Who: Bob Cadigan, president and chief executive officer of NOIA, the association representing oil and gas supply and service companies. [CBC ram audio file]
When: January 14, 2009.
Interview: With CBC radio’s Jeff Gilhooley about Chevron’s decision to defer drilling in the Orphan Basin.
Score: 19 “you knows” in a 4:00 minute interview, with the bulk occurring in the front end.
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Former natural resources minister Ed Byrne pleaded guilty to two of the charges against him resulting from the House of Assembly spending scandal.
He pleaded guilty to a count of fraud and another to a count of fraud against the government.
The Crown dropped other charges as part of a plea agreement worked out with Bryne through his lawyer, Robert Simmonds, Q.C.
Simmonds’ media scrum outside court is available here in ram format.
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Sir John Mortimer, creator of Horace Rumpole, passed away on Friday, aged 85.
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The provincial government pooled pension fund saw its asset value drop by $1.6 billion in calendar 2008, dropping to $5.1 billion on 31 December 2008 compared to $6.7 billion at year-end 1007, according to CBC Here and Now.
Public sector pensions are not in danger of imminent collapse but the story does illustrate the impact the global economic crisis is having on government’s financial position.
The table at left - taken from the pension fund committee’s most recent annual report (August 2008) shows the annual rate of growth for the funds investments. The average since the fund was created in 1981 is 10.8%.
The fund manages a varied portfolio of assets, including real estate through a corporation called Newvest.
The mortgaged properties include:
Newfoundland Hardwoods is a Crown Corporation established in 1950 to manufacture liquid asphalt and sell chemically treated poles and lumber to meet local needs.
The corporation was privatized in 1995 - that is the assets were sold off - but a board of directors was retained to deal with issues arising from the sale of its assets. The directors are all senior public servants in the innovation department.
Those issues have all been addressed save for one storage tank which has been sealed since there is no means of disposing of the contents within the province. The tank is inspected regularly.
In 2008, the directors issued a six page activity plan for the corporation for the period 2008-2011.
Newfoundland Hardwoods – the corporation with nothing else to do but keep an eye on a lone tank of chemical sludge somewhere in the province – is committed to supporting the innovation department’s mission to “foster regional and provincial prosperity.”
It will do that by - you guessed it – keeping an eye on the sludge tank.
You could not make this stuff up if you tried.
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Newfoundland and Labrador Farm Products Corporation is the Crown agency that used to run the chicken processing plant at Pleasantville.
The plant was sold in the late 1990s and Farm Products Corp has had nothing to do since then.
The corporation still exists, however, and cabinet appointed a board of directors for the corporation.
In March 2008, those directors - all public servants - dutifully filed an activity plan as required under the government’s accountability and transparency legislation.
The activity plan reported that the corporation was inactive.
The plan also reported the inactivity would continue.
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Ricardo Montalban, known to most English-speaking fans as either Mr. Rorke from Fantasy Island or as Khan, the villain from the second Star Trek film died Wednesday at age 88.
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Some people – evidently including the governing Provincial Conservatives, the Liberal Opposition and the New Democrats - thought it would be better to shut the paper mill in Grand Falls-Windsor than to have it open and employing people if there were fewer people working than there were in 2008.
That’s a choice they made.
Union members in the town acknowledged when they twice rejected any restructuring deals from the company that they knew what might happen if they voted down the proposals.
So why exactly would Lorraine Michael, the province’s lone New Democratic Party member in the House of Assembly, be disappointed that less than a month after voting to shut the mill, the provincial government doesn’t have anything better for workers than instructions on how to collect employment insurance or retrain for other jobs?
“We now have a substantial workforce in limbo, people who are understandably anxious about their futures and those of their families,” she said.
Sure they are, Lorraine.
But they aren’t in limbo.
They are unemployed, or soon will be. They need to start looking for new jobs. They need to start thinking about retraining for other work and maybe consider leaving Grand falls-Windsor and the surrounding communities if there isn’t any other work for them.
Maybe Lorraine - and every other highly paid legislator who voted to ram through the expropriation bill – should have taken a second to think about what they were doing. Rather than cheering, they might have considered the consequences of their actions.
Just a thought: maybe Lorraine could have asked to see the government’s plan before she gave them carte blanche to close the mill.
Former mill manager David Kerr put it this way recently:
"You know what's so sad about all of this? A nanosecond after CEO David Paterson was told about the legislated expropriation, let alone what he thinks of the Newfoundland government, he totally wrote off the mill - lock, stock and barrel. That's the way these guys think. If any door was ajar for negotiations to restart the mill (and it always is no matter what anyone says) it's now slammed shut, bolted and bricked up for good.
I don't know who's advising Premier Williams on this but they have to give their head a shake and go back to timing school. Timing is everything in this business and the time to expropriate was not now - good heavens while the mill is running give negotiations a chance. Expropriate on the last day a roll is dispatched on number three winder, not a second before.
"Also the union is insane. They are going around lauding Premier Williams for doing this great thing while at the same time trying to send a veiled olive branch to the company about getting back to the table. What are they smoking? The company reads newspapers, too. I bet Abitibi pulls the plug before March 28.
"Who in their wildest dreams thought this was the right thing to do now? This is a little like peeing in your pants in a snow storm. It feels good when you do it but wait a while and see."
Kerr made a similar comment on a Bond Papers post before Christmas, particularly in his sentiment that before expropriation there was at least a slim chance some agreement could have been reached. Your humble e-scribbler had written the mill off and – in this case like in a number of others – it would have been absolutely wonderful to be as wrong as Mr. Kerr said I was at the time.
Anyway…
Danny and Yvonne and Lorraine and all the others rammed through the expropriation bill without a second of hesitation and even less time for thought.
There’s a bit too much milk splattered over the floor to be crying about it now.
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On the one hand traditional make-work projects may be in decline:
The knocks against infrastructure are that it is not as labour-intensive as it used to be, tends to employ many more men than women and, these days, requires skills in engineering, technology and architecture that are already in short supply, critics say.
"A lot of this ethos of infrastructure-equals-jobs comes from the 1930s when you put a lot of guys to work digging ditches and shovelling gravel. And we don't do that any more," said Dr. Jim McNiven, professor emeritus and former dean of management at Dalhousie University.
On the other hand, maybe someone has found a new kind of make-work:
Perhaps this is the Canadian way with expropriations. In 1970, another firebrand, Quebec premier René Lévesque, passed a law to take control of Asbestos Corp.
The province wound up owning a business that was soon overwhelmed by a wave of asbestos class-action lawsuits. On top of that, the company was entangled for more than a decade in lawsuits from investors claiming their investments had been savaged by the expropriation.
In countries with developed legal systems, the legacy of expropriation can be years of legal headaches.
That last line should be “years of billable hours” and at least part of that will flow to friends of the government who - just by coincidence – happen to be lawyers.
There’s make-work and then there’s make work.
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Otherwise known as shuffling deputy ministers around.
1. We’d be remiss if we didn’t note that the provincial government’s recycling program – complete with the used tire mess – is now being run, albeit on an acting basis, by the same guy who runs the provincial government’s fire and disaster response crowd.
2. The acting minister of environment/acting deputy minister combo that’s been in place since last summer has been replaced by an acting minister/confirmed deputy minister. The guy’s been in the job six months and is only now confirmed as the deputy minister. Bet a lot got done in that department with all the acting going on.
3. What exactly is a deputy minister of special projects which, the release notes, includes collective bargaining? Since when is collective bargaining a “special project”? Not so very long ago that was handled by the person who is now called the deputy minister of the Public Service Secretariat, which, incidentally, also got a new deputy minister.
4. That deputy minister came from education which got – you guessed it – an acting deputy minister in her stead.
5. Jerome Kennedy mumbled something over the Christmas holidays about inefficiency in the public service. Well, he might take note of his boss’ habits in promoting inefficiency.
Firstly, too many people are appointed to too many positions in an acting capacity. As such, they have a limited ability to get down to work since they might be shuffled off to some other part of the The Hill before they know what hit them.
Secondly, sometimes people get stuck with two things that are unrelated. Like Mike Samson, a very capable fellow, who must now juggle bottles and cans as well as fire extinguishers. One of those jobs is – you are too quick – on an acting basis, so don’t expect anyone to be sorting out the mess of the cans and tires until the Premier gets around to putting a full-time boss at the recycling board.
Thirdly, in his own case, Jerome has reporting to him no less than four deputy ministers where there used to be two. That’s right. Four people doing the job that used to be handled by two. That’s four if we include the special projects DM since contract negotiations used to be the responsibility of the person running Treasury Board.
Fourthly, let’s not forget there’s still a staffing thing out there called the Public Service Commission - as opposed to a “secretariat” - with its own bureaucracy that does a whole bunch of other human resource-related stuff.
Fifthly, let’s notice the number of appointments where people just traded offices.
How confusing is this mess? Well consider that Jerome has been in finance/treasury board/OCIO/public service secretariat since well before Christmas. His name appears as the minister responsible on the index page for the Public Service Secretariat space on the government website.
Scan down the page, though, and you see this tidbit:
The Public Service Secretariat is headed by Deputy Minister David Gale who reports to the Minister of Finance and President of Treasury Board, Hon. Tom Marshall.
Now Gale just got shifted so the web-nerd for finance or treasury board or the public service secretariat or the office of the chief information officer (Knuckles Two) can be forgiven for not being right on the ball.
But Marshall? He’s been gone for months.
It would all make you laugh if it wasn’t your own cash supporting it.
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Chevron has decided to postpone an exploration drilling program in the deep water Orphan Basin, according to The Telegram and CBC, due to higher than expected rig costs for 2009.
Chevron regional manager Mark Macleod said the estimates were higher than the costs for the first well. According to some reports, the first exploration well cost twice as much as anticipated.
In late 2007, the company committed to drilling a second well during 2008 but those plans didn’t turn into action. Rig availability has been a consistent factor in drilling decisions since high demand has driven up costs accordingly against a relatively short supply of rigs capable of operating in deep water, difficult environments.
Chevron likely expects that demand will lessen for deep water drill rigs as the price of oil makes deep water plays less attractive.
In addition, as the Telegram reported:
"As well, we felt we needed to do some additional technical work to re-evaluate all the prospects in the basin from a risk and cost basis," MacLeod said. "So, we've got a bit more homework to do to be ready to drill, hopefully, in 2010."
Late last year, Chevron and its partners consolidated eight Orphan Basin exploration licences (ELs) into four.
Those ELs give the companies the right to explore the seabed.Under the consolidation, the companies will keep four reconfigured ELs until 2013. MacLeod says that consolidation didn't delay drilling.
"It's allowed us to more carefully focus on the best parts of the basin."
At the same time, Chevron is likely also looking closely at its bottom line. The company warned investors last week that fourth quarter profits in 2008 will likely be lower than those in the third quarter. Chevron blamed the lower price of crude and natural gas.
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From The Telegram, the latest exploits of the supposedly most open accountable and transparent administration in the history of mankind:
A fire that caused $323,000 damage to an offshore fabrication site operated by the provincial government’s energy corporation. Revealed through exemptions to the public tender act filed six months after the fire.
Jeers: to keeping things quiet. Here's something you might not have known: the Bull Arm fabrication site had an electrical fire that needed repairs costing more than $323,000 - and it didn't happen yesterday, either. The fire was in July. We'd be none the wiser save for a line in the public tender exemptions filed in the House of Assembly just before Christmas. Funny how everything from exemptions to the public tendering act to appointing judges to turfing out members of Memorial University's board of regents seems to happen either late on a Friday afternoon or else during the Christmas doldrums.
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Judge | Year Appointed | Year called to bar | Years in practice at appt |
Gloria Harding | 1998 | 1979 | 19 |
Wayne Gorman | 2000 | 1983 | 17 |
William English | 2000 | 1976 | 24 |
Patrick Kennedy | 2001 | Not given | 27 |
Colin Flynn | 2001 | Not given | 18 |
Harold Porter | 2001 | 1986* | 15 |
Catherine Allen-Westby | 2002 | 1986 | 16 |
Timothy Chalker | 2002 | 1971 | 31 |
Lynn Spracklin | 2002 | 1970 | 32 |
Bruce Short | 2003 | 1992 | 11 |
Michael Monaghan | 2006 | 1970 | 36 |
John Joy | 2006 | 1978 | 28 |
Jacqueline Jenkins | 2008 | 1990 | 18 |
Donald Singleton | 2008 | 1997 | 11 |
For the record, here is the section of the Provincial Court Act, 1991 under which cabinet appointed Don Singleton to be a Provincial Court Judge.
Remember: the Judicial Council didn’t make the appointment. Tom Marshall – justice minister and attorney general – picked Don singleton from a list of applicants some of whom were highly recommended and others of whom, including Singleton were “recommended”.
Appointment of judges
5. (1) The Lieutenant-Governor in Council, on the recommendation of the minister, may appoint persons to be judges of the court.
(2) No person shall be appointed as a judge unless he or she
(a) has been a member in good standing of the bar of one or more of the provinces of Canada for a total of at least 10 years; and
(b) is at the time of the appointment a practising member in good standing of the Law Society of Newfoundland.
(3) No person may be recommended by the minister under subsection (1) without the recommendation of the judicial council under paragraph 18(a).
For comparison, here is the section from the old act, circa 1974 and amended in 1978 and 1988, on appointment of judges:
Appointment of Provincial Court judges
(4) The terms of the appointment of Provincial Court judges shall be judicially noted.
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As CBC’s David Cochrane reported this evening Don Singleton had not one but three run-ins with the law for impaired driving in the 1980s over the course of three years. The first two never amounted to anything - one dismissed, the other dropped - but on the third one, Singleton blew one and a half times the legal limit and lost his license for six months. He also received a fine of $700. [corrected from two and a half times the limit in original]
The erstwhile provincial court judge took his name out of contention after inquiries turned up the impaired driving conviction.
Singleton claims he forgot about the conviction when he applied to be a judge last fall.
The court records for the three charges are available online, courtesy of cbc.ca/nl. Cochrane’s debrief can also be found there in ram audio file format.
The records turned up on Friday following an inquiry by a local reporter for records of any convictions against Singleton. The first search turned up nothing, apparently due to data entry errors - different birth date and address - in the database.
The inquiry prompted Chief Judge Reg Reid to search further. That second search turned up the conviction and two earlier charges. Interviewed by CBC’s Deanne Fleet, Reid said that, although he was the presiding judge in the 1990 conviction, there was nothing that made Singleton stand out at the time such that he remembered him.
Thus far, public comment is focusing on the need for a background check on all applicants for judicial appointments.
That ignores the fairly obvious question of why justice minister Tom Marshall plucked Singleton from a list of upwards of 30 applicants. Junior at the bar – barely past the minimum requirement for time in practice – Singleton didn’t seem to fit the same pattern as some of the appointees over the past decade.
Marshall also said he asked Reid to change the judicial committee's policy on background checks.
"I've asked him to review their policies and procedures and to implement a mandatory police search and provincial court search for every applicant," Marshall said.
While he’s at it, the justice minister should also change the policy for background checks on appointments to quasi-judicial panels as well. Singleton was appointed to the labour relations board in 2005 around the time of his conviction on the tax and import charges.
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Don Singleton won’t be sitting on the provincial court any time soon.
He withdrew his application, declined the nomination - whatever is the right word – after information turned up that not only did Singleton have a conviction for impaired driving on his record, he’d neglected to tell the panel that reviews applications for the judge jobs.
Driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence in Canada.
Turns out Provincial Court Chief Judge Reg Reid did a bit of checking and turned up the conviction.
Marshall has a the better part of a box of extra large farm fresh on his face for picking any old name off the list without considering the applicants any more deeply than that.
Singleton may have passed the basic review of his application, but if the committee reviewing the applicants didn’t rank them – as one suspects they didn’t – the justice minister wound up making a major blunder.
That’s an important point to keep in mind as the spin machine busily tries to lay the blame for this one on the committee and on Reg. Certainly that’s the tone of the interview Tom Marshall did with CBC’s David Cochrane last night and the way Cochrane’s debrief is running as your humble e-scribbler writes this.
The fault here is with the minister responsible who could have seen – on the face of it – that a guy with a mere 10 years at the bar might not be your first pick for a plum job.
Reid – known to most as Reg, not “Milton” as CBC has been calling him – likely took it upon himself to double check Singleton’s background after the most unlikely of names wound up being named as a judge. After all, the existing bench is chock full of senior former barristers, including a bunch of former Crown prosecutors. A guy with a decade under his belt would hardly get a look in without some sort of extra juice, like say a partisan connection.
If you didn’t know this about the current benchers, the crap about no sitting judges with criminal convictions might make it seem like it’s been a fluke thus far the system worked. But the system has worked because everyone involved, including the justice minister, looked carefully at the applicants.
In this case, they evidently didn’t.
Well, at least Tom didn’t.
But in any event, good on Reg.
The Doddering Old Man turned out to be not so old and not so doddering after all. Reg preserved the integrity of his bench.
Maybe They Who Must be Obeyed will take learn a lesson from this and take some advice from now on. They don’t know everything.
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In this case a transmission line for the Lower Churchill.
A couple of weeks ago, former Premier Roger Grimes took issue with a comment by noob finance minister Jerome Kennedy that the Lower Churchill transmission line would be a good project for federal infrastructure spending.
The Telegram story - not online - quoted Grimes:
"There has been no routing actually planned for a transmission line,"says Grimes. "If they have a transmission line already planned, already designed ... then why don't they tell us where it is?"He was reacting to Kennedy who the Telegram quoted as saying:
"That's something that we could start immediately, it's something thatWilliams did mention the Lower Churchill in that year-end interview.
we wouldn't have to wait for the environmental assessments because, essentially, we'd simply be building a transmission line," said Kennedy at the time.
Kennedy said Transportation Minister Trevor Taylor delivered a similar
message to federal Infrastructure Minister John Baird just days before.
Similar comments were made by [Premier Danny ] Williams in a year-end interview with The Telegram.
Williams also took issue with Kennedy’s comments in the Telly story on Grimes’ comments saying that Kennedy had spoken out of turn. There would need to be an environmental impact assessment. Williams also said that Grimes simply didn’t know enough about what was going on:
"Poor Roger is talking through his hat. He doesn't have the background,he doesn't have the information," says Williams.
"We've been working on this plan for a long, long time, we've a lot ofOf course, Grimes and Williams have been at odds over the Lower Churchill for years and of all the province’s politicians, Grimes seems to have a unique ability to get under Williams’ skin.
engineering done," says Williams.
But that’s not the only talk of transmission lines since the New Year. Emera president Chris Huskelson told the Halifax Chronicle Herald that without a line to Newfoundland, it made no sense – presumably economic sense - to try and ship power directly from Labrador into the Maritimes.
Then to cap it all, Ed Martin, president and chief executive officer of NALCO(R) and Hydro told the Chronicle Herald that shipping power across the Cabot Strait to Nova Scotia is one of the options Hydro is looking at for the Lower Churchill. Hydro and Emera signed a memorandum of understanding a year ago to explore the possibility of shipping power from the Lower Churchill to Nova Scotia. But as Martin said this weekend:"Newfoundland decides to bring energy to the island, it makes perfect sense to bring energy further to Nova Scotia. If they decide not to bring energy to the island, it won’t make sense to bring it to Nova Scotia."
"It’s looking like somewhere in the Sydney area would be an excellent landfall for us," Mr. Martin said of the proposed undersea cable.
"Not only is it distance-wise one of the closest points to Newfoundland, but it’s close to the Lingan plant, which is a significant emitter for Nova Scotia (Power) . . . but nothing is final yet."
Nothing is final yet.
Well, nothing is really clear in all of this. As labradore noted in a post on Sunday, not so very long ago, Martin and Hydro were talking about shipping electricity into New Brunswick from Cap St. George on Newfoundland’s west coast. That was certainly the option examined in 2005, as reported by both the Telegram and Stephen Maher of the Chronicle Herald. Sea Breeze Power of British Columbia was proposing an underwater line from the coast of labradore to Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia.
This isn’t a new idea. As Bond Papers reported in 2007, the idea of underwater transmission lines for Lower Churchill power goes back to the 1970s although officials were quick to note that it wasn’t an attractive proposition:
For one thing, according to Vic Young, president of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, the 77-mile cable across the Cabot Strait is an extremely poor prospect. Although a study two years ago stated it was technically possible, its capital and maintenance costs would be enormous. The electricity delivered would cost about twice what it would if brought down overland.
But all this talk of transmission lines and environmental assessments gets really curious when one looks at the Lower Churchill proposal which is now in the hands of a joint federal-provincial environmental assessment panel.
The only transmission lines mentioned in that proposal are for two running from Muskrat Falls to Gull Island and then a single line back to Churchill Falls. From there, power would head into Quebec through the existing interconnection.
The project is described very straightforwardly in the agreement between the federal and provincial governments on the environmental review panel:
The Proponent proposes a project/undertaking consisting of hydroelectric generating facilities at Gull Island and Muskrat Falls, and interconnecting transmission lines to the existing Labrador grid.
…
Interconnecting transmission lines consisting of:
• A 735 kV transmission line between Gull Island and Churchill Falls; and,• Two 230 kV transmission lines between Muskrat Falls and Gull Island.
The 735 kV transmission line is to be 203 km long and the 230 kV transmission lines are to be 60 km long. Both lines will be lattice-type steel structures. The location of the transmission lines is to be north of the Churchill River; the final route is the subject of a route selection study that will be combined on double-circuit structures.
No proposal has been presented publicly for any other transmission lines related to the Lower Churchill. There’s nothing in Quebec or New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In Both Quebec and New Brunswick, Hydro has simply filed an application for wheeling - moving power through the existing grid - but there’s no discussion of new transmission lines.
While Danny Williams might claim Roger Grimes isn’t up-to-speed on the project, existing public information suggests the Premier and his finance minister aren’t exactly coming clean on the whole thing either.
In fact, Grimes might well be closer to the truth given that if a new transmission line – say through Quebec – is being contemplated there’s been nothing done to make it possible within the next couple of months.
As Grimes noted – and the Premier concurred – a transmission line would have to go through an environmental assessment. That idea would be a wee bit more complicated politically if the line through Quebec was expressly intended to carry power from the Lower Churchill through Quebec to another market.
If there’s another line Kennedy was thinking about, like say across to eastern Newfoundland, there’s still a provincial environmental process that would at least have to be considered. The major problem there is one of cost. Figure on a project costing upwards of $2.0 billion by the time it is done.
The cost of that little make-work venture would be borne entirely by the ratepayers of eastern Newfoundland who, it should be noted, don’t really need all that extra power and certainly wouldn’t get it right away, anyway. Hydro just expropriated over a 100 megawatts of generating capacity from AbitibiBowater and there is surplus power in the grid since the Abitibi Stephenville mill closed in 2005. The Inco project at Long Harbour will suck up some of the juice but there is no great demand for power on the island in the near term.
As for timing, those lines – even if they were built over the next couple of years – would be more than a decade old before any Lower Churchill power coursed through them. The Lower Churchill project will take nine years to complete. The proposal in the environmental review called for construction to start in 2009 with first power in 2014 and the completion of the whole thing in 2018.
But even if the environmental assessment is finished this year it would be well into 2010 before anyone would start digging dirt in Labrador.
Even 2010 would be an optimistic start-time these given that Hydro doesn’t have a single customer for the Lower Churchill power and the money markets are a wee bit skittish these days what with the shortage of capital in the markets.
Heaven forbid that work might start without those contracts in place and with the work being funded out of the public treasury or whatever cash the energy corporation might have laying about. That’s what happened last time with BRINCO as some people are only now realizing. The company borrowed cash and started work in the mid-1960s. Hydro Quebec took maximum advantage of the BRINCO foolishness and with the latter in a financial bind managed to secure the sort of contract concessions it had been seeking from the start.
All the bluster at the time about running power down through Nova Scotia was just a tactic to improve the bargaining position with Hydro Quebec. Ditto the talk of running a line through Quebec with federal backing. There’s no evidence the request was ever made, even though many people insist on repeating the story. In the end, Hydro Quebec got everything it was looking for from the start and then some.
Maybe what we have here with all this talk of transmission lines is the same sort of bluster and political posturing we saw 40-odd years ago.
Certainly there is nothing in the public domain to suggest that anything Kennedy referred to is real.
Maybe Roger Grimes knows a lot more than Danny Williams will ever give him credit for. And when it comes to contracts, it’s not like the two haven’t been at odds before with Williams having to change his position when the facts were in. Anyone remember Voisey’s Bay?
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This may look funny, but it isn’t.
It is all too close to the reality of modern business and government.
Some of you will recognise people in this video. Some of you will put yourself in the place of the creative person. Not nearly enough of you will be able to correctly identify who is the creative person in this in the first place.
What would happen if a modern corporation – or government – had to develop a stop sign? [H/t to Lee Hobson, Shel Holtz and a raft of others if you follow the links.]
The province’s score on public access to government records is boosted by the performance of municipalities across the province. But that’s not the same as the provincial government.
Its record of openness - on the other hand - is nowhere near as good Saturday’s news suggests.
Of six requests for information under open records laws during a recent survey by the Canadian Newspaper Association, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador did not fully disclose in response to any of the requests.
The provincial score is boosted by the responses by municipalities across the province, all of which applied both the spirit and the letter of the access to information law to a greater extent than did the provincial government.
Provincial government departments and agencies received six requests. Of those half met the response that no records existed. Another was denied in full, while another was deemed a denial of access by the researchers. Only one request was answered with a partial disclosure.
The responses fit the pattern of apparently inaccurate or false responses found recently by the Telegram.
In one notorious case, the Executive Council claimed it had no records on so-called “purple files” even though the Telegram had an e-mail from the Premier’s Office – a record within the Executive Council under the access to information law – and the reporter saw such a file during an interview.
The responses to the CNA survey are astonishing and in some cases laughable:
1. Vehicles: No records/Not my department. The request for a “list of vehicles (including make, model, and year) available for transportation of members of cabinet and senior public servants. As well, please provide a copy of your policy on the idling of vehicles.” made to the Executive Council – the central government agency that vets all access requests yielded this answer:
Newfoundland and Labrador said it didn’t have any records on such vehicles, although the executive council office suggested filing a request to another department for an idling policy.
That’s right, rather than respond to the request and provide the information, the Executive Council told the researcher to file another access request with a line department. And that’s after the central agency that co-ordinates all government activity claimed it had no records on vehicles available for the use of cabinet ministers senior public servants.
It took 20 days to get those responses.
2. Road paving: A request for information on road paving work in the province got a ludicrous response. Specifically, the researchers asked for “[a]n electronic list of highway construction contracts including fields for the contractor,
contract value, date contract awarded and description of the work, for contracts of $100,000 or more awarded during the 2007-2008 fiscal year. Please provide the data in Microsoft Excel, Access or delimited text format.”
Provincial government departments use Excel and certainly maintain records electronically, i.e. on computers. The department’s response, therefore, is laughable:
The letter from the Transportation and Public Works department in Newfoundland stated that the information “does not exist in electronic form within this department,” even though the record released was a computer printout.
The government is known to maintain detailed records on road paving - by provincial electoral district - and political staff in the Premier’s Office have a hand in determining how much money goes to what district in the highly politicized system. Someone has the records and likely keeps them electronically rather than with quill pen.
3. Tasers: A request to the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary for policy on use of tasers by police did not receive any decision and was recorded as a refusal in full.
4. A request for briefing notes for the finance minister on carbon tax was denied in full.
5. A request for any audit conducted of physicians’ billings under the provincial medical plan earned a response of “no records.”
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