RBC Economics: Imaginary project to drive NL economy in 2010

Sometimes you wonder if these guys actually have a clue:

The recent Public and Private Investment Intentions survey revealed that growth in non-residential capital investment in the province will be the fastest in Canada, surging by an impressive 31.2%. This increase will be fuelled by stronger investment in mining, oil and gas extraction,
utilities (related to the Lower Churchill Hydro development project) and the provincial government’s aggressive infrastructure stimulus plan.

Lower Churchill Hydro development project?

Since no one will be spending money on a project that doesn’t exist it’s going to be pretty hard for that gigantic imaginary project to drive economic development in the province.

It’s like the Matshishkapeu Accord, appropriately named around these parts after the spirit of the anus, the flatulence god.  Because that’s pretty much what the whole LC project is right now:  so much hot air that hits your nostrils with a pretty ripe odour.

Then there’s this piece of sure shite from the boys at the bank:

Employment in the province fell by 5,200, causing the unemployment rate to rise during most of the year; however, outside of energy and mining, the rest of the domestic economy fared surprisingly well.

Sure.

Surprisingly well indeed, if you don’t mention that the fishery is down 22% in landed value.

And let’s not forget that forestry, as in pulp and paper making, is in near complete friggin’ meltdown.  Mills closed.  The one remaining mill has one machine going instead of two and is slicing off workers and costs in a desperate effort to stay afloat.

The province’s finance minister admits they’ve shagged up government spending so badly that current spending patterns are “unsustainable.”  But the fin min say recently that if it wasn’t for oil – thanks BP, CKW, BT, and   RG – he and DW would be shagged up royally?  good thing there were all those give-aways before 2003 of they’d be up the creek.

But sure sure thing, there, RBC economist guys.

Everything in Newfoundland and Labrador is just wonderful.

Protected by a magic bubble.

Friggin’ loons.

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Yep, that’s unscathed alrightee

The province’s fishing industry saw a 22% drop in the value of fish landings in 2009.

So much for coming through the recession protected by some sort of magic bubble. Then again, some of us mocked that idiotic idea the moment the words slipped out of someone’s mouth.

Now you know that when a provincial politician talks about coming through the recession better than most you know they were only talking about themselves, personally. 

They sure as heck weren’t talking about their constituents.

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The seven percent solution

Mark Griffin, former traitor, spouts the new government policy for rural development which is, to be sure exactly the same policy as other every other government before (save one) that didn’t have any idea what to do to develop the economy successfully either:  shift public service jobs into town and create new public service ones.

Send us a prison says lawyer Mark and quickly too before all that “political capital” is burned up.

Mark.

Bubbie.

We are in a pre-election period.

It could be we are in a pre-leadership period on top of that.

Over the next two years there’ll be no shortage of political will to distribute scarce tax dollars around on any scheme  - no matter how useless, no matter that it has been tried and failed before - that might pay for a few more votes.

Forget a prison.

Dream big.

Think of a gigantic greenhouse for growing things like cucumbers and tomatoes.

Just because it failed before doesn’t mean it can’t be useful again to get that last seven percent.

Mark Griffin, former traitor, may well have hit on the way to get that last seven percent of people fully satisfied.

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Wonderland

 

--and then all the people cheered again, and one man, who was more excited than the rest, flung his hat high into the air, and shouted (as well as I could make out) “Who roar for the Sub-Warden?” Everybody roared, but whether it was for the Sub-Warden, or not, did not clearly appear: some were shouting “Bread!” and some “Taxes!”, but no one seemed to know what it was they really wanted.

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales must begin, one could explain how to pronounce the name of the place by saying that it rhymed with “understand”.

But since “understand” has gone out of favour both as a word and an idea, one must now try and find a replacement.

What better choice than “Wonderland” for a place that these days most resembles the love child of Tim Burton and John Waters after consuming a truckload of the Peruvian marching powder reputedly popular in local junior high schools these days.

After all, this is a province where cabinet minister after cabinet minister admitted over the past six months that they shagged up public finances – spending is “unsustainable” – and the public response is to give them the highest satisfaction level in the history of polling anywhere in Atlantic Canada.

93%.

Higher than flag stomping time.

Higher than the January 2005 handout cheque victory.

Higher than not one but two back-to-back record surpluses that put more money in public coffers than the entire provincial budget 20 years ago.

Even higher satisfaction than the poll taken after the October 2007 election.

Without any apparent reason, people suddenly decided to be hugely satisfied.

Ah, but it was Danny’s bum ticker getting sympathy, some of you smarties are saying.

Take a look.  In a question in which people could show love for Hisself alone, he could only manage to go from 79% to 81%. Less than half the margin of error.  Hardly a thing worth noting at all, let alone label a surge. Were the Telegram story signed it could have been a job application to the Ministry of Truth.

And if you deconstruct the CRA poll numbers, it is even more bizarre.  After 24 months of steady decline, support for the provincial Tories shot up enough to beat the poll taken right after the 2007 election.

But that’s not all.

Even with satisfaction levels that Sarah Palin and George Bush The Younger could only dream of, still 15% of the people polled actually want someone other than the current Premier to be Premier.  In fact, half the people who want Yvonne Jones running the place instead of Danny Williams actually think that Danny Williams’ crowd is doing a completely or mostly satisfactory job. or maybe all 15% of them do which is even weirder.

Such is life in Wonderland.

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Penashue bails; Matshishkapeu Accord in trouble

Peter Penashue decided to pack it in as deputy grand chief of the Innu Nation.

That leaves the Matshishkapeu Accord in even more doubt than before now that its chief champion is gone to the sidelines. The Accord is crucial to development of the Lower Churchill.

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90 or more Club

The result of just a quickie google scan on politicians with a voter approval of 90% or better:

1.  Sarah Palin (Republican), former Governor of Alaska.

2.  Jon Huntsman, (Republican) former Governor of Utah.

3.  George W. Bush, (Republican) former President of the United States

4.  Hisself.

Interesting.

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And if Glenn Beck says it…

Well ya know it must be true.

Glenn likes Danny, too.

 

Way freakin’ spooky

Danny likes Canada’s health care system and goes to Florida for surgery.

Sarah Palin rants and raves against socialised medicine but admits that her family has come across the border for care.

They’ve been known to share an interest in reading, too.

Interesting.

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Ron Silver: No More.

Rest in peace.

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Financial shorts – Second Monday in March edition

1.  Crack whores rebel:  Icelanders voted against a US$5.3 billion package to deal with part of the country’s financial mess.

“This is a strong no from the Icelandic nation,” said Magnus Arni Skulason, co-founder of a group opposed to the deal.

“The Icelandic public understands that we are sovereign and we have to be treated like a sovereign nation — not being bullied like the British and the Dutch have been doing.”

Sovereign Icelanders may be, but they are also broke.  If they don’t like it when people come looking for their money back – it ain’t bullying, BTW – then maybe they shouldn’t have been running the financial equivalent of a crack-house.

2.  More hidden cash turns up:  There may be a few million extra in provincial coffers when the financial year ends.  This isn’t a windfall or a gift.  It’s just what you get when you compare the actual amount of federal transfers in the current fiscal year - $1.264 billion – to the $988 million reported in Budget 2009 last spring.

Well, that’s if you use the Estimates which gives different numbers than the ones in the budget speech. The numbers in the budget speech are pretty much dead-on the actual federal transfers.

Someone should ask the finance minister to explain why he feels the need to keep two sets of books.

3. Counter-intuitive.  Okay.  Crude is up.  Gold is up and silver is is up as well. US dollar is down.  The American economy shed jobs but not as many as expected.  Some news media are reporting this as a good thing.  Basically, it’s more of the recovery-is-here-yada-yada crap they’ve been fed since this time last year.

If the dollar is down, and oil and gold are up, that’s a sure sign that not only is the US economy not in recovery, it’s virtually a guarantee it won’t recover while prices for things like crude oil are that high.

The American economy needs oil prices to be about half of what they are currently in order to see a recovery tale hold.  And when a recovery does start, it won’t keep going if oil prices shoot back up to their current levels.

In the meantime, stand by for an “adjustment’ sometime in 2010 or early 2011.  The “correction” won’t be as big as the collapse in 2008 but it will hurt.

It will especially hurt any government that doesn’t have its financial house in order.

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She’s funny even if she doesn’t try

Let’s just say that Google's translator didn’t quite get the subtle nuances of a French-language story on Sarah Palin’s speech in Calgary.

Here’s the original:

L’ancienne gouverneure de l’État américain de l’Alaska et ancienne candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence, Sarah Palin, a fait salle comble samedi soir à Calgary.

Here’s the google version.

Ummm.

Not exactly.

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KGB Connections

While some may have viewed it as politically incorrect, CBC followed up on its expose of organized crime in Canada with a documentary on Soviet espionage in North America.

KGB Connections aired in 1982 and doesn’t appear to have aired since. The thing is now in the public domain and the whole program is available on youtube.  local audiences will be interested in the reference to one Soviet spy dropped off in St. John’s when a fishing vessel arrived to change crews and pick up supplies.

This version is in black and white but the show originally aired in colour. A colour version, slightly shorter in length, is also available on youtube.

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Firds of a bleather: legislature edition

The second Monday in March.

That would be this Monday, March 8.

Why is that an important day?

Well, under the standing orders of the House of Assembly, the legislature is supposed to sit:

“in the Winter-Spring from the second Monday in March to the Friday before the Victoria Day weekend with a break from the end of the sitting day on Maundy Thursday to the third Monday after Easter…”.

Seems pretty clear.

And yet, for some completely inexplicable reason the House of Assembly is not being called back into session on Monday, March 8, it being the second Monday in March.

Anyone care to suggest a rational, sensible, plausible and/or very good reason why the House likely won’t be sitting again until two weeks after it was supposed to be back?

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Innu vow to protest, continue caribou hunt

After a while, some of this stuff gets repeated so often you could be reading the news with an early undiagnosed case of dementia and not really know for sure that slowly you are losing your grip on reality.

Penashue.

Hickey. 

Innu. 

Protest.

Caribou.

Is it 2010 or 1987?

The answer  - at least for the old Canadian Press clipping below -  is 1987.  The first clue the story is older is the reference to “Innu Indians” and if you managed to slip by that one, the dead give-away is the mention of protests at a military runway.

Other than that, the rest of the story could be from events of the past six or seven years.  A group of Innu, protesting an issue they believe involves their aboriginal rights, decide to kill a few animals from an endangered herd.

A Penashue from Sheshatshiu, in this case Greg, speaks on behalf of the protesters:

''People ask us why we don't sit down and negotiate with government,'' said Greg Penashue, president of the Innu association. ''Well, that's not something I foresee in the near future.

Meanwhile, there’s a prediction of dire consequences from someone regular readers of these scribbles will recognise as a local favourite:

However, John Hickey, [right, shovelling something else in 2009] president of the Mealy Mountains Conservation Committee, said the illegal hunting could escalate into a full-scale slaughter of the herd.

''What's probably going to happen next year, in my estimation, is Metis hunters and hunters from other communities are going to start operating in there and we're going to have one big massacre in the Mealy Mountains,'' he said.

Now aside from the novelty of seeing the old story recycled in this way, there are a few other lessons to be drawn from all this.

Firstly, the Innu  - whether from Quebec or from Sheshatshiu – are past masters at using caribou hunts in sensitive areas as a way of attracting southern media attention for their political cause of the moment.

Second, the caribou herds involved have been used like this for more than 22 years and so far the herds have not been decimated.  There is good reason to doubt either the scientists views or, by referring back to that first point, what is actually going on.  Innu aren’t stupid people, individually or collectively.

Third, the same cannot be said for the white folks who – each and every year - fall for the same schtick without fail.  In that light,  John Hickey’s prediction of a “massacre” 22 years ago is laughable.  But he is basically no different than the crowd who have played the reflexive, knee-jerk white redneck role in the Annual Media Caribou Frenzy every year since.

What’s especially sad is that some of the biggest parts in the 2010 edition of the annual knee-jerk follies are played by a bunch of politicians who are supposed to be or who should be a heckuva lot smarter than they evidently are.  Felix, Danny and Kathy should know better than to get into the racket.  They aren’t being played for saps;  they have re-written the script for themselves and in the process done absolutely nothing to defuse the situation, strip the protest of its political value or advance the Lower Churchill land claim.

Rather, with their claims that charges might be laid they are showing themselves to be extraordinarily stunned.  As lawyers of some experience, Felix and Danny should both know that the aboriginal people of Canada have a constitutionally guaranteed right to hunt, fish and trap subject only to laws about safety and conservation.  In this case, showing any conservation issue is going to be highly problematic.  The facts speak for themselves.

In the end, if Danny and Felix try a politically-driven prosecution  - a la FPI and yellow-tail flounder, right - they can only lose as a matter of law.  They may secure the redneck vote and grumble about the friggin’ courts but that’s going to be of little use once the Innu have a much stronger political position as a result of pure stunnedness. 

On the other hand, now that Danny and Felix have built up an expectation that charges will be laid against the Innu – presumably knowing there is frig-all chance of a conviction – they are going to look like eunuchs if they decide that a prosecution is a waste of time and don’t lay charges.

They got into this mess, one suspects, for a very well-known habit of one of three  - Danny, Felix or Kathy - to shoot from the lip before the brain engages.  Henley v. Cable Atlantic is just one of many such examples. The people of the province have seen it countless times since 2003 and  - contrary to popular mythology – The Lip has cost taxpayers dearly indeed.  This case will likely prove to have a similar high price-tag attached to it.

Either way, the Innu will be stronger as a result of this little escapade. Building up sympathy among the southerners is a time-honoured part of their strategy and it will work now just as it did 22 years ago.

One potentially huge difference in the political response to the Innu outside Newfoundland and Labrador now versus earlier has to do with the level of interest of other governments in the whole affair.  If the feds were as attached to the Lower Churchill  as they were to low-altitude flight training in the 1980s or if the Lower Churchill project was more than a load of hot air, the federal politicians would be less susceptible to the political pressure that is likely to be applied to them very shortly.  There’s no way of knowing for sure – at this point – how they will react.

At the same time, these recent protests and the strong words being tossed highlight the huge cleavages within the Innu communities north and south of the Labrador-Quebec boundary. The white folks in this end of the province might want to consider that in a worst case scenario, there’s no guarantee “our Indians” will side with us against “their Indians.”  None of that bodes well for the Lower Churchill.

And if nothing else, all this highlights the sheer idiocy of believing that history started in 2003 and that – in an of themselves – the current lords and ladies ruling this place are inherently smarter than any average bear that went before.

If they were, then they wouldn’t have volunteered so eagerly to play the horse’s arse – yet again - in the pantomime that is Labrador hydro development.

April 22, 1987

Canadian Press

Innu Indians, locked in an escalating battle over native hunting rights and provincial laws, set up tents yesterday on the runway of a military airport.

Five tents were pitched at Canadian Forces Station Goose Bay by members of the Naskapi Montagnais Innu band to protest against the resumption of low-level flights by NATO fighter jets.

The Innu, who believe the flights disrupt the migratory patterns of caribou, were also protesting against the imprisonment of band members arrested on charges of illegally hunting caribou.

The tents, which were not disrupting airport activities, come after a winter of defiance by Innu from the central Labrador community of Sheshatshit.

The Innu, non-status Indians native to Labrador and Eastern Quebec, say they have killed at least 50 caribou from the protected Mealy Mountains' herd on the south coast of Labrador. The Innu consider the area part of their traditional hunting ground.

Six band leaders and Rev. Jim Roach, a Roman Catholic priest, are in jail awaiting a court appearance next week on charges of illegally hunting or illegally possessing caribou meat.

''People ask us why we don't sit down and negotiate with government,'' said Greg Penashue, president of the Innu association. ''Well, that's not something I foresee in the near future.

''How can they guarantee us rights when they throw us in jail virtually every day for practicing our traditional way of life?'' The Innu claim the right to roughly 300,000 square kilometres of land in Newfoundland and Quebec, saying the tribe was hunting caribou as its way of life before Newfoundland existed and has never signed a treaty giving up its rights.

However, John Hickey, president of the Mealy Mountains Conservation Committee, said the illegal hunting could escalate into a full-scale slaughter of the herd.

''What's probably going to happen next year, in my estimation, is Metis hunters and hunters from other communities are going to start operating in there and we're going to have one big massacre in the Mealy Mountains,'' he said.

Other native peoples in Labrador have also claimed traditional rights in the Mealy Mountains. The Innu receive government assistance in the form of subsidized housing, social services and hunting trips.

''If you get right down to it, the Innu went into a section of Labrador which is traditionally used by the Metis people,'' said Joe Goudie, president of the Labrador Metis Association.

''They have impinged on our land without consultation, without anything.''

The Mealy Mountains and the nearby Red Wine Mountains were closed to caribou hunting after the herd dwindled to less than 200 in 1975 from about 2,500 in the 1950s. The Innu are allowed unrestricted access to the George River caribou herd far in the north, whose numbers have mushroomed to more than 700,000.

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The Dead Parrot of Graduate Studies

“This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker.

This is a late parrot. 

It's a stiff. 

Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.  

Its metabolic processes are of interest only to historians. 

It's hopped the twig. 

It's shuffled off this mortal coil. 

It's run down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible! 

This.... is an ex-parrot.”

One could pity Noreen Golfman, Ph.d.

Theoretically, that is.

One could  - entirely in the abstract, mind you - actually manage to find some measure of sympathy for the good professor as she copes with the crisis besetting her academic charge, the School of Graduate Studies at Memorial University.

But that sympathy could only exist in the absence of the facts.

You see the university administration froze the grad studies budget for new students.  Starting this fall new graduate students won’t get any fellowship cash from the university.  According to Golfman, about half the university’s masters and doctoral students rely on the estimated $12,000 to $15,000 to help pay for their studies.

Grad Studies is facing a budget shortfall of about $2.0 million a year.  Supposedly the shortfall is the result of a 60% increase in enrolment within the past year.

Note the word:  enrolment.

That is slightly different from the words that appear in the Telegram story on the mess where the word “application” is used. A 60% increase in applications wouldn’t matter since those applications could be turned down in the absence of funds.

A problem exists because someone – maybe Noreen Golfman as dean of graduate studies – or some group of someones allowed enrolment to increase at such an insane rate in a single year.

Freezing spending is not, as Golfman claimed, “sending the right signal about being fiscally responsible.” Rather it sends a signal that someone or some group of someones was so utterly incompetent that they let the situation develop in the first place. The university administration had to freeze the thing in place or face catastrophe. 

As an aside:  what are the odds, incidentally, that Golfman didn’t make this decision all by her lonesome?

The implications are far more serious for the university than the mere inconvenience to a few thousand students. 

"It means that it will be very difficult to attract graduate students to the university this coming year because when you're a graduate student you apply to different universities and see who is going to offer you the best package," [faculty association president Ross] Klein says. "It affects the stature of the university because the graduate programs are one of the things that raise the stature."

You can tell Golfman understands the magnitude of the shag up because she has been bullshitting so heavily in the Telegram and to other media like the CBC:

“We will get control of our budget and hope to move forward with more support, but we couldn't in conscience go forward at the growth rate we are without knowing if we've got the money to do it.”

As Golfman knows, though, she and her colleagues did "go forward at the growth rate” knowing that they didn’t have the cash.  There isn't any indication anywhere that the funding levels were cut, tightened or otherwise altered until after the enrolment part of this fiscal fiasco.  Make no mistake, though: if there is a mess,  Golfman made it.

That isn't what you will see her acknowledge anywhere, though.  Nowhere does the bullshit about this flow more heavily than on Golfman’s own weekly blog Postcards from the edge. 

Golfman tries blaming the media for the current flap:

A freeze by any other name would not be a freeze. That’s of course why the media love to use the word: it signals exactly what freezes are, an act that seizes everything up.

She tries a minor play for sympathy:

“Forgive me, but I am somewhat preoccupied with the word freeze right now…”.

She tries to obfuscate by relying on the extracts from the Standard Book of Bureaucratic Bullshit:

Our staggering growth in the last couple of years has outrun our more limited capacity to support it, and so we are doing some intense focusing on how best to move ahead while staying committed to both the university’s Strategic Plan and the many students who are currently in our programs and require reasonable, long-term funding through the healthy front ends of their programs.

There is a mysteriously capitalised pair of phrases that seem as if they were cut and pasted whole from someone’s hastily typed notes on how to torque the whole shite-pile:

NOT SUCH A BIG DEAL, REALLY. IT’S CALLED GOOD FISCAL MANAGEMENT.

She tries to blame the media – slow news week – and then turns the whole thing into a commentary on “how basic communication works in our society”:

In a world of tweets and twerps, you know just how quickly the facts can be distorted. Just put a few nouns and verbs out there and watch how suddenly the message gets transformed into something quite different from its original meaning and context.

Ah yes, the ever popular “I was misquoted”, not by the usual culprits the news media but by the faceless crowds on facebook and other social media.

Golfman only accepts responsibility for a poor choice of words:  “I admit the memo used the phrase ‘temporary freeze,’ and if I had my time back I’d trade the word in for something softer, like ‘temporary hold’ on fellowship support for new, incoming students.” 

However in her bass-ackwards version her mistake was for telling things as they were – it really is a freeze – rather than employ the sort of mind-numbing drivel one used to find in news releases from Eastern Health about breast cancer testing.

And of course, Golfman would be remiss if she didn’t resort to the old academic stand-by, the supposed ignorance of those who have not been exposed to the rarefied intellectual environment of the average graduate school:

The whole world of graduate studies, as is the domain of research, is also a bit mystifying to the general public who, if they haven’t done a graduate degree, understandably find the whole notion of giving students money to study a little odd.

Only someone with the unadulterated arrogance to believe that could also try the extensive line of sheer foolishness Golfman has been peddling the past day or so in an effort to deflect attention from the rather obviously unsound fiscal management that led to this fiasco in the first place.

Golfman, of course, is the only one who has been avoiding facts, let alone distorting them. Her efforts to massage the message have been so amateurish, so lame, so pathetic that anyone with the IQ of a cup of warm spit – let alone the crowd at the university – could see what is actually going on.

The only thing Golfman succeeds at doing is giving the people of Newfoundland and Labrador a textbook example of how to bungle.   If she didn’t cause the problem in the first place – and she shouldn’t be off the hook for that one yet -  then she has certainly buggered the response to the crisis. 

But what is perhaps the most unforgivable sin in a string of Golfman’s unforgiveables is her mangling of the sacred canon of Monty Python:

(I am starting to feel like John Cleese defending his not-so-dead parrot, but I digress, again.)

Fans of the show will appreciate that while Golfman may like to think she’s playing Cleese’s part, she’s auditioning  - rather badly - to replace Michael Palin.  Cleese was the customer who;d be sold a bill of goods.  Michael Palin was the shopkeeper who tried every manner of deflection and bullshit to dodge responsibility for the fraud.

Oh yes, and the parrot was, unmistakably, and without question, dead.

One can only hope someone in the university administration will step in, like The Colonel, and put an end to Golfman’s miserable efforts at sketch comedy before more damage is done to the university.

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Norwegian Blue bonus:

The audio of the dead parrot sketch from the Live at Drury Lane album.  Those with a penchant for trivia and other things will note the sketch originally appeared in a Python episode titled “Full frontal nudity”. [dead link deleted]

Revised 27 April 2017 to correct typos,  clarify sentences,  and to advise that,  after the Grad Studies Fiasco, Golfman won a lovely promotion.

They are speaking his language

What I said before and I said going in, this is about principles, but it's also about money as well. At the end of the day, the promise and the principle converts to cash for the bottom line for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

That’s Danny Williams talking about the feud with Stephen Harper.

And now the Quebec Innu are looking for compensation for any development of the Lower Churchill.

This one should be easy to resolve.  Both sides are already speaking the same language:  the language of money.

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It’s all how you ask

Not all CBC is bad and not all CBC is bad all the time.

There was da Ceeb reporter in British Columbia who starts by asking very meekly if it is alright to talk to Hisself. 

Hisself obliges. 

And then there’s the appearance on the national Ceeb show that ran out of laughs long before they hired the low-rent Scott Thompson impersonator.

Hisself looks as tired as one might expect of a guy who had major surgery three weeks ago and who just hauled himself out to Vancouver to attend the Olympics. There are other times when he seems just plain annoyed.  Let’s just say this ain’t Colbert or the Daily Show.  Heck, it would have to stretch to come close to Air Farce. 

At the end of it you only wind up wondering why – after all the effort expended to kill off the media fascination with his hair and his scar  - he actually agreed to do this sort of thing.

 

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The Politics of the Caribou

Some pictures turned up in ye olde in-box showing caribou in Labrador.  The shots were taken this year.

At this point don’t get concerned with the discussion of which herd is which.  Are biologists in agreement that the various herds  - George, Red Wine, Joir, etc - are actually separate entities?  Or are they merely sub-sets of one large caribou population that ranges over what some people have referred to as the Quebec-Labrador peninsula?

If the Red Wine herd was really only 100 animals and it seldom migrated very far then six or seven years of hunting by both Labrador and Quebec Innu should have wiped them out.  Well, certainly if the Innu are reportedly taking way more than 100 animals every season.

The biology of it is one thing.  The politics of it is another and as this story of the Innu hunt has really taken off, people are getting a better perspective on the deep political cleavages that lay behind the annual caribou media frenzy.

There is the pressure on the provincial government, evidenced by a statement issued by Hisself  - presumably recuperating from heart surgery in sunnier climes - and the companion piece – a media availability by Hisself’s hand-picked political mouthpiece and occasional stunt-double.

Then there is Innu leader Peter Penashue pissing all over the Quebec Innu for supposedly being backward-assed and stunned.  Peter reveals the schism between the Innu south of the border and those north of it pretty nakedly. He may also be a bit ticked at being on the receiving end of some of the same tactics he and his associates have been known to use, but that’s another story.

But truth be told, Peter himself is not representing a monolithic group. Heck, Peter’s own mother isn’t on side with the deal.  And when it comes to hunting endangered caribou, Peter was singing a very different tune before Christmas than the one he spouts today.

In other words, the issues involved in this are complex.  They cannot be dismissed as easily as Peter dismisses them or as some of the non-aboriginal people of the south are making them out to be. 

Heck, it isn’t clear yet Peter’s own crowd north of the border will buy into the New Dawn or view it as merely a dolled up version of the original Matshishkapeu Accord. He may like people to think that everything is tucked in, but we heard that same story from him when the Matshishkapeu Accord rolled out the first time.  Whatever happened to that January 31 2009 ratification vote, there, Peter? 

As with a herd of caribou, there is much more to this story than may first appear.

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Firds of a bleather

Provincial finance minister Tom Marshall, speaking in Corner Brook in mid-February:

“Now we have to benefit from new industry, benefit from the knowledge economy, the innovation economy.”

Adios “stimulus”. 

Innovation is the new buzzword on provincial Tory lips.

And then a couple of days before the federal budget, you’ll never guess what federal Tories are saying, well according to Globe and Mail sources:

The Harper government's Throne Speech and budget this week will try to shift the spotlight away from the billions of dollars in short-term stimulus and onto measures designed to generate higher-paying, longer-term jobs.

 

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A knowledge economy, indeed

Finance minister Tom Marshall, in mid-February 2010:

“Now we have to benefit from new industry, benefit from the knowledge economy, the innovation economy.”

Sure, Tom:

A spending freeze on funding for graduate students at Memorial University of Newfoundland is expected to affect hundreds of professors and students.

The university's administration is freezing funding for new graduate students, starting fall 2010 because the university's School of Graduate Studies is running a deficit.

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Oil production figures

BP gave you the numbers in November 2009.

Turns out the provincial finance department’s statistics division did a run of the same figures in October but didn’t make them public until January 2010, three months later.

Still, they projected oil production over the whole fiscal year would be down 21% from the previous year. They changed the exact numbers from 98 million barrels forecast in March to 101 million barrels by December and – in true political hyper-torque mode -  in the December financial update this was pushed an an increase compared to the forecast.

It was – obviously -  an increase compared to the forecast; but that only masked the fact they were actually forecasting a drop of 21% in production regardless of how you looked at it.

That, almost inevitably, will translate into a substantial drop in revenue as well.  Yet,  the December financial statement claimed there’d be only a modest drop in oil revenue from the blockbuster year in 2008.  The finance officials never did show how they came up with that calculation.

The BP forecast for revenues used used actual royalty figures from the federal natural resources department. They show the provincial government’s royalties tracking below the March forecast.

And while the treasury will pocket close to $200 million from the Hibernia transportation dispute settlement it’s still a bit hard to see how oil prices are going to rebound sufficiently to produce the extra $520 million in oil revenues – compared to March’s forecast  -  that the revised treasury forecast said would be in hand by the end of the year.

Still, the final tally on the budget update in December only shift the figures around slightly.  If it holds on track, the provincial government will still wind up borrowing close on a billion dollars in cash – either from the banks or from its own temporary cash reserves – in order to balance the books.

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But if the “mother fish” is dead…

Apparently someone missed the fairly simple point that if a large size cod is a sign of a healthy stock – the big ones are successful breeders – then it only stands to reason that a large dead cod can’t help the endangered cod stocks to recover.

Because…like…you know…umm…

Dead cod don’t breed.

Right?

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Priorities

New legislation consolidating the province’s animal control and protections is due in the House of Assembly in a couple of weeks’ time.

Meanwhile, there are at least 10 pieces of legislation – one dating back to 2004 – which passed through the legislature but which are not in force.

And on top of that there are campaign promises, some of those dating back to 2003, which are still unfulfilled.

Danny Williams may think the crowd at the Ceeb are mothers for poking around his heart business but apparently  - what with those damn Dead Dogs from Dunville  - he sure looks to the Mother Corp to drive public policy.

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Whistleblower Protection Bill – the annual reminder

From January 2009,  here’s, here’s the link to the text of a draft bill to protect people who blow the whistle on misdeeds by public officials.

Your humble e-scribbler offered up this self-contained piece of draft legislation as a way of helping a government that seems to have a spot of trouble meeting its campaign commitments.

This one dated from 2007 and in his 2008 year-ender with the Telegram, the Premier said:

"We indicated that we would try and get that done by the end of this year. We realized getting into that, that that's a very complex piece of legislation that we have to make sure that it's done properly…".

No need to fear complexity.  This draft bill is based on a tested example from another province.

Never let it be said that your humble e-scribbler didn’t try and help out the provincial government, especially since it has been off for the past month recovering from major heart surgery.

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Bullshit headline; bullshit story

“Quebec Innu hunters may face charges” screams the headline above a cbc.ca/nl story.  The subject  - the annual caribou frenzy  - rivals the annual march madness of the seal slaughter for the media play it gets and the howls of protest from people within the province.

There is the first sentence that supports the headline and makes it look like the provincial government might actually be doing something to stop the hunt of caribou near an endangered herd.

The second sentence is a quote from the minister:

"We certainly do," [justice minister] Felix Collins told CBC News. "We certainly hope that the evidence will be sufficient to lay charges.”

Unfortunately the rest of the story reveals the naked truth:  the headline, lede and quote are sheer bullshit because the provincial government doesn’t have a scrap of evidence worthy of the name. 

There’s a quote from the minister that anyone with half a clue could figure out:

"Evidence taken from surveillance cameras presents some challenges because you have to identify a shooter with a dead animal on the ground, and given the angles of the cameras and the lighting and the clothing and distinguishing one individual from the other and what not, it takes quite a challenge to do that."

Collins said no evidence was seized at the scene.

If you listen the audio that goes with the story, Labrador Morning host Cindy Wall very simply notes for justice minister Felix Collins that there have been no charges laid despite the fact this stuff goes on regularly. Collins gamely insists that work is progressing and evidence is being assessed.  He even tries to make it sound like there is still a possibility charges might be laid arising from events last year.

Good luck with that one, there Felix.

Collins even insists that charges would be laid against anyone, including Innu from Labrador.  Wall pointedly corrects that one, too by calmly speaking truth to power. The last time Labrador Innu hunted in a restricted zone they got their gear back and no charges were laid.

Admittedly, Collins is in a hard spot on this one.  He’s caught between the domestic political pressure to do something and the practical problems of trying to do anything at all with a massive hydro-electric legacy project at stake. 

But Collins dilemma hardly warrants a news story that starts out with sheer crap for a headline, lede and opening quote.

Leave that for the crowd in the Confederation Building who get paid huge amounts to pour out just exactly that kind of bullshit.

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The Annual Caribou Frenzy: 2010 edition

Every year Quebec Innu hunt caribou in the northern part of the territory they claim.

Every year there is a panic about it.

This year was no exception.

There was just a unique excuse this year:  the Matshishkapeu Accord.

But every year the Innu hunt caribou, and every year the government gets its collective knockers in a giant bunch, some locals call for the army to be sent in to arrest the interlopers and every year the endangered Red Wine caribou herd and its 100 animals never seem to get slaughtered into extinction.

And it’s not like someone hasn’t pointed out that this pattern occurs.

Same bat time, give or take a few weeks.

Same bat place.

Every.

single.

year.

 

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SCANners

One of the pieces of legislation included last May in Bond Papers’ list of legislation  not in force has turned up dead.

Cause of death is reported to be changed priorities.

As Terry Roberts reported in the Saturday Telegram, the Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act (SCAN) won’t be put into force despite being passed by the legislature in 2007 and supposedly still being on track in 2008:

"At this point in time, there's no inclination to proclaim it because our priorities now have changed," Collins said.

"We've put significant investments into policing in the last couple of years, and that's where our priorities have gone."

He said the province's policing budgets have increased $40 million since 2004.

Collins said financial concerns played a role in deep-sixing the SCAN law.

"It's a question of getting the best bang for the buck with the resources you have," he noted.

But the minister could not put a dollar figure on how much implementing the Safer Communities law would have cost taxpayers.

Odd that Collins said financial concerns entered into consideration.  A highly misleading news release issued in 2007 – it was an election year, don’t forget – carried the title “Government takes action for safe communities and neighbourhoods” and also included this line:

Budget 2007 provided $237,000 for an investigation unit within the Department of Justice that will be in place as early as this fall.

Less than $250,000 dropped in 2007 with the clear implication in the release that not only was the legislation in force – when it wasn’t – but that government already budgeted cash to get the whole scheme up and rolling.

So how come three years later the whole thing is dead and money was a contributing factor to the project’s demise?

The SCAN messaging fit perfectly with the Tory campaign that fall which placed a heavy emphasis on crime and crime prevention.  The campaign even included a staged event with police recruits. 

SCAN didn’t get the highlight the Tory campaign expected though.  That’s likely because, as the Telegram reported, the law proved unpopular with community groups.  The Provincial Advisory Council on the Status of Women warned of serious problems with the bill and no evidence it actually worked in any of the other provinces  - like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and  Manitoba – where this type of law actually was in force.

Amendments to the bill seemed to address some of the concerns but apparently not sufficiently to avoid controversy.

SCAN legislation is supposed to deal with cases where property is being used for illegal activity but where it’s unlikely that the Crown prosecutors could  get a conviction under the Criminal Code or the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.  SCAN can also serve as a tip to law enforcement about illegal or suspicious activity.

SCAN isn’t the only topical piece of justice department legislation that is on the side of milk cartons.  In 2004, one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the new Tory-dominated legislature was designed to beef up court security. Six years later, the thing is still not in force. 

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Related:  “Massive cost overruns, delays now normal for provincial government?”

Too close for comfort: Gladiator and Pirates

Close your eyes and just listen to the music.

This is what you get when you hire the same guy  - or his associates - for both movies.  You not only get music that “sounds like” what so-and-so did for that film over there, you get pretty much the same stuff.

And if that wasn’t enough proof of One Thought Zimmer’s penchant for borrowing from himself, about half way through this compilation, you’ll find that Glad and pirates sounds like a chunk of the soundtrack for a Wesley Snipes parachuting movie.

 

Zimmer’s not alone.  James Horner seems to have had one idea and milked it through several movies as well.  The bits from Willow and Enemy at the Gates are laughable. And right at the end, there’s the past master of “homaging”, John Williams with photocopy job in JFK and Jurassic Park.

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The Last Post: Dead Dipper Dale

Tickling Bight  is no more.

It has ceased to be.

Bereft of life, it has run down the curtain and joined the invisible choir of political blogs in this province that vanished without a trace and without warning.

It has hydroqueened, you might say. Where is Hydroqueen these days, any way?

Tickling Bight may not have managed to last for one rideout, the shortest measurement in local politics. One rideout is 43 days, the length of time Tory Premier Tom Rideout held office in 1989. .

Tickling Bight was the partisan outlet for Dale Kirby, a local New Democrat organizer.

There’s no word on why the blog – which started without much fanfare -  slipped quietly into the night.

Resurrection Update:  And then just as mysteriously as it vanished, Tickling Bight reappears.

Again, just like the hydroqueen.

Someone forget to pay the bill or something?

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Kremlinology 18: And that was W.A. Mozart with a little tune called Lacrimosa…

In some countries,  you can tell when the latest Great Helmsman is dead. 

The radio stations bombard listeners with sombre music of a classical bent for a few hours before the formal announcement is made. Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, all got the warning treatment before being propped up for displays of ritual public grief and then stuffed in the Kremlin wall for posterity.

Well, there may not be any depressing music yet but we may already have begun to hear tests of the the eulogy for Danny Williams’ political career.

Tory backbencher Ed Buckingham called voice of the cabinet minister’s morning talk show on Friday to rebut some comments by an earlier caller about the Hibernia South deal. Maurice was out to lunch but Ed went a bit farther than necessary in defending the master’s honour when he got into the great wonderments of the deal just inked.

Ed picked up the thread about all the great knowledge and wisdom which is coming from  not just this deal but others.  Apparently before now, no one knew anything about oil and gas stuff.  But thanks to Glorious and Wondrous Leader’s efforts – according to Ed – we are learning more with each one and getting better and better at deal-making.

Then he tossed in the bit that was way too much.  The thing about WGL – according to Ed – is that he is always looking ahead to make sure that we his doting subjects, his sheep, his idiot children, his precious flock of stooges are looked after, all in preparation for the day when he is not around to lead us all in his usual wondrous and glorious fashion.

Now that line displayed an entirely patronising and belittling attitude toward the people of the province, let alone what it said about Ed and his fellow politicians currently sitting in the legislature.

And we’ve certainly heard the line about gaining knowledge and how that is a big part of these deals. Having an oil company is supposed to help “us” learn about oil stuff, like none of this has ever happened before in the history of the province.

What’s noticeable about this reference is that it is the first time – in light of the most recent unmentionable subject - that one of the truly faithful has dared to make any reference to the prospect that at some point someone else might have to put a hand to the tiller instead of the guy who has been doing it for the past seven years.

Even without reference to that most recent unmentionable subject, as distinct from the unmentionable subject Bob Wakeham mentioned, that seems to be about the only time some local Tories have floated the idea that Wondrous and Glorious Leader might actually not be here for the thousand years foretold in legend, the four terms joked about with VOCM or the one more election he told Fred Hutton about.

But if one of them does start talking about the post-Danny world, then it may not be so very far away after all.

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Just like the Daily News never died

Yes, folks, never let it be said that sycophancy need be without its inadvertent humour.  For record – and before it disappears – here is a headline that doesn’t really say exactly what was intended even though the article is another vintage bit of knob-polishing from a corner of the Internet that polishes DW’s knob more than a Tory back-bencher on Open Line sucking for a cabinet seat.

Punchy?

Well, it could mean sharp and incisive but “punchy” in that sense is usually used in reference to words on a page or in reference to an action. An example of a punchy column would be Bob Wakeham’s latest.

When used to characterise an individual – which is the sense of the headline - “punchy” usually means bewildered, dazed confused. It can be a synonym for punch-drunk which means “showing signs of brain damage”  as a result of receiving too many strong blows to the head.

Heaven knows there is plenty of doublethink going on these days but this headline on a post takes the cake.  Apparently Danny was both unaffected and addled all at the same time.

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Buried Update:  Post still appears, unaltered.  A flurry of overnight posting on everything from phlegm to cartoons drops it down the order so people would have to go looking for it.

Was the Vancouver source named Liz one wonders?

Ink-stained wretches of the world unite!

Telegram editorial page editor Russell Wangersky spreads the ribs on the latest racket and puts all the bits  - and that would be all the bits - where they belong.

One particular bit is rarely expressed these days but it is very true. 

Wangersky tackles the issue of the recent boycott of CBC over comments made by an on-air guest and then offers a suggestion:

If we were less competitive and self-serving, and more committed to the right of free access, the media in this province would stand up to this particular bully.

We’d set up our cameras and digital recorders for some Williams command-performance media event — some event that he felt was of critical importance for him to speak on, and when the premier appeared, all of the media would pack up their gear and leave him standing there. You’d probably only have to do that once, because Williams is no fool. Why do it?

Because every media outlet in this province will eventually feel the same premieral lash, unless they are so hopelessly hero-worshiping and fawning as to never come close to experiencing the same opprobrium.

Will it happen? I don’t know. I’m not sure that the media in this province realizes that today’s gain might be tomorrow’s servitude.

He’s right.

On everything.

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Kremlinology 17: Woof! Woof!

 

“If I collapse up here, please drag me to Seattle – because the Canadian Medical Association won’t have anything to do with me,” the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier said.

In politics, they call it a dog whistle.  That’s the use of coded language that sends a very particular message that can only be heard by those attuned to the code. 

In this case, the key word is “Canadian” and the concept is that the Canadian doctors  - like are just sooking because they couldn’t get to operate on The Other Great One.

It’s a theme that’s been running through Danny Williams’  comments since undergoing major heart surgery in the United States.  The doctors in Newfoundland and Labrador did a bang-up job.  When he had to look at options outside the province he went to another native son for advice.  This guy just happens to be a leading thoracic surgeon in New Jersey and he recommended a fellow in Miami. Williams did say that the option of having this surgery with this method done in Canada was never offered to him, but that, it seems might be nothing more than a lawyer’s careful choice of words.

Now that some Canadian surgeons are pointing out that the same procedure was available in Canada, it isn’t good enough for Danny Williams to rely on the idea that it was simply his choice.  He’s got to take a dig that fits both with his narrative on the surgery and, for those familiar with it, his highly defensive modus operandi.

Now the rather interesting thing is that as Williams slipped that one into his Thursday night speech at a small crowd in Vancouver, it appears that some of his homies have already started howling the same tune.

Telegram comment[ary]s editor Peter Jackson made very similar snide comments a couple of days ago in response to a blog post by Geoff Meeker criticising an [Telegram] editorial that may have been written in largest part by Jackson [Correction via Peter’s comment below:  “And I had no involvement whatsoever in the writing or even proofing of that Telegram editorial.]

Let me see,,, [sic] so it's you guys, some anti-Obamacare propagandists in the U,S,, and insecure mainland surgeons who think there's a big story here…

…

The Globe seems to have taken a cue from the defensive cardiologists, many of whom they [the Globe] likely hunted out themselves…

…

You can ramble on for ages about the merits of both systems. It has nothing to do with Danny Williams.

((I'm wearing my private opinionator hat herre, [sic] not that of a Telegram staffer.)

And then in the Friday Globe, there’s a letter to the editor from Marjorie Doyle:

Perhaps Mr. Williams should voluntarily undergo more surgeries and spread his custom among the pouting doctors.

Now maybe this is nothing more than three people who may share similar ideological views purely by chance taking a cue from a misleading headline in the Globe.  Read the story at the end of that link, incidentally, and you’ll notice the huge gap between what the doctors actually said and what the headline says.

Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time dog whistling turned up in local politics during Williams’ time in office.

And what better way to deflect the argument currently centring on him and his own choices than to make it into a fight between “us” and “them”.

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Let the jihad begin anew

Bar the doors and windows and get the small children off the streets.

Bourque’s Newswatch is likely to set off another round of entirely spontaneous protests that were in no circumstances encouraged on province-wide radio by a cabinet minister.

That top story is a link to Geoff Meeker’s post on the Premier’s anti-CBC crusade which – as previously noted – is not in any way a partisan attack and bears no connection whatsoever to the entirely spontaneous outpourings of rage and hate aimed at the news media for daring to discuss the fact the Premier was ill.

There are a bunch of comments below the post, including this one from local media bad boy Craig Westcott, a fellow who is more than passingly familiar with being blackballed:

Again though, the real issue is that Danny Williams, Dunderdale and his PR team tried to pull a fast one on the Newfoundland and Labrador public. They didn't get away with it, because NTV broke the story. But by regaining control of the public relations aspect of the issue, they managed to pull off an ever faster one in its wake.

Let me repeat: the local media has treated Danny Williams and his government with kid gloves, CBC included. ELizabeth [sic] Matthews' claim that Bob Wakeham's comments justify a ban on CBC coverage is an excuse. Matthews and Williams have conducted a relentless campaign to silence journalists. This is just another effort in that campaign. It's ironic that having long ignored what the Premier's Office has been doing to intimidate other journalists, the CBC now finds itself in that same uncomfortable and unfair spot.

Our profession, locally, has gone soft.

The second one is to the Globe’s story on the NAFTA challenge Abitibi launched against the provincial government’s seizure of assets belonging to three companies: Abitibi, ENEL and locally-based Fortis.

For the record, NTV ran the Abitibi story toward the front of its major supper hour newscast and included an interview with Abitibi spokesman Seth Kursman.  CBC ran a short script story in the second quarter hour. Just sayin’.

Readers not living in the bizarro world just off Cape Breton will find in Geoff’s post the complete record of what the now infamous Bob Wakeham said to piss off Danny all the down in Sarasota.  That such tame words have been attacked publicly by one local editor as “contemptible” will surely strike such readers as being entirely beyond comprehension.

For some reason the words “nutty, nutty, nutbar” come to mind.

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Illegal Dipper campaign donations in NS

Elections Nova Scotia is fining the provincial New Democratic Party over $10,00 in illegal campaign contributions.

Meanwhile, as BP told you this time last year, the Ontario NDP broke that province’s election finance laws in 2003 when they made a donation to Randy Collins’ campaign in Newfoundland and Labrador contrary to s. 29 of the Ontario Election Finances Act.

No word on whether or not the Ontario elections office ever followed up on that tidbit.  The maximum fine under Ontario law is $5,000.

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Dead Caterpillar Update

Apparently, Jerome accidentally lopped a bit of it off over Christmas so he took off the rest of it in order to keep everything looking neat.

So now it’s back.

Uh huh.

So by the same token  that would mean all those verbal tics last year just up and run off as if by magic too.

And over the past couple of weeks there was just a spontaneous and totally un-organized outpouring of venom and hatred aimed at certain news media for things they didn’t actually do.  yep.  Totally unprompted by any e-mails or calls people just magically said the same things at the same time which – purely by total coincidence  - happened to match exactly what the Premier’s Office wanted.

R-i-i-i-i-i-i-g--h-t.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, sunshine.

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Epic Fail on seizure looms

Back when the provincial government managed to ram an unprecedented bill through the legislature seizing private assets and crushing active legislation without compensation, one argument used to justify the seizure was novel.

Apparently the environmental clean-up costs and the potential penalty under the free trade deal for the seizure would be so close that the whole thing would wind up being a wash after a negotiated settlement.  No money would wind up changing hands but ultimately the mill – carefully excluded from the initial seizure – would come to the provincial government and Abitibi would just walk away.

Officially, the Premier described the idea this way:

So, if, in fact, there is contamination which is located with operations in Botwood or around the mill in Grand Falls or the logging operations or any other rivers or whatever happens to be where they have constructed bridges or have had a presence in Newfoundland and Labrador, then there may be environmental fallout from that and that has to be quantified. If that is quantified, then that would be offset against any responsibility for compensation. If there is an excess of value over liability, then that would be the amount that would be paid.

And if there was any discrepancy, then they’d add in the amount the provincial government paid out voluntarily to settle issues with some of Abitibi’s former employees.

Nice, tidy and wonderfully convenient.

Things haven’t quite worked out that way.

First the provincial government wound up getting the mill unceremoniously dumped in their laps.

Then Ernst and Young valued the environmental remediation at around $50 million and maybe as much as $100 million.

Now Abitibi has filed its NAFTA claim seeking damages of at least $500 million, reputedly a record amount if it is awarded.

It’s also not far off another old record, the cost of the Come by Chance bankruptcy back in the 1970s which was up to that time the largest bankruptcy in Canadian history.

So now having paid out the workers cash and assumed full liability for the environmental clean-up, the provincial government is now facing a history-making lawsuit for damages.

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Dunderdate;  Some choice words from natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale that reinforce the notion of the whole thing being a wash, at the end of the day on a go forward basis.  From the Telly, 25 Mar 09:

The company has publicly put the price tag for those assets at $300

million.

 

Dunderdale says the government's figure is lower than that, but would

not say just how far apart the two sides are.

 

She said the province has a clear idea of how much it thinks the

assets are worth and has determined a range of value it would be

willing to pay Abitibi.

But Dunderdale said the province wouldn't go beyond that range just to settle up with the company.

You’re definitely going to hell for that one

labradore redefines the latest officially-sanctioned terms for people who don’t swallow the official line whole.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he is definitely going to be blackballed for his latest series of posts on how local media have covered The Subject That Must Not Be Discussed.

 

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And while everyone was consumed in the latest psychodrama…

Some of you may have missed a couple of stories that highlight the impact  demographics – the aging population – will have on government budgets.

The federal parliamentary budget officer is warning that the federal government is facing a pretty serious “structural” imbalance that won’t be solved by simple budget cuts. As the Toronto Star reported:

Canada's falling birth rate coupled with baby boomers approaching retirement will "fundamentally" change the labour market for decades to come. In the next 10 years alone, the number of people who are retired compared to those still in the workforce will grow by 7 per cent – as much as it grew in the last four decades.

Retired workers pay less tax and draw more on programs like health care and seniors' benefits, driving up government costs.

Page said "permanent fiscal actions – either through increased taxes or reduced program spending, or some combination of both" will be needed to avoid ever-increasing government deficits.

The best line of all has a very familiar ring to it:

"The government's current fiscal structure is not sustainable over the long term," the report said.

Meanwhile, Quebec’s long standing pro-natalist policies won’t really deal with the very same problem in that province:

Bonne nouvelle : le Québec connaît depuis deux ans un petit baby-boom. Mauvaise nouvelle : il survient trop tard et sera donc loin d'être suffisant pour contrer l'effet de l'arrivée à la retraite de la génération du « vrai » baby-boom. Quand les bébés qui sont aujourd'hui dans leurs poussettes intégreront le marché du travail, ils ne seront jamais assez nombreux pour payer les pensions et les soins de santé de ceux qui s'appuieront alors sur une marchette !

Now these same issues will affect Newfoundland and Labrador, just as surely as the province never escaped the ravages of the current recession.

But how they will affect the province and what needs to be done are subjects for another post.

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Size matters

Well, it used to matter to leaders like Lyndon Johnson, anyway.

Here’s the now-legendary photograph of Johnson showing off the scar from his gall bladder surgery to a gaggle of reporters.

Biographers Irwin and Debi Unger argue that Johnson was merely trying to show that he was healing well. 

It didn’t come across that way.

That story leads off a paper by University of Missouri – Columbia professor Jeffrey Pasley on American presidents and media coverage of presidential health issues.

Unknown to the public and the press, Johnson's doctors had also been concerned about the possibility of more dangerous conditions, such as pancreatic cancer and a recurrence of his earlier heart troubles; true to their fears, the president actually developed a superventricular tachycardia (dangerously accelerated heartbeat) while undergoing anaesthesia. Trying to allay suspicions that Johnson was seriously ill, press secretary Bill Moyers "snowed [the White House press corps] with details," including full-color anatomical slides, and the news media duly carried daily reports of Johnson's convalescence, including such minutiae as how well the president slept on particular nights, Lady Bird planting a tree outside the hospital room window, and his viewing of "Hello, Dolly!" on television. Unfortunately, Moyers had no idea how far the president was willing to take the full disclosure policy. On October 20, [1965] Johnson was holding forth to the press as he sunned himself on the Bethesda Naval Hospital grounds.

"Apparently feeling words to be inadequate" in describing how he felt, the Baltimore Sun's Muriel Dobbin reported, "the President whipped up his blue knit sport shirt," and, as Time put it, "let the whole world inspect the ugly twelve-inch seam under his right rib cage" where the surgeons had done their work. Many newspapers and both major newsmagazines carried a photo that week of a squatting, squinting LBJ exposing his flesh for the press.

Moyers’ efforts are typical of what politicians and their staff try to do in order to dispel rumours about a politician’s health.  . Moyers pushed out bags of detail at a time when that volume of information was unheard of.  He might have been on safe ground too, if his boss hadn’t opted for the more earthy approach.

Pasley summarises a number of episodes that demonstrate just exactly how some episodes of presidential illness have been handled and mishandled. Take a minute and read the article. You won’t be disappointed.

There is a lesson in the American experience with illness and transparency, one that would be useful for any politician to heed.

Just as daylight is the best disinfectant for political corruption so too is factual information the curative for the diseases that fester in the often incestuous world of politics.  As with physical disease, moralising and ex poste facto rationalisations are seldom useful for preventing or curing a partisan pox.

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Paths of Glory

Geoff Meeker does a bang-up job, as always documenting an episode in the local media world, in this case, the bizarro blacklisting of CBC locally for something an on-air guest said.

A few quibbles/observations:

Pull the other one, Geoff:  If Liz Matthews actually had any say over government comms policy or if she actually disagreed with anything asinine the government has done since 2003 – like blackballing reporters -  then she wouldn’t be carrying out the policy so regularly on behalf of the person who really directs government comms policy.

Politically correct?  Try Politically Safe.  The Premier’s martial status was covered first by mainland media and then repeated by only a couple of locals.  There are certain types of stories that will only get covered by mainlanders first. As with the MUN presidential fiasco, someone on the mainland had to run that one first. it still hasn’t been touched by any locals and never will be.  There are some other stories in the same category, ones that fly against the current official narrative.

Reality?  What a concept!    What makes the CBC blackballing in this case so bizarre is that CBC  - collectively or individually - hasn’t really done anything to deserve it.  If you look at the totality of CBC political coverage it has been fair, accurate and generally along the lines of other local outlets. It should be as trusted an outlet for fair and accurate coverage – and certainly not for any sort of anti-government bias – as all the other local media outlets. 

Mind you, CBC cannot hope to match the shameless sycophancy of Danny-vision, d.b.a. “Out of the Fog” where one suspects they ship questions over to Danny for approval before they interview either government or opposition members.  Nor could CBC ever hope to compete with a radio station run by a guy who gets a patronage appointment to the Premier’s pet offshore oil company.  That fellow even calls his own station on air to run down the media in exactly the fashion of a planted partisan caller. 

But not being able to press ones nose to the political nether-cheeks with that sort of Olympian enthusiasm doesn’t mean that Ryan’s been slipping subversive messages into the nightly weather hits.

The best theory to explain the current spat with CBC seems to be that they are being shot pour encourager les autres, as the French generals used to say.

If nothing else, blackballing the entire corporation might play on any internal policy divisions within the Corp’s local crowd.  In the process, the potential might be there so that any future bits of CBC coverage that resembled the Ceeb of Wakeham’s day might be finally eliminated.

So while NTV actually did the dirty deed a couple of weeks ago, they have the one thing that no other media outlet has in Newfoundland and Labrador:  the biggest audience.  The Premier’s Office can’t afford to blackball them.

But overall, the relationship between the media and the current Premier is fundamentally different from the one Meeker describes at the end of his post.  There used to be a balance.  There used to be the potential that the media would resume its job of revealing government “mishaps and mistakes.” 

These days when one outlet is set upon as irrationally and incomprehensibly as in this case, there’s more likely to be talk of hair styles and how there was never much of anything to talk about anyway.

-srbp-

What Wakeham said

Every tool in the Tory tool shed may be manning the phones in yet another  campaign of partisan intimidation, but more than a few of the rest of us have wondered what Bob Wakeham said to get all the tools in a prudish tizzy.

Those of us who haven’t been practicing the two minute hate required of Party members might wonder what could possibly have caused Danny Williams to tell the Ceeb he won’t be talking to them because of:

"very unfortunate and unnecessary comments made about the premier on the CBC" that [Elizabeth] Matthews [notionally Williams’ director of communication] said were irrelevant and hurtful to his family, and for that reason the premier won't do interviews with the CBC about his health care.

You see, the plain truth is that Bob Wakeham didn’t really say much of anything on February 3 that normal human beings would find the least bit problematic.  In the context of a discussion about what the media ought to cover about politicians and their private lives, Wakeham mentioned a subject which – until now – the local news media had completely ignored.

After acknowledging that the local media hadn’t “done a Tiger Woods” and had covered some other issues like the Premier’s back surgery in 2003, Wakeham said:

I always found it kinda passing strange that we’ve…the media…has never dealt with the fact… never reported on his martial problems. To me that was kind of something that we should have reported on not in a real intimate way in trying to find out why his marriage went belly up but just as a matter of fact.  This was a woman who had been with him on the podium on election night, had been with him on election campaigns and all of a sudden she disappears…

That’s it.

There’s a few more words as the idea trails off but that’s the sum and substance of Wakeham/Goldstein’s evil words.

Those are the remarks that Wakeham’s fellow panellist that day has now described as “contemptible.”  The Telegram commentary editor also said that Wakeham’s remarks were “ill-timed”, a phrase that is rather curiously but surely coincidentally similar to the official view that the words were “completely irrelevant.”

Now Wakeham did bring the whole thing up again a couple of weeks later when his co-panellist on the Morning Show was none other than former Tory candidate, notorious Tory apologist and biographer Janice Wells. He went over the same ground again in much the same way.

But again, that was the sum of it:  report as fact matters of fact involving a prominent public official.
Only in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 could anyone find that the least bit radical  - let alone objectionable - as an idea.

Then again only in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003 would you find reporters who agree that it is unconscionable to report facts as facts.

Not all of them have actually said that out loud or typed it, mind you.  Nonetheless, some one of them have actually censored themselves both on this health story, aspects related to it and on other stories where the potential would be high that the callers and their political associates would be less than pleased.

And that would be exactly what the callers, the e-mailers and their partisan friends wanted all along.

What Bob Wakeham said was nothing at all.

What others said in response to his remarks, though, is yet more evidence of just how dysfunctional the political society of Newfoundland and Labrador is.

-srbp-