21st century is truly astounding.  

Instead of recognising that stunning achievement, people are crediting Danny Williams with a bizarre range of things; but the list, whether compiled at home or across the country, breaks down this way.

• They credited him for things he didn’t do:  Williams promised a raft of things from openness and transparency in government to sound fiscal management.  He just didn’t deliver on any of them.
• They credited him for stuff other people did:  the oil and mining windfalls came as a result of deals put together by premiers before Williams. Of that $70 billion Williams talked about in his goodbye speech,  the lion’s share of it came from deals delivered by Clyde Wells, Brian Tobin and Roger Grimes.
• They credited him for stuff that hasn’t happened yet:  let’s see Hebron in action before anyone breaks open the champagne.  It will likely work out fine but both the earlier reviews of Hibernia or Churchill Falls turned out to be wildly inaccurate, albeit for different reasons.
• They credited him for stuff that doesn’t exist.  There is no deal to develop the Lower Churchill. What else can anyone say to that sort of thing except note that Williams had them all playing his tune more completely at the end than ever before?

The things that Williams did do, like a one time transfer payment from Ottawa in 2005, have been swollen by the cultist chanting to the point of absurdity. 

And what of Danny Williams’ future? 

Well, in all likelihood,  he and his accomplishments will go the way of other politicians’, including those long-ago strongmen in whose ranks he clearly belongs. There is an inky abyss, a vacuum that awaits them all.  It is a cross between Limbo and Purgatory, a living death for the egotistical and the once-mighty.  Where once throngs sang their praises, there is only silence.

Five days after Williams announced his resignation, people still cry for his departure.  Five weeks from now, they’ll be more concerned about Christmas credit card bills and if politics excites them, they’ll be watching the race to replace him.  Five months from now and the province’s election campaign will be well under way.

Five years from now, people will struggle to remember that guy who parted his hair down the centre of his head.  The collective amnesia on which Danny Williams built his cult of personality will swallow him as surely as it swallowed his predecessors.

Who the gods would destroy, they would first make proud.

 

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Other reading:  Robert Rowe makes the point as succinctly as anyone might in a letter to the Telegram.

Williams might have instilled some sense of pride, however defined, in Randy Simms and others, but no dear leader did that for me. I had it before Williams, during Williams, and I’ll have it after Williams. I have never suffered from any sense of inferiority or poor second cousinism to other Canadians.

True pride cannot be grafted onto a people in Kim Jong-Il style. It is not fostered by belligerence. It is not waving a flag (nor lowering it, for that matter) and it is not the jingle in your pocket. Rather it is a feeling in your guts — deep in your guts — and I’d like to think we have always had it. That’s a gift Premier Williams could not give me. What we did not have was wealth, and I suspect Simms has conflated these issues.

With my gratitude for the effort, I wish the premier a jingle in his pocket and good health in the future.

Update:  Edited to eliminate an awkward sentence.

Lower Churchill: more potato, potato

Sometimes really interesting things crop up in two stories about the Lower Churchill. 

Take for example, the likelihood of a deal with Emera to run a power line to Nova Scotia.  There’s a Canadian Press story dated November 1 that says this:

The head of Nalcor Energy won't say whether the Newfoundland and Labrador Crown agency is close to inking a deal with Emera Inc. (TSX:EMA) on the proposed Lower Churchill hydroelectric project.

Then there’s a CBC story dated November 1 that says something else:

Hydroelectric power from a proposed project in Labrador could reach the Maritimes within five to six years, Ed Martin, president of Newfoundland's Nalcor Energy, said Monday.

That five years obviously wouldn’t start today because as of 2010, the project is still bogged down in an environmental assessment.  Still, Ed didn’t give a probably projection on that.  It could – entirely fantastically  - be pumping juice in five years;  odds are though that the project would not be pushing electricity a decade from now. 

Premier Danny Williams recently told a gathering of the province’s Reform-based Conservative Party that a deal to develop one dam was possibly very close.  Ed Martin, the head of the province’s energy corporation told reporters in Halifax this week that  - from the CBC story – "[t]ime will not drive us. It has to be right."

Hmmm.

Potato.  Potato.

Tomato. Tomato.

Maybe the whole thing’s off. 

Maybe the whole thing’s on.

Maybe the whole thing is half on, and half off, go-it-alone and with partners simultaneously.

Surely you’ve noticed that since 2005 this project has gone from doing it alone to doing it with partners to doing only a bit of it with partners and still nothing has happened after five years of endless public posturing.

Oh yes, and five years of secret talks, in addition to the public talking about it.

And the price, meanwhile is still $6.5 billion for the smaller dam and a bunch of expensive transmission lines.  That was the original price for two dams and a line to Quebec. The whole thing could actually cost as much as $14 billion.

But that’s not the end of the flippin’ and da floppin’.

Danny Williams told his Conservative followers that the line to Nova Scotia would be a sweet way to reject Quebec after all their slights, real and imagined, over the years.  According to CBC, Martin said that shipping all that power means NALCOR needs a line to Nova Scotia in addition to a line that runs through Quebec.

"If we are going to move the kind of volumes we're talking about over the 50 years, we've come to the conclusion we need both routes."

And in leading up to that comment, Martin restated one of the ideas your humble e-scribbler floated, just so he could refute it:

"With respect to that question of is it something that we're using it from a leverage perspective, the answer is no,"

Still, though, if Ed Martin actually had a deal or was really close to one, he’d be announcing it rather than talking about all sorts of scenarios and possibilities.

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Kremlinology 27: Going negative early has its risks

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can be forgiven this week if they thought they’d entered the savage world of American politics complete with its intense and highly orchestrated personal attacks.

While the 2011 provincial election campaign has been underway since last spring, the provincial Conservatives went negative this week with a pre-emptive attack on the Liberal party.  The pretext for the attack was the opposition office’s new communications director, Craig Westcott.

Conservative leader Danny Williams was characteristically blunt in justifying both the attack itself and the violation of the province’s privacy laws by the release of an e-mail Westcott wrote to the Premier’s office in February 2009.

I did feel it was important that the people of the province know who they’re dealing with and what they’re dealing with when this man is now an integral part of the official opposition in this province.

The task of leading the attack went to Kevin O’Brien, recently promoted from a low-level portfolio to the slightly more demanding job of municipal affairs. O’Brien noted the idea as well of letting people know what  - supposedly - they could expect from the Liberals:

It's sad really to see the Opposition take that path because what I see is a fellow that can't even contain himself with regard to expressing that hatred."

These statements stand out because they characterise something that had not occurred.  Both Williams and O’Brien drew attention to what they considered Westcott’s personal “hatred” for the Premier. 

Westcott has been characteristically blunt in his criticism of Williams, but his comments have been typically not as personal as Williams presents them.  And sure, Westcott made plain  - before he started the job – that he was concerned about Williams’ impact on politics and the potential the Williams’ Conservatives could win all 48 seats in the provincial legislature.  But at the point O’Brien mentioned the e-mail, the opposition itself hadn’t gone anywhere near negative.

Interestingly, Westcott described Williams accurately in 2007:

it's impossible to avoid being negative about a leader who is so negative himself, especially about his critics and some of the people who try to do business in this province.

And Williams and his crowd took great offense at anything and everything Westcott said.  For his part, Westcott released a raft of e-mails with Williams’ communications director at a time when Westcott published a local newspaper and couldn’t get an interview with Williams. Westcott ran for the federal Conservatives in 2008, largely as a personal gesture in reaction to Williams’ anti-Harper crusade.  One of the consequences is that CBC stopped using him as a commentator after the election.

That isn’t just background for the most recent shots in an ongoing personal feud,  nor does it suggest that both sides are equally guilty of anything. Westcott started his new job on Monday morning.  On Wednesday, the Conservatives launched the assault. Until then, there was nothing other than the known animosity between Westcott and Williams. The point to note is that the Conservatives characterised what Westcott and the Liberals would do in the future. 

But that prediction – and all the negative implications – are entirely a fiction created by Williams’ Conservatives.

Going negative isn’t something new for Williams.  He likes the ploy and has used it on everyone from Stephen Harper to a previously unknown lawyer named Mark Griffin.  Around the same time Westcott sent the now infamous – and previously private – e-mail, Williams labelled Griffin a traitor.  Williams also started a lengthy battle with the Globe and Mail over a column that speculated about Williams’ possible motives in expropriating assets from three private companies in central Newfoundland.

Nor is it the first time Williams has tried to put words into someone else’s mouth.  in the most famous episode cabinet minister John Hickey sued then opposition leader Roger Grimes for defamation.  The case quietly disappeared because Hickey sued Grimes not for what Grimes said but for what Williams attributed to Grimes.

The provincial Conservatives are a tough and effective political organization.  They bring message discipline and zeal to the table. On top of that they have an army of enthusiastic sock puppets who will fill any Internet space and radio talk show with pre-programmed lines. Going nasty and negative is second nature to them.

The curious thing about the episode is that Williams could easily have waited until the first lump of mud came hurling his way. 

But he didn’t.

He sent O’Brien out as his crap flinger, first.

Taking the first shot, going negative in this way, this early in a campaign would be a risky venture in any case in Newfoundland and Labrador. Most voters aren’t engaged in politics and the overwhelming majority aren’t thinking about the election yet.  Local politics is anything but the highly competitive, ideologically-divided wasteland of the United States. People don’t like taking the battle-axe to the heads of their neighbours and friends. 

Politics can be competitive, but heavily negative campaigning doesn’t bring any great benefits.  Going negative early carries a risk of alienating people from the Conservatives and from politics generally. And it’s not like Williams has a surplus of voter support he can afford to tick off with negative campaigning.  He won in 2003 and again in 2007 with about the same number of votes, about the same share of total eligible vote.  That’s because Williams’ voters consist of a core of traditional Conservative supporters plus a group of voters who have voted for other parties, usually Liberal, in the past.  

For someone with Williams’ reputation, however, there is the added danger that yet more relentless negativity will affect his own support. Voters may not be able to stomach a full year of his highly concentrated political bile on top of the seven years they’ve already witnessed. Even Conservatives have been known to revolt against Williams’ diktats.  In 2008, Conservatives in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl voted heavily for the New Democratic Party, despite the fact that four prominent cabinet ministers campaigned for the Liberal. In other ridings, they just stayed home in response to Williams’ personal anti-Harper crusade.

There are signs that voters, generally, in some parts of the province are discontented if not slightly cranky. Williams’ Conservatives have already started trying to mollify concerns over some issues. Public money is flowing freely in announcements about spending for new outdoor basketball courts or cassettes for x-ray machines.  A news conference heralding a new case of DVDs or a packet of screws can’t be far behind. 

The provincial Conservatives have also telegraphed that they are worried about voter attitudes toward the party, generally. Maybe it wouldn’t take much to see the sort of rejection of the Conservatives that happened in the Straits and White Bay North spread to other districts along the northeast coast and other parts of central and western Newfoundland and into Labrador.

In a sense, going negative early suggests the Conservatives are particularly sensitive about any prospect that a resurgent Liberal Party might be able to capitalise on voter discontent. It reinforces the idea that Williams’ personal smear of Marystown mayor Sam Synyard had more to do with a fear of political rivals than anything else.

In the insider baseball world of political reporting in this province, this week’s drama about an e-mail and a communications director may looks like one thing to some people.  But if you look more closely, another picture may appear.

No matter what, the next 12 months could bring some of the most interesting political developments in years.

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Outside the Overpass Update:  The Overpass is to Newfoundland and Labrador politics as the beltway is to American federal politics.  In that light, consider this e-mail from the province’s other daily that puts the week’s game of insider baseball in perspective:  “Get back to work”.

Going negative this early has its risks.

Sins of omission

“Five key bridges in the western portion of the T’Railway Provincial Park that closed in 2008 are now re-opened to park users. … [The five bridges are being ] replaced as a result of a $3.6 million allocation in Budget 2010: The Right Investments – For Our Children and Our Future.”

That’s part of the first paragraph of a happy-news release from the province’s environment.  It’s one of dozens issued every week in July as part of the happy-news offensive mounted by the provincial government in the run up to August’s scheduled polling by the provincial government pollster.

The release leaves out much relevant detail.

Not surprisingly, that detail is embarrassing to the provincial government and especially to the ever-embarrassing minister, Charlene Johnson.

For starters, the bridges in questions were all former railway bridges inherited by the provincial government in 1988 when the railway closed.  The provincial government took responsibility for the bridges but until 2008 – apparently  - did nothing with them.

No maintenance.

No repairs.

No inspections either, apparently.

At all.

That is until the federal government inspected a few that crossed over federally-monitored waterways.  They found a raft of them in what appeared to be perilous states of disrepair. 

In one case, one of the bridges had vanished entirely.  When inspectors showed up to take a lookee-look, they couldn’t find anything except the footings on either shore.

So basically this splendiferous investment of more than three and a half millions could have been avoided or at least spread out over time if someone – anyone – at any point along the way had decided to do some regular maintenance on the bridges.

Or even taken a peek at them once in a while.

Even an auditor general’s report in 2003 on inadequate inspection of road bridges seems to have prompted any action on the former railway bridges, the ones now used by pedestrians, snowmobilers and ATV operators.

None of this, by the by, stopped Johnson from claiming that her department prized public safety. As your humble e-scribbler noted at the time:

We understand the inconvenience of the closure of these structures; however, public safety has to be our number one priority," said Minister Johnson.

But...

Environment Minister Charlene Johnson said today the province does not conduct routine safety assessments of structures on the T’Railway, which is a provincial park.

“There’s no regular inspections, no,” Johnson said in response to questions from reporters.

That sort of bumbling is why some people find it odd that Charlene has adopted a tone of haughty arrogance when dealing with issues like the Abitibi expropriation fiasco or offshore oil.

That sort of bumbling is also likely why Charlene’s publicists decided to torque this release without any reference  whatsoever - an omission in other words - to the mess that started it all.

But all of it doesn’t explain the real sin of omission here:  namely the explanation of why the Premier keeps this minister in a job for which she is clearly unqualified and at which she has clearly been a disaster of BP proportions.

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Williams admits taxpayers stuck with bill for his expropriation mess

While his embattled environment minister blustered and stuck to the old line during Question Period, outside the legislature Premier Danny Williams admitted to reporters today that the taxpayers of the province will be stuck paying for the environmental cleanup from his expropriation mess.

CBC.ca/nl has a version of the story that’s worth checking out.

The cost of the clean-up, legal fees, any NAFTA penalties for the expropriation and the cost of compensation for seized assets belonging to three companies could reach $500 million or more based on the provincial government’s own estimates.

More to follow.

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Epic Fail of The Week: prov gov loses to Abitibi… again

First, the provincial government’s Legal Genius(es) drafted the expropriation bill which seized - all, as it turned out -  AbitibiBowater assets in Newfoundland and Labrador.

They told the good burghers of Danny-ville that this meant only that the power plants and everything else belong to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Everything, except that is for the mill itself, they said which would be used as leverage in negotiations over any compensation for the expropriation.

It would all be a wash, in the end.

Or so people were told publicly and in briefings before the expropriation bill turned up in public.

Then, people discovered that the same Legal Genius(es) didn’t actually exclude the mill as they’d originally claimed.

Nope.

They seized it all.

Big screw up.

Now, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador discover that trying to get some sort of court action forcing the former mill owners to foot the bill for environmental clean-up – as the legal genius(es) assured everyone – won’t work either.

Hands up anyone who is surprised at the latest failure by the provincial government?

Okay, well just stop and think for a minute: 

The Legal Genius(es) behind this latest string of expropriation epic fails would be exactly the same Legal Genius(es) who brought you the Ruelokke legal mess.

And they’d be the same Legal Genius(es) who are now betting massive chunks of the public purse on a law suit against Hydro-Quebec to try and settle a dispute over the 1969 contract.

Any bets on how good that one will turn out for taxpayers in the end?

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Medvale School for the Gifted Update:  Seems the Legal Genius(es) indeed have caught themselves in another bit of jurisprudential bother.  As Russell Wangersky astutely points out, the lovely Abitibi expropriation bill clearly gives no value to water rights and timber rights.  Yet, the scheme to funnel money to Corner Brook Pulp and Paper is based on timber rights having value.

The two things cannot live in the same space.

So either no cash will go to CBPP or, as your humble e-scribbler expects, the real legal geniuses who work for AbitibiBowater (they are 2-0 so far) will use the CBPP cash hand-over to put a much higher price on the expropriation now that they can legitimately claim cash for timber and water rights.

Not only that but AbitibiBowater can also claim – quite rightly – that the expropriation was unusual and punitive aimed specifically at one company and remains without any merit. Coupled with all the nasty words flicked by ministers toward Abitibi, they can likely show that the whole thing was prejudiced and that will only add to the poor beleaguered Newfoundland and Labrador Taxpayer’s legal misery in other places (NAFTA challenge anyone?)

Momentous Update:

Hypothetical Answer by Hard-done-by Citizen:  “Golly Gee Mr. Finance Minister, what will happen if they get more money?”

Not-so-hypothetical Answer by Finance Minister:  “The debt will go up.  We cannot stop the momentum.”

Danny of the Dead

Don’t be surprised if you start hearing more of Danny Dumaresque in the weeks ahead as the former Liberal politician tries to raise his profile in anticipation of a by-election in The Straits-White Bay North.

The Other Danny is reputedly planning to turn up in Flower’s Cove for the Big Protest. That’s Step Two.  Step One was calling local radio shows.

The Liberal Party’s answer to Jim Morgan last tried for a seat in the 2007 general election.  He was defeated in Torngat Mountains by Patty Pottle and a gazillion personal phone calls from The Danny Hisself.

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Hey, Steve! Message for ya!

Photographers sometimes capture images that they didn't see, but which turn up in the process of sorting shots after a shoot.

Like this one, taken during the recent campaign. Nope, it hasn't been photoshopped.

This is the original image as the premier adjusted his glasses during a speech.

Did he mean to do it?

Well, he meant to adjust his spectacles, but many of us use the middle finger to move our eyeglasses upward on the bridge of our nose.

Beyond that, there's no way of knowing if Danny wanted to send Steve a message.

Doesn't really matter.

It's still funny.

Danny Williams.

Middle finger salute.

And low and behold, a rather glum and sour expression.

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The Cult of the Individual, Dannyland version

Spend any time publicly criticising the current administration and its policies and at some point, you are bound to hear from the Premier's personal supporters.

Your humble e-scribbler gets them once in a while.

They are predictable. There's no discussion of the facts at hand, rather there is puzzlement at why there is any criticism of Danny.

In the radio call-in version there are direct personal attacks on the critic's integrity and motives and continued suggestions that so-and-so is in the pay of one of Dannyland's foreign demons.

Lately, correspondents have taken to suggesting that perhaps you should run office since you've apparently got it all figured out.

Maybe some of us will. Maybe some of us won't. Some of us have alternatives. Some of us are just not so quick to join the nearest parade condemning the supposed foreign oppressor of the moment.

That's the marvelous thing about democracy.

It's called free speech.

While some politicians and their supporters may find it uncomfortable, it's what helps to keep powerful interests in check. It's what helps to promote peaceful change as opposed to the sort of political instability, abuse of public freedoms, and in some cases political violence that is found all to often in many of the countries high on the current administration's list of oil jurisdictions to emulate.

Telegram managing editor Russell Wangersky is on the receiving end of a letter in this Saturday's edition of the province's largest circulation daily. It follows a fairly typical approach:

It makes you want to laugh at those critics. Passiveness in politics will get you nowhere. Williams is taking a much-needed strong stand, simply put. Those who are complaining, for the most part, seem to be those who want Williams to shut up and go away, accept the deal offered after the contract. Complain as they may, I doubt it will faze him one bit.

...

It makes you want to laugh at those critics. Passiveness in politics will get you nowhere. Williams is taking a much-needed strong stand, simply put. Those who are complaining, for the most part, seem to be those who want Williams to shut up and go away, accept the deal offered after the contract. Complain as they may, I doubt it will faze him one bit.

Wangersky responds in his own column in words that speak eloquently for themselves:

When it comes to premiers and prime ministers, I just don’t know who’s right at this point.

I honestly don’t know what’s right, and I’m pretty much sure that my grasp of the issue isn’t that much different from the 90 per cent of the people who have already made up their minds.

Now, I’m leery of bandwagons, especially the patriotic kind. Patriotism sells T-shirts and suppresses free thought.

I like to make up my own mind, and I don’t like the mindset that believes I should have my ideological windows smashed out for daring to not toe the provincial line.

So, what do I think?

I suspect, at this point, that Premier Williams may well have the clearest case — that he’s right in maintaining that a promise was broken.

At the same time, you have to ask yourself if it isn’t a mug’s game to believe the promise could be kept in the first place.

There is, more than anything else, the real politik [sic]of the situation.

This is a complicated little tangle: could a promise like the one Harper made ever, ever make its way through a minority government, tucked into a minority budget? Only the Bloc Quebecois supported the Conservative budget — would a promise made, and a government defeated, have served us any better than an equalization scheme that will apparently still give us more money than the restructured Atlantic Accord was going to?

Those are interesting questions, and ones that it is hard to find answers for — it’s easy enough if you just want to decide to back one side in the argument, but there has to be more to picking a side than just wearing your heart on your sleeve. That’s akin to voting for a particular party in an election because your father always voted for that party.

The Telegram's editorial this week praises economist Wade Locke for putting some factual information in the public view. More information is always good when looking at complex issues. More, accurate information promotes discussion which usually leads to a sensible decision.

The jingoism favoured by far too many in this province currently is, of course not a new approach at all. The revanchist undertones to arguments about the federal government may be a new flavour, but the jingoism is - by now - old hat.

The Churchill Falls deal was unanimously endorsed by the legislature at the time. That's the deal, you will recall, which brought a tremendous immediate benefit from construction jobs but which was built - ultimately - around the idea of deferred revenues. It was only later that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador heard about the details of the deal and just how long the benefits were to be deferred.

That Premier at that time, of course, liked it better when everybody just fell in line behind him. He, too, disliked criticism and his supporters made his displeasure clear in a variety of ways. The Premier at that time made it plain too, how much he hated his critics, telling a media scrum that the Telegram had been taken over by a gang of illiterates.

That Premier, like supporters of the current one, claimed that he wasn't fazed by the criticism, that he would carry on undaunted in his crusade to build the New Jerusalem.

How odd then, that the Premier and certainly his supporters spend so much time dealing with the critic. They never deal with the criticism.

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