Crude oil r’uh r’oh

From the Globe and Mail come some words of economic caution about the price of crude:

“The energy market has been the Johnny-come-lately to the overall commodity bubble,” said New York-based trader Stephen Schork. “What the market is doing is what it was doing in 2008: Selling the [U.S.] dollar and buying commodities with it. In 2008, it was primarily about energy but traders got their heads handed to them. Now energy is following rather reluctantly.”

He said a further deterioration in the U.S. dollar (USD/EUR-I0.73-0.001-0.19%) would re-ignite crude prices, while a recovery in the greenback would result in a more substantial pullback in commodities, including oil.

Mr. Schork said it is tough to justify $85 to $90 per barrel for crude on the strength of economic fundamentals. A $90 crude price translates into $3 per gallon for gasoline in the United States, and “that is not sustainable,” he said.

Not sustainable.

Those two words just won’t go away.

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How do you spell winner?

Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski seems likely to be re-elected in the first victory for a write-in candidate in an American federal election since 1954.

Murkowski lost the Republican nomination to Joe Miller, a challenger with backing from the Tea Party movement and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Murkowski decided to seek re-election but Alaskan election rules, voters would have to write her name on the ballot.

Double problem.

Although Murkowski she had been appointed to the senate by her father – governor Frank Murkowski – and although, she’d already won re-election in 2004, there was still a chance voters might not be able to spell her name correctly. In a two-way fight between a red Republican and a blue Democrat, voters could vote for colour or party and still get their choice regardless of how the candidate’s name looked on the ballot. A write-in candidacy could hinge on the accuracy with which voters rendered her name.

The Republican primary and the narrow Tea Party victory also foreshadowed a tough legal challenge to a third candidate.  Take this third party ad as a typical example of the anti-Murkowski war from the campaign:

Murkowski’s campaign used a simple television spot to push the spelling of her name and get across the reminder that she was the incumbent:

She campaign also used a 17 second video that showed how to vote for a write-in candidate. Her campaign uploaded 61 videos to her youtube account, most of them fairly simple productions with high production values.  In other words, they weren’t expensive to make and told a simple story very effectively.  Most noticeably they were positive.  Even an ad that pointed to problems in her opponents finished on a positive note and let the other guy’s words tie a potential noose around his neck.

The same couldn’t be said for Joe Miller’s stuff. The music in an anti-Murkowski spot remains dark and foreboding even when discussing Miller’s positives. There are – of course – spots on Miller’s youtube account that touch on the media persecution message popular among some conservatives and a core part of the Tea Party’s messaging.

The Alaska Daily News account of one incident includes some video of a confrontation that appears to involve conventional news media and security hired by the Miller campaign. The episode would be familiar to anyone who watched the federal Conservative campaign in the 2005-2006 Canadian general election.

The write-in ballots are the last to be counted in an election that still hasn’t been declared for either of the three candidates.  By some accounts, there are enough write-in ballots and enough of those for Murkowski to give her the election. Republican candidate Miller continues to battle hard by challenging the validity of individual ballots and accusing state officials of favouritism in the counting.

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Remembrance Day 2010

At the going down of the Sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.

Pass the word

In Kingston, a new mess at Canadian Forces Base Kingston carries the name of a man who survived internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  His actions while a prisoner saved the lives of many of his fellow prisoners.  he resisted all attempts to break him.

Two retired army colonels waged a private lobbying campaign to name the mess after Major Ron Routledge, DCM.

Colonel Peter Sutton put it aptly:

"Everybody should be conscious of what's gone before, and do everything you possibly can -- as Ron (Routledge) did with me -- to pass on the word."

Routledge set up a communication network between the Sham Shui Po prisoner of war Camp and British intelligence at Waichow through Chinese ration truck drivers. Without hesitation and fully aware of the dangers involved, Sergeant Routledge [his rank at the time] joined the ration party as the contact for the passage of messages to Chungking agents under the eyes of the Japanese guards.

The channel Routledge set up saved many lives through the supply of much needed medicine and  valuable information. The Japanese discovered the system.  They beat, starved and tortured Routledge mercilessly yet he refused to divulge any information that would jeopardize his comrades. A Japanese court martial sentenced Routledge to 15 years in a Hong Kong prison for espionage, a sentence that ended in 1945. Awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions, the citation for that bravery decoration reads, in part, “The resolute courage of this [non-commissioned officer] NCO in spite of indescribable suffering and his devotion to duty provide an example of the highest tradition in the service.”

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Lest we forget: forgotten edition

So innovation minister Shawn Skinner will be attending Remembrance Day ceremonies at the “St. John’s National War Memorial” on Thursday.

There are at least two problems with this particular news release:

First, the National War Memorial is in St. John’s but it is not the St. John’s memorial, as this release suggests.  It’s the one erected in the Dominion of Newfoundland in the 1920s as its national war memorial, hence the name.

Second, Skinner isn’t just participating, he is representing the provincial government – officially – in the one ceremony that represents the entire province. Nice if the Premier could have made it, but evidently he had something else on.

Incidentally, it was good to see the Premier on Tuesday tossing around a few softballs with former journalist Peter Walsh over at Dannyvision.  All that free television across the province is especially important in polling month.

Those two huge gaffes  - what Skinner will be doing and where the event takes place - are enough to make a mockery of the sentiment expressed in the release that people ought to attend a Remembrance ceremony.

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Suzuki Foundation takes aim at Gulf drilling #oilspill

Kathy Dunderdale might not be too worried about the environmental impacts of an offshore oil spill. 

Charlene Johnson might have trouble from day to day figuring out if the offshore is in her jurisdiction or not.

But make no mistake:  David Suzuki has the Gulf of St. Lawrence firmly in his sights. The David Suzuki Foundation is encouraging its supporters to contact the federal government to get a halt to drilling and other exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

A big part of the campaign is simulations of the impact of a spill at Old Harry:

Each simulation illustrates what could happen if an spill of approximately 10,000 barrels of oil per day took place over a 10-day period in various seasons. The model demonstrates the direction of the flow of oil emanating from an instant or continuous spill. Forecasts indicate the location and concentration of surface and underground oil over time.

There’s a spring, summer, fall and winter version.

The spring spill hits Newfoundland very hard.

Summer is worse for western Newfoundland.

Fall nails the south coast as far away as the Burin Peninsula.  St. Pierre would take it heavily in this scenario.

Winter hits five provinces but affects only a small portion of south western Newfoundland.

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Related:

• NL offshore drilling bans rests with prov gov
• Drill, baby! Drill!
• Miles before they hit the shore (labradore)

Mysterious missile off Los Angeles

The video  - shot by a KCBS news helicopter - shows what seems to me a missile fired from the ocean offshore Los Angeles and heading out to sea.

But so far no one knows what it was. 

The United States Air Force insists it didn’t launch anything from nearby Vandenberg air base and the United States Navy is also denying any launches.

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US labour board files complaint over Facebook firing

In the United States, the National Labor Relations Board is accusing a company of illegally firing an employee over a comment she made on Facebook.

From the New York Times:

The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, said, “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”

According to NYT, this looks like a straightforward case of free speech, as protected by law.

However,

employees might cross the line into unprotected territory if they disparage supervisors over something unrelated to work — for instance, a supervisor’s sexual performance — or if their statements are disloyal.

Courts often view workers’ statements as disloyal when they are defamatory and are not supported by facts. Mr. Babson cited a case upholding the firing of airline workers who held signs saying their airline was unsafe. But, he said, if employees held signs accurately saying their airline or restaurant had been cited for dozens of safety violations, that would most likely be protected.

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Lower Churchill: US and NL taxpayers might help subsidize costly big hydro project

Premier Danny Williams is promising a Lower Churchill deal before the end of the year and one way he could finance the project is by offloading the cost onto American and Canadian taxpayers.

Some American politicians are trying to redefine state environmental subsidies that currently don’t include hydro megaprojects like the Lower Churchill.  In Massachusetts, Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker not only advocated for big hydro as part of the state’s energy future, he also favoured giving big hydro projects the “renewable” status that would make them eligible for state subsidies. 

According to the Boston Globe, the subsidies in Massachusetts alone could be worth as much as six cents a kilowatt hour.

Incumbent Democratic governor Deval Patrick  - who won re-election last week - opposed the idea:

“It does not make sense to give renewable energy incentives to a foreign-owned enterprise for something that needs no subsidy,’’ Patrick said in a statement to the [Boston] Globe. “It would amount to a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars for Canadian ratepayers at the expense of Massachusetts customers.’’

That doesn’t mean the idea is dead in Massachusetts, though.  Energy giant Hydro-Quebec is lobbying hard for the “renewable” status for its own projects. Earlier this year, the company won a battle in Vermont to make hydro eligible for subsidies. That’s all part of HQ’s push to take its share of the New England energy market from 8.5% to upwards of 12%.

Lowering the cost of Lower Churchill power by six cents a kilowatt hour could make Muskrat Falls financially viable, especially if NALCOR left the American marketing to a private sector partner and let that company keep the subsidies.  NALCOR already sells power at the Quebec-New York border to Emera.  Under a deal announced in 2009, the Newfoundland and Labrador company apparently gets about the same rate per kilowatt hour it got from a similar deal with Quebec that expired in 2009.  Any other financial details, like profits from seasonal price fluctuations, seem to flow to the private sector.  It’s hard to know for sure since details of the 2009 detail are confidential. 

And while Danny Williams claimed last week he’d lay any development deal for the very expensive Muskrat Falls version of the project in front of the public, he hasn’t lived up to similar promises yet on other projects.  Many of the key details of the 2007 Hebron deal remain shrouded in secrecy.  Amendments to the province’s open records laws in 2008 shield the publicly owned NALCOR from disclosure of its financial dealings even though it receives public funds to run the company and its subsidiaries.

Foreign tax credits aren’t the only way NALCOR could subsidise the cost of building Muskrat Falls.

Under the most recent version of the Lower Churchill described recently by Premier Danny Williams, 40% of the power from Muskrat Falls would come to eastern Newfoundland. NALCOR’s environmental submissions on the project make it clear, however, that the island portion of the province doesn’t need the power now or in the foreseeable future. The company also plans to keep its diesel generators at Holyrood running even after it builds any new lines to the island from Labrador.

Shipping power to a part of the province that doesn’t need it would give the public utilities board the legal basis to offset any losses from sales to Nova Scotia or into Quebec by offloading them on local ratepayers.  That’s because provincial laws require that the public utilities board to set rates that protect NALCOR’s financial position from its entire operations.  But that rate-setting power only applies to domestic rates. PUB doesn’t regulate export prices.  By using Lower Churchill power in the province – even when it isn’t needed - NALCOR could use local ratepayers to subsidise power exports. 

Taxpayers could get hit another way on the deal as well.  Any NALCOR debt for the project – likely to be at least $6.0 billion – will wind up on the balance sheet of the provincial government, one of the most indebted provincial governments in Canada on a per capita basis. 

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How to win without news media

Texas governor Rick Perry won re-election without relying on conventional news media.

Perry shunned editorial board meetings, for example.  Those are sit-down sessions with the entire editorial staff.  It’s a traditional way to garner an endorsement and that is traditionally seen as a key part of any major political campaign.

The reason is pretty simple politics:

Mike Baselice, Perry's highly skilled pollster, acknowledged Wednesday at a public forum sponsored by The Texas Tribune that the campaign asked primary voters in Texas whether a newspaper endorsement would make them more or less likely to vote for Perry. Only 6 percent said an endorsement would make them more likely to support Perry, while an eye-popping 37 percent said it would make them less likely (56 percent said it made no difference).

In other words, for all the energy conventional thinking would have you put into sucking up to editors, the average Texas voter didn’t really give a rat’s derriere one way or the other. And with almost 40% taking an endorsement as a bad thing, that pretty much clinched the deal. 

Predictably the news media slagged Perry.  That only increased his standing in the eyes of voters, especially the 37% who said they would look unfavourably on a candidate who had a news media endorsement of any kind.

Perry also didn’t do the usual things associated with a conventional campaign, like lawn signs or direct mail.  Instead, his campaign used social media, paid television and “field operations” – face-to-face work by campaign volunteers.

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My own electoral grandpa: vote in an election that isn’t happening yet

Danny Williams is worried that local politics is being more like the American system.

Much like the more benighted souls in some parts of Eastern Europe, most of Africa and gigantic chunks of the Middle East, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians could only dream of such a thing.

You see, even though they live in one of the most civilised places in the world – Canada – they are subjected to electoral laws introduced since 2003 that make it possible for people to vote in elections that don’t actually exist. Talk about making a mockery of our democratic legacy.

News of the latest version of this farce came from ads in the local papers.  in itself that is another reminder of the backward steps for democracy taken in this province since 2003.  Where once the chief electoral officer was a non-partisan public servant, the last two have been partisans.  One was a former Liberal cabinet minister. 

The current one had to resign from his seat on a party organizing committee in order to take the job. The party, of course, is the province’s Reform-based Conservative Party, and the guy who currently serves as chief electoral officer used to be the president of that highly partisan crowd.


This is yet another one of those things you could not make up.  You could not make it up because it is the most ridiculous idea imaginable in a democracy.

Yet it exists as the law in this province.  It’s one of a package of “reforms” introduced by the governing Conservatives after 2003 that turned out to be more of a farce than not.  Meanwhile, the meaningful reforms Danny Williams promised in 2003 - new campaign finance laws, for one - simply vanished as if they never existed.  What was it he used to say about unkept promises?

And if you enjoyed this little tidbit of electoral idiocy, consider the version in 2007 when Williams called a by-election that never actually happened.  This was the original version of “I am my own electoral grandpa”.

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Kremlinology 28: How will he go?

Gordon Campbell resigned suddenly last week as Premier of British Columbia. Campbell’s been under considerable political pressure resulting fro introduction of the harmonized sales tax in the province.

The Globe this weekend is taking a look at the impact not only of Campbell’s departure but the abrupt way he left the political stage.  The quote Bob Plecas, a former Campbell advisor:

Any serious contender to replace Mr. Campbell, whose unpopular harmonized sales tax has crippled the party, would have to be free to differentiate himself or herself from the current policies, he added.

“But what he’s asking them to do is stay on the Titanic and keep rowing,” Mr. Plecas said.

It’s not exactly the same situation at the other end of the country.  Campbell left suddenly and pretty much unexpectedly.  Danny Williams, by contrast, has already made it abundantly clear he’s in the later stages of his political career in this province.

In fact, Williams first talked about quitting politics in late 2006.  Not surprisingly, one of the things he was moaning about at the time was the weight of the office he volunteered for. The backstory on his winter and spring full of discontent, at the time,  probably had much more to do with the collapse of Hebron talks and revelations about gross overspending and criminal activity in the House of Assembly, some of which continued until 2006, rather than any real annoyance with the life in the political goldfish bowl.

Fast forward four years.

Williams’ most recent version of the 12 minute rant at every Goldstein he could think of seemed to be much more about his frustration with the Lower Churchill, the budget and other matters than about liberals and the media.  After all, he finished up by urging people not to pay attention to the “bullshit”.  That would be, of course, the same “bullshit” he just spent 12 minutes obsessing about.

Doesn’t make sense, does it?

Not really.

Then again, it seldom does.

Maybe he was offering excuses for failure. 

“Imagine how much I could do…” or whatever the exact words were.  Your humble e-scribbler has made the same point many times before.  Maybe a lot more would get done if only the current administration didn’t spend so much time  - and public money - manipulating public opinion or obsessing about the three people in a coffee shop in Deer Lake who muttered misdemeanour words about the Old Man.

Maybe Williams was just venting his considerable frustration  - yet again - again with the job he volunteered for and that no one is forcing him to keep.  It’s just that those outbursts seem to be coming a bit more frequently lately.  His last Great Whine Session was in August, the last polling period.

As these bitch sessions seem to come closer and closer together, it seems appropriate to wonder how and when exactly Williams will finally give us all the wave from the Cessna door as he heads off to Florida more or less permanently.

Will he go before October 2011 or has his caucus roped him into one last kick at the cat?  What happens if the polls shift and it looks like he won’t reclaim the seats he has right now let alone score all of them?  Danny Williams hardly seems like the kind of guy who would stick around and settle for being in exactly the same spot again.  He needs to go for something bigger.  But what happens if he couldn’t hope to sweep all 48 seats in the House?

Will he struggle along and wait until 2013 or 2014 before pulling pin? Will he give plenty of lead time and hang around while his successors duke it out or will he pull a Campbell and walk out one fine January afternoon?

No matter what happens, we know that Danny Williams is in the final stages of his political career.  Go back to April and you can see a list of some of the contenders and pretenders to the throne who are already campaigning for his job. Maybe it’s time to think now about how he will finally slide out of his current job and when.

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Crude up, but what does it mean?

Crude oil finished the week on a high, with Brent coming closer to US$90 a barrel than at any time since October 2008.

That’s good.

Right?

Well, maybe.

Certainly, in the short run it brings in some extra cash.  The provincial government low-balled production estimates in the spring budget but the actual production level only offset prices below the forecast average of US$83. in the end, the forecast oil revenue will likely not be far off the actual budget projection of $2.1 billion. 

Don’t be surprised if it is more like $2.5 billion.  if that’s the case, then the current budget is the first one in a long while where the provincial government gave figures that were close to the actuals.

Unfortunately, the budget forecast a cash deficit of around $900 million.

Two things will help bring that number down.  First, production at Voisey’s Bay – even allowing for a strike – might start pushing government’s mining royalty back up to where it was before the recession.

Second, and perhaps most likely, the provincial government could be way off in its  capital works spending.  This is – you will recall – a government that has a real problem getting the job done.  If someone could come up with a little blue pill for it, these guys would buy it by the container load.  We are talking projects announced in one year, forecast to end in a couple and they only get around to tendering the thing at the end of the two years.  Delays and massive cost over-runs are routine.

Things would be a lot clearer if the provincial finance minister issued a mid-year financial update in September as he should.  That’s halfway through the fiscal year.  As it is, he will say something in December.  If last year is any indication, he’ll toss a load of sheer bullshit into the public mix in the hopes of keeping people lined up at the counter spending cash for Christmas.

The we just have to keep an eye on crude prices.  Oil is still the biggest revenue source the provincial government has. Things are fine as long as oil stays where it is now.  But when the markets can show an eight dollar a barrel increase in as many days, they can equally show a drop if the factors come together in the right way.

If the provincial government plans to unleash a year of election spending at the same time as the markets start to sort themselves out, this could prove to be a very interesting year indeed, right up to the next provincial election.

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Some loveable turncoats

‘In Newfoundland politics,”  wrote Bill Rowe, “you haven’t lost your political virginity unless you’ve knifed your own party in the back and crossed the floor of the House of Assembly at least once.”

At the time he wrote that – 1984 – Rowe was a lawyer, columnist, radio show host and the author of the splendidly titled Clapp’s Rock and The Temptation of Victor Gallanti. he was also the former leader of the provincial Liberals, a job he lost in the wake of a political scandal involving leaked police reports.

In 1985, Rowe tried to run for Brian Peckford’s Conservatives.  He lost the nomination fight.

In 1993, he carried the Liberal banner in the provincial general election and got a solid drubbing by the local Conservative candidate.

Fast forward a decade.  Conservative Danny Williams tried to lure Rowe back into politics as a Conservative.  Rowe held out for an appointment to a job as Williams’ personal ambassador to Hy’s.  He took up the job in 2004 and held it for a few months before packing it in to return to St. John’s.

Rowe is now touring the country, incidentally, flogging what is purported to be an insider’s account of things he was outside the room for during that brief sojourn on the Rideau.  According to reports, the mainlanders are lapping it up. The softcover book has hit the Globe and Mail’s hardcover best-seller list.

You could not make this stuff up if you tried.

One of his regular talk show callers these past few years has been a decent fellow named George Murphy.  He has garnered some local notoriety for his ability to forecast retail gasoline prices with some accuracy.  Murphy is a staunch supporter of the government’s gas price-fixing scheme, among other things.

Murphy’s gained some extra notoriety lately by being the latest local politician to carry on the fine tradition of crossing the floor to the other side.  Murphy very loudly and very publicly renounced the Liberal party and headed for the New Democrats. Murphy was cross that the Liberals did not hire him for a job, picking instead Craig Westcott, a journalist of some considerable experience who did a bit of work for the provincial Conservatives and whose only foray as a candidate was for the Harper Conservatives in opposition to Danny Williams’ Family Feud in 2008.

So far only one local journalist -  Telegram editor Brian Jones - has accurately captured the essence of former Liberal Murphy’s current position, that of New Democratic candidate in a by-election likely to be called next week for a seat formerly held by the Conservatives:

…Murphy didn’t like it that a Tory became a Grit, so he bolted. Murphy, a former Liberal, is now an NDPer.

He is seeking support from NDP members to win the party’s candidacy in the upcoming byelection in the district of Conception Bay East-Bell Island.

But by Murphy’s own logic, NDP rank-and-filers should be aghast. A former Liberal is tainting their pure gene pool, as it were.

Perhaps Murphy knows something the rest of us don’t — that changing parties is unacceptable for some people, i.e., Westcott, but entirely acceptable for others, i.e., himself.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve read that Telegram story three times and I’m still left thinking, let me get this straight…

You could not make this stuff up if you tried.

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The Traffic Report, November 1 - 5

No, folks, this is not a summary of Cecil Haire’s morning traffic reports on CBC Radio.

But something is going on all the same. Traffic in the past couple of weeks is up.  It’s currently running at 18% higher than the same time last month.

Here are the Top 10 stories, as determined by what people are reading:

1. Thin-skinned or what? (Arguably the first time a one sentence post linked to an article on Sarah Palin hit the top of the chart in this corner of cyberspace.)
2. Stop bullying
3. Lower Churchill:  Tshaukesh leads quiet resistance to the Old Man’s dream
4. Being negative
5. Smart politics versus not smart politics
6. Anger Management:  Conservative version
7. Keith Coombs:  financial genius and Lower Churchill:  more potato, potato [tie]
8. Rumours of his demise…
9. Court docket now online and Williams announces political exit plan [tie]
10. It gets better

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Shatner – F**k you

And the original

 

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Blaming liberals and the news media

You can find the Premier’s remarks at the annual Conservative Party fundraiser online at cbc.ca/nl.

He’s been down this road many times before but never this intensely.  And he finishes by telling us how much money the government spent.

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Drop-out drop detail

The 2008 report on schools from the provincial education department is a wealth of useful information on one of the most important government service areas.

Chapter 10 is about school leavers.  In light of the Statistics Canada report on drop-outs, it’s worth taking a closer look at the way the drop-out rate dropped in this province.

As we know from the Statistics Canada report, 19.9% of young people dropped out of school in Newfoundland and Labrador, on average, in the three years 1991-1993.  By 1996, that figure had declined to 16.7%.

By 2006, that number was down to 8.9%. The rate was lower in 2003, continued downward for the next two years and then jumped up in 2006. The current rate  - 7.4%  - is actually about what the rate was in 2005. The table is taken from the provincial government report.

Media reports indicate that a higher percentage of males than females dropped out in this province in 2009 (103% versus 6.6%). That’s a change from a decade and more ago when the male rate was dramatically higher.  According to CBC, “while rates have declined for both sexes, the rate of decrease was faster for men, narrowing the gap between the two.”

The provincial education department has another statistic, though.  It compares rural versus urban rates of school-leaving.  Here’s the provincial government table comparing the rates for all provinces and for the country as a whole.

This sort of statistic doesn’t bode well for economic development in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. And it doesn’t get any better when one considers the trend in the Eastern district, for example, that shows those graduating high school in rural areas are more likely than urban students to leave with a general pass.  n other words, they aren’t necessarily more likely to enter post-secondary education or training.

If a provincial government could only focus on one area in order to produce economic and social benefits to individuals and to the community as a whole, improving educational performance would be it.

Now it is interesting to pick up on comments on the other post on this report.  Both noted the possible influence of the cod moratorium in 1992 on the decline.  On the face of it, the answer seems to be that the moratorium did influence the rate.  Young people in rural areas, especially males, tended to leave school since they could make a living in the fishery or other similar work with a limited education.  Without the cod fishery they might have stayed in school.

Maybe.

The idea is worth exploring but the answer is likely to be more complex. Don’t forget that about 70,000 left Newfoundland and Labrador in the aftermath of the moratorium.  While the drop-out rate declined dramatically in the period between 1993 and 2005, the persistence of a high drop-out rate in rural Newfoundland  suggests there might be other factors at work.

Still, these numbers bear further consideration.

Especially considering the literacy and numeracy rates in the province.

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Williams’ shift sends Lower Churchill back to enviro drawing board for second time this year

As labradore has it, the panel conducting the environmental reviewing the Lower Churchill project is asking NALCOR  - the provincial government’s energy company - to submit a raft of new documentation now that the Premier has decided to completely revise the project.

Not surprising.

Not surprising at all.

Nor would it be surprising to find that both the panel and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency are privately spitting nickels in frustration at the twists and turns they’ve gone through to deal with this project.

Last January, the panel explained to NALCOR that the company’s submissions up to that point didn’t justify the project, as presented.  You got it.  NALCOR could not justify the project.  They also couldn’t demonstrate things like the claimed greenhouse gas emission reductions.  That’s because they don’t have any customers to show how the hydro juice will actually displace fossil fuels used in electricity generation anywhere on the planet.

NALCOR spent eight months  - until August 2010 - revising and revamping stuff, sending it along to the panel and then out to the interested parties for detailed review.

The Innu picked up on the fact that NALCOR and the provincial government were now substantially revising the project – the smaller dam and a whole new transmission routing – and said exactly that in their response filed with the environmental review panel. 

Based on the Premier’s comments at the end of October, the panel had to get the whole thing sorted in order to comply with the panel’s terms of reference.  Specifically, they are asking NALCOR to document:

a.  Changes to the project description, construction (including schedule) and operation;
b.  Transmission interconnection lines;
c.  Changes to accommodation facilities;
d.  New cost estimates;
e.  New socio-economic data and timing, particularly employment, work scheduling approach, labour requirements, goods and services;
f.  Changes to reservoir clearing and impoundment and validity of model results (mercury, flow, ice modeling, etc.);
g.  Harmful alteration, disruption and destruction of fish habitat and implications for the proposed Fish Habitat Compensation Plan;
h.  Potential aquatic and terrestrial impacts;
i.  Traditional land use and Aboriginal issues;
j.  Any other relevant information.

This is going to take another year or two, at least and the whole review is going to get way more interesting. 

The project the panel has right now consists entirely of two dams and a connection back to Churchill Falls so the power can head out through Quebec.  The line to Soldier’s Pond, near St. John’s is entirely within the province so that isn’t part of the federal review. But that’s it.  All that NALCOR is pushing is the same project Brian Tobin pushed in 1998.

Until now, the line to Nova Scotia simply didn’t exist except as a political throw-away line.  Events of the past two months have changed all that.  If NALCOR really intends to ship power to Nova Scotia – as discussed just within the past week -  they will now have to lay that on the table, in detail.  There will also be new interested parties looking for a say in what happens in the line from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia and then maybe in whatever connections will happen in New Brunswick. An already complex project just got a whole lot more complex.

Don’t forget that this project was supposed to be under construction right at this moment.  NALCOR was supposed to sanction it in 2009. 

This latest bad news comes on top of other setbacks and a reminder of the biggest inconvenient truth about the legendary project. Substantial chunks of the Innu community aren’t happy with the project. And if that weren’t enough, an analyst at the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council thinks the province needs to get its fiscal house in order before thinking of adding at least $6.0 billion to the public debt load.

But perhaps the biggest setback of all for Danny Williams’ plan was one entirely of his own making.  After rejecting a proposal to develop the deal with Hydro-Quebec and Ontario Hydro, Williams then spent five years  - entirely in secret - trying to get HQ to take an equity stake in the project. He even offered to set aside his political commitment that he would only sign a Lower Churchill deal if HQ provided redress for the 1969 contract.  HQ just wasn’t interested:  they’d already moved on to other big projects.

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It gets better

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