Taking your brain out of neutral #nlvotes #nlpoli

He said.

She said.

Claim.

Counter-claim.

Simple conflict.

Simple news story.

No problem?

Problem.

Well, maybe. 

You decide.

Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at New York University.  He doesn’t like “he said,she said journalism”.  In a recent post at his blog Pressthink Rosen writes about his recent experience with a complaint to National Public Radio (NPR) in Kansas about an NPR story on new state regulations for abortion clinics.

Clinic operators say the regulations are a form of harassment aimed specifically at abortion clinics with the intent to close down the few remaining ones in the state.

The state says the regulations are just part of the normal state government business of regulating things.

He said.

She said.

Rosen complained to the NPR ombudsman about the story.  He complained specifically about NPR’s failure to provide any additional information in the story that would help readers evaluate the contending claims. Rosen accused the NPR of using its style of reporting to shield the organization from attacks on a controversial subject, thereby doing its listeners a disservice.

NPR replied that to do what Rosen argued would be to take an editorial stance on the issue, to take sides.  And there’s just no way NPR would violate its professional ethics in that way. From NPR:

We forwarded Rosen’s criticism to the reporter, Kathy Lohr, who responded:

“I’ve covered the abortion issue for 20 years. My goal is to be fair and accurate.

“It would be inappropriate to take a position on an issue I’m covering. So, I don’t do that, with abortion or other issues.”

In another exchange with Rosen, Lohr made her point more emphatically;

Me [Rosen]: Why does NPR throw up its hands and tell its listeners: we have no idea who’s right? Is that really the best reporting you can do? Is that the excellence for which NPR is known?

Kathy Lohr: You want me to take a position on a public controversy. You want me to editorialize. To pick a side. What you don’t understand is: That’s not my job!

Rosen gives more detail in the post than he may have in the twitter and other short exchanges with the gang at NPR Kansas.  As Rosen points out in the post, he thinks that going a step beyond the mere reporting of the superficial controversy is actually part of the business of reporting, of informing the audience.

He bases that position on a set of bullet points he laid out at the front end of the post:

The conflict that sits at the heart of the story goes unexplored even though evidence to evaluate the contending claims is readily available. As a result, the news organization remains – ostensibly – neutral.  in effect, people are invited to join the reporters in putting their brains in neutral.

You can see the same sort of he said, she said story in recent coverage of the Liberal’s idea of giving government pensioners a small increase in their pension every year.

The Liberals said, then CBC got the “she said” controversy going with the comment from the provincial finance department that seemed to criticise their idea. The provincial Conservatives chimed in to take up the criticism and so the thing carried on for a day or two.

At no point did CBC actually explain the pensions issue on any level at all.  They certainly didn’t explain what the Liberals were trying to do and then compare it to the idea of what Conservatives were driving at. Hunt around the CBC’s online election web space and you will find exactly squat on the pensions issue beyond what they covered at the first.  None of the other conventional media have stepped in to explain it either.

The evidence to evaluate the contending positions is readily available.  The provincial finance department officials could explain what they meant.  The Liberals could too.

Nobody asked either of them.

Interesting idea: you can have a news report that doesn’t actually inform anybody about anything beyond the fact that one side said one thing and another said something else.

Forget the limitations of the electronic media like television and the format that gives maybe a couple of minutes for a report.  There are plenty of ways to get at the issue, including a longer piece on the same television news casts that carried the first story.

Now CBC is not alone in this.  Look around and you’ll find plenty of news reports that follow this sort of approach.  What makes this one stand out is that the CBC story winds up fitting the Conservative political narrative about supposed Liberal fiscal irresponsibility now and in the past. While the “he said, she said” story format is supposedly neutral, this one didn’t turn out that way. 

The pensions story as CBC covered it did a disservice to the audience in another way, beyond leaving the substance unexplored or having CBC’s story effectively injected into the campaign.

Fundamentally, the pensions story is about the kind of basic policy choice that the wonks out there think political debate ought to be about.

The pension liability exists.  The provincial government must deal with it.  In effect, they are already dealing with it by paying what the provincial government owes.  They pay it out of current account funds, the cash the government has every year to pay all its usual bills.

What the Liberals proposed to do is add a small percentage to the spending every year.  The end result would be that what is now costing a little over $500 million this year would cost about $750 million 20 years from now.

The Conservatives hung their hat on the idea that the Liberal plan would increase the unfunded liability.  It would.

What they didn’t explain is that the notion of unfunded liability is basically an accounting calculation. It is based on how much money you’d have to salt away in order to cover the debts in the event the government stopped operating tomorrow.

No one expects the provincial government to stop operating tomorrow.  The government gets to chose what to do.  They can put cash away in investments and pay the pensions out of the interest or pay it out of current account money. 

Either way will work.

What any government might do depends, as much  as anything else, on what revenue forecasts look like.  If things are going to be good for a long while, it might be better to pay the liability out of annual budget money.

If the forecasts say times will be tough or unpredictable, then it would be prudent to salt cash away.

A couple of decades ago, the unfunded liability was roughly what it is today:  three maybe four billion.  The total provincial government income in any one year was the same number, or less. The total size of the economy – the gross domestic product – was about double the unfunded liability.

No one had a choice. about salting cash away because there was no leftover cash to bank.  Liberal and Conservative governments did exactly the same thing and they did it for exactly the same basic reasons.  When people like Shawn Skinner talk about Liberal fiscal irresponsibility, they are simply full of shit. They don’t know what they are talking about. 

These days, the provincial government has enough cash in the bank today to cover all the unfunded liability in one pop. You don’t even need to notice that the total unfunded liability – even with the Liberal extra bit – is less than 25% of the GDP.  It’s about half the total government annual budget.

So how come the provincial Conservatives haven’t done anything about the unfunded pension liability yet? 

Good question.

The good answer is that they did what all governments do:  they made a choice.

They decided it is better to commit years of windfall oil cash to a whole bunch of extra spending and hold pretty well all of extra cash in reserve to help pay for Muskrat Falls.

How many of you knew about the pile of cash the provincial government has today sitting in temporary investments? 

How many knew what they were planning to do with it?

Odds are, that number is pretty close to zero.  That isn’t surprising. Somebody decided not to tell you that.

Avoiding any debate today on the pensions issue and how to pay for it means that people won’t ask uncomfortable questions that people who made decisions in government don’t want to answer.

Notice the way the Conservatives have framed their idea on pensions, incidentally:

… Addressing public pension plan liabilities and other postretirement liabilities will be a priority.

• We will develop a long-term plan to reduce
  our unfunded public pension plan liabilities
  in a responsible manner by making set
  periodic payments.
• At least a third of any surplus will be
  invested in the pension funds

They promise that they whatever they do will happen in the future.

But you shouldn’t forget that they crossed their fingers a wee bit earlier in the campaign platform:

Implementation of our priorities will be phased, if necessary, to accommodate fiscal constraint.

In other words, if things go south financially, if there’s another recession, then all bets are off.

When governments of the past didn’t have a choice, they paid pensions out of the cash on hand.

When a government has cash, they elect to do something else with the money rather than reduce the unfunded pension liability. They criticise someone else for the unfunded liability and make a promise that they will do something in the future.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

And in the meantime, very few voters have enough information   in the middle of an election to make an informed decision on which idea – the Liberal or the Conservative – is the way they want to go.

But they do have he said, she said.

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Potato, potato: legislative names version #nlvotes #nlpoli

The Telegram editorialist notes:

You have to like the title given to the new Conservative omnibus crime legislation by its authors. They went with the lovely title “The Safe Streets and Communities Act.” Sounds like a new, improved detergent.

Sounds a lot like the Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act, passed in 2007 in Newfoundland and Labrador as part of the provincial Conservatives’ campaign agenda. 

They haven’t put it into force, yet.

That get tough on crime thing isn’t just for Harperites. 

Potato. Potato.

Tory. Tory.

What’s the difference?

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Whodathunkit #nlvotes #nlpoli

Former Tory premier Tom Rideout, also former member of the House of Assembly for Baie Verte told a west coast Morning Show audience early in September that the public mood in the province was shifting.

People weren’t that fussy about all the pork-barrel spending his colleagues were doing in the run up to the formal election campaign.

This weekend CBC ran a story that noted Liberal leader Kevin Aylward got a great reception in Baie Verte the other night:

Liberals on Newfoundland's Baie Verte Peninsula held a noisy rally Friday night for party leader Kevin Aylward, who said the event shows the tide is turning in the election.

Hmmmm.

This is the kinda stuff that makes you wonder what is going on out there.

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Welcome to the Echo Chamber #nlpoli #nlvotes

Pretty simple idea, really.

Opinions, beliefs and ideas move around among like minded people in what is an essentially closed space. 

The effect can be amazingly powerful just as it can be amazingly deceptive and distorting.

President Barack Obama talked about the echo chamber in American political coverage in early 2010 during a meeting with Senate Democrats:

"Do you know what I think would actually make a difference.... If everybody here — excuse all the members of the press who are here — if everybody turned off your CNN, your Fox, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics. The topic is politics."

In the United States, the problem Obama is pointing out is not just the idea of people from different political perspectives focusing on politics exclusively all the time. 

This isn’t the Permanent Campaign* as all-consuming.

It’s about political polarization in the 100 channel universe. People chose what they want to pay attention to and, increasingly, that seems to be a matter of picking only the information  - websites, radio stations and television news programs  - that reinforce their existing beliefs.

Princeton University professor Cass Sunstein describes it this way in the 2001 digital book Echo Chambers:  Bush v Gore, Impeachment and Beyond,

Many of these vices involve the risk of fragmentation, as the increased power of individual choice allows people to sort themselves into innumerable homogeneous groups, which often results in amplifying their pre[-]existing views. Although millions of people are using the Internet to expand their horizons, many people are doing the opposite, creating a Daily Me that is specifically tailored to their own interests and prejudices. Whatever the exact numbers, it is important to realize that a well-functioning democracy—a republic—depends not just on freedom from censorship, but also on a set of common experiences and on unsought, unanticipated, and even unwanted exposures to diverse topics, people, and ideas. A system of “gated communities” is as unhealthy for cyberspace as it is for the real world.

Slightly north of the great republic, and in a much smaller place, there’s another kind of echo chamber.  The way it works may be slightly different but the concept is still the same.

The provincial government makes the noise.  Other provincial opinion leaders – other politicians, key interest groups and news media – reflect the noise back. 

The political parties themselves are semi-closed organizations dominated by self-selecting elites. The rules on who can get into the elites and how aren’t written down.  Sure both the Conservative and Liberal parties have constitutions that set out rules about how they are supposed to work.

But as first the Conservatives and the Liberals showed in 2011, their constitutions are fictions.  First the Conservatives twisted and turned before finally rejecting as illegitimate a candidate for leader of the party who followed exactly the same rules the party bosses themselves used.  Then the Liberals switched leaders.  The party executive may have created the process that ended with Kevin Aylward as leader, but what happened in the five weeks before that – secret offers to this one and that one – could only take place in a group where the written rules and the real rules are two different things.

And lest anyone thing the NDP is different consider the special role given to unions in its constitution.  A party with the word “democratic” in its name was hardly democratic at all.

To see how all this works, consider a couple of examples.

Start with the fishery in the current election to see insiders talking among themselves.

Earlier this year, CBC released the results of an opinion poll they commissioned from Corporate Research Associates. CBC found that:

… 60 per cent of the province believes the fishery should be concentrated in fewer locations to be more efficient.

Only 23 per cent say it is well managed and doesn't need change.

The majority opinion is that a smaller leaner fishery would be more profitable.

That isn’t as surprising as it would have been even five years ago. Times have really changed in the industry. And such a poll result isn’t surprising given that the industry leaders themselves agreed that they have to reduce the number of people and plants in the province.

What is surprising is that – even though a clear majority of people in the province support downsizing and the industry representatives themselves seem to agree - both the provincial Conservatives and Liberals want to create a new version of the Fisheries Loan Board in order to get more people into the industry. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives mentioned that this idea came from the union that represents plant workers and fishermen, incidentally.

Amazing, though, this fisheries policy might be, Muskrat Falls remains the finest example of the echo chamber of local politics and the interconnections among the groups inside the chamber that help to reinforce the messages.

Over the past 18 months, poll after poll done for the provincial government showed that only three or four percent of respondents thought it was the most urgent issue for the province.

Health care was at the top of peoples’ list of major issues, across the province hands down.  The economy and jobs came in second.

Nonetheless, Muskrat Falls has dominated provincial politics since Danny Williams announced his retirement deal in November 2010.

Muskrat Falls is the centre piece of the Conservatives’ re-election campaign.

The Liberals have a section of their platform devoted to hydro-electric development issues.

The New Democrats include it as well, although their comments are much more vague that the other two parties’ commitments.

A St. John’s Board of Trade panel selected the Lower Churchill overwhelmingly as the major issue for the election.

And lastly, a poll released last week shows that Muskrat Falls was a major issue for 13% of respondents.

But hang on a second.

As it turns out, the poll came from the firm that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation. 

And that Board of Trade thingy.  Well, the panel had only four people on it.  While the BOT didn’t release the names of the panel members, M5 was so proud that Craig Tucker had made the cut, they tweeted about his work on the Board’s panel that put together some comments for the election.

Yes, gang, that Craig Tucker.  Co-chair of the 2003 Tory election campaign, former Tory-appointed director of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro after 2003 and now the guy whose advertising firm is the agency of record for Nalcor.

Meanwhile, the CBC uses Nalcor’s lobbyist as an election commentator alongside their own provincial affairs reporter, as if the two were the same sort of independent political observers.  They didn’t even bother mention that the guy is Nalcor’s lobbyist in Ottawa.

What’s most amazing about CBC and those who reported the poll last week without noticing the Nalcor connections is that they didn’t feel the need to notice the Nalcor connections.

For people inside the echo chamber, that sort of detail might be so well known they didn’t feel like it was an issue.

But outside the circle of au courante types, out among the audience?

Not so much information that they’d readily have those details or even that they’d feel the need to go check. They trust the news media to give their all the relevant information, after all.

More than two decades ago, political scientist Susan McCorquodale wrote about the relationship between the media and politicians in this province.  She described it as '”symbiotic”, a close and long-term relationship that works to the benefit of both.

“News originates with the press release, the press conference or the daily sitting of the House of Assembly,” she wrote.  These days she might have added twitter, e-mail or the Blackberry message from a political source feeding tidbits to reporters.

McCorquodale noted the lack of investigative reporting, something else that remains little change these days.   And she also noted the “tendency of reporters to end up in comfortable PR jobs with government.”

What she could not have foreseen was the day when the president of the major commercial radio broadcasting firm would sit as a political appointee on the board of one of the provincial government’s energy companies.

Nor could McCorquodale have expected that this same fellow, so tight with the pols the could receive a patronage appointment, would call his own station to complain about media coverage of his patron’s health problems.

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador occurs inside a large echo chamber.  While in the United States, there are separate political echo chambers for people with differing political views, in newfoundland and Labrador, the echo chamber tends to separates the opinion elites from the majority of society.

To see it work, you only have to look at the general election campaign.

 

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• Permanent Campaign: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Dippers policy book implodes #nlpoli #nlvotes

Take this from CBC:

NDP Leader Lorraine Michael says she is not afraid to rip up a contract with the Hebron partners to deliver a three per cent surtax promised in her party's new election platform.

But, in an interview with On Point With David Cochrane, Michael admits that she is not sure how an NDP government would accomplish this, even though the Hebron agreement with the government specifically says the contract cannot be changed.

Understand, first of all, Lorraine and campaign team did not even know about the Hebron fiscal agreements limitation on adding new taxes until someone pointed it out.

Now their campaign platform a smouldering heap.  The financial responsibility thing they were shooting for is gone.

They have no answers.

If the NDP knew how to get around the problem, they’d tell you.  it should be very easy for them. But Lorraine and her gang are flummoxed because they don’t know what they are talking about.

So they fall back on the usual politician’s stock-in-trade.

Bluster, bluff and bullshit all start with the same letter because they are basically the same thing.  Lorraine Michael and the NDP have nothing but those three “B” words to offer now that their fiscally responsible election platform – coughbullshitcough – flaps in tatters in the wind.

And understand, second of all, that  the much bigger problem is the give-away in the Hebron deal itself, all thanks to Danny and Kathy.

Lorraine could have easily pointed that out to everyone.

But she didn’t.

Because she and her crew had no idea what was going on in the first place.

And they still don’t.

Bluff, bluster and bullshit produced the give-away in the first place.

Unfortunately, bluff, bluster and bullshit won’t make her huge credibility problems go away.

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Negotiating with Quebec #nlpoli #nlvotes

Kevin Aylward says that, as Premier, he’d have no problem negotiating with Quebec about developing the Lower Churchill.

A New Liberal Government will direct Nalcor to recommence negotiations with Quebec, Ontario and the federal government to develop the entire Lower Churchill. It is not financially feasible to develop only part of the Lower Churchill.

Before 2003, Danny Williams used to talk about how he would only sign a deal with Quebec if it included redress for Churchill Falls.

Then after 2003, according to Kathy Dunderdale, she and Williams spent five years trying – secretly – to get Quebec to take an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill and sign a deal without redress.

Put Churchill Falls to one side is how Dunderdale described it.

And none of the daily conventional media have reported it since she spilled the beans in September 2009.

Well, it doesn’t matter.  Dunderdale’s comments are a matter of public record.

Someone should ask her about those five years of secret negotiations and the huge change in policy she and her predecessor kept from the people of Newfoundland and Labrador until after they’d failed and why the Conservatives pretended publicly to be at war with Quebec the whole time.

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Campaign Week 1 Traffic #nlpoli #nlvotes

The Top 10 stories for last week, as selected by SRBP readers:

1. Dippers on point for first CBC political election panel
2. New Poll.  New Result.
3. Advertising group has Tory, Nalcor ties
4. The NDP and Regressive Social Policy:  education
5. The Hebron Give-away
6. The Public Sector Pensions thing explained
7. Some old habits must die really hard:  Telly edition
8. Ceeb spins story for Tories
9. The Damn-Fool Fisheries Policy
10. A come-to-Jesus moment

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Event Horizon

From December 2:

Well, in all likelihood,  he and his accomplishments will go the way of other politicians’, including those long-ago strongmen in whose ranks he clearly belongs. There is an inky abyss, a vacuum that awaits them all.  It is a cross between Limbo and Purgatory, a living death for the egotistical and the once-mighty.  Where once throngs sang their praises, there is only silence.

Five days after Williams announced his resignation, people still cry for his departure.  Five weeks from now, they’ll be more concerned about Christmas credit card bills and if politics excites them, they’ll be watching the race to replace him.  Five months from now and the province’s election campaign will be well under way.

Five years from now, people will struggle to remember that guy who parted his hair down the centre of his head.  The collective amnesia on which Danny Williams built his cult of personality will swallow him as surely as it swallowed his predecessors.

Who the gods would destroy, they would first make proud.

And as we near the end of September the following year, we are nearing the edge of the abyss.

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A come-to-Jesus moment #nlpoli #nlvotes

The always deadly labradore tackles comparative public spending increases in a post called simply “Three things”.

Scroll down through the post and read it out loud.

It’s worth the effort.

At the end, he invents a new phrase that will catch on.

Bet on it.

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Same old same old. #nlpoli

You will not be able to slide a sheet of paper, sez your humble e-scribbler, between the three parties in the general election.

They will be pandering for votes and promising an orgy of public spending.

And so far they are right on track.

The provincial Conservatives unleashed their Blue Book, likely named because it is starved of the oxygen of an original thought.

You can tell a party has been in power too long by the size of its campaign platform.  They run out of ideas.  They think that you can overwhelm people with verbiage and bullshit rather than stand behind a few ideas laid out plainly.

The Tories hit 75 pages, not counting the cover this time around.  Flip back and look at Roger Grimes’ monster manual that the Liberals produced in 2003 after 14 years in power.

Same idea.

It’s just taken the Tories seven years to exhaust their imagination reserve.

Now they are down to promises to think about doing something eventually.

Like public sector pensions:

• We will develop a long-term plan to reduce our unfunded public pension plan liabilities in a responsible manner by making set periodic payments.

Seven years in office and $4.0 billion in cash tied up in short-term investments and only now they will develop a plan – over an unspecified period of time – to try and fix the problem of unfunded pension liabilities.

Meanwhile they accuse the Liberals of being evil spenders for making a commitment to do something.

Interesting concept. 

You see government is already dealing with the unfunded liability right now.  They pay it out of general revenue, as the liabilities come due each year.  The Liberals proposed to do the same thing. Putting money into a fund to cover it off out of interest is one way of handling the pensions issue.  meeting it out of general revenue every year is another.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives promise to continue running things as they have.  That is hardly comforting to those who have paid attention to what they’ve done thus, as opposed to what they’ve claimed to do.

Meanwhile there are lots of plans to make plans. 

Wonderful stuff that since you cannot really hold any political party accountable for such vague and meaningless commitments as '"we will start working on writing down some ideas that we might implement if we ever have enough money…”.

And if there isn’t that, there’ll be stuff that adds up to precious little:

We will encourage schools to continue to draw attention to the successes and leadership of students and teachers at public assemblies and through other means in the school.

They forgot to say that they will do it now with New Energy!

The oil and gas section of the plan recycles old Tory commitments since 2003 and in one case – the natural gas royalty regime – carries one the Grits started in the late 1990s.

The fisheries section looks suspiciously familiar, right down to the pledge to create a fisheries loan board.  And like the Liberal commitment, the Tory one deliberately puts the words in lower case letters so that people might not confuse it with a Fisheries Loan Board.

Perhaps the funniest aspect of the Conservative platform – after the section on continuing a commitment to accountability – is the idea the whole thing will cost less than $200 million.

If the fisheries section is where the Tories and Grits are the same, then managing the money  is where the Tories and the Dippers share a common cause.

Any platform that includes the construction of a multi-billion megaproject and massive amounts of other capital spending by an administration that is notorious for its inability bring in anything on time and budget cannot deliver anything for a mere $137 million.

You cannot slide a sheet of paper in between the three parties in this election.  What differences there might be are purely a matter of degree and semantics.

No wonder so many people are frustrated and unmotivated to vote.

People want change and the parties are just offering four more years of the same old, same old.

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The Further Adventures of The ‘Stache #nlpoli

He shaved it before.

SRBP lit up the missing caterpillar from his top lip.

Jerome Kennedy grew it back.

Earlier this year, he lopped it off again.

Well, he didn’t grow it back this time, folks. .

That’s a screen cap from Thursday’s launch of the Conservative Party’s campaign policy book.

Jerome was conspicuously close to the Conservatives’ interim leader.

Conspicuous.

Just like the Tories were conspicuously in a region of the province where their support is soft in order to unveil their platform.

Conspicuous, just like the Liberals are when decided to unveil their policy book in St. Anthony.  Almost as far away from the Avalon as you can get and still be on the island,  in an area where seats could change hands from Blue to Red and really close to Labrador where other seats can change hands.

Incidentally, anyone who doesn’t know where sinantny is can just ask Fairity O’Brien.

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Some old habits must die really hard: Telly edition #nlpoli #nlvotes

In the last couple of days of the 1989 election, the Telegram featured a set of poll results done by a local company. 

The poll showed Tom Rideout’s Tories in front of the Clyde Wells Liberals by quite a margin.

Small problem of accuracy:  the Telegram didn’t mention that the polling firm was also the PC party pollster.

The company’s name was Omnifacts.

The Liberals issued a news release using their own rolling poll results that turned out to be way closer to the result than the Tory one. The title on the release was “Partisan polls should be identified”.

A version of the story turned up in a couple of Claire Hoy books and in both accounts Hoy’s supposed Liberal Party insider is someone who evidently didn’t understand how the Liberals were conducting their polls or what happened.  If the Liberals made up the numbers, as Hoy’s uninformed informant claimed, then they got the results pretty close to accurate.

Way more accurate say, than any given CRA poll over the past five years.  The Liberal poll showed the Libs on top by 3.5%.  In the end the popular vote was almost dead even, with the Tories slightly on top.  CRA missed the 2007 election by a country mile.

Anyway…

Fast forward 21 years and the latest iteration of the same firm – MQO or Market Quest Omnifacts – released another political poll this week.

In the Telegram story on page three of the Wednesday edition, the story starts out by referring to an “independent poll”.

That’s an interesting word choice.

MQO is part of a related group of companies that goes under the business name M5.

As Nalcor confirmed again for SRBP on Wednesday, the M5 Group is the agency of record for the provincial government’s energy corporation.

In effect, that would make MQO Nalcor’s pollster.

When asked by SRBP if MQO was doing work for the Tory Party or the provincial government or Nalcor, an MQO spokesperson said that “[w]hether or not the company currently has projects in play with the organizations you mentioned, I’m unaware.  It’s not something that MQO’s researcher’s would confirm for me due to client confidentiality.  In fact, the same is true for the entire group of m5 companies.”

 

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The Hebron Give-Away #nlpoli #nlvotes

If the province’s New Democrats form the next provincial government, they’ll have to look somewhere else besides the Hebron oil project for their three percent surtax on crude oil.

Under the 2008 Hebron fiscal agreement, then Premier Danny Williams and his natural resources minister, Kathy Dunderdale agreed to a clause that prevents the government from introducing any new oil revenue charges besides royalties for the life of the Hebron agreement.

Clause 9.1 states that “no additional tax, levy, fee or charge shall be imposed by the Province solely on a Development Project or on the
Proponents solely in relation to their interest in the Lands.”

The term “development project” means:

(i) exploration, development and production of oil resources from the Lands;

(ii) ancillary thereto, the production of gas from the Lands for use solely for the purpose of production of oil from the Lands, not for commercial production and sale; and

(iii) the ownership, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning and abandonment of all the assets in which the Proponents hold an undivided interest in relation to such activities.

While Hibernia has a good few years left in it, Terra Nova and White Rose won’t last as long.  That means we can only count on having two oil fields in production offshore.  As revenues dwindle and government spending pressures mount, there might be a day when a future provincial government would need to look at how it taxes resources for the benefit of the people of the province.

Thanks to the provincial Conservatives the future government will be screwed over when it comes to Hebron.  They’ve  given away the provincial government’s power to adjust the way it collects rent on behalf of the resource owners – you and your humble e-scribbler – for this lucrative non-renewable resource.

That’s in addition to the royalty giveaway up the front end that the Conservatives attacked before they got into office and when oil prices were low and then gleefully agreed to once they had the power and oil prices skyrocketed.

And even that is in addition to the clause in the Hebron deal that compels the provincial government to side with the oil companies on any regulatory changes the companies think might hurt their interests offshore.

That one – incidentally – is a give-away of incalculable proportions.

Anyway, someone at the NDP office needs to get out the calculator and rework the financial part of their election platform.

While he or she is doing that, the rest of us can wonder what other details they missed entirely in their amazingly low cost platform document.

And some other people will start wondering what else Danny and Kathy gave away without telling us.

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Liberal commitments for Labrador #nlpoli

From Yvonne Jones’ Facebook page, posted shortly after midnight:

Full Liberal Platform being released tomorrow. Includes a full section on Labrador. Highlighting the committment [sic] to pave the Labrador Highway, designate the Strait of Belle Isle Ferry service as essential and putting a new ferry in place to serve the people of Labrador year round. The liberals [sic] will look at a fixed link for the Island -Labrador crossing along with committing to 21st century communications, including high speed internet and cell phone coverage for Labradorians and much more. Labrador should be a priority for all political parties in this campaign, after all we are raking in the big bucks for the governments these days.

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A culture of entitlement #nlpoli #cdnpoli

In 2010, defence minister Peter MacKay used a Cormorant search and rescue helicopter from 103 Search and Rescue Squadron to fly him out of a fishing lodge on the Gander River, according to CTV.

"After cancelling previous efforts to demonstrate their search-and-rescue capabilities to Minister MacKay over the course of three years, the opportunity for a simulated search and rescue exercise finally presented itself in July of 2010," a DND statement said.

"As such, Minister MacKay cut his personal trip to the area short to participate in this Cormorant exercise."

However, military sources say no search-and-rescue demonstration was planned until the very day MacKay's office made the request to pick him up.

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Day 3: #pandermonium roundup #nlpoli #nlvotes

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward promised Wednesday that as Premier he’d cave in and settle a class action lawsuit that is trying to pin financial responsibility for moose accidents on the provincial government.

The provincial Tories did their  pandering before the election with everything from fire trucks to moose fences.

NDP leader Lorraine Michael promised that her party would cut some tax on gasoline. The CBC story doesn’t make it clear which tax Michael was talking about. The NDP platform doesn’t make it clear either, referring only to the tax on tax.

But it sounds good and that’s really all old-fashioned pols like all the rest are looking for when it comes to the pure pandering parts of their platform.

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The Public Sector Pensions thing explained #nlpoli #nlvotes

People can’t understand the racket over provincial pensions, what the Liberals proposed, what the CBC reported but hasn’t explained and what the provincial Conservatives are attacking the Liberals over.

Here’s a simple explanation of the math, the policy ideas and the problems with what’s happened.

The Background

The issue is about some retired provincial public servants whose pensions are not indexed to inflation and who continue to receive the same amount today they received up to two decades after they retired.

These pensioners have been pressing for a cost of living increase for most of the past 20 years.

Here’s what the Liberals proposed on Monday:

A New Liberal Government will provide a one-time 2.5%
increase to Public Sector Pensioners and subsequently, annual increases equivalent to CPI, to a maximum of 2%.

We will  establish an arms-length Review Commission to examine long term, just and equitable solutions following the principles of fairness and natural law. [Paragraphed for clarity]

That first bit is clear enough.  The second bit is important.  Keep it in mind for later.

On the day the Liberals announced that policy, CBC contacted the provincial finance department for an analysis and for some inexplicable reason, the department offered a comment on a political issue in the middle of an election campaign.

CBC reported that:

…the Department of Finance told CBC News that the Liberals' plan would add $1.2 billion in additional liabilities to the pension plan.

You can find links to two CBC stories at this recent SRBP post

By Wednesday, provincial Conservative leader Kathy Dunderdale was saying:

Premier Kathy Dunderdale calls the Liberal Party's plans to provide a one-time 2.5 per cent increase to public sector pensions, and annual increases up to 2 per cent, "frightening". Dunderdale questions Kevin Aylward's ability to balance the books. She says the full 2 per cent indexing would add about $1.8-billion to the unfunded liability.

That’s from VOCM.  The story might be disappeared within 24 hours of this post.

The Liberals counter that the proposal will cost an additional $13 million or so to the existing annual public sector pension spending or so the first year and an additional $10 million every year afterward, maximum until the to review commission reports and government acts on the recommendations.

Discussion

The major difference in the Liberal and Conservative argument is over annual cost versus total liability.

A check with the Liberal campaign found that they used the latest annual report of the provincial pension investment committee.

Then they looked at the total payment in 2010 of $532 million and change.  That’s right there on page four of the report.

Now right off the bat that includes administrative costs and refunds to people who’ve taken their cash and gone elsewhere. The Liberals actually started with a figure higher than the actual pension payments in 2010 of $494 million but let’s take $520 million which is the actual budgeted pension benefits payment this current year.

If you do simple math, you will find that 2.5% of $520 million is $13.0 million. In the first year, the Liberal pledge will cost the $520 million already committed plus another $13 million or $533 million.

In the worst case scenario, the maximum subsequent add-on will be 2% of the year before. The figure in the next year would be $533 plus  two percent of that ($533 + $10.66 million). 

One question to consider is how much that will cost over time.  Well, how long is a piece of string?

Let’s take 10 years as our length of time. 

If you work that out over 10 years, what is costing you $520 in 2011 will cost you roughly $636 million in 2021.  That’s $116 million more than today.

In 2031 – or 20 years from now - the annual price would be a little over $250 million more than the government is paging out today.

The Conservatives – and the finance department – refer to the public liability.

What they are doing is taking all the extra money, the 2.5% and the 2.0%, and then they are adding up all the extras over time to give you a number.  Their liability number is the extra spending added up over time.

Based on this example, their figure of $1.8 billion would be the cumulative total of the extra money in about Year 17.  Why they picked that number is a mystery because so far no one has explained anything.

Issues

What you have here is exactly what is supposed to occur during an election campaign.  One party is proposing something.  people are going to criticise it.

People need to look at this proposal and discuss it in all its merits or de-merits.  the people doing that should be the politicians and the general public.

Public servants shouldn’t be weighing in on this stuff. As a matter of principle, it is wrong. 

It gets particularly troubling when you consider that the comment officials gave to CBC deliberately chose to put forward a large – and therefore frightening – number when it becomes associated with words like liability and debt.

It becomes disingenuous when the finance officials failed to note – apparently – that you can do the same thing with any government spending.  total up the cumulative increase in anything and you can get a scary number.

The question is whether the people who are making the decisions have full, and accurate information in front of them so that they can make an informed chose.  What is in the public domain right now from CBC and the finance department is misinformation.

.And therein lies the second problem.

The CBC, like all news media, have a duty to inform their audience.

On this one, so far, no one has done anything to inform anyone about the pensions issue. Covering the “he said, she said” doesn’t cut it. 

And it really doesn’t cut it if the news media outlet went in search of a comment in the first place and – in the process – injected themselves into the political fray.  It’s one thing to observe and report about the game.  It’s another thing to throw a puck on the ice. 

What you’ve got now is not an informed discussion of the policy issue and its merits. You’ve got a confusing melee in which the ruling Conservatives are getting a free ride:  they haven’t had to explain themselves.  They can simply build off the implicitly objective third party critique coming via the CBC.

Meanwhile, has anyone asked the finance department to figure out the public finance liability in the NDP election platform?

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Advertising group has Tory, Nalcor ties #nlpoli

MQO, the market research company that released an opinion poll on the second day of the provincial general election, is part of a group of marketing and advertising companies with ties to the provincial Conservatives and Nalcor, the provincial government’s energy company.

M5 is the agency of record for Nalcor, a spokesperson for Nalcor confirmed for SRBP on Tuesday.

Craig Tucker is listed as managing director of M5 on the company’s website.

In 2004, then premier Danny Williams announced Tucker’s appointment to the board of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. Hydro was the predecessor of Nalcor. It appears Tucker left the board when Hydro became Nalcor.

According to a 2005 CBC story, Tucker co-chaired the Conservative’s 2003 election campaign. That CBC story was about a $150,000 contract that M5 landed from the provincial government to promote the $2.0 billion transfer deal with Ottawa signed in January 2005.

M5 has also been an active contributor to the Progressive Conservative party in the province.  From 2003 to 2010, the company gave  $29,200 in political donations to the PC party according to information from the province’s chief electoral officer.

SRBP contacted Karen McCarthy, the media contact on the MQO news release, via Twitter and later e-mail.  McCarthy is president of M5PR and is listed on the M5 website as senior vice-president, communications.

SRBP asked:

Is M5 doing any work currently for Nalcor, the prov gov and/or the PC party. If so, what is it doing?

McCarthy replied:

MQO Research conducted the poll on the NL election over the past weekend independent of any other organization.  The company is a “research force” in the Atlantic Region and feels a responsibility to report on issues of interest to people in the four Atlantic provinces.  The company has done work for many governments, corporations and others throughout the region since its inception.  Whether or not the company currently has projects in play with the organizations you mentioned, I’m unaware.  It’s not something that MQO’s researcher’s would confirm for me due to client confidentiality.  In fact, the same is true for the entire group of m5 companies.  I can speak for the company of which I am President.  m5pr is not doing any work for the PC Party, Nalcor or the Province.

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Undisclosed risk: NDP version #nlpoli #nlvotes

Sometimes you have to read something over and over just to make sure you didn’t misunderstand.

Like say this line from CBC’s online story of the NDP election platform launch:

In total, New Democrats are promising $142 million in new spending — $74 million from what it  called "efficiencies" and $68 million from a petroleum royalty surtax of three per cent.

The Telegram version is not quite so emphatic that the entire NDP platform is so inexpensive. They make it clear the pledges cover the first year only.

And when you look at the New Democrat platform, that’s the one thing that leaps out at you:  they’ve only costed one year.

Then you notice that while they talk about five pledges, there are a crap load of other things in there that are apparently something other than pledges.

What they are – maybe statement of good intentions -  is another matter.

And what they cost is a mystery.

Some of them could wind being quite costly.

Like say the pledge to increase the presence of government services in communities.  That sounds suspiciously like the Liberals’ plan in the late 1990s to shift stuff into places other than St. John’s.  The Tories carried on the same idea. It’s been very costly in a number of ways, not the least of which has been the increased size of the public service beyond what is actually needed in a province this size.

Or how about:

Plan a universal, publicly-funded and administered homecare and long-term care program.

Sure it says “plan” but plans have a way of becoming more than that once people catch on to the idea. The plan is only limited to year one.  What happens in years two, three and four?

Then there’s the commitment to yet more hand-outs, bail-outs and policy cop-outs:

• Introduce a provincial adjustment fund to assist employees and communities affected by industry downsizing or closures.
• Partner with industry to expand shipbuilding in the province.
• Assist in forest industry diversification for domestic and export markets.
• Increase primary and value-added production of agrifoods for local and  export markets through aid to small-scale production, processing and marketing.

None of that will be cheap.

None of that is costed in the NDP promise book.

And then there’s the gem:

Ensure that development of Labrador’s resources, including Gull Island and Muskrat Falls, is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and beneficial for the people of the province, especially the people of Labrador.

Muskrat is viable because the punters like you and me will pay full freight for it.  The NDP platform statement is a cleverly worded dodge.

Some of the NDP ideas are good ones. 

The pledge to undo the things Lorraine backed before that restricted public accountability and limited access?  Good thing.

Initiatives for people with disabilities, for newcomers?  Good and good.

The costs likely wouldn’t be high and the benefits are almost incalculable.

Other bits just show a lack of imagination:

Conduct a review to assess the need for electoral reform.

Anyone who has been even half asleep in this province the last couple of decades will know that one doesn’t need study.

It needs action.

You can likely put that vague statement about electoral reform down to the fact that the NDP’s financial backers aren’t keen on reforming things like the provincial political finance laws.  hard to imagine a political party with the word democratic in its name that is wishy-washy about electoral reform.

But there it is.

Just like the cost of electing an NDP government isn’t.

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Ceeb spins story for Tories #nlpoli

Rather than correct a mistaken early report on the cost of the Liberal party’s pension proposal the CBC online decided to torque the story against the Liberals.

In a story on the Liberal election pledge to give retired public servants a 2.5% increase followed by 2.0% per year, the CBC included a claim from the province’s finance department:

Meanwhile, the Department of Finance told CBC News that the Liberals' plan would add $1.2 billion in additional liabilities to the pension plan.

That’s not accurate and the CBC didn’t explain what the finance officials meant.

The follow-on CBC story looked like this.

After a couple of paragraphs of Tory talking points, the Ceeb story didn’t deliver any facts to back up Dunderdale’s claim or explain the finance department’s assessment.

Instead, CBC included more detail on Aylward’s announcement.

And right at the end – where news stories stick the least important information – you get the Liberal’s accounting of costs.

Aylward said increasing payments to a long-neglected group will cost more than $13 million in the first year, and about $10 million extra for each additional year.

Even those readers who trudged on to the end would have already been told repeatedly that this promise is foolhardy and expensive.

And the combined effect of both stories sets readers up to be skeptical of the Liberal explanation before they even got to it.

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New Poll. New Result #nlpoli

Quick.

Where’s Kathy Dunderdale today?

A new poll by advertising agency M5’s opinion research firm will give you a clue.

The poll replicates the actual numbers for CRA’s August omnibus when both are adjusted to remove the distortion of reporting voter choice as a percentage od decideds.

The MarketQuest Omnifacts poll showed the provincial Conservatives with 42% of respondents, the New Democrats at 23% and the Liberals at 145 with the undecideds at 20%.

The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9%, 19 times out of 20.

The CRA corrected numbers were 40 Tory, 18 Dipper,  and 16 Grit with 26% undecided.

Run that through the Amazing SRBP Vote-a-matic and you get a possible seat result of:

• PC:  38
• Libs: 4 to 7
• NDP:  3 to 6

So contrary to what Kathy “New Energy” Dunderdale said on Day One of the campaign, the polling shows the Tories will lose seats.  The question is more one of where they’ll lose them and to whom.

if you want an idea, consider that on the basic math of it the Tories have gone from 70% of votes cast to 53% of decided voters.  Bear with this for a second and switch back to using the numbers everyone else is using.

That’s a drop of 17 points since the last general election.

If you look at the seats the Tories won by a margin of 17% or less in 2007, this is what you get:

• Lake Melville
• Bellevue
• Labrador West
• Bay of Islands
• Torngat Mountains
• Humber Valley
• Isles of Notre Dame

On the face of that list right now, your humble e-scribbler would add an extra New Democrat in Labrador West to a future House of Assembly with the other seats being ones where the Liberals are historically strong and would likely pick up.

That would give you 10 Liberal seats total and that’s outside the Vote-a-matic forecast range. Just remember that this is a highly inexact subject.  What you can take away from it are places to look for further signs or information. And after all, when the poll results have a variation of five percent give or take, you are really not dealing with scalpel-like precision anyways.

For those who want to quibble, too, that this result would show the Liberals gaining more seats with fewer votes than the New Democrats, you need to appreciate that this set of observations on seats is based on taking polling and applying it against history, against what happened before.

Add to that the concept of vote efficiency and how it works in the current system.

The best example to use is the 1989 general election.  The Tories got more votes, but the Liberals took 34 seats on election night.  The Tories, for example, tend to show very well in polls.  They rack up tons of support in districts in St. John’s but once they’ve gotten enough votes to win the seat every one after that is a waste.

Well, it’s a waste from the standpoint that they didn’t need it to win.

Meanwhile over in another district – most likely off the northeast Avalon – the Tories are starving for votes.  The Liberal vote is distributed such that lots of votes don’t get wasted racking up margins beyond what you need to win.

Same thing applies, essentially, for the NDP.  They’ve got a couple or three pockets of strong support. It’s been enough to win two seats, historically.  And that’s about it.

Historically, you’d translate those polling numbers out and get a result in which the Tories could drop seven seats to the other two parties.

You likely won’t see this from the conventional media, but then again, the conventional media can’t get much beyond the superficial horse-race commentary.

All you can do, dear reader, is take it all in,  weigh it out and make up your own mind.

Oh yes. 

And notice where Kathy Dunderdale is today.

Labrador.

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The NDP and Regressive Social Policy: education #nlpoli

those who are interested in education policy and the current election campaign will be fascinated by a chunk of one conversation that broke out on Twitter Sunday. 

Two of the participants were Mark Watton, former Liberal candidate in the Humber West by-election earlier this year and Brad Evoy, a New Democratic Party supporter and former vice president (academic0 of the Grenfell campus Student Union in Corner Brook.

They were discussing NDP policy that would make post-secondary education in Newfoundland and Labrador free to any students.

This is an edited version of the conversation, but one that tries to preserves both the flow of the exchange and the thrust of Evoy’s position.  Evoy starts off on accessibility and then morphs into a wider argument:.

Watton:  Just because something costs money, doesn't mean it is inaccessible. …a viable investment i.e. one which individuals, as well as the state, can make.

Evoy:  That's mighty well and easy for you to say, Mr. Watton, but it is not so for many NLers.

Watton:  on what basis do you make that statement?

Evoy:  Again, individual investment should not prohibit what is best for our common good. …Aside from knowing those who suffer under debt loads and turn away from PSE due to cost? … So there is some with the ability to be affluent, that doesn't mean all can….Question now, would you even dare suggest the same for Primary and Secondary Education… As in our society some level of PSE is now as needed just as well as those, in many fields…would it not be better to remove personal wealth from the equation all together? … Is it not more equitable for students to be judged on their merit and pay tax when…...they are all established well enough to do so? That's the idea here….Some form of PSE is quickly becoming an employment baseline...... in many professions. We require skilled persons in our economy.

Watton:  so if something is an employment baseline the state should pay for it for everyone?

Evoy:  Aren't we already doing so from the period when high school was exactly that? …And, again, it's a baseline for many professions and some won't have the academics…

Free or low tuition has been a popular idea for decades.  The arguments in favour f it usually centre on accessibility for people from lower income families.

The only problem for people who make accessibility their foundation is that there isn’t any substantial evidence to support the claim about accessibility and free tuition.

Take a recent study from Ireland as typical.  Kevin Denny of the Institute for Fiscal Studies released a paper in may that looked at the impact of the Irish government policy that wiped out tuition fees in 1996. His conclusion is that eliminating tuition fees had no effect on university attendance by students from lower income families.

What did it do?

The only obvious effect of the policy was to provide a windfall gain to middle-class parents who no longer had to pay fees. [p. 14]

In a footnote Denny indicates there is some reason to believe that these families wound up shipping their children to private schools.  that would likely have had the effect of improving their academic performance which further disadvantaged children from lower income families in the competition to enter university.

Overall, while the numbers of students from low incomes went up after 1996, so too did the number of students from other  family income levels.  The effect was such that the proportions of students in university did not change significantly for the better with the elimination of tuition fees.

Flip back up to Evoy’s comments for a second and look at this bit:

would it not be better to remove personal wealth from the equation all together? … Is it not more equitable for students to be judged on their merit and pay tax when…...they are all established well enough to do so?

The effect of free tuition is the opposite, according to Denny.  It doesn’t take personal wealth out of the equation.  Rather, free tuition delivers a windfall to those who could already afford to send their children to university or who can afford it moreso than those on low incomes.

Incidentally, you can find similar conclusions to Denny’s work in other studies.  A 1990 paper by Benjamin Levin titled  “Tuition fees and university accessibility” noted that university students in Canada tended to be from families where one or both parents had university degrees.  University graduates earned, on average considerably more than non-graduates.  As such, free tuition would tend to provide a disproportionate advantage to those who were better able to pay for education anyway.

That’s without considering that the cost of a university education in this province is already unconnected to the actual cost of the education.  This is especially true in medicine and the other professions where incomes are higher and the ability to repay substantial loans would be much better than say a typical Arts graduate. 

And the other thing these studies have in common is that they found that other factors  - besides tuition fees - affect access to post-secondary education.

If accessibility is the goal, there are other ways to deal with it.  Levin argued that targeted programs were a better way to go.  Means tested grants, for example, or changing the ratio of student loans and grants based on student financial circumstances would help to ensure that students from low income families would not be disadvantaged because of fees.  In the professions, governments can do more of what they do now with a variety of cash incentives as well as provide means-tested grants.

What’s most interesting about the New Democrats and free tuition is the ease with which they have adopted what is essentially a regressive social policy. 

While New Democrats like Evoy talk about accessibility and how the party represents “ordinary” Canadians,  their solution is a blunt tax cut or subsidy approach that appears to be better suited to Conservatives. That’s especially striking in the case of free university tuition where research shows that eliminating fees doesn’t improve accessibility. 

It does, however, provide financial advantage to people who are already better able to pay tuition or people who would be better able to pay in their future career.

The NDP.

Not Tommy Douglas’ socially progressive party any more.

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Dippers on point for first CBC political election panel #nlpoli

Give the new Democrats’ Dale Kirby full marks for nailing natural resources minister Shawn Skinner hard over the blatant abuse of taxpayers inherent in having two partisans step down from their cabinet appointments to work on the Tory campaign.

Kirby, Skinner and Liberal Barry Snow made up the partisan panel for David Cochrane’s election show On Point.

The pair – Ross Reid and Len Simms – will slide back into their six figure salaries without so much as a hiccup to their pensionable time. The practice of sticking partisan loyalists into cabinet appointments destroys the impartiality and professionalism of the public service.

Skinner flopped sadly by claiming the pair were following policy and Snow imploded by siding with Skinner over the gross abuse of public money.

That was Snow’s second goof inside 60 seconds.  He started by blithely dismissed talk of Danny Williams and the patronage scandal as nothing proper to talk about.  He missed the political angle that Kirby jumped on to stick the knife in either on the one patronage angle or the other.

Kirby sank the whole thing by challenging Skinner to commit that the two hacks wouldn’t get their plums back.

Snow dropped the ball again when Cochrane handed him an easy one about Navigant and Muskrat Falls.  People were hoping that at the end of day, Snow had something to say besides “at the end of the day.”

He didn’t.

Kirby jumped on the “shocking lack of transparency” from Nalcor. 

Skinner had some talking points to use in response but nothing new.

As a final question, Cochrane asked Snow how paying for the fishery restructuring given that the Liberals planned to cut gas tax as well.  Snow started with ‘at the end of the day” and pretty much blathered from there.

Kirby hammered the memorandum of understanding that remains sitting on a shelf. He didn’t give any Earth-shattering new commitments but Kirby delivered some quotable lines.

At the end of the day, the Liberals will need to do a lot better than this if they want to remain competitive. Give him some briefing notes an some basic coaching and Snow might recover.

The Tories are weak.  They are an easy mark for even a modestly prepared opponent.

NDP scored big on the panel because they were ready and political.

The only downside for the Dippers and the upside for the Grits and Tories is that the On Point audience was probably pretty small.

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The Damn-Fool Fisheries Policy

Yesterday’s man delivered yesterday’s ideas and claimed it was the future.

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward unveiled his party’s fisheries platform on Friday.  As a historical document, it would be wonderful for an election from 1975. But in 2011, the colourful pamphlet serves only to remind everyone just how far out of touch its authors are with the province and its people 20 years after the collapse of the cod stocks.

The central problem of the fishery today is that stocks have been decimated by decades of overfishing as a result of government policies that encouraged too many people to enter the fishery than it could sustain economically or environmentally without hundreds of millions annually in federal and provincial government subsidies.

The Liberal policy for the fishery of the future is to return to the very policies that led to its current sorry state in the first place.

One can scarcely imagine anything more stupid. 

Take the cod stocks, reduced to the point that by 1992 the federal government had to shut down the fishery that brought Europeans to this place 500 years ago.  There were no fish left, at least for any commercially viable industry.

The cod numbers – the biomass – are not appreciably larger in 2011 than it was in 1992.

Well, armed with that knowledge, the Liberals want to increase the total allowable catch for the endangered cod to more than double its current level.

There is not a shred of scientific evidence to back them up.

None.

Common sense would tell you to stop fishing altogether.

The Liberals are having none of that sort of talk.

They want to double the current slaughter.

They are not content to let professionals get the last codfish from the sea. The Liberals want to widen the Damn Fool Fishery to boot. 

And to ensure they can find every last fish, the Liberals want to continue the current Tory policy of spending provincial cash on “fisheries science.”

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea – more knowledge is good – but if you look at the end purpose, you realise what the Liberals want to do. 

Conservation and sound management are not the objectives the people who wrote this policy had in mind.  If it was, they wouldn’t advocate resuming the cod slaughter. This is a plan to find the last fish so someone can split it and freeze it into a block for export with taxpayers footing the bill for most of it.

And when the fish are gone, they’ll be on the sea snails,  the sea cucumbers and the krill.

The Liberals want to set up $250 million for what would likely be a batch of make-work projects. They call it a Fisheries Investment and Diversification Fund but those are code words, to be sure. 

The “employment rebate” for processors is nothing more than committing taxpayers to cover the salaries of fish plant workers in businesses that would not survive economically without more government handouts.

Worst of all, the Liberals want to bring back the Fisheries Loan Board.

To understand the significance of this, you have to go back to the 1970s.  With the 200 mile limit in 1977 cam policies designed to increase the number people in the fishery.  Fish that used to be taken by foreigners were available only to Canadians once the 200 mile limit came into effect.

Both the federal and provincial governments abandoned plans to reform the fishery.  Instead they created policies to draw more people into the industry.  In 1976, there were 13,376 fishermen in the province.  By 1980 there were 33,640.  Total federal and provincial subsidies added up to about the same as the landed value of the catch.

The Fisheries Loan Board – provincial money for boats and gear – went from $12,488,000 in outstanding loans in 1976 to $43,796,000 in 1980.  Most of the money was never repaid.

But as far as the goal of getting more people into an already over-stressed industry, the FLB was a stunning success.

The Liberals even resurrect the old chestnuts of co-management and joint management.  And for good measure they repeat the asinine commitment to pay for federal jobs and add a new commitment to support Ryan Cleary’s quest to have taxpayers foot the bill for his education, a.k.a. the judicial inquiry into the fishery.

They don’t need an inquiry. Read anything by Memorial University economist William Shrank. He can tell what happened to the fish and why.  A 1995 article in Marine Policy, titled “Extended fisheries jurisdiction:  origin of the current crisis in Atlantic Canada’s fishery” is as good as any.

As for new ideas, the Liberal policy has none. 

There’s just a vague reference to making sure the aquaculture industry has government financial support and that the Liberals will make sure that projects don’t harm the environment.

To be fair to the Liberals, and to the architects of their policy like Beaton Tulk, the Tories and New Democrats are pushing variations on the same pathetic theme.

But for people looking for some solution to the problems plaguing the fishery and the people who depend on it today, the province’s three political parties have basically left them with nothing to look forward to.  What’s worse, if any of the political platforms make through to government policy, taxpayers will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted spending.

We know it is wasted because none of the ideas will work.

We know they won’t work because they failed in the past.  Either that or,  as in the case of joint management, for example, they are solutions that might have helped 30 years ago or more.  But the problems they were supposed to fix simply don’t exist any more.

Today we face new problems created by the sorts of policies some people in the Liberal Party think are solutions to the problems those same policies created.

They couldn’t be any more wrong than they are.

On Friday, yesterday’s man delivered yesterday’s ideas and claimed it was the future.

He couldn’t have been any more wrong.

- srbp -

White Knuckles

Voting is Open Now… for NL Blogger’s Choice Awards!

If you are looking for a catalogue of local blogs there is only one place to go;  the Newfoundland and Labrador Blog Roll.

It’s the well-tended baby of Stephen Eli Harris,  a local blogger himself.

you’ll find the current blog list on the left hand side of the page.  Be warned;  it’s long.  There are lots of you out there in Newfoundland and labrador with something on your mind.  And the topics are diverse.  Everything from politics to food to babies.

While you are there, take time to check the NL Blogger’s Choice Awards and vote for the blogs you like in the different categories.  Remember:  it’s one vote per day. And you can vote every day until the end of September.

Sir Robert Bond Papers is nominated in the Political/Commentary Blogs category alongside The Fighting Newfoundlander and The Rural Lens.

towniebastard is up for the Mixed Bag category and gas and Oil is up for the Travel/Business prize.

SEH managed to pick out three blogs based on his criteria of design, longevity and frequency of posting.  It is an honour to be in the running but when you check the three competitors in this category, you will see, the choice will be tough.

A vote for these humble e-scribbles would be greatly appreciated.

And don’t forget, the national blog awards are coming up next month.

So vote, early, vote often and if you are so inclined, vote Sir Robert Bond Papers.

- srbp -

Classical gas #nlpoli

Former Conservative policy advisor Cabot Martin knows a thing or two about energy.  The guy worked in the energy department in the 1970s and was involved in every major policy development in oil gas and electricity in the province for over a decade.

He’s got an op-ed piece in the Saturday Telegram that questions the wisdom of developing Muskrat Falls when the American markets are being shifted by cheap natural gas. Unfortunately, the thing isn’t online. The closest you can get is a reference in the editorial.

The editorial discusses the potential use of natural gas to replace Holyrood instead of Muskrat Falls.  The Telegram editorial and the Navigant report, released this week on behalf of Nalcor, mention a 2001 natural gas study done for the provincial government.

The gang at Navigant missed another important report study on the feasibility of bringing natural gas ashore from the Jeanne d’Arc basin.

2005.

Done for NOIA, the offshore oil and gas association by Dr. Stephen Bruneau.

Regular readers of these scribbles will recall this point from a post in July that discussed the natural gas option:

A 2005 discussion paper prepared for NOIA by Dr. Stephen Bruneau looked at six options for getting additional electricity for the island grid. Bruneau concluded that development of only 60% of the known gas reserves at Hibernia, White Rose and Terra Nova would give enough natural gas to power a Holyrood size generating plant at full capacity, 365 days a year for over a century.  That would displace 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Bruneau estimated the cost of a pipeline to bring the gas ashore to be $300 million. Another $400 million would build a natural gas generating plant, with another $112.5 million needed to build a short on-land pipeline and build natural gas handling facilities at sea.  Total cost would be less than $1.0 billion.

Nalcor didn’t study natural gas because it didn’t want to study it. 

They didn’t want to study it because their political masters had already directed them to pursue any development of the Lower Churchill.  Nothing else entered their collective skull.

The Conservatives and Nalcor started the most recent LC project in…wait for it…2005, the same year Bruneau did his work for NOIA.

Even as Danny Williams was launching down the road to the Muskrat mess, others were talking sensibly about alternatives to meet the province’s needs.

Three things to take away from this:

1. Nalcor did not make a decision on how best to meet consumer electricity needs in the province at the lowest cost for those consumers.  They followed political orders to build the Lower Churchill.  Period. Everything else got tossed in the bin.
2. Natural gas is a cheaper, viable alternative to Muskrat both for domestic needs, for electricity export and for industrial diversification.  Bruneau’s 2005 study put the cost at about a $1.0 billion.  Cabot Martin estimates $3.0 billion.  That’s still half the official estimate for Muskrat Falls. And frankly, since the official estimate of $6.2 billion is about 40% below the real cost they should be starting with, natural gas only gets better the more you know about Muskrat.*
3. People with way more experience in provincial energy policy that Kathy Dunderdale, Danny Williams and Ed Martin combined all think Muskrat is a big mistake.  Cabot Martin is just the latest.  Who would you trust:  the people who delivered the province’s oil industry or the gang that expropriated an environmental cesspool of a paper mill, by accident?

Think about it.

- srbp -

*edit for clarity of reference to 40% and Muskrat.

Traffic without Danny Rolls

Danny Williams had no roll in this week’s traffic.

No buns.

No loaves either.

But as it turns out he had a big role in the posts that went to the top of the week’s list of the 10 most popular scribbles.

Just like he had a big role in pushing Liz Matthews as vice chair of the offshore regulatory board.

And that’s the top post from last week.

1. Williams set to offer comms director plum patronage job
2. The first big political story of the campaign
3. To you with affection from Danny
4. An ex-Premier scorned
5. Dipper candidate screwed by Tory election law mess
6. The Popeye Algorithm
7. @cbcnl using Nalcor lobbyist as election commentator
8. Privacy commish sues Dunderdale gov over “political” e-mails on gov comps, phones
9. Good to the last vote:  Grit version and The Arrogance Factor
10. Good to the last vote:  NDP paints own caricature

- srbp -

There’s independent and then there’s Navigant #nlpoli

Nalcor chief executive Ed Martin told a CBC audience on Thursday that the Navigant report meets the joint review panel’s requirement for a complete, independent review of Kathy Dunderdale’s plan for saddling the provincial taxpayers with high electricity prices and unbearable debt.

Martin’s full of shite.

Like his claim that the report was independent.

The Navigant report is not independent.

Took five seconds to write.

One way you can tell Martin’s spewing crap? 

The Navigant guys who wrote the report used the word “independent”  89 times in an 79 page document.*

Another clue?

Kathy Dunderdale spent some ungodly amount of time on Open Line on Friday trying desperately prove Navigant wasn’t a set up.

Want another?

Then Tom Marshall called and had a go at the same thing.

Five seconds to claim. 

The better part of 30 minutes* for two senior cabinet ministers to try to disprove.

Methinks they protest too much.

To go back to Martin’s claim about the Navigant report and the joint panel requirement, here’s a table showing what the joint review panel recommended, what the public utilities board will be doing for its “independent” report and what Navigant just did:

Not the same.

Not even close.

- srbp -

* typos corrected.

The Popcorn Calculation #nlpoli

From the Telegram’s editorial on Wednesday:

The problem is that, when the proposed appointment first came to light, Premier Kathy Dunderdale and Natural Resources Minister Shawn Skinner fell all over each other claiming that they — not Williams — were responsible for the appointment. …

Problem is, the only way to keep the glare from falling on Williams was to deliberately dissemble and mislead, and it appears that the politicians who remained in office were completely up to the task.

At the very least, the letter shows Dunderdale and Skinner have a facility in being less than candid.

That’s really the crux of the story that dominated political news coverage for the first three days of this week.

And you have to put that fact against a group of politicians who claim they came to office on a platform of openness, accountability and transparency.

What they’ve done is the opposite of what they’ve claimed they were about.

Skinner and Dunderdale opened up a huge credibility gap for themselves.  That’s bad news for politicians. 

Danny Williams managed to maintained credibility even when he said some absolutely incredible things.  People believed him no matter how big – or how obvious –the whopper.  And he told whoppers a lot more often than people admit.

Kathy is no Danny, not by a long shot.

So when she heads into an election  - even against the Liberals and the NDP as weak and disorganized as they both really are,  taking a blow to your credibility is never good.

Lots of people already have questions about Dunderdale.  The CRA polls, as fundamentally skewed as they are, still aren’t so crude that they missed the huge drop in leader support for Dunderdale compared to Williams.

What’s worse is the drop in party support.  It now stands at a mere 44% of respondents to the last CRA poll, once you take all the CRA torquing and massaging out.  In other words, it wouldn’t take much to put the Tories into a serious election problem.

How do people respond to claims about Muskrat Falls, for example, when the person who is telling them the whole thing is great is also the person who dissembled and misled – in the words of the Telegram editorialist – about something as comparatively trivial as Danny Williams’ role in the Liz Matthews nomination?

People looking at the current provincial government will also start looking at other examples like the Dunderdale Skinner performance.  Joan Burke on the MUN president, for example. 

Dunderdale on Joan Cleary and the Public Tender Act.

Kevin O’Brien.

Kathy Dunderdale and the Tories stand on the edge of the Gorge of Eternal Peril.  Dunderdale’s credibility is weakened. More people than before will think twice when she says something now.

The Tories aren’t likely to be swallowed up by the political chasm as a result. 

Amateurs think winning a campaign is about having a star leader.

It isn’t.

It’s about the ground game.

The logistics.

That’s still where the Tories have an advantage.  If the party district organizations hold, that alone will pull through seats the Tories might otherwise lose.  District level organization beyond one or two spots has been the traditional NDP weakness. If they’ve added some strength, they could have a stronger showing.

The Liberals have atrophied at the district level over the past couple of terms.  They’ve rebounded in a good few but overall the party is still far weaker than it ought to be.  You can put that all down to neglect of the basic party organization by the people right at the top.

And organization on the ground is what wins campaigns.

But if the internal splits and schisms evident in the Danny Williams outburst this week got wider…

Well, that might be a different matter.

Stay tuned. 

The election is only just starting in earnest. this could be a real Ginger- get-the-popcorn kinda show.

- srbp -

Good to the last vote: Grit version #nlpoli

Not to be outdone by the Dippers, the Grits and their leader Kevin Aylward will release their fisheries policy on Friday at 11:00 AM at the Delta Hotel in St. John’s.

This one should be a doozie.

- srbp -

Good to the last vote: NDP paints own caricature #nlpoli

Your humble e-scribbler said it most recently just a few days ago:

The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs.  Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.

The province’s New Democrats unveiled their fisheries policy on Thursday.  It calls for increased government intervention in the fishery and an essentially open-ended commitment to public spending to keep plants open that are no longer financially viable or that are having problems due to excessive government intervention in the fishery already.

Here are some choice bits from the very brief NDP news release:

[NDP leader Lorraine] Michael says government must immediately reopen the plant [at Marystown] while the audit is going on, giving workers more employment.

The NDP wants the federal government to help fund the scheme in a perversion of the Employment Insurance system that looks more like make work than not:

In addition to demanding the immediate reopening of the plant, today the NDP is calling for the redirection of traditional Job Creation Partnership-type programs into the plant to ensure long term employment for fish plant workers.

And if that wasn’t enough, the New Democrats want to increase the government role in the fishery even more:

Michael also noted that since the plant is currently closed, the redfish concession given to OCI, which was agreed to by plant workers in order keep the plant open, should be revoked until the plant is reopened.

Now everyone should know that this specific release is aimed at a seat the NDP thinks they can win.  But the principle behind it is exactly what your humble e-scribbler predicted.  The NDP want to continue the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering begun decades ago with a return to the worst of the policies that helped create the current mess in the first place.

You couldn’t write a better parody of an NDP fisheries policy if you tried.

- srbp -

Privacy commish sues Dunderdale gov over “political” e-mails on gov comps, phones #nlpoli

The province’s access to information and privacy commissioner is taking the Dunderdale administration to court for its refusal to provide the commissioner with copies of e-mails on government computers and cellular telephones that government officials describe as “political in nature”.

Atlantic Business Magazine’s Rob Antle broke the story Wednesday afternoon on his blog at the magazine’s website.

At the heart of the suit are e-mails [that cover a period that would includes] related to accusations by erstwhile Tory leadership candidate Brad Cabana that a political staffer for then business minister Ross Wiseman attempted to bully him into quitting the leadership race. [There may be other political or party records involved as well.]

As CBC reported in January:

Cabana said the meeting with [Wiseman’s executive assistant Chick] Cholock happened in his [Cabana’s] home in Hickman's Harbour on Jan. 5 and his wife witnessed the exchange.

"They would marginalize me as a person. They would make me look like a quirk candidate and a glory seeker rather than someone who was really interested in the leadership and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador," he said.

An unidentified individual requested access to e-mails sent and received on government equipment by Cholock and Wiseman over three specific days in January.  As Antle reported for ABM:

The Department of Business provided the requester with about five pages of records. But the department advised that other responsive records were “political in nature” and exempt from disclosure.

The privacy and access commissioner’s office contacted the department to investigate an appeal of the department’s decision.  Under the province’s access laws, the commissioner has the legal right to review documents to determine if the department’s decision was correct.

The department refused the first request and ignored the second.

The commissioner then applied to the Supreme Court’s Trials Division for a review.

According to Antle, the provincial department appears to be relying on an earlier decision – currently under appeal – that barred the commissioner from reviewing many types of documents even if he did not subsequently recommend their disclosure.

In this case, according to Antle, the government is relying on a wide interpretation of a prohibition in the Access to Information and Protection of Personal Privacy Act that prohibits disclosure of constituency and political records.

That would be section 5(1):

This Act applies to all records in the custody of or under the control of a public body but does not apply to…

(c) a personal or constituency record of a member of the House of Assembly, that is in the possession or control of the member;

(c.1) records of a registered political party or caucus as defined in the House of Assembly Accountability, Integrity and Administration Act;

…

(d) a personal or constituency record of a minister;

According to Antle the department described the records as “political”.  There’s no indication of whether or not the department cited a specific section of the Act, as required by law,  when refusing to disclose certain records. 

In the past departments have used a fictitious category called ‘non-responsive” to cover information they did not wish to disclose but  which they had no legal basis to withhold. 

- srbp -

Updates:  There are changes to this post to correct wrong information and some mistaken extrapolations of what Rob Antle wrote.  Any errors and incorrect extrapolations are mine and mine alone.

Para 3: The initial request was a blanket one that covered a period of time.  Some of the e-mails that are withheld and labelled political are likely related to the cabana affair however until someone reviews them, there is no way anyone knows specifically what they contain.

Para 10 (currently under appeal) deleted.  Two decisions.  One under appeal, the other not.  Your humble e-scribbler confused the decisions.

Sections of the Act being cited by government are c and c.1 and not c and d.