Newfoundland and Labrador is forecast to post growth of 6.4 per cent this year, leading all provinces, the report said. This year's growth is fuelled primarily by increased mineral output, which is expected to fall off in 2008. As a result, real gross domestic product is forecast to grow by just 0.9 per cent next year, the report added.
From the sound of David Cochrane's debrief on CBC Radio, this is just another scurrilous attempt by the current minister of fisheries to interfere in the operation of fishing companies.
A few hundred people, maybe a few thousand people might turn out on Friday for a rally to support Premier Danny Williams in his latest racket with people no from Newfoundland and Labrador.
Whatever the reason, people will show up. How many is a crap shoot.The Panel recommends that the Equalization program be based on a ten-province standard and comprehensive revenue coverage with inclusion of 100 percent of natural resource revenues.Now this gets a bit odd when one considers that Premier Danny Williams himself endorsed the 100% inclusion of resource revenues in the Equalization formula. He is on the public record endorsing that position.
Deborah Coyne is a lawyer, activist and candidate in the next federal election in the Toronto-Danforth riding.It is unfortunate that when citizens are willing to contribute so much to the future of the country, we have a federal government offering so little national leadership. We have a federal government that is in the business of putting the government out of business, transferring significant fiscal power away from the federal government to the provincial governments, and talking about what divides us rather than what unites us in moving forward.Then there is this potent reminder that most provinces have higher trade betweens within Canada than there is internationally between Canada and other countries. The much-ballyhooed Council of the Federation has done nothing on this front of any consequence:
Our national government, with some exceptions, continues to be consumed with petty politics, outdated ideologies, power plays to find the Holy Grail of a majority government, costly and useless opinion polls to gauge, not important matters, but merely the popularity of the government.
The preoccupation of our political class with manipulating power has discredited politics as a whole in this country, and must be abandoned if the values of democracy are to endure into the future. Our governments and political elites no longer seem to want or need publicly engaged citizens. The growth of the state into universal healthcare, public education, social security, portable pensions, immigrant settlement, and so forth means that too often we have sat back and wrongly taken for granted Medicare, employment insurance, public education, public pensions,
progressive taxation and the successful integration of the growing numbers of new Canadians. Public institutions seem to run on automatic pilot, with no need for our active engagement. Professional armed forces are available with no need for conscription.
Our leaders no longer appeal to a “public purpose”; only to the needs of customers, client-citizens. Some observers refer to this as an era of “personal democracy”. Conditioned as we are to be consumers, customers, shoppers, clients, we prefer to influence politics on our own terms.
The political party has thus been sidelined as an instrument of mass organization, despite attempts to “brand” itself to appeal to the individual “consumer”. In its place, we have a huge range of here-today gone tomorrow networked-based organizations, and celebrity-based populism.
Until the path-breaking Alberta-British Columbia bilateral Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in August 2006 (effective 2007), trucks used to have to unload their loads at the border and repack them according to the different regulations in the two provinces. Crossing to the state of Montana was easier. Now with the Alberta and British Columbia economies essentially open to each other, a gain of some $4.8 billion in national income is expected. Imagine what would happen if all provinces pursued open trade within Canada!Speaking of the Council of the Federation, Deborah quotes Jeefrey Simpson's assessment. In light of recent events, it is amazing how perceptive this observation, from 2006, turned out to be:
At the same time as the federal government has weakened, the provincial and territorial leaders have increasingly organized themselves, most recently forming the Council of the Federation to try to arrogate to themselves more power. Journalist Jeffrey Simpson describes well how the annual meeting of premiers has "morphed into Canada’s equivalent of the Group of Eight Summit, with lavish banquets, superb entertainment, huge budgets, large retinues, security personnel everywhere, portentous and instantly forgotten communiqués and a ubiquitous aura of preening self-importance."The speech is lengthy but it is well written and well worth taking the time to read.
Pottle remembers it as a time of patronage and power; moral and fiscal responsibility seemed to be lacking, and there was a division between "promises and performance" and "words and works." He could not support a government that, in his view, had lost its integrity. In his resignation speech, he said that "the economic development programme of the government, in the broad sense, has spread itself too hastily. Time has not been taken to consolidate the programme step by step…. The Department of Economic Development is, in my view, inadequate to carry on the job it has to do, as far as its responsibility toward the 'new' industries is concerned … As I see it, the government has not given the leadership in these matters that ought properly to be expected of government...".He worked with the United Church of Canada during which time he spent a one year term as a United Nations social welfare advisor in Libya. In 1963, Pottle began work for the Department of Health and Welfare. He retired in 1972.
If Smallwood had been a revolutionary in the historical sense of the term, he would have exercised a directly decisive influence in changing the basic outlook of the Newfoundland people. If he had been responsibly radical, he would have been mainly instrumental in converting their life-values system. In fact, he did nothing of the kind. What he did was to capitalize on the gullibility of politically uneducated people and render them incredibly more gullible still. What he did was to take control of a dependent society that had always asked much of government and ordered it to ask for more. What he did was not to change the course of people’s expectations – he encouraged them to look for more of what they already had. He did not revolutionize his society – it can be more truly said that he parasitized it.
…
Newfoundland politics had always been notorious for the people’s chronic sense of dependence upon their political powers – a feeling which the powers did nothing effectively to dispel, but, in effect, had ingrained it by posing as their terrestrial saviours. In times of extreme adversity, this of course boomeranged, but Newfoundlanders have always been endowed with breasts of more than the normal capacity for the hope that springs eternal, so that a change of government was eternally tantamount to the prospect of a new saviourhood. For the benefit of the typical politician they have also been conveniently gifted with short political memory. If the time should ever arrive when Newfoundlanders had cause to look at their political estate in anything like creation’s light, and their political leadership was mature enough to feel no longer indispensable, then it could be well and truly said that the day of revolution had at last dawned.
Herbert L. Pottle, Newfoundland: Dawn Without Light; Politics, Power and the People in the Smallwood Era, pp. 166-7
While lucrative, the offshore industry still needs the support of the provincial government to advertise the region and to implement the programs and processes that make the industry function. Unless the terms of the 2007 Budget are changed to offset the fiscal loss for the value of its offshore resources, the province’s financial incentive to invest in the industry is compromised, thus threatening the entire industry.
The visit to Halifax from Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty last week shows that there is a dialogue taking place between the federal and provincial governments. This should be all that is needed to resolve the matter, as Mr. Flaherty’s own party, energetically led by then Opposition Leader Stephen Harper, had supported the terms of the 2005 New Offshore Agreement. Until the introduction of the 2007 Federal Budget, not a word of the Agreement’s legislation had been changed.
"Divers have filmed this mud before," said Mr. Pauly, who in 1998 wrote a seminal research paper that coined the term "fishing down the food web" to describe how commercial fishing is depleting the world's oceans.
"What was not known before was that you could see these mud trails from space. I was flabbergasted by it."
Mr. Pauly said Mr. Van Houtan had found the pictures by looking at images shot from a QuickBird satellite, owned by DigitalGlobe.
"He wanted to know what we were seeing in these pictures," said Mr. Pauly.
But as with other professional polemicists, Mr. Williams is occasionally the victim of his own hyperbole. Canadians are witnessing one such episode today.
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If there is merit in Newfoundland's position, then the premier should communicate it properly. Indeed, many people agree with him that revenues from non-renewable resources should not be in the formula. But the politics of insult won't help him or his fellow Newfoundlanders very much.
Outrage plays well with the voters back home, but in Ottawa's Langevin Block, the home of the prime minister's office, it only registers as a rude noise.
Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams says negotiations to give Nova Scotia more time to decide whether it should opt into a new equalization formula may be an attempt by Ottawa to pit the two provinces against each other.First, it assumes that there is some value for the federal Conservatives in "splitting" Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador over the Equalization ruckus.
One source said Ottawa wants to reward Premier Rodney MacDonald for taking a softer line in the dispute.The federal government knows the same thing the provincial governments know. What the federal government may well be doing is a bit of theatrics of its own to capitalize on popular discomfort with the 2005 offshore deals. The deals are particularly unpopular in some segments of vote-rich Ontario.
The strategy will establish a waste diversion program, establish waste management regions, develop modern standards and technology, maximize economic and employment opportunities, and assist with a public education program.Bravo.
The Provincial Waste Management Strategy is premised on five primary actions: increase waste diversion, establish waste management regions, develop modern standards and technology, maximize the economic and employment opportunities associated with waste management, and public education. The ultimate goal is to have full province-wide modern waste management by 2010, with some components of the strategy to be implemented this year.Nice to see the provincial government is practicing what it preaches by recycling old news.
Yet what is becoming increasingly obvious is that control of Newfoundland's future is slipping into the hands of Alberta, largely because of Mr. Williams' unrealistic expectations and the market's dispassionate behaviour.Cattaneo offers an assessment of the proposed energy plan, based as much as anything else on feedback she got from the local business community and what she is hearing from the oil companies. An equity stake for the provincial government's Hydro corporation, a high level of local investment by oil companies and a super-royalty regime.
Canada's two top oil-producing economies are developing such a strong symmetry they are becoming either/or situations in a skills-challenged reality, to the point it may take a big downturn in Alberta for Newfoundland to get a shot at benefiting from its offshore riches in the future.
[Paragraphing added for clarity] Three reasons: - Oil is badly needed, but labour and brains to produce it are now needed even more. Newfoundland's people and oil services companies are moving to Alberta in large numbers. The exodus is so large that Newfoundland's business community fears the province no longer has the workforce to build a new project, even if one were announced tomorrow. It also worries it cannot compete with Alberta wages, making any attempt to lure its people back futile.
In addition, the fiscal terms would make Newfoundland uncompetitive with Alberta, where the government has not owned a piece of the oil industry since it sold Alberta Energy Co. (the predecessor of EnCana Corp.) 20 years ago; its royalty rates, while under review, do not escalate with higher commodity prices; and there is no requirement to invest locally, other than a preference by the government to keep as much heavy oil upgrading in the province as possible.
[Paragraphing added for clarity] - Most companies with interests in Newfoundland's offshore now have ambitious oil sands plans. In fact, those plans have escalated since Hebron talks failed, making a return to the East Coast a hard task: ExxonMobil Corp. is a partner in the Kearl Lake project and has taken a larger role in the management of the Syncrude mining consortium; Petro-Canada is priming its Fort Hills project for takeoff in the summer; Chevron Corp. is a partner in the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, which is expanding aggressively; ConocoPhillips has its hands full with a major oilsands partnership with EnCana and interests in two other oilsands projects; Husky Energy Inc. just bought a major refinery in the United States as part of its own oilsands strategy. Even Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian oil company that has been taken over by Statoil ASA, made a big leap in the oilsands two weeks ago when it purchased North American Oil Sands Corp. and now plans to become one of its largest operators.
Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams has a point in his brawl with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It's not, though, the one that Williams is making by demanding extra equalization payments for Newfoundland.
Williams is insisting that Harper enact to the last "i" and "t" a promise on equalization payments to Newfoundland he made during the last election.
In fact, Newfoundland is doing fine out of the equalization program as it now stands.
And election promises aren't carved on tablets of stone. Harper, thus, was quite right to break his promise not to tax income trusts.
Instead, the point that Williams is making that touches a nerve has to do with Harper himself.
This point got blurred in Williams' roundhouse attack.
He called Harper "untrustworthy," "shameful," "dishonest," and "opportunistic" – all of which had about them the air of attention-gathering substitutes for his last performance when he pulled down the Maple Leaf flag.
That gimmick worked: Then-prime minister Paul Martin promptly gave Williams everything he wanted.
The point remains: What Williams is saying – when he's not shouting – is that Harper doesn't understand his own country.
And about that he's right.
Quite clearly, Canadians already sense this, and the effect of Williams' diatribe will merely sharpen their perception.
Truth is Clyde Wells would never have made such a dubious appointment in the first place.