David Cochrane called it right the other day in the scrum with Kathy Dunderdale. He asked if she was laying the groundwork for a failure at the trade talks, a failure of her personal position.
Dunderdale denied it in the scrum, but her latest claim – full of the same vague and largely unsubstantiated claims as on Monday – sounds like someone who is trying to blame someone else before the talks finish and the end result doesn’t match what she’s been personally staking out as a position.
Federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue wrote a letter to the Telegram to take issue with a previous correspondent in the province’s largest circulation daily:
In a letter you published recently, Kate MacDonald of Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s suggested that Newfoundland’s concerns have been “neglected” in Ottawa under the current Conservative government.
This could not be further from the truth.
Penashue then rattles off a bunch of thing the federal Tories have done while “both opposition parties either opposed or flip-flopped on these initiatives”.
Big fat hairy deal.
Seriously.
Who gives a frig?
What’s really interesting about this letter is the letter itself. A federal cabinet minister has to write a letter to the local paper taking exception to the comments of a vote. The question most people would ask is “why?”.
The answer is right at the end:
In closing, Ms. MacDonald was wrong to call me a “lapdog.” She should know that our province has produced only two dog breeds, the Newfoundland dog and the Labrador.
Like me, both are excellent working dogs but very poor lapdogs.
It’s the rule of opposites.
If it were otherwise - that is, if Penashue wasn’t some federal politician’s bitch - Penashue wouldn’t have to write a letter and compare himself to dogs in order to rebut the assumption is a “lapdog”. People would know it already. And Penashue would be confident that people knew. So he wouldn’t have to write a letter to the paper.
Besides, Penashue’s letter is wrong. More than two dog breeds originated in the province. He – or perhaps his mainland ghost-writer – should have checked. There is the Newfoundland and the Labrador. But the Labrador derived from another breed: the water dog.
And of course, people from Labrador are probably wondering how Penashue forgot about the Labrador variant of husky known, oddly enough as the Labrador Husky.
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Ed Martin from Nalcor and Chris Huskilson from Emera held a news conference in St. John’s on Friday to announce that they will not have a deal on Muskrat Falls finished by the January 31 deadline.
They issued a short, joint statement in addition to holding a news conference.
Ed Martin:
We have made significant progress on the agreements and we are nearing completion; however, we will not have all the detailed work completed by January 31 as previously stated.
We do have the majority of agreements completed. This consists of thousands of pages of contract details. Our next steps are to finalize all the detail in the agreements and complete our internal reviews and due diligence.
Both parties are committed to a quality outcome and we want to ensure clarity in these agreements.
Chris Huskilson:
The principles of the term sheet are still the foundation of all discussions and they have not changed.
We understand that there will be some people who will believe this is more significant than it is and we feel compelled to emphasize that our relationship is strong, the term sheet principles remain and they are guiding our work.
We continue to make progress and we will ensure that people are informed once we have finalized the agreements.
This is the second deadline the companies missed. Last November they slide the deadline from the end of that month until the end of January.
They announced the development with a simple statement:
“We are making good progress on the agreements,” said Ed Martin, President and CEO of Nalcor Energy. “However, we need more time to complete the volume of work required. Our relationship with Emera remains strong and both parties are committed to a quality outcome. These are important agreements and we’ll take the time to do them right."
Nalcor and Emera are targeting year‐end for completion of key agreements and both parties will then conduct review and due diligence prior to the end of January.’'
"We remain committed to the principles of the Term Sheet and look forward to finalizing an agreement with our partner Nalcor this year,” said Chris Huskilson,
President and CEO of Emera Inc. “This is an agreement that will be mutually beneficial for our customers in the region for decades to come. The additional time we are taking is modest in the grand scheme of things.”
Note the similar words.
But note the differences:
This time there is no new deadline even though they have completed “the majority” of the agreements. Last fall they said they would finish the agreements within a month and then allow another month for “due diligence”.
This time they actually came to St. John’s to make a big deal about the missed deadline. That made sure people would wonder about the high level of sensitivity the companies had to the possibility that some people might get the wrong idea.
Whoever those unnamed people are, they have enough influence to frighten the shit out of the two companies. You can tell because Huskilson actually mentioned their concern in his bit of the statement: "We understand that there will be some people who will believe this is more significant than it is …”
As it is, the big show in St. John’s telegraphed that maybe the deal isn’t so secure after all. Think of it like trotting out the deathly ill despot so people won’t speculate that he is about to kick off. They usually only do that right before he snuffs it, thereby confirming the rumours were right all along.
And if you really want to know how not to reassure people, try this line from Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter in Friday’s Chronicle Herald:
"They're now not even going to bother to set another deadline because they feel they're close to getting it completed, which I think is all a very good thing. It's all very good news, in fact."
It’s the Rule of Opposites, or the rule of opposites or the rule of opposites or the rule of opposites.
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The Premier, who had already indicated plans to seek another term, says that's the plan. And Williams quips, he's in politics for the long haul.
That courtesy of the radio station known derisively as voice of the cabinet minister who even supplied the audio version:
“Nothing has changed for me… so I am looking at possibly another four terms.”
Translation: apply the rule of opposites. Now there’s a concept people should be very familiar with.
And if by some chance he did stay at it for another four terms – 16 years – then Danny Williams would be both the oldest person sworn in as Premier since 1949 and the oldest person to leave the office.
Williams turns 61 this year and would be pretty close to 80 if he actually won four more general elections.
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