The New York Times’ Ben Schott challenges readers to have some fun and invent new words or phrases that have an obscured or no meaning to replace words and phrases that already work perfectly well.
Here is one to get you started:
Democratic Party (of Canada)
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Told it was a good idea.
From Brazil, a cute 45 second spot that shows peeing in the shower saves water in the long run.
Oil is there on the island’s west coast but why is it that the provincial government has to exploit the potential for oil instead of a local private company either alone or in partnership with others?
In a province where the private sector is so notoriously underdeveloped, the single biggest argument against NALCO’s recent bailout of Leprechaun Resources is that it stunts the local private sector.
It’s not like there isn’t considerable private sector activity on the west coast already, much of it undertaken at great risk by small local companies. They’ve soldiered on, risked much and raised plenty of capital from many sources all in search of a commercially viable play. Some of those local companies have far better plays on the go than Parson’s Pond.
It’s the epitome of what the provincial government should be encouraging in the province and it’s the kind of entrepreneurial spirit one would expect would get the unquestioned support from a Premier who told reporters recently that his heart is in the private sector.
The whole thing is even more incongruous when one considers that, in speaking with reporters yesterday, the Premier used Leduc (1947) as a point of comparison. Leduc was the first major oil discovery and it was made by the private sector.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the first oil discoveries have already been made and they were made by the private sector. The commercial finds on the west coast will come, and it should be the private sector doing the work.
Danny Williams may like to tell reporters he as “private sector guy” but his actions say something else.
This is a guy who has never really competed in the private sector in his life, outside of his law practice
But that’s not the private sector he likes to point to when he talks about being a private sector kinda guy. Nope, Williams likes to talk about running a cable company. But that is nowhere near like running an oil company. At Cable Atlantic, Williams had others doing the work in what was effectively a highly regulated monopoly. That’s essentially the situation he’s been trying to recreate for NALCO.
By muscling into the local onshore oil sector, NALCO has set itself up as the biggest player in the room with all sorts of grossly unfair advantages. It has the unlimited pockets of the taxpayer and therefore no problem pissing cash down hole after hole even if there is no sign and no possibility of a sign of oil. There are no shareholders to answer to and, unlike all the private sector companies, NALCO is effectively unregulated.
NALCO’s minister and the minister who makes regulatory decisions about the oil industry are one and the same. The department’s deputy minister sits on the board of NALCO Oil and Gas’s parent. NALCO just bought into licenses that expire in six months. Ordinarily an investor would have to struggle to justify an extension under the circumstances. NALCO knows they’ll get an exemption, extension or anything else it needs because it has connections no private sector company can match.
Whatever is behind NALCO’s sudden interest in onshore oil plays, it isn’t about repeating the glorious success of Leduc. It’s not about strengthening the province’s oil and gas sector or just the local private sector, the people who really make jobs and exploit opportunities.
Nope.
NALCO’s bailout isn’t even the giant make-work scheme many of its supporters seem to think it is. Government doesn’t create sustainable jobs and contrary to the baloney that comes from some mouths, economics shows that government doesn’t get the bulk of its spending back in taxes.
Whatever the motivation for sinking $20 million of public cash in this one venture, someone will have to dig deeper and ask more probing questions of the Premier to find out what’s really on the go.
In the meantime, let’s hope that the real private sector guys – the ones who’ve been looking for oil for years – hit oil before NALCO.
There’d be another sweet irony in such a development as well. You see if Danny Williams really was a private sector guy, he’d have never gotten into politics in the first place. If he really wanted to create jobs, jobs, jobs – as he claimed in 200o3 - he’d have taken his cable cash and invested in the private sector.
He’d have taken risks, been buoyed by a few successes, endured a few failures and then invested in new enterprises here and elsewhere. He’d be pushing for government policies that support entrepreneurs and encourage the growth of a sustainable, diverse private sector built on daring and imagination.
Instead, the supposed “private sector guy” got into politics and built the existing government bureaucracy into an even larger behemoth backed by policies that discourage innovation and investment and hook private sector companies in the province on government cash.
There hasn’t been a new approach since 2003. We’ve actually seen the same old approach in Newfoundland and Labrador that has consistently failed to deliver decade, after decade, after decade in a province led by saviour after genius after business success.
And, as we learned in Mount Pearl, Holyrood and elsewhere, there is no pot of gold at the end of that old rainbow of green cukes and red-soled rubbers, at least not for the people - the taxpayers of the province – whose money goes out the door.
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Skypower is owned 50% by Lehman Brothers which filed for bankruptcy last year in what was the largest bankruptcy filing in American history.
The Canadian renewable energy company is now seeking to sell all its assets. It reportedly has sufficient funds - $15 million – to see it through the asset sale process.
The Fermeuse project involves nine turbines with a combined capacity of 22 megawatts.
There’s no word on what will happen to the Fermeuse project.
Update: The Fermeuse project was certified operational on June 30, 2009. Power from the project is sold to Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro under a 20 year power purchase agreement signed in 2007.
The project, originally proposed by Vector Wind Energy was later taken over Canadian Hydro Developers on December 14, 2006. CDH turned the project over to Skypower two weeks later.
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Canadian Hydro Developers Inc operates a 197.8 megawatt wind farm project on Wolfe Island, near Kingston Ontario.
CHD installed the 86 turbines on farmland on the island in early 2009 and the project achieved operational status in early July. The power is sold directly into the Ontario grid. Each windmill cost $5.5 million. The overall project cost approximately $500 million.
The project hasn’t been without its share of critics, environmental watchdogs and complaints about noise are already appearing. A group opposed to wind turbines has started in prince Edward County.
There are also supporters, as well.
The new masthead picture is of a portion of the Wolfe Island wind farm, taken from the ferry running between Kingston and Wolfe Island.
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The Premier might have been otherwise engaged for the Council of the Federation meeting last week discussing trivial things like the recession and international trade.
But set up an event in the first few days after the government’s pollster starts collecting data and Danny’s there with bells on.
Thursday, alongside his old buddy Ken Marshall to unveil the logo for the 2010 Junos.
How big a deal is this logo unveiling?
Even the presence of Senator Fabian Manning can’t get Danny’s skin crawling enough to keep him from from showing up to goose a poll.
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The draft paratransit report for the City of St. John’s proposes a series of new tax grabs to pay for the system.
And deputy mayor Ron Ellsworth – also running for mayor in this fall’s municipal election – wants the whole thing in place before voting takes places:
Deputy Mayor Ron Ellsworth said that, in some way, the report would be revised to incorporate the concerns, but acknowledged that everything needs to be done by mid-September, before the municipal elections.
The report proposes:
- a new 2.5 cent per litre tax on gasoline sold within the City of St. John’s which would produce an estimated $10 million annually,
- a new surcharge of motor vehicle registrations for residents of St. John’s that would bring in an estimated $500,000 annually,
- a new surcharge on both parking fees and parking fines that would bring in an additional $150,000 annually,
- a new surcharge on taxi licenses that would generate an estimated $180,000 annually.
Having the provincial government pay the full cost of health-related transfers – something Ellsworth was talking up last January - would bring in about $300,000 annually. There was no public talk back then about more “creative” ways of sucking cash from taxpayer’s pockets.
Now all this might be a set of good ideas but really, there’s something fishy about the unseemly haste being display by the current council.
After all, this is the same crew that last time around busily assured everyone before the election that the Wells-Coombs Memorial Money Pit was in the black – at last – and then let us all know after the voting was done and counted that the whole thing was drowning in red ink. The thing continues to flounder.
The paratransit system may need more money but there’s no reason to quickly and quietly grant the crowd running Tammany at Gower the right to suck an additional $10 million out the pockets of taxpayers in the city.
Let’s have way more information and discussion before this little idea gets anywhere near implemented.
Incidentally, there’s nothing about this issue on Ellsworth campaign website.
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What do Sarah Palin and Ryan Cleary have in common?
Poor exit strategies that prompted rumours and a host of questions based on the way they left their jobs.
Admittedly, Sarah Palin was much funnier that Ryan ever was but the basic point remains the same: leaving a job requires a coherent exit strategy to quash rumours and avoid problems for both the person leaving and the soon-to-be-ex-employee.
The Globe has an interesting take on how to leave a job successfully.
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An effort ostensibly aimed at encouraging women to get involved in municipal politics – where there are no political parties – turned into a partisan affair. A meeting in St. John’s organised by the status of women’s council included only Tory speakers.
And not surprisingly, as cbc.ca/nl put it, “[w]omen who spoke at the sessions Tuesday brushed off criticism that the meetings have favoured Progressive Conservatives.” They then quoted Tory cabinet minister Diane Whelan.
No invitations to speak were extend to any women with NDP or Liberal affiliations apparently.
Equal Voice – a non-partisan, national group dedicated to increasing the number of women candidates in politics at all levels – wasn’t involved.
There’s a good reason for that: this event is tied to a campaign launched by Whelan last spring.
If anyone had been serious about a non-partisan campaign, they’d have organized it through an established non-partisan group like Equal Voice.
As it is, the whole thing starts to smell a little funky and a really good cause – getting more women in politics as candidates – gets twisted into something else. It’s hard to believe that this event could wind up having only three speakers - Flora MacDonald, Shannie Duff and Diane Whelan - and all of them have Tory ties.
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As usual, Christie Blatchford gets it right.
A front page story in the Tuesday Globe excoriates an Ottawa judge for remarks he didn’t make in the decision on the O’Brien influence peddling case. There’s another column that carries on with the same nonsense.
In his decision, Justice Douglas Cunningham assessed testimony from one Crown witness and found that the portion of her testimony on which the Crown was relying was not really central to the conversation she was having at the time.
Even during the portion of the witness’ evidence led by the Crown, there were sufficient variations in the statement to raise questions about her recollections. On top of that, the defence was able to demonstrate that, having had many significant events in her life at the time of her statement to police, the judge concluded that the witness’ “recollection of a brief, casual portion of her conversation is so imprecise that, through no fault of her own, I must assign it little weight”.
There is no reference by the judge to the sex of the witness or anything of the sort. There is nothing but a straight-up factual synopsis of the evidence, which is what you’d expect from a judge.
And out that, the legion of professional Irks has launched into an incredible pile of nonsense.
Shame on Toronto’s national newspaper for giving such crap such prominence.
But, as usual, Christie got it right.
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Ryan Cleary tells CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates his version of why he wants to get into politics.
Rather than settle questions, Cleary just makes his situation worse.
Note that Cleary brings up and then ducks the question of spending more time with his family. Then he admits the decision for him to leave VOCM’s employ was entirely VOCM’s business decision: he wanted to stay; they ended the relationship.
That doesn’t sound like:
Tonight [Cleary] he told me he simply made a decision to put his kids first, despite the fact that he enjoyed talk radio and has great respect for the team he leaves behind at VOCM. He just could not make the long term commitment needed by his employer to keep doing the Nightline program..so they parted ways.
Unfortunately, the cbc clip seems to cut out abruptly in the middle of things. Let’s hope they can fix it and get the rest of it posted.
In the meantime, it’s interesting to hear Cleary handling yet more controversy over his candidacy.
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Doesn’t anyone think?
Well, apparently Goose Bay mayor Leo Abbass thought enough of the negative connotations of a story in The Labradorian that he had to issue a news release to suck up to Labrador affairs minister John Hickey.
Apparently Leo thinks people are interested in his emotional state:
Mayor Leo Abbass is pleased with the work done so far. “Having thirty kilometers already completed, the widening and upgrading of eighty kilometers ongoing, and an additional fifty to be paved, will not only make the road safer for the travelling public, but also improve conditions for the transportation of goods into our region. We look forward to the completion of a hard-topped surface along the entire length of Phase I and the continued work on Phase II and III of the TLH.”
Of course, they won’t finished the work until next year – as originally planned - even though a recent government news release may have misled some people into believe there was some sort of “fast-tracking” or “acceleration” to the paving.
Leo didn’t say anything about that, of course. The sensitive folk of his town can just rest easy because Leo is “pleased.”
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1. Announcing the announcement of announcements previously announced: 11 August 2009, a news conference to announce the first cheque from a small government program pumped up to sound huge. The program was announced on June 5, 2009. That’s just bad planning. if they’d pushed that forwarded government could have had the announcement in one polling period and then the announcement of the announcement in the next one.
Someone should be shot.
2. Get three ministers and announce the blindingly obvious: it took Trevor Taylor, Paul Oram and the guy in charge of the cops to release a “social housing plan” for the province. Their “vision” is “of a province where Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have access to secure and affordable housing.”
Seems fairly obvious that a plan for providing affordable housing should have as its vision the provision of affordable housing.
That’s just the stuff that doesn’t involve spending bags of money but they are two good clues that polling season is on us once again.
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From a cbc.ca/nl discussion thread on oil exploration by the provincial government’s oil and gas corporation, a comment that gives new meaning to twittering:
It was a Liberal Government in Ottawa that sent Liberal John Efford to the Conservative Government of Newfoundland with a "take-it-or-leave-it" offer on the annual royalties from the offshore resources. It was the Conservative Government in Newfoundland under the leadership of Premier Williams who removed the Maple Leaf flag in protest of this insulting offer by the Liberals. It was the Conservative Government who finally reached a royalty agreement that is today bringing billions in to the treasury of this Province.
Was all this negotiate "prior to 2003"? It think not! The Liberals in Ottawa at that time were not interested in negotiating, but in ram-rodding an inferior royalty plan that would have kept Newfoundland a "have-not" Province. Instead we had a Premier and Government who had the intestinal fortitude to challenge their "keep them poor" attitude, and today we are a "have" Province.
Not a single thing in those two paragraphs is true.
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As Bond Papers reported yesterday, Ryan Cleary is looking for the New Democratic Party [name under review] nod in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.
We can say it’s official because Cleary’s blogger buddy carried the story a day after Bond reported it. The story is also filled with a raft of jabs and barbs.
Guess the other parts of the Bond Paper’s post - about the “spending time with family” thing being a nose-puller of a media line - must have been right too.
Now it’s only a matter of time before the rumoured other candidate – a “name” – comes forward. you can tell that part of the story is accurate since Cleary’s blogger buddy denies there’s a contender and wants the Dipper executive to get the nomination over with most ricky tick.
The only candidate wannabes who look to get nominations over right away are ones worried about challengers who could guarantee their plans to spend more time with the family.
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The provincial government is “accelerating” its commitment to road work in Labrador - whatever the heck that means - but that doesn’t mean the work will be done in 2009.
A government news release issued last week started with these glorious words:
The Williams Government is accelerating its commitment to revitalize the Trans Labrador Highway (TLH) by issuing a tender to lay asphalt on an additional 50 kilometre section of Phase I from Happy Valley-Goose Bay towards Churchill Falls. Rather than wait until next year to award the contract, the Provincial Government is getting ready now to award this further work.
That’s additional as in more than the 30 kilometres scheduled to be paved this year and the 80 kilometres to be widened.
There was even a quote from Labrador affairs minister John Hickey saying that “[t]his accelerated work on the Trans Labrador Highway is an excellent example of this government’s effort to realize its long-term vision for Labrador.”
But just like Tom Rideout couldn’t tell time, John Hickey and his colleagues are apparently having some difficulty with the concept “accelerated”.
As Hickey told The Labradorian this week: “We’re not sure if we’ll be able to get all of that paving done this year, but it’s our hope to have it started.”
Now in this case, “accelerated” would normally mean faster than anticipated or than originally plan. What Hickey told The Labradorian this week is that – despite his claims last week – the paving on the Trans-Labrador Highway between Churchill Falls and Goose Bay will be finished in 2001-2011…as originally planned.
Last week’s news release was evidently part of some sort of poll-goosing spin campaign. Heaven only knows what Hickey’s most recent comments were all about. Maybe it’s yet another hickey-up.
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Try 1989 for customers of Central Telephone in the United States.
That’s the date on this video from youtube and it looks to be about right.
There’s another video dated 1986 but the thing lacks any voice over or other identifying marks to suggest it is either an ad or something from about 1986.
The cell phone itself dates back way before that - try 1973 - with the first commercial product entering service in the mid to late 1970s. of course, with a handset going for about US$4,000, there weren’t a lot of them on the go.
As with home computers, consider the capabilities of cell phones back then and what they do today.
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Ryan Cleary’s departure from voice of the cabinet minister came as a surprise to most.
There was speculation he’d been fired for campaigning with Jack Layton. Cleary supporters came forward with other views including one version, reputedly straight from the horse’s mouth, that he left to spend more time with his family.
Here’s the way Cleary’s closest blogger-buddy put it:
However, he [Cleary] did say that the toll on his family was too high. He was missing way too many sports matches, PTA meetings and was not home to put his kids to bed. He told me that he could not make a long term commitment to Nightline. He was having trouble reconciling his love of family with the hours of the job. I think we can all understand that.
Tonight he told me he simply made a decision to put his kids first, despite the fact that he enjoyed talk radio and has great respect for the team he leaves behind at VOCM. He just could not make the long term commitment needed by his employer to keep doing the Nightline program..so they parted ways.
Well, that last one seemed like a real politician’s nose-puller. How many times have you heard a politician quit a job of leave politics claiming it was to spend more time with the wee ones? It’s used a lot but it’s seldom the story, the whole story and nothing but the story.
Turns out the bloggerated version from Cleary’s pal was a nose puller worthy of the love child of Karl Malden and Jimmy Durante.
Cleary told a gathering of local New Democrats over the weekend that he will be looking for their nomination in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl in the upcoming federal election. The Steele crowd wanted a long-term commitment, it seems, and Cleary couldn’t give such a commitment and run for the Dippers too.
Now if any of you know anything about politics, especially federal politics, you’ll know it’s not a venture for a guy who wants to spend more time with his life-partner and offspring. To the contrary, federal politics can be brutal on home life.
Missed birthday parties come with the territory. Putting the kids to bed would be something from a fantasy world. Getting to hockey games or school plays will also be dodgy and that’s even if the whole clan ups-stakes and moves to walking distance of Hy’s.
Add in any considerations of more complex family situations and you can see that politics would not be the life for someone who found it problematic to spend a few hours at night sharing pearls of wisdom with the likes of the Moon Man rather than helping the wee ones snuggle down in their Spidey jammies.
Now on the other hand, Cleary may have nothing to worry about. He might wind up with plenty of time on his hands.
The other New Democrat buzz from last weekend concerned an unnamed – but reputedly high profile - candidate who is also eyeing the seat Cleary wants. Unlike the relative walkover he faced last time in getting the nod, Cleary may have to organize to win the nomination in the first place. He’ll have to start banking some cash, assembling the team and indentifying supporters.
And then he would have to win the election.
In the meantime though, that story about leaving Nightline to spend more time with the kids sounds like the kind of stuff you get from certain kinds of politicians.
Bullshit isn’t an auspicious start to a political campaign.
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Tom Careen of Placentia is apparently vying for the title of Chief Fantasist here on Fantasy island. He’s become a regular letter writer to the Telegram usually on some topic out of the nationalist collection of fairy tales.
His latest one is an old nationalist chestnut, namely the Churchill Falls deal:
On page 191 of the Young Commission report, there is this paragraph: "In several meetings, we heard that Newfoundland and Labrador should pursue its constitutional rights under Section 92A of the Constitution Act, 1867, to access power and energy from Churchill Falls for industrial purposes in Labrador and on the island."
This is supposedly a magic solution to the 1969 contract that sees Hydro Quebec buy power from Churchill Falls at an extraordinarily low rate until 2016. At that point, the contract automatically renews until 2041 at an even lower rate.
Now it would appear that these people - careen included - actually bothered to read section 92(A), an addition to the Constitution Act in 1982. That will become plain in a moment.
What they are talking about is actually the now famous Churchill Falls legend about a power corridor through Quebec which – if you believe this part of the fairy tale – the request for which the federal government rejected in the 1960s for fear of inflaming Quebec separatists.
This is where the problems start.
Firstly, it doesn’t appear such a request was ever made in the first place, in order for it to be rejected.
Second, there was little incentive for the Newfoundland government to make the request in the first place. Churchill Falls may have been a deal between a private company – BRINCO – and Hydro Quebec but the project was one of Joe Smallwood’s great provincial projects. Anyone recall his words at the sod-turning, the bit about “our river”?
Well, one of the reasons why Smallwood most likely never made the request in the first place is that it would have been made under the old section 92 (10). In effect, had the request on the power corridor been made and accepted, the entire project would fall under federal jurisdiction and the entire Churchill Falls venture would have become a federal Crown corporation.
Not a provincial project any longer, but a federal one with no Joe Smallwood to take any of the credit for bringing it about. He’d have had to take a back seat and watch as one of his favourite pet projects was ripped from his hands all in order to deal with the tough negotiating position Hydro Quebec was taking.
Despite there being virtually no evidence the power corridor was anything more than a weak-assed bargaining ploy by Smallwood on behalf of BRINCO, the legend persists.
And, it appears that the whole myth has morphed from 92 (10)(a and c) to s. 92(A). on the face of it you can see how the whole thing changed simply in the retelling: there’s a ‘92” and an “a” in both; all you drop is the “10”. Stranger things have happened.
Of course, you’ll notice that at no point does anyone who mentions 92(A) usually ever discuss what the clause actually says. There is a summary on page 116 if the final report from the Young Royal Commission but that only highlights the shortcomings in Careen’s idea. All s.92 (1) does is ensure that the provincial governments can make laws governing non-renewable natural resources. The Young commission makes several recommendations but they are really vague. The wording is essentially that the provincial government should look after the best interests of the province including taking into consideration s.92(10).
But they don’t recommend anything specific and that is telling.
Simply put, there is nothing specific in s.92(10) that provides any solution to the Churchill Falls contract power rates. The provincial government can tax power exports but it can tax in such a way as to discrimination against export power. In other words, any tax applied to Churchill Falls - virtually all of which is exported - would also apply to power from Holyrood or Baie d’Espoir, all of which is consumed inside the province.
Tom Careen would have known that if he’d bothered to read the Constitution Act or even notice what the Young commission report actually says when it summarises what s.92(10) says.
Then again, as Chief Fantasist you wouldn’t be interested in anything except…well…fantasy.
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