Only a couple of years ago, national media were writing about all the women running provincial governments across Canada.
No less a pair of authorities as Jeff Simpson and Kathy Dunderdale agreed that politics would be different because all these women were around and, aw shucks, the gals just do things differently from the men.
The experience has proven to be far less than the promise.
Dale Kirby and Christopher Mitchelmore shifted their desks in the House of Assembly on Tuesday from the independent or unaffiliated part of the chamber to sit with the Liberals.
They left the New Democratic Party last fall voicing concerns as they left about Lorraine Michael’s leadership and the lack of election readiness in the party that had, in 2012, at one point topped the polls in the province.
The news on Tuesday was probably the least surprising news of any that’s happened in provincial politics in the past six months, but that didn’t stop some people from moaning about it.
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.
As the story goes, the crowd currently running this place were all set to issue a news release that the first woman premier in the province’s history was announcing the appointment of the first woman clerk of the House of Assembly.
Then someone quietly pointed out that another Premier had already done that.
In the 1970s.
Her name was Elizabeth Duff.
Darin King failed miserably in his first encounter with the opposition parties.
He didn’t have to.
After a wild weekend in Suburbia in the Woods, the province’s ruling Conservatives turned up all over the talk radio shows going on about how there were so many Tiny Tories at the convention and how a chunk of the provincial executive was made up of people under 30 years of age.
Clearly, the Tories are bothered by something to do with age, as in they are loaded down at the top end with people who aren’t young. Like say the Old Man, who was the oldest person elected Premier when he took office in 2003.
Or Kathy Dunderdale, who beat Danny by a good few years to be the oldest person ever elected Premier.
Or maybe they are just a-feared of the province’s New Democrats.
Tom Hedderson would probably like a do-over. Responding to an opposition call for a ban on road-side pesticide use by Hedderson’s department, the minister compared the toxicity of the chemical defoliant his people use to table salt.
And table salt was worse!
In politics, that sort of comment can be demonstrably true but it can also be one of those moments where that truth doesn’t matter as much as other truths.
Two posts, quite a distance apart touch on the same basic political (science) issue: the role of the local, get-out-the-vote effort in any political campaign.
The temperature in the House of Assembly is not even cooled down and Tory legislator Paul Lane (Mount Pearl South) is likely to find himself in the middle of a controversy involving the disclosure of personal information that is supposed to be protected under the Access to Information and Protection of Personal Privacy Act.
To some people the provincial Conservatives are in fine political shape. They are so firmly entrenched in power that they can afford to piss people off, to polarise the electorate.
There is always time to recover.
Yeah well, when you humble e-scribbler started predicting that Danny Williams would not run for a third term, plenty of people thought that was crazy too, and said so. 18 months before the event it seemed impossible. Even a few weeks and days in advance, the Old Man looked like he planned to stay until he died in office.
Funny how things change.
"I would go to an election tomorrow on these numbers," Premier Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Thursday. "You know, these aren't bad numbers. Look where my opposition is."
Fair enough. They are pretty good. It’s the trending that sucks.
But if Kathy Dunderdale is so confident in her strong public support and in the rightness of her Muskrat Falls cause, maybe she’d drop the writ and let the public settle the issue.
In eight years time, they may find that many of the changes they hoped for, like massive new industries, will still be little more than the fodder for someone else's rhetoric.Karma is a bitch, after all.
The gatekeepers of the natural transmission route through Quebec were denying us fair opportunity to get the power to market, and having been burnt once on the Upper Churchill, we were determined not to let that happen again.Quebec does not have a stranglehold on Labrador development. It’s that simple.
Failure to take the right course of action today would be no different than taking the wrong course of action a generation ago.Rejecting Muskrat Falls – even if it made perfect sense for economic and rational reasons – would be an emotional failure according to Kathy Dunderdale’s construction.
When you are home with a cold, there’s not much to do besides doze and read.
And when you are a political nerd at home with a cold, what better prezzie could there be than the papers presented at the Midwest Political Science Association? Not much, is the answer, except the Monkey Cage, which offered up the links to the MPSA and a bunch of other gems.
Here’s one from the Monkey Cage to hold you until the old e-scribbler brain is de-fuzied.
The Oil Curse: New book. Along with oil goes less democracy and economic instability. Who knew?
There are four qualities of oil revenue, according to Michael Ross that make them so attractive to governments. Your humble e-scribbler broke them out from Erik’s =post to make them easier to read quickly:
On that last one it was interesting to watch the evening news the past couple of days. People are talking about home care and crumbling infrastructure. No one mentioned the $4.0 billion in cash the provincial government is sitting on.
Now they haven’t hid it completely. The number is in the budget and other documents. It’s just hidden in plain site, so to speak.
Oh and it is going to pay for Muskrat Falls, in case you missed that little point. Muskrat Falls becomes – in effect – a giant tax on the public, incidentally, but that’s another issue. If no one “authoritative” speaks about it and no one in the media reports it, then it doesn’t really exist. Come to think of it, that point is in among the conference papers somewhere.
Anyway, ask Kathy, Dwight and Lorraine about The Cash sometime.
See what the Muskrat backers say.
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Okay so this is about the federal parties, but Rob Silver has a provocative idea.
But why not start a discussion between Liberals, New Democrats, Red Tories, and young people who have never been a member of a political party in their lives about a new vehicle – a new party. Consider it a blank slate. If we were starting from scratch, what would we fight for? How would we organize ourselves? So while there would still by definition be trade-offs (unless you start a new party by yourself, it's impossible for there not to be in politics), hopefully by starting something new, instead of squishing together two organizations with existing rules and structures, you could avoid the easy-to-imagine analysis of “who's taking over who,” “who won and who lost” that permeates so much Ottawa groupthink. Instead you'd create a new party for the next century. Naive potentially, I know.
The worst-case scenario? There's nothing there, both parties go on their merry way with new leaders and life goes on. Either there's something there to discuss, or not. Something that can be agreed to, or not. Something that a big enough group of caucus and membership of the parties are willing to leave their existing party in favour of, or not.
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One crowd can’t even successfully rig a process they set out to rig from the start. So now the Premier wants to have a debate she earlier rejected as unnecessary in a legislature she once called dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, another crowd of politicians decides to frig off to Ottawa to support one individual’s personal campaign to be the next Labrador member of parliament when they should have been home working on a much bigger issue for the whole province.
Both speak to a fundamental lack of competence.
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People aren’t stupid. They just don’t know stuff.
Politicians are no different.
In Kathy Dunderdale’s case, labradore had an absolutely devastating post last week about the Premier’s reaction to the impact that federal budget cuts might have on the province. The Premier said that there were only 500 hundred or 600 federal employees in the province so the jobs losses might be only 20 or 30.
As labradore noted:
As per Statscan's CANSIM Table 183-0002, there was an annualized average of about 7400 full-time-equivalent (FTE) federal government jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2011.
A five to six percent reduction in federal employment, if applied uniformly across the country, would result in the elimination of about 375 to 450 fedgov FTEs in the province.
“Would result” might be more accurately stated as “might result” since we still need to see lots of details to tell exactly how the federal budget cuts will work out in practice.
But still, Dunderdale was a long way off on the math. The potential size of the cuts could be 15 times larger than Dunderdale projected, unless she has some inside information she isn’t sharing. So yeah close, if by close you mean one fifteenth of the possible number.
For another tale of information and politics, consider Lorraine Michael and Dwight Ball on this week’s edition of On Point with David Cochrane. Toward the end of their segment, Ball noted how much his view of Muskrat Falls has shifted in the past year. He’s gone from support to something a little less than complete support.
Note two things. First, Ball supports Muskrat Falls; not surprising, the entire Liberal caucus does. He just thinks the government should wait a second and look at those other ideas before going ahead. The only difference between Ball and Dunderdale is how fast he would approve the project.
Second, Ball obviously trusts the provincial government completely and implicitly. Odds are, Ball assumed that he didn’t need to think about Muskrat Falls. He didn’t need to listen to the critics. Heck, he could just assume the critics were kooks and crackpots. They had to be wrong because government has all those smart people working there.
This sort of thinking doesn’t apply just to Ball and the Liberals. You could say the same thing of Lorraine Michael and the New Democrats.
Heck, listen to the politicians on the panel that Cochrane assembled for the weekend’s show and you’d hear much the same thing, in one version or another. Shawn Skinner likes Muskrat Falls. He just thinks the government may have undermined support for the project by the way they’ve responded to critics and sped along the public utilities board review.
Federation of labour president Lana Payne said basically the same thing. Splendid project undermined by a lousy sales job. One representing the government view and the other representing an opposition party and both believe exactly the same thing.
Interesting.
Skinner used to be a provincial cabinet minister. You expect him to love this project. But the Liberals and the New Democrats can only muster up a minor criticism of the Tories based on process alone.
Seems odd.
Seems stunningly superficial, and to be frank, it is.
They accept the government’s contention about natural gas without question, as well. None of the oil companies want to develop it, supposedly, because they can’t make money at it, therefore, natural gas sitting off our shores is unavailable to the people of the province to meet their own energy needs.
In any other place on the planet, the government would be pushing for the development of the cheapest source of energy for its own people. In Newfoundland and Labrador, all but a couple of politicians – literally no more than two at the moment - agree that people should have one of the most expensive forms of electricity available instead and give away some of it to other people. The only quibbles are about things like how best to convince the public they should pay for their electricity through the nose.
Now given the earlier comments they made – Dwight Ball was surprised to find all these cheaper alternatives that hadn’t been explored – you’d think maybe that Ball, Payne and the others might start to wonder if everything else Kathy Dunderdale and the Tories have been saying but be less than accurate as well. Maybe the problem with Muskrat falls is a bit more complicated than just some lousy marketing decisions.
Evidently not.
Now when most of us don’t know stuff, that’s one thing.
But when politicians - the people we trust to look after stuff – don’t know stuff, or don’t bother to learn stuff, that’s a whole other thing entirely.
And that whole other thing sure as heck ain’t good.
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Poke around some political websites over the past couple of months and you’ll find a few columns on the question of how much voters are paying attention to politics in the run-up to the American presidential election.
These will give you a good sample:
Take a few minutes and read those articles. One of the things you’ll appreciate when you get to the last one is that, as Matt Corley points out, voters aren’t stupid. That is, they don’t lack the intellectual ability to figure something out and make a decision. What they lack is information about some subjects.
The issue that those three articles all mention is gasoline prices. American presidents can’t do much to change gasoline prices. Most Americans apparently think he can. Not surprisingly, therefore, Republican candidates spend a chunk of their time bashing Barack Obama over American gasoline prices.
We’ve had the same issue here within the last decade. The incumbent Liberals introduced something called Petroleum Products Pricing, a system that supposedly regulates the price of gasoline and other fuels and ensures they are “reasonable”. The whole thing was a charade, of course, but the system stays partly because it is popular and partly because it has proven to be a cash cow for government.
That’s not the finest example of public ignorance and the politicians who preyed on it, though. To find that one, you’d have to look at the claim that the federal government took oil royalties from the provincial government through the federal government’s Equalization program. The federal government never did any such thing but that didn’t stop a provincial royal commission and two successive Premiers from going to war with Ottawa to try and right the imaginary wrong.
The second premier started his administration with a jihad over the royalties. They talked about cracking open the 1985 Atlantic Accord and renegotiating it. Finance minister Loyola Sullivan held a news conference in which he announced the shocking news that as provincial government revenues from its own sources went up, Equalization went down. He never bothered to mention that this was exactly how the system was supposed to work.
In the end, he and his boss settled for a $2.0 billion cheque.
And that was the end of it.
Still that didn’t stop a raft of politicians and a few other informed commentators like Wade Locke from suggesting it was much more than that. Some people still believe that the cash windfalls that swelled the provincial treasury from 2006 onward all came from that deal. They didn’t. They came from the oil royalty regimes dating back to 1990 and oil prices that have skyrocketed to historic heights due to international political and economic uncertainty.
People in the province - like people in any part of North America – don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics. And there are a great many things, like the inner workings of Equalization or how oil royalties make money for the province, that they simply leave to other people to figure out.
Voters aren’t stupid. They just leave those things to others, like politicians.
Voters expect those politicians to understand the details of complicated issues. They expect them to look after things while the voters get on with taking the kids to school and hockey practice and all the other stuff that occupies a normal life.
They just don’t expect politicians to tell them things that aren’t true. Sad to say, politicians sometimes seem to have a problem with that one.
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