DW missile hits target!

Danny Williams said Friday he wanted to send a missile to the oil industry.

It hit.

bloomberg.com - one of the most widely read business news services included this paragraph in its coverage of Husky Energy's financial reports:

Husky's plan to boost output at White Rose may be slowed after a provincial government ruling rejected the proposed expansion of Hibernia, a nearby field, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board said Feb. 1.

The missile message got through: Newfoundland and Labrador might not be a good place to invest.

Lower Churchill costs increase; must be polling season

This announcement on filing an application to build transmission lines in New Brunswick for Lower Churchill electrical power means three things:

1. The costs of the project will escalate;

2. Corporate Research Associates is in the field again; and,

3. There are by-elections on the go.

Service interruption

A minor technical glitch kept the updates down for a couple of days.

Bond is back!

We now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

McLellan joins LabMag

Former deputy prime minister Anne McLellan has joined New Millenium Corp as a strategic advisor.

New Millennium holds an 80% interest in the LabMag Iron Ore Project, the world's largest known undeveloped magnetite reserve that is currently at an advanced stage of exploration. The project is located in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador ("NL") about 220 km north of Labrador City and 30 km northwest of Schefferville, Quebec. The development envisions the construction and operation of a mine, crusher, concentrator, slurry pipeline, pellet plant, shiploading facilities and related infrastructure. Subject to positive feasibility studies and project financing, it is expected that pellet production from LabMag would constitute a significant new source of global pellet supply and would be shipped by ocean vessels to markets in Canada, the United States, Western Europe and Asia.

Williams acts...long after the fact (Updated)(Updated 2)

[Originally posted 02 February 2007]

Danny Williams wants members of the legislature repay a $2800 bonus granted in May 2004 for the previous fiscal year.

Yesterday - after the story broke - Williams was defending the legislators as supposed victims of incompetent administration or an Internal Economy Commission that ran its own private, unquestioned fiefdom.

With such heavy public criticism, the Premier has apparently changed his mind.

Well, sort of.

First there's this little admission : "I became aware of the decision some time after the fact, and I don’t think there is any disagreement that it was a poor decision that did not reflect the values and guiding principles of our government at that time."

How long is "some time"? A day? A few hours? A few years?

If it was so obviously wrong - as the Premier now acknowledges - why did it take the public furor to have the Premier act?

________________________

Update: 02 February 2007 Premier Danny Williams scrummed with reporters today on his news release. Under questioning from David Cochrane (if the voice on the CBC Radio broadcast was right), the Premier equivocated on when he first learned of the added allowance for members of the House of Assembly.

Cochrane persisted to his credit.

Williams persisted in his evasion, to his detriment.

Then he switched to excuses: he was a new Premier with huge responsibilities and lots of stuff going on; when he heard about it he never put it in the wage freeze context; he didn't pay attention because it was about compensation and allowances and since he doesn't take a salary, then he didn't feel it right to have input on these things.

A bad story for the Premier just got immensely worse.

The Premier's evasion is done for the same reason as the vague wording in the original minutes of the Internal Economy Commission approving the allowance increase.

The Premier seeks to evade responsibility for his own actions, or in this case his inaction.

His excuses are more revealing of his mindset in seeking to escape responsibility.

The Premier's job is a tough one. It carries weighty responsibilities, not the least of which is to watch over the spending of public money. He has helpers in his task, if he lets them help. But those helpers must receive clear and unmistakable direction. Having worked in the office, your humble e-scribbler can attest to the demands of the office. Having spoken over the years with several premiers, your scribbler is also witness to the weight that sits on the shoulders of each Premier.

None would have offered excuses. The exercise of offering excuses is bad enough; it is the antithesis of leadership and fundamentally, the Premier must be a leader in good times and bad.

Not putting the allowance hike in the context of the freeze is a excuse which - by the Premier's own implication - suggests his judgment is exceedingly poor. How could he not see what everyone else apparently saw at the time and the public knows now? The allowance increase was unnecessary. It was wrong. He should have stopped it when he learned of it. He is the Premier after all.

The third is excuse is perhaps even more serious by implication than the others since it contains a serious misstatement of fact.

Danny Williams, member of the House of Assembly and Premier, collects a salary and draws down on his constituency entitlements and other allowances just like every other member of the House of Assembly and member of cabinet.

It's a matter of fact.

Nothing wrong with it.

He lives entirely within his means and there is no sign of any impropriety on his part.

Danny Williams donates his salary to his own family charity.

That too is a matter of fact.

Nothing wrong with it.

Who better - as Premier, and given his example - than to put a stop to an inappropriate public hand-out done in a sneaky way?

For the Premier to say he turned a blind eye to this allowance since he doesn't collect a salary is to mislead the public on a key aspect of an important issue. One can only believe the Premier does so deliberately since he repeats the same false comment each time he mentions his salary.

The House of Assembly story today took on a much more ominous cast for Danny Williams and it did so as a consequence of the Premier's own comments.

Danny Williams enjoys almost unprecedented public confidence in his forthrightness and integrity. People believe that above all else, Danny Williams will be accountable. That is his reputation.

The essence of accountability is responsibility.

In evading responsibility for not putting a halt to the allowance when it occurred or as soon as he learned of it, in equivocating so miserably on even when he knew, Danny Williams attacked the heart of his credibility and hence his reputation.

Danny Williams forgot the most important lesson of scandal: it is not the action or the inaction - not matter how minor - that causes a downfall.

It is the evasion that kills you in the long run.
__________________________________

Update 2: When did Danny know about the extra cash? Likely May 2004, when it was approved, according to the Telegram front page story in its 03 February edition.

That little morsel wasn't reported by other media.

So the guy who had enough power to order the Internal Economy Commission to let the Auditor General back into the House of Assembly in April 2004 couldn't or wouldn't deal with a bonus stipend right after he froze public sector wages for two years.

Hmmm.

The secretive bonus was effectively hidden from view by a vaguely worded set of minutes from the meeting that approved the retroactive payment.

As for the total overspending by members of the House of Assembly allowances and assistance budget during the two years of the freeze - 2004 and 2005 - well that was hidden by misreporting - deliberately (?) - the spending in the annual budget estimates.

For FY 2004, the government estimates showed spending as dead-on budget even though the entire cabinet knew at the time the account was overspent by $479,000. The next year they misreported the spending, knowing full-well the account was overspent by $557,000

The Auditor General's reports to date have only identified 20% of the overspending for those two years. AG John Noseworthy says his work on overspending is done.

NL subsidiary posts higher profits in Alberta

FortisAlberta, subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador-based Fortis Inc announced Friday its profit for 2006 was Cdn$41.1 million, up from $31 million the year before.

The serial government slows further

Since Danny Williams took office in 2003 he's tried to manage the provincial government with everything - literally every little thing - flowing across his desk.

He's a micro-manager for micro-managers.

It shows in everything government does.

Or, to be more accurate what it doesn't do.

Micro-managing something as large as government means it doesn't take too long before your list of unaccomplishments - as Alice might say - is considerably long than your list of accomplishments.

There's plenty of meetings and busy-work and people generating "strategies", like the 20 or so Williams claims to have sitting on his desk right at the moment.

Some of the meetings go for hours, like one on the fishery last week that supposed went on for two or three hours. Smart leaders tell you any meeting longer than 30 minutes is useless.

But hey, it's hard to know for sure because Williams is also a definite bullshitter hyperbole addict. He tells fibs through the colourful use of exaggeration.

And he's a micro-manager.

That's why Bond Papers said that Danny Williams runs a serial government.

He takes everything - and we mean everything - one at a time.

He only has so much time available.

And so things pile up.

No surprise then, that Williams admits the latest bit of the House of Assembly money scandal is clogging the wheels of progress in Danny-land.

it's bound to do that.

God knows what else in his life is taking his mind off the business of micro-managing the living daylights out of a giant organization like government.

That's a government that in the next eight weeks has to:

- wage four by-elections;

- deliver a Throne Speech setting out the policy agenda for the next year;

- figure out what the policy agenda will be for the next year;

- write the Throne Speech, or at least edit it into yet another ear-numbing, soul-eating POS like the others so far;

- finish a budget that will call for more than $5.0 billion in spending and include a capital works program the size of the recent federal infrastructure project;

- wage an ongoing war with Big Oil;

- get ready for a war with Ottawa over hand-outs that are only necessary because of the failure of the war with Big Oil; and,

- cope with money scandals, bimbo eruptions or any other typical political crisis that might emerge - unforeseen - from the darkness.

It's enough to tighten even the tightest sphincter.

And as we know, that just makes the crap back up even more.

Williams to oilpatch: closed until further notice

Danny Williams is confused.

Or maybe Telegram political reporter Craig Jackson is confused.

In the Saturday paper, Danny Williams rants about Hebron, a multi-billion dollar deal that died last year and won't be revived anytime soon.

"I'm into a battle with them to make sure that they are not jamming us on the Hebron field," Williams said.

If Danny Williams is still in a battle on that one, then he is fighting alone. The oil companies left last year. They won't be coming back, at least as long as the pugnacious, dyspeptic, East Coast satrap is hanging around.

Danny should know he's not fighting on Hebron because...well...he killed it. Danny just got back from a very expensive hug-fest with the Alberta oil patch. Williams - you may recall - was trying to drum up work for local supply service companies who Williams shafted big time with his shut-down of the local oil industry last year. They had planned on doing work in this province on not one but oil developments.

Now people like Jerry Byrne are stuck with tagging along while Daddy Danny introduces them to Alberta, which is, as Danny put it, the place we want to be when we grow up.

To cap off the rant, Williams apparently then scolded Petro-Canada chief executive Ron Brenneman for pointing out that oil companies have other places to invest their money.

"Well, I ask Ron to tell me where he can get a return which gives him, basically, $60 on a $3 cost. That’s a pretty good return," said Williams,...

Well for one thing, those figures are not accurate for Hibernia, Hebron or anywhere else in the local offshore.

They are about as accurate as the Premier's comments on the secret bonus cash he called the scrum to discuss in the first place. Or for that matter they are about as accurate as a great many things he's been saying these last three years.

But I digress.

If Danny Williams wasn't so busy trying to cover up, paper over and otherwise dodge the mess in the House of Assembly - a mess he is responsible for just like the other forty-odd members of the legislature - Williams would have noticed Petro-Canada investing in places like Norway.

Why?

Let's compare the two places and their offshore:

A. Political Climate

1. Norway: Politically stable, mature democracy.

2. Newfoundland and Labrador: Politically unstable, immature democracy currently embroiled in a spending scandal.  While the leader is not implicated directly, he admitted on Friday to condoning secretive bonus payments to legislators. Same leader may have taken cash - which came as a tax-free entitlement - and donated to his family charity.

leader prone to rants. Since shortly after taking office, frequently talks of leaving office due to pressures of work and ingratitude of public.

Admires Hugo Chavez.

B. Regulatory environment

1. Norway: Regulatory authority arms length from government with no conflicts of interest with government policy and taxation arm or state-owned energy companies. A model system often used as an example for the world.

2. Newfoundland and Labrador: Regulatory authority arms length from government with no conflicts of interest with government policy and taxation arm or state-owned oil companies.

Warning: Since taking office, current Premier has been engaged in a series of efforts to bring all regulatory, policy and state-owned energy businesses under his direct control. Actively creates serious conflicts of interest. Attempted to subvert the independence of the regulatory authority by appointing political and ideological ally to senior position. Recently overturned regulatory decision on major project citing "lack of information."

C. Financial

1. Norway: A mature, stable financial environment in which government royalty and taxation is designed to balance government revenue with the need to stimulate exploration and development

2. Newfoundland and Labrador. Total unknown. In Hebron negotiations, Leader suddenly jacked up demands at last minute, after a working agreement was achieved. Gas royalty regime in development for 10 years, currently on hold while leader copes with widening political scandal. State-owned energy company officials recently spoke admiringly of oil and gas regime in developing world dictatorships.

Not surprising that the companies are quickly leaving the local oil patch for somewhere else.

Given the political mess that has been seizing more and more government attention and which on Friday started lapping at the door of the Premier's Office, it will be surprising if the local oilpatch rights itself or is righted any time soon.

Danny Williams is out of touch, overwhelmed and largely incapable of progress on many issues. From his scrum, all he can offer is bluster which sends a clear message to everyone, including Big Oil:

Newfoundland and Labrador's oilpatch is closed until further notice.

Williams money recall: Lipstick on a pig

Give the Telegram editorialist credit for stating it plainly and correctly.

In Saturday's editorial, the province's largest circulation daily tells its largest daily audience that it just isn't good enough for Danny Williams to ask his fellow politicians to return money now that they were caught getting it.

The payment itself is called "sleazy, dishonest and downright underhanded."

Absolutely.

The current crop of MHAs, rightly or wrongly, are now marked by their behaviour, maybe for the rest of their political careers. And because of that, they should be fully and publicly policed — they may not realize it, but if they had done the same as a civil servant, they would now be fired.

Let's see what happens.

Energy minister displays incompetence...again

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are growing sadly too familiar with incompetent legislators who sign documents without reading them.

In the case of natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale, they also know she has some difficulty with information. Google is a concept she never mastered in another portfolio as she insisted her officials would "do the due diligence piece".

Now in what may turn out to be another pissing match between this administration and someone else, Dunderdale has issued a news release and taken exception to the publication on Thursday of documents by the offshore regulatory board related to Hibernia South.

Dunderdale has a right to be embarrassed. Documents released show the inherent falsehood in many of Dunderdale's claims when she vetoed the Hibernia South project conditional approval. It's never nice to have your incompetence displayed in such an open and unequivocal fashion.

For example, Dunderdale claimed the Board's decision removed the province's ability to look after its financial interests. Not true, as the official Decision demonstrates in remarkably plain English. The project could proceed - if and only if - the provincial government was satisfied on matters related to royalties. Similar safeguards existed on benefits and two other issues affecting the long-term exploitation of the Hibernia field.

Dunderdale's veto letter, by contrast was poorly written and highly repetitive. Dunderdale's letter-writer(s) appeared to be grasping for any available excuse to justify a decision taken many months before by her boss.

It is highly unusual for a regulatory board to release information in this way.

However, both Dunderdale and her boss have consistently attacked the competence of the 60 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians protecting the interests of the province at the offshore Board. Their morale has suffered solely as a result of the ignorant comments directed at them either directly or indirectly by the Premier.

In her rejection letter, Dunderdale impugned the Board itself. The Board had little choice but to demonstrate that Dunderdale's attacks on its competence and actions were utterly without merit. The Board released information that might otherwise have been withheld to avoid a repetition of the sorry display of political games played by a former Premier and his energy minister over the Terra Nova project. At that time, Brian Tobin and Chuck Furey blamed the offshore board for decisions they sanctioned.

Bond Papers will have a lengthier post on this issue over the weekend. The only thing Dunderdale made clear in her letter released today, is that she needs to read her own documents rather than affixing her signature to letters dictated for her by others.

Did Williams fatten charity with allowance?

Since first confronted with the Auditor General's revelation that members of the legislature took a retro-active bonus in 2004, Premier Danny Williams has contended that it didn't apply to him as he does not take a salary.

His language has grown carefully precise but potentially misleading. Williams states that he did not take or receive the money personally.

Many people, including most reporters, have interpreted this to mean that Williams did not take the money full stop. Williams' publicist told the Telegram the Premier did not use the money - not because he takes no salary - but because, as the Telly attributes the remark, Williams "had sufficient constituency funds available.

The latter comment was made before the rest of us realized or were made aware that the House of Assembly actually had already overspent its budget by $350,000. Rather than provide reimbursement on a case by case basis, the House of Assembly's executive committee - controlled by three of Williams' senior ministers - opted to give everyone a retroactive bonus. The additional $2800 applied to the previous fiscal year and was not issued on the basis of receipted expenses.

On Friday, Danny Williams admitted he learned of the payment sometime after it was approved, but did nothing to stop it until public outrage reached its current peak. Williams' parliamentary assistant and one of his ministers tried to justify the retro-cash with no success on Thursday.

The key point to recall is that Williams in fact does collect a salary and routinely avails of allowances and other stipends from the House of Assembly.

The question to be answered is this: Did Danny Williams not receive the bonus at all or did he take and turn it over to the Williams Family Foundation?

The former is what people have assumed. But we have all made grave errors in doing along with what we assume Danny and others have meant when what they said was actually very different.

The latter would be entirely consistent with the Premier's language and with established practice of donating his salary and stipends to his family charity. It would also explain - more than anything else - why he simply kept his mouth shut about the thing. And too, since he had actually taken the money, it would explain the Premier's reluctance to admit when he knew about the bonus and why it took him three years and the ire of voters across the province to realize the allowance was a bad thing.

The Auditor General knows who got the money and who didn't.

Maybe he'd tell us, if someone asked.

Friday Follies

This wasn't there last night when Bond posted last night on advertising.

But overnight, this turned up on youtube.com.

It's funny.

Hibernia South veto has consequences

Bond Papers linked to the offshore board documents on Thursday, but the Telegram's Moira Baird does a much better job of covering the Hibernia South story here.

The offshore board noted the implication inherent in government's decision - namely that the approvals process would take longer on future projects.

Industry representative Paul Barnes concurs:

"From the industry’s perspective, this will mean it will take longer to get projects approved," said Paul Barnes, Atlantic Canada manager for CAPP in St. John’s.

"This flies in the face of what we’ve been working towards with governments over the last few years in trying to shorten timelines for regulatory approval."

Barnes says the Hibernia South decision erodes efforts to create a "single regulatory window" and increases uncertainty about the rules for Newfoundland offshore developments.

"It’s causing a lot of confusion,” he said. “You’ve got to have certainty around the regulatory regime because it has an impact on who invests here, why they invest and when they invest."

Advertising highs and well...ummm...

For SuperBowl Sunday (now that I know when it is!), here's a spot that remains one of the best SuperBowl spots ever run. This one comes from Pirate Radio and Television, which regular readers of Bond Papers will know is home to Terry O'Reilly's creatively warped cranium. Here's the link to O'Reilly's blog supporting his CBC radio show, Age of Persuasion.



On another level entirely are these spots coming from some pseudonyposter on youtube.com and aimed squarely at the local political market.

These showed up at the Bond e-mail just as they seem to have shown up in a bunch of other inboxes. Despite the fact the first one has had almost 8,000 hits and managed to make both vocm.com and NTV evening news, your humble e-scribbler isn't sure if they are hitting anything other than a novelty.

Nonetheless, here is the latest one: a karaoke version of an old Frank Sinatra song, rewritten to reflect local content.

This kind of guerrilla advertising is likely to spread as the technology to produce video of a reasonable quality grows more accessible.

Boston "guerrilla marketing" stunt: a dumb idea

The publicity stunt that set Boston police bomb squads hopping on Thursday was not a guerrilla stunt so much as a case of some monkey tossing his own...well, you know.

If convicted, the two twits misunderstood creative geniuses will fit right in; jails are full of stupid people victims of society.

Successful crooks never get caught.

And smart marketers don't screw up in the first place or compound their error with a totally lame news gaggle in which they talk about "hair" questions.

Alberta oilpatch keen on Norwegian offshore

From CanWest:

Canadian-based companies went to town Tuesday in Norway's offshore oil and gas licensing round, snapping up 13 of 49 parcels offered in the world's third-largest petroleum exporter.Petro-Canada led the way by gaining interests in seven blocks; Nexen Inc. had four and Talisman Energy Inc. came away with two.Half a world away, local analysts said the Norwegian North Sea offers potentially big discoveries for homegrown players operating in a mature oil and gas region....

So why aren't they looking at Newfoundland and Labrador?

Maybe this has something to do with it:

Though the state oil company Statoil controls about 60 per cent of the country's production, Norway has been liberalizing its fiscal regime to offset declines and attract new exploration.

Knowles compared it to competition between the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan to attract drilling dollars in their respective jurisdictions. "The same kind of thing happens between the U.K. and Norway."'

Fuelled by a royalty holiday on new discoveries, the European North Sea has become a hot spot for Canadian companies operating abroad.... [Emphasis added]

Around here, Danny Williams keeps pointing to the Norwegian example.

Well, apparently he doesn't understand how Norway really works.

Army reserve stretched by Afghan mission

Reserve army commanders told the Senate committee on national security that continuing the Afghan mission beyond 2009 will put increased pressure on reserve army units for training and recruiting.

Military family support centres opens in Corner Brook

With the deployment of nine reservists from second battalion of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, the Gander Military Family Resource Centre is opening an office in the west coast city.

Dunderdale wrong on offshore board and Hibernia South

The Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Board today released (click "what's new", once at the CNLOPB site) correspondence between the board and the provincial government on Hibernia South.

In total, the correspondence, including the formal reply to natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale's letter of January 17, 2007, demolishes every contention by the provincial government on the proposal and on the board's actions.

Among the choice comments: "The Board's Decision [sic] actually goes a step further by requiring that the agreement [commercial agreement among the proponents] be approved by the royalty owner, i.e. the Province, before it will be acceptable to the Board."

That's right: there would have been no production unless and until the provincial government was satisfied on its financial issues.

So much for Dunderdale's spin that she rejected the decision merely to seek "more information".

March Madness starts early

Danny meets with European journalists to talk up the seal hunt.

Q. What do the following have in common?

Anna Nicole Smith
Loretta Swit
Pam Ferdin
Elizabeth Berkley
Danny Williams

A. All use the seal hunt to boost their careers.