How do they elect these candidates?

Craig Welsh is a bastard who used be be from St. John’s. Now he lives in Iqaluit where he spent some time the other day pondering some of the candidates elected recently.

You can find his blog post here:  towniebastard.blogspot.com

All of which is a preamble to I'm sure there's a punchline to last night's election results in Quebec, but I've never really got French humour. For example, Ruth Ellen Brosseau won her seat despite:

A. Not living in the riding.
B. Going to Vegas in the middle of the campaign.
C. Her riding is 98% French and she can't really speak it that well.
D. Appears to have not even visited the riding during the election.

Yet she got 40% of the vote, won the seat and now gets a $150,000+ a year job, which is a bit of a step up from assistant manager at a pub.
So yes, there's a punchline here somewhere, I just don't get it. Can someone explain French humour to me, please?

A wise man, experienced in the arts of the campaign, once told your humble e-scribbler that a candidate in any given riding is basically worth about 5% of the vote total.  Monday’s night result was brutal example of just how true that is.  Any hint of scepticism left in this corner is gone.

The other chunk of the candidate votes in any given riding come from voting tradition, that is people who always or usually vote for the same party.  The other bit is driven by the campaign itself, usually at the national or provincial level.

Now there are individual candidates who can count for more.  We are talking averages here. So quick recap:  candidate:  a little.  Tradition and the campaign:  a lot.

Now in Quebec, as in Newfoundland and Labrador, voters also seem to make a distinction between provincial elections and federal ones.  They tend to pay less attention to federal campaigns.  Take a gander at some statistics on turn-out in federal elections by Memorial University professor Alex Marland and you can see the idea. 

People in this province typically don’t turn up in great numbers to vote for their federal representatives. In the 60 years after Confederation, turn-out in the province for a federal election cracked 70% exactly twice.  It hit the high 60s a few times but for the most part, turn-out has been less than 60% of eligible voters.

By contrast, provincial elections get turn-outs about 10 percentage points higher.

Marland puts this down to a bunch of factors including literacy levels.  That night be part of it, but frankly the one idea that really seems to explain the difference in turn-out  over time is proximity or familiarity.  Provincial ridings are smaller than federal ones. People may know the local candidate personally and odds are good they will get the chance to shake all the hands of everyone. 

The same can’t be said at the federal level.  And that is reinforced by the fact Ottawa is so far away both physically and mentally for most people.  Think of it as an extreme version of the old saying that all politics is local.

In other words, people don’t seem to see federal members as being as important as their provincial ones when it comes to affecting their lives. It’s hard to come up with a better idea to explain people trooping to the polls to vote for candidates with precious little life experience in some instances, let alone the kind of experience one needs to be an effective political representative in the national legislature.

There’s another notion you can add to this as well:  just as people don’t seem to be as personally connected to their federal candidates as they might have been once, the relentless message from the news media is that the individual candidate simply doesn’t have any kind of power and influence. Sure candidates make some promises but you have to wonder if people actually believe that, for argument sake, any of the newly minted parliamentarians will be able to do much now that the Harper gang have a majority.

Did the voters on Flower Hill mark their “x” for Ryan because he promised to relentlessly fight to get a n inquiry into the fishing industry or because Jack Layton promised to deliver more doctors and nurses?  Did they even know that Ryan  - himself  - thinks that is his main job now that he is off to Ottawa to spend more time with the kids?

In Newfoundland and Labrador,  people have an object lesson [on all this] right in front of them.  For the past seven years, local politicians counted for exactly zero compared to the Saviour of the Universe, attended by a raft of disciples who knew he crapped nuggets of pure gold every day, thrice a day. Now whether that is true or not on any level isn’t as important as the fact that some people seemed to believe it.

So if you have people getting this relentless message from politicians and from news media that everything is about Steve and Danny or Michael and Jack, and the local guy is just a placeholder or a bootlicker, you can see why people in Quebec and elsewhere might just look at what colour someone is and cast vote on that basis.

Disagree? In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the most visible campaign sign in the riding was a four foot by four foot sign bearing the name of Jack Layton.  This was no accident.  Nor was it an accident that smiling Jack was everywhere on NDP householders and in television and radio spots. Heck, even  Liberals like Scott Andrews are blaming the Liberal loss on the fact that Michael Ignatieff supposedly had no charisma and people didn’t like him compared to Jack and his accordion playing smile. 

There are a bunch of different reasons why people vote the way they do.  Tradition counts for much of it.  The dynamics of the campaign are part of it as well. But increasingly the evidence seems to be that local candidates don’t matter very much at all when it comes to voters making decisions about who gets their vote.

You can vote for a unilingual anglophone bar manager who has never visited your riding because she  - or by extension the federal political system - doesn’t count in the ordinary voter’s mind.

Now place-holder candidates aren’t new in politics.  England had its rotten borough and Newfoundland still has its seats where the party of choice can run a half-eaten Mary Brown’s snack box and the voters would send it off to St. John’s.  It just seems that these days, individual candidates seem to count for less and less.

This also doesn’t mean that everyone who does get elected these days is a previously chewed tater.  Politicians are a cross-section of society as a whole.  You get your good ones and your not-so-good ones.  You get your exceptional people and you get your oxygen thieves.

It’s just that we seem to be in a period where voters sometimes don’t seem to pay much attention to local candidates when they vote.  Good, bad or indifferent, local candidates don’t seem to count for much.

And incidentally, for the people on Flower Hill, the New Democrats want to take the tax off home heating fuel.  It’s just that they have also promised to back a provincial Conservative plan to make sure that anyone on fixed and low incomes will pay twice as much for electricity, guaranteed,  even without taxes, while people outside the province can get the same power for about what you are paying for it now. 

Not bad, eh?

The NDP aren’t alone.  The Liberals and the Conservatives in your riding promised basically the same thing.

You are forgiven if you missed that bit, though, in all the clips of Jack and the squeeze-box.

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[Proofed, edited to make sentences read more clearly]

This is just the beginning

People seem to forget that the federal New Democratic caucus was already made of people who seemed a little… what’s word… sketchy.

The latest:

The deputy leader of Canada's new Official Opposition party says he doubts the U.S. has photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.

Thomas Mulcair, who stands in for NDP Leader Jack Layton in the House of Commons when he is away, told CBC's Power & Politics with Evan Solomon that he doesn't believe photos exist of bin Laden following his killing by U.S. forces on Sunday in Pakistan.

"I don't think, from what I've heard, that those pictures exist and if they do I'll leave that up to the American military," he told host Evan Solomon.

And right behind that the party’s foreign affairs critic disowned the official Jack Layton stand-in.

"We have no reason to doubt the veracity of President Obama’s statement," Dewar wrote in an emailed statement.

This is just the beginning of the mess that is now the official opposition. 

Meanwhile, has anyone asked the party’s defence critic what he thinks of all this?

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The Dunderdale Referendum, encore

Pretty well every single conventional media outlet ran a story in the wake of the federal election about how the results might affect Kathy Dunderdale and the provincial Conservatives.

CBC has an online story about a possible “hangover.”  The Telly had a front pager on Wednesday on the same subject. NTV has a bit quoting Tom Marshall who denies there will be any backlash. 

Not surprisingly, the provincial Conservatives all claim things are rosy and wonderful.

But here’s what this is really all about

Kathy Dunderdale and her crowd joined with the argument federally that the provincial Tories have used relentlessly on their own since 2003.  It was all about getting behind the guys in power to get your goodies.  Voters in the province rejected that flatly.

Dunderdale and her team did not produce a single victory other than the squeaker in Labrador.  Everywhere else, their candidates got their asses handed to them. And that guy in Labrador is not one of Kathy’s crew.  He’s got his own mind and his own agenda and it may not match up with Kathy’s. This vote result is a major rebuke for Kathy Dunderdale by voters.

Politically, Kathy herself backed off her position as it became clear voters didn’t buy her endorsement.  She had members of her caucus who didn’t campaign with the rest or who did only the barest of bare minimums. Did Dunderdale herself make any campaign stops other than the one with Harper himself?

Dunderdale’s own statement on the results is exactly three sentences of bland platitudes. There is no reference to the loan guarantee and the Lower Churchill, at all. There is that line again about legitimate aspirations, whatever they are.  Sounds more like a hollow phrase cooked up  by the back-room brain trust rather than something that anyone  - including Dunderdale - actually understands.

Maybe she has finally looked at her own polls that show Muskrat is an issue for a mere three percent of voters.  The biggest issues for people are health care and the economy/job creation.  If she wants to create a connection between Muskrat and jobs, clearly people don’t see it.

But as referenda go, Dunderdale just took a huge political gamble and lost.

Badly.

Whether or not the Prime Minister delivers the loan guarantee actually doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Dunderdale launched a political campaign that, on the face of it, was the counter-part to ABC, and she couldn’t deliver.

That got noticed.

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Jack knows jack

Living in the west end of St. John’s out by working dairy farms you get used to the smell of cow manure and chicken crap.

Nothing however, compares to the hum coming off Jack Harris and Ryan Cleary who’ve been running around claiming that their victories in the federal election will translate into provincial gains.

A left-wing wave that is sending two St. John's New Democrats to Ottawa could keep rolling into the Newfoundland and Labrador election this fall, a re-elected MP says.

"Something that I believe firmly is that most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians actually have the same values and the same idea of what government should be about as New Democrats," St. John's East MP Jack Harris told CBC News.

Okay.

So for that to be true, people who usually and steadfastly vote for provincial Conservatives and who readily switch parties federally would have to abandon decades of practice.

Every single seat on the northeast Avalon – which Cleary and Harris as members of parliament in Ottawa - is a Tory seat and has been for seven years.

The NDP won Cleary’s seat by getting switch voters to switch.

D’uh!

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.

But here’s a second check on Harris’ prediction.  Jack won his riding handily in 2008. Again, massive Conservative vote switching, plus people who abandoned the Liberals at the same time.

There have been two provincial by-elections in Harris’ riding since then.  Both went to the provincial Conservatives by embarrassingly gigantic margins.  Jack Harris’s victory in 2008 and his electoral machine had zero discernable impact anywhere at the provincial level.

Now there are reasons for that we’ll get into for another post.

For now let’s just say that Jack and Ryan have a talking point that just laughable. Doesn’t matter though.  The boys have their work cut out for them in Ottawa so they’ll be a bit pre-occupied come the fall to try and live up to their predictions.

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St. John’s South-Mount Pearl: Vote Results Commentary

Take a look at the vote results in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl in the last four federal general elections and you can see the dramatic switch of Conservative votes to New Democrat votes.

Let’s start with the advance poll turn-out.  This is really just to remind everyone of the first sign something big was on the way.

The 2011 advance turn-out was 91% above the next highest, in 2006.  The advance vote turn-out in 2008  - the year of the Conservative civil war called ABC - was slightly below the range for the two previous elections but there was actually nothing radically out of line with it.

Now look at the results for the three major parties for the same elections.

First of all, the total vote for all three parties ranges from 33,137 in 2008 to 38,567 in 2011.  Leaving 2008 aside, total vote for the three parties in 2011 is only 4.2% higher than it was in 2006.

The Liberal 2011 vote total is 550 below the 2004 result and 3799 below the 2008 tally. On the whole, it is consistent with Liberal vote in the riding going back more than a decade. The 1997 Liberal vote in the old riding configuration, for example, was roughly 12,500. 

On the face of it, Siobhan Coady appears to have managed to capture and hold most of the usual Liberal vote in the riding over the four elections.  She gained about 2600 votes during the Conservative civil war, commonly known as the ABC campaign in 2008.

The most striking changes are in the Conservative and New Democrat vote.  Basically the two parties have traded places.

In 2004, when the provincial Conservatives held back from completely supporting the federal party, Loyal Hearn held the seat for the Conservatives.  Hearn increased his vote total in 2006 when the provincial Conservatives openly supported their federal cousins. In 2008, the civil war destroyed the connection between the two almost completely.

Take a look at the New Democrat number in that election and you can tell where the homeless Conservatives went. The bulk of them went to Cleary.  Some others stayed home.  A few went to Coady, likely the result of direct appeals by provincial Conservative cabinet ministers and members of the provincial legislature.

The 2008 vote total is the lowest of the four elections and the total for the four elections is actually fairly consistent over time. That strongly suggests that new voters didn’t enter the field suddenly in 2008.  Rather, existing Conservative voters opted for the New Democrats instead of the Liberals.

That same trend continued into 2011. The other part of the change was Loyola Sullivan who appears to have attracted old Conservatives back or pulled them away from Coady.  The new voters into the system were either old Conservatives who came back or some new voting from people who had not voted in the preceding four elections.

In 2011, the NDP vote increased by 4684.  Conservative vote increased by 4539.  That’s a combined total of  9,223. Liberal vote dropped by 3,799.  Total vote for all three parties increased by 5,430.  That’s a total of 9,229. 

There are a couple of things one can say about all this:

First, there is no way of knowing with absolute certainty which voters moved where and whether the increased total in 2011 came from new voters, old voters coming back or a combination of the two.  There just isn’t any information that would let anyone figure it out conclusively.

Second,  given the overall consistency in the total votes for the three parties, it is more likely that the changes in NDP support came from vote moving from the Conservatives to the New Democrats than from Liberals or from new voters.

Third, the result in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl isn’t part of any national trend toward the New Democrats. The 2011 result came from a trend that began before the 2011 campaign.

Fourth,  since the federal NDP voters in 2011 appear to be coming predominantly from provincial Conservatives, it is highly unlikely the New Democrats can translate their federal success into significant changes at the provincial level.

The party may have a good cadre of workers. They simply don’t have a reliable pool of voters who consistently vote for the same party federally and provincially.  The NDP won St. John’s South-Mount pearl by appealing to swing voters.  By definition, they are liable to swing in the future.  What could make them swing would be a good subject for further, detailed research.

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Why the Liberals lost…and the way ahead

You will read plenty of commentary on this election and the overwhelming majority of it will be complete and unvarnished horseshit.

Put it all out of your mind.

If you want to understand why Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals tanked so badly, read Rob Silver’s take on things.

Unite the left?  Rob puts it slightly differently that this but your humble e-scribbler is in the exact same neighbourhood: the two left-wing parties in this country at he federal level already got together to form the Bloc NDP.

Then read his ideas on what the party needs to do to come back.

He’s got that right, too.

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Election 2011 Witticisms

With a Conservative majority, odds are good senate reform will move along in the near future.

That could resurrect the idea of a Triple E senate: equal, elected and effective.

Add to that, according to one tweeter, that Peter Penashue’s win in Labrador could lead to a Triple P senate later in the year once Senator Bill Rompkey retires in a few weeks’ time.

Triple P?

Don’t look so confused.

 

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St. John’s South-Mount Pearl: some first observations #elxn41

1. Jack Layton is the new member of parliament for St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.  Remember those signs?  It wasn’t an accident the most visible sign was Jack Layton four bys.
2. Strategic plan.  Well-executed.  The NDP targeted this riding at a national level and drove the local plan according to the national need.  Their local communications materials played down the local candidate and played up the key messages that nationally targeted the issues research showed were important.  The local radio spots were classic local NDP:  top quality in every respect, right down to only mentioning the candidate when they had to.  otherwise they were right on the strategic point.
3. Warning:  Steep learning curve ahead.  Ryan Cleary may be the guy in the seat but there is no guarantee he understands how he got there.  His first media comments – talking about a provincial orange tide in October – tells you he has no idea who voted for him and why.  His second comments about priorities – fisheries inquiry – shows he really doesn’t have a clue as to how he got there.  This guy could be an accident waiting to happen.
4. You can’t hide him forever.  The follow-on to that is a warning to New Democrats that they can’t keep Ryan under wraps forever. In the run-up to the election, he didn’t have a platform to give him a high profile and with it his characteristic propensity to say things he inevitably would regret. That was a key to winning the seat.  The NDP brain trust better work hard on Number Three and hope it works before Number Four cuts in.  Go back and watch him during any of the debates during the campaign and you’ll see what an up-hill fight someone will have to get this guy ready for the Big Time.
5. Everyone missed it.  Outside of the campaigns, no one likely had a clue on voter trending in the riding.  Your humble e-scribbler ran with the pack on this one, labelling it a race that was too close to call.  We all got it wrong. 
6. The Blue Goes Orange.  What we all missed was the extent to which people who usually voted Conservative in the riding headed off to the NDP.  Not only did the Liberals lose votes, another block of voters who sat out in 2008 came back with a vengeance and headed for the NDP and Conservatives.   But it is important to know that Coady held the core Liberal vote over time.  What she lost were obviously the blue people who, especially in 2008 followed orders and went for the Liberals.  Left to their own devices they flooded to the Orange Team.
7. The NDH Play was a bust.  Remember what your humble e-scribbler said about provincial Tories not playing the Dunderdale game?  Well, here’s your proof.  If the awesome Tory machine in SJSMP had really backed the federal Cons with the vengeance some people would have you believe they did, then they could have elected the lead from Weekend at Bernies.  As it is, Loyola Sullivan tanked badly.
8. Look what happened last time.  Siobhan Coady was as organized as she has ever been and as aggressive as she could get.  Her campaign team deserves kudos for their efforts on the ground.  Unfortunately, Siobhan doesn’t seem to have figured out who she was really running against, ever.  Her messaging made that pretty clear what with the recycled 2008 talking points.  It’s really too bad.  Siobhan could have made a significant mark.

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The Dunderdale Referendum Election #elxn41

Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her team of provincial Conservatives decided to throw their weight behind the federal Conservatives in this election.

Talk about your epic fail.

Kathy made this a referendum on her Muskrat Falls policy, her leadership and her political potency.

Only one of her candidates took a first place finish.  Peter Penashue beat Todd Russell in a squeaker.

In Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, a last minute announcement in Corner Brook gave a flimsy cover for four cabinet ministers to get to the west coast to help Trevor Taylor against Liberal Gerry Byrne.  Waste of time and taxpayer-funded travel.

And in Avalon, where former incumbent Fabian Manning came frustratingly close, he can take the credit for most of that vote.  He worked hard after losing the seat in a close run in 2008 and Manning would have waged a tough campaign without provincial help.  Of course, he did get help, some if quite strong from people like Jerome Kennedy. It just wasn’t enough.

Then consider that the federal Conservatives – most of them former provincial cabinet ministers – all campaigned on the argument that you needed someone on the government side or else you’d starve.  It’s an argument the provincial Conservatives have used relentlessly since 2003.  They’ve waged a relentless and very old fashioned campaign of favouring districts they held and punishing opposition districts for things like road paving.

Voters across Newfoundland and Labrador  - including a raft of provincial Conservative voters - rejected that flatly.

The two changes in the province, one in St. John’s South -  Mount Pearl and the other in Labrador, have other implications that are worth their own posts.

But for now, the first-blush reaction to the federal result in Newfoundland and Labrador is that it doesn’t bode well for the province’s Conservatives.

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Dunderdale admin pours more cash into Corner Brook paper mill

On top of the millions in subsidies it has already provided to Corner Brook Pulp and Paper (Kruger), Kathy Dunderdale’s administration announced on Monday that it would pay $4.3 million over three years  to help workers at the mill upgrade their skills.

The only logical step next is for Kathy Dunderdale and her cabinet to give Kruger a receipt for the whole shooting match.

After all, taxpayers basically bought the mill piece by piece.

In related news, an economics professor at Memorial University thinks these sorts of subsidies don’t work:

[Michael] Wernerheim has high praise for the province's forest management strategy and for wanting to lay out a new path for an industry in decline, such as supporting smaller operations, like saw mills, and putting a greater focus on forests as ecosystems. 

But he found the government spends too much time, effort and money on continuing to support failing ways to protect jobs in the newsprint sector. 

"These short-term initiatives to protect jobs can retard the restructuring of the industry that we all want to see happening," he said.

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Bin Laden is dead!

From the New York Times account:

In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A.operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.

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Change is in the air… or maybe not #elxn41

In Election 2011, perhaps more so than any other recent election, people can see the shortcomings of national opinion polls.

They may capture an overall national picture but with horrendous margins of error and often limited information about voting behaviour they are all but useless in trying to project seat counts and even party standings. It’s not a problem facing one pollster;  it’s across the board.

You can also see the shortcomings of media commentary, especially as the electronic media seems to rely almost exclusively on reporters interviewing other reporters. There was a fine example of that last Friday on the CBC Radio Morning Show. There were penetrating insights into the fairly obvious: Avalon and St. John’s South-Mount Pearl might change hands.

And even some true head-scratchers like a version of the threehundredeight.blogspot.com seat projection that had Random-Burin-St. Goerges going Tory. John Ottenheimer coming on strong?  We’ll see.

There were also coments about “splits” and generalizations about how it all comes down to the “ground game”. That’s politico speak for getting vote to the polls. Again, it’s a bit like describing the intricacies of brain surgery by referring to a copy of Gray’s Anatomy of the human body.

What would have distinguished Friday’s commentary from the run-of-the-mill fare was any concrete information on what the campaigns actually look like on the ground.

And that’s where the local story starts to get interesting.  Anyone who believes that  Kathy Dunderdale’s people will be turning out en masse for the federal Conservatives, it just ain’t so. Some provincial Tory members of the House of Assembly have been working hard personally. Some have been doing only the minimum they had to in order to get by. A few more than Ed Buckingham have done exactly shag-all.

Now that may not be what you hear if you ask a Tory insider directly but the evidence of what actually happened will be clear once polling is done.

And as for the rank and file workers, that’s a whole other story. Kathy Dunderdale cannot direct them any more than Danny could actually get the blue people to vote Liberal in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl last time.  She quite obviously couldn’t lure them back from the New Democratic Party in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, let alone brow-beat them threaten them or otherwise produce the outcome some people might have been expecting.

This will NOT be a reverse ABC.

This very much will be a referendum on Kathy Dunderdale.  If Fabian Manning wins Avalon, it is a seat he won largely on his own.  If no other seats turn blue, the Dunderdale failed.  And if the Tory vote doesn’t shoot up to levels along the lines of what they saw in 2004 or 2006, then Dunderdale failed.  Monday could be a very bad night for Kathy Dunderdale.

Knowing what is happening on the ground will also tell you what odds there might be that some sort of NDP surge might have a wider effect on ridings in this province.  The national New Democrats have targeted the South.  It is getting money and bodies. They appear to have taken a strategy of minimising their candidate’s profile and played up Jack Layton very strongly.  If they are half as organized on voting day as they appear heading into the last day,  Ryan Cleary will give incumbent Siobhan Coady a very hard run for her money.  He might win.  It is close.

One potential factor to cross off your list:  Loyola Sullivan.  His angry old Rain Man routine simply turned people off.  His ego campaign – big round Loyola heads in front of a flag – simply looked ridiculous. 

Outside of St. John’s,  the Avalon is likely the only riding that will go blue and the NDP have resorted to names on ballots in every other riding other than the South. Miracles do happen but with no money and no organization, the orange people don;t stand much of a chance. 

As for the Tories, they will come in second in every seat off the Avalon. Certainly in Labrador, John Hickey has been campaigning hard for a senate seat, errr his federal friends, but odds are that Peter Penashue won’t be the new Tory member of parliament for Labrador.  Stay tuned on the senate seat.

Take that sort of stuff as a good indicator of what could be happening elsewhere.  In Quebec, people are telling pollsters they love the NDP. Problem is that the NDP only had the resources and committed the resources to Quebec that reflected their earlier appraisal that they could maybe hang on to one seat. Unless they have suddenly turned up hordes of volunteers in the past few weeks, they will have a devil of time turning those stated intentions into actual marks on a ballot. 

Again, stranger things have happened, but don’t be surprised if election results tonight coming out of Quebec don’t live up to advance billing.

The two places to watch nationally outside Quebec are the Greater Toronto Area and British Columbia. The Conservatives have targeted their energy into ridings  where they can turn them over and they could wind up squeaking out a comfortable minority or even a slim majority.

Change could be in the air.

But then again, it might not be.

You’ll only know for sure once the whole thing is done.

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April Showers Traffic for 2011

A fascinating month of April for traffic at ye olde e-scribbler’s corner of cyberspace shows a wind range of stories.

There’s the surprise first place honours for a post about rather sleazy piece of editing in order to fabricate a political attack.  One media outlet got suckered into using it.

Not surprisingly, most of the posts in the Top 10 in April are about Muskrat Falls and the possible implications of the federal election on Kathy Dunderdale’s leadership.

The really amazing thing is that a post on the last day of the month hit Number 10.

If you think this is all curious stuff, though wait until next month.  There’s a federal election on Monday and then the provincial government has to struggle through three more weeks of the provincial legislature (plus its a polling period) before they can head off to the summer campaign runs.

2011 will be an amazing political year across Canada.

1. Invented story:  political appointee and CBC attack government political opponent
2. A new Sprung greenhouse in the wilds of Labrador
3. Average NL family to pay $1000 per year more for Muskrat Falls power:  former PC finance minister
4. Another cheaper, greener alternative to Muskrat Falls
5. Buckingham not only local Tory to buck Dunderdale line on Harper
6. NTV/Telelink poll:  close, closer, no cigar and a referendum on Dunderdale
7. Conservative householder a multilevel bust
8. Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted
9. One big happy Conservative family... maybe
10. A little perspective, people

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A little perspective, people #elxn41

Nanos Research produces polls that are usually deadly accurate for the entire country.

But…

If you look at the regional breakdowns it rapidly becomes obvious that the regional numbers are useless for anything but wanking material for the twitterati.

You’ve likely seen a lot of references to “statistical ties” when people talk about polling during this election.  Well, at the regional level, the margins of error have been so wide sometimes that all parties have been in a “statistical tie” for most of the campaign. 

For example, Nanos’ April 28 Atlantic results at an MoE of about 10 percentage points.  Basically, that means it is possible the actual result is somewhere within a 20 point spread.  In BC the range is about 16 or 17 points. 

You’ll find that Ipsos’ April 29 poll has exactly the same basic problem.

And speaking of wank material, your humble e-scribbler could not pass up the opportunity to point out that Jack Layton’s over-the-top performance with reporter’s about a Sun media report suggests there is something here the guy is definitely up-tight about. 

And it isn’t the pain of having to face unfounded accusations.

Obviously this pales in comparison to the persistent smear job at least one NDP candidate has been mounting against an opponent.  That’s just hypocrisy, the NDP stock-in-trade.

More importantly, though, Jack’s grumpiness and use of bizarro third person references with passive voice sentences sounds like an attempt to mentally distance himself from something he finds difficult to address:

"Absolutely nothing wrong was done; there's no wrongdoing here…”

People don’t speak about nothing at all in this way.  The story deserved a contemptuous sneer.  Instead it got treated to a swooning counter-attack but not a personal one. 

Who did absolutely nothing wrong?  Hard to tell.  And that’s an odd counterpoint to a TV spot in which Layton promises he personally won’t stop until the job is done.

Imagine how Jack will handle it if he starts reading Gilles Duceppe talking points in Question Period as leader of the Bloc NDP.

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Traffic for the WTF Election #elxn41

There’s a decent chance that Canadians will wake up on Tuesday morning having traded Stephen Harper and his crowd of federal Conservatives for Jack Layton leading a raft of new members of parliament many of whom were only names on a ballot before Monday.

Just think about it for a minute.

The entire country winds up where Ontario was in October 1990.  People woke up across that province, looked around and realised that a whole bunch of them had marked their ballot for the Dippers figuring that they were the only ones doing it.  It was a province-wide 11-beer beautiful moments too many of have discovered we had on the morning after the night before.

This one could make the Guinness book of records for most people doing a simultaneous forehead slap.

In more modern language, this could become “The WTF Election” as Canadians look at the news Tuesday and wonder what-the-f**k everyone else was thinking when they got to the polling station.

Nobody can say that elections are boring and no one should ever complain about democracy in action.

People get exactly the government they deserve, every time.

And they also get to tell us what posts are most interesting here in this corner of the cyber-universe.  This week is no exception:

1. Conservative householder a multi-level bust
2. Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position
3. Advance Poll turn-out comparison
4. The choice is clear
5. The cost of doing business:  Muskrat Falls version
6. The peter principle
7. “The prize is worth the fight”:  Hearn rebuts Skinner on Muskrat Falls
8. US diplomatic cable reveals Emera trepidation about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill Falls
9. Attack of the fluffy bunnies
10. Nail ‘em up I say

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Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted #elxn41

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The choice is clear #nlpoli #elxn41

This is one of those political pictures destined to go down in history.

In years to come, they’ll refer to it as one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Like posting the picture on Facebook from Las Vegas of you, drunk, a pair of panties on your head, taking a leak in the middle of some street on that wild post-graduation trip.

You know the one.

Kathy Dunderdale now has one of those pictures. Every household in the province will likely have one by Monday, courtesy of Kathy’s new buddy, Stephen Harper.

It’s hard to know if she was drunk with Harper’s charm,  if all the trappings of having a job she never, ever dreamed she could get went to her head or she just started to believe she really is all that and a bag of political potato chips.

But whatever the reason, there’s no taking this sucker back.

Come the fall, you can bet that this is just one picture Kathy Dunderdale will see over and over and over again in any place where voters can see it.

 

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US diplomatic cable reveals Emera “trepidation” about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill

A cable from the American consulate in Halifax relays concerns that Emera had about negotiations with Danny Williams on the Lower Churchill.

Dated 15 January 2010, the cable is a summary of a meeting between the American consul general and James Spurr, a senior executive with the Nova Scotia-based company. The cable is available from Wikileaks.

Emera and the Lower Churchill: "Are we being used here?"

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¶4. (SBU) Closer to home Spurr talked about another possible venture for Emera: transmitting power from the proposed Lower Churchill River project in Labrador to New England. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland-Labrador (N-L) have an MOU to explore this option which would require the construction of sub-sea and overland power lines to transmit the power. Money issues aside, there would be technological challenges to overcome in this scenario. However, Spurr emphasized that with Emera's experience in dealing with transmission systems, natural gas pipelines and its knowledge of regulatory processes, it would not be an impossible feat. The unknown factor, as Spurr explained, is N-L Premier Danny Williams. Spurr explained that N-L had been the victim of bad resource deals in the past which have left Williams very cautious if not suspicious in his business negotiations. Given that legacy, Spurr remarked that he and his senior colleagues are equally cautious in dealing with the premier, with knowledge it makes more financial sense for N-L to do a deal with Quebec than with them. In fact, Spurr indicated he wouldn't be surprised if William ended up doing just that, and leaving Spurr and colleagues to speculate that Williams might be using them to exert more pressure on Quebec to offer a better deal for N-L.

That would have been a pretty savvy guess for Emera, given that in September 2009 Kathy Dunderdale revealed publicly that she and Williams had tried unsuccessfully for five years to lure Hydro-Quebec into taking an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill.

Conventional news media in Newfoundland and Labrador have never reported Dunderdale’s comments or made any other references to talks with Quebec despite the audio of Dunderdale’s comments being readily available.

In 2010, as part of his political exit strategy, Danny Williams signed a term sheet with Emera that could lead to development of a dam at Muskrat Falls. Under the deal, Emera will receive 35 terawatt years of electricity from Muskrat Falls in exchange for the cost of building a transmission line from Newfoundland to Cape Breton. In a conference call with reporters at time the tentative deal was announced, Emera executives’ comments suggested they had balked at earlier versions of the deal in part because the cost of power from Muskrat Falls was too high.

The current proposal is based entirely on the sale of power within Newfoundland and Labrador at full cost plus a guaranteed rate of return for the provincial government energy company. Premier Kathy Dunderdale acknowledged in the House of Assembly earlier this year that Muskrat Falls power will be too expensive to sell outside the province except at discount rates.

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Conservative householder a multi-level bust

Someone on the mainland decided to design a campaign householder for the federal Conservatives.

Pretty picture.

Nice little headline there.

You can tell the person is not from the province where it got dropped this past week.  There are two rather obvious  - and related - problems.  See if you can guess what the problem is.

No?

The name of the province is Newfoundland and Labrador and that’s Problem One.

Bigger problem is that in Labrador – where this thing is going as well as on the island – there is considerable opposition to the project because it is all about power for Newfoundland…

and shag-all for Labrador.

Stunned enough that the provincial Connies conned their federal Connie cousins into backing something that only 3% of people think should be a major priority for the province.

Stunneder still is the fact that the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost and his crowd are attacking Liberal Todd Russell’s opposition to the project as if that was somehow going to work against him come polling day.

Stunnedest of all, the Harper Bunker drops this little gem across the province, especially in Labrador where it will go over like the proverbial fart in church.  Todd Russell will be laughing all the way to the polls.

There are no wounds as painful as self-inflicted ones.

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Economy not sizzling in Tom Marshall’s home town

Finance minister Tom Marshall has always had a curious relationship with reality.

He likes to talk about debt reduction, for example, but he never really does anything about it, or as in his plan for Muskrat falls, he actually wants to increase the public debt by upwards of 50% of its current size.

When Marshall delivered the most recent budget – and set a record for public spending in the process – he told reporters that “our economy is sizzling right now.”

Tom must be referring to Bermuda or Barbados or wherever it is he takes the sun during the colder months.

He certainly isn’t talking about his own district of Humber East.

The Western Star reported on Thursday that the major container line serving the province is dropping Marshall’s home town of Corner Brook from its destinations.

Capt. Sid Hynes told The Western Star Thursday afternoon that export freight from Corner Brook has dropped by around 70 per cent and imported cargo has declined by about 30 per cent in the last five years.

Exports down by 70%.

Imports down by 30%.

Since 2005.

Now it surely doesn’t take an expert to tell that this is not an economy that is sizzling.

Anyone who claims it is sizzling might be fried though.

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The cost of doing business: Muskrat Falls version

Building the gravity base structure and drilling production wells for the Hebron project are now estimated at $8.3 billion, according to news stories on Wednesday.  In its story, The Telegram cites documents filed as part of the Hebron consortium's development application.

That's two thirds more than the original estimate of $5.0 billion.

Okay.

So if a project estimate prepared by people highly experienced in these types of projects and who have a keen interest in cost control has climbed by 66% in such a short period, odds are good that we can also change any cost estimates for a bunch of people with a lot less experience in building gigantic projects.

Like say Nalcor, a company that has, contrary to its own claims, shag-all experience in megaprojects.

They tell the world that a dam on the Lower Churchill river and a bunch of transmission lines will cost exactly the same as it would have in 1998:  roughly $6.2 billion.

Yeah, sure, buddy.

Put a Hebron cost multiplier on that sucker and you get $10.2 billion. We have not even factored in any inflationary impact.

But that is bad enough.

We are not done yet.

According to Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Muskrat Falls power would cost 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour to produce.  That is based on the project cost of $6.2 billion.

So if we can reasonably increase project costs by 66%, you can increase the cost per kilowatt hour by a similar amount.

Do the math.

It isn't pretty.

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Advance Poll turn-out comparison #elxn41

For the vote geeks out there, take a gander at this lovely chart showing turn-out in advance polls held in federal general elections from 2004 to 2011 for each of the ridings in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Some of the media reports have compared the 2011 advance polls votes to 2008.  That would be a misleading comparison since the federal Conservatives suffered from an unusual problem due to the Family Feud.  If you look at the two before that, you can get a better feel for recent trends.  2006 was a year of change nationally and it marked the last time the provincial Conservatives actually worked closely with their federal cousins.

Here’s what you can see:

Turn-out is up in every riding but the magnitude of the change is more dramatic in some cases than others. 

The easy number is in St. John’s East.  Lots of media reports have noted it had the highest advance poll turnout at 4474.  That corresponds to a 56% increase over the next largest turn-out in 2006. The rest of these numbers compare 2011 to the next largest turn-out.

St. John’s South-Mount Pearl is up 91% compared to 2006.

The lowest change in turn-out is Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor, up 2.3% compared to 2004 and Random-Burin-St. George’s, up 3.5% from the same election.

Avalon is showing a 47% increase compared to 2006.  That’s almost exactly the change in Labrador (48%).

What does it all mean?

That’s hard to tell. 

Look at the anomalies first.

On the face of it, there’s no reason why St. John’s East should show such a dramatic increase in total number of votes cast. The incumbent appears to be safely in his seat.  There is no heated contest in the riding.  While it looked potentially like a harder fight before the writ dropped, the reality has been that incumbent New Democrat Jack Harris could be vacationing in Las Vegas with his future Quebec caucus-mates and he’d still slaughter his competition. If there was some sort of surge toward the NDP, this would be a real sign since the seat is already orange.

Ditto Labrador.  There’s no sign of any dramatic change in the riding.  When you look at the riding with almost exactly the same rate of change – Avalon – it gets weirder.  

Avalon is the scene of a vicious fight between Scott Andrews for the Liberals and former Conservative incumbent Fabian Manning who Andrews beat in 2008. One would expect numbers there to be up way compared to another year when they had a hard-fought contest. 

So while those three seats looking odd, the other four seats,  the voter turn-out pictures look like what you would expect.  In the ridings where there’s been a really small change in turn-out, there’s no sense of a hard contest and the change in turn-out reflects that.  The numbers for Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte are up, but only 25%.  Again, that reflects a strong Conservative campaign, most likely, but it is hardly a sign of big change. In the absence of any other signs of revolution, this vote change looks relatively normal.

In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the blood feud between the New Democrats and incumbent Liberal Siobhan Coady has been intense since before the election started.  Seeing turn-out up by 91% is no surprise in what appears to be a tight race between two highly motivated and highly organized teams. The Conservatives don’t seem to be a factor, at least if the only publicly available poll is anything to judge by.  Any jump in turn-out is likely not coming from the Rain Man’s effort to get back in elected politics.

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Pavement Putin of Permafrost falling down on the job #elxn41

CBC news reports that residents of Labrador are complaining about the poor state of provincial highways in their part of the province.

"It's insulting that they think it's fine the way it is and that we should accept it the way it is," said [Kristin] Pardy.

Hmmm.

Makes you wonder what John Hickey has been doing with himself.  He holds down a cabinet portfolio responsible for Labrador Affairs. 

Hickey – who once launched a law suit against former Premier Roger grimes for something Danny Williams said – is rather proud of the roads in Labrador.  When Hickey hasn’t been trying to claim to have contracts with the federal government that don’t exist, he’s been known to pose for publicity shots featuring him shovelling pavement.

The simple answer to what Hickey has been up to is shovelling something other than pavement on behalf of his federal Conservative buddies. 

You can find a clip of Hickey that someone posted to twaudio of one of Hickey’s lengthy calls to local talk radio on behalf of his buddies from up-along.  He’s in the middle if you really feel the need to listen to a provincial cabinet minister who has clocked more time campaigning for the federal Conservatives since 2003 than any other current member of the provincial Tory caucus.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.

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Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position #elxn41

If the current trends hold, the New Democratic Party is poised to make record gains in Quebec.  EKOS is projecting that the NDP could win as many as 100 seats with a majority of those seats coming from Quebec.

The party’s new support in Quebec comes, of course, as a result of Jack Layton’s active campaign to court support from soft nationalists and sovereignists who had supported the Bloc Quebecois.

There’s no accident in this.  Layton knows exactly what he is doing and the model he is trying on is actually the one pioneered by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s.  Layton is even using the same language Mulroney used with his references to the idea that somehow Quebec is outside the constitution and needs to be brought in.

While national attention might be focused on the national implications of recent developments, there are some likely implications for people in Newfoundland and Labrador if Layton becomes leader of the opposition with a caucus half of whose members are from Quebec.

For starters, people who think the NDP will be able to represent interests of anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador on fundamental issues can think again. Such an NDP caucus would be driven by the fundamental division in its membership and the need to manage that relationship over time.

If people think the seven seats in this province count for little in the federal parliament any way, they can consider the implications of having an opposition leader whose position is based entirely on his seats in Quebec. 

Support for a loan guarantee? 

Gulf of St. Lawrence boundary?  

National electricity grid?

Money for energy infrastructure?

More federal money for Goose Bay?

Quebec soft nationalists and sovereignists would effectively control both the Bloc and the NDP on those issues.  Take three guesses how Layton and his crowd will stand on those issues.  The first two don’t count. That would be especially true on any initiative that couldn’t also be matched with a comparable cash outlay for Quebec.

T’would be interesting to see what happens if people in this province start asking politicians about these sorts of things.  Get ‘em on the record now.  Their comments could come back to haunt us all.

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Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies #elxn41

You can tell we are in the final week of a federal election campaign.

The attack ads are out.

Everybody has one.

Some people are whining about them.

Some candidates are trying to distance themselves from them, as in NDP candidate Ryan Cleary:

The NDP is distributing a flyer questioning Ignatieff's trust and attendance in Parliament.

The party's candidate in St. John's South–Mount Pearl, Ryan Cleary, said the negative advertisements are coming from the national NDP campaign, not his.

"I've seen that and that's one of the strategies they want to take, so, yeah," he said.

There’s no small measure of hypocrisy in the NDP attacks, of course.  Cleary’s supporters have been whining about since 2008 about some material Liberal incumbent Siobhan Coady circulated in the last election about Cleary.

There’s a reason why campaigns use so-called attack ads or negative ads:  when they are done properly, they work and they often work better than anything else.

“Done properly” means factual comments that address a concern voters have about a candidate, a party or a leader.

A campaign team will figure out the voter concern through polling.  Forget the horse-race stuff.  That’s just bumpf for the people who need to feed their tweets.   A well-organized campaign can turn around the run-away races or quickly eliminate a close race using solid research coupled with good communications and a willingness to use the tools correctly. 

Make no mistake:  it isn’t that simple or formulaic. Campaigns are as much about the battle between teams as anything else. Teams are made up of people. People make decisions and sometimes they make bad ones.  But given the situation, most campaigns will use the tools they have, including negative or attack ads.

What makes the spate of local attacks ads curious is that they seem to be bizarre.

According to the Telegram, the NDP dropped a postcard in St. John’s East this weekend that, like its counterpart in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl attached Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff because of his poor attendance in parliament?

Okay people.

Jack Harris needs to run attacks ads to fend off the Liberals?  According to the only poll publicly available, the Liberal contender in that riding is running at less than five percent of the vote.  The thing can’t have an spill-over because it was delivered to households.

But then there’s the issue. People loved Danny Williams all to pieces and he had such naked contempt for the legislature he set new record lows for sitting in the legislature by a serving Premier.  On the face of it, this is not what you would call a vote-determining issue.  But hey, maybe they have some sooper sekrit research that shows people in Kilbride and Torbay are parliamentary channel nerds.

Then there are the Conservative ones.  Loyola Sullivan is hammering away at the idea that without a Conservative government in Ottawa the loan guarantee for Muskrat Falls is a goner.

In February, 2011 CRA’s polling for the provincial government showed that three percent of respondents thought that the Lower Churchill should be the top priority of the provincial government in the next few years.

3%.

That’s not a typo.

That’s all.

Even if Loyola was running in Labrador, his Lower Churchill scare piece would appeal to only the 4% of respondents there who thought it was an issue.  Again, not exactly what you would call a topic that is going to drive voters to the polls, let alone make them pick a particular candidate.

For their part the Liberals, their bizarreness is the absence of any local negative pieces this time out. That’s not to say there aren’t;  maybe there are.  It’s just that your humble e-scribbler hasn’t seen or heard anything. 

Not like there isn’t plenty to hammer away at for either the Conservatives or the New Democrats and their candidates just like their could be for blue and orange to toss at red. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect in a race like St. John’s South-Mount Pearl that is, supposedly, too close to call.

Maybe the clue is the way all the candidates and all the media are fixated on Muskrat Falls. Grits and Dippers are talking about it because the Connies made it an issue. The media are covering it because the pols keep telling them it is big. But there is no sign the voters give a tinker’s damn about the dam.

Bizarro.

No one should be surprised if – in the end - the Newfoundland negative ads in this federal election are likely to fall completely flat.  The reason is simple: they obviously aren’t driven by what voters are interested in. 

As a result, they may look aggressive but they are the equivalent of hitting your opponent with fluffy stuffed bunnies. 

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When the rubber hits the road…

The current provincial government discovered innovation as a word they could use to describe something they thought might sell well with the punters.

You can reduce the thing down to a word because, as much as they talk about innovation, the current provincial government seems to be incapable of doing anything novel.

New.

Different.

Take, for example, the problem of recycling tires.  The current crowd inherited a problem from the crowd before them:  mounds of tires stockpiled at a couple of sites in the province and nothing that apparently could be done with them.  A couple of ideas cropped up but the companies behind them never got anywhere.

So the current crowd shipped them off to Quebec where they burn them for fuel.

Last week, the provincial government unveiled another contract to ship a few million used tires to Quebec, entirely at government expense, so that a couple of coal-fired cement plants there could supplement coal with tire bits.

Newfoundlanders paying to ship energy to Quebec in a deal where they get the benefit and the locals get to pick up the tab.

Churchill Falls.

Muskrat Falls.

Tires.

Same pattern.

Or burning them in Quebec before. 

Burning more in Quebec now.

More of the same, no matter how you look at it.

The cost for shipping the tires in the new contract is apparently about $3.0 million or more and while the provincial government has billions of dollars in cash, it hardly seems sensible that someone couldn’t figure out a way to use the tires productively in this province for less than six or seven million bucks it is likely costs to ship tires all told.

Heck, just for good measure, let’s make the figure $10 million. If we cannot do something within the province with our tires for less than $10 million and an environmental bonus, then shipping them is a good idea.

Right off the bat, we can scratch anything involving burning the tires.  Sure there are studies saying it is okay and yes, it is better than coal.  But there is something about burning tires in a place where we don’t burn coal any more that just doesn’t make sense.

And there are only so many blast mats you can make so there’s got to be something else out there.

Hmmm.

Google search!

Try a few possibilities and you can wind up at the website maintained by the Nova Scotia government’s recycling agency.  They had a problem figuring out what to do with their used tires.  After a report  identified serious questions about using tires as fuel, an expert committee recommended shredding the tires and using them in road construction and similar applications.

They call it tire-derived aggregate or TDA. It’s a pretty lightweight and inexpensive substitute for gravel in some construction.  In places prone to frost, TDA can actually help improve the lifespan of pavement.  There are some questions about TDA.  For example, some people regard using it as aggregate to be the same as burying the tires.  On the whole, the Nova Scotia committee thought that TDA was the way to go.

Then there’s the cost.

One presentation on the tire recycling site comes from an American company with experience in shredding tires. The presenter put the cost for the trucks, storage facility and shredders – the infrastructure – at about US$1.6 million.  You’d have to add labour costs in there to get the likely total cost but that hardly seems very costly to get started shredding tires.

And that’s just one alternative to shipping the mounds of used tires in Newfoundland out of the province and paying someone else to burn them.

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The peter principle #elxn41

What is about Conservative candidates and their tackle?

One provincial Conservative used a bunch of elections signs that touted the viability of his equipment.  He was  - or had? – the sign assured us “a member that works.”

Now the Conservative candidate in Labrador seems to be …  ummm… err… generous.

Yes.

That’s it.

Generous.

His signs carry the slogan “Peter for all.”

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Nail ‘em up, I say

The provincial government’s human resources, labour and employment department started a neat little promotion early last year to encourage young people to take a look at skilled trades.

It’s called Try the Trades.

So at the Telus Cup game this past Friday night, three provincial cabinet ministers took part in a little demonstration to draw some attention to it. 

Wonderful stuff. 

Great idea.

Except maybe the timing was a wee bit inappropriate.

This past Friday.

Driving nails.

Think about it for a second.

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“The prize is worth the fight”: Hearn rebuts Skinner on Muskrat Falls

Former Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro director Ed Hearn rebuts natural resources minister Shawn Skinner’s claim that anything other than doubling electricity and adding to the per capita debt load in the province by developing Muskrat Falls is too risky a venture:

While there would undoubtedly be a legal challenge to such legislation, a court challenge is not a valid reason to fail to pursue this initiative.

If the province’s right to reserve energy from the Upper Churchill were confirmed, the province would have access to sufficient energy to meet all its future needs on the island and in Labrador with energy priced at approximately 1/5th of a cent per kilowatt hour at cost.

The prize is worth the fight.

Hearn sensibly suggests that Skinner and his colleagues could refer a question to the Court of Appeal for an opinion before introducing any legislation on Churchill Falls power.

It really is that easy so one must wonder why Skinner and his colleagues are hell-bent on the other course.

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Easter Traffic 2011 #nlpoli #elxn41

So this Easter with all the politicking going on, will people get a visit from the Dunderbunny instead of the Easter Bunny?

As far as the federal Conservatives seem likely to find, a visit from the Dunderbunny doesn’t net you a stash of lovely votes or even chocolate. There just seems to be a little pile of odd-smelling brown buttons - if there is anything at all – and it’s probably best not to nibble them.

Maybe that’s what we will have to call members of a political leader’s fan club or her caucus?

Sounds like some cartoon comic-bookish all-girl band from Riverdale, though.

Josie and the Pussycats?

Meet Kathy and the Dunderbunnies.

Anyway…

On this second last week of April, the growing number of readers of these humble e-scribblers enjoyed these 10 posts more than others.

Alliteration is apparently quite popular.  You know.  The repetition of an initiation consonant sound, as in A fish called Wanda;  K-K-K-Ken’s c-c-coming to k-k-kill me. late week posts that get into the weekly Top Five are there for some reason.

Maybe it is alliteration.

Maybe it is something else.

Who knows?

In any event, here’s the list:

1. Buckingham not only local Tory to buck Dunderdale line on Harper
2. On minority governments
3. NTV/Telelink poll:  close, closer, no cigar and a referendum on Dunderdale
4. One big happy Conservative family…maybe
5. Kathy’s Keystone Kops Konfused on Konservative Kampaign
6. Seen on the campaign trail
7. The view from Flower Hill
8. Risky Business
9. The unsustainable lightness of Tom Marshall
10. Recycling a tire recycling story

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The Speaker is neutral…supposedly #elxn41

Another name leaped out from the Conservative’s news release on family unity in central Newfoundland this federal election time.

Roger Fitzgerald.

Spotted at a Conservative nomination for his old friend Loyola Sullivan.

Challenged on the absolute requirement for neutrality given his job as Speaker of the provincial legislature, the old Conservative warhorse snorted something about just being there to support an old friend and stomped off.

Maybe if they had a piano he could have claimed he could have channelled another nose-puller and claimed he was just there to play that. 

Anyway…

The release – available at the Connies’ Facebook space – proclaims:

Bonavista South MHA Roger Fitzgerald, the only other MHA in the
federal riding in which Hynes is running, is obliged to remain neutral
due to his role as Speaker of the House of Assembly.

Pointing that out so conspicuously is a bit conspicuous, isn’t it?

After all, no one familiar with Fitzgerald’s abysmal performance in the House would believe for a second he has neutral and unbiased in his job ever.

And anyone who turned up the first weekend of April at Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s coronation of April as leader of the provincial Conservatives would believe it either.

There was Fitzgerald, large as life, hob-nobbing with his fellow provincial Conservatives in an entirely partisan setting, celebrating his new boss’ new job.

Roger Fitzgerald neutral and unbiased?

Pull the other one.

It’s got bells on it.

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One big happy Conservative family… maybe #elxn41

Apparently there’s just one big happy Conservative family in central Newfoundland.

The federal Conservatives issued a news release on Wednesday to counteract any story, no matter how well founded,  that there are gigantic problems in Kathy Dunderdale’s campaign to elect more federal Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador.

They apparently wanted to answer your humble e-scribbler’s question about Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien, well-know Dan-Club member and – from local scuttlebutt – noticeably absent from the doorsteps of his provincial district of Gander this election.

Even Kathy was sounding like she was abandoning her effort to be the anti-Danny of this federal election.  You will recall Dunderdale’s predecessor vowed to make sure there were no Conservatives elected in 2008.  He delivered by suppressing his own crowd enough to turn over the three Avalon seats to the Liberals and the New Democrats.  Time will tell if Dunderdale’s plan will work but let’s just say for now that things aren’t looking so smurfy for her.

Scotia Capital: definitely read the fine print

Anyone who reads Scotia Capital’s summary on the recent Newfoundland and Labrador budget would be well advised to read the disclaimer on the bottom of the first page:

While the information is from sources believed reliable, neither the information nor the forecast shall be taken as a representation for which The Bank of Nova Scotia or Scotia Capital Inc. or any of their employees incur any responsibility.

So there you have it.  We are giving you this information but we don’t stand behind it, verify it or anything else it other than copy it onto a page.

Big Red Flag Number One should come when you see a chart that shows the provincial net debt at little more than $4.0 billion.  Note the asterisk indicating that this chart – prepared by the bank people – excludes unfunded pension and similar liabilities.

This chart enables the bank to make this forecast right up at the top of page one in a lovely box to get your attention:

With its sharply reduced debt burden, including its unfunded pension liabilities, its infrastructure replenishment and its tax relief, the Province is now better positioned to undertake the first stage of the major Lower Churchill hydro-electricity project.

Massive problem:  the net debt is not a shade above $4.0 billion with great revenue streams as mapped out in the rest of this document.

It is, in fact, that $4.0 billion ish number with another $5.2 billion.  The official government documents contain the accurate information. If you look at the total gross debt, it’s somewhere above $10 billion.

Not surprising that the bank will put a disclaimer in there:  when you present misleading information on page one and bury the information on page three, it’s a good idea to disown it somewhere.

What’s worse, the bank also buries another hint of other problems related to the Lower Churchill on page three of its budget summary:

…following less-than-expected cash outlays by the Province for capital assets in FY11 (sic) …

That would be a well established pattern of booking capital projects and then having problems getting them done without massive delays and gigantic cost over-runs.

Then there’s this little gem:  forecast deficits of almost $800 million dollars each over two years are not the result of overspending or any other sort of fiscal imprudence.

Nope.

The bank states that the cause of these chunky deficits “is a forecast net revenue decline of almost 6% in FY13, primarily reflecting the loss of the Atlantic Accord 1985 payments after the $536 million transfer in FY12.”

A provincial government that is bringing in oil revenues that would stagger a team of Alberta-sized oxen can’t balance its books because a limited set of federal hand-outs that were known to be limited have finally run out.

In other words, the provincial government plans to spend almost a billion more than it knows it will bring it but that is not their fault or any sign of dubious financial management.

You have got to be frickin’ kidding, Bank of Nova Scotia economist types.

They aren’t done yet, those bank analysts. 

Apparently, Muskrat Falls will be

a major source of new export revenues and a key factor facilitating Labrador’s development, but the undertaking is still ambitious, placing a high premium on the Province’s fiscal flexibility.

This sort of comment is nothing beyond government-sourced spin and sheer crap. The project cannot be a source of new export revenues given that the Premier has already publicly acknowledged the government intends to sell any export power it does manage to flog at a price below production costs.

And it’s not like any of this information is not already in the public domain, but obviously when anyone reads a Scotiabank economic assessment of anything, they might want to check for disclaimers and pay close attention to them.  If the Newfoundland and Labrador budget analysis commentary is anything to judge by, these guys have no idea what is going on beyond what they read in a government news release.

- srbp -

Kathy’s Keystone Kops Konfused on Konservative Kampaign #elxn41

Even Kathy Dunderdale isn’t backing Kathy Dunderdale on support for the federal Conservatives.

The Premier is apparently no longer quite as cozy with Stephen Harper’s party as she was a few weeks ago.  Not surprising is that, given that evidence is mounting that both members of her caucus and rank and file Tories in the province are jumping from Dunderdale’s bandwagon.

In the House of Assembly today, Dunderdale told opposition leader Yvonne Jones:

Mr. Harper is in Newfoundland today, I suggest you go and have a chat with him and find out what his commitment is and what he has to say, because nobody over here has to answer for Mr. Harper. We answer for the Progressive Conservative Party of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Progressive Conservative Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and we welcome every opportunity to talk about the great things we are doing for this Province.

Nobody on the Conservative benches are answering for Harper’s party.

Bit of a problem.

Dunderdale said that right after  - mere seconds after, in fact - the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost, none other than Labrador affairs minister John Hickey stood on his haunches and proudly spoke for the federal Conservatives:

The federal government placed $40 million in a new airstrip, the longest airstrip up on 5 Wing Goose Bay. They also invested in a new air terminal building. They promised 650 troops that we did not see, but we did not see them anywhere across the country. Let me say to the hon. Member: While your government was there what did you do? What did your Premier today do when he went to Germany and did not even as much as go to see the German parliament that thanked him for the low level flying that was happening in Happy Valley-Goose Bay at 5 Wing Goose Bay?

Seems there are some serious divisions within the provincial Conservative cabinet.  Either that or Kathy changed her mind based on the most recent polls and news reports.

- srbp -

Buckingham not only local Tory to buck Dunderdale line on Harper #elxn41

St. John’s East member of the House of Assembly Ed Buckingham is known to be thoughtful and frank in his views.

No surprise therefore that Buckingham told the Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel (CPAC) that he is sitting on the sidelines in the current federal election campaign.  As CBC quotes him from the CPAC interview:

"I'm not aligning myself with anyone, I'm just going to sit on the sidelines and let events unfold as they will," ….

Buckingham isn’t alone.

Other provincial Conservatives aren’t banging doors to get their federal cousins elected even though in pretty well all cases, the federal candidate is a former provincial Conservative caucus member.

Your humble e-scribbler’s had a few e-mails and tweets about local Tories who are changing the air in their tires or sorting their DVD collection rather than work for a Muskrat Falls loan guarantee via Stephen Harper’s pledges.

Anyone seen Fairity O’Brien out in Gander trying to unseat Scott Simms?

In the CBC story, at least one of the Tories who is playing along certainly doesn’t look very enthusiastic.  Tom Osborne, of the local Conservative powerhouse family, only says that he’s “lent a hand” and done “a little bit “ of campaigning with St. John’s South-Mount Pearl Conservative candidate Loyola Sullivan.  Now that’s not very much energy for a guy who reportedly thought about running for Harper’s gang at one point.

The real story here, though, is not about the number of elected provincial Conservatives who are not following Kathy Dunderdale’s lead and latched their lips to the federal Conservative leader’s hindmost regions.

Nope.

The real story here is that, according to the only poll released thus far, rank and file provincial Conservatives are likewise not supporting Kathy Dunderdale’s direction. If they were, Sullivan, Jerry Byrne and Fabian Manning would be leading in their respective seats.  They aren’t. 

Sullivan isn’t doing well at all.  That’s nasty considering that two of the provincial seats in his riding are held by members of the Osborne-Ridgley machine and every seat on the northeast Avalon is currently held by a provincial Tory.  If they really could deliver the vote – or wanted to - surely they would.

Given the way Kathy tied the federal election and her Muskrat Falls obsession together, it’s going to be hard to avoid connecting the dots should the federal Conservatives fail in their efforts to gain a seat in the province.  And if they win only one seat by a slim margin, Kathy Dunderdale cannot claim to hold a marker for some future favour.

Odd as it may seem the real political story of the federal election in this province might wind up being the implications it holds for provincial politics.

BTW, have they had the nomination for Buckingham’s district yet?  Just curious.

- srbp -

NTV/Telelink poll: close, closer, no cigar and a referendum on Dunderdale #elxn41

NTV/Telelink released results Wednesday of a poll they conducted last in the three seats on the province’s Avalon peninsula.

Results:

Margin of Error = +/- 4.8%, 19 times out of 20.

A.    St. John’s East

Incumbent Jack Harris (NDP) leads with 44.9% compared to 16.6% for Conservative Jerry Byrne and 2.9% for Liberal John Allan.  Undecided was 27.8%.  The remainder were Green or wouldn’t give a choice.

B.  St. John’s South-Mount Pearl

Incumbent Liberal Siobhan Coady (26.3%) leads New Democrat Ryan Cleary (23.8%) and Conservative Loyola Sullivan (17.5%).  Undecided was 28.7%.

C.  Avalon

Incumbent Liberal Scott Andrews is at 30.4% with the guy he beat last time – form MP Fabian Manning of the Conservatives at 27.8%.  UND was 32.4%.

Commentary:

No one should be really surprised by any of these results. 

Harris has always been the clear favourite in St. John’s East.  Around these parts, your humble e-scribbler gave Byrne more credit for peeling away some of the old blue voters who went to Harris in 2008 but there should never have been any doubt Harris would win in the end.  These results confirm he should win handily.

That result also likely goes a long way to explaining why Byrne distanced himself from his own leader at a rally today in St. John’s.  Byrne unveiled his own personal platform and made it clear that a vote for him was not a vote for Stephen Harper. That’s an odd thing to do right before your leader comes roaring back into town for a second spin through the province.

In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl,  both your humble e-scribbler and some national projections  - like threehundredeight.blogspot.com – had the race much closer with the Tories closer to the other two than they are in this poll result.  In the seat projection linked at threehundredeight from Wednesday night, the SJSMP result has the NDP at 28%, the Tories at 30-ish and the Liberals at 40%.  That’s based on an amalgam of national polls so you can see how far they can vary from a specific poll done locally.

Coady’s got a highly organised and aggressive campaign.  She’s be calling regularly.  Ditto Sullivan but while Cleary’s team are fired up and seem to doing well, there is little sign of them on the phones and anywhere other than in signs in the district.

Meanwhile, in Avalon, the blood feud is clearly on.  Manning is fighting hard to win back the seat he lost and the closer poll result shows this is a seat to keep an eye on.

But here’s a little thing to pay attention to:  NTV/Telelink asked voters to indicate how satisfied they were with the incumbent.  In all three ridings, the incumbent scored very high satisfaction ratings with Harris’ number being stratospheric.  Coady was in the low 70s and Andrews was in the high 60s.

Now the pollsters apparently didn’t cross-tabulate that with vote intention in their report. Here’s a big hint for news director Fred Hutton or political reporter Michael Connors:  you’ve got some nifty questions there.  It would be very interesting to use the data to its full potential so that viewers can get something a bit more substantial than the mere horse-race results.

Another thing:  the margin of error is big so it is theoretically possible SJSMP is tighter for all three than it seems. As it is, Avalon and SJSMP are close, closer and SJE is simply no cigar.  Harris can head to Florida if he wants and pull a Colbert.

And as a last point, consider the implications of these results for provincial Conservatives and Kathy Dunderdale.  With her endorsement of Stephen Harper at the start, Kathy made this federal election a referendum on her leadership and on the Muskrat Falls project.

There’s no sign that provincial Conservatives are following her lead. 

Period. 

Full stop. 

End of story.

Dunderdale and her crew decided very openly and obviously to take a completely opposite approach this time to the one they followed in 2008 with Danny Williams at the helm.  Williams was good at his word and at the very least made sure that the provincial Conservatives stayed away from their federal cousins.  The result was devastating for the Conservatives and earned Williams a reputation far beyond what he actually did.

But at least he delivered.

The scale of Kathy Dunderdale’s personal defeat on May 2 will be defined by how many seats the federal Tories don’t win.  As it looks right now, the only hope they have appears to be in Avalon.  Dunderdale’s candidates are losing everywhere else and in two of the ridings on the Avalon peninsula, her candidates are well back in the pack. 

It’s not like the federal Conservatives aren’t playing up Muskrat for her.  It isn’t like her own crew aren’t campaigning.  Steve Kent may have looked pretty grim at Byrne’s rally on Wednesday but he was there for the cameras.  Other provincial Tories may not be turning out as Dunderdale might wish and that’s a further sign of difficulties within the Tory camp provincially and federally.

Stay tuned to the vote on May 2.  More might be at stake than just the federal election in Newfoundland and Labrador.

- srbp -

Recycling a tire recycling story

Environment minister Ross Wiseman announced on Wednesday that his department found a couple of cement plants in Quebec to take a bunch of old tires off his hands.

The crowd in Quebec will burn the tires to replace coal in their heating system or some such.

The provincial government will issue a tender call to ship the tires to Quebec.  Presumably the provincial government will be footing the bill.

Scroll down through the news release and you’ll see mention of another plan to ship tires to Quebec for burning.

It’s from 2010.

And guess what?

The provincial government is paying to ship those tires to Quebec as well.

Still, aside from the whole trading with the enemy vibe this gives off, is there anything in this latest announcement that counts as new?

- srbp -