Does anyone really take Wade Locke seriously anymore?
Really?
Do they?
Go back to last October to see why.
The next time reporters have Wade on camera, give him a spoon to bend with his psychic ability.
Wade might just be able to do it. God knows he sure can’t figure out energy pricing and sound economic policy..
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Most of you have probably never heard of a fellow named Alonzo John Gallishaw.
John Gallishaw is best remembered in his native land for his brief service in the Newfoundland regiment during the Great War. Wounded at Gallipoli, Gallishaw was invalided out of service and eventually went back to the United States. Born in St. John’s in 1890, Gallishaw had been in the United States at the time war broke out. He was studying English at Harvard University, of all places.
He took up a teaching appointment and after the Americans entered the war, Gallishaw enlisted in the American Army in January 1918. He took a commission and went to France as part of the American expeditionary force That was Gallishaw’s hat-trick since he had enlisted briefly in the Canadian army on the war to Newfoundland in 1915.
A couple of years after his war with one prime minister, Danny Williams was locked in another war with another federal first minister.
Williams was demanding compensation for yet another supposed injustice.
“What I said before and I said going in, this is about principles,” Williams told reporters in November 2007 “but it's also about money as well. At the end of the day, the promise and the principle converts to cash for the bottom line ….”
The pattern set in 2004 was repeating itself.
The story of the 2004 war with Ottawa is the story of disconnects, mismatches, incongruities, of things that just didn't add up.
October 2004 is a good example. In the middle of the month, Loyola Sullivan, the provincial lead negotiator, went to Ottawa for a meeting with federal finance minister, Ralph Goodale. he headed the negotiations for the federal government in the effort to find a draft agreement.
Sullivan told reporters the chances of a deal looked good. The two governments were talking about something that would last eight years and bring the provincial government between $1.4 and $2.0 billion depending on the price of oil.
At exactly the same time, Premier Danny Williams was telling reporters the provincial position had not changed. "There are no movements from the government of Newfoundland and Labrador,” Williams told Rob Antle of the Telegram on October 16. “There's no doubt about.that. We have no intention of moving.”
On June 4, 2004, Danny Williams delivered a keynote speech to delegates at the oil and gas conference organized annual by the association that represented offshore service and supply companies.
“Newfoundlanders and Labradorians should not support any candidate or any party in the upcoming federal election” he said, “that does not clearly and unequivocally provide us with a commitment to keep 100 per cent of our provincial revenues under the Atlantic Accord.”
The day after Williams’ speech, Martin was in St. John’s as part of his election tour of Eastern Canada. Martin told the CBC that in an early morning conversation with Williams, “I have made it very clear that the proposal that he has put forth is a proposal that we accept."
New Democratic party candidate Linda McQuaig caused a bit of a stir in the first week of the federal election campaign when she said that in order to meet the national carbon emission reduction targets, we’d likely have to leave most of the oil sands oil in the ground, undeveloped.
Writing in the Toronto Star on Tuesday, Seth Klein of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said the reaction to what he called McQuaig’s “innocuous and true statement” is just further evidence that “our politics do not allow for serious — and truly honest — discussion of the most pressing issues of our time.”
Klein then decries the fact that all sorts of politicians from all sorts of parties are not embracing all sorts of policies that Klein thinks are not just good ideas but absolutely correct ones. Therefore, our politics is bad.
Well, it isn’t actually.
Labrador economy must diversify to survive, say opposition parties.
There is a CBC headline to conjure with.
Pure political magic for the two parties promising something different from what has gone on before.
Liberal leader Dwight Ball told CBC that we “must look at the other advantages that we would have available to us, things like power.”
"This government talks a lot about the export of power. I want to talk about using that power as a competitive advantage for us."
Lorraine Michael, for the New Democratic Party, said that "Government has to have long term plans that will deal with helping communities and workers when the issues arise." Michael thinks that we have been too dependent on private sector corporations in Labrador.
No one has ever heard those ideas before
The Telegram has been running a series this week on the number of communities in the province where people can’t drink the water supplied by their local municipality.
Regular readers will know the issue as it first came up here in 2009, in 2011, and in 2013.
A couple of years ago, CBC was highlighting the problem. Your humble e-scribbler reminded the universe that giving people water fit to drink was one of those fundamental commitments the Conservatives made to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2003.
And it was one of those fundamental commitments that they failed utterly and completely to honour.
There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept, their leader used to say.
He was absolutely right.
Not so very long ago, provincial Conservatives were crowing about how they would be running all sorts of mining projects in Labrador using electricity from Muskrat Falls.
These days, the word from Labrador isn’t all that good. One mine is closed and, on Tuesday, things looked bad both for the major mine operating in western Labrador and the KAMI project.
No one can take an glee in the bad news. What we should do is remember that the assumptions on which the Conservatives spent heavily over the past decade were completely inconsistent with about a century and a half of experience with resource extraction industries years in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Rather than learn from our considerable, collective experience, the Conservatives arrogantly assumed they alone knew better than everyone else.
They didn’t.
We all get to pay the price.
Oh joy.
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It should be.
Blake examines:
Resettlement gets two chapters, one before 1965 and one for the period afterward. Likewise, offshore oil and gas gets two chapters, the second focussing on the period between 1979 and 1985.
Blake examines the relationship between the province and the federal government in the context of Canadian federalism and, specifically, through the lens of executive federalism. That is, he frames the discussion as one focussed primarily on the relationship between the individual first ministers. There are sound reasons for doing this. Blake describes his reasons for doing so and puts the book in a general theoretical framework in a crisply written introduction.
Cast your mind back to April 2007
In his ongoing penchant for fighting with everyone and for small-mindedness, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams decides he will only refer to the new Prime Minister as “Steve”.
Williams made no bones about the fact his decision was very personal and intended to be insulting.
The first English debate is over.
Here are some quick observations to help you cut through the huge amount of noise coming from the conventional media.
Debate host Paul Wells showed why he’s one of the best political journalists in the country. Read his opening column on the campaign, in case you missed it.
As for the party leaders, here it is in the short form:
Stephen Harper
Looked and performed like Stephen Harper, the guy who has been prime minister for the past decade.
His weak spot was the senate. He wasn’t clear on the party policy. When discussing who controls senators, Harper admitted his gang are puppets. You can say the same thing of the senate that Harper said of the Bloc-NDP position on a sovereign Quebec: who the frack wants to bring THAT up again?
Other than that, steady as she goes.
What was most remarkable about the PM was that he was the same old steady-as-she-goes guy. For his folks, that is reassuring. For his opponents, that’s a bad thing since it means none of them managed to get a knife edge under his armour and expose a bit of flesh to chew on.
Thomas Mulcair
Three words: smug, uncomfortable, robotic.
Having not watched much of Mulcair in the House, your humble e-scribbler now understands that conventional media journalists who praise his sharp debating skills or his strong style are on something.
Not onto something.
On something.
Seriously.
Weak moment: What’s your number?
The alliance with Bloc supporters is Mulcair’s greatest liability. Both Trudeau and Harper took turns savaging the Bloc-NDP leader and he handled all of it badly. They will return to this again and again in English Canada. Mulcair cannot run from it, as much as he clearly wants to. Without that huge base in Quebec, Mulcair is just another small party leader with a beard.
To go with that strategic problem, you had a really clear tactical blunder: Whoever told Tom to recite “What’s your number?” should be shot. It made him look condescending, and that’s the most generous thing you could say about it. The fact Mulcair set Trudeau up for his highly quotable riposte mirrored the way the NDP strategy is playing neatly into the federal Conservative agenda.
Funny moment: when he slipped in the line about standing with Jack Layton. It looked scripted and desperate at the same time. Expect to see Mulcair ditch his own wife for campaign appearances with Olivia Chow by his side and lots more references to Layton, the Dipper Ronald Reagan.
Mulcair’s strongest moments were on the economy, which is also where Harper was the weakest. Reciting economic stats. Nerds got wood. No one else did. This could have been the spot where Mulcair shone.
Could have been.
Elizabeth May
Give her some rest and you have by far the strongest performance of the night, overall. May spoke clearly, intelligently, and succinctly about her party position. She did the same when going at the other four over theirs.
Weakness: prefacing every comment with “all due respect”.
At best, it was tedious. At worst, it was transparently passive aggressive.
Given Mulcair’s evident discomfort and May’s strong performance, don’t be surprised if the Bloc-NDP start shying away from other debates. Bloc-NDP support is notoriously soft. The Greens could bleed NDP support in the west. If May performs like this again and again, that could erode the Dipper position in some close races. They’ll want to hide their man away and let him only appear in tightly scripted moments as they did on opening day of the formal campaign.
Justin Trudeau
He showed up with his pants on, the right way around.
The Conservatives lowered expectations of Trudeau to the point that his performance will surely help change perceptions of him in key ridings. The Cons might want to rethink that strategy.
Weak point: the closer. Ugh. Did he end? or wait. There are a couple of words I forgot. Let’s. stumble.
Strong point: my number is nine.
A scripted line drilled into the candidate’s head. The boys and girls in the Grit backroom did their oppo in spades or have a spy in the Dipper debate camp. They anticipated the NDP line and gave Justin a rejoinder he delivered with consummate skill. It was probably the only quotable moment of the night in a debate that was surprisingly devoid of the quotable one-liners we are used to.
Trudeau isn’t out of the woods on credibility yet but his debate performance was a step in the right direction.
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Pierre Karl Peladeau won’t say yes or no to development of Old Harry, according to ledevoir.com.
Le Devoir interviewed the Parti Quebecois leader during a recent visit to the Magdalen Islands. Peladeau refused to endorse a moratorium on development, a move favoured by the islands fishermen who are concerned about the potential economic and environmental damage that could result from a major oil spill. Peladeau said the issue of a moratorium needed more study.
Peladeau insisted, however, that any decisions about Old Harry belonged solely to Quebec. He criticised the recent introduction of a bill in the National Assembly that would enable Quebec to establish a joint management board like the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.
“If the Gulf is in federal jurisdiction,” Peladeau told Le Devoir, “recall that it is Ottawa that sets fish quotas. In an independent country, the question would not arise.”
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Updated
If you want to get a really good summary of the contending election strategies at this early stage of the federal campaign, read Evan Solomon’s piece at macleans.ca.
It’s simple, concise, and – from the feel of it – informed by conversations with people who know what is going on. That sets Solomon apart from a lot of media types who write “analysis” pieces.
The Conservatives strategy has been to drive Trudeau’s numbers down so that Mulcair rises. So far so good. While Solomon considers this a risky strategy for Harper, all you have to do is look at the New Democrats to see it could be a very effective idea.
It’s one of those persistent comments.
You don’t hear it or see it every day but, once in a while it comes back.
Like in 2013 . Some guy used the discussion about access to in formation – specifically rescinding Bill 29 – to wonder if we might be able to rescind the supposedly anti-democratic referendum on denominational education.
That’s actually the most common term in that letter to the editor:
On the first working day during August, 2015, the provincial government issued four news releases.
Two announced funding from the spring budget.
The other two warned reporters of two more funding announcements to be made on the second working day in August.
Corporate Research Associates will be in the field very soon.
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Anyone surprised by the news isn;t paying any attention to local politics at all.
Ross Wiseman has his pension. It cannot get any fatter. He likely won’t get re-elected in the November general election and even if he does, Wiseman has no interest in sitting on the opposition benches now that he has been in government.
15 years is long enough, sez Ross, so he won’t be running in the next election.
For those who are shocked and for the entertainment of the rest here are three moments from Ross’ political life over the past 15 years.
There are plenty of signs that the federal Conservatives will start the official campaign for the fall election earlier than scheduled. Earlier being as soon as Monday, rather than the usual federal campaign period of five or six weeks before polling day on October 19.
You’ve got to call it the official campaign because the fixed election date has meant that parties engage in an unofficial campaign months before the official campaign starts. All the Conservatives will do – if they drop the writ on Monday – is trigger some particular election rules and get the open warfare started a bit earlier than usual.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the early federal election will have a significant impact on the provincial election due in November. We are not talking about the strain on campaign volunteers. We are talking about public attention and money.
People thought that meant the Tories would do away with the practice of stuffing people into fat government jobs based solely on their political connections.
And so the Conservatives proved they were different by appointing failed candidate Joan Cleary to run the Bull Arm Corporation. Cleary had absolutely no relevant experience, but they owed her some pork and so she got the high-paid job.
In the late 1990s, the provincial government faced some tough financial times. The debt and the size of the economy were the same number. The government went through the usual rounds of layoffs and cuts, and the sorts of things they needed to keep the budget under control.
One of the things government did to help deal with the financial state was to get rid of a batch of provincial parks that it had built up since the development of the provincial roads system in the 1960s. They weren’t parks in the sense of the national systems in Canada or the United States. They were campgrounds and picnic sites.
In 1997, they billed the 21 sites as “business opportunities” for private sector or local not-for-profit groups. By the end of the year, they’d manage to get rid of the lot. “These parks were made available to the private sector, tourism minister Sandra Kelly told the House of Assembly, “because they offered viable business opportunities for rural Newfoundland. Government also realized that it no longer needed to play as large a role in the recreational camping industry as it once had in the 1970s.”
Recreational camping industry.
Heading into an election and with the three major federal parties within five or six points of each other in the opinion polls, the Prime Minister has decided that this is the time to talk about reforming the senate.
Stephen Harper said last week that he will not make any more appointments to the senate. His plan is to create a crisis and then either reform the senate or abolish it in the ensuing melee among and with the provincial premiers.
The New Democrats are flattered. They have already advocated abolishing the senate altogether. This is a popular idea in Quebec where the NDP are threatened by the resurgence of the Bloc Quebecois. The NDP won its current status as official opposition in 2011 with a surprising haul of seats in the province as the Bloc vote collapsed and its supporters looked for a politically friendly home.
The sovereignists found a welcome embrace from the NDP. To the extent that anyone else in the country thinks about the senate, it is likely only as the object of derision given the recent scandals over spending. Few have thought through the implication of the NDP plan. In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, it would cut in half the province’s representation in Ottawa.
For some time now, Nalcor has needed an extra line from Bay d’Espoir to increase the capacity across the Isthmus of Avalon.
They just kept finding excuses not to install it.
In January 2014, Nalcor chief executive Ed Martin told CBC’s Ted Blades that the line would be the most expensive option with additional generation on the Avalon being more cost-effective. Nalcor’s analysis, according to Martin, showed there was no justification for the extra line.
From the Financial Post, Tom Adams and Ed Hollett take a look at three issues that will hold up any development of Gull Island:
While Gull Island might have a modest edge over Muskrat Falls’ cost per unit of production due to its greater size and less challenging local geology, it’s highly doubtful that Nalcor would be able to offer Gull Island electricity at Ontario prices that are remotely competitive. That is, not without massive subsidies from somewhere.
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:
If nothing else, media coverage about energy talks between Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador shows just how much people don’t know about what is going on in the country.
Not a crowd for half measures, the National Post ran a story on Monday morning that was rife with basic factual mistakes. They even started the piece with a statement that had two facts in it, both of which were simply not true.
“Ontario is the latest customer to line up to purchase Newfoundland and Labrador’s growing supply of hydroelectricity…”
Ontario and the faltering Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador are talking about the possibility of developing Gull Island to supply Ontario with renewable energy.
CBC’s online story on Monday said exactly that:
Ontario eyeing Lower Churchill hydroelectric power from Labrador.
But if you listen to what grim-faced energy minister Derrick Dalley said to CBC’s David Cochrane during the supper hour news on Monday, there is a lot less to the announcement than first appeared.
Black women in the United States are twice as likely to die as a result of complications of pregnancy and childbirth as are white and Hispanic Americans, according to new research. The story turned up in The Economist over the weekend.
But there’s more.
The United States is one of only eight countries globally to see its maternal mortality rate head up in decade 2003 to 2013..”American women are now more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as their counterparts in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany or Japan,” according to The Economist.. The overall American rate of maternal death is 18.5 for every 100,000 live births.
Seven companies in Newfoundland and Labrador have reached a deal with Elections Canada in the Penashue illegal contributions case.
According to Canadian Press, the companies have reached an agreement with Elections Canada in which the companies admit to making illegal contributions and promise not to do so again.
“Executives of Air Labrador Ltd., Dee-Max Innu Tautshuap Ltd., Innu-Chiasson Construction Ltd., Kakatshu Construction Ltd., Labrador Sales Ltd. and N.E. Parrot Surveys Ltd. admit they directed their companies to donate $1,000 each to Penashue’s campaign.
The CEO of Pennecon Ltd. [the seventh company] admits that six of his company’s officers were involved in sending Penashue’s campaign a $5,500 corporate cheque.”
Federal election finance laws prohibit corporations from making political donations.
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Politicians help out with each other’s election campaigns all the time.
There’s nothing unusual for a municipal politician to work on a provincial or federal campaign or for a federal politician to help a provincial colleague. Sometimes the one politician will work as the campaign manager for another.
Usually, the politicians don;t broadcast the fact. There are many reason s for this. Not the least of the reasons is that the campaign is about the person seeking election, not the staffer, regardless of the fact that the staffer might be well-known publicly in his or her own right.
That’s one reason why it is so odd for Conservative Jonathan Galgay to be so vocal and public about the fact that Liberal candidate Paul Antle has taken Galgay on as his campaign manager.
All the country’s provincial and territorial leaders – except for Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia – are in Newfoundland and Labrador this week for their annual conference.
What an opportunity for Paul Davis in an election year. He gets to show himself off looking all leader-like and premieral or whatever the word is for it.
The first day of the meeting the premiers and territorial leaders discussed aboriginal issues in Goose Bay. In the afternoon, Davis laid on an all-expense-paid trip to the super exciting megaproject at Muskrat Falls.
And then everything went horribly wrong.
After days of intense talks, the Europeans apparently have finally reached a final deal to help Greece out of its latest financial misery.
Greece is broke. With a gross domestic product of about US$238 billion, the country had a government debt of about US$346 billion. Some of the country’s banks have very low reserves of cash. People have already made a rush and withdrawn their money from them. This has forced the government to impose a tight limit on withdrawals in order to avoid a bank collapse of the type that hit Newfoundland in 1894.
Under the new deal, the European Union will place officials in key parts of the Greek government in order to ensure that the Greeks actually implement reforms that are part of the bail-out deal.
It’s a tough response, but then again the Greeks are in a tough economic spot. The third tough spot, since 2009. For all that, though, there are people around the world who believe the whole problem is imaginary. They believe that something called “austerity” is the real culprit. If you just got rid of it, so this way of thinking goes, the Greeks could go back to the way things used to be.
Unnamed Conservative “insiders” have been talking about the Ches Crosbie nomination fiasco as if it was a rejection of a new Tory Jesus or something.
The way they talk you’d think people are waiting breathlessly for the pictures on Jane Crosbie’s Twitter feed of young Ches taking his first steps across Virginia Lake, just as his father and grandfather did at his tender age without getting so much as a bunion moistened.
Some of these nameless Conservatives - to use the words from the CBC story – .”believe Ches Crosbie could have raised at least $100,000 by now for his run in Avalon. Many of those donors will now sit on their wallets rather than give cash to another candidate.”
Now that’s an interesting claim.
Nameless Conservative Party insiders predict that without Ches Crosbie as a candidate, the federal Conservative party will be crippled in Newfoundland and Labrador in the next election.
Supposedly Ches could have raised $100,000 dollars already. But without Ches, they won’t raise a penny. Volunteers will stay home, too.
But here’s the thing:
CBC’s story on Thursday is essentially more of the same completely preposterous Ches-the-Saviour-of-the-Conservative-Nation fairy tale that John and Jane Crosbie have been shovelling since Canada Day.
Mostly, Ball said, the aim is to have a “grassroots” summer of meeting with people and talking about the issues that affect the province — and talking about how the current government is letting people down. [Telegram]Mostly, the tour will be about real consultation.
The public utilities board asked Liberty Consulting to review Hydro’s decisions in 11 projects.
Hydro is looking for a rate increase. The board wanted to make sure the increase was justified.
Of the 11 projects, the consultant found:
“Liberty found that the costs that Hydro could have avoided in the absence of the instances of imprudence found by Liberty were:
With that sort of report, you just know that Nalcor has just gotten everything exactly right at Muskrat Falls.
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If you take John Crosbie’s version at face value, the Conservative Party rejected his son Ches as a candidate for the party in Avalon because of the intervention of David Wells.
Wells, the son of retired justice Robert Wells, is a senator from Newfoundland and Labrador. He is also an influential Conservative, the sort of fellow who normally goes about his business largely out of the public spotlight. .
Thanks to Crosbie, Wells is in the public eye. According to Crosbie, Wells didn’t “want Ches to be elected as an MP in the district of Avalon or any federal district because he would be too independent-minded and [Wells] wouldn't be in control as he has been now for a couple of years of most of the transactions between Newfoundland and the federal government.”
What the venerable Conservative was doing with that accusation was telling us less about the specific events that led to Ches’ rejection and more about a bigger story behind the scenes in Conservative politics.
The reports you will likely read in the conventional media all peg the Muskrat Falls project as behind schedule.
That’s what the latest project update from the provincial government and Nalcor says.
The media reports are also citing an overall number that has the project modestly off schedule.
You need to look at the whole report.
Every story told thus far about Ches Crosbie and the riding in Avalon has the unmistakeable odour of bullshit about it.
The latest twist, namely that Senator David Wells was scuttling a potential rival as The Biggest Conservative in Newfoundland and Labrador, is a bit more in the realm of plausible but it still doesn’t quite ring true.
Jihad against people who dissed Harper?
It is possible that, in the process of "remembering," we may be in danger of forgetting the real aspirations of the men of 1916 when we gather on Memorial Day tomorrow.Sobering though it may have been, Cadigan had no trouble using the corpses at Beaumont Hamel for his own purpose and that is where we begin.
Two-thirds of respondents to the most recent Abacus-VOCM News poll said they believed the Liberal Party will win the next provincial general election.
That’s an important question because recent American research suggests it is a good indication of the actual vote result than the traditional “which party will you vote for?” question.
There’s another reason why this question is important. Look at the contrast between NDP and Conservative supporters. More than half of New Democratic supporters think the Liberals will win.
Only 28% of Dippers think their own party will win the next election. A majority of provincial Conservatives think the Tories will win. But get this: 37% of Tories think the Grits will come out on top.
People who think there is some kind of NDP wave about sweep the universe can think again.
Rex Hillier: the first political victim of the bill that redrew the political map in Newfoundland.
Simple story.
Easy peasey.
And complete crap.
Two different polls from two different pollsters using two different polling methods have shown basically the same thing: the New Democrats and Conservatives are duking it out for second place, both of whom remain well behind the Liberals who hold a massive lead in provincial politics.
Corporate Research Associates (May) showed the Conservatives still slightly ahead of the New Democrats. Abacus Data’s most recent poll for VOCM shows the New Democrats slightly ahead.
Abacus’ David Coletto described the NDP jump as “rare”, but that’s not really the case.
Steve Porter made history on Thursday night.
He defeated an incumbent in the House of Assembly - Rex Hillier - in a party nomination fight. This doesn’t happen very often, mostly because political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador have seldom held nomination contests at the district level involving incumbents.
That isn’t a function of the lack of interest among prospective politicians. It’s just been the practice to grant incumbents a lock on the district once they win the nomination the first time. That’s one of the reasons why local politics can’t really be considered to be highly competitive. The parties restrict the opportunities for challengers to enter the fray.
Porter tried for the nomination before and lost to Hillier in a squeaker. He didn’t put together a strong get-out-the-vote operation the last time and wanted to give it another go. This time around Porter had some help from experienced campaigners. It made a difference.
Aside from the specifics of this particular situation, contested nominations are an important way of refreshing a political party. The competition keeps everyone on their toes.
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First, we have the Conservative Party. 
Second, we have the Liberal Party.
Third, and last, is the New Democratic Party.
"They are interested. They saw the quality of .my crab and they asked me how they could do to access other crab like that. I replied that the best way would be to open a factory in the Acadian Peninsula. Sure, between showing interest and actually doing it, there still has work to do, but at least they can learn," he said.
This pretty picture shows a very ugly problem.
All that space in between those two lines is debt. It is either borrowing from the banks and other lenders or it is borrowing from ourselves through spending all our one-time oil money. If the government spends as they indicated in the budget, about two thirds of that gap on the far right is borrowing from the banks. One third is from oil money.
Just for a bit of fun, let’s project ahead into the future a bit to see what might happen. We’ll use the oil price projections the government used. And we’ll use the most recent oil production figures from the offshore board. You might be surprised at the results.
Not that we didn’t know the provincial government had already granted exemptions to its supposedly sacred minimum fish processing requirements, but CBC this week gave us an insight into just how often the government has waived the MPRs.
In 2010, the provincial government approved 11t exemptions out of 19 requests. In the last six months of 2014 alone, it approved 27 out of 29 requests.
That’s quite a jump.
The wild spurt of exemptions came at exactly the same time - ironically enough - that Premier Paul Davis was insisting that MPRs were an essential part of the government’s efforts to keep fish processing jobs in the province.
They were so important that he and his colleagues would only give them up for a $280 million slush fund of federal cash controlled by the provincial government.
The latest case of the Premier and one of his ministers saying different things can’t be put down to brain farts.
You also cannot dismiss this because fisheries minister Vaughan Granter can’t speak in short spurts or whatever the heck that line was from last weekend’s On Point.
This one is a case of two cabinet ministers saying two different things.
Don Mills says people in Newfoundland and Labrador have a false impression of the state of the provincial economy.
Wade Locke says Mills is full of it.
One of them included a slide showing projected offshore oil production. (right)
You can hear that pretty clearly in the most recent episode of On Point. The political panel talked about a couple of cock-ups by the Conservatives last week.
Taking a lesson he learned from Reform Conservative turned Grit turned provincial Conservative Steve Kent, provincial Connie turned Grit Paul Lane goes places, takes a picture of himself there, tweets it, and then frigs off somewhere else. The selfie makes it look like he stayed at the event. That’s how he can be in so many places at the same time.
The provincial government will balance its books this year by borrowing $2.1 billion.
Lots of people don’t know that, as Michael Caine would say.
The government included in its budget plans this year a hike in the HST of two percent.
The tax hike will bring in $200 million.
That $200 million will just about cover the interest in one year on all the new debt the provincial government plans to add between now and 2021.
The $2.1 billion this year is the tip of a very big iceberg of new debt, you see. The new debt will go on top of the other $12 billion we already owe. The total cost just to pay the interest on that debt in 2021 will be $1.0 billion.
When people found out about the HST hike, they lost their minds.
Fast forward to 2017.
“This may be our last shot at it,” said captain of industry Paul Antle this week as he set off to find other captains of industry to help him save the province. .
Gotta get off the oil, see. The Tories have frigged everything up..
Not so very long ago another rich guy-turned-politician said pretty much the same sort of thing.
The Liberals had cocked things up so badly – said captain of industry Danny Williams - that he was trying to get oil royalties that Ottawa was taking.
They weren’t really doing that, as Williams later admitted, but hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good story.
“Williams provided [Macleans scribbler Paul Wells with] chapter and verse of his battle with Ottawa for a bigger share of the wealth generated by offshore oil. He passionately advanced the idea that this is his province's last, best hope to become a have rather than a perennial have-not.” That was December 2004..
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Imagine, if you can, what it must be like to be Sandy Collins. Sandy is a very young man who is - right now - living the first line of his epitaph.
Imagine, if you can do two at one, what it must be like to be Veronica Hayden. Veronica is Paul Davis’ principal assistant.
Both took to Twitter last weekend to harass Liberal leader Dwight Ball over the fact that he seemed to be saying contradictory things.
They must have been feeling very proud, strong, and determined.
And then it was Monday.
The provincial government announced four years ago that a caribou memorial at Gallipoli would be part of the Honour 100 commemorations to make the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
For those who don’t know, the Newfoundland regiment fought its first battles on the Turkish peninsula from September 1915 to January 1916. Gallipoli is the only major battle site from the First World War that doesn’t have a caribou memorial.
That’s why the provincial government announcement in 2011 was such welcome news.
That’s also why it came as such a disappointing shock to so many people on Monday to learn that not only had the provincial government scrapped the memorial but that they had done so because they could not find $500,000 in the budget to cover the cost. That is precisely what odds and sods minister Darin King told the House.
A couple of years ago, the province’s auditor general noted that a Crown agency responsible for developing an integrated health information system was paying salaries to its employees that were way outside provincial government guidelines.
The Telegram reported last fall that the problem was still unresolved 18 months after the auditor general issued his report. This was no small matter. Salaries grew 354% between 2007 and 2012, according to the Telegram. In one case, the salary for a senior executive member jumped by 119%.
Last week, and in the wake of an updated report by the province’s auditor general, Canadian Press reported that health minister Steve Kent had cut salaries at NLCHI. They’d save $50, 000 in one case and altogether the salary cuts would save $330,000.
Small problem.
Wade Locke and Don Mills are two of the faces most associated with the current Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador, aside from the politicians, that is.
Mills played a key role in Danny Williams administration. Mills polling firm provided government with quarterly surveys. Williams also tried to manipulate Mills’ survey results for questions on local politics that Mills used to market his research company.
The quarterly polling was key to Williams efforts to silence dissent and maximize his own freedom of political action. The more popular Williams became, the less likely were any opposition politicians or news media to question his decisions.
And for everyone else, the Conservative message was that any dissidents were out of step with the majority of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. Mills’ polling purportedly showed that Williams and his party were popular to an unheard of degree. “He’s right because he’s popular and he’s popular because he is right,” was a common Conservative talking point.
That’s why it has been so interesting the past few months that Mills has been criticising the provincial Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Don Mills is the latest fan of the provincial Conservatives to turn on them savagely.
The St. John’s Board of Trade had Don back to deliver a luncheon speech this week. According to CBC, Mills said:
"The downside of Danny Williams, and I have a lot of respect for him, is that he doubled the provincial budget within that timeframe too," … "He left the province with a structural budget problem that is going to be difficult to fix."
Mills also endorsed the private sector as the engine of economic growth, something Williams firmly opposed.
A decade ago, Mills couldn’t say enough about Williams the Wonderful. Now, Mills cannot distance himself enough from Old Twitchy and his legacy of what Mills calls “a structural budget problem.”
It’s possible they are simply mirroring the intransigence of their Quebec counterparts to co-operate with actions in this province — as, for example, Hydro-Québec did in refusing to participate in PUB hearings on the water management agreement.The problem with the statement is that it simply is not true.
All this talk of austerity, gutting the public service….
Then you look at the salary costs, from the provincial budget.
There’s something that just doesn’t add up.
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The annual budget is probably the most political document of any government in a Westminster style parliament like ours.
At its simplest and most obvious level the budget is the formal statement of a government’s priorities. Once approved by 1the legislature, it gives government the legal authority to spend money.
The budget is, in that sense, the most obvious display of what political scientist David Easton defined as politics: the authoritative allocation of values.
There’s more politics to the budget than just that, however.
There was one older fellow, a bit on the round side, who walked with a limp. The other fellow walked very straight and had a really high collar on his shirt. Sorta like Don Cherry would wear one of the workers said.
