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.

Score Two for the Telly #nlpoli

James McLeod’s Telegram front-pager – above the masthead no less – on John Noseworthy’s $150,000 contract with the provincial government got all the facts right.

He nailed it all, in detail.

Plus he provided the complete explanation offered by Joan Shea, the minister of the department that gave Noseworthy the contract.

That was one.

An Unwavering Commitment to Inaction, Indecision, and Extra Pork #nlpoli

In 2010, the provincial government appointed Captain Mark Turner to look at the “province’s offshore oil spill prevention and response capabilities.”

He produced the 273 page report and the provincial government dutifully released it along with a lovely news release.

Then-natural resources minister Shawn Skinner committed that the provincial government  would “study the report, and consult with the responsible stakeholders to ensure all recommendations are considered.”

Lay-offs, Noseworthy and other things the Premier talked about #nlpoli

Listen closely and you can hear the beep-beep-beep of the garbage truck of government comms as it backs up on the idea of laying off public sectors workers as a result of government’s “review” of programs and spending.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale scrummed [link to CBC’s raw video]outside the House of Assembly on Monday and CBC’s David Cochrane - the guy who on Friday got her to accept the premise that she might lay people – led off the questioning.  He repeated comments by public sector union boss Carol Furlong.

Notice that Dunderdale doesn’t talk about layoffs in her first answer except to start out by saying that people need to relax.  That isn’t a direct retraction of her comments from Friday, but take a look at the rest of it and you can see where she is going.

Dunderdale claimed that she has said time and again that this is about “good fiscal management” and nothing more.  Of course, the truth is that Dunderdale said a great many things, some of them contradictory.  Her comment to the media is one of her stock approaches whenever she frigs up.  Dunderdale claims she has said the correct thing all along, with the clear implication the rest of us are just not grasping her brilliance.  For one of the earliest examples see Dunderdale and the Joan Cleary mess in December 2006.

Dunderdale also said that government needs to “constantly” review programs to make sure they are efficient and effective.  Then she  referred to some unspecified programs in Joan Burke’s department that are upwards of two or three decades old.

Fair enough.

Except that the government got into its current mess because they didn’t review anything ever.  Instead, they just piled on the hiring and piled on the spending with no goals.  They had no idea where things were going. 

To give you a sense of out far out-to-lunch Dunderdale and her colleagues took things, consider this table from a post back in September 2010.

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador spends more per person to deliver programs than any other government in Canada, bar none.

In fact, Kathy Dunderdale and her colleagues in cabinet spend more than $3,000 per person more than Alberta does.  That’s not good.  That’s how grossly inefficient and ineffective they are.

The reason is simple.  As with anything in life, if you have no idea where you want to go, you can never tell when you get there or if you get there. So it is that a government that has more money coming through the doors than any of its predecessors has to talk about cuts to spending and layoffs.

In the scrum, Dunderdale said that might be related to the people administering the programs but that permanent employees are safe.

Cochrane comes at the layoffs issue again and this time Dunderdale doesn’t duck.  She accepts the potential there might be layoffs. She emphasises that the review is not about what she terms “gutting” the public service   She puts the review down to effective management of the public service itself. 

Of course, that rings hollow in light of the facts of the matter.

Dunderdale swings to the old line about permanent employees being protected.  Then she adds a twist:

… and others can be redeployed

By 2:53 of the scrum though, Dunderdale is back to acknowledging that cabinet has a number of potential cuts in mind.  She goes on about how “temporary” means only around for a short time.

By 3:36 in the scrum Dunderdale says she “is not going to lie” about it.  Who said anything about lies?

Cochrane then comes back at her to ask what the number is.

So having successfully cooled everyone’s jets in the first couple of minutes, Dunderdale then says she and her cabinet colleagues are considering lay-offs for 800 employees or, “far less than” 800.

And at that point, with a suck of air, someone else takes up the questioning.

Time into the scrum:  four minutes.

And in those four minutes, Kathy Dunderdale has changed directions in her messaging twice in completely contradictory directions.

She started by backing the truck up.

And then by four minutes she is in forward gear again and driving right over the same issue she tried to back off of a couple of minutes earlier.

Dunderdale gets a respite from the layoffs for a second as she answers a question about John Noseworthy and his pork-barrel job.  Dunderdale does what Joan Burke didn’t do in the House.  Dunderdale ties the hire with Noseworthy’s supposed unique skill set.

Then Cochrane goes back to the lay-offs.

“We will look at all of the temporary employees,” said Dunderdale, “the same way we will look at all of the permanent employees.”  Of course since permanent employees aren’t being looked at,l this sounds very confused and confusing.  And indeed it is.

But there’s that beep-beep-beep again.

However, by 6:00 minutes into the scrum, Dunderdale has said that there will be lay-offs but  that the number will be less than 800.

Look at Dunderdale’s face at this point in the scrum as she gets another question about Noseworthy.  She’s clearly pissed off. She doesn’t know anybody better qualified to do the job, Dunderdale insists.  That is actually part of the problem, of course:  hiring people with connections as opposed to qualifications. 

In response to another question, Dunderdale does the pre-emptive denial, saying that no one made any promises to Noseworthy when he decided to run in the last election.  She puts responsibility for Noseworthy’s job on Joan Burke, saying that Burke brought the name to Dunderdale.

At that point, the scrum switches to other topics.  It’s a wonder everyone wasn’t dizzy what with all the shifts of position.  Expect more shifting to come. 

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Kremlinology 39: What Burke didn’t say #nlpoli

In defending the $140,000 –a-year patronage job she gave to former Tory candidate John Noseworthy, advanced skills minister Joan Burke told the House of Assembly:

Mr. Speaker, no one can argue that Mr. Noseworthy has a unique set of skills.

Indeed no one can make such an argument.

Former auditor general John Noseworthy doesn’t have any special skills at least, in this case.

He is an accountant with lots of experience as a provincial auditor.  In that role, he has been known to make a few serious fumbles.

Everything that Burke said her department needed to help the department sort itself out could be had from a great many people out there.  Some would be former provincial public servants here or from other provinces.  Some would be former federal public servants and some would come from the private sector. What’s more, all of those people would know more about the core mandate of Burke’s department than than John Noseworthy.

Joan Burke is right.

No one can argue Noseworthy has a unique skill set.

He doesn’t.

And to her credit, at no point in her response to questions in the House did Burke actually say he did. 

Looks like someone foisted the guy on Burke and she got stuck trying to defend someone else’s pork-barrel decision.

The clue is in what Joan didn’t say.

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Separated at birth: missing cat edition

 

Bond arch-villain Ernst Blofeld

Tory Auditor General cum candidate John Noseworthy

 

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A cause for grave concern #nlpoli

The Office of the Auditor General is an independent and reliable source of the objective, fact-based information that the House of Assembly needs to fulfill one of its most important roles: holding the provincial government accountable for its stewardship of public funds.

That’s a paraphrase of the description of the auditor general’s job found on the federal auditor general’s website.

Let’s add a bit of a twist to that description, though. The Auditor General’s office is not just an officer for the legislature alone; the AG office is one of the officers the public must trust to ensure that government spends your tax dollars and mine properly.

Aside from anything else, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador must have confidence that the person who serves as Auditor General is not a partisan for any political party and is functioning free of any favour or threat from the government itself.

John Noseworthy likely shattered that confidence for a good few people in the province on Tuesday when he became the second Auditor General in a row to leave office and enter politics.

In this case, Noseworthy announced his new political career a mere 16 days after leaving the job that he wants to run as a candidate for the ruling provincial Conservatives in the fall general election.

But that’s not the whole story.

Noseworthy had a year or more left  in his term when he announced last June that he was quitting to pursue “other professional opportunities.”  Asked about political ambitions at the time, Noseworthy merely told reporters he was ruling nothing out.

News reports on Tuesday mentioned his role in uncovering the House of Assembly spending scandal.  In interviews, Noseworthy was quick to call his own reports on government spending “scathing” and noted that he was critical of government.

That’s as maybe. The timing alone creates the impression of an unseemly haste to leave his job early in order to enter politics.   His comments appear self-serving and - in light of some of his actions over the past seven or eight years - dubious.

Noseworthy has been a bit of a media darling since 2006 and the spending scandal.  What that means is that local reporters have not questioned him even when there was good reason to doubt his comments, claims and conclusions.

For starters, Noseworthy has never accounted for millions of dollars of overspending that took place during the scandal period from 1996 to 2006.  Instead, he looked at other issues.

Nor has he explained why his own reports actually ignored the overspending. You’ll only find reference to the actual degree of overspending here at SRBP and in Chief Justice Derek Green’s report on the spending scandal.

In the parts he did report on, your humble e-scribbler raised questions about his public comments at the time and how he was conducting his reviews.  Chief Justice Green even recommended significant changes to sections of the law governing the Auditor General as a result of the inappropriate - and in some instances unfounded – accusations Noseworthy levelled at members of the legislature.

Then there’s the question of how both he and his old boss, now Tory Senator Elizabeth Marshall never made any comment on the level of overspending in the House of assembly accounts until 2006.  They may not have had access to the House books for a part of the scandal period but they did have access to the Comptroller General’s records for the whole time and he wrote all the cheques used to shell out the cash. And they never raised the issue once, except for the one time when Marshall’s attempt to investigate a single cabinet minister – Liberal as it turns out – got shut down.

Noseworthy’s also been known to polish his own knob and that of his future political associates.  In a 2009 report, Noseworthy actually made up a fictitious report recommendation and credited the government with following it.

A 2007 report claimed that the same agency produced a deficit and a surplus at the same time.

Nothing was quite as bizarre, though, as Noseworthy’s sudden decision to try and audit the offshore regulatory board.  At the time, Noseworthy’s office did not include the board in a list of government agencies the Ag felt he had the authority to audit. 

Noseworthy made quite the stink about getting inside the board offices, issuing a special report.

But once he got in, the whole thing vanished.

No subsequent reports.

No updates.

No letters.

Nothing.

Not until your humble e-scribbler brought up the question of the vanished Earth-shattering issue and reporters trotted off to Noseworthy’s office to see what gives.

Access problems, Noseworthy harrumphed.

But no word on his silence on the whole matter for the better part of two and a half years.

There was just a little cock-up in a story on the whole thing by one local radio station.

Funny thing in that little episode as it turns out. Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner wound up reminding everyone of the sweeping changes to provincial laws that wound up effectively shielding so much of Nalcor’s operations from public oversight.

Noseworthy didn’t say boo about any of that as it sailed through the legislature and it didn’t make any reference to it in any of his comments since June when he announced his retirement.

Maybe Noseworthy will be like his predecessor Beth Marshall who, after entering politics, didn’t find any problems with giving politicians access to bags of cash they could hand out to constituents, often without receipts.

Ah yes, old-fashioned patronage politics and the importance of having a member on the government side to dole out the goodies.

And, by gosh, didn’t John Noseworthy mention just that - having someone on the government side  - as he launched his career in politics.

Incompetence?

Normal practices?

Bias?

Whatever the cause, John Noseworthy’s announcement on Tuesday is the finest example yet of why our province desperately needs a fundamental, democratic revolution.

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Skinner throws AG under bus

[Updated in another post]

Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner threw outgoing Auditor General John Noseworthy under the bus on Wednesday as he contradicted the AG’s claim he can’t get access to some of the offshore regulatory board’s records.

Voice of the Cabinet Minister ran a story based on Skinner’s comments with the afternoon call-in show’s new host Pete Soucy.  Here’s the whole thing in case the disappear it:

The government is refuting claims by a talk show caller that the auditor general cannot gain access to the books from the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board. The A.G. complained recently that he was unable to obtain the information he was looking for.

However, the minister of natural resources, Shawn Skinner, replied on VOCM Backtalk with Pete Soucy that that claim is untrue. He said there is a provision for the auditor general to review commercially sensitive information.

That’s pretty odd considering Noseworthy has been very friendly to the current administration on so many occasions.  Even the timing of his initial attack on the offshore board in 2008 could be seen as a way to help the incumbent Conservatives out in their efforts to put negotiating pressure on the oil companies or to poke at the guy who embarrassed Danny Williams so badly in Williams’ bizarro struggle to make Andy Wells the board boss.

So what gives?

Well, it could be the rumour Noseworthy will be running for the Liberals in the fall.  There doesn’t appear to be any substance to it at the moment but the rumour is strong.  Maybe Skinner wanted to start a pre-emptive strike on Noseworthy’s credibility.

And – as with the bullshit about Dean MacDonald being a long-time Liberal – rumours have a way of being accepted unquestioningly as fact by some in this town, if enough people repeat the same fairy tale often enough. well, that or if the right people say so.

That doesn’t mean Noseworthy won’t run in the fall. It just means there are no signs at the moment – even behind the scenes – that Noseworthy will be a candidate.  Now odds are that the opposition parties are both falling over themselves to get Noseworthy as a candidate just because someone said the guy would be a good catch.  See those rumours at work again? 

But there’s a difference between that and the idea Skinner is about to announce or that he is already locked in.  If Skinner was trying to undermine Noseworthy, he was acting on the basis of shite intel.

That isn’t the only plausible explanation for Skinner’s comment.  Now this is Voice of the Cabinet Minister after all, so there is a possibility they just misunderstood what Skinner said.

And, it could also be that Skinner is just wrong, again.

After all, it isn’t like he has never said things that are patently, obviously and demonstrably false before.

Who knows?  Lots of strange things are turning up in the news these days as the political world slowly twists itself in a whole new bunch of shapes.

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AG finishes term with more fumbles

Outgoing auditor general John Noseworthy held to his pattern of making less-than-accurate claims or claims without evidence, this time with respect to the offshore regulatory board.

Noseworthy’s claims and the accurate information from the board are in a story available at the Telegram website.

In his latest accusation, Noseworthy said he did not have full access to the offshore board records.  Fact is, he did.  What Noseworthy couldn’t get was proprietary information belonging to the oil companies.

“We invited him in. He had sent four people in, they were here for four months conducting an audit. He had full access to the board,” [offshore board CEO Max] Ruelokke said.

But Ruelokke said Noseworthy’s staff did not have access to information provided to the board by oil companies — which the companies deem to be proprietory [sic]— and that’s because of section 119 of the Atlantic Accord Act.

The act states companies have to approve the release of the information to any third party.

“When we asked (the companies) to do so, on behalf of the auditor general, they refused to do that. So we couldn’t release it to him,” Ruelokke said.

The distinction is significant.

Your humble e-scribbler has raised questions about Noseworthy’s attack on the board – and that’s what it has been – from the beginning.

The most recent post on the topic raised the question  of why Noseworthy had failed to produce a report or bothered to update the public on it since he launched his public attack on the board in 2008.  Maybe Noseworthy’s most recent unfounded accusation was an effort to deflect attention away from his own shortcomings.

While Noseworthy enjoys local “media cred’ – that is, they will never, ever question any of his pronouncements – the retiring auditor’s record is far from pristine.

Noseworthy missed millions in House of Assembly overspending that continued well into 2006. The accurate figure turned up in some fairly simple analysis done by the Green commission. 

Despite having access to financial records kept by the comptroller general, Noseworthy did not once report on the obvious overspending in some House of Assembly accounts until after his auditors stumbled across irregularities in 2006.

From the rings to spending by individual members of the legislature to the actual rules in place during the period, Noseworthy or his crew simply didn’t do the homework in many cases to know what they were looking at. That didn’t stop him from making claims that were baseless or that lacked evidence.

And to cap it all, Noseworthy still hasn’t completed the tasks set out for him in a 2006 cabinet order.  Instead he substituted his own commentary on individual member’s spending in an incomplete report he issued to wide media coverage.

And on that one Noseworthy also missed one fairly obvious problem in the House scandal: diversion of public money for partisan purposes. It’s obvious wrong and there was way more to it than just the $11,000 he did report.  Three times that turned up during subsequent criminal trials of former members of the House.  And while Noseworthy couldn’t have reported that while the investigations and trials were under way, it was the most fundamentally corrupt practice he should have seen raised in his original audits.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Noseworthy focused on trinkets.  In one news conference, Noseworthy said that he and his staff “did not find” any rings.  That led many to believe initially that the rings did not exist. They quickly turned up, however if one looked. Obviously, Noseworthy and his staff didn’t look.   

In perhaps the most bizarre case, Noseworthy replaced his actual recommendations for a report on government operations and substituted one he never made.  He then reported compliance with his invented recommendation in a review he produce of government compliance with his reports.

The matter gets to be all the more serious when you realise the subject of the original report was an apparent lack of adequate management of public money handed out to private sector companies.

Noseworthy has never explained the discrepancy in what he reported originally and what he claimed happened later on. Nor did Noseworthy report in his self-assessment that one of the companies covered in the original report had gone bankrupt in the intervening two years.

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AG quietly starts offshore board audit

Officials of the province’s auditor general have started their audit of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, the spokesperson for the board confirmed for Bond Papers.

The audit began earlier this month.

The board is the joint federal provincial body that regulates the province’s offshore oil and gas industry.  Last year, the board issued invitations to both the federal and provincial auditors general to conduct audits;  only the provincial auditor accepted.

In the letter, chairman and chief executive officer Max Ruelokke notes that the board is concerned about "recent comments in the media concerning its finances which may be construed to imply some impropriety in the Board's finances."

That would be comments by Noseworthy, who is no stranger to making unsubstantiated accusations.

Auditor general John Noseworthy decided last year to audit the board, despite the fact that his office had never listed the board as an entity subject to audit.  Noseworthy claimed to have legal advice supporting his new position.  The legal opinion has never been made public.

The board refused the request indicating that  - as a joint federal-provincial body – the board should be audit by both federal and provincial auditors.

This did not satisfy Noseworthy who issued a special report accusing the board of breaking the province’s Auditor General Act.

Noseworthy made reference to the special report in his annual report for the year ending March 31, 2008.  However, Noseworthy neglected to note in the report that the dispute had been resolved and his office was now conducting the audit.

-srbp-

Related:

“No access restriction: offshore board”

“NL AG hoist by own petard of misleading statements”

R'uh R'oh

Premier Danny Williams may have given the Auditor General extra staff to shift the focus of his review of the House of Assembly spending scandal, but John Noseworthy is peeved about lack of access to documents to conduct a review of the fibreoptic deal.

In a scathing letter to Innovation, Trade and Rural Development Minister Trevor Taylor this week, auditor general John Noseworthy says his office still has not been provided with all necessary information.

Noseworthy said he has identified documentation that has not been turned over by the government, and as a result, “it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to have any confidence in this process.”

Good thing Danny's gone on vacation.

This story, on top of Wade Locke's assessment of the Equalization racket, would make for as uncomfortable a weekend as he's spent since taking office.

We can expect to hear the moaning when he gets back.

And for the record, there is no truth to the rumour that Williams has hired a former senior DND official with experience in shagging up the Somalia inquiry to liaise with Noseworthy on this and other files.

-30-

Partisan abuse of AG even worse

The use of the AG's office for partisan purposes is worse than first thought.

Here's what Premier Danny Williams said to reporters, yesterday:

If three quarters of the people who were reported on happen to be Tory, then — if that was the case and there was some negativity — there then it would be disproportionate to the Tories," Williams said.

"If we do this over the complete period of time, it's a fair representation, because it's all relative."

Even though the problems in the House started after 1997 (by the AG's own reports), Danny Williams wants to use a whole bunch of other members of the House, mostly Liberal, to try and counterbalance what happened over the past decade.

Notice, by the way, that in the past decade, Danny Williams himself has been in the House of Assembly either as Leader of the Opposition or as Premier for six years.

60% of the key period.

Whatever the Auditor General was originally going to do was directly relevant to judging the behaviour of all people seeking re-election. It's especially relevant to use detailed information to balance what those individuals knew and did with what they promised to do.

The Premier also said this:

"If people are going to decide on what's right or wrong in regards of what [incumbents] did was appropriate or inappropriate, then they are in a position to measure what went on before and what went on with other governments, and what the standard was," Williams said.

That assumes that what voters see is a complete record, let alone one that is relevant to the goings-on in the House over the past decade.

Don't count on that level of disclosure.

After all, the Premier still hasn't come clean on what he knew about the the secret bonus cash, when.

And that's really the crux of the problem for the Premier.

He set the bar.

He should be judged against what undertakings he gave to the electorate.

What Clyde Wells did should be irrelevant. Danny Williams just made it germane.

He won't like the consequences of that comparison.

Weighed.

Measured.

Came up really short.