Python at 40

The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired 40 years ago this month on the BBC.

Taped first but according to some sources aired third was the original premiere episode titled “Whither Canada?”

It seems appropriate.

Curiously enough, this was also the title of the final major assignment at the National Defence College.  Maybe there was some thus far undiscovered connection.

The first episode aired October 5, 1969.

Graham Chapman died one day shy of 20 years later, on October 4, 1989.  

John Cleese delivered what has become a legendary eulogy for his old writing partner at a memorial service held in December that year.

He very quickly manages to change the tone of the event, as can be seen by the crowd shots as he begins speaking and then hits the jokes.

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The shrimp industry explained

Derek Butler in the Telegram.

As usual there’s way more to the issue than meets the eye.

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The search for a university president: compare and contrast

At McMaster, they started hunted in January and 10 months later came up with a winner.

At Memorial,  it has already taken almost 10 months just to go through the bullshit at the front end designed solely to get people to forget the sheer sh*t-wreck made of your humble e-scribbler’s alma mater in the first go- ‘round.

The only way the Memorial University search committee will find a president before the end of this year is if John Fitzgerald  - Our Man in a Blue Line Cab, seen left, hard at it on the diplomatic circuit - tells Danny he wants out of Ottawa pronto.

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If only they’d read their briefing materials…

While health minister Jerome Kennedy busily backs off decisions he took only a few weeks ago on health care, there is something obviously haphazard and chaotic about the way the current administration is approaching virtually everything they do.

Your humble e-scribbler has noted this before in other policy areas. Equalization is the most obvious subject and, as it turned out, that was a post that was extremely popular.

But in the case of health care, word of the on-again and possibly off-again review of some services makes one want to turn back the clock to 2002.

That’s the year a provincial government with no cash to speak of - and certainly far less than the billion dollar surpluses Jerome! and his buddies have turned up – laid down a simple set of practical guides to health care delivery across the province.

Healthier Together (2002) was touted as a strategic health plan for Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s still available on the health department website. Read together Along with regional profiles produced the following year, you get a very good picture of the health issues in each part of the province and the solutions needed.

If you want to get a sense of how the document could help the government of today, take a look at the section on the organization of the health care regional authorities:

Newfoundland and Labrador is a large geographic area with a highly dispersed population where regions often have different circumstances and needs. This is partly the reason why the province has 14 health care boards.

It is not possible to compare the diversity of this province to the relative uniformity of Winnipeg or Edmonton, where populations which exceed that of Newfoundland and Labrador are serviced by a single health authority. However, if the number of health boards in this province create barriers to proper patient care, then re-examination is needed.

One of the problems both the Premier and the current health minister pointed to was a lack of accurate information they had when making decisions.

Well, the 2002 approach affirmed that decision-making authority on delivery of service belonged to the regions, not to people far removed from where the service was delivered. It also noted that the number of boards allowed gave a system that could take into account the local issues that could get lost in a larger system.

But when you turn to the section on where services would be located, there’s a simple model for health care that could work very easily today. After all, this thing was drafted only seven years and and, as it notes, the health care system currently in place goes back 20 and more years:

Primary health care sites will be the common denominator of service for the whole province. These sites will provide a cluster or network of basic services, plus public health and social services consistent with the mandates of the health and community service boards. Each site will serve a defined geographical region designed to ensure the right number of health professionals to service the population. For example, a minimum of five family physicians will be needed in a primary service site so that coverage can be provided 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week. Therefore, a region should contain no less than 6,000 people and the site should be located so that 95 per cent of the population within that region are within 60 minutes driving time to the site. Depending on the geographic shape of a region or the remoteness of some communities, additional facilities may be located outside the main primary health care site to be serviced by a small complement of staff or by providers who make routine visits to the area.

Doesn’t that sound just a wee bit like Lewisporte?

All this makes you wonder if the turn-over at the senior levels in the current administration has served to rob the government of much-needed corporate memory, the kind of memory that would serve a cabinet well in tough economic times.

That turn-over didn’t come as a result of retirements and normal job changes-over. Rather there seems to be some other force at work producing a parade of ministers in some departments and the ping-ponging of others (finance and justice) while at the public service level there is an equally high level of change. All of it must surely make it very hard to implement a coherent and sustained set of policies over time.

And when people making decisions don’t have a clue about what happened relatively recently or when it is official policy to denigrate everything that occurred before October 2003, it makes the job of running government all that much more difficult.

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Will Danny expropriate this one too?

Kruger is talking cuts and concessions at the major private sector employer in the premier’s own district.

So far, not a peep from the provincial government.

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The Alberta Deficit Fighting Strategy

Where would Albertans be without such sound guardianship of the public purse?

In 2008, give yourself a 30% wage hike.

In 2009, set spending to run a deficit of 11%, later jumping to 20%.

Later in 2009, cut your own salary by 15%.  Cut cabinet pay by 10%.

Freeze the salaries of top civil servants.

Preach restraint.

Easy enough when you are still looking at a net gain of between 15% and 20% on your own pay.

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Randy Simms can relax

So if Randy Simms can get himself into a load of hot water with some people, then we can only wait and watch to see what will happen to Gene Simmons for uttering these bon mots  - among others - about his partner, Shannon Tweed:

Look, it’s the 21st century, and the thing women have been clamouring for is finally upon us: you’re free. You’re no longer indentured slaves. You no longer have to be in the kitchen, or leave the smoking room so the men can talk. And the greatest asset Shannon has is that she’s a modern woman. Besides being stunning, six feet tall and, of course, a Newfie, I worship the ground she walks on. But part of the relationship is that it’s no-nonsense. We don’t call each other “honey” and “sweetheart” and all those clichés. That’s television talk, just a paint-by-numbers relationship. When I talk to her, it’s straight ahead, like an equal partner, and she to me.

Apparently, Gene is smitten because:

This is the hottest woman on earth. And she’s an alpha female. She doesn’t talk about whether the vacuum cleaner works or not. Doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Has a strong moral centre, no drugs, no booze. No whining. No bad hair days.

This should be interesting.

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Fuzzy Logic, cabinet ministers version

Just to recap:

So the Lewisporte health care centre started out as a chronic care and acute care centre at a cost of $22 million.

Then it ballooned to $42 million even before anything got built.

Paul Oram told us all before he quit that government – i.e. cabinet, which presumably includes Jerome and Danny – chopped out all the acute care bits and cut the building cost to $32 million.

That acute care bit included lab and x-ray.

And because the building cost of the project mushroomed and then got cut, the same people decided to slice $200,000 out of the operating budget.

So basically, even before anything got built, lab and x-ray would disappear and would stay disappeared even if nothing got built at all.

And now, even after slicing the building cost to $32 million by eliminating all the acute care stuff, one of the guys who made the cut decision in the first place is now asking the local concerned citizens community to help him find another $2.0 million in cuts so that maybe he’ll give them back the $200,000.

Uh huh.

So the whole thing comes down to finding $2.0 million in savings in a project which already went 110% over budget before anyone could blink and which is still 50% over budget.

Riiiiight.

And so when that $2.0 million disappears in further cost over-runs, what happens then?

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Prissy politics

Anyone ever see a letter to the editor from Dr. Noel Cadigan taking a politician to task for referring to someone as a traitor?

Doubtful you’ll find one.

But Cadigan found a problem with the use of the word “crackie” in reference to health minister Jerome Kennedy.  For those who don’t know, a crackie is a common enough term in colloquial Newfoundland English for a small, yappy dog.  It’s also a common-enough term in Newfoundland politics.

All in all, it is relatively benign.

So benign in fact it that a letter from anyone complaining of its use – save from an elderly maiden aunt who was born in the reign of Queen Anne – stands out.

Cadigan isn’t that pompous, most likely, nor is he quite as sensitive as the letter suggests.  Rather he is using  the coded language of current Newfoundland politics.  Note the lecturing, condescending tone of the letter in the fashion of a prissy school master lecturing an errant lower form boy in a public school. 

Note as well the pointed reference to what the Telegram ought to be doing instead of offering critical commentary in an editorial.

Sound much like Paul Oram?

You get the picture.

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Another tumble coming

People may be cheering the rising loonie.

Some people may be rubbing their hands with glee at the current and forecast prices for crude.

Gold is wonderful, if you own it already.

But, note the references in those articles to “weak fundamentals” and the fact there haven’t been many “signs of a pickup in the underlying oil demand in industrialized countries”.

The same sort of underlying weakness  - particularly in the American economy  - is what fuelled the surges in oil prices before the peak in mid-2008.

Remember what happened after that, right?

Well, get ready again.

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The result of fisheries mismanagement

Once upon a time, Fishery Products International built a state-of-the-art shrimp processing plant that would have provided employment to its work force 48 weeks out of 52.

The project was contingent on the provincial fisheries minister showing some sense in handing out shrimp processing licenses.  It depended on provincial politicians not trying to shift all the displaced cod and other plants with which the province remains grossly oversupplied onto other species like shrimp.

And, as it turned out, it also depended on provincial politicians not actively collaborating with efforts to smash the company that ran the plant and then sell off the bits and pieces – including the highly successful brands and the marketing arm – to anyone who wanted to scoop up the remains.

All it needed was a plant able to complete internationally run by a local fishing company big enough and well enough established to compete successfully around the globe.

That didn’t work, did it?

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Ya got four years, Kurtis

Ralph won this one and he ain’t giving up the seat for  a second try.

Odds are extremely good, though, that this will be his last kick at the political cat.

Bide your time.  Brush up your pitch.  Get some experience under your belt.  Give it another go.

At least you aren’t recycling yourself at the school board.

Ya got four years, Kurtis: 

Use the time wisely.

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Zombieland

Fresh from his humiliating defeat at the hands of Doc O’Keefe, Ron Ellsworth is not content to be politically dead for a moment.

He is playing the political zombie card.

Ron is trying his hand at getting elected – again – to the Eastern School District board. 

He’s running in the zone that matches Ward Four in the City of St. John’s.

Lest you think this makes Ellsworth something special,  Ronnie isn’t alone in being a defeated candidate trying his hand at another elected office. 

Over in the board zone that matches Ward Two, voters can find Scott Fitzgerald.  He ran in said ward just a few weeks ago and was soundly defeated by incumbent Frank Galgay.

Meanwhile, in the zone matching city Ward Three there is George Joyce.  You may recall George ran in the last provincial election against Sheila Osborne in St. John’s West.

And, of course, the guy from Avalon West who is currently the board chair – Milton Peach – is a former Tory cabinet minister from the Peckford years.

Now for people who haven’t held elected office before, the school board can be a way of getting your name around and building up some contacts for a run at something else.

For Scott and even George, then,  there is some sense to this if they have future political ambitions.

But as for Ron, it seems a  bit odd to go backwards  - so to speak - like this.

After all, if he loses this one, where else can he go?

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When all they can offer is an E.A., Terra Nova version

Said it before.

Say it again.

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Yep. Something’s wrong.

Gasoline prices in Newfoundland and Labrador jumped by more than three cents per litre last Thursday.

Interestingly, the prices in this province have taken some wildly leaps up and down over the last while.  But they didn’t flip quite some much on average across the country.

Your humble e-scribbler has always maintained the government gas price-fixing scheme needs to be abolished.  Here’s more evidence.

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Cliffs to buy Wabush Mines

Cleveland-based Cliffs Resources is exercising its right of first refusal to acquire outstanding shares in Wabush Mines from U.S. Steel and ArcelorMittel, according to CBC.

The buy-out comes in response to a bid by Consolidated Thompson for the shares.

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Jerome’s Guarded Language

labradore does yet another commendable job on demographics and recent population increases.

He also dissects the former finance minister’s guarded language when attributing the in-migration trends to a cause.

Basically, Jerome doesn’t.

He talks instead about things that will happen manana.

Tomorrow is a very important concept in the language of Newfoundland politics.  it is when things happen.  Unlike American politics where happy days are here again, Newfoundland politics is a place where good things will come tomorrow. 

We must be ready for a better tomorrow.

Today is a chore to be endured until tomorrow.

Today there must be cuts in health care and so forth, but it will be all worth it, tomorrow.

There are lessons to be learned from here or there that will prepare us for the rapture coming tomorrow.

The Lower Churchill is on the way.  It gets here tomorrow just as it has been getting here tomorrow for 40 years now. Some people aren’t attuned to the local political argot and so get taken for a ride. It’s especially wonderful to read the post on selective perception from 2006 and note the issues that still dog the Lower Churchill three years after the most recent political resurrection of this golem.

Heck, in one sense, Tom Rideout can hardly be faulted for thinking one June that tomorrow was actually four months away.

And tomorrow as we all know is a day that never arrives anyway.  When it does get here it is actually “today”.

Yet for all that, people still wonder why Alice in Wonderland is a good metaphor for Newfoundland politics.

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66 at 6 in 2

Once it was a million dollars, but heck if there was only a half a million there are better things to do with it than give it to Rolls-Royce or any other company that could get along without it and still create jobs in Mount Pearl.

And heck, I wouldn’t be pumping cash into getting more women to have babies. 

I’d put the money into looking after the ones we have and are having. Your humble e-scribbler would support breast feeding in Newfoundland and Labrador.

It’s good, preventive health care.

It helps change attitudes toward women way better than being crude and beating the crap out of Randy Simms for something he didn’t say.

There is a campaign apparently, as this story from The Aurora notes.

"We are launching this campaign in Labrador-City Wabush to highlight the success this region has had in promoting breastfeeding," Ms. Murphy Goodridge said during the launch. "Labrador-Grenfell Health is the first regional health authority in the province to implement a comprehensive regional breastfeeding policy based on international standards. Breastfeeding rates throughout Labrador have always been higher than the rest of the province, so I am here to recognize Labrador-Grenfell Health employees and their community partners on their tremendous success and to encourage them to continue to strive to improve breastfeeding rates. Other areas of the province are looking to replicate your success."

According to the article the province-wide initiation rate is a mere 64%.  That’s up a mere 1.3% since 2006. The old article had an old link to the Breastfeeding Coalition:  here’s the new one.

And initiation isn’t the telling factor.  Three years ago only 11% of mothers who started breast-feeding were still breast-feeding six months later. Women aren’t sticking with it. The rate by 2008 was a mere 12%.  That’s basically no change.

Whatever the ponderous government agencies have been doing ain’t enough.  Maybe we need to free-up the people actually running the programs and get a lot of that health care bureaucracy and stodgie government-ish thinking get out of the way.

And lookit, nothing would work to start our children out healthier than to encourage breastfeeding.

The BFC has a campaign to boost breastfeeding but frankly a few posters ain’t gonna do the job.  The campaign needs to have a much higher profile.  For one thing, there could be a group of prominent local someones in addition to all the other stuff outlined in the BFC strategic plan to help reinforce the message about breastfeeding.

And rather than just talk about the need for supportive environments, people need to start initiating action.  There needs to be a concerted effort to make the workplace more tit-friendly, for example.  There needs to be a much wider effort to make more parts of society accepting of breastfeeding.

So there’s an idea.

Rather than kick Randy Simms in ‘nads for something someone misheard or deliberately misrepresented, maybe someone could have done something positive like asked him about the City of Mount Pearl’s breast-feeding policy. 

Are women councillors who are breastfeeding their children able to do so during a council meeting or a committee meeting? 

What about the provincial government?

Was Charlene Johnson able to get her little one to latch on while Danny was in full rant around the cabinet table?   Not ideal for the digestion, admittedly, but still,  you get the point.

And what was all that with her having to get back to work a mere month after giving birth supposedly – and the emphasis is on supposedly – because there was no maternity leave policy in the House of Assembly?

Pish-posh.

Talk about your unfriendly work environment for women.  Now I may have missed it but I don’t recall anyone from PACSW championing that cause at that time.  There’s one for the government appointed pseudo-bureaucrats to tackle.

But there’s an example of simple issue that directly affects the ability of women to get involved and/or stay involved in many more aspects of life outside the family once they start having children.

Simple.

Practical.

Effective.

And everyone wins in so many ways.

People in Newfoundland and Labrador need to get involved in an effort to dramatically increase the breastfeeding rates in this province.

What’s been going on already is great but it isn’t enough.  Clearly.  Not enough.

So on this thanksgiving weekend, let’s applaud the efforts of the provincial Breastfeeding Coalition.  Let’s applaud Labrador West with the highest initiation rate – 75% – in the whole province.

But let’s recognise that that 75% is still 15% below the national average.

And we need to get some kind of “66 at 6 in 2” drive going to ensure that  within two years, we have 66% of mothers in the province still breastfeeding their infants six months after giving birth.

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Some ideas for 66 at 6 in 2

-  A better website.  It’s do-able and younger families are more likely to use the Internet for information.  The current one is buried away and it doesn’t have the kind of simple stuff you’ll find elsewhere.  A good example of a BF supportive site:  the US government one.  There are lots of others.

-  Paul Daly’s shot is great but there is a need to use a much more aggressive approach with messages tailored to different audiences.  And for mercy sakes don’t post the poster as a pdf.   You can get some ideas from this approach mapped out by students in the UK.

-  Nothing work better at changing attitudes and behaviour than making it clear that the dominant attitude has shifted.  People openly supporting breastfeeding – highlighted by some prominent locals – would start the ball rolling.

-  And just do it.  Nothing will work better than having the women who are breastfeeding just doing it.

Blooms and roses

News reports about a climb in the number of jobs across the country buried a key aspect of the story, as in this example from the Globe.

But there was a catch. Much of the private sector has yet to start hiring again. The job growth was due to 36,000 positions added in the public sector, while the private sector shed 17,100 jobs, in sectors such as transportation, professional services and accommodation. Private sector employment has dropped 3.9 per cent over the past year.

That was paragraph four, long after the stuff about huge gains and ones bigger than expected.

Now this is a rather interesting revelation in light of economic developments in Newfoundland and Labrador.

You see the boom on the northeast Avalon isn’t being fuelled by the offshore.  It’s coming entirely from massive increases in public sector hiring, public sector wage increases and a huge jump in public sector spending.

The most recent round of ‘stimulus’ spending for capital works is just more cash in on top of the gigantic increases in public spending over the past four years. That would be the “unsustainable” ones for those who missed the drama of the past few weeks.

Incidentally, the guy who revelled in boosting spending beyond the levels that the economy could support is back in charge of the cash box.  He proudly noted for listeners of one local call-in show that the province currently outspends Alberta on a per person basis just as it has done for most of the past decade and a half.

Yet for all that, the province just shed 4200 full-time jobs between August and September 2009 and there are 3100 fewer full-times jobs this September compared to last.

All this should lead people to be a bit cautious about predicting the end of the recession and the quick return to happier times. 

Here in this province, the current provincial economy is sustained by huge levels of public sector spending.  But that just isn’t going to work given the anticipated drop in oil production over the next four years.  Even if the global economy rebounds, crude oil prices aren’t likely to hit levels double and triple what they are today:  that’s the sort of prices the provincial government would need to keep up its current spending.

No one should be surprised, therefore, that the premier and his new health minister – the guy who used to be finance minister – just headed out to a by-election and pulled a fast one on the locals.

Come help us figure out cuts to the building cost, they said, so you can keep lab and x-ray services.  What they didn’t point out is that the savings needed are not the $200,000 in annual operating costs but the millions in construction costs.

In Lewisporte, for example, estimated costs for the new combination seniors home and acute care clinic skyrocketed from $22 million to $42 million before they even got to thinking about putting the first shovel in the ground.  In order to contain costs, government scrapped the acute care bit for a saving of $10 million.

But do the math. 

In order to restore the acute care centre and its anticipated cost of $10 million, the locals in Lewisporte will have to cut out one third of the beds – at least – in the new chronic care centre in order to get laboratory and x-ray service back.

So where are those old people supposed to go?

That’s a very good question.

Too bad the current administration doesn’t have an answer even though the problem and a viable solution have been available  - but ignored - for over a decade.

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Darrell Dexter: sucker

From the Chronicle-Herald:

Premier Darrell Dexter had a private meeting Monday with the president of Newfoundland’s energy corporation in an attempt to have electricity from the Lower Churchill Falls hydro project go through Nova Scotia.

Dexter apparently thinks the project is going somewhere and that there is any intention to run a power line through Nova Scotia.

Danny Williams hasn’t even been able to convince Hydro-Quebec to take an ownership stake in the project currently valued – not at $6 billion as claimed by the Herald – but at more like $10 billion. Heck, he even got bitched slapped into an emergency session of the legislature after his legal drafters tried a childish bit of word-play to screw with the 1961 Churchill Falls lease.

On top of that, the province’s finances are apparently so tight they have to cut health care despite having billions flowing in oil revenues. 

There are no – that’s right:  no – customers for the project.  A potential deal with Rhode Island has been buggered up. And that’s something the Premier once described as being “very,very” crucial to the project.

The land claims deal vital to getting the project going is lost in the wilderness.

The timetable on the project has been pushed back repeatedly and there are even rumours swirling now the thing will be sent back for a major environmental overall because the first set of environmental documents submitted to the federal assessment process were grossly deficient.

And, most amazingly of all given Dexter’s efforts to get in at the front end, there just are no plans whatsoever to run a power line from Labrador anywhere near Nova Scotia. 

If the Nova Scotians is fronting any money for this thing or even thinking of dropping cash on the Lower Churchill, he is being snookered, big time.

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