Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s year-end talking points for 2012 were pretty grim.
As she told CBC’s David Cochrane, the provincial government is facing an enormous deficit. The deficit is the result not of government spending but of the up-and-down nature of the commodities on which government revenues depend.
The result is that government will have to raise taxes or cut jobs or some combination of both in order to cope with the deficit next year.
This should sound awfully familiar to people.
The Telegram’s Saturday front page story on Tory efforts to manipulate online polls and comments garnered two equal and opposite reactions over the weekend in that political echo chamber called Twitter. [The story isn’t free. it’s in the online subscriber edition]
Some people got into a lather over it.
Some other people tried to blow it off as something we’ve known all along, something everyone does everywhere, and no big thing.
Equal and opposite, if you will, but the big issue here is in the middle of these two opinion poles.
Flip over to the Occupy NL blog and you’ll see a critique of some recent SRBP posts on the provincial government’s bonus cash for live babies program.
Let’s summarise the critique and then go from there. While this summary will get you through this post, to be fair and to make sure that nothing gets missed, go read the full post with all the charts included at Occupy NL.
The author takes issue with the SRBP approach in the initial post in the December series, which looked at the total number of births. He contends that we should look at “the average number of live births a woman can expect in her lifetime based on age-specific fertility rates in a given year. Secondly, his analysis doesn't acknowledge that declining birth rates is a trend nation-wide and that provincial rates should be compared to what is happening in other provinces.”
Air New Zealand capitalizes on Peter Jackson and his love of Tolkien:
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Here they are, folks, the 10 most-read posts of 2012 at SRBP.
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Via Occupy Newfoundland and Labrador, a different take on the success of the bootie call from the one presented in this corner recently.
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then get serious about blogging.
From the Harvard Business Review:
Writing is still the clearest and most definitive medium for demonstrating expertise on the web. But as thought leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk have shown with video blogging and fellow HBR blogger Mitch Joel with podcasting (i.e., audio blogging), as long as your content is rich and thoughtful, you can still build up a massive following and reputation regardless of your channel. In an information-hungry world, there will always be a need for expert content. And there will always be more readers and "retweeters" than there will be creators.
If you want to have an impact, you might as well be the one setting the agenda by blogging your ideas.
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This was the second filibuster this year and the Telegram’s legislative reported posed a simple question via Twitter before the House closed.
What does it say about current Newfoundland and Labrador political culture that we’ve had two such filibusters in a single year?
Normally a filibuster is an opposition tactic to hold up a government proposal the opposition doesn’t like. That was the case with the Bill 29 filibuster in the spring.
As it turns out, the Muskrat Falls filibuster was different things for different parties.
As the last instalment in our survey of birth rates, let’s take a look at the group 15 to 19 and the other end of the scale for statistics, women aged 40-44 at the time of the child’s birth.
The blue line is the number of births to mothers between ages 15 and 19. From 810 births in 1991 down to 321 in 2010. Note, though that the low point on the blue line is 2005 at 254. Since then the number of births to mothers between 15 and 19 has risen steadily. The rate is lower, though: one in 32 in 1991 compared to one in 46 in 2010.
The numbers of babies born to women between 40 and 45 remains relatively very low. Still, it has doubled in the past two decades from the 52 births in 1991 to the 100 that occurred in 2010.
The red line is the births for mothers aged 35 to 39. It’s there for comparison. In 1991, women in their late 30s gave birth to 387 babies. That is just less than half the number of children born to mothers 19 and under. Two decades later the teenagers are not having as many babies and the older women are having more. Notice, however, that the 2010 moms in the 35 to 39 category still were not having as many babies as the teenagers 20 years earlier.
[Note: This is a revised version of the original post. The earlier one was based on the wrong tables]
The 2007 provincial government bounty on live births appears to have had little impact on trends in birth rates among the 20-somethings in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The same is true for the 30-somethings.
As we told you a couple of weeks ago, it doesn’t look like the provincial government’s policy of paying cash for live births produced any improvement in the birthrate in the province except for the year they announced the bonus cash.
When you look at the birth rate by age of mother some other interesting things appear.
Let’s start with the 20-somethings. Note: this is a revised version of the post. The original post was based on the wrong Statistics Canada tables.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale likes to pretend that the critics haven’t been able to find a problem with Muskrat Falls.
Well, that’s simply not true.
They’ve found tons of problems with the project that Kathy Dunderdale is finishing on behalf of Danny Williams. Dunderdale either doesn’t understand the project at all on any level, has deluded herself into believing what she says is true even when it obviously isn’t (the PUB loves Muskrat Falls!), or she just doesn’t give a rat’s bollocks about anything.
That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Take your pick but that’s it: one of those three
Regardless of any of that, though, you can be assured of one thing. Muskrat Falls is not a very good idea. It is not the lowest cost option for taxpayers.
Absolutely.
Without question.
Not the lowest cost option.
The provincial Conservatives will guarantee that taxpayers in Newfoundland and Labrador will be forced to pay for Muskrat Falls no matter what happens to oil prices or with new technology. They are closing the electrical markets on the island portion of the province so that consumers and businesses in Newfoundland can only buy electricity from Nalcor.
Under changes to the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 currently being debated in the House of Assembly, the same provincial Conservatives who fought for years for open access to markets outside the province will close the electricity markets on the island portion of the province to competition.
Section 14.1 (1) of the new bill allows that Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro – a Nalcor subsidiary – will have the exclusive right to “supply, distribute and sell electrical power or energy to a retailer or industrial customer in the province.”
Retailers or industrial customers will only be allowed to purchase electrical power or energy from NL Hydro. Another clause of the bill prohibits companies from developing electrical power on their own land for their own use.
