More Showboat!

Another possible 2011 campaign song for the province’s reform-based Conservative Party:

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Guaranteed Annual Income

The Globe and Mail version by Kevin Milligan.

From the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador’s idea for income support reform as a means of promoting fundamental economic and social transformation:

The unemployment insurance system was originally intended to provide temporary income to people seeking alternative employment who had lost their regular jobs in the work force. The system was not designed to provide basic income support, or as supplemental income for short-term, seasonal jobs. The present downturn in the economy has pointed to weaknesses in this system which must be addressed and corrected.

Strategy Statement. The Province will work with the Federal Government to ensure that the inevitable changes to the current income security system are designed so that basic income support is provided to every household, and that weaknesses in the present system are corrected to encourage the economic growth that is needed to reduce dependency on income security itself.

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Bond Papers needs your vote

The Sir Robert Bond Papers is in the run-off for Best Blog in Canada and Best Political Blog in Canada as part of the annual Canadian Blog Awards.

Your humble e-scribbler is humbly asking for your support.

The second  - and final - round of voting lasts until October 26.  You can vote once a day until then and can always get as many of your friends to vote as possible from their computers.  Vote early and vote often is not a joke in this case.

For convenience, there are links to both polls on the right hand side there.  it might be tough to pull out a win in the Best Blog category but there is a shot at best Political Blog.  The competition is pretty stiff in both categories but hopefully you’ll agree that, almost six years after the first post,  BP is one of the best political blogs in Canada.

Thanks to all those who voted in the first round and now it’s on to the run-offs. With your continued support Bond Papers will go far.

Click the pictures to vote for Bond Papers

Best Blog in Canada

Best Political Blog in Canada

 

Tom Rideout meets the Bride of Frankenstein

Anyone who wants to understand the reason why the fishery in this province remains an economic and social disaster need look no further than recent comments by the former Premier and former fisheries minister who had not one but two kicks at the portfolio.

Tom Rideout spoke to a young audience in Corner Brook the other day. As the Western Star reports it, Rideout gave only two options for the future:

One option is to let the private sector take over the industry — whereby non-profitable plants will eventually close and licences will lapse, solving the problem of over-processing capacity.

“It will be messy, but it will solve the problem,” he said.

However, as the past has shown, he said, whenever a processor closes a plant, often another group will claim they are able to do it better.

“The communities get together, their political leadership get together, they demand the licence be transferred, the new operator limps on from one crisis to another, and the communities continue to what I would call a slow march to their own death,” he said.

The second option is for government to buy out processors in geographically defined regions of the province. He said there are many employment opportunities on the Avalon Peninsula, that the plants in these areas can be be more easily closed and these areas could survive.

By his own version, Rideout served as fisheries minister in the 1980s –at a time of supposed boom – and then served in the same job about 20 years later, at a time when things were much worse.  Rideout’s version of that in-between time [CBC audio link] is, to put it generously, a bit self-serving.  For the moment, however, let us stick with Rideout’s version of events in the 1980s and then the later bit within the past few years.

During Tom Rideout’s tenure as fisheries minister in the 1980s, the fishery was in the early stages of a decline that led, ultimately to the 1992 cod fish collapse.  The policies at both the provincial and federal level encouraged people to fish anything and everything that could be caught.  The boom, as Rideout sees it, was entirely a time of artificial plenty brought about by policies that contributed significantly to the 1992 collapse. Things looked good but anyone who wanted to see could tell things were bad.

If we did not know this from other comments, as we do, we know that the fishery was in a very difficult state because Rideout tells us that in his interview with CBC.  Someone else can ask why it is that Rideout at one time claims things were great when he was minister and at the same time acknowledges the arse was pretty much out of ‘er at the same time. 

Suffice it to say that Rideout’s appreciation of his original tenure, therefore is superficial, at best.  He apparently has no grasp of what happened in the 1980s. he has some understanding of the basic  problem – too many people, too few fish – and the political dynamic that helped to create it in the 1980s when he was minister.  This is the same dynamic that took hold once again in the late 1990s when another fisheries minister did what Rideout and his cabinet colleagues did in the 1980s.

That is, they operated under the assumption that the provincial government must interfere in the fishery to a degree it does not do in other sectors of the economy.  You can see this in the way Rideout describes the two options, quoted above. In both, it is the provincial government that manages the fishery as it does now by controlling the issuance of licenses.

What Rideout describes as “letting the private sector take over” is, of course nothing of the sort. He is basically describing the situation that exists today.  That’s how he can then describe this part of the scenario:

“The communities get together, their political leadership get together, they demand the licence be transferred, the new operator limps on from one crisis to another, and the communities continue to what I would call a slow march to their own death…”.

If the fishery were left to run as a business, there would be no licenses to transfer based on political criteria.    A company could apply for a license to operate business and, so long as it met the same business regulations as all others, it would open. Licenses would be issued only on the basis of operating a business, not on the location of the plant, the type of fish or anything of the sort.  These are all artificial restrictions on business that reflect the very situation in the time Rideout was first the fisheries minister that created the political morass that continues today.

As long as the plant could make money it would stay open.  If it could not make money, then it would close.  Period.  Rideout is apparently concerned about workers.  Well, undoubtedly some bright people could figure out how to deal with that just as bright people in other industries do now.

That is what would happen if the fishery were run as any other type of industry.  And incidentally, the fishery department would comprise a few officials in another department of food related industry or something of the sort.  A small fishery department would be nothing but a reflection that government finally got out of the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering Rideout  - and a great many others - helped run.

Rideout’s second scenario is nothing more than a dolled up version of the first, but with a much greater financial burden for ordinary taxpayers in the province.

In short, whatever Tom Rideout told that young and impressionable audience in Corner Brook a couple of days ago, he showed them how persistent is the thinking that created the mess in the fishery and that continues to torture the men and women of the province today with the same blinkered thinking.

Rideout is right about one thing though, aside from his admission that like the rest of us he has made mistakes.  Rideout is right that nothing of any consequence will happen as long as we are in this pre-election period.  We can add to it the pre-leadership period and then right after that, the next pre-election period. That is always what happens as long as politicians of a certain type want to play God in the fishery.

Until politicians decide to get themselves out of the fishing industry altogether, the people involved in the industry are doomed to live daily in reruns of the same social slasher film.

Update:  Here’s the CBC online version of Rideout’s comments.

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Related:

• Good to the last fish
• And it only took a year
• Up the creek with Jackman and Rideout

Fair to middling on entrepreneurial qualities

Only 3.8% of the St. John’s businesses that responded to a survey conducted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business felt that government had a good awareness of small business.

Almost 60%  of respondents expressed concern about the burden of government paperwork on their business.

67.1% felt the state of business was good but only 24% expected to hire new full-time works within the next three to four months. 55.3% felt that their business would be “better” or “somewhat better” over the next 12 months.

From the CFIB news release:

There is no single best way to measure the entrepreneurship quotient of cities, so CFIB combines a range of approaches to arrive at an overall score. It may seem obvious, but the surest signs of an entrepreneurial hot spot are the presence of a high concentration of entrepreneurs and a high business start-up rate. It is also important that business owners have high levels of optimism and success in their operations. Good public policy is also critical, so we look at the presence of supportive local government tax and regulatory policies.

St. John’s placed 36th out of 100 cities studied by CFIB.

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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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