According to a major Telegram story on Monday morning, the provincial government won’t be able to release some information about Muskrat Falls because of the provincial access to information laws.
There’s only one problem: the Telegram got the whole thing wrong.
The story of the 2014 provincial Conservative Party leadership contest is a study in politics on its most basic level.
It is a story of those with influence and of those who have less of it or none at all.
It is a story of how politics actually works inside the Conservative Party, instead of how we imagine it.
It is a fascinating story.
The provincial government will be establishing a committee of senior public servants to co-ordinate information on Muskrat Falls for cabinet.
VOCM faithfully reported Premier Tom Marshall’s comments to reporters outside the House of Assembly. The people want more, says Tom, so the Conservatives are going to give the public more oversight. The new committee will receive monthly project updates and quarterly financial updates from Nalcor, according to the VOCM story. The committee will issue an annual report.
All new stuff supposedly.
Except it isn’t.
“Province to deliver on promise of whistleblower law” read the headline for the CBC’s online story about the provincial government throne speech read Wednesday in the House of Assembly.
About half way down the story, it says that “Premier Tom Marshall is fighting back against the perception” that the government he’s been a part of since 2003 is secretive.
You’ll see the same idea in the Telegram’s story:
In today’s throne speech, Premier Tom Marshall made his most significant signal so far that the government is doing everything possible to be more open and transparent.
What’s interesting about this idea, that Tom Marshall alone did all this, is simply not true.
by JM and EGH
The BBC online news magazine carried an article on March 10 that should be of interest to all those following the Muskrat Falls debate.
“Do massive dams ever make sense?” summarizes the work of researchers at Oxford University. They studied more than 245 large dams completed between 1934 and 2007.
A large dam is one with a wall height of more than 15 metres. Muskrat Falls would meet the study criteria
The researchers found that dams ran 96% over their approved budgets, on average. One Brazilian dam went 240% over budget. With few exceptions, the researchers found that the dams were not economically viable.
“On the outside, Shawn Skinner and John Ottenheimer are still mulling it over, “wrote Des Sullivan last Thursday. “The price tag of running a credible campaign still daunts them; if Frank Coleman confirms his candidacy, both will fold.”
VOCM reported on Monday afternoon that Frank Coleman would make his final decision on Wednesday. CBC’s David Cochrane reported that same information on Monday evening and added an interesting extra bit of information: unidentified Conservative Party insiders told Cochrane that it is looking less and less likely that Coleman will run.
Neither would declare they were in the race until, respectively, Thursday and Friday.
[Includes Hamlet update]
If David Cochrane’s sources are right, Danny Breen won’t be running for the Conservatives in Virginia Waters after all.
That means that unless the Conservatives come up with an amazing and currently unknown candidate, they will likely not only lose the upcoming by-election but run the risk of coming in third place behind the New Democrats.
Breen has impeccable Conservative credentials. He’s already well-known having done the impossible: been a strong, solid, and visible performer on St. John’s city council without succumbing to the drama-queen antics of some of his colleagues.
You’ll hear Conservatives, Corporate Research Associates, and some commentators play up the fact that public satisfaction with the governing Conservatives has gone up in CRA’s most recent quarterly poll.
That’s wonderful but that poll and a couple of bucks will get you a nice hot coffee at Tim’s. Other than that, the satisfaction numbers don”t mean much.
Just to give you a starting point, here are the Conservatives’ satisfaction numbers since the last general election in October 2011.
As laughable as it is for the Premier’s Office to insist former Premier Kathy Dunderdale received only 46 e-mails in a single week and sent none, there are some other things in this little episode that are worth noticing.
Put ‘em all together with other information and you might have something interesting. Not necessarily huge, but interesting and revealing.
How odd that the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador – arguably the busiest job in the province, bar none - received only 46 e-mails in a one week period in January.
And how extremely odd that none them – apparently - came from any of her staff, senior public servants, cabinet ministers or other politicians.
And how completely bizarre that in that same period the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t send a single e-mail of her own to anyone about anything.
A tale out of Ottawa reveals the extent to which access to information problems crop up in lots of places.
CBC News asked for a copy of a memo from the commander of the Canadian Army about leaks of information within the army. CBC apparently had a copy of the memo or someone had seen it and so they formally requested a copy.
The tale gets interesting because of the internal dispute over how to respond to the request. Most public affairs officers advised the commander to direct the CBC to file an access to information request. Only one public affairs officer – a former political aide to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – advised against that action and, ultimately, refused to be the one to tell CBC what to do.
The army relented, largely due to that refusal, and released the letter to the media without forcing them to go through the access process.
Think back to last December.
A couple of Nalcor guys bragged about the company’s strategy of importing electricity when they needed during the months when prices were low and then exporting our own electricity when electricity prices were high.
Brilliant idea. It worked for Hydro-Quebec for most of the past 50 years.
There’s only one problem: it won’t work any more.
In the fall sitting of the House of Assembly in 2008, the provincial government repealed an old law regulating the practice of midwifery.
Then-health minister Ross Wiseman introduced the repeal bill at second reading and promised to replace it with a new law:
We envisage under the new legislation midwifery being an autonomous profession, separate and apart from nursing. [Hansard, 01 Dec 08]
The Health Professions Act – passed by the House of Assembly in 2010 – made it possible for government to set up midwives as a small, self-regulating profession.
After another four years, you’d think we might be a bit closer to what Wiseman originally promised. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.
With all the talk the past couple of days about the relationship between the provincial government and the provincial energy corporation, it might be a useful time to ask a fairly simple question:
What does Nalcor do?
Might seem like such an obvious question that it you are laughing, but hang on a second and let’s see what turns up if we go back and look at what the Conservatives said in the past about the energy corporation.
Nalcor Energy is running the Muskrat Falls project without any independent oversight from the provincial government.
In two interviews with the Telegram’s James McLeod natural resources minister Derrick Dalley identified Nalcor boss Ed Martin as the government’s chief source of information on the project. According to Dalley, Martin passes information to the deputy minister of natural resources who passes it to Dalley.
Additionally, noted Dalley’s communications director in an e-mail sent between the two interviews, the “Departments of Finance and Natural Resources work in close collaboration with Nalcor Energy and have regular meetings and exchanges of information…”.
McLeod asked Dalley repeatedly about any use by the provincial government of its own independent sources to vet Nalcor’s work. Dalley replied that the department didn’t have the expertise to duplicate that of Nalcor. What’s more, Daley asked rhetorically, “why would we duplicate within the department [of natural resources]” the work going on at Nalcor to develop the project.
Dalley cited external contractors - such as Manitoba Hydro - hired by Nalcor to vet work at each decision gate for the project as an example of work that “we have done” to validate Nalcor’s project management.
This year it is Charlene Johnson’s turn to host a series of meetings across the province that the provincial Conservatives cynically tout as a way for people to have some input into the provincial budget.
It’s cynical because – as the Conservatives know – the major budget decisions are already made before the finance minister heads to the first of these meetings. They are a waste of time.
The people who show up at these sessions have no idea what the actual state of the province’s finances are. The provincial government hides the real numbers until budget day. Therefore the people who show up can’t offer any sensible suggestions, anyway. Instead, they wind up begging like a bunch of serfs for more cash for this and more cash for that, even though the cash isn’t really available.
Digging through a set of files in the provincial archives once upon a time, your humble e-scribbler came across a particular file in a set bequeathed to the archives decades ago by the fellow who wrote the original legislation that helped create the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in the Great War.
The hand-written title on it was “unconscious press humour.” The file contained a raft of clippings from the local newspapers where the headline made an inadvertent joke when placed in the context of the story. We are not talking about “Stripper bares all”, the now legendary Telegram headline from the 1980s that wound up in the National Lampoon’s “True Facts” page thanks to Liberal member of parliament Dave Rooney. We are talking stuff where some earnest headline writer had put together a groaner entirely by accident.
These days, you’d title the file on your computer something like “inadvertent media jokes” or if you haven’t grown tired of it yet and wanted to stay true to the original name, “Bob Wakeham, Volume 15.”
When it needed a lobbyist in Ottawa to monitor the federal environmental review process for its Kami project, Alderon Iron Ore turned to Summa Strategies and a well-connected fellow named Tim Powers.
You can find out information like this thanks to the federal registry of lobbyists. Powers’ registration number for the Alderon gig is 777504-308605. It’s a matter of public record.
For those who may not know, Powers is also a registered lobbyist (777504-14002) for Nalcor Energy in its dealings with the federal government. Again, it’s a matter of public record.
But what about Alderon’s dealings with the provincial government and its agency, Nalcor Energy? Did they have anyone interceding on their behalf?
Good question.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer.
From the Chronicle Herald:
In its letter, the board also points out that parts of the project have been delayed. That includes a 10-month change in the timeline for the transition to start-up and operations. Commissioning of the 180-kilometre cable is slated to be completed by October 2017 rather than December 2016. [emphasis added]
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Writing good speeches is more art than science but even without much experience, you can tell when a part of a speech doesn’t ring true.
There was a spot like that in Kathy Dunderdale’s resignation speech.
Hearing it made you wince.
It just didn’t sit right.
Reading the passage doesn’t make it any better. Here it is:
“Bullshit,” wrote philosopher Harry Frankfurt a few years ago, “is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
Enter Danny Williams, Doc O’Keefe, and Tom Hann.
The T’ree Amigos dismissed the Conference Board of Canada’s recent population projection for the province with the simple argument that the booming economy in the province - due largely to oil - would attract people here in droves.
That’s a really interesting idea because we can actually look at the evidence available to see if that might be true. The province has been doing very well economically for the past decade. Arguably, the province was even doing fairly well for the decade before that, compared to the 1970s and 1980s what with oil development that started in the early 1990s.
So what happened?
Tuesday’s scrum with Danny Williams proved at least two things
The first is that the Old Man will say anything that comes into his head and most of it isn’t even close to true. Second is that the local reporters gaggled around him wouldn’t call him on his obvious bullshit if their lives depended on it.
Never have.
Never will.
Among other things on Tuesday, the Old Man claimed that building a new electricity transmission line to western Labrador from Churchill Falls is a “no brainer” because without the electricity the company whose board Danny sits on won’t build the new Kami mine.
When Nalcor needs a bunch of Quebec lawyers, one of the firms they go to is Fasken Martineau. Nalcor has been relying on FM for lots of things over the years, including the infamous series of appeals to the Quebec energy regulator.
Last week, FM issued a news release about the close of the financial deal for the project. It included a quote from Xeno Martis, the lead lawyer from FM for the project:
"Fasken Martineau conceived and proposed a modified "wrap structure" which sheltered the lenders from any project risk and provided them with direct recourse to the Sovereign," added Mr. Martis.
That was important, as one of the underwriters described in a Financial Post story a couple of weeks ago:
“The benefit of the guarantee was that no one had to look at the merits of the underlying project.”
Whatever the provincial government paid Fasken Martineau via Nalcor, that bit of work was worth it. After all, as a result of the way FM structured the deal, investors were protected from any risk and none had to look at the merits of the project before putting money into it.
The provincial Conservatives can also thank FM for other cash.
Timon and Pumbaa turned up at St. John’s City Hall for the rainbow flag raising on Friday.
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After Bill Barry - the only declared candidate - former cabinet minister Shawn Skinner is the least imaginary of the potential candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“What I’m running for is to form the next government,” Skinner told the Telegram’s James McLeod. What I am running for. Present tense. Definitive.
Not what I am thinking about running for. Not what I might run for.
What I am running for.
And yet Skinner hasn’t actually announced that he is running. The main reason he gave to the Telegram is understandable: the party hasn’t announced the rules for the contest yet.
One of the rules Skinner is particularly concerned about is the spending limit for the campaign.
A day after the shocking news that Tim Powers is not going to be a candidate for Conservative Party leader in Newfoundland and Labrador, another imaginary candidate dropped out of a race he was never in.
Charlie Oliver announced on Wednesday he would back Bill Barry, most likely.
And instead of running to be Premier, Charlie wants to fund some sort of “think tank” instead.
Now Charlie might come through with the dough, but the whole idea looks a lot more like something someone gave Charlie to say as a way of saving face.
Dale Kirby and Christopher Mitchelmore shifted their desks in the House of Assembly on Tuesday from the independent or unaffiliated part of the chamber to sit with the Liberals.
They left the New Democratic Party last fall voicing concerns as they left about Lorraine Michael’s leadership and the lack of election readiness in the party that had, in 2012, at one point topped the polls in the province.
The news on Tuesday was probably the least surprising news of any that’s happened in provincial politics in the past six months, but that didn’t stop some people from moaning about it.
A new poll by Abacus Data for VOCM shows the Liberals under Dwight ball leading the governing Conservatives in every region of Newfoundland and Labrador.
According to a new VOCM-Abacus Data random telephone survey of 500 eligible voters in Newfoundland and Labrador, the NL Liberals hold a 15-point lead over the PC Party among committed voters (Liberal 49% vs. PC 34%) with the NDP well back in third at 15%.
But that’s not all.
Two separate e-mails plunked the same article in the SRBP inbox on Friday.
Both highlighted the same quote from this National Post story on Muskrat Falls financing:
“The benefit of the guarantee was that no one had to look at the merits of the underlying project,” says Steve Halliday, managing director and head of global credit trading and distribution at TD.
So the investors bought into the project without looking at the merits of the project.
How many ways can that be bad for the people who will be stuck paying for it?
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Premier Tom Marshall confirmed on Thursday that the provincial government will be doing the review of the provincial information and privacy law a year earlier than scheduled.
They will also be appointing three people to serve as the commission conducting the review. The provincial government is also accepting nominations for commissioners.
While other details of the review aren’t public yet, the news so far is good.
When they got up on Wednesday morning, everyone in the province who was paying attention knew that Bill Barry was going to launch his bid for the provincial Conservative Party leadership later that afternoon in Corner Brook.
Barry made his plans clear the week before. He’s the only one definitely in the race so far. On Tuesday night, Barry posted an invitation on facebook for people to come out and join him if they were alienated from provincial politics and fed up with the way things were going.
Any news hunter scanning the radio dial on Wednesday heard about the Barry newser, but just before 8:00 AM, VOCM news director Fred Hutton played the tape of an interviewed he’d bagged the night before with former Liberal leadership contender Cathy Bennett. No one had heard from her since the Liberals elected Dwight Ball, but there was Bennett telling the audience of the province’s largest privately owned radio network that she was definitely running in Virginia Waters in the next election as a Liberal.
Gone was the Bennett of her campaign, at times brusque and stiff. In her interview with Hutton, Cathy Bennett displayed displayed all the skills she’d learned from her hard months on the campaign trail. She was articulate, confident and professional. Bennett affirmed her commitment to the Liberal Party and spoke confidently of the change she wanted to bring to the province as part of a future Liberal government.
What’s so striking about the race to replace Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the provincial Conservative Party is how spectacularly unspectacular it is so far.
Maybe things will change once the Conservative Party executive meets to figure out the leadership contest rules. But so far the whole thing has been decidedly dull.
Having tried to slide by without renewing their party, the provincial Conservatives are now talking up the joys of change.
They’ve talked about everything else.
Change is the only thing they haven’t talked about.
So now it’s their new talking point.
Problem is that they don’t seem to be doing much to … well… change.
The same people saying and doing the same things as they have always done won’t change anything
A provincial Conservative started out the week explaining why he cut a deal with a couple of provincial Liberals so he could get re-elected.
As part of his speech on Monday, Paul Lane said:
While there are indeed many people doing quite well in this economy…there are still many people who are not experiencing the positive impacts of our economy. As a matter of fact for many people, this economy is causing many people to fall further behind…
Those people include seniors, people with disabilities, people on fixed and low incomes, and in many cases, children. Government must focus on matters important to these people and the “everyday person”, said Lane.
Another provincial Conservative changed his political life last week. On Friday, Tom Marshall became the 11th Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. After talking the oath of office, Marshall said:
So it is therefore very important to me that all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians shall share fully and fairly in the benefits of our newfound prosperity, and have a voice in the way it is distributed.
So let us ensure that the fight against poverty and inequality intensifies in our province and we never forget the needs of those who are aged, who have disabilities, who are infirmed [sic], and who live on fixed and low incomes.
The words may be slightly different but there is no make that they both said the same thing: government must now turn its attention to something new.
There’s also no accident that the two said pretty much the same thing. Tom didn’t figure out what to say after hearing Paul. Far from it. Much of what Paul said - like when he spoke about “our” government - sounded like a speech he had planned for a Conservative audience.
What they were both reciting is the last script the Conservatives are turning to in their effort to find the magic message that they think will make the polls bounce upward again.
There was a lot of that - reciting talking points - among provincial Conservatives last week.
Since Kathy quit and Tom Marshall taking over on Friday morning, people are wondering when we will go to the polls.
There’s talk about a snap election.
There’s talk about the clock starts ticking on Friday so the election has to be done within the next 12 months.
To help guide you through it, here’s an overview of the issue.
If you have not read Kathy Dunderdale’s resignation speech, take a moment and do so now.
What is most striking about the speech is that there is absolutely nothing anywhere in it that Kathy Dunderdale can claim as her personal accomplishment as Premier. There’s nothing she actually did during her three years in the most powerful political office in the province.
What Dunderdale talked about in the list of accomplishments are things that the Conservatives have done – supposedly – since 2003.
But look at the speech again. There is nothing that Kathy set out to do and can now leave office safe in the knowledge she accomplished it.
Instead, you will find a sentence toward the end, as she was clewing up, that mentioned something she hoped:
As the first woman to serve as Premier, I hope I have stoked the fires of imagination in young girls in our province and inspired them to consider standing for public office.
That is the only part of the speech where Dunderdale spoke with some personal conviction. This was important to her.
Provincial Conservatives will get together on Wednesday morning and eventually admit the worst kept secret in local political circles: the local Tories will have a new leader before the next election.
Kathy always was an interim leader. The original plan was to keep her for a few months to keep the lights on and some heat in the office so the pipes didn’t freeze. Once the 2011 election came and went, the Conservatives were supposed to dump her, hold a leadership and carry on from there.
As it turned out, Kathy Dunderdale just lasted a lot longer than people originally intended.
Kathy is going.
Tom Marshall gets to quit politics as interim Premier.
That’s if the reports on Tuesday night hold through Wednesday morning.
Here are some quick observations:
In all the political chatter on Monday, no idea got a stronger negative reaction than the one from your humble e-scribbler that Paul Lane had secured himself a plum appointment in a future Liberal government, including a seat in cabinet.
For some reason, the idea of Minister Paul Lane just infuriated people.
Some said it was just not true.
Some said it was preposterous.
Others said that no one had made Lane any promises.
Let’s take a closer look at this.
Paul Lane scored big on Monday.
First, he secured his nomination and his seat in the next provincial election by running as a Liberal. As long as the party continues on its current track, Lane will win easy re-election not on his own merits but – as in 2011 – on the coat-tails of the party he was hooked up with at the time.
To be sure, Liberal leader Dwight Ball insisted Lane has no guarantee of a safe nomination, but in practical terms, that is a huge nose-puller. Incumbents are typically hard to unseat. Incumbents with a year and a half of profile before the nomination are that much hard to beat. And those with the enthusiastic and unqualified support of the party leader and the entire caucus likely could not be defeated with a crucifix, stake and a bathtub of Holy water. Paul Lane is safe.
And then there is the little bonus Lane garnered on Monday that few seem to grasp at this point. By convention, no party leader in Newfoundland and Labrador has ever left any of his opposition bench mates out of the fat once they win an election.
In 1989, the only incumbent who didn’t get to cabinet was Kevin Aylward. That was only because Aylward had blotted his copybook not once but twice over the leader and his seat. Aylward eventually got his reward. In 2003, Danny Williams rewarded all of his caucus mates with plum jobs of one kind or another.
These are the kind of rewards that require no overt promise. If asked, politicians can always quickly say they’ve made no promises. But everyone understands, with a figurative wink, that they’ll be looked after.
Dwight Ball will have a hard time breaking that tradition. It’s part of the unspoken constitution of politics. There are lots of things Ball and his people will say to justify Lane’s reward, when it happens. Some of it might even be plausibly true. But that doesn’t matter. The fix is already in. Paul Lane finished Monday with a guarantee of anything any ambitious politician would want: a secure future and, in all likelihood, a cabinet seat in a future government.
Evidently that is something the ambitious Mr. Lane he couldn’t get from the Conservatives.
If you want to understand what the provincial government’s audited financial statements really mean, you will have to skip Tom Marshall’s comments last week and look instead at the lengthy set of observations from the Auditor General released on Friday.
Paddon’s comments are especially important for two reasons.
First of all, Paddon is the former deputy minister of finance. He knows both the current situation and how the government got there. if he is speaking this plainly now about the government;s financial position, you can imagine what he was saying as the current administration got itself into a mess in the first place.
Second, Paddon explains a great many things in plain enough English so that anyone can understand his points. As you will see, they are not what the government has chosen to talk about.
It’s the sort of thing that leaps out at you.
As SRBP mentioned on Thursday, in her book Shopping for votes veteran political reporter Susan Delacourt put it in stark terms. Consumer spending has accounted for 60 to 70 percent of American gross domestic product since 1980. In Canada, it’s been more like 52 to 58 percent nationally. “So when politicians say that they are focused on the economy,” Delacourt wrote, “what they often mean is that they are focused on getting Canadians to buy stuff.”
Well, here’s a pretty chart to give you some local figures. They come from Statistics Canada CANSIM 384-0038 showing gross domestic product based on expenditure, in constant 2007 dollars.
The Conservatives used to say that Newfoundland and Labrador was eastern North America’s energy warehouse. Once Danny Williams ran for the hills and left Kathy Dunderdale in charge, she kicked everything up a notch.
Energy warehouse was too plain for Kathy, whose party ran on the slogan “New Energy” in the 2011 general election.
With Kathy running the place, it became a super warehouse. “We are an energy super warehouse,” said Kathy countless times.
The New Energy Party even clipped this bit of Kathy from the House of Assembly for its website back in 2011:
Mr. Speaker, this Province is an energy super warehouse. We have what the world wants. We will bring it to market. We will supply our own people, Mr. Speaker, and we will earn from those resources for generations to come.
“We will supply our own people, Mr. Speaker.”
There is always something interesting in the province’s audited financial statements and – sadly – it is often at odds with what the politicians have been saying.
On Tuesday, the provincial government released the audited statements for Fiscal Year 2012 (01 Apr 12 to 31 Mar 13) and they are no exception.
The rolling blackouts on the island of Newfoundland could warn of bigger problems to come, if a new paper by the analyst JM is correct.
Underestimating peak load and the potential impact on the Muskrat Falls solution
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Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador never think about the electricity into their homes. They don’t know where it comes from and they certainly don’t have any idea how it gets from the generating plants to their fridges, washing machines, and television sets.
People are thinking about those things a lot more these days, in the wake of the recent power supply crisis.
One of the issues you will likely hear a lot more about in upcoming hearings by the public utilities board is about a new power transmission line from the hydro generating station at Bay d’Espoir across the isthmus and on to Holyrood.
Here’s some additional information about the project.
The provincial government started its campaign to gain control of the political agenda on Thursday with its announcement that it would appoint someone to do something sometime in the future.
The conventional media outlets didn’t report Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s announcement that way. The Telegram, for example, called it an “independent” review but acknowledged in the second sentence of its brief story that Dunderdale “doesn't know the shape or scope of the review”.
CBC went farther in its online story, saying that the “independent review” would “look at the current electrical system in Newfoundland and Labrador; how it operates, how it is managed, and how it is regulated as the province moves from an isolated system to an interconnected system.”
But really, all of that is just an unsubstantiated claim, given that the news release includes these words in a quote attributed to the Premier:
…over the next six weeks my government will work to draft terms of reference and identify an independent body to conduct a review.
In January 2012, Ed Martin and his nasally drone ridiculed the idea of shifting demand for electricity from one part of the day to another so that his company wouldn’t have a problem meeting spikes in demand during the winter.
He dismissed the idea as “theoretical” even though it’s widely used across Canada in places where the electricity system is well managed.
Two years later, almost to the day, energy conservation and demand management are Martin’s best friend to help people get through what his Conservative friends are willing to concede was the current “inconvenience.”
The action of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill once said, “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Some people in Newfoundland and Labrador likely felt that way after Day Three of Kathy Dunderdale’s one woman crusade to deny that the province is experiencing a crisis.
Most people just cock their heads to one side and mouth the three letters W, T, and F.
Kathy Dunderdale did two major interviews on the first working day since the start of the Nalcor generation crisis.
One was with registered Nalcor lobbyist Tim Powers (# 777504-14002) who is currently holding down a guest spot hosting on VOCM. The whole interview is actually online at vocm.com. The second was with CBC’s John Furlong on Radio Noon. As of Monday night, it wasn’t online. She also had a media availability later in the day with Earl Ludlow from Newfoundland Power.
If you heard both great interviews. If not, listen to the VOCM one. Powers repeated the interview on Monday night when he co-hosted the night-time talk show with Jonathan Richler. You’ll hear a whole lot that confirms the observations we made here on Monday. Let’s walk through the day.
Some observations:
1. Yep. It’s a crisis.
When you have a major utility cutting electricity to people in a blizzard at random, for random periods of time because it cannot supply enough electricity to meet demand, you have a crisis.
That’s what it feels like to the people in it. That’s what it is.
People never knew when their lights would be on or off, nor would they know for how long. The Newfoundland Power and the NL Hydro operations people who briefed the public were straightforward and factual. They did their jobs well.
The thing is that the public emergency system, including the politicians, didn’t clue in that randomly shutting off power to thousands of voters at a time over the course of several days might be a bit of a problem for the voters.
Government is about making decisions.
In trying to understand what is going on, how governments make decisions is sometimes more important than what decisions get made.
That’s why SRBP has highlighted things about the structure and organization of government. The past year was no exception.
Federal provincial relations
Cast your mind back to the early part of 2012. Kathy Dunderdale was frustrated. She couldn’t figure out how to deal with the crowd in Ottawa.
Suck up to them.
Attack them.
Didn’t matter.
They still wouldn’t do what Kathy wanted.
The end of the calendar always brings the string of Best of, Top 10, and any other kind of year in review piece. In the conventional media it’s the season of the interview with leading politicians.
At SRBP this year we did a Top 13 for ‘13 list. It just ran through all the posts and pages that attracted the largest number of readers during the year.
You get a bit of a different picture of the year when you go through the posts month by month to see what turns up. Patterns emerge that aren’t as readily apparent when you are reading them – or writing them – daily.
For your reading pleasure as we head into the last weekend of 2013 is the list of the top 13 stories at SRBP, as determined by what the readers turned to most:
Some of you may have been surprised to find out this weekend that Nalcor has a scheme to import cheap electricity into the province.
A couple of Nalcor officials could barely contain their excitement in an interview with the Telegram’s James McLeod. Here’s the idea in a nutshell:
Essentially, Nalcor would slow down or shut off some of its hydro dams and let the water build up in the reservoir, while buying cheap power from the market. Then later, during peak demand times on the mainland, Nalcor would run the hydro dams flat out and turn a profit.
You are probably scratching your head because the provincial government has always insisted Muskrat Falls was the cheapest way to supply the province with electricity.
Well, now you know they lied.
But that’s really the smallest implication of the weekend story.
The marine rescue sub-centre story is one of those things that typifies politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.
It’s entirely the creation of a few politicians with their own agenda and a whole bunch of other sincere, well-meaning people have gotten sucked into what is – essentially - a complete pile of shite.
Two years.
That’s all it took to destroy the provincial government’s historic fisheries policy that had been built on the highly successful state-controlled model pioneered by such economic powerhouses as the Soviet Union, Albania, and North Korea.
Three deputy minister appointments announced on Tuesday brings the number of senior executive appointments in the public service to 24 in the second half of 2013, according to information from the provincial government’s Order in Council database.
That brings the total number of senior executive appointments in 2013 to 51. Cabinet made 27 such appointments in the first six months of the year. Cabinet made 12 of them in the first quarter.
Since one of the appointments was a temporary job for a senior deputy minister who retired in September, you could reduce the total to 50. But that’s still a record, compared to the previous record 49 senior appointments made in 2012.
In the past decade cabinet has typically made a series of senior appointments in December. That means there is still plenty of time to move the new record significantly higher.
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Related:
Someone organized a stunt designed solely to gain publicity and no one invited the Old Mullet Hisself to huff and puff and pose for the cameras.
Clearly, the people handling Hisself’s publicity should be fired.
S-H-O-T.
Fired.
Frankly <shoulder twitch> I gotta tell ya.
</eyeroll>
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The Liberal Party executive may have screwed up by failing to put in place any campaign finance rules during the recent leadership but the candidates are putting it right.
Liberal leader Dwight Ball and three of his four fellow candidates released information on their campaign expenses on Monday.
Ball committed to release information immediately after he won the leadership but his disclosure went one better than he’d originally indicated. Not only did Ball ask donors for permission to release their names and the amounts, he refunded money his campaign had received from people who wanted to remain anonymous.
Ball leads by example.
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1. Nova Scotian customers protected; this province not. (Telegram, December 11, 2013) by Ron Penney and David Vardy
The UARB has been empowered to protect the interests of consumers against their public utility, Nova Scotia Power Inc. (NSPI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Emera. Emera is a publicly traded corporation working in partnership with Nalcor Energy, a non-regulated Crown corporation, to build the Maritime Link. The government of Nova Scotia allowed the UARB to balance the interests of ratepayers and the proponent, a privately owned company, at arm’s length from government.
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador took a divergent course of action. They joined hands with their Crown corporation and made it immune from regulatory control.
They took away the powers of our own PUB, so it could not protect the interests of ratepayers. They sanctioned the Muskrat Falls project prematurely and weakened the ability of Nalcor to negotiate a better agreement with Emera. The result is that we are exposed to a one-sided agreement, tilted in favour of Nova Scotia and decidedly disadvantageous to this province’s ratepayers.
Cost estimates for the Muskrat Falls project have apparently jumped by 16% - $1.0 billion - in the past year. That’s based on information released by the provincial government on Tuesday and the details of the federal loan guarantee.
The new price appears to be $7.2 billion. The Decision Gate 3 estimate, released in October 2012, was $6.2 billion for the Muskrat Falls dam, a tie to Churchill Falls, and the line to Soldier’s Pond on the island of Newfoundland.
The new cost is 44% more than the $5.0 billion cost estimate for the dam and island link components of the project when it was approved in late 2010.
There’s something perverse about the way politicians these days use a memorial to the dead of two world wars in the last century as a backdrop for their own political spectacles.
That’s what Kathy Dunderdale did – yet again – on Tuesday night to tell Newfoundlanders and Labradorians about something she regards as truly wonderful.
“This is one of those occasions we should tell our children about,” said Premier Kathy Dunderdale on province-wide television Tuesday night, “and help them understand how important this moment is for them and their future.”
She’s right.
It will be important to mark this moment in time. We’ll have to help generations of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians not yet even born understand the magnitude of what Dunderdale and her associates have done.
When Premier Kathy Dunderdale spoke to a St. John’s Board of Trade last May, she claimed the federal government had tried to tie the federal loan guarantee on Muskrat Falls to the European free trade talks.
There’s no evidence that her claim is true, at least based on the selected documents Dunderdale released last week in the House of Assembly on the negotiations.
The documents actually show something else.
Two news stories last week reminded us once again of the nature of federal-provincial relations for Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade.
A story in the Chronicle Herald reported on recent comments by Danny Williams about a sharp personal exchange he supposed had with Stephen Harper before the later became prime minister.
The second story was the release late in the week by Premier Kathy Dunderdale of some documents about the provincial government’s position on the Canada- European Union trade agreement. The 80-odd pages of e-mails and letters include an effort by the provincial government to tie search and rescue, an offshore safety agency, and the federal government’s Hibernia shares in a deal between the federal and provincial governments.
Just for the sake of looking at some numbers, here are some statistics on university enrolment in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade.
The figures are from Statistics Canada.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t govern by polls.
That’s what she told reporters – yet again – as they asked her about yet another poll that showed the provincial Conservatives aren’t doing so well with eligible voters.
Then Kathy explained to reporters that the polls told her that she and her colleagues must do a better job of communicating with the people of the province. Oh yes, and she’d happily “take” the improvement in the satisfaction with her administration.
Dunderdale wasn’t the only one having some problems with the results of the Corporate Research Associates November poll numbers. New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael blamed her party’s dramatic drop on the two guys who left her caucus. Never mind that the Dipper problems showed up in the polls well before this past quarter.
Let’s dig into this latest set of polling numbers though and see if we can help Kathy and Lorraine figure out what the polls results mean.
Anyone who wants to understand the value of the House of Assembly need only look at Question Period on Tuesday.
Liberal Andrew Parsons threw question after question at child, and family services minister Paul Davis about a report by the Child and Youth Advocate into the case of a young man, aged 16 years, who went to jail a couple of years ago for killing a man in a fire. The young man was living alone, unsupervised, at the time, having been taken into custody by government officials.
Parsons asked question after question and Davis through out anything but a direct answer in reply, time after time.
The value of the House in this instance is not in getting important information. Rather, the value lay in exposing Davis’ weakness in not having good answers in reply to the Advocate’s damning report.
If you accept the provincial government’s version of things, spending a half a billion dollars more than you are collecting is a responsible decision.
That’s the headline the government’s communications people put on the news release covering the release of the fall budget update.
And if you look at either the Telegram or the CBC version of the story, the biggest thing to notice is that the provincial government deficit is $100 million less than originally forecast.
Let’s take a deeper look and see what is there.
Finance minister Tom Marshall will present his mid-year financial update on Monday. It is supposed to be a way of bringing everyone up to date on how the annual budget is going. It’s an accountability thing.
Since the government’s fiscal year starts in April, the middle of the year was September. So December is well past the mid-year. As we all know, December is the last month of the calendar year so this mid-year report is a bit late there, too. The only calendar that puts December in the middle of some year or other seems to be the provincial Conservative one.
The whole idea of a mid-year financial up-date winds up being a bit of a farce, then. It’s much like having a consultation about what to put in the budget after the cabinet has already decided on the budget in secret beforehand.
Farce is not a word you associate with good government. It’s more the type of word you’ll find to describe something like the annual Mummer’s Parade. For those who don’t know, mummering is a bit of Christmas entertainment when people pretend to be something they are not. Mummering is foolishness in a good sense of the word. In politics these days, as with the Mummers’ Parade, it seems that foolish is the new normal.
And that is not good.
According to a new commentary on the Muskrat Falls project by Memorial University economist James Feehan, legislation passed in December 2012 shields Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro from competition, thereby “reducing efficiency and innovation and preventing wholesale access to American consumers” by violating the open market principles on which the American electricity market is based.
Feehan concludes that potential gains for the province and consumers from unimpeded trade and the development of a competitive market will be blocked.
“Instead, Island ratepayers will be forced to pay for this expensive project, whatever the cost.”
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In addition to the $17 million in public cash announced in 2011, the provincial government has given an additional undisclosed amount of public money from several departments to a company trying to re- open a fluorspar mine on the Burin Peninsula.
Justice minister Darin King made that apparently unwitting disclosure in answer to questions in the House of Assembly from Liberal leader Dwight Ball. King was answering a follow-up question from Ball on the $17 million. He’d originally posed questions that fisheries minister Keith Hutchings answered. Hutchings said the company had drawn down $300,000 of the public money. When Ball asked King to clear up the obvious discrepancy, King said emphatically:
I said zero of the $17 million has been drawn down because it is targeted toward the wharf project. There are other sources of funding from Natural Resources and other departments where the company has availed of to move the project forward. The $17 million was targeted specifically to that particular project. [Emphasis added]
Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday, while the polls were still open mind you, that the by-election results would be no big thing.
Life would go on.
The world would turn.
And the Conservatives had two years left in their mandate.
That’s when everyone in the province understood that the provincial Conservatives had already conceded defeat in the Carbonear-Harbour Grace by-election.
Unfortunately for Dunderdale, though, the election result means something. Here’s what.
There are times when the talk in the province sounds a bit like the soundtrack to a movie, a comedy to be precise.
On Monday, finance minister Tom Marshall sounded a bit familiar: “This is a golden age, Mr. Speaker,” Marshall said, “a golden age.”
Recall only a few years ago, Marshall was talking about Muskrat Falls like it was Bay d’Espoir: build a hydroelectric facility to supply lots of cheap electricity for industry that can create jobs for the people who will pay for it all. Now Bay d’Espoir is another story altogether, but there’s a bit more to the history that makes this click together.
Some old fellow by the name of Williams once said that there was no greater fraud than an unkept promise.
He said that around the time he promised to bring in a law that would protect public servants who protected the public interest by disclosing wrongdoing.
Well, he never kept that solemn promise to protect whistleblowers.
The Telegram noticed:
By the end of question period on Tuesday, only an hour or so in, the words “Mr. Speaker” had been uttered 142 times. One of the worst offenders? Premier Kathy Dunderdale answered 11 questions that day, with 31 “Mr. Speakers,” including lines like “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition has a terrible time with facts. He really does, Mr. Speaker, because I certainly do not mind at any time in this House or anywhere else having a debate upon the facts.”
There is even a tee shirt.
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Glen Carter’s second novel has had an honoured place on the coffee table chez e-scribbler for the past few couple of weeks. Dog-eared pages and bits of paper marked the progress through the story that moves smoothly from continent to continent and country to country as it unfolds.
And then the book went on the missing list.
No sign of it anywhere.
No sign, until finally on Sunday evening around suppertime, 15 year old daughter asked her frustrated father what he was looking for. Oh that, she says. It was the anniversary Friday and I started to read it.
You know you have a winner when it grabs two readers as different as a middle-aged father and a teenaged daughter.
In early October, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board issued two new significant discovery licenses to Suncor and Statoil, partners in Ballicaters.
On November 18, CNLOPB updated its offshore resource estimates to include the estimated 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural in the Ballicaters SDLs.
That makes it the third largest gas field in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin after Hibernia (3.1 TCF) and White Rose (1.98 TCF)
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On Monday, Premier Kathy Dunderdale blew off any questions in the House of Assembly about Bill 29 with the comment that the centre for Law and Democracy said the province was third in the country for transparency.
Well, as regular readers well know, the Premier is not usually right about many things and this is a fine example.
(Continued from Part 1)
On October 19, Russell Wangersky wrote a column for The Telegram entitled "20 questions for the premier." Mr. Wangersky posed questions about the development of the Muskrat Falls project.
On November 9, Premier Kathy Dunderdale replied.
Unfortunately, the Premier did not provide much factual information. In the interest of informing Newfoundlanders and Labradorians on this important issue, here are 20 clear answers to 20 clear questions. The information presented here comes from the provincial government and Nalcor as well as publicly available information, such as electricity markets across northeastern North America. The post includes links to background information.
The Second 10 Questions
