When they were high in the polls it was because they were making the right decisions.
Now that they are in the political polling basement it is because they are making the right decisions.
That doesn’t make sense but that’s pretty much the only way to describe Conservative Party leader Kathy Dunderdale’s speech to the party faithful in Gander a few weeks ago.
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Reporters asked the premier on Wednesday about comments by Nova Scotia premier-elect Stephen McNeil about Muskrat Falls.
Here’s what CBC reported:
"Our contract — our agreement — is with Emera. They're going to sell the power to Nova Scotia," she said.
The Telegram had an extra bit along the same lines:
“I just want to remind people again that the agreement between Newfoundland and Labrador — Nalcor specifically — is with Emera. Emera is a publicly traded company,” she said.
She also told reporters that the agreements with Nova Scotia covered off every possible outcome so everything was just fine.
Whatever.
In your otherwise dull Thursday, take a look at an article in The Atlantic about an army of paid Internet commenters from Russia.
This paragraph leaped out:
Paid, pro-government commenters aren't a new phenomenon in Russia, and similar practices are widespread in countless countries. In their Freedom on the Net report released last week, the NGO Freedom House said the strategy has been on the rise over the past two years, and is now rampant in 22 of the 60 countries the group examined. China, Bahrain, and Russia are at the forefront of this practice, Freedom House wrote.
The links are in the original.
Now think about this province over the past decade. Seems we’ve been leading the world in another area of endeavour, but not one that is really all that worthwhile.
China.
Bahrain.
Russia.
And the former Republic of Dannystan now doing business as Dunderville.
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These days, you have to hunt around the government website to find the provincial energy plan. That’s despite the claim on the website – once you’ve found it – that the 2007 document “guides and defines Newfoundland and Labrador’s vision for energy resource development”.
The first pillar of that policy is something called “equity ownership.” It’s right there on page 18:
Taking equity ownership in projects to ensure first-hand knowledge of how resources are managed, to share in that management, to foster closer government/industry alignment of interests and to provide an additional source of revenue.
Pretty clear?
In both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, the local media will report when a town gets a new fire truck.
The difference between the two ends there.
On the face of it, anyone even passingly familiar with political events in Newfoundland and Labrador for the past decade would look with some justifiable scepticism on an announcement from justice minister Darin King on Monday that the provincial government was going to have another look at building a new provincial prison to replace one built in 1859.
After all, this project has been on the go for a lot longer than 2008, the year mentioned in the news release. The current crowd running the place have been trying to get the federal government to pay for the prison pretty much since they took office.
The favoured location for the new prison for most of past decade has been Harbour Grace. That’s in the district recently vacated by Jerome Kennedy.
There’s another reason to be on your guard with this announcement.
Cathy Bennett launched a 48-day tour of the province last week as part of her bid for the Liberal leadership.
The local media dutifully attended but the story didn’t make the news in any major way. That’s partly because Bennett and the other Liberal candidates have been traveling around the province pretty much since Day One of the campaign. That’s also partly because Bennett launched the same day the story broke of Jerome Kennedy’s imminent resignation.
All the same, the launch event was news not in itself, necessarily, but for what it means in a wider context.
In Quebec, Jacques Parizeau has turned on the Parti Quebecois’ values charter. It made national news.
In Newfoundland and Labrador last week, former Conservative finance minister John Collins took another swipe at Muskrat Falls in a letter to the editor of the Telegram. Not many likely read it and no other media reported on it.
But they should have.
To make it easier to find, here is a post that links all the bits of the report serialized here back in 2010.
Some of you might be searching for more details since this fascinating tale now that Bill Rowe has printed his volume of reminiscences and anecdotes titled The Premiers: Frank and Joey – Greed, Power, and Lust.
For anyone even halfway clued in to local politics, the rumours have been thick for months that Jerome Kennedy was about to bail from provincial politics.
Now it seems the time has come. The latest media reports have him going as early as today (Wednesday) while the versions reported Monday had the departure coming next week.
There are three things about Kennedy’s resignation that stand out.
So not the same thing.
If the party releases the numbers, we’ll know the actual number of people who have signed up to vote in the Liberal leadership once the party has gone through all the forms and deleted the duplicates, triplicates, and the various fakes. We’ll also know how many signed up as supporters – with no financial or other real ties to the party – and how many signed on as members.
In the meantime, a couple of the campaigns released their own numbers on how many people they signed up. The Paul Antle camp is claiming around 10,500, while presumptive front-runner Dwight Ball’s team is claiming 15,000.
At a staged media event, Cathy Bennett didn’t offer reporters any numbers of her own to reporters. Bennett just said she wasn’t worried about 10,000 or more supposedly signed by her rivals. Ok. She’s focused on launching a tour that was in no way just more of the same travelling around thing she’s been doing since July but this time dolled up for a staged media event. Fair enough.
“Don’t question my values,” Cathy Bennett warned one her fellow candidates in the Liberal leadership, “and I won’t question yours.”
The other candidate in that part of the debate wasn’t questioning her values. He just asked, as many have wondered, about the time over the past decade when she was giving money to the ruling Conservatives and holding an appointment only given to the most trusted associates of the current Premier and her predecessor.
On the face of it, that record doesn’t jive with Bennett’s talking point that she has always been a Liberal. So the other candidates kept bringing the issue up. Bennett’s usual response has been to recite the obviously suspect claim - I have always been a Liberal, even when I was a Tory - that brings you back to the perpetually unanswered question.
When she isn;t doing that, Bennett has tossed out the sort of aggressive reply like the one about values that doesn’t fit either. Not only was the question about facts not values, but you’d think that as a rule a political leadership candidate would welcome the chance to talk about her values. It’s a soft pitch to knock out of the park. Yet Bennett clearly didn’t want to get into any discussion about facts or values.
Liberal leadership candidate Danny Dumaresque wants to reform the provincial election laws to ban corporate donations, as the Telegram reported on Thursday.
“I think in Newfoundland and Labrador, we’ve got to update the program,” he said. “(We’re) not living up to the expectations of the voting public, and it’s time for us to go forward and get current and have the respect for the voting public that they deserve.”
He said he wants to see a system in which the law would prevent “any possibility that big business can have access to elected officials — especially people in the government.”
So far Dumaresque is the only Liberal candidate to offer this kind of progressive reform ideas.
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Every day, in every way, things are better and better.
No, that wasn’t Inspector Dreyfus from the Pink Panther movies. That was one of the key messages Premier Kathy Dunderdale brought to her fellow Conservatives at their earlier-than-usual annual meeting this past weekend.
With any politician, it is always a good idea to do a veracity check on any claims he or she makes. One of the ways we could measure that claim of “better” is to look at the number of employment insurance claims filed each month. Statistics Canada keeps records.
Newfoundland and Labrador still has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country after a decade of the Conservative government. So how are the number of EI claims doing?
SRBP told you on July 18 and this past Saturday, the Telegram had a front page story telling us that the Liberal leadership campaign has no financial rules.
James McLeod’s piece added the views from the individual candidates. Only Danny Dumaresque plans to release any details on who gave him money and how much they gave. The best the others will do is tell us how much they raised in total or list the individual amounts, but without indicating who gave the money.
Frankly, the campaigns and the candidates can claim anything they want. In the absence of an independently verified set of financial statements, their claims, promises, and commitments are meaningless.
The Conservatives running the province got together with their staff and key supporters this weekend to reaffirm their conviction that they alone ought to be running the province.
Some people seem to think it’s remarkable that they stand together behind Kathy Dunderdale and her supposed wonderful charm, despite what the polls says.
There’s nothing remarkable in it at all. People in power have a hard time understanding it when the voters turn on them. They carry on with their schemes, convinced in their own rightness. It’s a form of self-delusion. It’s what the mind does to help people cope when what they believe and what is true are two radically different things.
Forget all the heavy talk about pension liabilities, debt, Fairity O'Brien and the Liberal leadership.
Let’s talk about crap, or specifically one of the most hysterically funny commercial in a long time.
The product is called poopourri. It’s a type of bathroom deodorizer.
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A few people people in Newfoundland and Labrador are getting agitated about the fact there’s a street in Nova Scotia called Newfie Lane.
For those who may not know, the word “newfie” causes huge problems among Newfoundlanders. Some – like your humble e-scribbler - have never heard it used except with some measure of insult attached to it. It’s the other N-word.
Others don’t mind it so much. The key thing to note here is that being from Newfoundland and all things associated with that are powerful symbols. Place is a big thing here. Identity is a big thing. The two go together.
Not so long ago one of the frequent claims people in the conventional media used to make about “blogsters” was that you couldn’t trust what they wrote because it might not be true.
You don’t hear that sort of thing as much as you used to. But whenever the idea comes up, you have to wonder why some people believe that the Internet is uniquely vulnerable to harbouring untrue things.
After all, just this past weekend the Globe and Mail had a story by Jane Taber that was just nonsense.
Lots of people believed it. People in the provincial government circulated it widely.
But it was false.
Last week, municipal affairs minister Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien denied having anything to do with having a couple of New Democratic Party politicians “uninvited” from a community breakfast organized by the Gander Chamber of Commerce at the annual Festival of Flight.
O’Brien told reporters:
I don't hold any power over them as the MHA. I don't fund them. I can't pull their funding or anything like that. So the NDP nor anybody can say that.
This week, we learned that nothing could be further from the truth.
Markets in northeastern North America are already awash in cheap electricity, thanks in large part of the discovery of massive amounts of natural gas in the United States. They’ll be that way for decades to come.
Current forecasts New England’s regional electricity transmission organization hold that improvements in energy efficiency will allow New England states to expand their economy without increasing energy consumption proportionately. That means that eight years from now, New England will be using as much electricity as it is today.
There’s no shortage of supply, either. As a result, current wholesale electricity prices in New England are about one tenth of what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will pay for Muskrat Falls.
And it is with that context the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are only now learning that a team from the provincial government has been in Quebec for the past two weeks as part of talks with the Quebec government about the 1969 Churchill Falls power contract, according to one news outlet, and development the Gull Island power plant according to another.
The very best thing that may be said about the idea of a law school at Memorial University is that the proponents of the idea have failed to make their case.
The very worst is that the university is currently wasting everyone’s time by talking about something with no shape, no form, and hence no substance.
After all, the committee that held its last public meeting the other night has the task – according to Memorial – of looking at “the demographics of existing Canadian law schools, current and future needs for more lawyers, and benefits to Memorial, among other goals.”
They needed to do this before they started “consulting”.
Shawn Skinner used to be a provincial cabinet minister.
Now he works for a construction company trying to get a major contract at Muskrat Falls. Skinner is the senior director of business development with Aecon.
Presumably that job involves him meeting with or arranging meetings with people at Nalcor and the provincial government in an effort to land the Big Contract.
So why isn’t Shawn - or anyone else connected to his company – registered as a lobbyist as required by the lobbyist registration law Shawn and his Conservative colleagues introduced in 2004?
Good question.
Let’s take a break from politics and have a look at the amazing way that technology has developed in the past decade.
All those small radio controlled helicopters you see in the stores these days? Yeah well, they - or ones very similar - are already in use for keeping an eye on things in the military.
Here’s a brief video about one such very small remotely piloted vehicle in use by the British Army in Afghanistan. Tough out the fusilier’s thick Geordie accent. What he is says is that he and a section of a soldiers (about eight) can use these tiny Black Hornet cameras to scout just a few metres around their location to spot any problems.
Kathy Dunderdale cannot quit as leader of the provincial Conservative Party, says Fairity O’Brien in an interview with NTV.
He stresses it over and over. The caucus is solidly behind her.
He stresses it so much – right down to telling you that he wants to stress the message in this interview – that where you’d start to believe that what he is saying is the literal truth: Kathy wants to go but the caucus won’t let her.
The idea came together neatly in a celebrity interview not by someone in the private sector media but by a representative of the state-run broadcaster. “Government by Fernando” it’s called and it is worth going to read even if you read it back in 2006.
By now you have all heard about the latest CRA August quarterly marketing poll.
Fascinating stuff.
Supposedly the Liberals grew at the expense of the New Democrats. You’d believe that too, unless you looked at CRA party choice numbers without the “decideds-only” skew. For your amusement, here is a convenient chart showing the numbers as SRBP has unscrewed them
As students head back to Memorial University, you can see the impact the ongoing tuition freeze is having on the university’s budget.
You can see it in the policy to pass credit card handling fees on to students. In the official university organ – the Gazette – the university claimed it eliminated the fee. That’s not true. The fees still get paid. The university just transferred responsibility for paying them directly to students who want to pay fees using a credit card. According to a November 2012 story in the Telegram, the university expected to recover about $550,000 by making students pay the extra fees.
That seems like such a measly sum compared to the university budget, but when the administration has very few ways of raising capital, they have to squeeze every penny until the Old Girl screams.
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Related:
Ask people in the St. John’s business community about the economy and they are likely to have trouble holding back the grin long enough to get a few words out.
Look around Capital City and you’ll see plenty of job vacancies in the restaurants and small shops.
Meanwhile, some locals found it newsworthy this Labour Day weekend to note that the companies building the Long Harbour nickel smelter/refinery have had to bring in skilled workers from overseas to fill jobs the local labour pool can’t supply.
All sounds wonderful, until you start to look a little closer.
On August 1, the provincial cabinet revoked tax breaks granted to two companies in the province under the Economic Development and Growth Enterprises (EDGE) program.
Order-in-Council 2013-218 states that cabinet took the decision “due to the companies not meeting a term or condition to which the incentives are subject.” The two companies are:
The order in council doesn’t indicate what term or condition the companies failed to meet.
There’s a story about Danny Williams before he became the Old Man. It was either in 2001 during the by-elections on the Great Northern Peninsula or later during the 2003 general election.
As the convoy of Winnebago and media drives down the highway, Williams suddenly pulls over and points across to Labrador. Then he says something to the effect that there is no reason why we couldn’t build a tunnel across to the mainland.
Some ideas never die, no matter how implausible they might be or no matter how many sensible arguments there are not to do them.
One of them is the idea of building a tunnel from Newfoundland to Labrador. Technically, it’s possible. But, as SRBP pointed out in 2005, a pretty simple look at the economics of the project make it as loopy an idea as Muskrat Falls.
That’s why people call it the Stunnel: a stunned tunnel.
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Identifying supporters is only part of the challenge in a political campaign. That’s basically what the five candidates in the Liberal leadership contest are doing when they sign people up to vote in November. It’s a lot tougher a job than some people apparently thought.
One of the big factors in any political campaign is the candidate’s stump speech. The name comes from the days when a candidate would go from town to town and stand on the nearest raised platform – including a tree stump – to tell whatever crowd gathered why they should vote for him.
These days you might call it the vote proposition or the strategic message. The simpler the statement the better. People remember short, clear ideas like Nike’s “Just do it” or Coke’s “It’s the real thing.” Former Conservative cabinet minister Shawn Skinner used a variation on that second term when he labelled leadership candidate Cathy Bennett’s message – choose change – “strategic” during a recent discussion with the On Point political panel.
What Bennett’s campaign really shows is something else.
According to the commentator JM, the implementation of the Utility and Review Board conditional approval will mean that “Nova Scotia will receive 60% of the power, for what amounts to about 30% of the cost” of the Muskrat Falls project.
Using information provided by Nalcor to the Public Utilities Board, JM concludes that “there is a potential 37% increase in the incremental rates charged to Newfoundland and Labrador ratepayers for Muskrat Falls Energy” if Nalcor meets the UARB condition.
This would be reduced to a 10% increase if all export revenue in the early years of the project were used to offset the burden on the Newfoundland and Labrador ratepayers. This is assuming that the Holyrood thermal plant can be decommissioned as per the original plan. If the allocation of additional power to Nova Scotia results in Holyrood’s life being extended beyond 2021, then these rates will potentially further increase.
Older people are more likely to vote.
In the 2011 federal election, about 50% of the eligible voters aged 18 to 24 years actually voted. That compares to 25 to 34s turned out at about the same rate. People in the 35 to 44 bracket turned out at around the national average of 61%.
Compare that to 70% turn-out for 45- to 54-year-olds and 82% among eligible voters aged 65 to 74, according to figures from Statistics Canada.
Other factors influenced turn-out as well.
One of the major factors affecting economic development in Newfoundland and Labrador is the literacy level of the population.
If you want to see the extent of the problem in one area, consider the case of Bell Island. According to a May 2008 briefing note released as part of a recent Access to Information request:
“…50% of the population age 20 years and older has less than a high school graduation certificate or equivalent diploma. Less than 30% of the population possesses a diploma in skills or trades….”
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Just flip over to labradore for a look at his latest pretty chart. It shows the compilation of poll results from various sources going back to early 2010 for the Conservatives, the New Democrats, and the Liberals in the province.
On average, labradore tells us, the Conservatives have dropped five percentage points each quarter since early 2011.
Note the corresponding changes for the other two parties.
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Over the past few days, one American political science blog has been at the centre of a pretty hot controversy about a post on the value of networking for younger political scientists. Follow the links below and you’ll find further
Brian Rathbun, the author of the post quit the collective blog called The Duck of Minerva, with a short note that included this comment:
Through poorly chosen and ill-considered language and images, I made light of women’s challenges both in their academic and in their daily lives, for which I am deeply sorry.
Thankfully, someone reposted the original Rathbun piece that some found offensive. Take a moment and read it before going on with the rest of this. Be warned the title is crude and some may find it distasteful: “Intellectual Jailbait: Hunting for Underage Ideas at APSA”. That’s the American Political Science Association conference he’s talking about.
One Conservative Kathy gave Ross Reid a new job recently.
Last January, your humble e-scribbler had another job in mind for Reid.
Kathy came really close.
Right floor. Wrong office.
And then there’s the other Cathy who told us a few months ago that there were multiple, interlocking business cases for Muskrat Falls. A couple of weeks ago, she’d whittled it down to just one business case.
She still hasn’t been willing to tell us what they are or it is.
In any event, there is just one business case for Muskrat Falls, as your humble e-scribbler explained in 2012.
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Premier Kathy Dunderdale made a few more appointments on Friday to boost her chances of setting a phenomenal record for shifting people around in the senior ranks of the provincial public service.
She made three appointments following hot on the heels of the quickie switcheroo made necessary by Robert Thompson’s apparently unexpected resignation last month.
August is polling month for Corporate Research Associates.
In the first 15 days of the month, the provincial government announcement machinery has been running in overdrive. Realistically, though, there have only been 10 working days if you pluck out weekends and Regatta Day,when the provincial government head office in St. John’s shuts down.
They call it Site C.
No, it isn’t a sequel to Jurassic Park or The Lost World.
Site C is a 900 megawatt hydroelectric dam project in British Columbia that BC Hydro originally estimated would cost $6.0 billion. The provincial government shielded the project from scrutiny by the provincial utilities regulator.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Keep a pad of paper and a pencil beside you as you read this book.
Jot down the biases you can relate to Muskrat Falls.
Try not to cry.
____________
This is a touching, highly personal account that doesn’t take you anywhere except inside the author’s head.
That’s all you’ll need to understand what he experienced, his psychological injuries, and how far McWhirter has come to be able to tell the parts of his story that are in this book.
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Last week, the Quebec Superior Court dismissed a motion to hear an appeal from Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro over decisions taken by the Quebec’s energy regulator in 2010.
As NTV reported on Friday, “Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro asked for transmission access from Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie in January 2006. But Nalcor says it was met with delays, so it appealed to Quebec’s version of the Public Utilities Board, the Régie de l’énergie.”
That’s a fair, if very general, account of the dispute. You can see the same thing in the other media, such as the CBC’s online account. The Telegram editorial on Monday described the dispute this way – “the Régie de l'énergie rejected all requested corridors for transmitting power through Québec” - although that isn’t even close to what actually happened.
Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation tried but failed in 2012 in an effort to see hundreds of thousands of pages of confidential Hydro-Quebec documents on the 1969 Power Contract between CFLCo and Hydro-Quebec.
A decision by the Quebec access to information commissioner in November 2012 denied CF(L)Co access to the documents under a section of the provincial access to information law that excludes requests that are so large that answering them would interfere with the normal operations of the public body.
Curiously enough that’s exactly the same ruling the Newfoundland and Labrador access commissioner made on a 2008 case involving a request for access to e-mails in the Premier’s Office. In his decision, filed in January 2009, the provincial access commissioner determined that:
the number of e-mails encompassed by the request was over 119,000. At a rate of 500 e-mails per day, it would take about 8 [sic] months to process the request. The Commissioner found that this was an unreasonable interference with the operations of Executive Council.
Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One.
There’s no sign of any commemorations or other events to mark the occasion, but undoubtedly there will be plenty. Your humble e-scribbler is working to finish off a major paper that’s been in the works for far too long. It builds on some original research into Newfoundland’s involvement and pre-war defence policy.
August 7th is the anniversary of the decision by the Newfoundland cabinet on what shape the country’s participation would take. What follows is a revamped version of a post from 2007 on the same occasion.
Here’s what St. John’s mayor Dennis O’Keefe told city council on Monday, according to the Telegram on Wednesday:
O’Keefe proceeded to talk about the fact the city lost the opportunity to hold a Springsteen concert this summer because it and the promoter couldn’t come up with a suitable venue.
This summer.
2013.
Bruce toured North America last year, 2012.
This year all his gigs have been in Europe.
What gives?
Appointing Ross Reid as her chief of staff is probably the smartest thing Premier Kathy Dunderdale has ever done and will ever do.
Reid is an experienced political operator with extensive connections and reputation for bringing people together successfully.
Given all the other decisions Dunderdale has made in her political career, especially since the Williams brothers made her Premier, that’s why this one just does not fit.
Cabinet made 12 appointments at the deputy minister and assistant deputy minister rank in the second quarter of the 2013 calendar year (01 April to 30 June).
The information comes from cabinet orders (orders-in-council) needed to make these appointments and released by the provincial government via its website.
That’s consistent with the 15 appointments made between 01 January and 31 March.
If the pattern continues, the provincial government will make a record 60 such appointments by the end of the calendar year, bettering the previous record of 49 set in 2012.
This does not include recent changes in the Premier’s Office or cabinet secretariat.
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If you want some really sharp insight into the latest developments in the Muskrat Falls saga, check out the Thursday post at Uncle Gnarley titled “Don’t tell the Newfoundlanders”.
Don’t stop when you get to the end.
Read the comments. There are 10 more from different people who add even more insight. Here’s a sample:
Des:
The Emera application was issued on January 28, 2013.
As soon as the carrot of Figure 4-4 was put in front of the UARB, Nalcor should have realised they were going to grab it, and refuse to give the carrot back. The process was de-railed as soon as this Figure 4-4 was shown to the people of Nova Scotia.
Newfoundlanders should read through the UARB hearings. There was a great deal of dialogue between Nalcor and Emera about surplus power availability. Yet during the June 2013 AGM, Ed Martin responded to questioning from Jim Morgan that he was not approached by Emera about surplus power. Something does not correlate. Something does not add up.
But if you want to see what benefits an open and transparent process brings, then read the economics that were presented to the UARB [Excel file at the bottom of the link above] A clear summary of the costs, the returns, and when the equity will be repaid. This is a level of detail and clarity that Newfoundlanders are yet to see, on a project which we will pay for.
Here in Newfoundland we have a premier who is now saying that the link does not require UARB approval. But if the cost are not recovered in the rate base (15 cents/kwhr) how will it be paid for on the open Market (5 cents)? Who pays?\
Our premier should also understand that in accordance with the National Energy Board, before any power is sold in the US it must first be offered to Canadian utilities at commercially competitive terms. So if they build a link with the intent to sell it to New England at 4 cents, then the terms of their NEB report license dictate that Nalcor will first must offer it to Nova Scotians at 4 cents.
Premier Dunderdale may get Premier Dexter re-elected yet.
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The Thursday morning post of Liberal leadership campaign videos included a technical note that explained why the videos in it didn’t fit with the formatting here at SRBP.
The reason for the problem – as the post noted – is that the people who posted the videos at youtube put some limitations on the embedding code. This simple point apparently escaped a couple of readers who spent some time lecturing about how your humble e-scribbler could scale the youtube videos or edit the code.
*sigh*
Leave entirely to one side the spectacle of the guy who gets paid as the consumer advocate sitting there on the CBC flailing his arms around explaining Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s latest rate request.
Tom Johnson sounded like a Hydro spokesperson as he went on about things called “puts” and how this sort of cost was up, and this was offset by something else. Prices on the island would go down, therefore, while in Labrador, where the issues are different, costs would go up.
Johnson did a better job of defending Nalcor than he did during Muskrat Falls.
Leave that to one side.
For those who want to read them, here are two decisions related to Brad Cabana’s recent Muskrat Falls case.
The first is the decision on his application to have the judge remove herself from the case:
Watch too many crime shows and after a while a few of the ideas start to sing into your skull.
Take blood spatter for example. In some kinds of violent death, lots of blood will fly around. The drops leave a distinctive spray pattern that can tell you lots about what went on.
And then there is sometimes the bits of the pattern that are missing. There is sometimes a void, a gap where something that the blood spattered on is missing.
The void – the missing stuff - sometimes tells much more than what is there.
Konrad Yakabuski warned in 2006 that Newfoundland and Labrador would probably get a huge financial shock trying to develop the Lower Churchill on its own.
Now, the knowledgeable Globe and Mail correspondent is back again with the observation that revenge motive behind Muskrat Falls is not a very successful business strategy… for Newfoundland and Labrador.
Consider this a public service for all those people who tweeted his commentary over the weekend thinking that he was chastising Hydro-Quebec.
Guess again.
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The people of Newfoundland and Labrador won;t get information on Muskrat falls water management from the provincial government or its energy corporation.
They should wait to hear about things in Quebec courts, according to Tom Marshall, the Newfoundland and Labrador energy minister.
Marshall was responding to a call by former Premier Brian Peckford for the provincial government to release information about the province’s position on a recent Hydro-Quebec lawsuit against Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation.
Here’s a bit of the Telegram story:
Marshall said that citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador can absolutely know what the government’s case is, as long as they pay close attention to the Quebec court system.
“They will know in court,” he said. “They’re going to hear the whole thing. They’ll see it. They’ll follow it all.”
In other news, the provincial Conservatives are still wondering why their popularity is at record low levels for an incumbent government in Newfoundland and Labrador…
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Premiers Kathy Dunderdale and Darrell Dexter may be telling everyone that the Maritime Link can;t be stopped but the private sector company involved in the project said in June there is no plan on what to do if the Nova Scotia utilities regulatory ultimate turns thumbs down on the Link proposal.
Via labradore, the statement of claim filed on behalf of Hydro-Quebec earlier this week.
You can search it and read it in English. Those of you using Chrome will find the translation very simple.
If the text here is too small, then click on the title - Hydro-Quebec Statement of Claim by labradore – and go straight to Scribd.
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Take away the bluster: “The agenda won’t be set by Quebec in terms of how we do our work, how we develop our resources, and how we access markets.”
Take away the old fairy tales : “I would characterize this as a desperate move by a company that’s been trying one way or the other to thwart development on the lower Churchill for a number of years, unless it was clearly in the best interests of the people of Quebec.”
Dispose of all the crap and what’s left of Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s comments on the Hydro-Quebec legal challenge about the 1969 is very few words that reveal much.
You can read the full decision by the UARB (pdf) but here are some points to note.
Right off the bat, you will see in the full report that Nova Scotia consumers had the benefit of reviews by several consultants all of which are included in the UARB report. This stands in stark contrast to the rigged reviews conducted in Newfoundland and Labrador before the final approval by the provincial government.
Right off that the bat, that means that the public interest was far better served in Nova Scotia than it was at any point during the past decade in dealing with the Lower Churchill.
From Hydro-Quebec:
MONTREAL, July 22, 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - Hydro-Québec is filing a motion today with the Québec Superior Court to obtain a declaratory judgment. The company is asking the Court to confirm that two recent positions taken by CF(L)Co with respect to the Churchill Falls Contract (the Contract) are ill-founded. The Québec Superior Court has exclusive jurisdiction to rule on any dispute arising out of the Contract. It should be noted that the Contract will be automatically renewed in 2016, for a 25-year period ending in 2041.
1 - Energy deliveries to which Hydro-Québec is entitled
Under the terms of the Contract which Hydro-Québec and CF(L)Co concluded in 1969, Hydro-Québec has certain essential rights, including:• The exclusive right to purchase virtually all of the power and energy produced by Churchill Falls Generating Station until August 31, 2041;
• The right to benefit from operational flexibility.
According to the recent positions taken by CF(L)Co, Hydro-Québec would, for the entire Contract renewal period (2016 to 2041), be entitled only to fixed monthly blocks of energy. This position would deprive Hydro-Québec of the operational flexibility to determine the quantities of energy it can request from CF(L)Co. This operational flexibility enables Hydro-Québec to coordinate the operation of Churchill Falls with its entire generating fleet, and to do so both on a seasonal and a multi-year basis.In Hydro-Québec's opinion, CF(L)Co's position is incompatible with several provisions of the Contract. Hydro-Québec wishes to have the Court confirm that it will not be obliged to limit its requests for energy deliveries to fixed monthly blocks from 2016 to 2041.
2 - Sale of quantities exceeding 300 MW by CF(L)Co
Under the Contract, until 2041, CF(L)Co has the right to recapture a 300-MW block of power and energy and sell it to a third party. However, this right has limitations: CF(L)Co may not, under any circumstances, sell quantities exceeding 300 MW to a third party, until expiry of the Contract. Yet, since June of 2012, CF(L)Co has sold quantities of more than 300 MW to Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro (NLH), a related provincial Crown corporation, causing the interruption of deliveries scheduled by Hydro-Québec under the Contract.Hydro-Québec therefore wishes to confirm that, as long as the Contract is in effect, namely until August 31, 2041, CF(L)Co may not sell quantities of power and energy exceeding 300 MW to a third party, including NLH.
For further information:
Gary Sutherland, Hydro-Québec, 514 289-4418,
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sutherland.gary@hydro.qc.ca
So if Stephen Harper’s staffing problem is that “all the good ones quit”, what is the story on the staffing problems in Kathy Dunderdale’s office?
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Look at the shelves in any bookstore around town these days and you will likely see endless copies of Greg Malone’s book Don’t tell the Newfoundlanders.
The piles of books show that few people are actually interested in Malone’s malarkey. Well, very few people beyond the crowd who – like Malone and open line regular Agnes – already had swallowed the load already, without question. Malone’s book contains the sort of crap Malone and others have been getting on with for years. Back in 2009, for example, the Canadian Press gave their fact checker a day off and asked Greg some stuff about Confederation in time for a piece for the 60th anniversary of the momentous event.
Drew Brown, he of the recent paper and public talk on nationalism, has a piece in The Scope this month that has a go at the conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, he trashes the notion completely.
The Liberal leadership is not even a couple of weeks old and already reporters are getting inundated with the suggestions from anonymous turd-mongers wondering why they are not covering this angle or that aspect of one candidate
The Telegram’s James McLeod wrote a blog post about it on Tuesday, rattling off some examples of the stuff he’s been getting. McLeod offers a few simple explanations of why reporters don’t cover the sort of crap that these tidbits of excrement.
In the process, he actually gives publicity to the stuff he says wouldn’t be covered for journalistic so there is a bit of a contradiction in there. For the most part, what you can see are the sort of small-minded points offered up by people who have nothing much to say and on top of that don;t even have the stones to identify themselves. The world is full of those sorts of sorry specimens of humanity; politics just makes it seems like there are more of them attached to political parties.
A college or university education has an undeniable value both to the student and to the society as a whole.
But should either party bear a disproportionate share of the cost of the education?
Of course not. The challenge for policy makers in the provincial government and at the university and the colleges in the province is how to strike a balance between the two. The one that’s been in place for the past decade works extremely well for students whose representatives – not surprisingly – are pushing for an even sweeter and sweeter deal regardless of the financial implications to the university and the provincial government.
Free tuition is fundamentally unworkable. There’s no reason to believe that free tuition would improve participation rates, successful completion rates, or any other desirable outcome for society. By the same token, forcing students to bear the full cost of tuition up front would likely serve as a powerful deterrent since few individuals and families could afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars post-secondary education costs these days.
There might be an alternative.
Last November, it was easy to dismiss Paul Antle as another potential Liberal leadership candidate who lots of people talked about but who sounded more like he had better things to do.
Two things in July changed that.
First, Antle raced around at the last minute and joined the leadership race.
Second, and more importantly, Antle delivered the best campaign kick-off of the lot.
Screaming headline across the top of the front page of the Saturday Telly:
SNC-Lavalin shut out of Hydro-Quebec projects
And right underneath, the claim that it is a Telegram exclusive.
That would be right except for the fact someone else reported it months ago.
The problems first surfaced in April, as reported by Radio-Canada.
And La presse had the specific Muskrat Falls angle in early May. The recent decision on the Romaine project reported on Saturday by the Telly is just the same as the La Presse story…only much later.
Where’s the exclusive?
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Liberal member of parliament Yvonne Jones is pissed off.
She told VOCM that “there are 1,016 people that are payrolled [sic]under the Muskrat Falls project. 201 of those are Labradorians. So we have less than 10 per cent of Labrador people employed as part of that project.”
She said that was unacceptable.
Someone forgot to point out to the mathematically challenged politician that 201 is a teensy bit shy of 20% of 1,016.
Not less than 10%.
But about double that.
19.7% to be super-accurate.
So if someone pointed out to Jones that there are twice as many Labradorians working at Muskrat Falls as she thought, would she be only half as pissed off?
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Score another one for the Telegram’s James McLeod.
He interviewed finance minister Jerome Kennedy and wrote a story that centred on Kennedy’s contention that his party’s 2011 election promises weren’t really promises at all but a general blueprint or platform intend to implement depending on the cash available.
The story caused Kennedy such problems that he took to the Thursday morning open line show to claim he was misquoted and that the comments were taken out of context. Later on he issued a news release that claimed the Conservatives had actually delivered on 43% of their promises. The short release include a long list that someone apparently cut and pasted from the original list of Conservative not-promises.
Kennedy just made a bad situation worse.
One of the things about writing SRBP is that posts sometimes show changes in thinking as your humble e-scribbler gains more information.
Over the last few posts and on Twitter, some of you may have seen a comment to the effect that you could replace the government subsidy to the university with a tuition hike and be cash to the good. Well, that just is’;t the case. As Tuesday’s post showed, the government grant covers about 71% of the university’s operating revenue every year. Tuition covered about the same percentage (11%) as it did in 1977.
Taking a hard look at the current numbers showed that tuition and fees from the 18,700 graduate, undergraduate, and distance students at the university, full- and part-time brings in slightly less than $60 million annually.
What hasn’t changed, though, is the starting point of this mini series from last Friday: the university needs cash. The question is how to get it.
Here’s the e-mail that’s making the rounds:
I am running for Leader of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador. I have no confidence in the current government. We've come too far to go backwards. I love this place and I understand its DNA. Our province has no leadership. That's about to change.
Please join me for the launch of my Liberal Leadership Campaign on Thursday, July 11th, 12:00 noon.
Manuels River Hibernia Interpretation Centre//7 Conception Bay Highway//Conception Bay South, Newfoundland [sic]//A1W 3A2
Paul
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Memorial University’s dean of graduate studies wasn’t so keen on China as a source of students in February 2011. In a post on her blog Postcards from the edge, Noreen Golfman wrote;
The point is that Memorial, if it is to play seriously in the realm of international recruitment, cannot afford merely to be part of the bandwagon. It has to get ahead of it. China is already so yesterday.
The academics even invented a word for the trend – surprise, surprise - at universities to seek more and more of their student population from other countries. They call it “internationalization”.
The motivation is simple: money. Golfman acknowledged that point up front in the same blog post. The available pool of young people is getting smaller, thanks to the fact that birthrates are dropping off in the developed world. As a result, universities have to go on a hunt for students to keep everything operating:
And, so, yes, the motivation has been, in the first instance, largely economic.
None of that is a surprise. Nor would anyone be surprised to find that by November 2011, Golfman was in China on a student-hunting safari. She was back there again in 2012.
VOCM’s newsroom is taking a massive step downward with a headline on the Liberal leadership. On Friday, Dwight Ball stepped down as interim leader. The caucus will decide his replace – officially – at a meeting they’ll hold in a couple of weeks.
The entire VO story consists of these few sentences under the headline “Liberal Party Leaderless”:
Dwight Ball has submitted his resignation as lnterim Leader of the Liberal Party. Ball is joining business leaders Paul Antle and Cathy Bennett, MHA Jim Bennett, and former MHA Danny Dumaresque in the race. Party president Judy Morrow says the process should ensure a strong, united party in the next general election. Voting will take place in November.
So either VO is now openly employing the Sun and Fox News stylebook in the newsroom or someone at VOCM is applying for a job as a government communications director.
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“We lost, but that passion for fighting the injustice of a retroactive law change — that passion I will bring to the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, and to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador…”
Liberal leadership hopeful Paul Antle
CBC reported on Friday that a “Federal Court of Appeal judge ruled in 2010 that a trust set up in the Caribbean by the wife of Liberal leadership candidate Paul Antle was a ‘sham’ used to incorrectly shield [sic] more than $1 million from capital gains taxes.”
That sounds like a great campaign slogan:
Paul Antle: fighting for tax shelters
His team has their work cut out for them.
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In early June, a CBC investigation revealed that Memorial University is charging special fees for some international graduates students. That was just one of a series of problems with the international student programs noted in the report.
Some of the students were Chinese. As it turns out, 36% of [all] Memorial’s grad [international] students are from China.* That’s a figure that turned up in a news release on June 27 that came out of the recent junket by the Premier, a couple of her retiring ministers, Ed Martin from Nalcor and Memorial president Gary Kachinowski.
One agreement signed on the trip set up “the China Scholarship Council and Memorial University of Newfoundland Joint Funding Program, which will support up to 20 qualified doctoral students who will be jointly funded by Memorial University and the CSC to pursue doctoral studies.”
Cathy Bennett’s leadership launch event was organized as one would expect. Her speech was scripted and, hand gestures and all, well rehearsed.
From the start there was the flush of jargon that one expects these days from business people getting into politics. A “decision process’ had led her to this spot. The province must be “best in class”. Things must be “actioned”. We must “start a conversation.” Energy, passion and fire - especially passion – occurred in the speech with as much frequency as “strong voice” used to turn up with others.
She pledged to be “open and accountable” as well as honest and persuasive.”
Bennett didn’t offer much beyond stock phrases on anything, though, except on three points: increased immigration, full-day kindergarten, and Muskrat Falls.
