Showboat!

A possible 2011 campaign song for the province’s Reform-based Conservative Party:

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Tom Rideout: the audio version

The former Premier who left Danny Williams’ cabinet in a huff and under fire from the Old Man himself had a chat with some students at Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus (formerly Grenfell College),

He apparently had a few choice observations, as CBC lifted out for the morning  newscast on Tuesday.  For example, Rideout warned that not much will happen on the fishery  - even though it needs to be done – simply because there’s an election on the way.  Rideout also said something along the lines that the current - or any administration for that matter - administration shouldn’t get a sweep of the House after the next election because that wouldn’t be good for the province.

For the record, here’s a link to podcast of Tom’s interview with CBC radio’s western Morning Show Monday morning: 

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/nlwcmornshow_20101018_39763.mp3

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No Dawn gives another Lower Churchill setback

The New Dawn agreement is dead.

Again.

The provincial government announced the land claims deal in 2008, touting it as  crucial to development of the Lower Churchill.  The whole thing was supposed to go to a vote in January 2009 but the Innu leadership quietly shelved those plans. Despite comments from the Innu leadership in mid-2009 that some substantive issues remained to be negotiated, the deal was still off the rails a year after it was signed.

Now Labradorian columnist Michael Johansen tells the world that the Premier recently met with the new Innu leadership and got some bad news. The premier apparently wanted to get the whole thing signed by November.  According to Johansen, Grand Chief Joseph Riche explained that the deadline wouldn’t fly.

The new grand chief is Joseph Riche. He also trained in the law, like Williams, but they might not have much else in common. They don’t seem to share the same enthusiasm for damming big rivers, or for passing the New Dawn. As a consequence, Williams is learning that the issue won’t be settled one way or another before spring — and no guarantees.

So, until possibly April or May, the premier must wait, sitting in the morning twilight for his New Dawn, hoping it doesn’t all go black.

Interestingly enough, the rumour started to sputter a couple of weeks ago with talk of an impending Lower Churchill announcement in November.  Those of us who’ve been following the latest saga of the Lower Churchill didn’t see anything obvious on the horizon.  The environmental assessment process is bogged down with  significant problems. There are no markets and no money and the provincial government itself can’t afford to backstop the $14 billion project all by its lonesome.

The Innu Nation gambit seems to fit the rumour mill scenario, but, as Johansen notes, even that angle is now gone.

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Whither provincially-funded search and rescue?

Not so very long ago a bunch of provincial politicians rushed forward to insist that the federal government ought to do more to help people in peril on the oceans offshore Newfoundland and Labrador.

Ignore for the moment that what most of them really wanted was more federal jobs in the east-end of Newfoundland.

Just notice that not a single one of those same politicians – federal or provincial – will dare step forward to endorse an idea that cropped up this past weekend in Labrador.  Well, they won’t step forward as long as the scheme has to come from the provincial government’s coffers.

A fellow travelling the highway in the sparsely populated region of the province found himself in a nasty truck accident. It took police an hour and a half to make the trip by road and when they arrived, the police car didn’t include any sort of rescue equipment to help get the guy out of the twisted remains of his truck.

His idea is pretty simple:

"If they [the provincial government] had emergency services at those [highway maintenance] depots then they would have been there more quickly and they would have had the proper equipment to push my seat out of the way."

Now if someone could find a way to beg Ottawa for the money….

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The party bus drinking thing explained

When it comes to absolutely idiotic, nothing quite matches the operators of a local party bus.

No, it’s not idiotic that people apparently want to drive around St. John’s on its absolutely pathetic streets and drink alcohol in a confined space, although the thought of that never quite seemed to make sense to your humble e-scribbler.  Let’s not discuss, for the moment, the fact that one of these tarted up school buses has a zip line in it.

That’s actually another issue of potential idiocy.

No, the idiocy is the claim by the operator of one of these buses that he will continue to serve alcohol or allow alcohol but will work to ensure the people on the bus are over 19 years of age.  Police pulled over one of the buses recently and ticketed the driver under the Liquor Control Act.

This guy needs a brain, a lawyer or a lawyer with a brain.

This isn’t an issue of the legal drinking age in the province.

It has to do with the black and white words of the law:

80. (1) A person shall not drive or have the care or control of a motor vehicle as defined in the Highway Traffic Act, whether it is in motion or not, while there is contained in it, alcoholic liquor, except

(a) alcoholic liquor in a bottle or package that is unopened and the seal unbroken; or

(b) alcoholic liquor in a bottle or package that is packed with personal effects in baggage that is fastened closed or that is not otherwise readily available to a person in the vehicle.

(2) Where a person is convicted of an offence under subsection (1), the court may order that person to pay a minimum fine of $250 and a maximum fine of $500 or, in default, to imprisonment for a minimum term of 2 days and a maximum term of 7 days.

People have been done for drinking in a van parked by a picket line and used as a shelter during a labour dispute. You cannot have open liquor containers in a vehicle.

Period.

If the people operating party buses want people to be able to tipple in the vehicles, they’ll need to get a change in the law. promising to restrict drinking to people over the legal drinking age is foolish.

 

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Damning with faint praise

It’s an easy and quick read, if that’s part of your criteria for literary entertainment, although there’s nothing particularly revealing about the battle over the Atlantic Accord.

Rowe did not play a major, consequential role in the Accord talks, and remained, for the most part, on the periphery.

The Telegram’s Bob Wakeham recommends Bill Rowe’s light-weight, gossipy book about his very brief tenure as the Premier’s personal representative to Hy’s.

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Related:

• Elizabeth Towers Fire Investigation
• Why columnists need editors

Traffics Stoppers, October 11-15

1. Campaign Sign, Two
2. The weight of office
3. Campaign Sign: Outrage
4. When the rubber meets the paper mill
5. Air Canada, the Maple Leafs and Sucking
6. Pudding proved
7. Pudding is for afters
8. Court docket now online
9. When the status quo is not an option:  Newfoundland and Labrador version
10. Campaign Sign and What’s Happening?!! (tie)

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FCKH8

And the full-on version, here.

 

 

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Campaign sign: Outrage

Prediction:  This will go viral:

Prediction:  This scares the shit out of the provincial Reform-based Conservative Party in the province already campaigning hard for re-election.

Prediction:  The socks will wear themselves out attacking it as viciously as they attacked CBC over Danny’s heart surgery. (That goes hand in hand with the second prediction)

 

(h/t labradore)

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Kremlinology 26: Magma Displacement

In the Hunt for Red October, a computer used by an American hunter-killer submarine to identify noises in the ocean mistakes a new type of Soviet propeller noise as a type of earthquake.

Magma displacement.

In politics, it is easy to hear a noise and think it is one thing when the cause is something else.

Take – for example – Danny Williams’ most recent petty, venomous attack on Sam Synyard, the mayor of Marystown.

Some people may think this is just Danny waging the sort of scurrilous personal attack that is his political stock-in-trade, his default setting.  And as sure as Danny Williams had nothing to do with recent oil windfalls in the provincial treasury, so too has he shown a marked preference for the political version of the hockey player’s cheap hit in the corner, the spear.

A few things about this most recent Williams smear point to another cause that produced the usual cross check. 

First, Williams noted in his remark after the cabinet shuffle that Sam Synyard complained during the early days of the Igor clean-up – according to Williams anyway -  that the provincial government had not done enough after another hurricane. That isn’t the way Synyard came across back in September. It’s also very strange that Williams had plenty of opportunity at the time to smack Synyard but didn’t. Why he brought the whole thing up three weeks later seems odd.

Second, Williams and Synyard are actually on the same wavelength.  As the Premier readily noted, the provincial government is ready to pour cash into yet another private sector company.

Third, you’ll find that not only did the Premier revisit the whole Synyard affair for a second day, Premier wannabe Darin King and his fellow cabinet minister Clyde Jackman, chimed in add their voices to the din.

These members of a Reform-based Conservative Party seem a tad sensitive. Just like the political sensitivity displayed during the Igor response.  Bridge news conferences when the news story was really somewhere else.  Cabinet ministers jumping on any signs of discontent.

And then on CBC on Thursday evening, more stories of discontent on the Burin Peninsula with the slowness of provincial financial aid for people devastated by Igor.

There’s only one more detail you need to add to get the whole picture.  Danny called Sam a Liberal.

There is the key to the whole thing. People on the Burin Peninsula aren’t happy with Danny Williams, Darin King and Clyde Jackman.  There are lots of unhappy people out there after a series of natural disasters since 2003.  That’s one of the reasons why the very first thing the provincial emergency response people made sure to tell everyone after Igor was to get their claims filed early.

You can really tell the political sensitivity because the filing claims is the thing Danny highlighted for people on the day of the storm.  He really played up the cash.  And then the day after the storm,  Danny and his merry band hopped helicopters to tour the Burin Peninsula.  That’s how they showed their concern. Even though the Bonavista Peninsula took a demonstrably harder hit, Danny showed up on the Burin. The fact that this political showboating only pissed people off more was just a bonus.

What evidently scares Danny, Clyde and Darin politically shitless is that any politician might do as Danny is wont to do and take political advantage of all that discontent.  They know, or at least they think, that this is the sort of issue that could motivate voters and turn around a couple of seats in the next election.  It only needs a politician smart enough to hit the sore point. 

Attacking Sam Synyard personally is Danny’s way of trying to drive a potentially dangerous political rival off a potentially devastating issue for the for the Conservatives. It’s that simple.

Unless you connect all the dots, though, you’d only see more of the same superficial Danny-noise.

But if you know what to look for, you’ll see the magma displacement that is causing trembling in the political earth in some places.  This is not unusual rumbling, mind you, but in the imaginary world created by Danny Williams – the world where all is perfect and he alone is master – any sign of problems, any opening for an opponent is like a hurricane, earthquake and tidal wave rolled into one.

Oh yes.  Some places, plural.

It’s not just the Burin or even the Great Northern.  Labrador West, sections of the northeast coast.  They are all places where the locals are unhappy with the current administration. To the Conservatives they are threats to life and limb.

And to the other parties they are potential opportunities.  That’s what has Danny, Clyde and Darin and all their friends so jumpy.

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Campaign Sign, Two

The picture.

The missing caption:

“Can every camera get a clear shot of me?  Those people on the other side of the room can’t see me.  Can someone tell that old guy to sit down and STFU? At last I am getting something close to the recognition I so richly deserved from the beginning and tried so hard to achieve.”

The faces say it all.

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When the status quo is not an option, Newfoundland and Labrador version

A year before the next provincial election and Premier Danny Williams shifted around a couple of bodies in his cabinet.

What is telling about this event is not so much what happened but what the Premier said about it. Aside from the platitudes about the three people who got new jobs, the Premier said the shuffle came as a result of the death of one of his ministers. That’s no doubt quite literally true, but the clear implication is that if Diane Whelan had not contracted cancer last year and, sadly, passed away a few days ago, he’d have left everything exactly as it is.

No change. 

No shuffling. 

No new direction.

Just more of the same.

Take that as confirmation that,as Bond Papers has noted before, we are in a strange pre-election period coupled with a pre-leadership spell. Ordinarily a party and a leader headed for his third term would already be looking at bringing in a new crop of faces around the cabinet table, working out some new ideas and, generally, laying the foundation for the future. Think of it as a sort of political version of Mike Holmes meets Sarah Richardson.

Successful political parties tend to re-invent themselves over time. In Alberta or in Ottawa, the more successful political parties have tended to shift as the public mood has shifted.  Different political challenges require different political styles.  The public likes change periodically,.  They get tired of the same crap over and over. The people themselves tend to wear out. There are a bunch of reasons  for it, but change is important if parties want to stay in power and actually do something while they are at it.

The alternative is that they get punted and the public sticks in another bunch. With the exception of Joe Smallwood, post-Confederation’s successful elected Premiers have tended to stay in office for 10 years or less.  Frank Mores left after seven years in office.  Ditto Clyde Wells.  Brian Peckford went for a decade but, realistically he was worn out after 1985 or 1986.

If the Tories had run a leadership campaign in 1986, they might well have carried on running the province forever.  But for some inexplicable reason, Peckford hung around growing increasingly paranoid or grandiose or whatever that was.  By the time he finally handed off, the party was so split up internally they settled on Tom Rideout.

In 1989, the Tories ran a crop of worn out faces who tried to pretend they represented change. Voters responded accordingly. In St. John’s, the Liberals scored historic victories in the 1989 election. Not post-Confederation historic, but historic electoral success since 1833 kinda stuff.

Failure to change is basically the story behind the Liberal defeat in 2003 as well.  One old Liberal political hand said publicly at the 2001 leadership convention that the party would have to change – to reinvigorate itself – or the voters would change for them.  He was right.

There is still time for the Reform-based Conservative Party currently running the province.  Nothing says the Old Man won’t shuffle his cabinet in the spring.  After all, there are a bunch of cabinet and caucus members looking at hanging up their skates next fall. Spring could still be a good time to put a lick of paint on the old house.  The scouts might have picked up a few local stars at the municipalities convention in St. John’s last week.  We won’t know for sure until happens.

But the trend and the attitudes suggest that what you are seeing today is what you will get to vote for next fall.  Any change will come after 2011.

The only problem is that the province needs some new ideas right now. 

The big news on Wednesday was an announcement by business minister Ross Wiseman that the provincial government will now aim cash handouts specifically to airplane operators.  Now this practice of offering cash hand-outs to businesses has a very long and sorry history in Newfoundland and Labrador. That history  - well known to anyone over the age of 30 in the province - and their own sorry-assed experience  - known to anyone who can read - hasn’t stopped the Reform-based Conservative Party led by Danny Williams from keeping up the practice.

From tossing public cash at any hare-brained scheme imaginable to unsustainable public spending to constantly looking for federal hand-outs, the current administration is an homage to every idea that never worked for this province.

The status quo is not a viable option for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

But the news from the provincial government today, on any front, is that we are doomed to more of the same.

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Pudding is for afters

Those known to purr sweet nothings about the Old Man's rear have a new claim.

A book ostensibly about the Old Man's 2004-05 feud with the federal government for more transfer payments is - as voice of the cabinet minister claimed this morning - the fifth best selling book in the country. You can find the claim in other places, no doubt, but the Great Government Oracle of the Valley spouted that one this morning.

Curiously enough, this book does not appear at all on the Canadian best seller list printed by the Globe on Wednesday, October 13.

The Number Five book on the Globe and Mail's own soft-cover best seller list for non-fiction is a book titled A heartbreaking work of staggering genius.  While the title may fit with Bill Rowe's own view of his latest magnum opus, this is not the book in question.

For some bizarre reason, a memoir by the original provincial ambassador to Hy's is listed on the Globe's hardcover non-fiction page.

The book has a soft cover.

Oh well.

Significant chunks of the book are fiction as well but that didn't stop them from listing it there either.

In any event, the book that was six months in the living and five years in the writing is listed with titles that seem oddly appropriate:

• Shit my Dad says is Number 6.
• Even silence has an end is Number 4.
• Assholes finish first is Number 3.

A book might be known, one thinks, by the company it keeps.

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Pudding proved

The proof of any pudding is in the eating, so they say, and in the case of Danny "Puddy" Williams, it seems we are talking blood pudding.

Not a week ago did these words of glorious praise for the Premier appear in a national newspaper, courtesy of  Tim Powers:

What often goes unreported about Williams is his decency. 

Then on Wednesday, the Premier decided to offer his views on a local mayor who did nothing other than speak his mind about an issue or two of concern for his town [via the Telegram]:

He called the Marystown mayor “ignorant,” said the comments were “asinine,” and said Synard “doesn’t count.”

Pudding proved.

Doses of humanity, indeed, Tim.

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Campaign Sign

A media advisory on the official opening of a basketball court.

Seriously.

If ever there was proof the provincial government has quotas of happy news each department must meet, let one look no further than a media advisory heralding the official opening of the first outdoor basketball court in the Town of Conception Bay South.

As further proof of the undeclared leadership war in the province’s ruling Reform-based Conservative Party, note that it took not only two cabinet ministers to announce this monumental achievement, but one of them is undeclared leadership candidate Darin King.

Next thing you know King will be turning up at a conference of the province’s mayors and councilors to discuss municipal issues.

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Air Canada, the Maple Leafs and sucking

Air Canada sucks.

The Toronto Maple Leafs also suck.

Both suck for the same, basic reason.

They have fanatics who will suffer any indignity, pay any price, endure any privation and bear any humiliation to support them.

One could find evidence of this on the morning after Thanksgiving at St. John’s International Airport. A line up of Air Canada fans  - most of whom had used the online or kiosk check-in system – stood silently in a queue for upwards of an hour in order to check their bags for one of four flights leaving Capital City at ungodly hours bound for destinations on the mainland.

This is proof - in an instant -  of both the stunnedness of the economist's “Rational Actor” model of economic behaviour and proof that the markets work. You see, Air Canada continues to suck because people continue to fly with them despite the inconvenience, cost, indignity, humiliation, privation and apparent indifference of the airline to its customers. 

The airline bosses know the cattle will still line up.

No matter what.

So where is the incentive to change?

Ditto the Maple Leafs. 

Compare the Leafs to the Canadiens.  If the Habs lose three games in a row, the stands look like a Quebec provincial Conservative Party conference.  The team then has to change or face some pretty serious financial consequences.  Bums in seats pay the bills.  Empty seats cause problems.

Politics is a bit like that as well.  In Ottawa, where the three mainstream parties each continue to suck in their own unique way, the voters have rewarded their collective  - and continuing - suckiness with a political pox on all the houses. The parties are each struggling to find the magic solution that will put more votes in their column.  Votes are the key to electoral success and when voters are stingy with their love, the parties have to come courting.

Meanwhile in St. John’s voters prove that politics within the province is pretty much down to perceived popularity.

Tim Powers proves the point in spades the day after Thanksgiving with a little homage to the fellow who created the state-owned energy company that Tim’s been know to lobby for in Ottawa.

Danny Williams is amazing, as we are supposed to believe, because he has decided, in all his magnificence, not to kick the living political shit out of a woman who – as we speak – is battling breast cancer.  “Doses of humanity can pay real political dividends…”.

That’s the sort of sentence that should make the blood run cold. Few politicians could be quite so brazen as to make political hay out of someone else’s personal tragedy.  Fewer still could make such a point so crassly by putting the political ahead of the human:  the rest of that sentence reads “never mind that it [ – humanity – ] is the right thing to do.”

Never mind, indeed.

Tim, it seems, is made of sterner stuff than the rest of us. Either that or he is waging a campaign to have politicos replace lawyers in the old joke about barristers and lab rats.

Powers does note, rightly, that Yvonne Jones wished the Premier well when the Old Man scurried off last winter to get his heart fixed up by an American surgeon.  Tim  does not mention, though, that no one wrote a column or a blog on how wonderful Yvonne was for not kicking Danny in the balls. 

And that’s really the difference in the two situations and the difference between Danny Williams and his Reform-based Conservative Party and all other parties.

Tim likes Danny Williams and his Reform-based Conservative Party just as he likes the Ottawa version of the Reform-based Conservative Party.  Both are characterised by an over-weaning emphasis on central control and secrecy.

Unlike Danny Williams, Stephen Harper lacks a gang of ruthless fans who will go anywhere and say anything to perpetuate the illusion surrounding their guy.  From Open Line shows to Policy Options to the Globe – the Newfoundland nationalist’s newspaper of record – they are there to keep the myth alive. When it comes to polishing their own guy’s knob or pettiness and viciousness in attacking enemies, Stephen Harper and any of his communications directors are toddlers compared to Williams and his fanboys. 

Air Canada, the Maple Leafs and Danny Williams are successful business ventures, each in different fields.

The reasons for their success are not necessarily what is advertised.

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When the rubber meets the paper mill

The provincial government ships used car and truck tires to Quebec where they are burned.

Operators at the province’s last remaining paper mill is considering using tires as a source of fuel in its operations.

Here are two points to consider right off the top, taken from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s web page on tire-derived fuels.

First of all, burning isn’t the optimum. It’s the fourth use of out a list of five:

EPA supports the highest and best practical use of scrap tires in accordance with the waste management hierarchy, in order of preference: reduce, reuse, recycle, waste-to-energy, and disposal in an appropriate facility.

Second of all, paper mills require tires that have a large amount of processing before they are used as fuel:

The main problem in using TDF in the paper industry is the need to use de-wired tires. The wires often clog the feed systems. Also, the mills sometimes sell the resulting ash to farmers who require the ash to be free of iron. De-wired TDF can cost up to 50 % more than regular TDF.

Let the discussion being.

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The weight of office

Any political office can take its toll on a person but the job of Premier is in another league.  Take a look at most elected Premiers of Newfoundland and Labrador and the guy who left the office looks a damn-sight older than the fellow who walked in the door a decade or so earlier.

Danny Williams is no exception, but in some respects the wear of office is quite striking.  Someone pointed this out to your humble e-scribbler the other day with reference to a 2004 clip of Rick Mercer and Danny Williams from 2004.

Slim, lively and young-looking even allowing he was – at the time – the oldest person ever elected Premier.  That still doesn’t do Danny justice, by the way.  Take a look at the clip and realise it was only six and a half years ago.

Then take a look at a clip of the Premier from last week.

Puffier, heavier-set and very much a man looking his age. This is one of the better recent clips and stills, incidentally.

Now the Old Man doesn’t look like he’s on death’s door or anything even close to it.

But the contrast with the vibrant, young-looking man who took the world by storm in 2004 can’t be any more stark.

The job takes its toll.

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What’s happening?!!!

Well, in the world of provincial fisheries not much of any value to people in the fishing industry.

In July, the provincial government announced it would start spending cash duplicating scientific research on some fish stocks that was already being done elsewhere. “Study” is what some government’s do when they lack the political mojo to do something concrete. Nothing screams impotence like the July fish science announcement.

Somewhere along the line, the provincial fisheries department hired Fred Stubbs to handle media in the department.

Hence Friday’s announcement of an announcement previously announced.

And they will be studying a fish stock which is – in case someone missed the announcement in 1992 – under a fishing moratorium.

Odd they missed that little tidbit of information. 

It was in all the papers.

Anyway, there are two bits of actually useful information in this vacuous POS from the fish department:

First, we now have a date when the Irish will send us their boat.

Second, we also know of yet another junket to Ireland that produced nothing other than expenses that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador will have to cover.

There is a third thing, but that isn’t really in the release.  It’s what’s not in the release. The provincial government is going to spend bags of taxpayer cash to study cod, a species that is commercially extinct and that could easily become biologically extinct as well if we aren’t careful.

What isn’t in the release is a mention of species that people in this province depend on to earn a living and about which the scientific and commercial fishing community know relatively little.

Crab.

Shrimp.

Stuff like that.

If we are going to spend public money, surely we should be spending it to gather information we don’t have on fish stocks that are commercially important.

Hiring out-of-work Irish crews to study cod seems like a monumental waste of time.  Well a waste of time unless you want to distract attention away from the government’s complete impotence when it comes to fisheries issues that matter.

Someone check Clyde Jackman’s luggage and make sure he didn’t lose the memorandum of understanding file in some Galway motel.

That’s the last thing fishermen need.

Okay.

The last thing they need other than a $14 million study of northern cod.

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Edit:  removed question mark not needed.

Information expropriation: Premier threatens industrial inquiry over Voisey’s strike

Premier Danny Williams is warning both parties in the 14 month old strike at Voisey’s Bay that his administration will appoint and industrial inquiry commission under the province’s labour laws to settle the dispute if the parties can’t find agreement within 14 days.

Under the Labour Relations Act, the province’s labour minister may appoint a commission of as few as one person to inquire into a dispute under terms of reference set by the minister.

Some news reports refer to the purpose of the inquiry to "maintain and secure industrial peace." 

That’s not really the strength of the inquiry approach in this case.

The commission will operates with the powers of a conciliation board under the same act.  That’s an important step in the collective bargaining process the provincial government skipped in its sudden desire to intervene in the lengthy strike.

The real value of an inquiry for the provincial government  - as opposed to a simple conciliation board – is that the government alone controls not only the outcome but when and how the results of the inquiry investigations will go to the public.

Think of it as information expropriation and the threat is clear enough in the Premier’s comments:

“Why aren't they settling? Does the company have some reason it doesn't want to settle? Why did it settle in Sudbury and not settle in Newfoundland and Labrador?…

"If the union is getting some of the wage demands that it wants but not getting everything that it wants, is there some reason why the union is not settling? Is it personalities?"

With a conciliation board, the parties would settle the strike with the help of a government panel.  With an inquiry, there is the threat that one side or the other or maybe both will have their private information tossed into the public bear-pit. The government may not make the information public, though. They may just sit on it and use what they learn about the profitability of the company operation for their own purposes.

It’s not like they haven’t tried that sort of thing before with other companies. Anyone ever hear of the data room application?

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