It’s not just that the Muskrat Falls project is a bad idea; the process by which the current provincial administration is forcing it through stinks as well.
If you want to see the problem take a look at the way the provincial government handled the public utilities board – it had no legal authority to conduct its own review of Muskrat Falls - with what is happening in Nova Scotia on another matter involving that province’s utilities regulator.
From a decision in a lawsuit between a moving company and a customer who sued the company claiming that the movers failed to deliver some of her goods:
14. Third, there was no corroboration, whether in the forms of invoices, bills of lading, or photographs, of the claims of loss made by the Plaintiff. For example, the Plaintiff claims that the Defendant lost an original painting, which was painted by “one of the Group of Seven”. She was unable to say which member of the Group of Seven painted the painting, or where or under which circumstances she acquired it, other than to say that she had bought it at an auction for seven hundred dollars ($700.00). She did not have a certificate of authenticity for the painting. There was no confirmation of the provenance of the painting. Furthermore, while the Group of Seven were a group of Canadian landscape painters, famous for their portrayal of the Canadian Shield, the Plaintiff said that her Group of Seven painting, by an unknown artist, was of a tiger.
A painting of a tiger.
A tiger.
By a member of the Group of Seven.
Must have been by Bernie, a lesser known member of the Group of Seven, who specialised in tigers, dogs playing poker, kids with really big eyes or Elvis from his Vegas years, painted - of course - on velvet.
You can only wish you could make this stuff up.
-srbp-
Follow this one for a second.
In 2005, Kathy Dunderdale – minister responsible for the Rural Secretariat - announced a raft of appointments to the groups that advise government about rural economic development. One of the appointees is a guy named Ted Lewis from Croque.
In November 2005, Lewis went on a provincial government trade mission to Greenland. he represented a company called Holson Forest Products.
In July 2008, industry minister Trevor Taylor announced $25,000 in provincial money for a company called Quality North to help it expand its markets for manufactured wood panels into places like Greenland and Iceland. Quality North was formed in 2006 by three people, one of whom was Ted Lewis of Holson Forest Products
On August 12, 2009, Tom Hedderson - the provincial fisheries minister - announced that Ted Lewis would take over as chair of the board that approves fish processing licenses.
On August 21, 2009, then-natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale announced that her department would be giving $10 million to Holson Forest Products to set up a wood pellet plant in Roddickton. The head of the company is a guy named Ted Lewis.
By 2011, a news story turned up in the Telegram saying that the company expected to start production in late March. But, as events unfolded, the company has had trouble shipping pellets because of the cost of routing them through nearby ports.
Liberal member of the House of Assembly Ed Joyce says he has been having trouble finding out what is happening with the provincial money. The Telegram even wrote an editorial about the problem, largely because one company official complained that the political inquiries were hurting the company.
But if you go to the official record of the House of Assembly, you will see that questions came up in the House on May 15. On May 16, natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy added some details on the cash:
There was a $10 million investment which included a $7 million repayable loan, a $2 million non-repayable loan, and $1 million under the Green Fund.
Mr. Speaker, Holson has since come back looking for more money and we have indicated that there is only so far as a government that we can go. Beyond Roddickton, we also put $1 million in 2010 to assist harvesters in the Northern Peninsula, of which $830,000 has been spent as of March 31, 2012.
In response to another question in June, Kennedy added even more information. What’s interesting is that Kennedy used the information to attack the local MHA who had asked a question about something else:
Let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, how this Third Party [the NDP] works. About three weeks ago, I got an e-mail from the Member for The Straits – White Bay North asking if I would meet with him and the owner of the Roddickton plant to discuss what was going on in Roddickton. I wrote him back, Mr. Speaker. I said if Mr. Lewis wishes to meet with me, he can contact me directly. I never heard back from Mr. Lewis.
So what the member opposite did, he tried to interject himself into the middle of the situation. He was obviously told to go away out of it, Mr. Speaker. I would suggest to him that if he is going to come forward with suggestions that he make sure that they are real and they are practical. What we are worried about is keeping this industry alive, keeping Kruger open and benefiting the people of this Province, Mr. Speaker.
And on August 13, 2012, Lewis wrote a letter to the Northern Pen explaining the current shutdown. Lewis said that the company needed to find a cheaper way to ship pellets overseas because the price for pellets dropped right after they got the cash commitment from the provincial government. Now that prices are recovering the lowered value of the Euro is causing problems.
The company is still working on the problem, apparently:
Any investment into either of these ports reduces the feasibility of pellet transportation. Roddickton harbour has the depth of water required and the required land base. With the right facility in Roddickton this and other industries can prosper. Thankfully there are plans moving forward to develop the infrastructure – no commitments yet.
Liberal fisheries critic Jim Bennett is only wondering whether or not the fisheries minister thinks that it’s alright to have the processing plant licensing board run by a guy whose company is on the hook to the province government for the better part of $10 million.
Here’s what Bennett told the Western Star:
"Is Lewis in a perceived conflict of interest in his job as chairperson of the Fish Processing Licensing Board, given that his company owes so much money to the government," Bennett questioned in a press release issued Monday.
Via telephone, Bennett said it was not an accusation, but that he would like the minister to review the appointment to determine whether or not there is a conflict.
Doesn’t that seem rather, errmmm, what is the best way to put it?
Oh yes.
Lame-assed.
That’s it, Bennett’s comments are lame-assed, weak, and laughable.
-srbp-
On his Telegram blog post on Monday, James McLeod posed three questions about the Muskrat Falls debate.
Let’s answer them.
On the front page of Tuesday’s Telegram was a story on the provincial Liberal Party’s renewal process. it isn’t available online unless you have a subscription to the paper.
this renewal thing has been going on for a while. Dean MacDonald, Siobhan Coady, and Kevin Aylward are travelling around the province meeting with people and talking about the future of the provincial Liberals.
CBC’s got the story:
ExxonMobil will be able to move work related to the Hebron oil project out of Newfoundland within days, as the possibility fades for an agreement to use local fabrication facilities.
“We’re not making any real progress, and it doesn’t appear that mediation will solve the issue,” Natural Resources Minister Jerome Kennedy told CBC News late this week.
Kennedy can rattle on all he wants about what a great case he believes the provincial government had.
Talk, as SRBP noted in June, is exceedingly cheap. When the provincial government signed the Hebron agreement in 2008 they were not concerned about local benefits at all. They took what the companies had on the table and nothing more. Ed Martin’s view as head of Nalcor seems to be the same view of local industrial benefits he held when he worked for Big Oil.
-srbp-
You have to wonder sometimes how far Tory politicians will go to issue a good news comment of some kind during the time when the government pollster is in the field.
They are the only ones who do this, apparently, as part of the Tories’ organized effort to skew public opinion polls and then crow about the adulterated results.
Anyway, this is a two part example of the lengths to which the quarterly orgy of public onanism goes sometimes.
There’s something just too funny for words about former Premier Danny Williams sometimes.
It’s the kind of “too funny” where you don’t know whether he gets the joke and is just having a laugh at his own expense or is so completely blind to how asinine his own words make him look.
You see it is absolutely ridiculous for Danny Williams to deride his predecessor, Roger Grimes, for supposedly wanting to “wrap his arms” around Quebec in order to develop the Lower Churchill when Williams himself spent five years doing just that.
Of course it was only after Williams’ suck-job failed that he started in with the anti-Quebec crap.
Too friggin’ funny, Danny.
So funny in fact that SRBP even made a big map to help people make some kind of sense out of Williams’ foolishness.
-srbp-
“As a lawyer,” natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy told reporters on Thursday,” you’d often hear the phrase that the best predictor of past behaviour is future behaviour.”
This is not just a slip of the tongue. The minister is confused. Obviously confused.
You can see that confusion in Kennedy’s other comments. He called reporters together around 12:30 and gave them some of his thoughts on a letter by former premier Roger Grimes that appeared in the Thursday Telegram. Kennedy was a bit tense, it seems, and so it isn’t surprising that in his remarks, Jerome confused his tenses.
Verb tenses.
And that, as they say, made all the difference in the world.
For five years, the provincial Conservatives secretly tried to interest Quebec in part ownership of the Lower Churchill, according to Premier Kathy Dunderdale.
In September 2009, she told Open Line host Randy Simms (audio at right) about the secret efforts made by then-Premier Danny Williams, Dunderdale and Nalcor boss Ed Martin to sell Hydro-Quebec an equity share.
Dunderdale said that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador was prepared to leave aside any question of redress on the Lower Churchill. The Conservatives previously committed that a deal on the Lower Churchill with Quebec would have to include redress for the disastrous 1969 contract between Brinco and Hydro-Quebec.
In Nova Scotia, energy minister Charlie Parker touted the benefits of the Muskrat falls deal for his province in a letter to the Chronicle Herald, published on Wednesday.
Parker flipped the bird to opposition politician Andrew Younger, taking issue with Younger’s claim that the deal would lead to increase electricity prices for Nova Scotians:
The cost of this electricity will be virtually the same in Year 35 as it is in Year 1 of the agreement. This is the principal benefit of the project and it’s why this government has worked so hard to ensure it goes ahead.
He’s absolutely right.
When any country or province depends heavily on the money that comes from resource extraction, it affects politics there.
Political scientist Michael Ross is probably the most recent author on the subject. Terry Karl has also written extensively on the resource curse. She wrote of the best known books on the subject: The paradox of plenty: oil booms and petro-states. You can also find some of Karl’s further thoughts on the issue in an article she wrote in 2007 and revised in 2009.
These studies focus on the developing world, for the most part, but what academics observe about those countries can cause you to think again about politics in other places.
Like say, Newfoundland and Labrador.
To borrow a phrase from Quebec Premier Jean Charest the other day, Twitter is a conversation between apparatchiks and journalists. That’s pretty much it, although in Newfoundland and Labrador as elsewhere a few other people weigh into the exchanges.
The political Twitter world is a variation of the echo chamber. That’s what Charest meant: a small group of people discuss or argue among themselves, sometimes without much concern for the outside world.
You can really see how that plays out in Newfoundland and Labrador again this week in the aftermath of the Tories’ orchestrated attack on the five lawyers who went public - again – with their criticisms of Muskrat Falls.
On Friday, the Conservatives sent Mount Pearl North MHA Steve Kent out as the designated hitter in a deliberate, orchestrated personal attack on the five lawyers who oppose Muskrat Falls.
He turned up on CBC’s On Point and repeated much of the same innuendo on Twitter.
Kent got a lot of negative feedback on Twitter and likely elsewhere about his comments. On Monday, Kent and his colleagues had dropped the personal crap.
As part of the orchestrated campaign to attack the people making the comments instead of the comments themselves , finance minister Tom Marshall trotted out in front of the news media on Friday to lace into a group of five lawyers.
Marshall said comments by five lawyers opposed to Muskrat Falls were “nothing new” and had been addressed before. All true.
At the same time, though, Marshall quickly read through an obviously prepared diatribe in which he said that the “use of such inflammatory language in my view is irresponsible and borders on fear mongering.”
People should pay attention to Marshall’s comments, but not because of Tom’s laughable hypocrisy.
How many times should anyone need to change the key point in any discussion?
Well, this past weekend, natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy signalled what is the latest shift in strategic messaging on the Lower Churchill project since October 2010.
Under a complex arrangement, Nalcor will send electricity from Muskrat Falls to Quebec in place of electricity from Churchill Falls during some months of the year.
Nalcor hasn’t disclosed any other details of the arrangement. It appears Nalcor’s Muskrat Falls company will swap the electricity - possibly free of charge - with its affiliate Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation, which will send it to Quebec under the terms of the 1969 contract at 1969 prices.
And rather than getting electricity from Muskrat Falls, Nova Scotians could receive electricity from Churchill Falls or any of Nalcor’s other hydro-electric generating stations on the island
You can find aspects of the arrangement in a clip from NTV.
There’s more to it, though.
