Another Homer Simpson moment

So a couple of communities on the coast of Labrador are complaining of lack of action by the provincial government. One is a roads issues which falls under the responsibility of Trevor Taylor, the transportation minister.  The other concerns water and sewer work which is the responsibility of Diane Whelan, the municipal affairs minister.

To answer the media questions, the provincial government deploys John “The Shoveller” Hickey, the minister of Labrador Affairs.  His response sets him up for a big fall:

"I can't act on issues if people to raise them with me," Mr. Hickey said. "I got to say, these communities need leadership. Getting on an open line show is just not cutting it."

Now right off the bat, we have no idea which level of leadership Hickey is criticising:  Is it the mayor and town councils in the affected communities?  Is it the local member of the House of Assembly or is it his cabinet colleagues who are showing inadequate leadership by not bringing this issue to his attention?

But the real problem with Hickey’s comments is that he has set himself up for a huge political smack between the eyes.  All someone has to do is produce letters to his office concerning these issues and the old boy will look like a complete idiot.

Not a good spot.

And how likely, you may ask, is it that someone would be able to produce such correspondence?

Well consider that the issue of a road to connect Norman Bay to the rest of Labrador came up at the 2005 annual meeting of the Combined Councils of Labrador.  If a townie could find this on the Internet with a simple google search, surely John Hickey or someone from his staff could have noted this issue. And it’s not like Hickey wouldn’t have already been aware of these issues:  he attended a session with Labrador politicians. 

On top of that there’s the story in the Northern Pen - and reprinted  in the Western Star - from last February about a letter from one resident of Norman Bay to Barack Obama looking for help with roads.  This didn’t turn up in Hickey’s media clippings?

How about the letter the fellow says he wrote to …wait a minute…John Hickey:

Roberts said he's exhausted all possible avenues locally, having sent letters to Labrador MP Todd Russell and other federal politicians, as well as to Labrador Affairs Minister John Hickey.

Did John get the letter?

And if that wasn’t good enough, it’s not like the issue of roads in the area didn’t come up in the House of Assembly in 2007.  Again, a simple google search turned up a wonderful couple of answers from Hickey, none of which blamed others for the situation.  Rather Hickey just deployed the traditional bureaucratic response that he’d take the issues under advisement.

Then there’s the Northern Strategic Plan, which includes references to communities along the southeast coast of Labrador raising concerns about an inability to cost-share water and sewer work.  Hickey must have heard someone mention this stuff given that his picture and a message are included at the front end of the plan document.

So there it is:  Hickey says he’s never heard of the issues because no one has sent him letters.  There’s ample evidence he is aware of the issues in southern Labrador and that at least one person has actually written to him.

This is a classic Homer Simpson moment.  You can see the letters turning up all over the place and Hickey being embarrassed at his own stunnedness in making a comment that is only too easy to prove false.

All the rest of us can do is laugh and utter a “D’oh” in unison.

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Fallow field?

nottawa raises an interesting point about NALCO’s bailout of the Parson’s Pond oil licenses.

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Shocker of the century: soldiers, sex, speed and booze version

Some prudes at the Department of National Defence need to get a grip.

Apparently, they are  concerned because a recent study showed that the mostly male, young soldiers returning from Afghanistan are spending their bonus pay getting laid and going on the beer during a five day “decompression” stint on Cyprus after their operational tour is over.

According to the Toronto Star:

The problem reached such a state when the last contingent of Canadians stopped off in Cyprus this spring that military officials have recommended slapping a two-drink limit on soldiers for the first night of their decompression to "facilitate learning" in a Day 2 course on transitioning from life at war to life at home.

Soldiers are apparently also spending their cash renting dune buggies or fast jet skis they they then use to race about at high speed.

It’s hard to know which is more ludicrous:  the fact that someone at National Defence headquarters paid good money to study this or that the Toronto Star is reporting it as if it was shocking and somehow worthy of corrective action.

DND is apparently considering adding some lectures to the post-deployment curriculum to address the “problem”.

Now the Star is not known for the high standards of its reporting, especially when it comes to matters military.

But still.

A bunch of young men want to release some tension after six months of hard  work - need we remind the dorks at the Star life threatening at that – and so they blow some cash getting drunk and enjoying the company of other willing young people. those that break the law get arrested and dealt with in the courts.

Where exactly is the problem in all this?

Well, where other than among or with the crowd who write this crap for the Star’s readers?

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Another safari reporter bags small game

When you drop in, do a couple of quickie interviews and then head off again, you tend to miss the details.  The Globe is the latest vehicle for the safari reporter’s guide to something called Newfoundland.

There are some nuggets of gold in the story but they are inundated with the same old crap that’s been written a dozen times.  Gee, no one has ever called the province “The Rock” before or noted that economic diversification is a major goal.

There’s even the obligatory interview with  Danny who does his part to spread a few complete falsehoods (like the bit about “ a St. John's-heavy boom” being because half the population lives in or around the capital) and resurrect some foolishness  from the early days of his administration (the Stunnel is apparently one of his dreams).   BTW, note the curious – and continuing -  tendency to refer to the psychological state of the entire province and the psychological state of a single person as if they were interchangeable or the same thing.

Count on the locals who normally judge their own self-worth by what appears in the Globe to be feeling a bit buoyant initially. 

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PUB pork snacks: the editorial view

The Saturday Telegram editorial makes good points about the recent pork appointment at the board of commissioners of public utilities, but it misses one key fact:

The provincial government actually started a hiring process for the public utilities board that should have resulted in merit-based appointments.

They decided to cancel the competition and revert to the old method of appointment.

The current administration actually started down the right road and then turned around and went back.

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Takogo kak…

So what is it about northern strongmen, physical activity and their supposed political power?

Ya got yer Putin, the pecs and a swim in a Siberian lake…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or Hickey and…

the…

umm…

err…

shovel.

 

 

 

 

 

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NALCO buys pot from Leprechaun, has one year to find black gold

The provincial government’s energy corporation will spend at least $20 million over the next year to drill exploration wells on three licenses near Parsons Pond.  The wells must be drilled within the next 12 months or so or the licenses will revert to the Crown.

NALCOR Energy acquired a 67% interest in the venture for slightly more than CDN$500,000; that represents about 85% of the interest previously held by Calgary-based Leprechaun Resources. The remainder is split among a group of small private sector companies:  Leprechaun Resources, Deer Lake Oil and Gas, InvestCan and Vulcan Minerals.  The only changes in the interests held by each company appears to be with the Leprechaun portion.

Leprechaun tried to raise capital for the venture last year through a public share offering.  Evidently that offering didn’t attract as much attention as expected. It appears that the provincial government’s energy corporation stepped in to salvage the project. 

Vulcan and InvestCan are also partnered on a separate venture in the Bay St. George region.  The drilling program on the Robinsons No. 1 is planned to finish this year at at depth of 3600 metres.  Earlier this year, Vulcan drilled two wells in the shallow Flat Bay deposit, both of which showed oil.

In mid July 2009, the provincial environment department notified Leprechaun that its application for an access road at Parsons Pond would require an Environmental Preview Report.

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Devil in the details Update: From Moira Baird’s excellent Telegram story:

1. Expiry date on the existing licenses:  February 1, 2010. That’s two tight a time frame to get three holes spudded and assessed.

2.  Drilling as early as September:  Using what rig?  If NALCO doesn’t have one already lined up and on site, they will have to bring one in from as far away as Alberta or the Gulf Of Mexico.  Good luck with that.  The best prospect would be to use the rig Vulcasn currently is using on Robinsons No. 1.  Availability late fall or early winter.

3.  Friends in high places:  NALCO’s Jim Keating on the possibility of getting an extension on the licenses:  “I believe, if required, we'll be able to seek an extension for the licences to make sure that ... we optimize the best results for the people of the province and our partners.”

Can you say “unfair advantage”, boys and girls?

4. Which other companies:  “[NALCO boss Ed] Martin said Nalcor has been assessing the west coast for the past two years and had also been approached by some of the exploration companies.”

Okay.  Which ones and for what properties?

We know about Leprechaun, which has former cabinet minister Paul Shelley in key positions.  How about Deer Lake Oil and Gas with former Peckford aide Cabot Martin at the helm?

Those would be the most likely choices and they might also explain why Leprechaun effectively got what looks more like a government bailout than a farm-in. 

After all, if Leprechaun had the cash to do the drilling program, it wouldn’t have sold out to NALCO or anyone else.  And if all Leprechaun had needed was an easy extension of the license to get the job done, they also wouldn’t have sold out such a large stake to NALCO.

Nope, license extensions are only easy if you’ve got connections and NALCO is connected all the way to the top.

5.  Pull the other one:  $14 million out of a total of $20 million?  The drilling program was estimated to cost $26 million, not 14.  Where’d the rest of the cost go?

Counterpointing

Of course pumping out a raft of good news, even if it is recycled for the most part, does help to offset the latest employment figures.

There are over 6,000 not working in July 2009 in Newfoundland and Labrador who were working full-time in the same month last year.  There are actually 7200 fewer full-time workers year over year but a slight gain in part-time employment shaved a bit off the net employment picture.

You won’t see much reporting of the jobs stats in Newfoundland and Labrador, but you will see plenty of space given to the “joy, joy” stuff.

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You know its polling season

1.  An announcement about fibre-optic something or other.

2.  An announcement about energy something or other.

3.  Money for road paving, announced again and again.

There must be some really intense concern on the 8th that the public mood needs a lot of extra help to be happy for the pollsters this summer.

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The longest, slowest good-bye in political history

For those who don’t know, the Council of the Federation isn’t another Star Trek convention.  It’s the new name for the meetings where all Canadian premiers get together and talk about stuff.

Only a few years ago it was one of the most important thing on the go, at least for one premier.

Now, suddenly, things like protecting the environment, fixing employment insurance and rebuilding the economy are not so important. Some unspecified office business is.

Maybe this is another step in the long, slow, good-bye announced in 2006.

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Pork appointment at PUB

Another one of the Tory faithful has gone to his reward as a full-time commissioner of public utilities.

Jim Oxford will start work on September 9th.

Regular readers will note that just before the last provincial election the governing Conservatives announced a public competition for both the chair and commissioners jobs.  They collected a few resumes but then scrapped the whole idea shortly afterward.

The Public Service Commission, the crowd that supposedly ran the competition, refused to provide any substantive information to your humble e-scribbler when he inquired about the whole mess last year. They would confirm a competition had started but beyond that, there was nothing but stony silence.

The absence of a genuinely impartial process for selecting commissioners might be the reason why the minister making Oxford’s appointment had to go to the lengths of pointing out that the public utilities board is an independent body.

Either that or Tom Marshall was sensitive to the fact that Oxford was not only a career public servant in Mount Pearl but the guy who managed the Tory party finances since the year A.D. Naught. 

Oxford joins Andy Wells, the chairman appointed last year.

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Real Leaders Shovel It, apparently

There’s been a silly exchange of letters to the editor the past couple of weeks between a fellow named Matthew Pike and the John Hickey.  Hickey took time out from shovelling pavement to shovelling something else in response to a letter from Pike.

The whole thing is silly because Pike started out by kicking Hickey over the foolish government position on the Goose Bay airbase.  It’s pretty silly for Pike to try and hold Hickey to account for a position which  is based on holding John Hickey’s federal political buddies to a promise anyone with half a clue knew was total bullshit when it was uttered.  Hickey campaigned for the federal Connies a couple of times  while the federal Connies were running hard on the bullshit promise of a battalion of soldiers for Goose Bay. Now he is slagging them off for not delivering.  Pike was poking Hickey for supposedly not doing more to push for bullshit.

Anyway, the exchange got sillier considering that the best come-back Hickey could toss at Pike is that Pike is a staffer at the provincial Liberal Party office.  Maybe he is.  Maybe he isn’t.  It’s really irrelevant given the inherent foolishness of Hickey’s position on Goose Bay.  That’s also really not much of a point coming from a cabinet minister in a party which relies so heavily on plants in the media. 

Enter Shannon Tobin. 

Tobin decided to dip his oar into the exchange this week in a letter the editor thankfully decided to leave off the newspapers website.  He didn’t point out the obvious.  Instead he decided to back Hickey.  After starting out with a couple of paragraphs based entirely on Pike’s employment status, Tobin drops this wet kiss:

Now I am proud to state that I support the Progressive Conservative party of Newfoundland and Labrador mainly because I know that the PC party has and continues to show a lot more respect towards Labrador than the Liberals ever did.

After accusing someone else of partisanship, Tobin tosses his own partisan affiliation on the table in such glowing – and entirely irrelevant - terms.  The rest of the letter continues the unqualified partisan praise for Hickey  - nothing on the Goose Bay base issue itself, by the by  - before finishing with the assurance from Tobin that  “the view from Lake Melville with John Hickey as our MHA is a bright and magnificent one.”

Takogo kak Hickey:  There’s something about a man in hard hat and safety vest, apparently.  In a letter to The Labradorian, Shannon Tobin credits Hickey with bringing benefits to central Labrador: “… including the fact that we finally will have some  much needed pavement placed on the TLH…it is quite clear that John Hickey is a real leader and there isn’t any need for a change.”

Tobin’s letter is such an over-the-top love letter to John Hickey’s political backside one can easily conclude one of two things:  either Tobin is applying for a job in Hickey’s office via The Labradorian.  Or he’s been applying already but has had no luck in the hunt for Hickey-related work thus far. 

Now of course, there’s no reason to doubt Tobin’s sincerity. He likely believes every partisan word of what he wrote  but, in the ordinary course, one does not usually see even the most blind of congenitally blind partisans weighing in to an essentially trivial bun fight between two other partisans unless there is something else going on.

About the only thing Tobin wrote which likely reflected the views of the majority came in his second sentence:  “I am a little displeased that some would take advantage of this option [writing a letter to the editor] for seemingly political motives.” 

They likely find letters like Tobin’s more than a little displeasing.

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Only NL GM dealer affected by cuts closes doors

Clarenville’s Decker Motors is the only General Motors dealership in Newfoundland and Labrador affected by the company’s cuts to dealerships.

The company closed its doors last week after 47 years in business.

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What we pay him the big bucks for…

Labrador affairs minister John Hickey vows to pave roads in Labrador s’posin’ he’s got to do it himself, one shovel full at a time.

Many people wonder what Hickey does in his portfolio.

Now they know.

Nit-picky Update:  Okay.  So he writes letters to the editor of the local weekly too.

And issues inadvertently funny “news” releases.

Oh yeah…and he once sued former Premier Roger Grimes for defamation for something Danny Williams actually said.

Whatever happened to that law suit anyway?

 

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How Irish we aren’t: airline version

So how come, with news of a new airline serving St. John’s, none of the locals have suggested trying to bring Ryanair to Newfoundland?

Stranded passengers.

Shagged-up check-in that causes some serious security issues.

An airline boss who muses about cutting the number of lavatories per aircraft to one AND charging to use it, or about imposing a fat tax on passengers and then basically tells disgruntled passengers to feck off.

For a crowd that spend most of their time bitching about travel to and from the island, Ryanair and Michael O’Leary would seem the perfect match.

 

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Dear Krista…

It’s pronounced “aitch”.

Not “hay-tch”.

Once is fine, but hearing it every time the term “H1N1” turns up in a newscast the mispronunciation grates on the nerves.

Just thought we’d sort that out before someone slips minestrone into a script.

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Canadian Press and CBC desperately need online fact checker

Someone needs to start doing some fact checking on stories posted on CBC’s web site.

A Canadian Press story on a Russian Proton K rocket contains this claim:

The Proton-K re-entry was reminiscent of a 2005 incident, when a U.S. military rocket splashed down in the vicinity of the Hibernia oil platform, on Newfoundland's Grand Banks, shortly after its launch from Florida.

The planned launch of the Titan IV B-30 rocket prompted Premier Danny Williams to order an evacuation of several offshore-oil platforms.

But the order was soon rescinded when American air force officials assured Ottawa the risks were small and the rocket would be destroyed if it veered off course.

None of it happened.

1.  Danny Williams didn’t order an evacuation of rigs – he doesn’t have the legal authority.

2.  Danny didn’t rescind the order not only because he didn’t give it  in the first place but because the evacuation  - or more accurately, a removal of non-essential personnel - went ahead. 

3.  The assurances from American authorities were the same all the way through the sorry-assed episode. The government reaction went through a few permutations mostly as people stopped making asses of themselves in public but nothing the Americans said produced any changes in the provincial government reaction.

4.  The Titan didn’t “splash down”.  The booster section broke up as it returned to Earth, as predicted. 

5.  The thing also wasn’t near the Hibernia rig unless more than 100 kilometres away is “near”.

Seriously, people.  This stuff happened within the past five years.  The facts are readily accessible on line.  It’s astonishing that CP would cock it up that badly and CBC would let the cock-up stand.

CP and CBC need a fact checker.

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The junk science of ink blots

If some psychologists are worried that knowledge of the Rorschach test posted to the Internet has invalidated the ink blots as a diagnostic tool, then perhaps they might consider the entire test to be useless as a diagnostic tool in the first place.

After all, based on that little bit of psycho-logic, the test was invalidated from the moment the first book on Rorschach appeared in the first library.

Moreover, the test was rendered invalid in its application to the millions of people who have gone through psychology courses that discussed the whole concept of figuring out personality through what people say in response to blotches on bits of paper.

And of course, that also would mean the test would be automatically invalidated for use on anyone who has previously been “tested” using Rorschach or a similar method.

Rather than jumping all over some Canadian doctor who posted information on Wikipedia, all those psychologists who are getting their knickers in proverbial knots might just consider that their own argument suggests that their much-praised “test” is perhaps a bit more like phrenology than they’d care to admit.

In other words, Rorschach might just be utterly useless - at best  - or junk science at worst.   It would be far more like divination than diagnosis and definitely heading for the realm of intellectual fraud.

And all of that is derived from the argument advanced by the people supposedly defending Rorschach's method.

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Historically challenged

Having the provincial government eliminate interest charges on provincial student loans is considered an ”unprecedented” initiative by…umm…the provincial government.

Students can borrow government-guaranteed money to finance their education.  That would run to the tens of thousands these days, but not having to pay any interest on that loan is considered something worth heralding from the roof-tops as a feat unequalled anywhere in the civilized universe.

But it wasn’t that long ago that going to university in Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t require any borrowing at all.

The former students writing this sort of knob-polish evidently aren’t history grads.

Either that or they are the people who teach google use over in InTRD.

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Waiting for the news release…

when Newfoundland and Labrador’s population drops by one half of one percent would be like waiting for government to lower gas prices by half a cent.

Not gonna happen.

But government will raise prices by a little more than a quarter of a cent. Such is the sensitivity of the government gas pricing fixing scheme when the prices aren’t in the consumer interest.

And cabinet ministers will issue news releases when the population estimates go up by a comparably small amount.  Last summer, then-finance minister Tom Marshall issued a news release heralding a growth in population of a mere 171 people.

Thus far, not a peep on an estimated population drop of  264.

That could be because the growth in population – triggered as it was by the recession – could now turn once more in population decline as the western world comes out of a recession.

And while the current administration likes to claim credit for things they didn’t do – oil revenues and  increased population for two examples – they seldom like to take responsibility for stuff they do.

Funny that, iddn’t it?

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