The story of the 2014 provincial Conservative Party leadership contest is a study in politics on its most basic level.
It is a story of those with influence and of those who have less of it or none at all.
It is a story of how politics actually works inside the Conservative Party, instead of how we imagine it.
It is a fascinating story.
Shawn Skinner used to be a provincial cabinet minister.
Now he works for a construction company trying to get a major contract at Muskrat Falls. Skinner is the senior director of business development with Aecon.
Presumably that job involves him meeting with or arranging meetings with people at Nalcor and the provincial government in an effort to land the Big Contract.
So why isn’t Shawn - or anyone else connected to his company – registered as a lobbyist as required by the lobbyist registration law Shawn and his Conservative colleagues introduced in 2004?
Good question.
A copy of a draft letter for Williams’ signature, included in a package of information released under the province’s access to information law, bore the date “December 2, 2010”. It concluded:
It is with pleasure that I offer you the position of full-time vice-chairperson of the C-NLOPB, upon expiry of the term of office of the incumbent. Should you accept this offer of employment your appointment would take effect on January 1, 2011 for a term of six years in accordance with applicable legislation.
Williams’ last day on the job was December 3. The letter was never sent, apparently.
Usually, officials prepare a letter making a job offer of this type only after senior officials in the Premier’s Office have reviewed the appointment and discussed it – even if informally - with the prospective appointee. There would be no reason to draft such a letter unless the appointment was finalized.
CBC Provincial Affairs reporter David Cochrane broke the story of Matthews’ appointment on March 2, 2011, some three months later. He didn’t indicate when the provincial government had made the decision to put Matthews forward. It doesn’t appear Cochrane knew.
Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner issued a brief statement the following day confirming that the provincial government had nominated Matthews. Skinner didn’t attach any dates to the decision.
The Liberal Opposition did put dates on it.
On March 11, Opposition Leader Yvonne Jones issued a news release that included a letter from Skinner to his federal counterpart, Christian Paradis. The date on the letter was December 21. It included a three-paragraph biography for Matthews.
In a brief news release later on March 11, Skinner confirmed the letter to Paradis had been sent.
Due to a gaffe in the Liberal office, the Liberal release went out originally without the letter attached. Before the Liberals had a chance to send out the letter, Cochrane posted a comment to Twitter:
(March 11) “Where are you getting this from? Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly. She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment. Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”. [Emphasis added]
That claim – that Matthews “had never been told of any appointment” - became a key element of the story in subsequent days. In hindsight, another part of that comment now stands out as well: “Do Libs have draft letter never sent?”
Matthews withdrew her nomination on March 14. In a prepared statement, Matthews made no mention of the discrepancies in versions of events surrounding the appointment. She blamed her decision on efforts by Liberal leader Yvonne Jones to politicize the issue of her appointment.
In a scrum with reporters the next day, Skinner apparently picked up on the idea Matthews had no knowledge of the appointment. He told reporters that an unspecified breakdown in communications led to a situation and as a result, Matthews apparently didn’t know about the appointment.
CBC’s online story of Skinner’s comments began with this sentence:
A communication breakdown left Elizabeth Matthews in the dark about her appointment to an offshore petroleum board late last year, according to Newfoundland and Labrador's Natural Resources minister.
It included Skinner’s comment:
"I signed the letter. I sent it off and I assumed that the rest of it would have happened as it should have happened, but I'll find that out. There was a communications breakdown in that regard," Skinner said Monday.
The Telegram version of the scrum appeared on March 16. It included a comment from Matthews that she “received an [Order in Council] in the mail in January at which point I contacted the Premier’s Office to inquire about its contents.”
That’s not exactly the same as saying she had “never been told of any appointment”, as Cochrane tweeted on March 11.
Matthews’ comment to the Telegram is vague about whether or not she’d known of the appointment before she got the letter in January. At the time, some might have interpreted her Telegram comments to mean Matthews had been surprised to receive the letter in January and called the Premier’s Office for an explanation.
Existence of a draft letter for Williams’ signature addressed to his then-director of communications as well as the document trail released to the public changes all that.
The package of documents containing the December 2 letter also contained an e-mail exchange between Matthews and the chief of staff in the Premier’s Office and the chief of staff and the deputy minister of natural resources in which Matthews’ forwarded a copy of her resume.
The date of the e-mail exchange was December 21.
Cabinet met the same day to decide on Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board, among other things.
Elizabeth Matthews’ name is on the distribution list for the order.
That’s also the day Skinner wrote his federal counterpart advising of the Matthews appointment.
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Liberal leader Kevin Aylward may have personally been waffling about Muskrat Falls a week or so ago, but his position has shifted:
An Aylward led government would immediately halt all spending on this project and establish a truly independent analysis to look at all options for meeting domestic energy demands. The review currently before the Public Utilities Board is not a true independent review. It is limited in scope and resources and is designed to provide government and Nalcor with a predetermined result.
That’s the last paragraph in a short, simple news release that Aylward issued Friday.
That leaves just Kathy Dunderdale and Lorraine Michael of the NDP struggling with their positions.
Michael is still talking about getting more information but her fundamental problem of privately supporting an unpopular deal remains.
In a news release Friday, Michael said:
NDP Leader Lorraine Michael (MHA, Signal Hill-Quidi Vidi) said the government’s release of the Report of the Joint Review Panel into the Muskrat Falls project may be a step towards the transparency she has been asking for, but it raises more questions about the project.
She said the provincial government should stop “pouring money into the project” and that “[w]e need to have a broadbased [sic]independent analysis.” It appears, though, that Michael is still limiting herself to a discussion of developing Muskrat Falls, as the Conservatives and Nova Scotia new Democrats are proposing as opposed to looking primarily at options to meet domestic energy needs.
Meanwhile, Kathy Dunderdale and the Conservatives are ploughing ahead. Dunderdale seemed to be confused about the panel’s rejection of the premises on which she is pursuing the megadebt project. According to CBC,
"We're on the same path," Dunderdale told reporters in St. John's Thursday. "We're not misaligned. We absolutely agree."
“We” is apparently the provincial government and the panel.
Of course, that just makes it all the more embarrassing that the provincial government’s energy corporation couldn’t supply the review panel with simple, straightforward explanations of the reasons why it wants to pursue the project and what the implications will be.
After two years of review and months of public hearing’s and after giving Nalcor a second chance to correct deficiencies in its presentation, the panel concluded:
Need, Purpose and Rationale
… the Panel concluded that Nalcor had not demonstrated the justification of the Project as a whole in energy and economic terms, and that there are outstanding questions related to both Muskrat Falls and Gull Island regarding their ability to deliver the projected long term financial benefits to the Province, even if other sanctioning requirements were met. The Panel therefore recommended that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador carry out separate formal financial reviews before sanctioning either Muskrat Falls or Gull Island to confirm whether the component being considered for sanction would in fact deliver the projected long-term financial benefits. [Page 3, Emphasis added]
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But that doesn’t mean natural resources minister Shawn Skinner escaped completely unscathed from his episode on Backtalk on Wednesday.
Here’s the latest version of a story about comments Skinner made on VO’s afternoon call-in show. The head on the story was “Retraction”:
The following story appeared on the web in a manner which left the impression that a minister was speaking about the C-NLOPB, when, in fact, he only referenced Nalcor in his call to VOCM Backtalk.
The government is refuting claims by a talk show caller that the auditor general cannot gain access to the books at Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. On VOCM Backtalk with Pete Soucy, a caller said the provincially-owned utility would not allow an audit. However, Natural Resources Minister Shawn Skinner told the show that claim was untrue.
While the auditor general has complained that he was unable to get the information he wanted from the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, he has never expressed any concerns about Nalcor or its predecessor, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.
There.
That’s clearer.
Not.
Here’s the actual “following story” that this supposedly replaces, although you’ll notice that in the version above, there actually isn’t the bit of the “following story” that it replaces.
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.
What we actually have here is an entirely new version of Skinner’s comments.
In the new version, the caller was talking about Nalcor, not the offshore board. So Skinner didn’t throw the AG under any sort of bus. VO made the mistake. That was one of the possibilities in the earlier post and, frankly, it makes more sense given the very friendly relationship between the AG and the current administration.
All the same, if you look at what Skinner was actually talking about, he did wind up raising a rather uncomfortable issue of another sort. Skinner just reminds us all of changes that Skinner and his colleagues made to the Energy Corporation Act in 2008 that effectively hid Nalcor from any meaningful public scrutiny and independent oversight.
That’s so much better.
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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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Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner is writing more letters to the editor of the Telegram these days that the former Open Line hydro queen sends tweets.
The government must have polling showing that the Muskrat Falls project isn’t going over well among the great unwashed.
In his latest epistle to the unclean, Skinner writes:
Hydro must comply with legislation and regulations that require it to ensure sufficient electricity is available at all times. If supply is required to meet demand, then the Electrical Power Control Act states that this new generation must come from the least-cost source.
That would be great.
It would be peachy, if it only it were true.
But it isn’t true.
Now there’s no way of knowing if Skinner didn’t realise the letter had at least one false statement in it or the person who drafted the letter didn’t keep current with current events so this is not a lie.
But there is absolutely no doubt that what Shawn wrote to the Telegram’s editor is not true.
It is false.
It is incorrect.
Newfoundland and Labrador Regulation 92/00 exempts the Lower Churchill project from the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994:
Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro is exempt from the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 and the Public Utilities Act for all aspects of its activities pertaining to the Labrador Hydro Project as defined in section 2 [of the regulation].
Section 2 describes the entire project, including Muskrat Falls and the power line to Soldier’s Pond.
The whole issue got huge discussion during a recent sitting of the legislature. It’s been in Shawn’s briefing notes for months. Your humble e-scribbler discussed it at length in the following posts:
Muskrat Falls power does not have to be the cheapest power. In fact, the entire project financing only works because consumers will be forced by law to pay for the whole thing plus a profit while export customers will get it for gigantic discounts.
So if Shawn is so obviously, blatantly, totally wrong about such a fundamental issue as this, how many other things is he wrong about?
Or to be more accurate…
If this sort of blatantly false statement can wind up in public with the minister’s name on it, how much other stuff from Nalcor and the provincial government on Muskrat is also false?
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Section 92A [of the Constitution Act, 1867] provides authority to tax, set export quotas and prices with respect to electrical energy produced in the province. Properly drafted legislation could allow the province to recall energy from the Upper Churchill at a cost of two mils (one-fifth of a cent) per kilowatt hour for domestic needs. Similarly, properly drafted provincial legislation would prevent the renewal of the Upper Churchill contract in 2016 unless there were proper price adjustments and energy reserved for provincial needs.Skinner - or more accurately his letter-writing aide - summarises it this way:
Section 92A resolved these issues by confirming and expanding provincial power to include the authority to legislate in respect of the export of natural resources and electricity.Too risky, says Skinner, to go after something which he dismisses as theoretical.
This theoretically includes the power to impose restrictions upon the export of electricity from a province, or to require electricity destined for export to be diverted to the provincial grid.
Mr. Hearn uses the common term for such legislated action: to “recall” power.
Take a gander at Hansard for Wednesday and you’ll see an interesting series of questions put to Shawn Skinner about the settlement in the Star Lake expropriation.
You can see pretty easily that the expropriation back in 2008 had nothing to do with getting back timber and water from an evil foreign company.
Nope.
The real story was about something else.
Shawn told the House, in all earnestness, that as a result of the 2008 expropriation of the Star Lake hydro-electric facility, the people of the Happy Province could now benefit from having 18 megawatts of electricity to meet their needs.
From that, Mr. Speaker, that generating station will put electricity into the system that will benefit the people in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We now have an asset that is a fairly new asset, about ten or twelve years old. It is an asset that for decades to come will be able to provide clean, renewable power for this Province that we will benefit from.
Skinner makes it sound like Star Lake will do something now that it wasn’t doing before.
Fact is that Enel and Abitibi developed Star Lake in the 1990s in response to a request for proposals issued by Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. The provincial government’s electricity producer wanted to add some new renewable energy to its island supply that would help reduce the need for thermal generated stuff at Holyrood.
And that’s what Star Lake did. It wasn’t supplying power to the Abitibi mill at Grand Falls-Windsor, as Abitibi’s other hydro generators did. Star Lake made the light bulbs glow in homes on the island.
Now, NL Hydro bought the power from Star Lake and turned around and sold it to Newfoundland Power who in urn retailed it to consumers. Skinner put the annual cost of the power from Star Lake at $10 or $11 million annually.
Nalcor tried to buy Star Lake – as it turned out – before the expropriation but Abitibi apparently rebuffed the offer. They preferred to sell the whole affair to Enel, their partner at the time.
In the end, Nalcor got Star Lake. The cost came in at around $73 million on a facility that cost about $50 million to build. Skinner says it was $60 million. Okay. Tomato. Tomato.
What’s interesting here is not that the lovely people of the island now have electricity, it is the financials of the whole thing. Follow that link right there - LINK – and you will see a couple of curious things.
In early 2009, Danny Williams pretty well blew away any idea that the island needed power from some expensive project in Labrador as a result of the Vale smelter in Long Harbour. As the Telegram reported:
Williams explained that the province didn't need the power from the Exploits River in order to accommodate the Long Harbour plant. He said 70 megawatts were freed up when the Stephenville paper mill closed, and an additional 54 megawatts of wind power has also been added to the grid.
Williams also said that:
the most important fact is that the province, through Nalcor Energy, a Crown corporation, will take full control of the power at the end of March. [emphasis added]
Why is that important, you ask?
Well, it has to do with those power purchase arrangements. you see, Skinner mentioned those on Wednesday as a way of saying that the $73 million for Star Lake meant the provincial energy company wouldn’t have to pay that money out any longer.
True enough.
But how, asked Yvonne Jones, would Nalcor recover the cost of the settlement?
Why silly thing, by selling power to the lovely ratepayers of the island, sez Shawn:
We are going to be selling electricity into the provincial grid. That was the point I was trying to make. I apologize if I did not make it clearly enough for the Opposition House Leader. We are selling electricity into the provincial grid. The Public Utilities Board sets a price and the people who receive the electricity pay the price, Mr. Speaker.
Hands up anyone who has seen Nalcor head to the public utilities board to lower electricity rates now that they won’t have to shell out that $10 million annually. Of course they haven’t and one would be exceedingly naive to expect them to do it.
By having a near total monopoly on electricity production in the province, Nalcor can now pocket the $10 million annually it used to pass along to Enel along with whatever margin it took on top. Nice windfall.
In fact, if the loan is the only thing they are directly liable for and it is for a 25 year term, the actual annual cost to Nalcor is a trifling sum. They are basically pocketing a gigantic profit on every megawatt from Star Lake they have generated since December 2008.
Not bad, eh?
Nalcor’s bottom line is that much fatter courtesy of the good people of the Happy province. People are already used to paying the higher rates so Nalcor can just keep on making them pay rather than pass any savings that Skinner was talking about on to consumers. he was crowing about bigger profits for Nalcor, not a brighter future for the ratepayers of the island.
And when Muskrat does come along in 2017, well the same ratepayers keep on footing the bills for the government monopoly: Nalcor’s entire plan for Muskrat Falls is based on profitability from provincial ratepayers alone.
Just like at Star Lake.
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No, this is not an April Fool’s joke almost a week late.
In answering a question on the source for government electricity price forecasts that are more than double actual experience recently, natural resources minister Shawn Skinner told the House of Assembly on Tuesday that CBC National News is his source for high-level energy intelligence:
… The CBC National News did a survey; they project up to a 50 per cent increase in the electricity rates.
Mr. Speaker, the reason we are developing Muskrat Falls is to solve that problem, and by solving it we will be able to ensure that the rates will increase by 0.7 per cent per year as opposed to the 4 percent to 6 per cent that they are increasing now.
What Skinner didn’t say is that the recent CBC news report he cited - dated March 30, 2011 - actually includes the Muskrat Falls rates as part of its projection for greatly increased electricity prices by 2020.
In other words, CBC wasn’t forecasting. The report was describing the result of the government’s proposal to double domestic electricity prices.
But wait.
It gets worse for Skinner, who seems to have misunderstood his briefing notes very seriously.
For starters, none of the story used actual demand forecasts for Newfoundland and Labrador based on its situation. Skinner basically used possible events in Alberta - and other places - as justification for actual decisions in this province taken before the CBC story even hit the Internet.
Then realise that the increase in electricity rates over the next decade CBC is talking about isn’t actually a forecast. They are really just suggesting a possible conclusion based on some of the prices being paid to producers in Ontario and other places in central Canada for some new technologies. Even the language is obviously conditional:
…it seems to mean inexorable price hikes…
Seems to mean?
You hope someone would say “will definitely mean” before Skinner signed on to a guaranteed doubling of electricity prices for his constituents, as a minimum. Evidently he didn’t notice the obvious problems related in the story by people on fixed incomes when faced with electricity price increases of the magnitude he is obviously comfortable with. Hint: Perhaps someone should point out the province’s own demographic forecasts for the Minister.
So yeah, maybe, theoretically prices might skyrocket if you can judge by the biogas and other similar experimental or relatively small-scale projects CBC cited. Unfortunately their speculation is pretty much shite: they didn’t do a detailed analysis of the total energy generating mix and what might actually happen to prices if consumption rises 23% in the next decade, as forecast by the National Energy Board.
Talk about faulty reasoning.
Even that is not the end of it, sadly.
That 35% increase in prices over the past five years or “recent years” that Skinner and Premier Kathy Dunderdale like to talk about?
Turns out it is actually a 20 year average rate of change adjusted for inflation:
Altogether, it seems to mean inexorable price hikes for a commodity that's already 30 per cent more expensive than in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.
So if you were really forecasting for the next decade based on the preceding two decades, you might want to try a 15% increase adjusted for inflation. Math geniuses will pretty quickly tell if that works out to be a 50% increase unadjusted for inflation or any other way.
And if all of that isn’t bad news consider that the La Romaine project in Quebec will produce electricity at a cost of less than half the Muskrat Falls total of 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Hydro-Quebec will get its power from La Romaine for 6.4 cents per kwh. That project is also more cost effective than Muskrat Falls, producing 1550 MW compared to the Nalcor project’s 824 MW and at about the same price ($6.2 to $6.5 billion forecast).
So if you take the province’s natural resources minister at his word, he is relying on media speculation to make serious decisions about the province’s future.
Talk about three guys and a magic eight ball.
You simply cannot make this stuff up.
As a last point, CBC can’t even get its basic facts straight on electricity generation in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The chart of current and forecast projects:
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From the annals of the Anything But Conservative Campaign there’s this little bit of independence displayed by current natural resources minister Shawn Skinner back in 2008.
Danny bitch-slapped him into submission PDQ for this one:
Not for me, it isn't. My boss can vote for who he wishes. He can mark his 'X' where he wishes to mark it. From my perspective, I have a job to do. I'm elected by the people of St. John's Centre. I'm in cabinet representing the people of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and I have a job to do. And I'm going to do that to the best of my ability.
If and when there is a federal election, we all as individual citizens can make up our own minds what we want to do. I'm here today as a provincial minister and I'm carrying out my duties as a provincial minister.
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Both the federal and Quebec provincial governments may have released the text of their agreement on underwater resources in the Gulf of St. Lawrence last week but Newfoundland and Labrador natural resources minister Shawn Skinner didn’t even see a copy until today – March 28.
As he told the provincial legislature during Question Period:
…It just came into our possession over the weekend is my understanding. I actually saw a copy of it this morning myself. I have not had an opportunity to review [it]…
Anyone with access to the Internet could have had a copy of the deal the day the federal and Quebec governments released it.
That’s where your humble e-scribbler found it last Thursday for a post that appeared on Friday. That post included this assessment:
What’s most interesting about the Laurentide Accord, though is the fact that it is modelled, generally, on the Atlantic Accord (1985) between Newfoundland and Labrador and the federal government or the similar Nova Scotia offshore accord.
As Skinner told the House, his officials did manage to figure out this much since they clapped eyes on the agreement over the weekend:
What I am told by officials at this point, where they have done a cursory review, is that it is very similar to the accords that have been done with Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia. The agreement is very similar…
Tomorrow, Skinner will likely be telling everyone that Quebec doesn’t get Equalization offsets, that provincial spending is unsustainable and Elvis has left the building.
Or at least that’s what he understands from briefings provided by his officials.
Sheesh.
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Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner is in Halifax talking energy co-operation with his counterparts in the Maritime provinces.
Odd that the provincial government didn’t play it up more than issuing a few lines in a media advisory on Monday, the day the meetings started.
After all, New Brunswick energy minister Craig Leonard is interested in some of Skinner’s Lower Churchill electricity. As Leonard told the Telegraph Journal:
"There will be a considerable amount of energy that's moving through the province," Leonard says.
"That's an opportunity for us. That's clean, renewable power that will be moving through our transmission system, whether it's en route to New England or we could utilize it ourselves."
Now as regular readers of these scribbles know, the Muskrat Falls proposal is a hugely expensive proposition that Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her Conservatives expect Newfoundland and Labrador residents to pay for. The cost to produce the power, according to Dunderdale back before Christmas will be at least 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour.
Now that is interesting given that the old NB Power deal with Hydro-Quebec was supposed to lower electricity rates in the near term. When the New Brunswick government unveiled the deal, consumer electricity rates were around 11 cents per kilowatt hour. Hydro-Quebec had oodles of electricity, some of it from very low-cost operations and could have made a tidy sum off New Brunswick customers even at reduced current rates.
Leonard and his colleagues campaigned against the deal and if they now buy Muskrat Falls power, they’d be doing exactly the opposite from what the Shawn Graham deal would have delivered.
Maybe the crowd in Fredericton will just settle for making some cash off the power that Nalcor will wheel through to the United States.
Oh.
That’s right.
There’s a power glut south of the border.
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New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael claimed that Danny Williams committed to introduce a law banning replacement workers during strikes.
Human resources, labour and employment minister Susan Sullivan claims that “[t]he government has never made such a commitment.”
Both are off base.
What actually happened is that cabinet ministers John Hickey and Shawn Skinner both indicated in 2007 that the provincial cabinet was reviewing the issue of labour legislation, including the need for anti-scab laws.
Hickey told CBC:
“Minister Skinner has advised me that inside the department, this whole legislation is under review, [and] I have taken the opportunity to review other legislation across the country … so these are issues that we as a government certainly are looking at dealing with.”
Skinner told the House of Assembly that the province’s labour laws were under review:
… I have indicated that the Labour Relations Agency, through its Strategic Partnership Initiative, is undertaking a review of all of the labour legislation in the Province. That will look at whatever the union representatives on that committee and the employer representatives on that committee wish to bring to the table for discussion. Once that review is complete, we will be in a better position at that time to look at the kinds of things will need to be updated in the legislation.
…
MS. JONES: …My question today to the minister is: Are you prepared to move up the agenda on anti-scab legislation and have it brought to the House of Assembly so that we do not have situations like we have at Voisey’s Bay in the future?
MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Minister of Human Resources, Labour and Employment.
SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!
MR. SKINNER: Mr. Speaker, as I have indicated in my earlier remarks, we do have a strategic partnership between our Labour Relations Agency, the unions and the employers representative groups in this Province. We have a process in place that all parties have agreed to follow, and we will be following that process to do a thorough review and to make sure that any and all issues that are important to the people of this Province, be they employers or be they employees, will be reviewed and will be brought forward for consideration by the government.
We have undertaken that commitment, we will fulfil that commitment, and once we know what the results of that are we will decide then what actions can be taken.
Danny Williams might not have made a commitment about anti-scab legislation but two of his cabinet ministers sure did.
What Sullivan needed to explain is not who made a commitment but why it is taking more than two years to complete a review of the province’s labour laws.
Is this another example of something gone missing in action in the bowels of the Confederation Building?
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INTRD minister Shawn Skinner is in Europe this week on a junket promoting the Atlantic Canada gateway to Europeans.
The event is in Antwerp, one of the largest ports in Europe.
So in light of the government’s preference for the poll goosing potential of bashing seals over the larger trade interests of the province, one must ask:
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Offal News posted an audio recording of human resources minister Shawn Skinner's profuse apology and backtracking exercise discussed earlier at both Offal News and Bond Papers.
Give it a listen.
You can really hear the magnitude of the reaction not from Skinner on his own, but likely from Skinner's boss or The Boss' staff.
"There are some people who've indicated to me," says Skinner, " that they felt that was the spin that was put it." The "spin" to use Skinner's words would be the suggestion that he wasn't really supportive of Danny Williams' ABC, anti-Harper campaign.
Skinner indicates that he apologized to the Premier, although an apology seems odd if there really wasn't anything that he said in the beginning that he ought to apologise for. On the same day Danny's only outside ally in the War on Harper went down to defeat at the hands of a Harper ally, there just wasn't any way Danny Williams wanted to spend any time suggesting that - despite the obvious comments - he had at least one minister prepared to say publicly that he was interested in getting on with the job and leaving the loafer-pissing to someone else. Skinner's not alone in the caucus or the cabinet. He's just the one with the cajones to say so publicly, even if inadvertently.
After all, Skinner's reason for calling Open Line this morning - supposedly on his own initiative - was to explain that what some people might attribute to him was not what he meant.
Why apologize for something you didn't say?
Supposedly didn't say.
You can follow the click to Offal or just watch the video below.
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Jonathan Crowe: But I mean, your boss is saying "Anybody But Conservative" in the next election. That's gotta be difficult when you meet Minister Hearn out in the lobby and shake hands.
Hon. Shawn Skinner: Not for me, it isn't. My boss can vote for who he wishes. He can mark his 'X' where he wishes to mark it. From my perspective, I have a job to do. I'm elected by the people of St. John's Centre. I'm in cabinet representing the people of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and I have a job to do. And I'm going to do that to the best of my ability.
If and when there is a federal election, we all as individual citizens can make up our own minds what we want to do. I'm here today as a provincial minister and I'm carrying out my duties as a provincial minister.
These words are causing Skinner such problems that he apparently felt the need - or more likely was ordered - to call Randy Simms just now and explain that he was completely behind his Leader in the anti-Harper campaign.
And Randy bought Skinner's explanation.
Problem solved.
Not at all.
First of all, Simms seems rather quick to accept one side of a story these days even if the other side is equally plausible and neither side has been proven correct by an independent review. Think fundraising, accountants and a shoe that has yet to drop on that set of ledger books.
Second, Skinner's comments are pretty obviously out of step with Danny Williams' plan to fight against the federal Conservatives. One would have to be willfully blind to miss the sentence "my boss can vote for who he wishes," followed right away by the clear statement that meanwhile I, Shawn Skinner, am elected by the people of my district to represent them.
Skinner's been known to make some ill-advised remarks, but it's pretty hard to imagine in this instance that he didn't mean what he said or that he was taken "out of context". bankrupting the province was obviously out of context and Simms and other news media jumped all over that one.
Here, though, we have another matter. It's highly likely - as in, bet the farm on it - that there is some disagreement within the current administration with the ongoing war with Ottawa.
That disagreement on Williams' policy is reflected in Skinner's remarks. It's blatantly obvious.
Cabinet ministers represent the people of the province and need to have a working relationship with whichever administration is in power in the federal government. Most don't have that right now and the only way to fix it is to get Danny to settle the blood feud.
The problem for local Tories is all the worse given that most of them are good friends with their Conservative counterparts and have been working the same campaigns and same backrooms for years. They certainly wouldn't want to campaign against Tom Osborne, for example, or Jack Byrne should those fellows actually take a run for federal politics. Given the internal Tory fractures, it would very hard for Danny Williams to deploy a cohesive political force behind any Liberal or New Democrat candidate. Williams might be able to force Shawn Skinner to tug the forelock and apologise to Williams publicly because Shawn likes the cabinet job he holds.
But would Shawn be prepared to pull a Scott Simms and go knocking doors for the New Democrat in St. John's South?
This schism within the local Tories is apparent enough that the federal Conservatives are working to exploit it. Loyola Hearn and his federal friends are nowhere near as politically stunned as Lorraine, Yvonne and the other Danny. Case on point: the letters on disaster compensation. Don't think they came from the provincial side of the racket. There are other, less obvious signs, but the signs are there that the Connies are trying to wedge open those cracks in the Danny Williams team just a wee bit wider than they are.
And Shawn?
Well, he just said what other local Tories are saying behind closed doors and in small groups, just like some have started to explore leadership options for the time only a few short months from now when we will be in a post-Danny Dannyland.
The next few months are going to be very interesting.
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