Tom Marshall has a few days left as premier so he figured the best thing to do would be to name the courthouse in Corner Brook after Danny Williams, Marshall’s patron.
One of the reasons Marshall gave for his decision was that the province has not done as well as the time when Danny Williams was Premier.
Marshall couldn’t have found a more fitting legacy for Danny Williams if he had really tried. After all, The courthouse and Williams go together
Justice minister Terry French announced on Thursday that he’d be resigning in a couple of weeks time to take up a job in the private sector. French’s announcement looked like an effort to get in front of rumours that have been circulating for a while in some circles and that intensified in the past couple of days. It didn’t look like a well rehearsed or planned thing.
This was also the same day that Charlene Johnson confirmed she is quitting politics to go live in Brunei where her husband has been working for an undisclosed period of time. Johnson told reporters that she and her husband had actually decided over a year ago that she would leave politics. It’s still curious that with all the work- and health-related reasons Johnson offered for taking a year or more to leave actually, she couldn’t manage to hang on for just a couple of days or weeks longer.
In any event, we found out that Johnson really wasn’t leaving now for family reasons after all. There was some other reason for her to go, not that it matters at this point. What does matter is that she has gone. In a couple of weeks, Terry French will go and that means the provincial Conservatives will face three by-elections before Christmas.
When Kathy Dunderdale jumped or was flicked out of office in the first part of 2014, CRA boss Don Mills issued a release covering his company’s February 2014 self-promotion poll that claimed that Tom Marshall was doing wonders for the Conservative party because public satisfaction with the government was up in the poll.
“NL government satisfaction improves with new leader” said the headline. Unfortunately for Mills and CRA, that headline connected up two things - government satisfaction and new leader – in a way the poll data didn’t support. You see, satisfaction went up the quarter before that as well, with the old leader.
There’s just no connection between “satisfaction” and the public choice for best party to form government or for best premier. The Conservatives have strong satisfaction numbers and yet a clear majority of respondents want to vote for some other party to run the government and someone other than Tom to be Premier.
Skip ahead six months and Mills is at it again.
Finance minister Charlene Johnson will be leaving politics on Friday, September 5.
Under changes that Johnson and her colleagues made to the provincial election laws, that means the Premier - whoever it is at the time - will have to call a by-election no later than November 5 and have the by-election over by later than December 5.
He’ll also have to call one in the seat the current Premier Tom Marshall has said he will vacate as soon as is humanly possible after the Conservative leadership convention on the weekend of the 13th and 14th of September.
Johnson’s resignation really put the screws to her soon-to-be former colleagues. They went from having to fight one by-election – which they stand to lose unless its Ottenheimer the Premier – to having to fight two, pretty much at the same time. The problem is, the Conservatives don;t have the resources to fight two by-elections at opposite ends of the province on the same day. Unless Ottenheimer takes the leadership and runs in Humber East, the Conservatives are likely to lose both by-elections before Christmas.
So much for morale.
Meanwhile, the double by-election makes it even less likely the new Premier - whoever he is – will have a fall sitting of the House. He’s more likely to put off the sitting until the spring, then unveil a new throne speech and a budget before heading to an election, if the polls turn around. The official excuse won’t be about the by-elections: it’s more likely to be some guff about having to give the new cabinet (and an off-the-street appointee or two) the chance to come to grips with their new jobs.
Everyone will be waving to Charlene on Friday but in a few weeks time, they’ll be likely giving her back the finger she’s giving them this week, family reasons, and all.
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Three things:
1. The agreement to deal with the unfunded pension liability is a good thing for workers and for taxpayers. It deals with a substantial financial problem, which is the bonus for taxpayers, while preserving defined benefit pension plans for workers, which is the big win for them. The costs are relatively modest in terms of increased premiums, averaging, and early retirement age.
2. This is only part of the province’s financial problem. It’s the easiest one to deal with. The others – Muskrat Falls and the embedded unsustainable overspending – are much larger financially and it will fall to the next administration after the Conservatives will have to deal with. Coming to grips with them won’t be easy by any means.
At least Tom Marshall took care of the problem he created. In an interview with CBC on Tuesday, Marshall tried to blame others for the problem and claim credit for fixing it for himself, but as with pretty much everything a provincial Conservative politician says, nothing could be further from the truth.
Efforts to deal with the unfunded liability started in 1997. A decade later, the problem with less than half the size it is today. Instead of dealing with it then, Marshall began the program of fiscal mismanagement that ballooned the unfunded pension liability and added all the other financial mess that we’ll be cleaning up for decades to come.
3. The St. John’s Board of Trade, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and other similar lobby groups should be ashamed for providing false information to the public while pretending it was truthful and unbiased. Even in an election year, some politician would be doing a public service by issuing an appropriate tongue-lashing to the crop of bullshit-mongers running those two groups. The Board of Trade in particular has a lot to answer for. They have screwed taxpayers twice; first by being party to the Muskrat Falls mess and then by attacking public sector workers with falsehoods.
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Over at Uncle Gnarley, JM’s at it again with the first of a two-parter on Nalcor and its problems with forecasting for Muskrat Falls.
Nalcor assumed that they would get 830 megawatts of electricity out of Muskrat Falls in the winter months when demand is highest. That’s the number they gave everyone else and, as you can tell by the language Nalcor uses, it was an assumption, not a solid forecast. Now they say they should be able to get 673 MW at Soldier;s Pond from Muskrat Falls. That’s a difference of 157 MW, not an inconsiderable difference.
The story flopped out on Friday morning, broken by VOCM, based presumably on information that came directly from Charlene Johnson herself.
We can presume that because as the rest of the newsrooms caught up to VOCM, Johnson confirmed that the story was generally true. As CBC reported, “Johnson said she wants to leave because of family concerns. Her husband now works overseas. As well, she is the mother of a young daughter.”
The eulogies for her political career were quick and generally laudatory. Some picked up on the line from her commentary that she was leaving because of family considerations and pronounced it entirely right and just. Her husband was working out of the country and her young daughter was just five years old.
Good for you, girl, they clucked in paternalistic approval. Someone claimed out that Johnson had broken new ground by being the first politician to give birth while in office. She’d challenged the conventions, so the claim went, and forced the legislature to consider new rules about parental leave and responsibilities. The political panel assembled for this week’s On Point over at CBC all thanked Charlene for her years of service and wished her well.
All wonderful stuff, except that “family reasons” is an excuse so worn out from over-use and, as in Johnson’s case, misuse, such that it is not a cliche. “Family reasons” is beyond that. It is now a code word for something else.
And everyone knows it is bullshit.
It’s the Friday before a long weekend.
Enjoy some music.
And if you like Morgan James, you can find more of her work at her website: www.morganjames.com.
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The day after the by-election in St. George’s-Stephenville East, federal New Democratic Party member of parliament Ryan Cleary showed an interest in provincial politics some might find curious.
“The question is not how to stop NL Liberals,” Cleary tweeted, “but how to boost provincial New Democrats. Status quo not working.”
Status quo means Lorraine Michael’s leadership, of course.
Cleary’s right. Lorraine’s leadership has proven to be a dismal failure. Not only did she and her supporters fail to capitalise on the strong showing in 2011, they’ve obviously failed to gain any ground as the support for the province’s Conservatives has collapsed. The by-election on the west coast confirmed that the New Democrats under Lorraine are staying firmly where they were. They aren’t losing ground, but they also aren’t growing, either.
Conservative leadership candidate Steve Kent may be running in third place in the race, but the guy makes bold promises.
His energy policy includes the pledge about Muskrat Falls that he will “bring this project in on time, and on budget.”
That’s a rather silly promise considering that the project – originally budgeted at $5.0 billion - is already officially estimated to cost $7.0 billion and will more likely cost something well above $8.0 billion before everything is done. For those of you doing the math, that puts the project officially at 40% more than when the project was approved in 2010 and more likely about 60% over budget.
Jessica Valenti, a columnist at the Guardian newspaper argued in her column in early August, that women should get free feminine hygiene products.
Consider these points from Valenti’s column:
Valenti doesn’t make her argument on cost, but on basic health care policy.
Amanda Marcotte at slate.com took a more blunt approach:
Valenti is asking audiences to really think about how the right to move about in public without bleeding all over yourself, a no-brainer for men, is a privilege for women that depends all too much on their ability to afford sanitary products.
It boils down to the same basic idea, though.
Take that idea.
Kick it around in your own mind.
We’ll come back to it another day and work it through as a potential public policy issue.
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From the blurb:
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Poor Sandy Collins.
The Minister (of the Moment) of Public Engagement and a gaggle of senior public servants went to meet the access to information review committee on Tuesday. Supposed to be half a day chatting about this whole letting people have access to government information thing . Turned into a marathon grilling.
Not pretty.
There is no limit to how selectively provincial Conservatives will read a document in order to find some microscopic filament that might possibly confirm that they have really been running the most magnificent administration in the history of the galaxy.
They still insist, for example, that they are the tops in leadership and accountability even though the most recent poll shows that 77% of the people in the province don’t think so.
Conservatives also insist they have done financial miracles. No less a personage than the party’s vice president took to the Twitter on Monday to tell everyone that:
According to Fraser Institute, SK and NL are the only provinces that reduced their public debt since 2007.
Well, they said a lot more than that, but evidently Mark Whiffen and didn’t need to read anything but that. Since the rest of us are not obliged or inclined to such delusions, let’s see what the gang at the Fraser Institute actually said.
Who was the first Newfoundlander elected to the Canadian House of Commons?
What party did he represent?
What year was he elected?
What riding did he represent?
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The Liberals are touting their latest campaign-style television spot featuring Dwight Ball talking about accountability and connecting with voters. In the spot, he’s driving somewhere in the driving province and as he talks the thing cuts to shots of him talking to people.
Remember that the latest poll shows that the Liberals own the accountability and leadership issue (48% to the Conservatives’ 13%). This tidy little spot reinforces the Liberal strength and highlights the Conservatives’ weakness.
When you are done watching that, flip over the the Mother Corps’ online archive and watch a 1971 current affairs documentary on the provincial election that year. Your mind will bend about a lot of things, not the least of which is the comment from New Democratic Party leader Jim Walsh.
Yes, friends, that Jim Walsh. He’s out west somewhere now, a long way removed in every way from that 1971 election.
But when your mind gets back on its even keel again, notice the portion of the documentary where Frank Moores is driving along a stretch of newly paved highway talking about the problems of the faltering Smallwood administration. While it’s highly unlikely the producers of the new spot remembered or knew about the old documentary, some would say there is a fitting parallel in there.
Let that be your Freak Friday political thrill for the week.
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Wednesday morning started with an intriguing but hardly surprising story.
CBC’s David Cochrane tweeted that sources in the John Ottenheimer camp believed that Conservative leadership candidates Steve Kent and Paul Davis were working together to thwart Ottenheimer’s bid. Kent quickly replied via Twitter, writing that “I am not teamed up with any camp.”
NTV’s Mike Connors tweeted a couple of hours after Cochrane that former cabinet minister and Ottenheimer campaign co-chair Shawn Skinner told him that Kent and Davis had started “combining slates” of delegates at some delegate selection meetings. Connors also tweeted the Kent denial that he was teaming up with anyone. Connors also added Skinner’s assessment that Ottenheimer was leading the delegate count or was tied with Davis while Kent was in third place.
Bu then Connors added some detail that made it clear Kent’s denial earlier just wasn’t true.
Tom Marshall is a typical politician. He got into politics to make things better.
And, as he reaches the end of his political career, Tom feels a little frustrated or disappointed in how things turned out. Marshall’s big hopes didn’t turn into equally big results.
So he blames others.
Justin Simms makes films.
His latest project is a documentary about Danny Williams. Funded by the National Film Board, the movie, imaginatively titled “Danny”, will premiere in Halifax next month at the Atlantic Film Festival.
“We had a window of time,” Simms told The Overcast recently, “where we kind of fought back and stood up to Canada in a way that we never have and possibly never will again.” Simms was talking about the racket a decade ago over federal transfer payments, including Equalization.
Simms said that it was very interesting for the team that made the documentary “to see us, the further we get away from that, reassessing it.”
Williams may be gone from the political scene, but as The Overcast put it, “the rapid pace of change in the province continues. ‘That might make the films and the art we make about the place,’ Simms said, 'all the more important.’”
Anyone who wants to get insight into the political landscape in Newfoundland and Labrador need look no further than the Abacus poll commissioned by VOCM, the first bit of which was released on Thursday.
Provincial Conservatives may be running around consoling themselves with all sorts of notions but the reality of their position is starkly revealed by Abacus. Don’t look at the party choice numbers. Although that’s bad enough news for Conservatives and New Democrats, that’s the simple stuff. Look instead at all the data below that.
Companies large and small in the province are under considerable stress as a result of Nalcor’s Muskrat Falls project.
The cause? This CBC story from Labrador mentions “steep wages” as the major issue:
"Over across the river, the average paying job is up to $40 an hour, and that's before benefits and everything else, so it's very, very hard to compete with," said [Mike] Hickey [of Hickey’s Construction].
According to CBC, Hickey’s been having a hard time keeping employees as a result. He just can’t compete with those kinds of wages.
The provincial government headquarters offices in St. John’s will be closed on Wednesday for the annual St. John’s regatta.
There won’t be any news releases most likely.
But so far, there have been three working days in August, the same month when Corporate research Associates will be in the field, and that’s been plenty of time for government’s publicity machine to get to work on its regular poll-goosing agenda
Reluctant Premier Tom Marshall said some interesting things in what appears to be his retirement interview with the Western Star.
Like running for office in 2011 wasn’t what he planned. It was what happened after some unnamed person or people asked him to stay around a while longer. He was set to go before the last election as SRBP told you back then. He only stuck around as party of inside deal worked out by the Conservatives that including keeping Kathy Dunderdale as figurehead leader.
Just like sticking around these past few months wasn’t in his plans either. In fact, when Bill Barry packed it in, Marshall was ready to go at that moment. He hung around because that’s what Frank Coleman wanted, presumably just like Marshall later fired all his own staff in a miserable way one Friday afternoon because that’s what Frank and his people wanted.
And when it comes to leaving office this time, Marshall won’t be going anywhere until the next leader of the party tells him what to do. The always sharp labradore already pointed out that Tom is a little mixed up on how that works. Marshall told the Western Star that he will resign “when the next premier chooses to call a byelection.” Of course, there can’t be a by-election until Tom resigns so what Tom said doesn’t make sense.
But just look at what he said. He’ll resign when the next Premier calls a by-election. But…
If either Steve Kent or Paul Davis win the leadership, then the Premier won’t need to call a by-election. They already have seats in the legislature, Tom can stay in his seat as a backbencher unless there’s some reason to get someone in Tom’s place in a hurry.
Maybe Tom was just saying that he’ll be going regardless of who wins and his successor will have to call a by-election to replace him as a member of the House of Assembly.
Or maybe Tom was having a slip of the Freudian kind.
In the context of the interview, Tom was talking about when he’d hand over to the next Premier, not just when he’d leave as the member of Humber East.
Premier calling a by-election.
The only one of the three candidates who would need Tom’s seat would be John Ottenheimer. Maybe Tom was giving us a clue to who he knows will win the leadership. Freudian slips can be fun. We’ll know in a few weeks if this was one.
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Temporary premier Tom Marshall and natural resources minister Derrick Dalley released a 40-odd page document on Thursday. It’s was supposed to be a report of a committee of senior public servants appointed to provide something called “oversight” of the project.
Neither the report nor the committee actually reports on anything about the project. This first report is actually about re[porting on the project. More specifically it contains information about the oversight committee, all the other sources of “oversight” for the project, some boilerplate about project schedules and budgets, and a report from Ernst and Young.
That last document takes up about 12 pages of the total. It is dated July 25 and describes what Ernst and Young suggest would be the best way for this “oversight” to work.
If you wanted to know how to say absolutely nothing useful in 40 pages, this is the document to study.
Saskatoon Health Region released a report on July 18 on the rates of sexually transmitted infections in the city in 2013.
A CBC report earlier this week quoted the deputy regional health officer as saying that social media was having an impact on the rates of syphilis in the city.
"We do know that meet-ups using social media has led to an increase in these types of infections, and even outbreaks of syphilis, in other parts of the country," Julie Kryzanowski, the region's deputy medical health officer, told CBC News Monday.
That’s actually a follow-on from a similar story in April in which Kryzanowski’s predecessor said that the regional health authority had interviewed some of the patients who reported they “were using certain social media sites to meet sex partners.”
So that got your humble e-scribbler wondering about STI rates in this province.
Government is like a lot of things in life: it’s about finding solutions to problems.
Okay.
If that upsets your cynical sensibilities, think about it as about finding answers to questions.
Better?
Good.
Now matter what way you want to look at it, that’s basically what government is supposed to do. There’s a problem. Government comes up with the answer. Ideally, they ponder the problem. They look at it from a whole bunch of angles. They figure out if it really is a problem first and then come up with a way to deal with it. They might even come up with a bunch of ways of dealing with it
If you are a Newfoundland politics junkie who hasn’t been reading Uncle Gnarley, then you’ve been missing out.
You can fix that by reading the latest offering from Gnarley – a.k.a. Des Sullivan – about Nalcor and the idea of having bureaucrats play at being entrepreneurs.
While you’re at it, you might also want to read a couple of SRBP posts to go with it:
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This week, Statistics Canada released their latest compilation of crime statistics based on reports by police.
The figures in the release were year to year but if you hunt around a bit, you can find the original tables of data. from there, you can pluck out specific information. In this post, we’ve pulled out the data for St. John’s from 2003 to 2013.
In any delegated political convention, you need to elect delegates in each of the districts who will vote for your candidate at the leadership convention.
CBC’s On Point featured three individuals last weekend who were touted as being key players in each of the camps. David Brazil was from the Kent Krew. Paul Oram was there as a Paul Davis supporter. Shawn Skinner was John Ottenheimer’s man.
There are times when a politician’s comments are so stunned they just take your breath away.
The first few days of the Damn-fool Fishery this weekend were marred by a tragic and entirely preventable death off Bell Island. A man drowned after being tossed from the boat in which he was riding. None of the people in the boat were wearing life jackets.
The major of the largest community on Bell Island turned up on CBC Monday evening. Gary Gosine explained that while some people might think the man would be alive today had been wearing a life jacket, the real culprit in this tragedy was the federal government. The feds restricted the “food fishery” to a few weeks of the year. people have to go out in all kinds of weather while in other provinces they can fish a lot more often.
Where does one begin to explain the utter stupidity of Gosine’s comments?
On Monday, Quebec premier Philippe Couillard left the impression that the third and fourth dams on the La Romaine river were in doubt.
Couillard told reporters as he headed to the meeting of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers that Hydro-Quebec would finish the first two dams, currently under construction, and then make a decision:
“We will evaluate them and we will see exactly what is needed. [translation of “On va les évaluer et on va voir justement quel est le besoin.”
According to La Presse, Couillard said that HQ would assess electricity needs for industrial use within Quebec as well as for export before determining whether to build the last two dams of a four dam project.
A report commissioned for the short-lived Parti Quebecois administration last year concluded that continued development of La Romaine would not be profitable, given the large surplus of electricity currently available to Hydro-Quebec.
The entire cost of the the La Romaine development is pegged at $6.5 billion for approximately 1500 megawatts of electricity. If HQ proceeds with the remaining dams, the current schedule will see the third on line by 2017 and the fourth producing electricity by 2020.
A statement issued by Couillard’s office on Tuesday changed the story. The statement said that planning was already underway for the third and fourth dams. It also repeated Couillard’s comment from Monday that the surplus generating capacity would be an asset for Hydro-Quebec in the marketplace.
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The Duke of Connaught, Governor General of Canada and uncle of King George, visited St. John’s in the middle of July, 1914. During his visit, he officially opened a new park in St. John’s and inspected the paramilitary groups that formed the basis of Newfoundland’s defence plan in the event of war, of just the sort that was on the horizon in July 1914.
As part of imperial defence preparations in the decade and a half before, the Newfoundland government had participated like all the parts of the British empire. At the 1909 Imperial Conference, Sir Edward Morris had committed officially to organize soldiers for local defence and potentially service in addition to the Royal Naval Reserve division created around the time of the Boer War at the turn of the century and maintained by the Newfoundland government at a cost of 3,000 pounds sterling annually ever since.
The Newfoundland force would draw its men from the paramilitary brigades like the Legion of Frontiersmen, the Armed Lads’ Brigade in Twillingate, King Edward brigade in Harbour Grace, and the religious groups like the Church Lads’ Brigade, the Catholic Cadet Corps, the Methodist Guards, and the Newfoundland Highlanders, representing the Presbyterian Church.
In the event, the British government signalled the imperial governments to adopted the precautionary stage of the country’s defence plan on July 29, 1914. Newfoundland did so. The Admiralty mobilized the Royal Navy the same day and on July 30, the governor in St. John’s formally forwarded a telegram to the commanding officer of the naval reserve division in St. John’s to “hold in readiness” for a call-out. That word came at 4:00 AM local time on August 2, in a message sent through official channels in the name of the secretary of state fro colonies (Harcourt) to the governors of colonies with naval reservists.
One of the great things about political campaigns is that the players have a chance to surprise observers. We saw that in the Liberal leadership as Cathy Bennett went from being a complete political novice to coming in third against two experienced competitors.
In the Conservative leadership race, we have three experienced politicians so there is none of the newbie growth potential.
That doesn’t mean that we haven’t seen some shifts in perception in the first couple of weeks.
In September 2008, four cabinet ministers went to Harbour Grace to announce that the provincial government was giving the company $8.0 million in public money, interest free.
It’s an interesting picture because within 12 months of the announcement, the two on the right – Taylor and Oram – would be gone from politics. Williams left in 2010, the year the provincial government started a “review” of the loan after the company cut the work force to 100. They never did add any jobs. Kennedy hung on the longest of the lot, but five years after his trip to the boot factory, Jerome was gone from politics as well.
After a couple of false starts over the past year, it looks like NTV has started posting episodes of Issues and Answers online.
That’s good news for political junkies. The half hour public affairs show airs Sundays at noon with a couple of rebroadcasts. Unfortunately, if you missed it or forgot to program the PVR - or before that the VCR – you were basically SOL.
If NTV keeps posting them online, more people will get a chance to see them.
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The Telegram’s Peter Jackson used the most recent JM paper on consumer electricity prices and Muskrat Falls as part of his Wednesday column.
Peter made some worthwhile observations, so head over and read the column if you haven’t already. That includes pointing out that current forecasts have electricity prices in Ontario and British Columbia rising by 42% and 45% by 2018.
“All these numbers are maddening,” writes Jackson, “both in terms of scale and in terms of variability between Nalcor and critics.”
Absolutely true.
A couple of years ago, Liberal leader Dwight Ball said the Liberals would use earnings from Muskrat Falls to lower electricity prices for consumers in this province.
The Conservatives dismissed the idea at the time.
Then a couple of weeks ago, with news the cost of Muskrat Falls continues to climb, Premier Tom Marshall told the province that he and his colleagues had adopted the idea of using revenues from Muskrat Falls to lower consumer prices as their own policy.
That’s not all of it. To understand the importance of Marshall’s comments fully you have to start at the beginning.
Cost over-runs on Muskrat Falls as well as other costs not included in previous calculations by Nalcor will likely increase current electricity prices by almost double their rate in 2011, according to a recent assessment.
JM, a professional engineer who has worked extensively in the construction of large engineering projects, totalled up revised project costs and other factors including:
JM estimates that any revenue from sales would only lower the price of Muskrat falls electricity by about three cents a kilowatt hour.
However, the reader should be reminded that the government of Newfoundland will be borrowing 1 Billion dollars to finance the equity contributions into the project. Assuming a 5% annual interest rate on the borrowed equity there would be an annual interest payment of 50 million dollars. What Nalcor put in one pocket, they take from the other.
Consumer electricity prices from Muskrat Falls
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If you are one of the political savants who thinks that dominating Twitter makes for a modern, inspired, and successful political leadership campaign, then say hello to Premier Steve Kent, right.
To understand the real Steve Kent and not the manufactured front he presents to the world these days, take a look at this 2007 post by Simon Lono back when he wrote Offal News.
There’s a great quote in it from Kent when he was thinking about a run at federal politics for the Alliance/Reform crowd. You’ll be struck by how familiar it is.
When you get over the willies, skip over to Uncle Gnarley. Des Sullivan notes that the “narrative” on Muskrat Falls is changing as the project goes along.
That’s it for the week. Enjoy the summer sunshine.
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Before the year is out, we will have yet another strategy from the provincial government.
We were supposed to have this one on July 1, however like pretty well everything associated with the current crowd running the place, it is a day late. The minister responsible for the strategy – Fairity O’Brien – says we will now have it some unspecified time in the fall. That will be after Fairity releases a document that tells us what the government heard during some sort of consultation process that they are almost as fond of as they are of strategy writing.
The thing will likely also be a dollar short, as well, if recent experience is any guide. You see this “population growth strategy” is actually the second kick at the cat for the provincial government. Their existing strategies aimed at dealing with some of the factors affecting population were all dismal failures.
By the end of the week, Premier Tom Marshall will be short at least two cabinet ministers.
Paul Davis quit as health minister on Wednesday and Steve Kent is expected to follow on Thursday as both vie for the party leadership.
On top of that he’s missing Joan Shea who quit last month.
Some think Tom will shuffle the cabinet. He could do that, except that he doesn’t really have much to shuffle with. On top of that, he’d also be stuffing people into cabinet who the new leader might not want to face as a cabinet minister in the middle of September.
Tom doesn’t have to shuffle his cabinet at all. This is the slow time of the year as Trevor Taylor laughingly put it or, to be more accurate, everything is on hold anyway while the party sorts out its leadership mess.
Therefore, Tom can rely on his table of alternate ministers, established by order in council at the last major shuffle in May. That’s the official list of substitutions to cover periods when the appointed minister of a department is out of town or incapacitated.
Paul Davis is gone. Between Susan Sullivan as first alternate and Sandy Collins as second, the job of health minister will get done. And if Susan goes, Sandy can get the job as stand in.
Over in municipal affairs, Fairity O’Brien will fill in.
And if Susan Sullivan jumps into the race – as she should given Paul Davis’ weak, amateurish launch on Wednesday - there’s someone to replace her, using the same table.
Pas de sweat.
If Tom needs to have someone fill in on a temporary basis other than the alternates table, he can do that using powers in the Executive Council Act and something called the Crown or Royal Prerogative. It takes a cabinet order but surely the crowd running the place can manage to do that, as they did in 2013, all without the show of a cabinet shuffle. It’s really just paper work after all.
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By the end of the week, the provincial Conservatives will have the leadership race they deliberately avoided the last time out. That’s the one that ended with the Coleman fiasco.
It will be different in at least two ways: first, there will actually be a race, in the sense that there will be three competitors. Second, unless someone shows up who no one has even whispered about yet, the race will be comprised entirely of party insiders.
Last time out, if you can cast your mind back three or four months, people like Steve Kent – who will launch his campaign on Thursday – insisted that the party needed a fresh face from outside the circle of people running the party from the inside.
Tread softly here! Go reverently and slow!
Let your soul go down upon its knees
And with bowed head, and heart abased strive hard
To grasp the future gain in the sore loss!
For not one foot of this dank sod but drank
Its surfeit of the blood of gallant men.
Who for their faith their hope – for life and liberty
Here made the sacrifice – here gave their lives
And gave right willingly – for you and me.-srbp-
Nalcor boss Ed Martin told everyone in the province last week that his pet project has increased in price by almost another billion dollars. It’s now more than $8.0 billion, when the 2010 price was $5.0 billion.
That wasn’t news. Martin and the provincial government knew that last December, as SRBP pointed out last December. We’ve known it since last year. Martin and the provincial government just refused to tell the people paying for the project about it when the people building it knew the costs.
Martin insists it is still cheapest. We know that isn’t true because Nalcor plans to buy cheaper electricity from elsewhere and import it here over the Maritime Link while charging local consumers for electricity that is far more expensive but that they aren’t getting.
Martin also said something to the effect that we are just paying ourselves for this project and the electricity anyway. That’s not true either.
We are paying everyone but ourselves.
$6.99 billion is the new cost estimate for the Muskrat Falls dam and the link to the island.
With that much money and with such a record of inaccurate forecasts, giving a cost estimate to two decimal places could only be a terribly cynical attempt at humour by the highly paid people running Nalcor.
Seriously.
Did Ed Martin, Gil Bennett and Dawn Dalley really think that people wouldn’t recognise the oldest and most transparent bit of retail psychology on the planet and think this project wouldn’t cost $7.0 billion?
No.
It’s almost $7.0 billion.
Anyway…
Tuesday’s video is available at parcnl.ca.
Your humble e-scribbler is Number 2 on June 25.
At the front end of the Number 1 video is Vaughn Hammond of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. he made some really solid comments about a problem some of his members have been running into since Bill 29. They used to rely on access to information in order to get information to bid on tenders. In a competitive industry, such as some of the suppliers Hammond represents, disclosing information helps get a better price for taxpayers.
If you want your SRBP fix this Wednesday morning check out the Privacy and Access Review Committee hearings at 11:00 AM.
They are streaming it live at parcnl.ca.
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If you are looking for some political reading over the summer, here are a few books worth checking out.
Tragedy in the Commons by Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan. Here’s the whole Random House blurb:
In Tragedy in the Commons, Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan, founders of the non-partisan think tank Samara, draw on an astonishing eighty exit interviews with former Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum to unearth surprising observations about the practice of politics in Canada.
Though Canada is at the top of international rankings of democracies, Canadians themselves increasingly don’t see politics as a way to solve society’s problems. Small wonder. In the news, they see grandstanding in the House of Commons and MPs pursuing agendas that don’t always make sense to the people who elected them.
You’ll likely hear a lot of talk from Conservatives over the next few weeks about their “grassroots.”
Trevor Taylor, for one mentioned them twice last week when talking about the aftermath of the Coleman fiasco. The Conservatives need a contest that will “mobilize” the grassroots, according to Taylor. They need a leader who can “connect with the grassroots.”
The only problem for Trevor is that the party doesn’t have any grassroots.
If you are needing a political fix this weekend you can get two of the better variety online.
David Cochrane is back from an extended absence and to celebrate, he’s clacked out a synopsis of recent going’s on in the Conservative leadership fiasco. He’s got all the details of stuff that’s been flying around town, right down to the story about how the victims of the Friday Night Massacre found their security passes to the building cut off while they were trying to move out that fateful Friday.
A decade ago, the offshore regulatory board reduced its estimate of the recoverable reserves in the Terra Nova field from 405 million barrels to 354 million barrels.
Danny Williams was trying to squeeze additional transfer payments out of the federal government in the guise of getting provincial oil royalties that the federal government supposedly took back.
The whole thing was a fraud of the first magnitude but hundreds of thousands of people in Newfoundland and Labrador fell for it.
Sometimes a comment is so profoundly revealing you just can’t let it slide by.
This one came from Milly Brown, the Premier’s communications director, in an exchange with Simon Lono on Twitter on Wednesday. And just so everyone knows up front, this is not from Milly’s personal account, if she has one. It’s a comment from Milly in her official capacity.
As your humble e-scribbler spent time on Tuesday finishing off a presentation to the ATIPPA inquiry next week (11 AM, 25 June), here are a couple of quickies you might find interesting:
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If you want to get a decent discussion of the Ontario election results and the way polling research tracked the campaign, take a look at a piece from The Star on Sunday.
The piece talks about different ways of conducting a poll – Internet panel, live calls or automated calls – and compares the results of each technique with the election outcome and with different polls conducted during the last week of the campaign.
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We’re shit at giving it, we’re shit at getting it, respecting it, promoting it. Criticism in Newfoundland is bad.
“Fundamentally, the [Conservative Party leadership] process works,” former Conservative cabinet minister Shawn Skinner said on CBC’s On Point last weekend. “It’s been proven in the past. The party would have been better served if there’d been more candidates, but it is what it is.”
It’s a variation on what Skinner said on the same program after he confirmed he wouldn’t run.
In itself, the statement is literally true: the process delivered a leader for the party.
But that’s about all it seemed to do.
The incredible story from Ireland about the remains of 800 babies and children found in a discarded septic tank caused your humble e-scribbler to think a bit about local history.
Then this post at the Monkey Cage put it in a bigger perspective.
How times change.
Last week, industry minister Susan Sullivan attended an announcement by Air Canada that they would be bringing back year-round direct flights between St. John’s and London. Starting in the fall, Air Canada will offer three direct flights a week to London. Next summer, they’ll offer daily service.
It’s great news for anyone who wants to travel to Europe for business or on holiday. For that matter, if you want to get anywhere to the East, having a flight to London is a bonus. It’s like having that daily shuttle to Newark if you want to go anywhere in the United States and further south.
At times like this, it seems like a million years ago that the same people who are running the province these days were engaged in a complete insane jihad against Air Canada for making a simple business decision.
Tom Marshall spent his last few hours ever as a member of the House of Assembly on Thursday, as the spring session drew to a close. Tom’s already handed in his notice and will be out of the Premier’s Office and politics around this time next month.
Marshall is decent fellow who brought sincerity, integrity, and dignity to the House and to the cabinet responsibilities he bore. He took a lot of praise from colleagues on both sides of the House on Thursday and Tom deserved every word. Tom’s short tenure as Premier began with some of the smartest moves the Conservatives have ever made.
It’s unfortunate that the end of his tenure has been marred by a series of unfortunate events. But in another sense, those events are typical of the history of the current administration.
Corporate Research Associates and the provincial Conservatives played up the change in government satisfaction in the release of CRA’s quarterly advertising poll on Wednesday.
But CRA’s satisfaction numbers don’t mean anything, as regular readers of this corner recall from last month. CRA doesn’t explore “satisfaction” to see what it means and, as you can see from the party choice numbers, voters don’t think it means much either. The Conservatives get high government satisfaction numbers but they still indicate they’d vote for another party by a wide margin if there was an election tomorrow.
Essentially the Conservatives today are in the same spot the Liberals were in before the 2003 election. That is, the same spot, with one difference: the Liberals were polling higher. That should send a shiver up the spine of a few Conservatives. Either that it would spur them to all sorts of imaginary crap like pretending that the Liberal vote is soft or that people are just waiting with bated breath for the real Coleman to emerge and unleash his “vision” on them.
Rather than fantasy, let’s see what the CRA numbers might tell us if we try to keep both feet on the ground.
John Crosbie, the elder statesmen of Conservatives in the province took a shot at Danny Williams for his continued interference in the internal affairs of the provincial Conservatives.
Danny blew a gasket and willingly gave interviews to every media outlet in town, thereby guaranteeing that the story that can only do even more damage to the provincial Conservatives would keep going for a day longer than the Conservatives needed.
Not to be outdone, Tweet minister Steve Kent called a couple of the local media outlets and claimed that his unique status in the Conservative leadership-race-that-never-was entitled him to refute Crosbie. Thus the story will drag on for yet another news cycle longer than the Conservatives really needed.
Every now and again, someone will talk about voter apathy.
Last week, Steve Kent was circulating the link to an article that claimed that youth engagement – getting young people more involved in the community and in politics – was a way of getting more people to vote at election time.
That’s what voter apathy is about, by the way: low voter turn-out at the polls. It’s a big issue in most of Europe and in North America. we’ll get back to it in a minute.
Kent was so keen on this article because he is working hard to become the youth engagement guru of Newfoundland and Labrador. He is especially proud of his first bill in the legislature – Bill 6 – that included a couple of clauses that say a town council can name people under the age of 18 years to positions called “youth representatives.”
The smart guy they could have had – but frigged over twice - told Canadian Press:
“The understanding of the [provincial political] climate isn’t as sophisticated as it should be for those who are working with Mr. Coleman on the strategic side.”
Without knowing what the smart guy said, one of the guys supporting Mr. Coleman said:
“I don’t think anybody ever dreamed in a million years that Frank would take the heat that he has taken over the past few months since he decided to run…”.
The ferry service between Newfoundland and Cape Breton is economically important to the province as a whole, but it’s especially sensitive for Port aux Basques.
Marine Atlantic announced a change in the summer ferry schedule on Thursday. The company will reduce the number of crossings daily and put one of its ferries on stand-by in the event they need it.
This isn’t the schedule the company announced in February for its busiest season of the year but, as the company spokesperson put it in this media interviews, their original projections turned out to be high. As a result, the company has reduced the number of schedules crossings while keeping the option of adding capacity if bookings pick up.
The Telegram’s James McLeod started a story that appeared on 26 May with the following sentence:
Premier-designate Frank Coleman says he wants to run a premier’s office with fewer people, and he’s starting that already — six weeks before he becomes premier.
What neither McLeod, nor his editors, nor anyone else in the province’s news media seemed to wonder is how Coleman did that. They’ve all treated events last Friday evening as normal. They’ve reported it as routine.
According to NTV’s Mike Connors Frank Coleman said that he and Tom Marshall agreed to Friday’s events. That is, they both agreed to sack all but a couple of Tom’s staff members and replace them gradually with people of Coleman’s choosing.
For his part, Tom Marshall insists that he appointed Coleman’s people and that there is only one Premier in the province. That’s all beside the point, though, as Marshall well knows.
Liberal leader Dwight Ball and Conservative leader-designate Frank Coleman delivered speeches in St. John’s last week and you couldn’t have scripted more startling contrasts.
Ball delivered a speech at an event that reflected his party’s standing in the polls: more than 500 people who paid $500 a head to attend.
Coleman spoke to a small meeting of the St. John’s Rotary Club where the audience paid a few dollars to the Club.
Thanks to the Telegram’s James McLeod, you can compare the two speeches. Since James posted the speeches and Coleman’s scrum to youtube, we’ll also give you those links.
Take the time to listen to the speeches yourself, but here are some observations about the pair of them.
From the industry association representing companies that provide sureties and other bonds, released May 26, 2014:
News Release
For Immediate Release: May 26, 2014
Recent remarks by Nick McGrath, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure for Newfoundland and Labrador about the use of surety bonds on public projects are completely preposterous. So says Steve Ness, the President of the Surety Association of Canada.
“Mr. McGrath clearly doesn’t understand surety bonds; nor does he comprehend how they work to protect public construction buyers from serious losses.” said Ness. His comments were made in response to a statement made by Minister McGrath following the ministry’s decision to release Humber Valley Paving from its obligations to complete an unfinished project without making a claim on its performance surety bond. The government instead opted to see to the completion itself and has now retendered the uncompleted portion of the project. In explaining this controversial decision, McGrath stated: "If I had called in the bonds, I would not have got the job done on time and on budget," [sic (comma in original)]
Frank Coleman recorded CBC’s On Point with Peter Cowan on Thursday or Friday afternoon.
During the show, Coleman acknowledged that he had a personal financial interest in a decision by transport minister Nick McGrath to let Humber Valley Paving out of a contract without calling the performances bonds associated with the project. Coleman’s son – connected to the company at the time - negotiated with department officials on behalf of the company.
Auditor General Terry Paddon is currently investigating the contract decision based on a request from Premier Tom Marshall.
Whether McGrath should have called the bonds is another question. But Coleman told CBC that he had personally guaranteed the bonds. As a result, he would have been personally on the hook for the bond despite the fact he had sold his interest in Humber Valley Paving three days before his son contacted the department about the contract.
Whether McGrath would have called the bonds or should have is another matter.
Coleman recorded the show well before it aired. But what happened on Friday evening caught everyone by surprise.
Whatever is going on in the Premier’s Office these days, it isn’t an orderly and organized transition from one premier to another.
That’s certain.
Every transition from one premier to another since 1949 - whether it involved a change of party or not - has happened in a matter of a few days or at most a couple of weeks. Your humble e-scribbler was directly involved in two of them and is familiar with most of the rest.
News on Friday that Tom Marshall had fired all but two of his staff doesn’t look like any transition anyone has ever seen.
For those who missed it, here’s the podcast from the Fisheries Broadcast for May 22, complete with your humble e-scribbler talking about politics and the fishery.
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If you want to get a sense of how the New Democratic Party convention actually ran last weekend, take a few minutes and listen to Tony Adey’s interview on CBC’s Corner Brook Morning Show.
Adey attended the convention but announced afterward that he was leaving the party. Adey believes that the convention was stacked and that more New Democrats want to see major changes in the party than the convention vote suggested.
He noted that the chair of the meeting wouldn’t allow debate on the motion about whether or not hold a leadership convention. For all that, they still had to spend 45 minutes answering questions as many of the delegates couldn’t tell if a yes vote would mean the party wouldn’t have a leadership review. Adey also said there was a discrepancy between the number in the room for the vote and the tally of ballots. More people voted, apparently, than were officially in the room.
The most forceful point Adey made in the speech is that Lorraine Michael believes she can be Premier while many people in the party believe that Lorraine has to go so that the party can attract new candidates and move forward.
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Is anyone else having trouble trying to figure out what all the fuss is about Cathy Bennett, Nalcor, and conflict of interest?
Seriously.
Here’s the story in a nutshell.
According to New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael, the party convention this past weekend was “a room of people who are saying, 'we're new, we're moving forward.'" [quote via CBC]
Would that merely saying the words made it so.
The reality is that the party isn’t new. They aren’t moving forward either, except in the sense that time moves only in one direction and the province’s New Democrats are willing to watch the clock.
The Conference Board of Canada released a report last week that assessed economic performance in each of the provinces in Canada.
“The resource-driven economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador can boast A+ grades for their economic performance,” read the first sentence of the news release accompanying the report, titled How Canada Performs: Economy.
Amazing stuff and more than a few people - most likely provincial Conservatives – stuck their chest out in pride. They should have read the big print in the report. The first sentence is more than a wee bit misleading.
Senator Fabian Manning says that the 2008 Anything but Conservative campaign is stilling hurting the province in dealing with the federal government.
“There's no doubt in my mind that the ABC campaign,” Manning told CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast,” [that] we pay a price for that, and people can shrug it off and say, 'That's just an excuse,' but I've been around this game too long now to not know that without a voice here at the table we are at a major disadvantage." [via CBC]
The disadvantage Manning referred to was the lack of a regional minister in the current cabinet who represents a riding in Newfoundland and Labrador. Some people might be tempted to dismiss Manning’s comments at sour grapes. After all, the ABC campaign cost Manning not only his seat in the House but also his chance for a seat in cabinet.
On that point, though, Manning is right. The regional minister is a key player in Ottawa and the province has undoubtedly suffered to one degree another by not having such an influential voice at the federal cabinet table.
Frecker Drive is a well-designed residential street in the west end of St. John’s. The street is wide: you can park cars on either side and still have space left for two cars to pass abreast easily along its entire length.
This is a residential street. As you might imagine, it has its fair share of cars and trucks as well as the odd bicycle. They’ve been able to live together safely on the street because it is wide and the traffic flow is relatively light.
When the city planners decided to bring bicycle lanes to the City of St. John’s a couple of years ago, they settled on Frecker Drive. They banned parking from one side of the street. And on both sides of the street they marked out two bi-directional bicycle lanes for the full length of the avenue.
In light of the controversy about Humber Valley Paving, here are some of the Conservative promises made in 2003 about contracts and public tendering, controls on political donations, special committees of the legislature, and disclosure of lobbying activities.
Each of them bears on the HVP tendering controversy in one way or another. You humble e-scribbler has highlighted some of the sentences in bold because they contrast so starkly with that the Conservatives did once they got into office.
Note the bit about revising the Public Tender Act. The Conservatives promised it in 2003. They gave notice that they planned to introduce a new public tendering law in the spring 2012 session of the legislature. And then it disappeared. They promised campaign finance reform and did nothing once in office.
Enjoy!
Part of the problem the folks at Nalcor have had in trying to build support for on Muskrat Falls is that they never explain things completely, in plain English.
The result is that they look like they are hiding something .That is, they look like they are not being candid or sincere. They often come across as if they are not telling you the whole story.
Take as a fine example, the war of words that is erupting between Nalcor board chair Ken Marshall on the one hand and David Vardy and Ron Penney on the other. Marshall had a lengthy op-ed piece one Saturday, Vardy and Penney had a rebuttal on April 19 and now Marshall is back again.
Frank Coleman’s idea for change in Newfoundland and Labrador is to keep everything the way it is.
As CBC reported in March, “Coleman said one of his priorities if he assumed the role of premier would be to maintain the economic momentum created by the Tories.”
He might even want to roll back the clock a bit, too, on some things.
But on economic policy, Coleman is firmly committed to the Conservative plan to use public money to subsidize private sector businesses.
Nalcor’s effort to have local taxpayers subsidize electricity exports to Massachusetts came up in the House of Assembly on Thursday.
Well, sort of came up.
New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael asked a couple of lame questions and got – not surprisingly - a few equally lame answers.
Here they are, in their entirety.
Farley Mowat passed away on May 7, 2014, aged 92.
The prolific Canadian writer and environmentalist was just shy of his 93rd birthday on May 12.
Mowat wrote about his experiences in three books: The regiment (1955), And no birds sang (1979), and My father’s son (1993).
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If nothing else, the controversy over the sweet heart deal the provincial Conservatives cut with Frank Coleman’s son at Humber Valley Paving should dispel the fairy tale that Coleman and his family are political outsiders.
They are very much the quintessential political insiders.
Transportation minister Nick McGrath admitted to reporters on Tuesday that he’d never been involved in a negotiation before about road paving contracts like the one with Gene Coleman for Humber Valley Paving.
That takes juice. In itself, that should give an idea as to why the deal stands out in people’s minds and why the Coleman influence is obviously so strong. The Coleman influence is so strong, in fact, that it clouds people’s minds.
[In a hole with a jack-hammer update at bottom]
The controversy around Humber Valley Paving got worse for the provincial Conservatives on Monday as transportation minister Nick McGrath confirmed that he actually released $19 million in performance and goods bond’s supplied by the paving company despite the fact they failed to complete the tender as original awarded.
But that’s not all.
Put McGrath’s comments in the House on Monday together with media reports last week and you have a pretty clear picture of the pretty sweet deal McGrath cut with HVP.
