Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday, while the polls were still open mind you, that the by-election results would be no big thing.
Life would go on.
The world would turn.
And the Conservatives had two years left in their mandate.
That’s when everyone in the province understood that the provincial Conservatives had already conceded defeat in the Carbonear-Harbour Grace by-election.
Unfortunately for Dunderdale, though, the election result means something. Here’s what.
With the House of Assembly open again, the major topic of Question Period was Muskrat Falls and the second version of the deal to ship power to Nova Scotia.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale explained it on Monday in terms of firm and “non-firm”. Firm power is what you know that the hydro plants will be able to produce reliably. The unfirm power is the stuff that you can get when there is plenty of water.
What’s interesting is how much of this unfirm power the Premier says is around. It is:
“half a terawatt to four or five terawatts a year. Based on fifty years of hydrogeology, the amount of snow or rain in this Province, we have been able to commit to Emera 1.2 extra terawatts of power on average; …, some years that might be 0.5 terawatt, another year that might be three.”
On the face of it, that is such a really interesting idea that it is worth digging into the notion a bit more.
No sooner had Lorraine Michael pronounced the New Democratic caucus back together again than two of its members announced that they would leave and sit in the House of Assembly as independent New Democrat members of the legislature.
Dale Kirby and Christopher Mitchelmore made the announcement in separate media statements on Tuesday morning.
This latest twist didn’t actually end anything, of course. It’s merely another step in a drama that will play out for another year or more. Let’s take a look at 10 observations about the whole ferkakta tale
Earlier this year, mining giant Vale was saying they’d start production at the new Long Harbour smelter in 2013, but after a meeting with Premier Kathy Dunderdale in Brazil, the company won’t be ramping up until 2015.
That’s the news from VOCM on the weekend, although they didn’t report the actual news about the delay at Long Harbour. VO just reported that Dunderdale met with Vale officials and that the start-up date was 2015, as if it had always been two years away.
The premier says she went down a few days early to meet specifically with Vale officials to get an update on the Long Harbour development and the Voisey's Bay mine site.
She says Vale officials indicated that Long Harbour will start to ramp up in 2015, while they're looking to go underground at Voisey's Bay.
According to VOCM, the company officials are concerned about power supplies “in the area”. But the story isn’t clear if the power supply problems are in Labrador or at Long Harbour.
When they were high in the polls it was because they were making the right decisions.
Now that they are in the political polling basement it is because they are making the right decisions.
That doesn’t make sense but that’s pretty much the only way to describe Conservative Party leader Kathy Dunderdale’s speech to the party faithful in Gander a few weeks ago.
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Reporters asked the premier on Wednesday about comments by Nova Scotia premier-elect Stephen McNeil about Muskrat Falls.
Here’s what CBC reported:
"Our contract — our agreement — is with Emera. They're going to sell the power to Nova Scotia," she said.
The Telegram had an extra bit along the same lines:
“I just want to remind people again that the agreement between Newfoundland and Labrador — Nalcor specifically — is with Emera. Emera is a publicly traded company,” she said.
She also told reporters that the agreements with Nova Scotia covered off every possible outcome so everything was just fine.
Whatever.
Markets in northeastern North America are already awash in cheap electricity, thanks in large part of the discovery of massive amounts of natural gas in the United States. They’ll be that way for decades to come.
Current forecasts New England’s regional electricity transmission organization hold that improvements in energy efficiency will allow New England states to expand their economy without increasing energy consumption proportionately. That means that eight years from now, New England will be using as much electricity as it is today.
There’s no shortage of supply, either. As a result, current wholesale electricity prices in New England are about one tenth of what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will pay for Muskrat Falls.
And it is with that context the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are only now learning that a team from the provincial government has been in Quebec for the past two weeks as part of talks with the Quebec government about the 1969 Churchill Falls power contract, according to one news outlet, and development the Gull Island power plant according to another.
Kathy Dunderdale cannot quit as leader of the provincial Conservative Party, says Fairity O’Brien in an interview with NTV.
He stresses it over and over. The caucus is solidly behind her.
He stresses it so much – right down to telling you that he wants to stress the message in this interview – that where you’d start to believe that what he is saying is the literal truth: Kathy wants to go but the caucus won’t let her.
The idea came together neatly in a celebrity interview not by someone in the private sector media but by a representative of the state-run broadcaster. “Government by Fernando” it’s called and it is worth going to read even if you read it back in 2006.
So if Stephen Harper’s staffing problem is that “all the good ones quit”, what is the story on the staffing problems in Kathy Dunderdale’s office?
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As a rule, cabinet ministers should be able to tell you exactly what government policy is on any given subject. They all sit at the same table and they each have an obligation to support the policy they collectively decide.
When two ministers say starkly different things, then, you can understand that people tend to notice the discrepancy. The difference usually signals a major problem or controversy and that simply cannot stand. The principle of cabinet solidarity means that in public they must all sing the same song..
It’s bad enough when two ministers disagree. But when the difference is between the Premier and a minister, the matter becomes very serious. If there is one person who must know what government is doing, that person would be the first minister. If there is one person who gets to set government policy, it is the first minister. Everyone else just has an opinion.
That big, ginormous phone-banging-up, trade dispute thingy with evil Ottawa?
So not happening any more.
"We seem to be back on track. We have alignment," Premier Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday at an event announcing fitness grants to community groups.
All the talk the past week or so about negotiations between the crowd in Confederation Building and the crowd in Ottawa brought out the conventional wisdom about premiers using fights with the feds for political purposes.
The coincidence of a talk on nationalism the week before linked the two ideas together neatly for some people. Kathy Dunderdale was having a row with Ottawa, possibly to boost her polling and maybe as a show of nationalist fervour that we all love.
Yeah, maybe that’s true.
And then again, maybe it just isn’t.