Joan Cook retired from the senate on October 6.
The Chretien-era appointee hit the magic age to retire from what used to be known as the Antechamber to the Kingdom of Heaven. Used to be the only way most senators left the job and its lovely salary was to die.
That means there is a vacancy from Newfoundland and Labrador just waiting to be filled by Stephen Harper.
Who will get it?
There’s a good question.
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Even in Paul Oram’s political death, he and Danny Williams can’t get on the same page.
Asked about Oram’s resignation, Danny Williams told reporters that when it comes to an individual’s health and family, he doesn’t even try and convince someone to stay. “I just accept it,” said Williams.
But that’s not what Paul says. As the Gander Beacon put it:
Mr. Oram said the premier asked whether he would consider staying on as an MHA, but he said he felt if he was going to walk away from one aspect of his work, he would prefer to fully remove himself from politics.
"I just felt that if I needed to regain control of my life, I had to walk away from politics altogether."
That’s not the first time that Oram and Williams have been at odds.
On the same day in early September – before Oram’s surprise resignation - Williams said the decision on cutting lab and x-ray services was made months earlier, long before Oram became minister.
Williams told a scrum that Lewisporte MHA Wade Verge knew of the cuts some time before July 9, 2009. Williams indicated Verge had the information from both Williams’ chief of staff and from Ross Wiseman when the latter was still health minister.
Oram told the House of Assembly - at almost the same time Williams was talking to reporters at another location - that he made the decision after meeting with concerned citizens in Lewisporte in mid-August.
None of the dates match up since letters released by Oram in early September were part of the pre-budget process. They were dated in February 2009.
But now even Danny Williams can’t get it straight.
According to the Northern Pen, the Beacon’s sister newspaper, a campaigning Danny Williams said something completely different from his earlier versions:
"Paul Oram had proceeded on the basis of recommendations made to him by the health authority," stated Premier Williams.
Not only did Oram now supposedly make a decisions Williams earlier attributed to someone else but the health authorities actually didn’t make the recommendations. They were simply asked for options to save money, money that – as it turned out – they actually never had to save anyway.
No wonder some people don’t trust some politicians.
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The provincial government seems to be in one of those strange places it goes every now and then.
It’s a world where the messages are decidedly mixed, if one picks a generous way to describe it.
Totally confused would be another way of saying there are two completely contradictory messages rolling at the same time.
Both of them are coming from the current finance minister who is also a former finance minister and notorious for running an open cheque-book department.
In the latest incarnation, Tom Marshall is seen supporting a CBC news story that rising oil prices are wiping out the projected government deficit.
Just yesterday it was a tale of looming financial woes. Tom Marshall even repeated the message that government spending - i.e. the spending he oversaw in the job before - is unsustainable.
In the CBC story, though, Marshall tries desperately to avoid giving any firm indication of the province’s current financial state:
If the price averages $70 a barrel for the entire year, it could wipe out the provincial deficit, but Marshall cautions against such predictions yet.
"It's not just the price," he said. "It's the volume. It's the exchange rate and of course we don't know what's going to happen in the future in terms of production numbers."
There are a couple of things to note here.
First of all, Marshall knows exactly where things are at this, the midpoint in the fiscal year. he also knows where things are likely to wind up within a relatively narrow range of possibilities. Marshall just didn’t want to share, even if CBC actually asked, and he likely won’t share until December if recent practice holds firm.
Of course, there’s a reason why the government holds on to information. They clam up so that people who ought to have accurate information can’t get it, but that’s another issue.
Second of all, we can fill in some numbers but not others.
The stuff we are missing includes revenue figures like sales tax, mineral royalties and personal income tax. If those are lower than expected, then it would take more than high oil prices to deliver a balanced budget. It’s unlikely those figures will turn out lower than estimated since the finance department routinely low-ball revenues these days. But still, we don’t know because they aren’t saying.
We also don’t know what government spending is actually like. Operational spending may be up or it may be down. Ditto the capital budget, or the “stimulus” as it is known currently. If projects are behind schedule or delayed – as many are – then the cash budgeted for those projects will reduce the overall spending part of the budget. A healthy chunk of the massive surplus in the last couples of years has been coming from forecast spending that just never happened and wound up not happening for two or three budgets.
As for oil, we can get a fairly good idea of what that looks like.
Price is one element. The 2009 budget used a figure of US$50 a barrel and an exchange rate that put oil at the equivalent of around Cdn$60. Oil is currently almost $20 a barrel higher than that, even allowing for the lower exchange rate with the American dollar.
Production is another element. Last year, oil production exceeded 125 million barrels. This year, the provincial budget used a figure of 98.5 million barrels or a decline of 21%. As it stands right now production in the first five months of the fiscal year is down about 27% compared to last year. A 27% drop in production would mean a total production of about 93.75 million barrels.
But that’s not the whole oil picture.
The other bit is the percentage of each barrel the treasury gets and neither the budget documents last March nor Tom Marshall these days will talk about that publicly either.
Thanks to the 19 year old Hibernia royalty regime, the provincial government take at Hibernia jumped to between 30% and 42.5% this year when the project hit pay-out. Terra Nova and White Rose are already in pay-out and are pumping 30% royalty rates based on the original royalty regimes from before 2003.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
The budget figures don’t appear to include the higher royalty rates. factor those in and even the lower production total of 93 million barrels would produce provincial royalties of at least $1.9 billion. When your humble e-scribbler ran the numbers in August - estimating the revenues from each project - the figure came out about the same as last year’s oil royalty.
What all this means is that even allowing for some variation in other revenues and in overall spending, the books will likely be balanced this year on an accrual basis even at the low-end estimate. On a cash basis there would a shortfall; the budget forecast $1.3 billion.
On the upper end, the forecast accrual deficit would turn into a surplus of something on the order of $500 million. On a cash basis, the books would be balanced.
All in all, though, one must wonder why there is some much confusion coming from the current and former finance minister(s). They could be letting the rest of is on their own projections since, the only negotiations going on right now are with voters.
Voters have a right to know how their own finances are looking, don’t they?
Oh yes.
And let’s not forget in all this that the budget last year included $1.8 billion in temporary investments that no one wanted to draw any attention to.
Makes you wonder why Tom and Jerome and Danny have been putting on the poor mouth again, even if just for a minute now and then.
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In any major business venture, it is important to ensure that the product will meet demand in the marketplace including consumer preferences.
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Check out Lee Hopkins’ blog post on his latest podcast with fellow communications consultant Allen Jenkins.
This is worth checking out for two videos, both of which turn out ultimately to be really cheesy marketing stunts.
One is from Denmark and involves a young woman who is supposedly looking for the father of her child. The child is supposedly the result of a drunken one-nighter with some unknown tourist.
While it looks a bit pathetic, the video is apparently a tourism board idea. Allan and Lee discuss the cost and the target market, one of which is outrageous while the other is imponderable. They also discuss the complete failure of the campaign. At least two senior officials – one with the tourism board, the other with the agency – wound up leaving their employment over the fiasco. According to the lads, there were more in the sequence which have since been shelved.
The inspiration for this bit of tomfoolery was a stunt in Australia involving a jacket and a supposed chance encounter in a bar. The subsequent controversy - based on alleged misrepresentation of the video - saw one of the creative geniuses behind the thing leaving his company to pursue other opportunities.
Oh yes, the Danish one also generated another version of the Hitler meme.
Great podcast on a great topic from two guys who know their stuff. lee and Allen discuss viral videos and ethics at some length. it’s all good stuff.
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Okay.
The latest H1N1 update from the provincial medical officer of health says there have been seven confirmed cases of H1N1 in the province over the past week. This is the second wave.
So how does she know it is seven confirmed cases of H1N1?
You see the official advice from the health department is that if you get sick you don’t go to the doctor or to a hospital emergency room:
If you get influenza-like symptoms, but are otherwise healthy, stay home to avoid infecting others and treat the symptoms.
So how exactly do they know that there have been seven confirmed H1N1 cases in the province in the last week?
Just wondering.
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The offshore board’s inquiry into offshore helicopter safety started in St. John’s on October 19.
You can find the inquiry website via the offshore board website or here: www.oshsi.nl.ca.
For the record, you can also find:
Transcribing is fast. You can find the testimony from this morning already posted.
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Someone writes a letter to the Western Star commenting on Danny Williams’ use of language.
Some members of The Fan Club take issue in predictable ways.
More comments follow, pro and con.
Fascinating.
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Tom Marshall in 2008 on the need for balanced budget legislation:
“I would like to see us come forward with some fiscal responsibility legislation that would make it a commitment of every government to ensure that, as a principle, we budget for a balanced budget, recognizing it won’t be possible to always have a balanced budget,” said Marshall. “And, if we can’t balance the budget, there would be an obligation on the government to explain and disclose to the people of the province why it didn’t happen and to disclose a strategy to ensure we get back to a balanced budget over a certain period of time.”
Marshall prefers to have balanced budget legislation that doesn’t require balanced budgets.
At least Tom is consistent. From 2007:
"I don't know if I agree with balanced budget legislation," Marshall said.
"I certainly would agree with fiscal responsibility legislation … but I'm not prepared to be locked in automatically to a balanced budget every year," he said.
Not surprising then that government spending up to know has been unsustainable and - dare one say it? – not very sound or responsible.
We know because the current finance minister told us.
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Reborn finance minister Tom “Marshall's challenge now is balancing declining revenues against increasing needs” to quote the Telegram story from today’s from page.
He said the key is "spending wiser, and spending smarter."
Okay, sez your humble e-scribbler, so does that means Marshall’s previous tenure as finance minister involved spending dumb and dumber?
Interesting line to take during a by-election, incidentally. Cuts to spending by Marshall’s predecessor are what got the governing party into this by-election in the first place. Jerome! Kennedy the high-pitched predecessor – now the higher pitched health minister – has been busily backtracking on the cuts Marshall, Kennedy and their boss approved in cabinet.
Curious.
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People in Newfoundland and Labrador must surely be looking with some puzzlement on the flap over federal Conservatives handing out government money as if it was their own.
In this province, their provincial Conservative cousins have the thing down to a science. The use of public money for partisan benefit is an old one in Newfoundland and Labrador but this current crowd have raised it to a fine art.
The House of Assembly spending scandal was – for the most part – a scam worked up to push free and untraceable cash that politicians could hand out to all and sundry in their district for any purpose the politician could think of approving.
So pervasive was the practice that a review by the auditor general found scarcely a single politician from any political party who sat in the House after the scam started in 1998 who did not use it to some extent.
The review also revealed that the politicians elected after 2003 used it with an enthusiasm their federal cousins could only envy. Of the top ten spenders as a percentage of their constituency operations allowance, six were elected after 2003 and all but one was a Tory.
As it turned out, one of the biggest supporters of the public cash for partisan benefit scheme was a former auditor general. Ironically, she was the one the House management commission blocked from looking at some aspects of the scam while it was first organizing. Beth Marshall also felt no qualms about handing out cash in small and larger amounts, nor did she feel any difficulty that there was a skimpy audit trail for the cash or that money was going to duplicate existing government programs in some cases.
The use of public money for partisan purposes was not confined to individual members of the legislature and that’s where the parallel with the federal Conservatives really becomes apparent. Since 2003, the Provincial Conservatives have worked to make sure that local partisan benefit came from any available pot of public cash:
- As we found out when Tom Rideout packed it in, road paving and construction is over-seen by a political staffer in the Premier’s office.
Since 2003, it has been consistently managed in a way to maximise the benefit to Conservative districts and to punish those that voted for another party.
- Fire trucks are a recent favourite for the spending announcement with the local MHA. With the recent by-elections and political upheaval, the fire truck announcements are coming about one a week.
The one they’ve consistently used is the small time cash being handed out by one department or another. The money is from a legitimate departmental program but when the cash is handed out someone from the government caucus gets the credit. It is inevitably called a “donation” or a “contribution” to make the free cash sound like anything but what it is.
There’s nothing new about it. Back in 2007, Bond Papers linked to an old CBC news story that dates from the early 1970s that mentions the same practice dating back three or four decades and more.
But just because something is old is not a reason to think it is okay. Not all traditions are fine or honorable.
Nor is it any better that it is done quietly in these parts as opposed to brazenly at the federal level. The quiet nature of the local practice makes it all the more insidious.
Done loudly or quietly, though the practice is enough to make anyone concerned for the state of our democracy feel very queasy indeed.
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We knew Paul Oram’s comments the day he left politics were complete hogwash.
labradore refutes him, point by point. And he adds the picture of Oram and his wife from 2006 that puts paid to the whole pack of nonsense Oram spouted about not wanting his family in the media.
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The much-feared inflation demon continues to shrink away.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, inflation hit -0.9% in September 2009 compared to a year earlier, down from –0.7% in August.
The figures come from the latest Statistics Canada release.
Back just before the collapse last year, some people were speculating that it might be time to take action to fight the largely imaginary inflation demon. Subsequent events seem to have taken care of that little problem nicely.
Then again, there are other issues which some people seem hell bent on ignoring.
Kinda funny when the guy responsible for both the largest spending increases and one of the largest budgeted deficits in Newfoundland history accuses others of going on a wild spending spree.
And then re-appoints to run finance the guy who oversaw the real open cheque-book government in the first place.
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Consider if you will, the number of times a provincial government official – usually the tourism minister du jour – has bitched about the ferry service between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
The fares.
The schedule.
The ships.
Doesn’t matter: Marine Atlantic supposedly sucks.
Now for the poor folks running Marine Atlantic, they just can’t win. One minister refers to the ferries as constitutional cattle-cars. People clog the open line shows to chime in their agreement.
So the company invests in a new boat with plenty of modern, trendy conveniences.
The same people bitch that it is too grand when all they need is the marine equivalent of a cattle-car.
Anyways, the latest round of bleating is about a fare increase to offset rising fuel costs.
Clyde Jackman issued a news release on October 6 predicting possible dire consequences resulting from the latest fare changes.
Diane Whelan did the bitching in June 2008.
In 2007, there was a bevy:
Okay.
Still following?
But, just a few weeks ago, Clyde was out there trumpeting the fact that “[n]on-resident traffic on Marine Atlantic is up 4.4 per cent over 2008, while resident traffic exiting the province is down almost one per cent…”.
So despite all the supposed problems, there are actually more people using the service this year compared last year.
That wasn’t good enough: by October 16 Jackman had decided that traffic on the ferries was actually up 5.2% from last year And, said Jackman, “…we cannot continue to grow this industry without a reliable, affordable Gulf ferry service.”
But hang on a moment.
There is a problem here with the minister’s logic:
If the current ferry service is not reliable and is not affordable – according to the bitching to date – how can it be that the ferry traffic is growing?
Tut. Tut.
It’s really terrible to see this sort of pessimism coming from a provincial cabinet minister.
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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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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.
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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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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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