Telling it like it is

Some choice Indy quotes:

"We've been free to investigate and explore all things Newfoundland and Labrador, free from the responsibilities that come with being the daily newspaper of record.  Our ambition is to remain a weekly." (from the editor-in-chief's column)

"The Independent did not request the expenses for PC MHA Trevor Taylor due to budgetary constraints."  (from a front page story on expense claims by provincial fisheries ministers between 1995 and 2008).

Investigate and explore, but only the bits we can afford.  S'pose the job of telling the whole story will have to fall to the daily newspaper of record using its evilly-deep, evilly-Quebec-based evil pockets.

For those who don't know, Taylor was fisheries minister from October 2003 to November 2005.  He is currently the minister of innovation, trade and rural development and the acting fisheries minister. 

Interesting editorial decision.

Of the others who the Indy did spend money on, Yvonne Jones was fisheries minister for eight months and Gerry Reid served as fisheries minister from February 2001 to February 2003. 

 

Some other choice quotes:

"The Independent is on the block, if you haven't heard and care to know." (from the editor-in-chief's column)

"[Peter] Cashin's son Michael is scheduled to return home this month from New York City, where he lives. I plan to ask for the editing job. [on the second volume of his father's memoirs]" (from the editor-in-chief's other column)

-srbp-

When the trend becomes an excuse

Bond Papers has noted before the once lamentable, now deplorable, trend to reduce the number of sitting days of the House of Assembly.

The issue is not one merely of the number of days the House sits.  The root of the problem is the increasing tendency for the legislature to pass bills with only a cursory glance. 

In the spring 2007 sitting, for example, 57 out of the 72 bills passed through the major stages of debate in less than a day.  That's a House of Assembly day, by the way, which is typically a few hours in the afternoon Monday to Thursday. 

One of those bills was the Green accountability bill which was pushed through on the last day of the sitting.  The public, and indeed, many members didn't realize that a few amendments made quietly ensured that some of the more important parts of the legislation setting controls on spending wouldn't take effect until the fall.

In most legislatures, ordinary members of the House, that is those without ministerial portfolios sit on committees.  Those committees take legislation, examine the bills in detail, sometimes holding public hearings and discussion to gather public reaction.  Sometimes bills get changed from what government intended,.  Sometimes they pass, as is.  Sometimes they get killed.

That's an important part of the process.  The public gets to know what the government is planning.  Interested individuals and groups can study a bill and figure out it will affect them.  They can recommend changes which may or may not be accepted.  The public gets to see the laws being made, they are consulted and, in some instances they can actually change the direction that government - in its wisdom  - thought was the right way to go.  If nothing else, including people in the process gives the outcome greater legitimacy and acceptance than it otherwise might have.

In the session just ended - the first since the election last fall - the House struck some committees but purely for the purpose of expediting passage of the budget.  They didn't get to study the energy corporation bills for example. 

Heck, the whole House didn't get to even know the bills were coming until the last week or so of the session. When it did come, there were some inconsequential amendments to the bill restructuring the energy corporation but for the most part, most people had no idea what the implications were of the measure. 

The pernicious impact of this approach is easy to see.  Even one seasoned reporter who has covered the legislature thought the bill would let reporters find out about corporation spending but protect sensitive commercial information like technology secrets from disclosure. 

He couldn't have been more wrong if he tried but, in fairness, the words "commercially sensitive information" are in the bill.   If you didn't carefully read the bill or if you didn't get the chance to read it at all you might assume those words had the typical meaning.   They don't.  It's in the bill.

Sensitive commercial information is basically any information related to the business of the company.  Number of pencils and pens used?  Apparently that's sensitive. As the legislation put it:

"commercially sensitive information" means information relating to the business affairs or activities of the corporation or a subsidiary, or of a third party provided to the corporation or the subsidiary by the third party, ...

As if that all weren't bad enough, the province's education minister is now saying legislation to create a second university in the province will be delayed until at least the fall sitting. 

The idea was approved by government a year ago and it's been a controversial decision.  Rumblings around the university in St. John's would have you believe that the external recruiters hired to find a new president found one.  But their choice - the current acting president - was turned down by government since the fellow is not all that thrilled with the Grenfell scheme.

That's really all to one side.  Legislative drafting on an issue like this shouldn't this long.  But if it does, there must be a reason for it more convincing than this one:

"We are just at the point, I guess, with a busy schedule in the house of assembly and certainly the tedious work in developing the legislation, that we didn't have sufficient time … for the full debate that it deserved"...

CBC's television report gave a bit more information than that though.  West coast reporter Doug Greer there are indications one minister was not satisfied the bill lived up to what Grenfell had been promised. Now it may be the fall of 2009 or later before the changes take effect, according to CBC news.

All of this is to suggest that a decision like creating a second university can appear to be a good one at the beginning but that, at the very least, other information can lead to a reappraisal or an adjustment of the course. 

Your humble e-scribbler changed his mind as he found out more about the proposal.  Obviously - if the education minister's comments are taken at face value - others much more intimately involved in the process have been adjusting things as well.

In other words, time and the supposed business of the legislature isn't the problem here.  Something else is. If the Grenfell decision is controversial as it has been presented, maybe other ideas can come forward from a full debate in the legislature.

The same can be said of other pieces of legislation which have been rammed through the House with barely enough time for the ink to dry on the order paper.

Maybe it's time to reform the House of Assembly and let the rest of us in on the discussion of public business.  That's one of the things legislatures are for and its one of the potential solutions to the government's problem with the Grenfell bill.  A properly functioning legislative committee system could take this one on and navigate the controversial waters exactly as they are supposed to do in this messy, complicated thing called democracy.

As it stands, though, the current House with its handful of short sitting days each year hasn't been the source of the delay in this decision.

In blaming the delay on a busy schedule in the House, Joan Burke just offered a huge excuse that obviously isn't true.

-srbp-

Related:

nottawa - "Busy, busy, busy" and "Busy, busy, busy (II)"

The silent majority got it right

Not surprisingly, the likely death rattle of the Independent - yet again - is stirring up some local controversy.

There's an interesting thread over at Geoff Meeker's blog at the Telly site if anyone is curious about what might wind up being a long one.  The post in question is actually a guest piece by former Current publisher Mark Smith.

Smith took some exception to comments made by Indy supreme editor Ryan Cleary about poaching advertising.  He also laced into the circulation claims Ryan made.

One comment  - thus far - from Frank Carroll offered a defence of the Indy and Cleary that got the old e-scribbler's blood racing.

The most important issue is that the province may be about to lose a vibrant competitor to the Transcontinental monopoly. The Telegram has responded to competition in the past by beefing up its editorial operations. (There would be no Sunday edition of the Telegram were it not for the Sunday Express.)

Let's get one thing clear right up front.  With a paid circulation of  only 4,000, the Independent wasn't competing with anyone else in the local media marketplace for anything.  It sure as hell wasn't competing with any of the dailies or weeklies anywhere across the province. 

The weeklies outside St. John's never had much competition anyway, even when they were owned by Robinson Blackmore.  When the Indy first started, it was pushing into some markets and finding some success in Goose Bay and Corner Brook. Somewhere along the line, the paper seems to have retreated from its province-wide approach and focused on the townie crowd.  Makes sense, given that the pink, white and green people all live within spitting distance of the Ship.

The Telly likely never sweated the Indy for a second.  That's because in the modern age, all media compete with each other.  Long gone and dead are the days were radio fought radio, television battled television and the print heads tossed jars of ink at  each other.

It's a bit of speculation, but it wouldn't be too surprising to find that when Russell Wangersky gets up in the morning, he's wondering what Gullage and Furlong are up to.  His online spot news is looking at VOCM.  And the other newsrooms are looking at the Telly.

As noted here yesterday, the Indy had more than enough time to fix itself both editorially and financially to make the paper work.  If it really wanted to compete with the Telegram and the rest, the Internet was the perfect way to put the talent pool in the newsroom to work five days a week at a low cost.  If there was any investigative journalism or longer form stuff, then the weekly edition was the place for it. 

Know the niche, fill it, deliver the product and offer the advertisers a solid platform for reaching their desired demographics.  It's not rocket science.  It's not easy either.  But Mark Smith lays it out succinctly all the while managing to keep his wheaties where they belong.

The sad truth is that for the past three or four years Ryan was better at breaking wind than breaking news. It didn't have to be that way.

As a last point, there's the bit that actually got the blood racing.  It's the Sunday Express thing.  The Express had a short life.  In the time it was around, the paper broke news and it ran with its own stories relentlessly.  There wasn't much in the way of bluster and trash talk.  People just worked hard at the craft of reporting.  Not everything was gold but just by doing the hard work day in and day out, the men and women there got more hits than misses. 

And to understand that is to understand the difference between being a decent newspaper and talking about being one.

So enough of the Indy and Ryan Cleary. 

The world moves on. 

Except for the handful of us who seem to have some inexplicable need to chew on the paper's entrails, the rest of the province made its decision about the Indy a long while ago.

For all the whining and bombast, for all the pleas and the grandiose claims and the nationalist posturing,  Ryan only ever managed to persuade 4,000 to have the Indy delivered to their homes each week.

The rest of us should go with the silent - and overwhelming - majority.

504,000 people can't be that wrong.

-srbp-

No election reports from provincial elections office since 2003?

"The post of the year"

Well, if democracy, and openness were the topics the answer would be yes.

labradore has posted a scathing indictment of the province's elections office demonstrating the repeated failings of the office to comply with the law - apparently - and certainly by failing any reasonable standard of public communication.

Quebec's elections office has already posted to the Internet results of the may by-elections.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, we are still waiting on any statistical reports on elections since October 2003. 

"Publish". The only sign that any recent electoral results have been published is the library catalogue entry noted above. (And no, offering to mail a copy to anyone who thinks to ask, does not constitute "publishing.")
And "within 9 months".

In respect of the Exploits by-election, that mandatory nine-month deadline expired on March 23, 2006. For Placentia & St. Mary's, the deadline was November 21, 2006. For Signal Hill—Quidi Vidi, it was August 1, 2007. For Ferryland, Port au Port, and Kilbride, November 8, 2007. Humber Valley and Labrador West met the deadline five days later.

And for the general election of 2007, having been held on October 9, 2007 — the day before the much-larger Ontario, whose poll-by-polls have been available for quite some time now — that mandatory statutory deadline was on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008.

There simply is no excuse for this complete failure.

But the first comment on the post is right:  this is the story of the year.  it demonstrates in one single spot:

-  a complete lack of transparency and openness as set down in the elections; and,

-  a persistent failure of accountability since the House of Assembly to which the elections office reports, apparently hasn't been able to sort the situation out.

What the office has been doing, apparently, is filling out "plan" documents filled with pap like this from the communications section on page 10 of the "business plan" for 2008-2011:

It is important for the Office of the Chief Electoral Office to communicate clear, strong messages to its primary clients and the general public. Various types of communications are used frequently to address issues, particularly important dates and reminders. Public notices, advertising, press releases, media kits, and public service announcements [sentence break in original]

are just a few of the methods that are used to inform the public of ‘need to know’ information. For example, the Special Ballot process was advertised in local papers, radio and television. Additionally, a news release was sent out to alert electors about Special Ballot deadlines and general information.

The OCEO also has a website that contains a wealth of information on the electoral process. The Office strives to keep the website up-to-date and current with issues that pertain to elections.

Those three paragraphs are clearly bunk written by people who don't know what they are doing.  Can you have more than one primary client, for argument sake?

The last one beggars description given that at the time it was written the people writing it knew full well that the office was grossly out of compliance with its major public statute, the Elections Act, 1991. 

The website should be the main communications vehicle.  Technology allows fewer people to do more things with less effort. All the missing reports could have been posted to the Internet within seconds of being completed thereby meeting the office's duties to the voters of the province - its "primary client" - and meeting the requirement to be open and transparent.

Openness and transparency are simple attitudes that can be tied to simple behaviours. Clearly the attitudes don't exist or the behaviours required, like filling out the formula "plans" lead people to waste energy on stuff that ultimately doesn't get the job done.

Something is seriously screwed up at the elections office. 

More people and more cash won't fix what is clearly isn't a resource problem.

If public servant Wayne Greene could meet his statutory obligations with few people and not much cash,  there's no excuse for the former cabinet minister who succeeded him and the former partisan activist of the current governing party who succeeded him.

There's a leadership problem.

Someone needs to fix it.

Soon.

But just don't hold your breath waiting.

Just stand by for the "messages" to be "delivered" to "primary clients".

-srbp-

The race to the swift

From the Guardian, online the story of how one media giant took a money losing print publication on line with dramatic results.

But axing print editions of popular magazines is a bold move and McGovern acknowledges this was a risky strategy - InfoWorld was distributing 180,000 copies in the US every week when it decided to ditch print, retaining online and events. "Many said without print people wouldn't be reminded every week of our brand and 40% of our revenue would disappear overnight," he recalls.

One year later McGovern, who still privately owns IDG, says InfoWorld's online revenues had trebled, the magazine's overall revenues were up 10%, and without the costs of print, paper and postage, profit margins went from -3% to 37%.

Flip of the fedora to In front of your nose and Andrew Bruce Smith.

-srbp-

Requiem for a lightweight

The Independent is no more.

Well, not at this moment but the prospect of the paper surviving the latest withdrawal of investor Brian Dobbin is limited.

Editor Ryan Cleary told CBC Radio a bunch of things this afternoon. 

He noted, for example that the paper's circulation has grown 10% in the past year or so.

Okay.  Then if the paper was making money, and circulation was on the rise, and Dobbin remained committed to the idea of the weekly pseudo-separatist broadsheet, he might be willing to keep his cash invested.

Evidently he wasn't.

There was a noticeable drop in government advertising in the last issue.  Only two pages compared to five or six full pages before now.  That's got to hurt.

The loss of Stirling Press may have hurt, if the Indy was using their offset.  But, the non-stop crap-fight Cleary waged against Transcontinental certainly wouldn't help any chances of cutting a deal with them to print the Indy.

There's a thing called friendly competition but Cleary made it a vicious, public blood feud which was of no value at all to anyone.   The Indy was never a market threat to the Telly but there'd certainly be no great willingness to even talk about cutting any kind of deal.

But face it:  if the Indy was making money or making enough, Brian Dobbin wouldn't be taking his teddy and if not throwing it in the corner at least taking it  somewhere else.   If it was a marginal venture or losing money, it's easy to see why Dobbin'd be heading elsewhere and taking his dough with him.  If the paper was marginal or a money loser, he also wouldn't have had any interest in shelling out more cash to buy the Stirling press and take on that along with everything else.

The Indy has obviously gone through a bunch of changes in the past year or so all in an effort to reduce costs.  They've moved out of the downtown and into cheaper digs on LeMarchant Road.

Obviously, it didn't work.

This marks the second withdrawal by Dobbin and the second death of the weekly. As Bond Papers noted the last time the lights went out at the Indy, the paper failed to live up each week to the boasting and bragging of editor Cleary. That certainly hasn't helped the paper.

Cleary also said something to the effect that there is room in the province for another paper.  We'll we already have a flood of papers in St. John's and it wouldn't take much for any of them to spread province-wide.

 The Scope and The Business Post are doing reasonably well, but they use a different business model and they both have content the Indy has never been able to match on any level. They can expand and fill whatever gap the Indy leaves behind.  Neither will likely look for a circulation boost from Joan Forsey or Patrick O'Flaherty, though. 

Different business model plus content people look forward to reading and you have a winner.

Both the Scope and the Business Post can also move to new media approaches more readily than the Indy seemed to be willing to do.  It's online presence sucked from the start, but it could be forgiven in a start-up.  By this point, though, the Indy could have shifted dramatically in the direction to more successful print media elsewhere: online daily content updated as the day rolls with new and different stuff in the print. 

Or Cleary could have just as easily shifted the whole thing online at lower costs long ago.  Put the energy into producing a decent quality daily, hard news product and go head to head with the big guys. Maybe they'll try to reform the whole thing in that direction now.  For some reason, that doesn't seem likely.

Here's the ultimate point:  print as done by the Indy is either dead or on life support with a prediction of imminent death.  The smarties have changed their business model - The Business Post - or morphed into another approach, like the Telly over the past couple of years.  Other old dailies and weeklies have gone for more dramatic makeovers with good results.

So the Indy dies again.

Two weeks of wailing on the Open Lines.  Maybe another "Save us" campaign.

And then we can all go back to the rest of the local media marketplace. 

Heaven knows there's plenty of quality content to chose from.

-srbp-

Shell shelves Sarnia sands refinery

Royal Dutch Shell won't be building a new 200,000 barrel per day refinery in Sarnia, Ontario to process oil from the Alberta tar sands.

The company cited poor market conditions and surging costs, according to Reuters.

In other words, a company with its own guaranteed source of raw material isn't building a greenfield refinery close to both the source of raw material and markets. 

Instead, Shell will be expanding capacity at existing refineries to serve the North American market.

That would be pretty much consistent with this previous Bond Papers post on NLRC's problems with its larger project proposed for Placentia Bay and very much at odds with any suggestion that tight American capital markets due to the subprime crisis are to blame.

-srbp-

Covering Britney is cheaper

Well, it would be, given how little the woman usually wears in public.

A doff of the derby to Lee Hopkins, one of Australia's leading public relations practitioners in the so-called new media, for posting a link to the following video.

It's a presentation from February by Alisa Miller, of Public Radio International.  She was speaking at a TED conference - Technology, Entertainment, Design - and dazzled the audience with her assessment of changes in American coverage of international stories.

We like to think that Canadian news coverage is different, that it's better than what the Americans do.  We cover the world better, are better informed about what goes on beyond our borders.

But is that true?

Is it true when our borders are sometimes the provincial ones politically and in our heads?

-srbp-

Nothing says "election" like politicians and cash, the BC version

Stockwell's wetsuit apparently has a big "S" emblazoned on it.

Well, we presume he wears the wetsuit under his day clothes since there's no other way to explain how  he could be in St. John's propping up a retiring caucus mate and at the same time be announcing $272 million bucks for British Columbia.

Meanwhile,  the Uncaped Crusader, Minister of Public Safety stopped off at some point in the recent past to visit glorious Drayton Valley, unveil a memorial and chat with the locals about important issues of the Day.

Like, for argument's sake, the wonderful benefits of having a fixed election date:

Day said having a scheduled date not only removes power from the governing party to call a snap election, but it also allows voters to weigh the government actions accordingly.

“The people will no longer look at a new tax credit policy and wonder if it has been introduced because an election is going to be called soon,” said Day.

Maybe it is the Summer of Love, federal edition.

The local mayor got in a pitch for some of this decentralization stuff Stockwell and his pals have been musing about.  The local mayor said the town is interested in getting something related to intelligence, the town apparently being a "good fit" for intelligence what with its emphasis on crime prevention.

Tell us, Moe - and that is the mayor's real first name - if there is a burg in this country from one end of 'er to the other that has an emphasis on crime encouragement?

And of course, this movement of intelligence from the National Capital Region into Drayton Valley would occur  - should it occur - in such a manner that no one could possibly confuse the relocation of  those fat federal paycheques with any pending election.

We'll leave aside the obvious joke about transferring intelligence from Ottawa and only note that public tit-sucking is clearly a national pass-time.

Moe might be running Drayton Valley, but Larry's heading up a Great City these days,  Shemp has got a regional borough in Manitoba and another Larry, his brother Daryl and his other Daryl are the reeve, police chief and fire department head in a township in southwestern Ontario.

-srbp-

The challenge of demographic change (3)

Trip, click, stumble or otherwise magically teleport yourself to labradore for a couple of commentaries on the latest population stuff from Statistics Canada.

You'll find gold.

The first one notes that natural population decline - the excess of deaths over births - hit Newfoundland along the northeast coast about 10 years ago, then set in around Stephenville, and went along the south coast before hitting Humber Valley in 2004.

Natural decline is just one of the elements making up the population figures.  Even without outmigration, in other words, only Labrador, St. John's, and the Avalon have sustained  enough births to outpace the number of deaths.

Someone needs to track where the bootie call cheques are going.  Odds are the grand per live one is hitting the Avalon, St. John's and Labrador rather than where there needs to be a change in fertility levels if we want to kill off the natural population decline.

There are two things about that:  first, as a matter of public policy, the bootie call will likely only reinforce existing trends rather than counteract them.  Second, it would be interesting to see what impact the bootie call announcement had on votes last time out.  Heaven knows there were enough people calling from all around bitching about not getting the cheques.

The second post at labradore looks specifically at natural population decline trends over 20 years for four areas.

-srbp-

Nothing says "election" like politicians and public cash, the Nova Scotia version

Nova Scotia's offshore arrangement with Ottawa is a wee bit different in places than the one signed by Brian Mulroney and Brian Peckford for Newfoundland and Labrador.

Last week, an expert panel handed both the federal and Nova Scotia governments a report on how to handle something called "Crown shares".  Nova Scotia is owed cash, it seems dating back to the mid 1980s.

Apparently, the amount the federales are about to cough up is $850 million. 

That's a nice compromise between the $200 million suggested by Ottawa and the $1.8 billion the Nova Scotians were seeking.

-srbp-

Nothing says "election" like politicians and public cash

Stockwell came to town today.

Along for the ride were Loyola Hearn, the federal fisheries minister, Conservative member of parliament Fabian Manning, and Norm Doyle, soon-to-be double pensioned. 

Stockwell, a minister in the federal government,  took a few moments from traipsing around a provincial prison and a few other choice spots not featured in the usual tourist itinerary to pass out some federal dough with the local boys. 

$279, 349 in money from the federal disaster fund, f'rinstance.

For a disaster that happened in 2000.

The merry band handed out another cheque;   280-odd thousand to let communities tally up crime numbers.

Local reporters asked the moneybags about the $150 million in cash for a federal prison.  Some enterprising souls, you see, are one step ahead of the local daily.  They have hit on another island on which to model for our future, this time Alcatraz, using an election goodie floated out before the last time the Tories held power in Ottawa.

Stockwell assured the reporters that no decision had been made yet on the future of the provincially-owned and operated Lakeside Hilton,  a.k.a Her Majesty's Penitentiary.  

You can tell there's an election coming, can't you? 

It's not quite the Summer of Love, but then again it hasn't been much like summer this summer in St. John's so it all fits.

There's another announcement scheduled for tomorrow with Stockwell and Norm.  More public cash, no doubt, for something called "flood recovery".

-srbp-

Yes, Virginia, it's torture

Christopher Hitchens discovered recently that his earlier assessment of torture was correct.

Hot on the heels of having tried to argue a distinction between something called extreme interrogation and torture, he agreed to experience waterboarding.

For those who don't know, waterboarding is a technique whereby the victim is bound to an inclined board, head down,  so that he so she cannot move.  Heavy towels are then placed over the victims face.  Water is then poured on the towels.

Hitchens lasted 10 seconds - by his own account - before he dropped the weights he was holding as part of the safety procedures.

The waterboarding stopped.

There were safety procedures in Hitchen's case simply because he wasn't a prisoner who had been rendered  - as the phrase goes - into the hands of the people who do this sort of thing for a living.

His demonstration was run by American special forces veterans.

10 seconds.

At least that's what he told an interview with CBC's As it happens.

The full account, in Hitchens own words, can be found in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

-srbp-

Going it alone, the federal version

The year:   1983.

The issue:  restructuring three bankrupt private fish companies into what would eventually become Fishery Products International.

The solution:  the federal government decided in late June 1983 to bypass the provincial government and invest $75 million in federal cash.  The resulting company was supposed to be entirely in the private sector with the federal government owning shares along with other investors.

The source:  A Globe and Mail story - left -  by Michael Harris. [Note:  To read the article, click on the picture and you can open it in a larger version.]

The previous May, the federal and provincial governments had a memorandum of understanding - according to the story signed by then fish minister Jim Morgan - but after a series of changes and further disagreements, federal fisheries minister Pierre de Bane turned up in St. John's to announce the "go-it-alone" option.

This is offered only as a curiosity since there are plenty of more clippings and many more details to the fishery restructuring in the mid-1980s and the eventual creation of FPI.

Still, it is interesting to see the federal and provincial governments in a disagreement.

It's even more interesting to see the willingness of the feds to go it alone on a fisheries issue.

Doesn't sound like the story you get from the usual sources, does it?

-srbp-

Update:  The story appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail.  There's another little thing the local myth-mongers won't like.  The paper they love to hate as the read it every day actually put a major story about this province on the front page.

His own private Gene Krupa

Oram says there are a lot of companies inquiring about the potential to do business here, especially with the economy booming as it is now.

The Oram in this quotation from the Great Oracle of the Valley would be the disciple Paul Oram, minister of business.

Look at his news release pile and that of his predecessor and we might conclude he is the "minister-of-traveling-around-giving-speeches-to-anyone-who-will-listen", but that's another issue.

Now back to the quote.

The Quote.

Now presumably the G.O.V. got the quote right and Paul actually did say that the economy is booming right now. And presumably he was talking about the economy in this province, it being the economy which a business minister in this province would be concerned about.

'Cause if he did say the economy is booming,  you got to wonder if the disciples talk among themselves.

The disciple Tom delivered his budget earlier this year with predictions for economic growth across the province that were not booming. Indeed no economic oracle  - public sector or private - has been predicting a booming economy in Newfoundland and Labrador since at least the Summer of Love last year.

In fact, they aren't predicting a booming economy next year, either.

And even if all that weren't true, we need only look to last week's provincial forecast issued by RBC Economics. 

They issue these things quarterly and Bond Papers has posted more than a few from the major banks. Here's the RBC one from June 25 2007.

The forecast for Newfoundland and Labrador and it has been consisten since last year - is for the province to go from leading the country in growth to trailing badly.  They've refined their forecast of "trailing" to say that the economy will grow at the blistering pace of point two percent.

That's two tenths of one percent for those weaned on the New Math.

That is so perilously close to a recession that a breath in the wrong place would push it over.

That is so not a "boom".

Take a look at the forecast for next year.  Run your eye across the line in the pdf linked above.  Run your finger if you have to and move your lips to read the words.  That's what your humble e-scribbler had to do just to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

Even if you have to move your finger so slowly people would think you were dead or asleep,  there's no way you'd describe the next two years in the provincial economy as a "boom".

Growth in employment?  Two per cent this year versus one half of one per cent next year.

Housing starts?  Two thousand  - that's it two friggin' thousand versus the double digits - like in the 30, 40s and 50 thousands in Ontario, Alberta, Quebec and Bee Cee.

Even in Saskatchewan they'll have double Newfoundland's starts next year.

Manitoba?  Poor Equalization-receiving Manitoba? 

New Brunswick?  The benighted crowd up the Saint John river?

Both are forecast to see more than twice as many housing starts as "booming" Newfoundland.

Retail sales?  From a growth of 8.9% in 2007 and an anticipated growth of 6% in 2008, RBC says that  there'll be just 2% growth next year.

There is no an indicator in that pile that says "boom", unless we are talking about last year.

The disciple Paul must be dancing to his own drummer, to borrow a phrase.  That's the only way to explain the comments which are, at least, somewhat inconsistent with the facts.

In fact, Paul Oram's comments are so far removed from reality that he must have his own private drum kit pounding away with skins pounded by no less a drummer than the ghost of the long-late Gene Krupa or maybe  Buddy Rich in the middle of a seizure of some kind.

If Paul has a pile of  prospective projects on his desk - at last count, the disciple Kevin was scanning 60 of the things when he went off to look after issuing permits and licenses - or even just a list of companies that are looking to come here and set up shop, perhaps Paul'd be good enough to give us a list of them.

Let us see the reason for his optimism.

He can just pass them along to the Great Oracle of the Valley and they'll get the word out.

Otherwise, we'll just consider that his latest word is as good as his description of the economy as "booming".

-srbp-

Where's your messiah now, see?

In these miraculous times, even those grown weary can find succor in the second - or is it the third?  - coming of yet another political saviour.

Not content with merely refreshing his own political soul, the true believer must  spread the word of  the (latest) deliverer's imminent return, now that the Way before this one has turned out to be a dead end. 

Maybe messiah-spotting comes easier when you've spotted a few before.

The converted - or is it the prodigal? -  must attack the heretics who didn't turn up for the  loaves and fishes enjoyed by the multitude at a cleverly unnamed event that look's like it was held in  - appropriately enough -  a church basement.

Seems, though, that  multitude-size estimating continues to bedevil the faithful even for sermons they didn't organize.

All of this is in good humour, but it does make you wonder which prescient partisan pronounced these words:

One member of the Liberal Caucus, a sometimes nemesis, once remarked that people did not trust me because no one really knew what my agenda was.

-srbp-

A conversion on the road to Deseronto

The greatest value in travel is what we learn of ourselves.

And I thought then of the many kindnesses we'd been shown - the hospitality of our hosts, the generosity of the woman at the golf club who had given us fresh-picked strawberries, the artist couple who kept Selma in their chicken pen until we could figure out what to do, the friendly waitress who told us of her remarkable life journey from Brighton, England to Brighton, Ont. - and I felt as at home as I ever had, and everything was warm and familiar.

Right here, in Canada.

Then again, sometimes we learn that we are all not so very different after all.

-srbp-

And the Oracle spake onto them, saying...

Yea, verily, the disciple Paul traveleth  far and wide even unto the heathen countries preaching the gospel and findeth that there is great interest in setting up new businesses in the Happy Land.

Especially, sayeth Paul, in the less urban areas:  "all of this will benefit rural areas of the province."

Thus spaketh the Great Oracle of the Valley, otherwise known as the voice of the cabinet minister.

Not much outward and visible sign of any of this actually happening via this particular ministry, though.

That despite all the traveling and preaching not just by Paul but a previous disciple or two, and this just from the stuff released publicly. (By the by, count the number of speaking engagement advisories versus actual news.)

There was even a trip to Qatar and Japan that was so productive in making the unbelievers aware of the gospel that it required a news release once the 10 day excursion was over and second trip over a year later to introduce the province to the people who had been introduced to it before. (yes, that second one is still headed with something about volleyball camps.)

Of course, all of this has been chronicled in the Book of Raymond (Authorized Version):

It must be admitted that the local press hasn't done much than dutifully set their tape recorders going whenever Smallwood steps off the place and send the results over the airwaves or commit it to black and white as it rolls off the assembly line...

People who flung their arms to the skies, made little groans of ecstasy, dropped their drawers or otherwise went cracked in celebration...will probably go through the whole drill at the latest pronouncement his week.

They've been through a dozen or more of these announcements...[b]ut they're always on tap to go into the raptures ...

Even the outward and visible signs are hard to keep track of, let alone the esoteric details.  Quick, for the grand prize of a second-hand pair of panty hose, how many times have the wrangling gang and that "battery of lawyers" been across the Atlantic for the signing of final papers...

Perhaps, in future, we should just write this stuff up as Book of Raymond, page so and so.

It all seems so very familiar.

-srbp-

Titanic found in '85 during secret US DOD mission

The team that found the wreck of the RMS Titanic was working for the United States Department of Defense at the time.

Oceanographer Bob Ballard was under contract to survey wrecks of the USS Thresher (SSN-593) and the USS Scorpion (SSN-589).  Once that work had been completed, Ballard and his crew were able to spend the final 12 days of the voyage hunting for Titanic.

They found Titanic approximately where they expected and in several pieces, again as expected. The 1985 search included the Atlantis II, support ship for the deep submersible Alvin, as well as the French deep ocean ship Le Suroit,  shown right, in 1/200 scale.

DOD was interested in gaining further information about why the submarines sank during the 1960s.  Both were lost suddenly. 

Thresher (model left) sank about 350 kilometres (190 nautical miles) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

 Scorpion sank about 740 kilometres southwest of the Azores.

DOD also wanted to conduct an environmental survey since the nuclear reactors of both ships had been lost and exposed to the deep ocean since the sinkings.

A board of inquiry concluded Thresher had been lost due to a series of events following a catastrophic leak in the ship's cooling system while at a test depth of 1,000 feet.  Ballard's evidence confirmed that theory.

Less is certain about the loss of Scorpion, (right, 1/283 model) . Evidence collected in the 1985 mission apparently points to the submarine being struck by one of her own torpedoes which had run wild. 

Discovery of the Titanic provided convenient cover for the classified portion of the voyage. At least one Internet site mentions the Titanic as the primary mission with the submarine wrecks being diversions.

Local angle:  Cape Race wireless station received Titanic's distress call in April 1912.  Data collected from the sound underwater surveillance system (SOSUS) station at Argentia helped pinpoint the wreck of Scorpion in 1968.

-srbp-

This is not history

"The bottomless gullibility of the Newfoundland people."

There's a phrase for you.

And the column it comes from, with the same title, appeared in the Evening Telegram on September 24, 1970.

You'll find it along with 166 other columns by Ray Guy in a new compilation from Boulder Publications. The book - Ray Guy: the Smallwood Years - covers the period 1963 to 1970.  This is the stuff that made Guy a household name in Newfoundland and Labrador as an able critic of the province's first premier after Confederation.

The Boulder handout puts it this way:

This volume is not a collection of witticisms; it is a historical work in its own right, told by a writer who emerged during the era of Premier Joseph Smallwood. During his time in power, Smallwood ruled Newfoundland and Labrador like an emperor. Using the weapons of political intimidation, Smallwood’s influence went largely unchecked – until the mid-1960s when Guy was hired by The Evening Telegram. Guy became one of Smallwood’s sworn enemies, one who could not be intimidated or bribed into submission.

That's a bit much.  This isn't history by any stretch.  But you don't need to know the players to get the jokes or feel the sting of the jabs.  Guy could have been writing about Huey Long or Duplessis.

Guy also wasn't the cause of Smallwood's downfall. As Guy himself notes in the introduction, the anti-Smallwood columny started at the Telly with Harold Horwood.  Guy came along in the early 1960s and while Horwood went on to become better known to a certain generation as a writer of books, Guy's writing still holds power.

The language is simple, but not simple-minded. There is a deftness to the way Guy uses words, even when he is stringing  together a hideous collection of word plays.  Take as an example the column "To be frank, Moores lacks color";  Brian Goff would be teamed with Hugh Shea if Guy had his way since a Shea-Goff ticket have the proper balance and might win. Get it?

There are other places, though where Guy lays waste not only to the politicians but also to the people who elected them. He holds forth on Farley Mowat and Harold Horwood and offers his perspective on growing up out beyond the overpass.

There's a throw-away column on hair  - read it if you want to be a writer - but one that lampoons coverage of shenanigans in an inner city park is properly placed among some of the best in the book. 

Labradorians may be surprised to find Guy's sensitivity to the Labradorian perspective and then feel enraged to realize how long they've been given the same soap about resources and provincial spending.

There's something for everybody.

Anyone reading this book today will find much of it all too familiar.  The stacked radio call-in shows, the unquestioning ladies and gentlemen of the local press, the silent back-benchers, the promise of hydro developments, undersea cables and tunnels, rows with Quebec, paper mills and an oil refinery all will leave the reader feeling as though they have fallen into the Twilight Zone.

The names may be different but the script is the same;  well except for Billy Rowe, who evidently still genuflects toward the 8th as he did then.  

If anything, though, the book is marred by the editing.  There are errors of fact in the cutlines on the illustrations.  Others have noted the Crosbie one.  The picture of a hydro project is Twin Falls, not Churchill Falls which itself is incorrectly referred to as the "Upper Churchill Falls".  There is no "Upper" Churchill Falls.
In other instances, even an inveterate news and political junkie like your humble e-scribbler couldn't figure out why some things were stuffed into this 400 page tome.  There are times when it seemed the thing  might have been better - and actually sold well - as two volumes. 

One could have focused on the purely political stuff while another took a look at resettlement and out-migration and the enormous transformations of Newfoundland society that  was just starting as Guy was writing.  There are some things that need a background note or two just to help along the flow of the story. [Changed paragraphing, with the added observation:  There is more to Guy's columns than humour.  His observations on the societal changes are an example of this.]

Fortunately, these are nits to pick at and Guy's columns contain more gems than junk. The column from which the title of this post is taken should be reprinted and handed out to every household in the province. [Update: Blame it on the trouble with finding the right title for a post.   The title for this post as it appears, "This is not history",  is an homage - some would say shameless rip off - of a column Guy wrote titled "This is a column", itself a jab at an editorial by Harold Horwood. The first sentence of the post, as it appears, was originally the title.]

Another, on democracy and the responsibility of individuals to do their civic duty should replace whatever crud it is they now use in the schools for "social studies". That letter sums up his own philosophy and every column was an exercise in living it.  Heck, Ray should photocopy that column and staple it in front of Ryan's eyes.  Maybe then the poor fellow will understand what it really means to tell it like it is.

Look.

Buy this book.

Click ------> HERE!

Follow the instructions, whip out the old credit card and buy it on line.

Better still, get in the car, head to the nearest bookstore and plunk the 22 bucks for it.

You won't regret it.

Your family won't mind the chuckling and giggling coming from behind the WC door and don't be surprised if you find yourself squirming and sniggering when you recognize a place or a phrase or  - especially - a person.

Just hope to God the person you recognize isn't you.

-srbp-