Patronage and pork #nlpoli

Think of it as classic political news in Newfoundland and Labrador.

VOCM headline: “Premier commits to fixing patronage issues in government”.

At the same time, some people in Western Labrador are  angry at the Premier for closing a small government office in Wabush.

In the VOCM news story, Premier Dwight Ball was referring to the controversy appointment he authorized at The Rooms. Many people consider that patronage because the person who got the appointment had previously been a political staffer in the Opposition office while Ball was Opposition leader.

What makes this a classic political story in Newfoundland and Labrador, though, is that no one sees the other job – the bureaucratic office in Labrador City – as patronage even though that’s what it is.

At the turn of the century, the provincial government relocated departments or bits of departments from St. John’s to other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador.  They called it “regionalization”.  The idea was to spread the “benefit” of government spending around the province instead of concentrating it in St. John’s.

We are not talking about putting a snow clearing depot for the west coast on the west coast.  We are talking about shifting the office of the fire commissioner with seven high paying jobs and putting them in Deer Lake, along with a bunch of people who run provincial parks. The aquaculture division of the fisheries department went to the coastal community of Grand Falls-Windsor, and the medical care commission offices – the folks who pay doctors for their services – went to GFW as well.

“You can do the work anywhere” was a common rationalization for the whole scheme and it certainly is true.  You *can* do these administrative jobs anywhere.  But it was more efficient in many cases to do them in St. John’s, which is, after all, the capital city and administrative centre of government. 

No experience preferred: energy corp pork edition #nlpoli

The provincial government announced the latest round of Pure Pork (TM)  patronage appointments on Friday.  They've stuck four people on the board of the provincial energy corporation.

Aside from Tory ties, the one thing the members of the board have in common is a complete lack of experience related to the operations of the energy corporation.

-srbp-

A bad week for Penashue #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Poor Peter Penashue.

First, the federal Conservative intergovernmental affairs minister gets hammered for stupidly appointing his campaign manager to a position on the offshore regulatory board even though the guy isn’t qualified for the job. The SRBP post spawned a raft of comments in all sorts of places across the province about Penashue’s shameless decision to pork-up his buddy.

Then, on Wednesday, Liberal member of parliament Scott Simms outs Penashue for personally calling federal employees in Penashue’s riding to assure them they are safe from job cuts or transfers. Penashue apparently didn’t call any other federal employees in the province.

You know Penashue got caught doing something wrong.  As CBC reported:

Penashue walked past reporters after question period Wednesday and did not comment.

Since bad news comes in threes sometimes, it all makes you wonder what little rocket Penashue will get up his derriere next.

- srbp -

The Arrogance Factor #nlpoli

Can Len Simms be far behind your humble e-scribbler asked back in June when deputy minister Ross Reid quit his job to run the Tory campaign.

Simms – a former Tory party leader – ditched his patronage appointment in 2007 to work the Tory campaign.

Both got reappointed to their jobs as soon as the Tories was back in office.

The answer to June’s question was an emphatic”yes” on Tuesday as the Tories announced Simms was quitting his job to play at politics for a bit.

For the purposes of analysis, assume both the existence of political arrogance and that the level of arrogance for an incumbent political party grows in proportion to the length of time it is in power.

Arrogance.

That’s about the only way you can explain the Tory sense of entitlements to treat public service jobs as partisan plums they can abuse in this manner, let alone to admit that Simms is a partisan hack and apparently see nothing wrong in what they are doing.

- srbp -

The Politics of Public Spending

Check the local media for the past week and you’ll see a sudden bunch of stories about the series of fire truck announcements provincial politicians of the Tory persuasion are making across the province.

Voice of the Cabinet Minister’s got one.

CBC’s got one.

Apparently there have been 19 announcements or unveilings of new fire trucks, with three more to come.

Municipal affairs minister Fairity O’Brien insists this is just routine stuff and has nothing to do with the provincial election coming in October.

Now ordinarily that would be such a nose puller of a line that one would involuntarily scream “bullshit” at the top of one’s lungs. 

Except that it is Fairity O’Brien. 

In fairitiness to Fairity, the guy who probably can’t remember the name of the  district St. Anthony is in and who bullshitted about planning and emergency response likely does not know that what he said about the fire truck and the truth are two different things.

So let’s just say he has a particularly virulent case of pinochiosis.

And that he’s more full of shite than usual on top of that, besides.

The announcements are all about politics and the upcoming election.  Even Fairity knows it.  As Geoff Meeker pointed out, here’s what Fairity said in his rambling answer to a question on an open line call-in show about the pork announcements.  After denying they were political, O’Brien said:

okay, so the question here in my district is, and I am only speaking for myself, do you want four more years of what you’ve just experienced in the last eight, or do you want to sit in the Opposition, or whatever it may be…

Now sending such an incredibly weak minister as O’Brien out to defend blatant pork-barrel politics is a sign of arrogance or cynicism.  Take your pick which it is; either way is bad.

O’Brien threat, however is one thing:  stupid.  Were Fairity and his colleagues to punish a district for voting for an opposition member, they would only be cutting their own political throats. Ask the Tories from the 1980s what that sort of political extortion netted them. 

Better yet, ask the Tories on the Great Northern Peninsula what even the mere perception of a political vendetta – the air ambulance decision – has netted them since the Tories lost the Straits and White Bay North by-election.

Not much of any good would come back the answer.

If Kathy Dunderdale wanted to send a stupid message to voters about patronage and voting, then she evidently picked the right fellow.  Fairity O’Brien did a fine job for her.

The Tories might have a bigger problem.  They might be faced with an electorate that knows full well this is all about pork and that realises they win pork no matter what way they vote. He who lives by the hock might wind up dying by the hock, so to speak.

All three political parties in the province will be running campaigns this fall built around delivering ever increasing amounts of pork in exchange for votes.  All three political parties agree that the provincial economy is going gangbusters.  So basically there’d be no legitimate reason to justify cutting back any spending.

The choice for voters this fall is not between fire trucks and no fire trucks. It is over how many fire trucks they want. 

Or a search and rescue centre.

Or an offshore supply base.

If you want to see naked electoral pork-barrelling in action, don’t look at fire trucks.

That’s old hat.  The first election fire truck announcements came in 2007.

Look instead at Bay Bulls.

The provincial and federal governments held separate announcements this week to give cash to the same project.  They held separate announcements so the provincial minister – in trouble in his own district – could get some free advertising for himself without the original tree hugging federal cabinet minister horning in.

Federal cash of $1.0 million for an expansion to Pennecon’s offshore supply base at Bay Bulls met the investment criteria for a provincial program.  Now the province will kick another half million.

$1.5 million in public money for a project estimated to cost no more than $2.1 million in total.

The job haul? 

Maybe 15. 

$100,000 per job.

The Tories hand out millions of taxpayer dollars to private businesses, often free of charge  The Newfoundland and Labrador NDP want to give Nova Scotians a free university education. The Liberals and the New Democrats want to give rich people in the province a break on their Hummer fill-ups and cut the cost of heating their luxury homes. Next thing you know the Liberals will resurrect that God-forsaken Stunnel idea just to mark themselves as the stupidest of stupid political parties.

But seriously: the Tories ran in 2007 on the argument that the Liberals would bankrupt the province by spending like drunken sailors.

They simply can’t make the argument any more. No one will believe it is possible to bankrupt the place after Fairity and his buddies spent the last four years spending on anything and everything imaginable.  And they really will find it hard to accept that money is tight if every political party in the province wants to double electricity rates in the province and double the public debt at the same time through this insane Muskrat Falls megadebt project.

Happy days are indeed here again, b’ys.

The only thing missing is the Fonz.

Now that you are squirming a bit, think about what might happen if at the same time people had three parties offering variations on a pork-flavoured platform, they also realised that neither of the leaders would be in their jobs four years from now.

And then wonder what all that might mean in an election where there is nothing to chose from and turn-out might drop by 20%, mostly consisting of Tory voters.

After all, that’s what happened in 2007.  Liberal vote collapsed.  Tory vote declined and the same New Democrats turned out in 2007 that had turned out in 2003.

It could give new meaning to the politics of public spending.

- srbp -

A room with a view of the pork barrel

The provincial ambassador’s office in Ottawa costs the better part of a half million a year to run, hasn’t had an ambassador in it for the better part of the past two years and so Premier Kathy Dunderdale will keep it open because it is so effective.

The office serves a great purpose when it’s functioning the way that it should,” she told a Telegram editorial board [last] Wednesday. “And it’s important to me that we maintain that.”

The thing is the office hasn’t served any purpose except to demonstrate how completely useless it is or how crap Premier’s have been in finding people to occupy the sinecure.

The first incumbent -  former Liberal cabinet minister, former wannabe Conservative candidate, former Liberal candidate and soon-to-be-former radio talk show host Bill Rowe – stayed in the job for about half a year and accomplished exactly squat before packing it in and coming back home.

Rowe – who left politics in the late 1970s after a political scandal about leaked police reports – wrote about his complete waste of tax money in Ottawa in a book that became a national best seller last year.  The book is a litany of slapstick moments like making taxpayer’s foot the bill for shipping his used snow-tires to the nation’s capital or his inability to get Danny Williams’ political and public service bureaucracy to cough up a Blackberry and a laptop for weeks on end.

Your humble e-scribbler has described the book as an insider’s account of events the author wasn’t inside the room for.

As Rowe documents, Danny Williams offered Rowe a key position in the new administration before the 2003 general election. Rowe stayed in his job on-air during the election and took up his ambassadorial appointment as Williams’ personal representative to Hy’s early in 2004.

The second incumbent  - former Memorial University professor John Fitzgerald  - reportedly spent most of his time not meeting with federal officials, that is when he wasn’t hanging out in the Commons visitors gallery.  His tenure in Ottawa coincided with Danny' Williams’ endless feuds with Ottawa for something or other and after a certain point he reportedly had a hard time getting in to see anyone. Regular readers will recall him as Our Man in a Blue Line Cab.

Fitzgerald quietly left Ottawa when his contract ended.  Williams gave him another contract in St. John’s in the classic patronage holding pen of the protocol office.  His official title is “special advisor.”

Before Bill Rowe, the provincial government never maintained an office in Ottawa.  The job of dealing with the federal government fell to officials and ministers, including the Premier.  And more often than not over the past 30 years there has been an office called Intergovernmental Affairs intended to deal specifically with – you guessed it – relations between and among governments in Canada.

So there you have it.  The office has been vacant for more time than it’s been filled, a point labradore makes succinctly.  And when it has been occupied, the incumbents apparently accomplished nothing.

And yet the current Premier wants to keep spending money on an office that has never worked because it is great when it works.

Says more about Kathy Dunderdale’s judgement than anything else, apparently.

- srbp -

The politics of history - editorial version

The history of politics in Newfoundland and Labrador is very much the history of patronage.

The practice is accurately described in this Western Star editorial titled “Independence” (04 September 1956):

If an electorate thinks that the prime purpose of democracy in action is to provide patronage for their particular constituency and the politician gets the feeling that in order to curry votes he has to descend to the level of the electorate, then it is understandable at least why he follows the path of least resistance, expresses no disagreement whatsoever with the party in power, thereby hoping to be able to wheedle from the government patronage and public funds for his constituency where votes will reward him by returning him to office again.

- srbp -

Related:  “The politics of history”

A summer like no other: the labradore analysis

Take a gander at this analysis at labradore of the stunning blizzard of funding announcements from a single ministry in the Williams administration.

More than one third of all releases issued since June 1 have been from a single department and all involve hand-outs of government cash. The traditional ministry of pork – transportation – is in second place with 8% (23 releases).*

Now your humble e-scribbler has another perspective on the Summer of Love, Part Deux in the works, but in the meantime, labradore gives a couple of useful observations:

For two, a whole lot of little funding announcements, of a few thousands to tens of thousands of dollars at most, keeps the public mind dutifully associating Danny Williams-Government with the expenditure of money, in a wide variety of geographic locales, without the sticker shock of using roads, schools, or hospitals to generate happy headlines.

For three, there really isn’t anything of substance going on inside Danny Williams-Government that can be used to keep the flow of Happy News flowing in a pre-pre-election summer. Anything big and important that can be delayed until calendar year 2011, will be. That leaves the smaller stuff.

There will be plenty more small stuff next year - don’t be so foolish – but both those points are dead on the money. It is a perpetual campaign in Newfoundland and Labrador.  The politics never stops. Only the naive and Danny-lovers would have you believe otherwise.

- srbp -

*  Corrects from typo in original.

Connies, pork and electoral ridings

On the federal level, the Globe and Mail reports that the federal Conservatives directed federal spending cash from the stimulus program heavily toward battleground ridings.

Wow.

Connies, pork, patronage and polls all tied together.

Quel surprise.

Meanwhile, in a small province to the east ruled by a Reform-based Conservative Party,  nothing could be further from the truth.

- srbp -

Nothing could be further from the truth: political pavement pork punishment version

As labradore documents yet again, the Premier can deny all he wants that things like paving is apportioned on a partisan basis, with the most money going to districts that vote the “correct” way.

The facts tell a complete different story.

When it comes to Danny Williams’ claims that he doesn’t do political retribution, you might say that nothing could be further from the truth.

The first set of tables show the simple distinction of Tory versus Grit and Dipper.

The second set of tables colour cabinet ministers in a darker blue.

Here’s the 2008 figures:

There’s only one quibble.  Labradore claims that the minister of pavement, as he calls it, is the transportation minister.

As the people of the province discovered during the Rideout resignation fiasco, the whole pavement program is supervised by a political staffer in the Premier’s Office. Some people described this sort of thing as “normal” at the time.

Oh, yes, one more thing:

As labradore also notes, the provincial government no longer gives dollar amounts for road paving done in each district.  They hype the heck out of the cash but they hide the amounts involved.

Purely coincidentally, they stopped giving the dollar figures last year after labradore’s analyses started making the rounds.

Transparent and accountable sounds like “Canada’s New Government”.

-srbp-

It’s always about the money

Former cabinet minister Trevor Taylor, whose surprise resignation last fall triggered a wave of set-backs and problems for the ruling Conservatives, wrote a letter to the newspaper in his former district last week about the air ambulance controversy.

Trev’s argument in a nutshell, paraphrased by your humble e-scribbler:

• “Any intelligent person” would have seen that an independent review of the air ambulance service would lead to government shifting the airplane from St. Anthony, however, it was only through Taylor’s political intervention that the ambulance stayed in St. Anthony.
• Oh yes, and I brought $163 million to the district and [some people] claimed I did nothing.  You elected the other guys.
• Live with your f*ck up.

Did he really mean to suggest he created the situation that triggered the review and relocation, i.e. the incidents in Labrador?

Methinks not.

But the logic is inescapable:  Taylor is effectively taking responsible for the circumstances that existed before the relocation.  If any “intelligent person’ could have foreseen the service needed to be moved, then only Trevor’s political arguments based on something other than the most effective and efficient operation of the service kept it in what Trevor suggests would be the wrong place, were it not for political interference.

Interesting.

Curiously,  he makes no reference to the fact that the review recommending relocation was structured in such a way as to support that conclusion already, not as an independent and open-ended review on the efficient operation of the air ambulance service. 

Oh yes and it is all about money:

During that time I had the complete and unwavering support of the Premier for viable legitimate investments in the district, to the tune of $163 million during the six years we were in government, one of the biggest investments in any district in the province.

And then he finishes with a heartfelt “f- you to his former constituents:

The district voted for change, change is what you are getting.

Trevor’s letter also suggests that there was a deep-seated dissatisfaction with Taylor and no shortage of deep animosity between Taylor and his constituents.Taylor’s letter speaks volumes about how he and his colleagues operate:  pork, for one, and if you read between the lines, payback for the other.

The current administration is viciously partisan in a way not seen in this province since the 1960s.

Maybe that’s why it feels like 1970.

-srbp-

New Year’s Contest: name the new NL senator

So parliament will start anew in the New Year and all the empty seats in the senate will have new bums to fill them.

Who do you think will get the nod?

Who do you think should get the job, if it wasn’t a partisan wank-fest?

Drop a name in a comment space. See if you can beat some of the suggestions on a post from last October.

-srbp-

Job Vacancy – no experience required

Joan Cook retired from the senate on October 6. 

The Chretien-era appointee hit the magic age to retire from what used to be known as the Antechamber to the Kingdom of Heaven.  Used to be the only way most senators left the job and its lovely salary was to die.

That means there is a vacancy from Newfoundland and Labrador just waiting to be filled by Stephen Harper.

Who will get it?

There’s a good question.

-srbp-

Provincial Tory pork star praises federal Connie cash

Local Tory stalwart Len Simms didn’t get the memo.

The former Provincial Conservative heavyweight, now holding down the heavyweight pork-post as head of Newfoundland AND Labrador Housing Corporation is praising the federal government’s stimulus package.

According to voice of the cabinet minister, Simms will have more than double the money to spend on interior and exterior renovations to public property – but hanks to federal cash.

That would be the evil federal government that always does nasty things to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Well, that is, the feds do that at least in the mind of the guy who funnels beaucoup provincial cash into Simms’ bank account.

Simms, you will recall, left his pork-post just long enough to run the Provincial Conservative campaign in 2007.  Just think of it as a form of in-out scheme.

There’s the in part of the scheme.

There’s the out part.

But the back “in” again part is apparently a double-whammy of salary plus pension.

 

-srbp-

Another poll shows the NL starting numbers

Corporate Research Associates released results today of questions posed to a sample of voters in Newfoundland and Labrador in August and the results confirm, in some respects, the picture of the electorate drawn by the recent NTV/Telelink survey.

When asked to indicate which party they would vote for in a federal election, 43% of decided respondents said Liberal, 35% said Conservative, 20% said NDP and one percent indicated they would vote for the Green Party.

Thirty-nine (39) percent were undecided, would not vote or refused to answer. The survey of 402 residents of Newfoundland and Labrador was conducted between August 12 and August 28, 2008.  It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The table shows how the numbers line up with the results of the 2006 general election and the NTV poll. The table should not be read as reflecting a trend.  The Telelink and CRA surveys are sufficiently close together in time so that the results confirm each other. 

	2006 GE	CRA Aug 08	NTV Sept 08
Conservative	42.7	35	31.8
Liberal	42.8	43	42.4
New Democratic Party	13.6	20	19.6
Green	?	1	?
UND/Ref/DK	-	39	55
MoE (95%CL)		+/- 4.9%	+/- 3.3%

 

As indicated in an earlier post, based on the polling data and an analysis of historic voting trends, this breakout would suggest that the four ridings that went Liberal in the last election would remain Liberal but with high margins of victory.  The three ridings held previously by the Conservatives would be potentially tight races.

At least one media report in Newfoundland and Labrador noted that two thirds of decided respondents would not be voting Conservative.  This is not unusual in federal politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, where a majority typically vote for a party other than Conservative. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians typically vote anything but Conservative.

One interesting result from the NTV survey - not covered by the CRA poll - is the feeling by almost two thirds of respondents that the ABC campaign is harming federal-provincial relations.

This is hardly surprising given that the provincial government has been repeatedly claiming that the province is being punished for the Family Feud between the federal and Provincial Conservatives.

As well, there has long been a perception in local politics that districts should side with the perceived winner in an election or risk not receiving road paving, school and hospital construction or other public spending.  The power of pork in traditional politics both federally and provincially remains strong.  A party would not have to threaten this in order for the perception to exist and for it to influence voting behaviour.

As well, while it may not be documented, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that some voters approach voting choice as a lottery in which one must be on the winning side or risk "losing" ones vote.

All of that can have an impact on voting results, especially if the races on the Avalon peninsula indeed are tight. Voters may switch between now and polling day based on perceptions of the national campaign.

Not surprisingly, at least one federal Conservative candidate - Craig Westcott  - has used the argument in several media interviews that the province needs to have an elected representative in the federal cabinet.  Both Westcott and Avalon incumbent Fabian manning have also referred to the need to get past the current wrangling  between the provincial and federal governments in the best interests of the province.  This was not implicitly threatening but reflected - at least by the words and tone - an effort to point at the political benefit of supporting the party which currently leading in the polls and which many observers believe will form another minority government.

-srbp-

Speaking of snouts in troughs...

If the provincial government is so concerned at the high price of ferry tickets to and from Newfoundland (caused by high oil prices), perhaps they might consider a little arrangement.

Supply the federal Crown corporation out of the provincial government's private reserve of light sweet crude from White Rose. The subsidy wouldn't save the federal government anything, but it would do wonders for all the provincial businesses dependent on tourism.

Or, better still, rather than looking for yet another federal hand-out, perhaps the provincial government could chop the HST from hotels, motels, restaurants and from gasoline and diesel. That would definitely stimulate tourism and offset ferry and other transportation cost increases caused by rising fuel prices.

As the for the constitutional commitment, the provincial transportation minister speaks about, perhaps Diane Whelan could read the Terms of Union.

Term 32, section (1) reads:

Canada will maintain in accordance with the traffic offering a freight and passenger steamship service between North Sydney and Port aux Basques, which, on completion of a motor highway between Corner Brook and Port aux Basques, will include suitable provision for the carriage of motor vehicles...

Marine Atlantic's ferry service to and from Newfoundland is among the lowest cost services in the country, bar none on the basis of cost per kilometre travelled.

-srbp-

The politics of pork

Surely someone has noticed two things about the weather and the weather offices lately.

1. As this story notes, people are not happy in Goose Bay at getting their forecasts from Gander. Lack of timeliness, accuracy and similar matters are at issue.

2. To the legion of pork-chasers who pretended that returning the weather office to Gander was about public safety and accuracy in forecasting and not about stick noses into public troughs, did any of you notice the gross inaccuracy of last Monday's forecast in St. John's?

5 cm of snow morphed into 13.8.

Wow, they must have hired the provincial government deficit/surplus forecasters to do weather in their spare time.

Oh and while we are at it, has anyone who reported on the Great Pork Chasing Caper bothered to ask where marine forecasting is done for the Newfoundland and Labrador region?

And aviation?

Yes, it was all about public safety.

In a pig's eye.

-srbp-

De Trenton a Bagotville?

During the last federal election future defence minister Gordo promised battalions for everyone.

In Bagotville Quebec on Friday, he delivered a new air force wing. Not exactly a rapid reaction army battalion, as originally promised but something new.

The official National Defence news release makes it sound like a bit of an odd creature comprising air force personnel that would deploy in a humanitarian crisis. Even the defence minister's speaking notes are vague on the nature of the new organization, which he termed an air expeditionary wing. It will apparently consist of aircraft of an unspecified type along with army personnel, mostly medical and logistics from the sound of it. O'Connor said that Canada's allies are creating this type of organization.

Well, sort of, Gordo.

The American air force uses air expeditionary wings but primarily as collections of air force squadrons to support joint military operations. They aren't self-contained entities with attached soldiers and sailors. They also aren't necessarily permanent organizations. They are pulled together for the mission.

What this Canadian air wing sounds like is a headquarters apparatus that will have aircraft attached to it for mission purposes, while the aircraft will be located somewhere else. The Canadian Forces have been down that road before.

But what about the "battalion" promised to Trenton? Check this story from the Belleville Intelligencer, dated in late June:

"We're trying to acquire land at this moment," he said. "We have to wait and see whether we're successful in acquiring the land.

"I want to resolve the land issue first. If and when we acquire that land, then we can announce what we're proposing to do."

One rumour circulating locally reports the government may move the airborne project to CFB Bagotville, Que., should the Trenton deal fail. When asked for comment on the rumour, O'Connor expressed confidence in the land talks.

Did the Trenton land deal fail that quickly?

Meanwhile, the people in Goose Bay are wondering when Gordo will be heading to their town to deliver on his election pork promises.

-srbp-