Highly Diffused Government #nlpoli

By now, plenty of people in Newfoundland and Labrador have likely heard finance minister Jerome Kennedy’s comments about his party’s last election platform.

“You used the word promise,”  Kennedy said to the Telegram’s James McLeod.  “I’m not sure that the Blue Book can be described as a promise.”  Kennedy said that the platform contained a bunch of what he called “initiatives” that his party planned to implement between 2011 and 2015.  Everyone had to bear in mind that “there’s always the caveat that the commitments will be made having regard to the fiscal situation of the province.”

Make out of that what you want.  Some people have already made fun or harrumpfed through the odd Tweet or two.  McLeod noted in an story on Wednesday that Kennedy’s new warning about calling them “promises” is at odds with the Conservative during the election.

What’s more interesting thing to what McLeod might call a political uber-nerd is what the transcript reveals about how the Conservatives operate.

Ministerial Whimsy #nlpoli

Ever wonder why the provincial government passes laws and then never puts them into force?

Like the Sustainable Development Act that the Conservatives pushed through the House in 2007 and then abandoned.

Or the Court Security Act they passed in 2004, ignored for six years, then brought back with a couple of minor changes to the wording, repealed the old Act they’d never implemented, and passed through the House the new one as…wait for it… the Court Security Act, 2010. <fake dramatic music noise>Dunt…dunt… dah.

Literacy plan still MIA #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Newfoundland and Labrador has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country.

There’s a huge demand for skilled labour in the province and that illiteracy level doesn’t help.

The 1992 Strategic Economic Plan recognised the connection between literacy and economic development:  it’s not like government officials weren’t generally aware of the concept.

And yet:

“There are no province-wide initiatives to deal with family literacy, aboriginal literacy, English as a Second Language, GED (General Educational Development) preparation or workplace literacy and essential skills,” [Literacy NL executive director Caroline Vaughan] said.

That’s a killer quote taken from a story the Telegram ran Monday about a news release from Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador.  They are wondering where the heck the strategic literacy plan went. 

The Telegram again:

Literacy NL said is was told by the province last September the plan would be released in the 2011 calendar year.

In case you are left scratching your head, be assured that the provincial government started work on a literacy plan in 2008.  They even had consultations.

As you can see from the picture, they started work on it so long ago that the link is dead from the news release announcing the consultation to the consultation document. In fact if you try and find anything on “literacy” in the education department, you’ll find yourself out of luck.  Most the links in this search your humble e-scribbler tried on Monday night turned up 404s – page not found. Ditto another search run from the front page of the government website.

You really couldn’t make this shit up.

If you want a strategic literacy plan from the government, you can find one.

It’s a link to one developed 11 years ago when Judy Foote was education minister.

You really, really couldn’t make this up.

And if you want to find the adult learning and literacy section, you will have to guess that it is now part of Joan Burke’s new department of advanced learning and skills development.  The government’s website won’t tell you where it is, though.

A search of the advance education department website for “literacy plan” redirects to a search of the old human resources, labour and employment department. That’s foolish since adult literacy belonged to education before the recent re-organization. Luckily for the government types, people who have a problem with literacy likely don’t have enough computer knowledge to get totally frigged up by the government’s website. They wouldn’t be able to get to the advanced education site to get misdirected by the search engine.

You really, really, really could not make this stuff up.

That’s not to say that successive ministers of education haven’t done something about adult literacy.

In 2010, education minister Darin King issued a news release that endorsed an awareness program on literacy being launched by the four Atlantic provinces.

In 2009, the education department issued a news release on behalf of the Council of the Federation to announce the Council had recognised someone here for achievement in adult literacy.

Aside from those news releases, though, the education department hasn’t been able to deliver the latest update to the provincial literacy plan. 

Regular readers of these e-scribbles will be noticing a familiar pattern here.  For whatever reason, the current administration cannot seem to deliver anything. They’ve got a chronic problem.:

• Serial Government:  the “Northern Strategic Plan” that was out of date before they released it.
• Serial Government:  the original business department.
• What plan was that again? The NSP also wasn’t much of a plan;  it was pretty much just a list of spending.  Sounds suspiciously like the $5.0 billion infrastructure “strategy” in the most recent Auditor General’s report.
• A list as long as your arm:  Check the section on building maintenance in the AG report and you’ll find another example of government’s fundamental management problems.  Hundreds of buildings need repairs.  Some need so much overdue maintenance work it would be cheaper to tear the buildings down and build a new one.
• The missing oil royalty regime:  according to the energy plan from 2007, the Tories were supposed to deliver a natural gas royalty regime (under development since 1997) as well as a completely new oil royalty regime.  They posted something called a gas royalty in April 2010 but the thing isn’t back by regulations.  Is it real or just a fake?
• There’s also the churn in senior management.
• And the fact that massive cost over-runs and delays are now the norm in provincial government public works.

The literacy plan joins a long list of commitments that are missing in action or went missing for years.

You can read Literacy NL’s  submission to the consultation on the literacy plan here.

- srbp -

The real story of the Ottawa office #nlpoli

Nobody’s been in the job since since January 2010.

There’s no evidence that the two people who held the job actually did anything substantive during the time from 2004 to 2010 that someone held down the position known derisively as the Ambassador or – as your humble e-scribbler preferred – the Premier’s Personal Envoy to Hy’s.

And yet it still took Premier Kathy Dunderdale a full year and then some of her own term as Premier, plus the experience of interviewing a few potential replacements to realise what Premiers before Williams knew:  the whole thing was a foolish waste of time.

Lord sufferin’ dynamite, Old Man.

That is absolutely stunning.

And it tells you so much about how two successive Premiers and their administrations actually work.

They led with their strong suit:  the hyper-torqued official announcement that was long on the bullshit and short on the truth.  As a result, most of the conventional media reports were full of it, too.  Take the Ceeb’s account as an example of the type.

As some media accounts of the Premier’s scrum with reporters make it sound, Dunderdale has found a new way of doing things, what with ministers, deputy ministers and other officials talking to their federal counterparts.  And with communications better now that Kath and Steve are on the same wavelength, the Ottawa office is just not needed anymore.

No sir.  There’s a new energy in town and, by gosh, the release assures us all “it made sense to have our Intergovernmental and Aboriginal Affairs Secretariat assume responsibility, over the long term, for the functions that would have been carried out through the Ottawa office.”

Whatever functions the office did perform – there were no people in it, evidently – they were such that over a six year period, the big job in the office sat vacant for about half the time.  So whatever the crowd in Intergovernmental Affairs are taking on, odds are it wasn’t much.  They will just carry doing what they have done since the 1970s:  deal with their federal and provincial counterparts on a variety of issues.

So you caught that, right?

Since the 1970s, IGA has been doing all the things people claim this personal envoy job did. And they kept doing it all the way through the time this office existed, whether someone worked in it or not.

Now while your humble e-scribbler can say this based on his own knowledge of the provincial government and from seven years in the Premier’s Office, you really don’t have to go by that alone.

Consider the version of events by no less a person than Bill Rowe, the first personal envoy to Hy’s,  Rhodes Scholar, radio host, writer and secret police report leaker extraordinaire.  His insider’s account of things he was outside the room for made it plain Rowe did nothing while he was there.

There is no mention in the book’s of anything Rowe actually accomplished.  Well, aside from wait around for a cell phone and a laptop and arrange to have his used snow tires shipped up to him from Sin Jawns.  Like there was no place up there to buy new ones. 

Now Rowe sold a lot of those books.  Mainlanders are especially gullible, it turns out.  Hopefully, the guy made a few bucks of the book.  But if he only cleared a twonie, then his time in Ottawa at taxpayers’ expense was infinitely more productive for Rowe than it was for the people who footed the bill for his sojourn on the Rideau.

Our man in a Blue Line cab – Rowe’s eventual successor - did no better, although he stayed longer. Danny Williams acknowledged as much when Fitz packed it in at the end of his one and only contract.  Williams found him a nice new job back home.  Williams insisted the office in Ottawa would remain open, to be filled eventually with some other incumbent.

Kathy Dunderdale said the same thing after Danny handed over the Premier’s Office to her. Last June,

“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.”

Nothing changed in the intervening six months or so, except Dunderdale’s talking points. The bottom line remains now as it has since Danny Williams decided to give his old alum chum a nice perk;  the job was a total waste of public money.  Public servants in this province and cabinet ministers never stopped doing the work they and their predecessors have done.

The fact that it took the Tories two years to shut the office down and that it took Kathy Dunderdale a full year to arrive at an incredibly simple  - and glaringly obvious – conclusion tells you this is a government that consistently has a hard time getting things done.

In other words, not a thing has changed since the serial government took office.

- srbp -

Rumpole and the Old, Old Story

The sorry tale of the Summer of Discontent in Gander turns out to be a much sorrier tale than first appeared.

At the end of a story entitled “One Judge Short” from last February (not online), The Beacon reported that then-provincial Court Chief Judge Reg Reid had “requested the minister fill the position [in Gander] as quickly as possible.” 

It seems that justice minister Tom Marshall could have used the same list of candidates from which he picked Don Singleton for a round of musical judicial chairs to also find a name to fill the vacancy in Gander.

When the Singleton appointment went sour, though, Marshall did nothing with either of the two vacancies.  Nor did he do anything with the list of candidates in front of him either – except flick it to one side - even though there were other names on it of people who not only met the bare minimums set out in the legislation but exceeded them. 

And that was six months ago.

In the meantime, not only are there still vacancies in Gander and St. John’s yet to be filled but two more have turned up.

Chief Judge Reg Reid retired in April.  That leaves newbie Judge Mark Pike in the role of assistant chief judge, a position that appears to have been created for him to fill but there is still a new vacancy in St. John’s.

On top of that, Judge Joe Woodrow – familiar to visitors to Courtroom Number Seven  - opted to retire in February and now sits on a per diem basis (as required).

There you have it:  three judges’ seats in St. John’s empty and one in Gander, all of which need to be filled.  Plus – and for some equally unfathomable reason – cabinet has not gotten around to appointing a replacement for Reid even though he’s been gone since April.  The chief judge’s job is a cabinet appointment, you see.

As a sign of how serious the problem is in Gander, consider that The Beacon reported last February the issue came up at a Gander town council meeting that month.

The chair of the town’s economic development committee wanted someone to have a chat with Hander member of the House of Assembly Kevin O’Brien.  The prospect of having cases directed to other towns caused some furrowed brows, it seems, since the people attending trials in Gander bring with them a certain benefit to the local innkeepers and restauranteurs. The slowdown in the courthouse meant a slowdown in the local economy.

Now this sort of dithering and delay is nothing new either for the justice department or the current administration as a whole.

Retired justice Bill Marshall (no relation) has been working on not one but two separate “reviews” one of which appears to have been underway since 2004.  Not a thing has come of either review and the government is also refusing to release any information about the status of either review.

Since 2003, a surprising number of senior public service positions have gone without a permanent appointment for periods of up to two years.  Some are appointed on an acting basis for extraordinarily long times and for no apparent reason. In other instances, legislation is passed but  not put into effect and in other instances, reports and promised policies have sat untended for two or three years.  It’s all part of the “missing in action” syndrome that befalls chunks of government these days.

Now part of the cause of all this might be that the appointments to the bench are supposed to be made  - ultimately - by the Lieutenant Governor-in-Council.  That’s legalese ease for cabinet.  And, if the practice with deputy ministers is any indication, “cabinet appointment” now means the picks are made by the Premier Himself and only the Premier.

And if he is pre-occupied with other things, no matter what those other things are, … well, that’s been pretty much the old, old story of this administration since Day One.

-srbp-

5 years and counting: still no sustainable development act

A 2003 Provincial Conservative election promise  - to ensure that economic development and the environment were in sync  - remains unfilled five years after the Provincial Conservatives took power and two years after the law was passed by the province’s legislature.

The province’s Sustainable Development Act, passed by the legislature in early 2007, has not been proclaimed and is therefore not law.

In the meantime, the provincial government’s energy corporation is proceeding with development of the Lower Churchill, including a plan to sling high-voltage power lines through a UNESCO World Heritage site.

That certainly wouldn’t be the popular impression since then-environment minister Clyde Jackman issued a news release in June 2007 that made it sound like the Act was in place:

The sustainable management of the province’s natural resources is now enshrined in the Sustainable Development Act that was passed in the current session of the House of Assembly. Sustainable development will ensure the province’s renewable and non-renewable resources are developed to maximize benefits for the province, while protecting the natural environment so that future generations have the ability to meet their own needs.

The release said more than half a million dollars had been set aside in 2007 to establish the advisory committee that is at the heart of the act.  No legislation, though meant no committee.

The unproclaimed act featured prominently in the Provincial Conservative Party’s 2007 election campaign platform.  The second blue print also made it sound as though the act was in force and work was underway:

Through our new Sustainable Development Act, we will ensure that development proceeds in harmony with our natural environment, securing our greatest natural strengths while promoting eco-friendly enterprise.

…

• enforce the provisions of the Sustainable Development Act regarding the responsible and sustainable development of our natural environment, ensuring that our resource development decisions address the full range of environmental, social and economic values and that workers, environmentalists, industry, communities, aboriginal peoples and others have a say in how our resources are managed. [Emphasis in original]

Without the sustainability act in place, there can be no enforcement of its provisions.

Without the act, there is also no Strategic Environmental Management Plan, even though the provincial government committed to have one in place by 2009.

The SEMP was supposed to be the document that put the commitment to environmentally sustainable economic development into action.

-srbp-

Your serial government at work

There's a northern "strategic plan" for Labrador.

Labrador is north, so that bit is redundant.

Well, unless the plan is for northern Labrador.

Anyway...

As the news release notes, this "plan" fulfils a commitment from the 2005 throne speech. That means it has taken two full years to generate this document.

That's a pretty long time, especially considering that things like a wind power project and Lower Churchill development have already started in the case of the latter, or been postponed (the former) while this plan was being developed.

So what's the thrust of the document? Well, there is the obligatory commitment to sweeping goals of making things "better". There is plenty of cash committed here and that likely is the real purpose of the document: spending in an election year.

Other than that, most of the initiatives in the plan are already in train or are the sorts of things that one might expect, like building schools where needed and improving access to health care.

There is a curious one under natural resource development:

Support Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro to conduct an ACOA funded assessment of technical options for natural gas developments off Labrador...

If Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro is going to get into oil and gas development, then that could be a good thing. It could be - conditional language - since we don't know what Hydro's role will look like or what the financial implications are.

In this specific case, the technical options for developing gas offshore Labrador could be explored and likely would be explored - if they have not been explored already - by the license holders.

It is curious that the Hydro corporation will be studying these options. But it is even more curious that studying the options requires federal funding through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA). Surely Hydro has enough retained earnings to fund the study.

Beyond that, though and aside from all the good things to happen in Labrador, this document bears all the marks of something completed over two years ago. Note the number of phrases which project ore shipments and employments levels...for 2006. In early 2007, those projections should be easy since the year is past. Hindsight is always more accurate than foresight.

This is your serial government at work.

Not only does it take two years to complete a "strategy", but the strategy contains no concrete measurable goals to judge success. Major strategic decisions on everything from a new hydroelectric project, delay of a wind power project and decisions on new mine developments in western Labrador are all taken before the "strategy" is in place. On top of that, document is actually held up through the bureaucratic process to the point where it is announced fully two years after it started.

Surely it would have been nice to develop an actual strategy, one that lays out the guiding principles for its various components like health care and resource development.

Surely it would have been nice to have those principles before decisions are made.

-30-