Reality Control #nlpoli

The Memory Hole

Nineteen eighty-four is popular these days.

People think that the ideas in the book like the memory hole are modeled on communist or fascist dictatorships from the early part of the last century.

What those people forget is that George Orwell worked at the BBC during the Second World War.  As Dorian Lynskey noted in his recent history of the novel, Orwell thought that “radio, as it existed in the 1940s, [was] ‘inherently totalitarian.’”  

In Spain during the Civil War, he saw his first newspapers that “did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied by an ordinary lie.” But it was in his exposure to radio during the Second World War that Orwell heard in all the propaganda on all sides very similar distortions of reality.

“This kind of thing is frightening to me," Orwell wrote in his 1943 essay Looking back on the Spanish war, “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

“After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history… Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So, for all practical purposes the lie will have become the truth”.

This is only a small step to the slogan of the Party in Nineteen eighty-four: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The Walking Dead Duck

This evening Liberals will elect a new leader.

And about two weeks from now – likely Friday, August 14 – the new leader will take the oath of office and become the 38^th first minister of Newfoundland and Labrador since it became self-governing (May 5, 1855) and the 14^th Premier since Confederation in 1949.

Dwight Ball survived 1704 days.

That’s four years, seven months and 30 days.

55 months, 30 days.

Or barely more than a single term.

It is hard to remember a day of that very short tenure that Dwight Ball was not embroiled in a controversy.  The ones he did not make, he bungled, which made them far worse than they were.  The provincial government’s financial state is no better now that Ball is leaving than when he took office.  Arguably, it is worse.  

The House of Assembly is diminished in every respect compared to even the low point it was at when he took office and Ball leaves the Office of Premier itself diminished.  His was a spectacularly dysfunctional office from the start and it never got better.  Even single-celled organisms can learn but the relentless repetition of the same blunders in everything from staffing to how Ball and his office responded to events are the hallmark of Dwight Ball’s political career. Ball has been a zombie Premier, of sorts, one of the political walking dead.

Bollocks #nlpoli

Kill the wabbit?

Moody’s has changed its outlook on the provincial government’s debt from stable to negative while sustaining the A1 rating it gave the province in July 2019. That, by the way, was a downgrade.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Moody’s said the change in outlook reflects the company’s view that the provincial government’s “credit profile will weaken due to the sharp decline in oil prices and its reduced budgetary flexibility to adjust to this shock. Under Moody's base case, oil prices are expected to average $40-$45/bbl in 2020 before returning to $50-$55/bbl in 2021…”.

Moody’s expects the provincial deficit for 2020 could reach 25% of revenue in 2020 and about 11% in 2021. Previously, Moody’s had forecast deficits of 11%  and 4% respectively for those years.

Moody’s expects the provincial debt will reach 270% of revenue by 2023 with pressure that this will increase after 2023.  In other words, Moody’s doesn’t believe that the government will balance the budget in 2023.

All around in circles #nlpoli

Going around in circles must be frustrating.

Plummeting crude prices have dropped refining margins to negative numbers and so it isn’t surprising that Come by Chance refinery announced Sunday it is shutting down operations for upwards of five months.

The official excuse is the pandemic but the real reason is economics. There’s no point in running a business that isn’t making money.  And you cannot make money in a global market where demand for petroleum products has dropped like a stone.

The same economic reality that is hitting the oil industry is hitting governments in provinces that depend heavily on oil royalties.  In Alberta, Western Canada Select was trading at less than five Canadian dollars a barrel on Friday. 

According to the National Post, the provincial government estimates that every dollar in crude prices costs the Alberta government $355 million in lost royalties. Economist Trevor Tombe estimates the drop in crude prices thus far has cost the Alberta government about $5 billion in royalties.

Newfoundland and Labrador is in worse shape.  Going into what is now the crisis year of 2020, Dwight Ball’s Liberal administration forecast as deficit of almost $800 million.  Last Thursday, the provincial legislature approved government requests to borrow almost $3 billion dollars directly or through the provincial hydro corporation.  Finance minister Tom Osborne told reporters outside the House of Assembly he had no idea how big the 2020 deficit would be.

Experience Counts - COVID Economic Balls-Up Edition #nlpoli

Update:  The links below don't work any more.

Both the screwed up one (March 20) and the revised one (March 21) appear to have disappeared from the government list of orders issued during the emergency.

___________________________

On Friday Premier Dwight Ball took a question from reporters about the Liberal leadership that is still underway.

In a moment of egotistical boasting, Ball said it “takes experience to get through this crisis that we're dealing with. Someone said to me this morning it takes experience to do that job, and not often do you see a card on the back of a fire truck saying 'Novice Driver’”.

On Friday,  the provincial government issued an order under the Public Health Protection and Promotion Act that directed individuals entering Newfoundland and Labrador from out of the province – either originating or returning – to enter a mandatory period of isolation for 14 days regardless of whether they were exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 or not.

Problem:  The Friday order, as written, effectively shut down the provincial economy and cut the province off from supplies of food and fuel.

All individuals arriving in Newfoundland and Labrador from outside the province must self-isolate for 14 days, including those individuals arriving from other provinces and territories in Canada.

The original order applied to *everyone*:

•  crews on Marine Atlantic ferries,
• tanker crews, including the folks coming to Come by Chance and the refinery, 
• OCEANEX crews and other shipping companies that bring food, fuel, and essential supplies into the province,
• people who work on one side of the border in Labrador and live on the other,
• people involved in supplying electricity to the province, 
• crews working on and supplying the offshore platforms,
• medical personnel arriving to help treat patients or back-fill positions, 
• airline crews and passengers of all kinds,
• helicopter crews servicing the offshore rigs, which are outside the three-mile limit that is the province's jurisdiction, and
• truck drivers who bring everything and anything into the province and who take manufactured goods out again.

No one in the provincial government, least of all the people who wrote up the order or the ones who approved it, realized what they were doing.

And so, after some uncertainty in the world outside government and a bunch of frantic calls and emails, the provincial government issued a second order the next day exempting all those people needed to keep the province running and keep people fed.

Someone check for a Novice Premier sign on the back of Dwight's car.

-srbp-

Transitory Records #nlpoli

In dealing with one aspect of the business of getting Carla Foote from Executive Council to The Rooms,  deputy minster Ted Lomond suggested to The Rooms CEO that he delete the email in which Lomond had forwarded a proposed draft of a letter.

cbc.ca/nl ran a story on it Monday based on the report from the Citizen's Representative into allegations against Lomond's minister, Chris Mitchelmore.  The CBC story included this quote:

"I talked to Mr. Brinton a number of times and I said to him that in light of everything that is happening, I would suggest you delete your transitory records," Lomond told the Office of the Citizens' Representative. 

Brinton said he knew their conversation would be subject to requests under the Access to Information and Privacy Protection Act [ATIPPA], and said he wanted to make sure his emails were in order.

"You knew this was going to get ATIPP'd," he told the citizen's rep. "So I would like to have my records neat and tidy, final versions lined up."

Transitory records are not described in ATIPPA.  They are covered in the law that governs how government maintains its records.  It's called the Management of Information Act. Anyone submitting requests for government documents under ATIPPA should know both pieces of legislation inside out.  For those who are interested,  the Office of the Chief Information Officer has a tidy little description of "transitory records".

A mouthful of burp #nlpoli

Not one mitigation scheme.

Not two mitigation schemes.

Three mitigation schemes.

Delivered by the end of January.

All wonderful grand and all believable if you have had the sense knocked out of you by the endless string of promises Dwight Ball has made about mitigating the impact of Muskrat Falls on electricity rates.

Promises made but not kept.

The Rookies, the House, and the Orchestra Pit #nlpoli

What is reported is seldom what happened even though what happened is far more interesting than the stuff that falls into the orchestra pit.

Events in the House of Assembly are the result of decisions by members of all three parties.  Any analysis that ignores the simple realities of the House or robs the individual members and their parties of their agency is misleading.

_____________________ 

The biggest story from the House of Assembly’s latest session was Ches Crosbie’s call last Thursday for his party to hold a vote on his leadership next spring.

There’s no surprise in this.  Political parties usually dump leaders after a failed election and this time will be no exception for both the federal and provincial Conservatives.

The immediate impact of this, aside from what it means for the Conservatives, is that the Liberals will now have an easy ride getting their budget through the House no matter how bad it is.  The Conservatives won’t want to trigger an election in the midst of a leadership change.

And there *will* be a change.  The Ball-led Liberals are weak, and the polling numbers reflect that. Any reasonably competent opposition could unseat them in a general election.  After all, Crosbie’s incompetent crowd came within a hair’s breadth of unseating the Liberals and the Liberals have not gotten better six months later.  So, expect a new Conservative leadership hopeful to emerge after Christmas to lead a reinvigorated blue bunch.

Meanwhile on the Liberal side, Dwight Ball will also face a leadership review vote in the middle of 2020 at the party’s postponed annual conference.  The party executive skipped out the one for 2019 because it was an election year, but it must have a convention in June 2020 according to the party constitution. That’s not to say that party president and Dwight Ball loyalist John Allen isn’t trying to find some way to push the convention off to 2021.  Apparently, there is anxiety over the prospect that Ball wouldn’t survive the mandatory leadership review vote that comes with the next party convention.

But as big as Crosbie’s Thursday announcement and Ball’s situation are for the future of the province – there is that little provincial government financial mess sitting out there unaddressed – that wasn’t what the news media and the local political commentariat were yammering about last week.

No.

Dippers go home #nlpoli

The latest quarterly poll from Narrative Research shows that a gaggle of folks who were likely New Democratic Party supporters returned to the fold in the past quarter and are now happy to identify as New Democrats once more.

So while this is good news for Alison Coffin and the NDP,  it really puts everything back in the space the parties occupied before February 2019.  That's when things were decidedly beige.

You can see this in the chart at right by looking at the orange line (NDP party support) and the green line (undecided, no choice, refused to answer, will not vote).  What you also see there is that generally polling from other firms has picked up the same basic pattern.

More to the Trimper Affair #nlpoli

The most important implications of the Trimper Affair escaped notice.

_____________________________________

In the midst of all the public commentary about the Trimper affair last week – strikingly racist as it was in some respects – even the people ostensibly supporting the Innu missed the most obvious and most meaningful aspects of it.

The most striking was the skillful way in which the Innu Nation organization obliterated Perry Trimper as a political force and imposed its will on southern politicians from all parties.  The Innu Nation project against Trimper displayed a sophisticated understanding of how the media works in the province, a solid appreciation of the weaknesses of the governing Liberals under Dwight Ball, the organizational cohesion to implement a simple but effective plan, and, above all the will to do it.

Equally compelling to watch was the speed with which the Premier’s Office slit Trimper’s political throat.    While southern newsrooms and Twitterati neither knew about nor cared about the wider context of the story that unfolded in front of them last week, Dwight Ball and his staff either knew or ought to have known.

After all, Ball had brought Trimper back to cabinet only the week before he resigned.  The environment side of Trimper’s portfolio would bring him in direct contact with the sensitive issue of Muskrat Falls and others throughout Labrador and Newfoundland that would involve dealing with organizations representing Indigenous people.

Certainly, Ball and his staff would have noticed that Trimper took – literally – a dozen votes out of Sheshatshiu in the general elections.  Of the two polls in the community, Trimper got five in one and seven in the other.  His Conservative opponent garnered 238 votes.  An unaffiliated candidate took three votes in each poll. 

Ball and his staff, admittedly down by three key people since the election, should have anticipated problems might come up with Trimper.  Yet, Ball brought him back to cabinet and at the very first sign of trouble, Ball disowned his minister. Ball’s statement issued Thursday evening said - in effect – that Trimper did not represent the government.  The statement was blunt and simple.

The Political Doldrums #nlpoli

Last week,  Newfoundlanders and Labradorians got a few reminders of the magnitude of the political problem they face in addition to the financial and economic problems already lurking.

The most obvious  was word that one of the longest-serving members of Dwight Ball’s inner circle has decided to leave for the private sector.  Joy Buckle is the third senior staffer to quit Ball’s office in as many months. Her departure will affect both Ball’s office and its ability to manage the day-to-day business of government.  It will also affect party election readiness, such as it is anyway.  

Buckle’s departure may be the most obvious indicator of how big a problem the province faces, but its significance is not.  Buckle continues a pattern of staff turn-over in Ball’s office and the senior ranks of the public service in the very short time he has been Premier.  

And in that respect,  Ball’s premiership has carried on the pattern of the Conservatives after 2010. A decade of political uncertainty – if not outright instability -  has meant that administration after administration has been unable to come to grips with the financial problems facing the province.  This is the reminder of how big is – how incredibly persistent is – the political problem in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Captain Dildo, Dwight Ball, and the New Approach to Old Stereotypes #nlpoli

Last week, the Premier’s Office sent out a picture of the Premier standing next to the mascot of a town in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Nothing odd about it until you realise the mascot is called Captain Dildo and the Premier named Ball is standing to the left of the figure, which is slightly taller than him.

A dildo and a ball. 

Easy pickings for the jokesters out there. 

At least he is not Da Wight Ball, a wag observed.  No, came the reply, he is Da Weft Ball.

Some people might struggle to understand how the Premier and his staff could be beweft themselves,  beweft… err.. bereft… of a stwategy….

No, stragedy.

Umm.

Strategy.

The Slaughterhouse Five #nlpoli

Coupled with comparable high rates of staff changes in the senior ranks of the public service,  unprecedented staff turn-over in a critical part of Premier Dwight Ball's office raises questions that need to be addressed.

Premier Dwight Ball has entered the history books.

He has chewed up more communications directors than any Premier since 1972.

Word from the Confederation Building is that Erin Sulley, right, who left community television for the communications business only last October, is now the Premier’s Director of Communications.  It's the most senior political communications job in the provincial government

Sulley was host of Out of the Fog just before joining Ball's staff last fall in the media relations role. In what was a pretty clear conflict of interest, she also started writing a column for the Telegram at the same time.

Mitigating Muskrat Falls: Ron, Harry, and Hermione are still baffled #nlpoli

Mitigating the impacts Muskrat Falls will have on taxpayers of Newfoundland and Labrador remains the single biggest unanswered question in the province nine years after the project started and the politicians first started talking about how they might do it.

To mark the 14th anniversary of The Sir Robert Bond Papers,  here's the tale from 2010 to now.

Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador finally noticed the impact Muskrat Falls would have on electricity prices when Nalcor chief executive Stan Marshall confirmed that Muskrat Falls would double electricity prices in the province once it was finished in 2021. 

That was the middle of 2017.

The word “mitigates” - to make less severe or painful - became popular overnight.  Since Marshall’s comments, just about all that anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador has fretted about is how the government will make electricity prices not double because of Muskrat Falls.

But here’s the thing:  Muskrat Falls was always supposed to double your electricity prices. Right from the start – November 2010 – the provincial government talked about electricity prices of between 14 and 16 cents wholesale, which would have made the retail cost in this province about double what it was at the time.  No worries, people like Kathy Dunderdale said.  Oil prices will be so high and electricity prices will be so high by 2017, anyway, that you will never notice Muskrat Falls except that it will stop prices from climbing higher.

Paddon's report on Martin contract just bizarre #nlpoli

After a lengthy review,  Auditor General Terry Paddon said Monday that the provincial government hounded former Nalcor boss Ed Martin out of his job.  He had no choice but leave and since he never quit and no one fired him,  Martin was entitled to the multi-million separation payments he got

"The events which [sic] occurred in the months leading up to Mr. Martin’s cessation of employment and which culminated in the wording in the Budget speech on April 14, 2016 and subsequent comments to the media by Government officials were tantamount to constructive dismissal."

 What's truly bizarre, though, is the behaviour Paddon considered to be harassment.

Duff in the hole encore #nlpoli

Oh dear.

The CBC has gone off to the mainland to get Duff Conacher to make a comment about the need for political finance reform in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Three observations:

1.  There is a desperate need for campaign finance reform in Newfoundland and Labrador.  SRBP has been writing about it relentlessly for a dozen years.  By comparison, the conventional media simply couldn't be arsed to cover the subject more often than not.

When they did notice something was amiss, as in 2006,  they were inclined to follow the line set by the government-of-the-day rather than have a look at the facts for themselves. What they would have discovered in the massive patronage scheme that ran here between 1996 and 2006, for example, was that the the level of misuse of public funds went *up* after 2003.

And after that they'd have found all sorts of other odd things.  Donations by companies getting hefty contracts from government?  Absolutely, a problem. Tired of writing about it.  Finance minister and later premier Tom Marshall financed his entire election campaign in 2011 out of a series of seven cheques from construction companies all of which did work for the government as Marshall shovelled cash into capital works at an unprecedented - and unsustainable - rate.

But what about political donations by town councils and the police?  Or what about a politician who ran a charity while he was in office that was funded by his government salary)?

2,  Conacher knows shag-all about what is happening here, as some of his previous comments have shown.  That actually weakens the case for campaign finance reform here since he is going to miss more than he hits.

Duff's good for the penetrating insights into the obvious - we need reform because it lends itself to corruption - but as with the CBC story his ignorance of the particulars makes him look like a bit of a goof at best or a blind nob at worst.  You see, Duff's been stonily silent on far worse things between 2003 and 2015 than anything he said before 2003 or since 2015.

3.  Stunned as me arse or what?  You really have to shake your head in disbelief at Dwight Ball's comments in the CBC story.  His election platform included a promise to change the campaign finance laws.  Instead of playing that up, Ball goes on the defensive making he look like he opposes finance reform.

That's the kind of stuff that must leave everyone outside of the Premier's Office banging their heads on the wall in frustration.  Inside the office, it's likely high-fives all around as the boss nailed another one to the wall.

Nailed his thumb more like it.

-srbp-

Putting the sunk in sunk cost #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Muskrat Falls is basically an $800 million tax on the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. That's roughly the amount you get using numbers Nalcor chief executive Stan Marshall made public last summer.

Muskrat Falls is a tax on the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.  Always was that.  Never was anything else.  The plan was to collect the tax by doubling electricity rates.  Regular readers have known this since *before* Danny Williams announced the scheme.

Take all that as the starting point when you hear Dwight Ball tell Anthony Germain on the CBC St. John's Morning Show that Ball is spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep our electricity prices from doubling.

Brutal #nlpoli

Any Liberals who thought they were out of the political woods got a harsh reminder of the truth on Tuesday.

Their leader remains as unpopular as ever.

According to Angus Reid, only 20% of respondents to their recent poll thought Premier Dwight Ball was doing a good job. That's scarcely changed since last spring.

75% disapprove of the job Ball is doing.

Corporate Research Associates showed a curious 10 point jump in its leader-choice question last time around.  Bit of a different question, to be sure, but folks might want to notice that CRA winds up being a bit of an outlier in this respect. Other pollsters had results for party choice through October and November that were all pretty much the same. Seems odd that everything else would track but that something like support for party leader would be well outside the margin of error of the polls.

Maybe CRA was little bit high.

Maybe.

-srbp-

Poll numbers not very comforting #nlpoli

A little over a month ago,  only about 16 or 17 percent of respondents told pollsters they thought Dwight Ball was the best choice for Premier.

In November, 27% of respondents picked Ball above Paul Davis and Earle McCurdy in Corporate Research Associate's quarterly survey.

That's a big jump in 30 days.

The only thing that changed in those 30 days is that folks finally got the message Ball has been sending since July:  all those layoffs and cuts we had planned for the fall are off. If public perception of Ball is that closely tied to whether or not he carries an axe,  his political fortunes will rise or fall with the provincial government's financial state.

Mazel Tov Cocktails #nlpoli

Scottie Nell Hughes is one of the legion of ident-a-bots who turned up on news programs during the recent American election spouting lines from the Trump campaign. She's already famous as the one who gave us the mazel tov cocktail flub.  She grabbed some headlines last week for making the comment that there is no such thing as facts.

Specifically, Hughes said that "...one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they're not really facts. Everybody has a way—it's kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts."