Step 1. Google any of the following words:
"danny williams"
"pc party"
"newfoundland"
Step 2: Check the sponsored links, usually on the right hand side.
Hint: Try "pc party" first and see if your search turns up the same result as the one we just did here at Bond.
Step 3: lol or roflyao
Update - Step 4; Google "bob ridgley". You won't find any website for the candidate. The first link that turns up is interesting.-srbp-
Someone picked up on the fact that some campaign signs - in this case for Tory Beth Marshall - don't carry any reference to the "Danny Williams Team."
There are plenty of re-cycled signs around and Marshall appears to have been frugal with her campaign expenses.
Let's hope Bond Papers doesn't get as many comments on Marshall as CBC radio did after her interview yesterday. The server couldn't handle the volume of criticism aimed at the former auditor general
-srbp-
But take this curious situation: Simon Lono, a Liberal candidate in St. John's North, actually attended a Tory nomination meeting in St. John's East and voted for a candidate there, even though he wasn't eligible to vote in the district at all.This comment makes it sound like Lono did something improper or illegal.
The Western Star (Corner Brook)
Opinion, Saturday, January 20, 2007, p. 6
Byelection promises to be interesting
Next month's by election in Port au Port has drawn a slew of candidates lining up for the PC party nomination. The byelection became necessary with the resignation of PC Jim Hodder, who after serving 21 years in the House of Assembly, decided to leave for health reasons.
It's good to see that seven citizens have come forward to offer themselves because it shows there is real interest in the seat and it will be interesting to see who gets the nod when voting takes place Monday.
The Progressive Conservative party has opened nomination voting to the general public and they're to be commended for doing so. A person shouldn't have to be a card-carrying member of the party to help make the decision on who their candidate will be.
Often voters are undecided in an election and tend to vote for the man or the woman rather than along party lines. This open system gives any person the opportunity to be involved at the grassroots level of politics. There are good candidates running for the PC nomination and whoever takes it will likely have a fight on his or her hands since the district was known to be a Liberal one in the past.
That changed in the last election when Hodder took it from incumbent Gerald Smith and it remains to be seen what message voters want to send this time around.
With a general election coming in the fall, this byelection promises to be more interesting than most.
"We can't be a dying race."
Premier Danny Williams
Dog whistle politics is the use of code words that carry specific meanings for specific segments of an audience. The majority may miss them, but for certain segments they have a different meaning than the one most people might assume.
The term originated, according to some accounts, in Australian politics in the 1990s and the ideas of Howard strategist Lynton Crosby. It's based on a theory of voter motivation that is far from controversial in and of itself. As Crosby put it:
"People don't generally vote simply on the basis of issues," he told a conference in Canberra last May [2004]. "They vote as much on the values and motivation of political parties in taking a particular position on an issue... It is the values you communicate, and the motivation you have, that influences the way people vote."
It's hard to escape the idea that there is something of a dog whistle in Danny Williams use of the word race, especially when you see the sort of posturing on the issue that turned up after the remarks. It's code in the local nationalist fringe, just as it would be in Quebec.
The themes in the last throne speech and the campaign song all have a flavour and tone which would appeal across several audience segments. There's the talk of pride of place which most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians feel and its a core value pretty well everyone has.
The bootie call policy itself is a pretty straightforward example of the sort of retail politics that took Stephen Harper to 24 Sussex last year. It also makes it appear to some people that the premier and his crew are trying to do something to stem the tide of outmigration by paying people to stay and have children.
But if you wanted to look at another layer, consider that idea of Newfoundlanders as being a distinct race of people is a notion most common among those who never quite got over their loss in the 1948 referendum. Williams has raised the traditional political theatrical device of the external enemy to a fine art, playing to the insecure and largely xenophobic crowd who thrive on the myths of carpetbaggers and Canadians who pillage the benighted people of God's other Eden. To those people, defending a Newfoundland race beset by a declining birthrate and the loss of their culture to the evils of the mainland is as instinctive as breathing.
But for most of "race' is such an odd word, that it's sudden appearance in public remarks by the Premier would elicit one of two responses. Either people would ask what he meant or, as in this case, the embedded atmosphere of the media on the bus might well lead people to rationalize the word as an unimportant anomaly.
Problem is that things are quite that easy.
Political messaging sometimes comes on layers, with different aspects aimed at different segments of the audience. It takes a sophisticated organization to research and detect how messages are playing in smaller segments of the population and then adjust messages according.
Williams has done it before. The one instance in which such a detailed analysis was conducted occurred in 2004 with polling on the flag controversy. The poll results were obtained by the Telegram under Access to Information laws. Shortly afterward, the Premier's office stopped purchasing polling other than CRA through any publicly accessible means. That doesn't mean the sophisticated polling stopped.
Political messaging in a skilled organization isn't developed on the basis of the simplified and almost simplistic analysis offered in the Corporate Research Associate's quarterly omnibus political questions. Skilled operators would know what messages resonate with specific audiences.
The Premier's race comment might just be a slip of the tongue. But don't bet on it.
Danny Williams is a savvy politician whose has built his success on surrounding himself with a team of capable, sophisticated marketers. He doesn't often drop words out there carelessly, even if occasionally he gets suckered into musing on taking away free speech. those are core to his political agenda.
In this instance, "race" is the word Danny Williams chose without prompting.
It's a word that was on his mind.
There's a reason why the word came up.
Maybe he was whistling a tune intended, in part, for some of his most hard core supporters.
-srbp-
"The Auditor General [John Noseworthy] has no basis to base his opinion on that those expenditures were inappropriate."The AG based his views on the report by Chief Justice Green and his scathing indictment of the practice of donations. When pressed by Jeff Gilhooley on whether or not the donations were inappropriate, given that they came from an allowance that was never intended to include donations, Marshall was unequivocal: "They are appropriate."
Sometimes, though, one gets an uneasy feeling when the same people who scream "no more give-aways" step forward to say "trust me", but then don't release any details of the deal.Fears that Newfoundland came out on the short end of the stick in the agreement to develop Churchill Falls appear to be unfounded.
In fact, Newfoundland fares quite well, although it may appear otherwise on the surface.
...
The $950 million project in Labrador has been a long time coming. However, it probably would have come earlier had it not been for Premier J.R. Smallwood's uncontrolled outbursts of provincialism...
There are references to name calling, of Smallwood referring to keeping the project from the "clutches of Quebec" and things that sound eerily familiar.
And I want people here to know that I am not prepared to leave Labradorians excluded on my watch. Labrador's day has arrived. This is Labrador's time to shine, to flourish and to reap the benefits of growth as our province moves forward, united, toward self-reliance.It's odd to use this sort of phrase a second time, at least under the circumstances.
Washington Profile: Russia is not the only country to attempt to increase birth rates through government policy and incentives. How effective have these kinds of policies been in other countries, for example, in western Europe?A discussion paper from the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Democratic Policy examines fertility policies in western European countries. Note that the paper discusses a range of policies aimed at supporting people raising children, not merely the performance bonus system for producing children.
Eberstadt: Birth incentive plans are almost always ineffective in the long run. The typical history of birth incentive plans in western Europe and elsewhere has been to elicit a small blip in birth rates followed by a bigger slump. The reason for the blip is that some parents “on the fence” about the timing of a second or a third child take advantage of the introduction of these incentives. And the subsequent slump takes place because the bonuses alter parents' timing of desired births, not desired birth totals. If one were to have a serious pronatalist economic plan, you’d be getting into some very big money. You would have to have vastly larger outlays than are currently accorded to social security, healthcare or any other existing programs. Basically, you’d have to be prepared to be hiring women to work as baby ranchers—and in a modern economy, given the opportunity cost of women’s labor, a program like that would be staggeringly expensive. That, I think, explains the limited success of pronatalist efforts in the western historical record. By the way, it also turns out to be very difficult to talk up the birth rate: the bully pulpit and the government usually can’t convince people to have extra children out of patriotism or civic duty.
Washington Profile: Russia has become a country with significant immigration flows. How is this likely to impact on its demographic situation?
Russia has the same problem that other European countries have, with the prospect of population decline, and the question of changing ethnic composition. Many of the prospective migrants to Russia are not of Russian ethnicity, and as you know, the government has increasingly indicated a nationalist, or a nativist, objection to immigration to the Russian Federation. There still are a number of millions of Russians in the near abroad, but the flow of Russian ethnic migration to the Russian Federation has declined almost to a trickle over the past decade. Barring some sort of awful political upheaval, I don’t know how realistic it would be to think that these ethnic Russians in the near abroad might want to pack up and head back to the Russian Federation. So Russia is facing the same kind of issues as the rest of Europe. Throughout Europe, the key question in this regard is: can the newcomers be turned into loyal and productive citizens? Some places have a better track record of this than others.
From the Gulf News:
What ends up happening is the only opposition for government is the province’s media. But then government has a way of stifling media as it has done with ‘The Independent’ newspaper in St. John’s. Danny has cut off his office from any access by most of that newspaper’s reporters.
It's a bit behind the times. Count the provincial government advertising in the front section of the thin newspaper. Ryan's back in Danny's good books after a brief time in the doghouse for daring to write about the Williams Family Foundation. After some whining on Ryan's part, Danny gave in and started talking to him again.
But wait a second.
Come to think of it, the logic isn't curious after all.
1. Story of the Day: Incumbents seeking re-election who were mentioned in the Auditor General's report on Friday but who were not returning media phone calls. You can run but you can't hide.
2. Media Coverage story of the Day: Nobody carried the Tory campaign launch rally live. Timed to coincide with the supper hour news shows, as in 1999 and 2003, the Big Speech and the Big rally garnered squat. Not a single broadcaster gave the Premier free air time - live - to kick off his campaign.
3. Image of the Day: A toss-up. on the one hand there is footage of the bussed-in crowd (a small one at that) welcoming Liberal leader Gerry Reid as he climbed off a fishing boat to unveil the Liberal policy platform. If Simon (Lono) had been there, the biblical allusion to launching into the deep on faith couldn't have been more complete.
Your humble e-scribbler will swear on a stack of Bibles he had nothing to do with the whole thing; Biblical imagery is dangerous since today's fishing for votes can end up with the leader nailed to a tree. If that wasn't bad enough, only a relatively small number in the province might even pick up the message.
Tied with that is the Tory campaign with its references to the "Danny Williams team" while the bus and the website have nothing but pictures (updated) of the Big Giant Head from 2003's Tory ego campaign.
The Tories might win out, though, if we add the picture of Danny Williams flying to Deer Lake on a leased Cessna Citation executive jet hot on the heels of the House of Assembly extravagance report from the Auditor General. The CBC video of the Premier deplaning all by himself (not even a body man or other staffers) didn't quite match up with the "Team Danny" thing either.
Odd for a People's Campaign to have a decidedly capitalist mode of transportation.
4. Crushed Ego: The Tory campaign song dumped the references to what many took to be local bloggers heard in the version unveiled to the St. John's Board of Trade. The thing was running long, anyway. It still has plenty of stuff in it to fuel a dozen posts, like bizarre references to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians facing the future with "poisoned tongues" and an attitude.
5. Boosted Ego: remember we mentioned the phrase "The future is ours". Turns out it is the Tory campaign slogan.
In reading the Auditor General's latest report on inappropriate spending by members of the provincial legislature, there are some little things that pop up at you:
1. The $1,000 then-finance minister Loyola Sullivan paid to Mile One Stadium in 2005. What was that for?
2. The partisan expenditures. Since these things are obviously verboten - no ethical relative defense applies to that one, there Premier - how come the Auditor General didn't expose every single instance of this corrupt practice? It doesn't matter that the amount was only around $11,000.
That might just be the bit that was so obvious the auditors - who buggered up sections of other reports on the legislature - couldn't miss it. Perhaps there is more of the misdirected funding buried in some of the other accounts.
Partisan expenditures relate to supporting a Member's political party and would be considered an inappropriate constituency allowance expenditure. I note that the Green Commission Report indicated that expenses related to politically partisan activities should not be a reimbursable constituency allowance expense.
During the review, we identified only $11,093 during the period 1989-90 through to 2005-06 in claims that could be considered partisan in nature. However, there was no Member who had significant claims relating to partisan expenditures. Some of the items we did identify as partisan included:
- advertisement to thank voters;
- refreshments and facility rental for party meeting;
- flowers to other Member for election congratulations;
- dinner tickets for various party associations;
- expense claim to attend party convention;
- players fees for political golf tournament (this same fee was denied on another Member's claim form); and
- Federal party fundraising events.
3. The AG's sudden lip-lock. For a man who was prepared to male wild accusations before without a shred of credible evidence to present, John Noseworthy's silence on Friday was interesting. Chief Justice Green didn't suggest the AG couldn't say anything at all, he just strongly hinted that an auditor might want to refrain from making accusing of criminality without having the knowledge or ability to make such a claim.
Then again, if I had to explain why only two people were named in the double-billing scandal but the problem was more widespread, I might be barring the doors and windows too.
4. The $2800 bucks. The current repayment issue for that money is listed in the Auditor General's report as if it was more than just a policy some members adopted. Did the Auditor General include the $2800 on the account as an overpayment made to members before he discovered in the course of another audit that the payments had actually be authorised?
Inquiring minds might want to stick a microphone down the newly dug rabbit hole the AG lives in and see if he actually made at least one inappropriate accusation against a member who received the money, legitimately, since it was approved by the legislature's management committee. Let's not even think about whether it was the right thing for the committee to approve the money in secret. Heck, even the Premier and Beth Marshall weren't prepared to try and stop the hand-out. Let's just see if Noseworthy actually made the accusation before he knew the facts.
5. How can the Auditor General tell us that Kathy Goudie received money for expenses after she resigned when she resigned well after the period covered by this audit?
6. If he can tell us that, why didn't he tell us about the $5,000 of public money Tom Rideout "gifted" in 2007 back-dated to 2006? Not only would that amount change Rideout's "gifting" total, it would also likely attract Noseworthy's attention for the backdating.
7. And while we are looking at "gifting" why did the AG bury the bit on inadequate documentation of "gifts" in the back? (Figure 35, page 64)
Turns out that of the $1.5 million or thereabouts in "gifts", 21% had inadequate documentation. The peak periods?
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | |
| $36,875 | $50,253 | $87,966 | $23,991 | $41,276 |
And was there any pattern to the inadequate documentation and who was submitting it? pattern that is beyond the fact that while the total "gifts" went up after the 2003 election, the instances of poor documentation went down.
It's the little things that sometimes really do catch your eye.
-srbp-
The Western Star (Corner Brook)
Opinion, Friday, September 14, 2007, p. 6
Changes to Election Act are ill-conceived
Mark Watton
Dear Editor: On Oct. 9 and 10, voters in Newfoundland & Labrador and Ontario will cast ballots under new "fixed election date" regimes. For the first time, the date of each election has been known well in advance, set by legislated changes to each province's elections act.
While campaigning is officially underway in Ontario, the writ has yet to be issued in Newfoundland and Labrador. With the shortest required writ period in Canada at 21 days, candidates will have to wait until next week to officially hit the hustings. After all, the election, despite its predetermined date, has not officially begun. Surprisingly, however, voting already has.
That's right. In an election which is not yet official, in which candidates can not yet legally be nominated, it is not only possible to obtain a ballot already, it's legal to cast it. Valid votes in an election not yet called have been cast since Aug. 20. In all other jurisdictions where mail-in ballots are allowed, such ballots are requested only after the writ has been issued. Manitoba is one exception, where voters may request such ballots before the writ, but as elsewhere will only receive them afterwards. Some provinces are subsequently required to provide these voters with a list of registered candidates when nominations are filed.
There is no reason why similar provisions could not have been incorporated in our Elections Act. No reason, except for a succession of partisan Chief Electoral Officers, and the unabashed self-interest of the current Members of the House of Assembly.
The rationale behind fixed election dates was to curb the advantage of incumbent governments using hastily called elections to pre-empt their opponents. In recent memory, Ontarians punished Premier David Peterson for attempting such a stunt in 1990, while in Newfoundland and Labrador, electors went to the polls in three times (1993, 1996, and 1999) in a span of less than six years.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the current Elections Act has replaced this perceived advantage for a governing party with a profound advantage for incumbent members of all party stripes. No wonder it was passed with little debate and virtually no opposition.
Similar to their quiet deal to continue the flow of maligned members' allowances through to the election, MHAs did not flinch when presented with an opportunity to use their name recognition and stuff the ballot boxes before any opponents could even register as candidates.
Ten years ago, in Libman v. Quebec, a unanimous Supreme Court of Canada stated: "Elections are fair and equitable only if all citizens are reasonably informed of all the possible choices and if parties and candidates are given a reasonable opportunity to present their positions..." More recently, in Figueroa v. Canada, they ruled that provisions of Canada's Elections Act which effectively ensured "that voters are better informed of the political platform of some candidates than they are of others" violated s.3 of the Charter and struck them down.
It is hard to imagine a greater democratic injustice than rules which permit incumbent candidates to campaign (and do so free from electoral spending scrutiny) and collect votes while their potential opponents cannot even register.
This ill-conceived and poorly-drafted legislation raises many issues of contradiction and disparity. It allows some individuals to receive votes under a party name while others can only receive votes under the name of a candidate, an impossibility given that individuals are not considered candidates until they meet the criteria - several weeks later.
In Haig v. Canada, the Supreme Court ruled that the Charter requires electoral laws to "grant every citizen of this country the right to play a meaningful role in the selection of elected representatives", an impossibility in a province without any means of preventing a determinative number of ballots being cast in a district before candidates are even nominated.
In 2000, the world was stunned as the fate of its only superpower was decided by hanging chads, inoperable voting machines, and a myriad of electoral inconsistencies. A handful of Florida counties reminded the outside world just how fragile democracy could be. The sad truth is we only cared about the flawed process because the result was close. Had either candidate won by a large margin, the inadequacies of America's electoral system would have been swept under the rug for another four years.
The "fixed" election results of 2007 in Newfoundland and Labrador likely won't be as close as those we witnessed in Florida in 2000, nor as consequential. But there's no reason to be any less concerned.
Mark Watton is a Newfoundlander studying law at Dalhousie University. He is a former political staffer residing in Halifax.
Initial news coverage and most public reaction to the latest report on the House of Assembly scandal will focus on the easy and the obvious.
Wine, artwork, pens, jewelry, cigarettes, travel, and hockey tickets.
On the eve of a provincial general election, Premier Danny Williams is encouraging people to look beyond the scandal now that reforms are supposedly in place:
But at the end of the day, do not lose faith in the political system in this province because our democracy is too important for the electorate to lose faith.
Our democracy is too important for people to lose faith in it and in the people elected to lead. However, we should not be rushed past this latest report with the admonishment of the New York cop to gawkers at a skyscraper suicide: "Move along, there Johnny, nothing to see here. " Nor should we be distracted by the baubles and trinkets that too many focused on already.
Rather, we should focus on the core damage done to our democracy by a decade in which politicians of all shades, new and old, handed out public money as gifts to constituents based solely on their own discretion and almost entirely hidden from wide public view, let alone scrutiny.
Bond Papers has hit this point before - the lure of soft money - and earned the Premier's ire for it. The Auditor General's report on Friday brings home the point once more. Of the $2.2 million in questionable spending John Noseworthy identified, $1,471,108 (63%) went to what have been incorrectly called donations.
No one should miss the point that the highest years of total inappropriate spending identified by Noseworthy were the most recent:
| 2001-02 | 2002-03 | 2003-04 | 2004-05 | 2005-06 |
| $217,200 | $272,729 | $388,948 | $284,725 | $299,261 |
As a matter of simple observation one can see that after a peak in the last election year, inappropriate spending did not decline; it increased. For all the assurances of change, even as the scandal broke, clearly something continued to be amiss. Even after the public received the Green report - and its scathing condemnation of the gifting practice - members of the legislature still opted to keep the rules in place that allowed gifting, at least until after the election.
For those who may not be sure of what we are driving at here, let us simply quote Chief Justice Derek Green on the point:
First and foremost, the practice of making financial contributions and spending in this way supports the unacceptable notion that the politician’s success is tied to buying support with favours. Such things, especially the buying of drinks, tickets and other items at events, has overtones of the old practice of treating - providing food, drink or entertainment for the purpose of influencing a decision to vote or not to vote. As I wrote in Chapter 9, it demeans the role of the elected representative and reinforces the view that the standards of the politician are not grounded in principle. In fact, I would go further. The old practice of treating was usually undertaken using the politician’s own funds or his or her campaign funds. To the extent that the current practice involves the use of public funds, it is doubly objectionable.
Related to the notion of using public funds to ingratiate oneself with voters is the
unfair advantage that the ability to do that gives to the incumbent politician over other contenders in the next election.
To put it simply, gifting erodes our democracy in a far more insidious way than does anything else the Auditor General has described. Nothing revealed in his report is acceptable, but it is the widespread nature of gifting that should make it more odious than some of our politicians appear to appreciate.
Beyond that, gifting, as practiced over the past decade calls into serious question the judgements of legislators. The money was given for things that either used to be or were covered by government programs that were as fairly, equitably and impartially distributed as might be possible. These include eyeglasses and medical devices, funding for volunteer fire departments, accommodations and transportation.
Some of money given as gifts actually replaced programs such as medical assistance transportation eliminated from a budget voted by the same legislators. In no small irony, it would seem that just this past election summer, the members on the government side had found a way to continue making gifts of public money, this time through line departments. The lure of soft money has not dissipated; the siren merely sings its tune from another cliff.
Gifting knows no party boundaries.
Look at the top 10 gifters in the study period, by dollar volume. All, coincidentally, are or were cabinet ministers; some served as members of the Internal Economy Commission while on the opposition benches, while in government, or both:
| Rank | Name | Party | Amount |
| 1. | Wally Anderson | Liberal | $88,954 |
| 2. | Judy Foote | Liberal | $69,131 |
| 3. | Ed Byrne | PC | $63,284 |
| 4. | Loyola Sullivan | PC | $44,848 |
| 5. | Tom Osborne | PC | $44,770 |
| 6. | Anna Thistle | Liberal | $43,445 |
| 7. | Percy Barrett | Liberal | $43,444 |
| 8. | Sandra Kelly | Liberal | $42,398 |
| 9. | Paul Shelley | PC | $37,331 |
| 10. | John Ottenheimer | PC | $36,868 |
But to make sure the picture is clear , let us also consider the top 10 gifters by percentage of allowance given as gifts. What will become apparent is that gifting is not merely a hold-over from the days before 2003. They all represent constituencies on the northeast Avalon, arguably the most prosperous portion of the province.
They are almost all some of the newest members of the legislature (other than those elected in recent by-elections) and all embraced the gifting system with an enthusiasm that outshines the ardor of longer-serving members of any political party.
| Rank | Name | Party | Percentage |
| 1. | Diane Whelan | PC | 49.05 |
| 2. | Shawn Skinner | PC | 46.96 |
| 3. | Kathy Dunderdale | PC | 46.90 |
| 4. | Bob Ridgley | PC | 38.21 |
| 5. | Elizabeth Marshall | PC | 34.23 |
| 6. | Tom Osborne | PC | 30.16 |
| 7. | Hubert Kitchen | Liberal | 30.10 |
| 8. | Sheila Osborne | PC | 26.30 |
| 9. | David Denine | PC | 25.96 |
| 10. | John Ottenheimer | PC | 25.49 |
The formal election campaign begins on Monday. Many have talked of an election about sweeps by the majority party, unprecedented popularity, the poor performance of the opposition parties and resource deals worth billions. As a result of the Auditor General's latest report, the focus of the campaign for many voters may wind up being questions of ethics, judgment and propriety.
If this report and the practice of gifting it reveals is an indication, those are exactly what we should think about before casting our votes.
-srbp-
Once the transmission link is constructed, Hydro will enter into a Power Purchase Agreement with the Lower Churchill Project for the purchase of power to offset thermal generation at the Holyrood Generating Station, which will assist in financing the project.Hydro - which should be the owner (if we really are going it alone) or controlling partner in the Lower Churchill development company - will actually purchase power from itself in order to replace the Holyrood generating plant.
How refreshing it is to hear a government making plans that consider a time that they might not be in office, as well as the time that they are;How refreshing indeed, although it's doubtful Telly publisher Miller Ayre would acknowledge the most significant approach of the type. That would be Challenge and change, the province's strategic economic plan issued in 1992. It laid the groundwork for much of the economic success of recent times.
to have a government looking at the long-term needs of the province, as well as addressing the sort of short-term needs that get governments re-elected.
In the case of Churchill Falls, the assumption was that electricity supply would keep power prices low. A huge and unexpected upsurge in demand, when increased oil prices suddenly meant home-heating with electricity was more economical than fuel oil, blew those assumptions right out of the water.The old Telegram editorialist four decades ago took a decidedly more cautious view of that agreement. Here's a sample of thinking at the time, in the form of a scan of one editorial. Click on it to enlarge the picture. You should be able to pick out the last two paragraphs.
Blades: I’ll get back to that subsidy in a minute, but let me just pursue the cost of the line a little bit further, you said roughly a hundred million dollars to put a spur out to the south coast when the line comes across to the island, what would it cost to go out to the northeast coast above Groswater Bay?That's where things got rather odd. Dunderdale explained that the Holyrood replacement would be financed through a guaranteed power purchase agreement with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.
Dunderdale: Well, I would have to get those numbers for you Ted, I don’t have
them right in front of me, but it would cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, would drive rates up significantly for ratepayers in Labrador and on the island.
Blades: Alright, well given that it’s going to cost billions of dollars to
run the line down to the island, so does that mean that our rates are
going to go up here on the island to pay for that?
Dunderdale: No, what it means is that’s part of the overall project, we’ll need to get financing for the project, we will have to leverage the money that we earn out of our non-renewable projects to help fund the $6- to $9-billion that are going to be required to build the Lower Churchill. What happens with the transmission link is we are able to sell power from the Lower Churchill to Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro to replace Holyrood, so the transmission link, right in the first instance, gives us the first opportunity to have a power purchase agreement with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro for around 500 MW of power, which will be part of the financing deal, will allow us to leverage financing to develop that project.Then again, maybe she didn't misspeak. Maybe LCDC will sell the power to its parent, which will in turn sell to Power. Then Hydro - rather bizarrely one might think - would provide the purchase agreement for 500 megawatts of power and somehow give NLDC another bit of leverage to raise the capital to build the project. The Holyrood replacement power represents 18% of the estimated 2800 megawatts that would come from the Gull Island and Muskrat Falls generators.
It's such a good deal, Williams said, that if he were outside government and had the chance to make such an investment, he would do so "in a heartbeat."
But Williams is not outside government and the comfort zone for a private investor is not a useful guide for the deployment of public funds.
Newfoundlanders might want to consider what happened when another Conservative premier used his provincial treasury to acquire a stake in the oil business.
In 1981 in Ontario, Bill Davis committed about $800 million to buy shares in Suncor. After falling in value for more than a decade, they were dumped in the early 1990s for a net loss of about $400 million.
Still, if Williams is right and the money starts rolling in, he will have earned his local-hero status.
If not, Williams will have provided another example of why politicians should stick to governing and leave investing to people who are only gambling their own money.
The game makes you think about the issues surrounding energy usage, society’s needs, security, effects on the environment… indeed, all the hot issues surrounding the changes happening in our world and the impacts we have on our environment.willyoujoinus.com is a Chevron initiative designed to foster an online discussion about energy and environmental issues. The website is essentially conventional in many respects, although it apes the interactivity and language of Web 2.0 with terms like "post".
Energyville is cleverly conceived and implemented. It has credibility, both in the breadth and depth of content and the fact that The Economist is behind its development.
Where it really scores is in how it wraps all of this up and presents it in a highly entertaining way.
What would be great is if this online game were to be developed as a standalone, downloadable version and made available for a nominal cost if not for free. Then I think there would be real opportunities for enormous awareness-raising.
Anyway, have a go yourself and see if it impacts your thinking about our environment