CBC confused by repetition of decade-old hospital promise #nlpoli

Maybe the poor folks at CBC were just confused.

Heaven knows it can be confusing with all the announcements of the hospital in Corner Brook since 2007.

"Price tag missing,"  the headline screamed, "as Corner Brook hospital finally gets green light."

The price tag should be missing because... wait for it... the government didn't give the hospital the green light.

Read the very first sentence of the official news release.

Another premier... same health care facility #nlpoli

A gaggle of provincial politicians representing districts along the west coast of Newfoundland turned up in Corner Brook on Friday for another one of the set-piece media events that government's uncommunications bureaucracy loves if only for their mind-numbing sameness.

The headline on the news release is simple:  "Premier announces New Long-Term Care Facility for Corner Brook".  Construction will start this fall, according to the very first sentence.

120 beds for long-term care.  15 beds for palliative (end-of-life) care.  Another 10 beds for rehabilitative care.

The second paragraph - all in bold according to the template so folks know it is a quote from the most important person - starts with the obligatory statement that every action of government and its employees from bowel movements to budgets is guided by the latest Roadmap to Salvation announced last fall in  hideously expensive media event.   As polls showed, no one was impressed by it.

In-house and cheap #nlpoli

Provincial government communications consists chiefly of making up vacuous comments for ministers to recite.

They are called key messages.  In the uncomms-speak of the government bureaucrats,  they are KMs, pronounced Kay-Emmzzz.

On Thursday, two rating agencies downgraded the province's rating with a negative outlook.  Not surprising but definitely not helpful since the government has already exhausted its political capital for nothing thanks to the complete disaster last spring.

Anyway, let's take a look at what Moody's said about the government's finances.  Specifically let's look at what they said about the negative trending.

The persistence of uncommunication in government #nlpoli

For some interesting insights into the way government works, take a look at an access to information request someone submitted for documents related to the bond ratings for the province issued earlier this year.

First, notice that the department responsible for openness and transparency continues to follow the decidedly closed and opaque practice of printing electronic documents,  scanning them, and then posting a picture of the document.  This makes it harder to find information in the documents and use it and of course that is precisely the intent of the practice.

Second, notice the enormous amount of effort spent by finance department officials to obtain comparative credit ratings for other provinces and for Newfoundland and Labrador over time.  It’s a relatively meaningless piece of information but it sucked up an astonishingly large amount of email traffic.

Darin, King of Uncommunication

Plenty of people in Newfoundland and Labrador are running around thinking that, as a result of a bureaucratic error,  a bunch of people at the College of the North Atlantic got more in their pay envelopes than they were entitled to receive.

It’s understandable that they believe this or something like it since that is exactly what is implied in the very careful selection of words education minister Darin King used to reveal this issue on Monday:

Education Minister Discloses Errors Made at
College of the North Atlantic’s Qatar Campus

There is that word right there in the headline on the release:  “errors”.

That same idea is also there in the release itself, referring to “salary overpayments”, and “errors” that were “made in determining salaries”.

All through his comments in the House of Assembly on Tuesday, King kept using the word “error”:

I made a release yesterday that fully disclosed to the Province an error that has been made to the tune of approximately $5 million. I also made it fully clear that this is not a decision of government that made this error; …

…we would do an external review for the purpose of trying to determine exactly where the College of the North Atlantic made mistakes that led to the error that has been identified

But then there is a curious statement attributed to the minister in the news release:

"I want to assure employees of the Qatar campus that they will continue to receive their current salary for the remainder of their contract," said Minister King. "We will continue to work with the college as they address this situation and assess the full financial impact of the errors."

Okay.

Just follow this for a second.

As a result of an “error”, people have been overpaid – supposedly – but then there is an assurance that those same people will continue to receive their “current salary” – that is, presumably, the overpaid one – until the contracts expire.

Odd, isn’t it?

It’s odd because what people think happened and what actually occurred are two different things.  All those people are running around believing things that aren’t true  because the news release and the minister’s media lines bury the real story under mountains of obfuscation.

If you confronted King about the news release, he will insist he told all.  Well, he didn’t really do that in the release itself, but between the news release and his subsequent comments, the real story is there;  you just have to dig it out from underneath the vague words and sentences in what is truly a classic piece of uncommunication. 

To find out what really happened, though, you just have to read carefully. 

Take a look at what education minister Darin King told the House on Tuesday:

I also made it fully clear that this is not a decision of government that made this error;  it was a decision made by the College of the North Atlantic which is an arm’s-length corporation of government, Mr. Speaker.

The editors at Hansard mistakenly stuck a semi-colon in there but there is no mistaking that the error was not overpayment. Just take out the mistake in punctuation and read the resulting sentence out loud. 

Poof.

The “error” not a mistake at all.  It was some unspecified decision taken by the people who run the College of the North Atlantic.

But what decision?

Well, that bit too is buried away in another comment King made:

For example, it is only about a month and a half ago, Mr. Speaker, when the former president of the college decided, without the proper authority and authorization, to sign a one year extension to the current contracting tender, …

Poof.

He tried to obscure the relationship between the “error” and this example of him being helpful but that’s just a bit too convenient a bit of timing to be real. 

Put that comment about helpfulness together with the rest of it and a more complete and accurate version of the current crisis appears than the one most people seem to be getting.

All clear now?

King’s two news releases on Monday are a classic example of uncommunication, of concealing crucial information by carefully selecting words and sentences that have fuzzy meanings. It’s like issuing a news release that makes it sound like Abitibi abandoned a mill site rather than admit that the provincial government had shagged up royally and expropriated the thing by mistake.

Oh yes, and it was two releases.

The second one – issued as King scrummed reporters – announced that that president of CMA tossed her teddy in the corner on Friday afternoon citing, among other things, inappropriate provincial government interference in the management of her operation.

Despite the fact King had the resignation three days beforehand, the announcement appeared one and a half hours after the first release in which King claimed credit for disclosures he really didn’t make.  It might just be bungling – Lord knows there’s been enough of that lately  – but there is something about the second release and the timing that screams “uncommunication.”

-srbp-

Firds of a bleather: uncommunication edition

What government departments or agencies in Newfoundland and Labrador have a policy like the one at Environment Canada forbidding interviews unless they’ve been cleared by the strategic uncommunications folks first?

-srbp-

Taxpayers shafted

On February 2, Abitibi notified the provincial government that the company vacated the only properties the provincial government didn’t expropriate in December 2008.

As a result, the taxpayers of Newfoundland and Labrador are entirely responsible for cleaning up whatever environmental mess may be attached to the century old facility.

There is no word on how big the problems at the old paper mill are or how much it will cost taxpayers to clean it up.

The official government release on the development is a masterpiece of uncommunication from a department – natural resources – that has become legendary for its practice of the dark art of misinformation. 

There is even a complete contradiction in the claim at the front – namely that the provincial government is now responsible for the sit in every respect and a statement at the back that Abitibi is still liable.

This is the third financial shaft to be felt by taxpayers resulting from the 2008 expropriation.  The first is the yet-unresolved bill for the expropriation itself.  The second is the voluntary payment by the provincial government of money owed by the company.

-srbp-

The voice of the cabinet minister

Heard on Tuesday January 20, the voice of a cabinet minister on the voice of the cabinet minister, saying:

We’re good at issuin’ releases.

Truer words were never spoken.

-srbp-

Canary in the oil sands

In tough economic times, migrant labourers are a clue to how bad things are getting.

They are a clue.

Like a canary in the coal mine or in this case, the oil sands.

When those canaries flock back home, that fact is usually not presented as a triumph.

-srbp-

Uncommunication

Public relations involves communicating with people to gain and maintain support.

Communicating:  the activity of conveying information.

Information: a collection of facts or data or knowledge about specific events or news.

Seems pretty easy both to understand and to do, but apparently not.

Take this sound bite, for example, from a news conference to answer reporters' questions about the dismissal of the lab director at the Health Sciences Complex in St. John's:

"I implore you, this decision today was made about the future, not about the past."

Now lest you think this is a case of selective editing, I'd suggest you follow the link to the TransCon story on the news conference.  Notice how little of it is taken from information - that is hard facts - told by the people sitting at the head of the boardroom table.

Most of it, like most of the news stories on this firing, draws attention to other issues, like evidence at the Cameron Inquiry about the improper and possibly illegal disposal of Crown assets.  A piece of important laboratory equipment was handed over to a private individual apparently free of charge.  This individual refurbished it and sold it for a tidy profit.  What's more, the computer that went with the machine included patient data - it could be as much as every test ever run on the thing - which the Inquiry managed to retrieve.

There may well be other aspects to this that aren't in the public domain, but with just what is already out there, it isn't hard for people to put two and two together and conclude Gulliver's sudden departure is connected to events that came to light at the Cameron Inquiry.

What you have in this case could be called uncommunication. 

Think of it as the opposite of communication because uncommunication doesn't involve the conveying of facts, data or knowledge. 

Quite the opposite.  It's not about conveying information at all.  Uncommunication actually leaves the recipient in worse shape - at least with respect to facts, data and knowledge - than if he or she knew nothing at all.

Take another government example of uncommunication: the workplace health and safety commission's computer security failure.  You don't have to look hard to see an effort to avoid providing information - facts, data and knowledge - to anyone.  There are plenty of words strung together as sentences but, as with the Eastern Health comment above, they are for the most part devoid of any clear meaning.

Or consider the lighter version, namely the tendency of cabinet ministers to repeat cliches and verbal ticks so frequently they get turned around in them.  Like, this line from the Premier's scrum on Monday:

...it’s so important for our children, for our youth, to realize that this is a historic day, this is a turning point for them, in their lives, on a go-forward basis.

Yes, even the future is coming on a go forward basis.  Perhaps we will move forward on a go forward basis into that future.  The Premier's Maserati has three gear positions:  Go forward on a go forward basis, go backward on a go forward basis and park on a go forward basis.  He likely bought it after doing the due diligence piece, another of his cliches that every cabinet minister recites.

His language is so riddled with verbal ticks and meaningless phrases, it is difficult sometimes to understand if he understands what he is saying. 

Let's not forget his "don't quote me on that" bit from the same scrum:

we’re just very proud and honoured and very pleased that in fact right now we can go it alone and excuse me, don’t quote me on that we can go it on our own, from that perspective.

If there is a difference between "we can go it alone" and "we can go it on our own" then it is one only in the Premier's mind. If there is some importance to that phrase then that too remains only in the Premier's mind. We are going it alone on the Lower Churchill supposedly, but are looking for financial backing, financial partners and a loan guarantee from Ottawa.

The phrase means nothing.

This phenomenon is not confined to government circles. 

Take, for example, the case of NLRC, the proposed refinery near Come By Chance.  At the heart of the company's recent legal travails appears to be uncommunication;  that is, according to a statement of claim the company failed to disclose that key financial backers had withdrawn. That issue hasn't be clarified such that a news report on Thursday stated that the company was fine until law suits started.

However, that may not be true.  The company may have appeared to be fine.  But if the statement of claim proves true, that was only an appearance. Company statements, including the memo obtained by CBC discuss generalities without conveying meaningful information.  If the statement of claim is true, there may even have been withholding of information - in other words: uncommunication.

The trend is not universal.

Rutter Technologies announced on Thursday it had won yet another contract to build components for the light armoured vehicle family currently in service in both the Canadian and United States armies.  The news release contains all the relevant information you need to know why this is important plus there are a couple of obligatory feel-good statements from key people involved.

Summary:  $14.6 million from General Dynamics Land Systems to build electrical systems for the Stryker vehicle over the next 19 months that will increase the Stryker's current carrying capacity.  The components will be built by Rutter in St. John's at its facility on Thorburn Road.  Rutter will hire an unspecified number of additional people and add another shift at its plant.

Lay that release side by side with one announcing yet another half million dollars of public money in a manufacturing company and you'll see the uncommunication of the government release. The feel-good statements far outweigh the factual stuff, a hall-mark of uncommunication.

As Rutter demonstrates, the trend to uncommunication is not universal.

There is still hope...

on a go-forward basis.

Arrrrrggggghhh.

-srbp-