The budget consultation farce is starting early this year.
Last year, and the year before the farce started in January.
Doesn’t matter: major budget decisions are made before Tom Marshall hits the road.
Fool ‘em once, shame on you.
Fool ‘em twice, shame on them.
So what is it for fool ‘em seven times in a row?
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This post first appeared as a column in the old Sunday Independent in 2004
Your humble e-scribbler posted at Bond Papers in July 2005 along with a few extra comments, including this one:
Reviewing the column now about 18 months after I wrote it, the only thing I would disagree with is the conclusion: I was wrong. People here don't seem to tire of having the same carpet threads being pushed in front of them again and again. Actually, I'd have to admit that over the past 18 months we have seen old ideas and old threads being sold time and again at their original price, marked up to account for inflation.
In light of this period of change in provincial politics, it’s worthwhile to take another look at how things looked like just six years ago:
The politics of history
History is a powerful thing in Newfoundland and Labrador politics.In his victory speech a few weeks ago, premier-elect Danny Williams pledged that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had voted to seize control of their destiny using words eerily reminiscent of Smallwood, Peckford and Tobin. "There will be no more giveaways. The giveaways end right here and right now!"
Why are we stuck on this rhetorical merry-go-round?
One reason is that political leaders take a Calvinist approach to history. As Calvin told his stuffed tiger Hobbes many years ago, people reinvent history to suit modern prejudices and to fit modern needs. We spin our history, old and new, reweaving the threads of fact to suit the immediate need. Tories blame the Liberals for job cuts in the early 1990s, conveniently forgetting the world recession, and the abysmal state of the province’s finances. New Liberals blame old Liberals for the Upper Churchill give-away. Nationalists blame foreigners for everything from the collapse of responsible government to current resource "giveaways", all the while forgetting that we have controlled our own destiny for most of the past 200 years.
The second reason is that spin seems to work. Politicians like to get elected. Brian Tobin and Brian Peckford won huge majority governments promising that one day the sun will shine, that we will be masters in our own house or that not one teaspoon of ore will leave the province. They hammered at the giveaways, vowing never again. At least in Peckford’s case, he stuck around long enough to make a decision, yet, as good as his intentions were in signing the Atlantic Accord, newer politicians have found in that deal their latest scapegoat.
The third reason is that politicians are people and people like sameness; it’s a human characteristic. Change in any form is often intimidating. For politicians in a province that has experienced relatively little change throughout its history, more of the same seems like the answer to everything, especially if you want to get elected.
The fourth reason is that there is a certain expectation that everything in the province is government's responsibility. For most of our history, Newfoundland and Labrador has been a top-down place. Churches and politicians ran things. The churches handled schools, salvation and morality. The government ran everything else, from job creation to the dole. If voters expect you to walk on water, and you don't have a better idea, politicians found it easier to take a step or blame someone else for the supposed failure, if they wanted to get elected.
History seems to push politicians to more of the same, but ironically, history is about change. And as the Newfoundland and Labrador electorate changes, they are getting better able to spot the same carpet being sold to them time and again.
The choice for the new crop of politicians elected last month is whether to spin history for immediate, and ultimately short-lived, gains. Or use history - our experience, our culture - as one tool to guide substantive changes in and for Newfoundland and Labrador. In eight years time, they may find that many of the changes they hoped for like massive new industries will still be little more than the fodder for someone else's rhetoric.
The four factors just mentioned, though, are all within their power to change.
For a politician to change those in Newfoundland and Labrador would be something truly historic.
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As part of the little series of reminders about the new Premier, here’s one of your humble e-scribbler’s favourites, from October 2010:
She told an audience in Grand Falls-Windsor that “[i]t is probably wiser not to share information because people don ‘t understand the analysis that has to go into it once a proposal comes up, you have an obligation to do an analysis on it.”
Yes folks, apparently the rest of us are not capable of comprehending the analysis that officials routinely feed to Kathy Dunderdale to help make her the genius that she is.
Uh huh.
Right.
The rest of us didn’t expropriate a frackin environmental nightmare in Grand Falls-Windsor and then neglect to tell people about it until way after.
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Vanity Fair’s got Randy Quaid.
Paul Wells decides to go to two objective sources to sum up Danny Williams.
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A new poll by Angus Reid shows public approval in Newfoundland and Labrador for Danny Williams’ performance as premier fell from 80% in February 2010 to 67% in November.
That’s an interesting detail buried in the release from Angus Reid. Most media outlets apparently have taken the company’s news release and not looked at the attached research report.
The release lede notes that Williams topped the list of all premiers with Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall coming second. The first sentence of the analysis section states that while impressive, “the overall approval rating for Williams in Newfoundland and Labrador is now 11 points lower than it was at the end of 2009.”
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On Friday, Danny Williams will head to Government House and resign as Premier, just as eight others have done before him.
Danny Williams was a superlative tactical politician, the likes of which one seldom sees anywhere in Canada and certainly one has seen very rarely in this province.
That was his singular strength and for seven years he campaigned relentlessly to sustain his cult of personality. That cult then gave him license to pursue his own political agenda free of any interference by a thriving, healthy democracy.
Craig Welsh, the townie bastard, put it aptly:
And what I mean by "he can get away with doing it" is that the premier's popularity is such that he could strangle a baby in the middle of the Avalon Mall parking lot with the assembled provincial media in attendance and there would be people that would say the baby had it coming.
It’s a graphic image.
It is a disturbing image.
But it is an accurate description of Williams’ political influence. He could say things that were patently, demonstrably false and people would accept it unquestioningly. Supposedly cynical and sceptical media types were not immune from his powers of persuasion, despite what Danny liked to pretend. Some were known to leap to defend him.
Danny Williams was right because he was popular and popular because he was right. That he could create and sustain that preposterous notion and have it accepted by so many people is the sum of his political genius.
That was no mean accomplishment. Danny Williams ranks with the likes of Joe Smallwood, W.A.C. Bennett and Maurice Duplessis. Anyone who looks on that accomplishment - cultist worship 40 years after the last of the old demagogues held power – cannot fail to be impressed. That Williams was able to spread that cult of absurdity to the national level amongst business, academic, editorial and political leaders in a G-8 country at the start of the 21st century is truly astounding.
Instead of recognising that stunning achievement, people are crediting Danny Williams with a bizarre range of things; but the list, whether compiled at home or across the country, breaks down this way.
The things that Williams did do, like a one time transfer payment from Ottawa in 2005, have been swollen by the cultist chanting to the point of absurdity.
And what of Danny Williams’ future?
Well, in all likelihood, he and his accomplishments will go the way of other politicians’, including those long-ago strongmen in whose ranks he clearly belongs. There is an inky abyss, a vacuum that awaits them all. It is a cross between Limbo and Purgatory, a living death for the egotistical and the once-mighty. Where once throngs sang their praises, there is only silence.
Five days after Williams announced his resignation, people still cry for his departure. Five weeks from now, they’ll be more concerned about Christmas credit card bills and if politics excites them, they’ll be watching the race to replace him. Five months from now and the province’s election campaign will be well under way.
Five years from now, people will struggle to remember that guy who parted his hair down the centre of his head. The collective amnesia on which Danny Williams built his cult of personality will swallow him as surely as it swallowed his predecessors.
Who the gods would destroy, they would first make proud.
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Other reading: Robert Rowe makes the point as succinctly as anyone might in a letter to the Telegram.
Williams might have instilled some sense of pride, however defined, in Randy Simms and others, but no dear leader did that for me. I had it before Williams, during Williams, and I’ll have it after Williams. I have never suffered from any sense of inferiority or poor second cousinism to other Canadians.
True pride cannot be grafted onto a people in Kim Jong-Il style. It is not fostered by belligerence. It is not waving a flag (nor lowering it, for that matter) and it is not the jingle in your pocket. Rather it is a feeling in your guts — deep in your guts — and I’d like to think we have always had it. That’s a gift Premier Williams could not give me. What we did not have was wealth, and I suspect Simms has conflated these issues.
With my gratitude for the effort, I wish the premier a jingle in his pocket and good health in the future.
Update: Edited to eliminate an awkward sentence.
Crude supplies available through OPEC will be sufficient to meet global demand through to the year 2020 according to international energy consultants Purvin & Gertz.
“Robust supply increases from non-OPEC producers such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, and Brazil will be mirrored by expected large production capacity increases from Angola, Nigeria, and Iraq,” Purvin & Gertz said. This will result in no appreciable change in OPEC's market share until after 2015. [from Penn Energy]
That growth in supply from Canada would be coming from Newfoundland and Labrador.
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Give finance minister Tom Marshall credit for one thing is nothing else.
Tom told a CBC Radio Morning Show [audio file]audience in St. John’s on Wednesday the God’s honest truth about oil royalties and recent windfalls; Danny didn’t do it.
Those royalties are a function of three things, according to Tom:
And, sez, Tom, those are things the provincial government doesn’t control. Regular readers of these e-scribbles will be familiar with the idea.
So there you have it, straight from an authoritative source: Danny didn’t do it.
But the interview on Wednesday was also a chance for Tom to slip back into his regular routine of saying one thing that sounds sensible, all the while denying the insensible stuff he’s actually doing as finance minister.
He told CBC that:
"It would be a travesty if we don't use this windfall we have, this oil — which will be gone one day — if we don't use that to get rid of this massive debt that our people and our governments have accumulated," …
Only Tom Marshall could say that with a straight face.
Don’t misunderstand: not using the oil windfall to reduce the public debt burden in this province should be one of the provincial government’s main uses for the gigantic oil windfall.
The funny part is that the provincial government has been doing just the opposite of what Tom said. He got the verb tense wrong and he ought to know it. It is a travesty that the provincial government has not been using the oil windfall from the middle part of the decade to pay down the huge public debt.
Not “would be”.
“Is”.
Tom Marshall, finance minister, has consistent refused throughout his entire term of office to accept any suggestion that would significantly reduce public indebtedness. Marshall has been very clear about his desire to retain the right to overspend the public accounts free of any fetters:
I certainly would agree with fiscal responsibility legislation … but I'm not prepared to be locked in automatically to a balanced budget every year," he said [in April 2007].
The most he’d accept, apparently, is a law that said balanced budgets might be an interesting idea.
Then Tom went right on jacking up spending whenever he could. In fact, he boosted it up so high and so far that people have called the current financial state of the province as unsustainable.
Who said that?
Well, not just your humble e-scribbler. There was – according to Marshall himself - an analyst for Moody’s bond raters who questioned the sustainability of public spending. Then there was a cabinet minister who muttered the word as he left cabinet.
And most recently, an analyst for the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council warned that the provincial government needed to tackle its massive debt before it started thinking about piling on even more debt for an energy megaproject.
That would, of course, be the massive increase in the public debt Tom Marshall and his colleague’s announced a week and a bit ago.
Tom Marshall: debt fighter.
Or not.
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NTV’s Michael Connors isn’t a flashy reporter but he is a solid performer, day-in, day-out.
He doesn’t work for the news outlet everyone loves to hate, but then again, NTV manages to score solid news hits time after time.
One of his reports on November 26 was an overview of the political landscape in the province after Danny Williams. It includes an observation that Kathy Dunderdale and the next Tory leader after her may well face a fractious caucus.
That’s true. Danny Williams ran a tight ship not because he was a populist, as Memorial University professor Alex Marland claims, but because he ruled with an iron hand.
People in Williams’ caucus – and it was his caucus, not a Conservative Party caucus - saw time after time his enthusiasm in attaching people for the tiniest of alleged transgressions and his willingness to go to war with Fabian Manning over what, apparently, was a mix-up in which manning brother was thinking of running federally.
With that gone and with the pent up egos of a few really ambitious politicians about to display themselves for the first time in seven years, it all might wind up like some sort of Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale meets Mardi Gras.
More likely, though, the problems won’t be with caucus discipline. There might be people who start speaking a bit too freely about their own opinions as opposed to standing with their team.
More likely, the problems will come as the campaign heats up and leading contenders start to smash into each other. Things are pretty civilised so far, but then again what is happening right now is only a few notches above the simmering undeclared war that’s been going on for months.
Supposedly, prospective late-comer candidates are making calls gauging support while the ones who’ve already decided to run are starting to take the wrappers off their teams. Those people are making calls on behalf of candidates like Joan Burke, she who has had a war chest for some time.
The object of her likely aggression will be Jerome Kennedy. His coy comments about maybe not wanting to be the man who follows the man are just talk. He’s got people salted away throughout government and it would be a complete surprise if he didn’t run at this point.
There is still the outside possibility the Tories will try to emulate the Tobin coup in 1996, but odds are against it. A crew got Tobin into place before potential leaders like John Efford even started. They could then head into a quickie election and carry on from there.
The Tories don’t seem to function like that. In 1989, they opted for battle-axes to the sides of each other’s heads. Not a good move, as it turned out. The warfare lasted well into the next decade and really didn’t disappear until Danny showed up as the saviour in 2000.
In 1979, they had a large battle that ended successfully in several respects. But that was a completely different caucus both in style and substance from the current Tory one. For one thing, the incoming leader could remake the party and take it to further success.
What does Danny’s replacement do? There could be an anti-Danny who tries to disown his predecessor’s style and policies. That’s got limited potential. on the other hand there could well be a candidate who tries to pass himself or herself as the distilled essence of Danny; all the anger but none of the depth. Being more Danny than Danny isn’t likely to be a winnable strategy in some parts of the province either.
In any event, the whole thing will stay calm through Christmas. Once the New Year arrives and the party figures out what it will do for a convention, all bets are off.
And in the end, the leadership will be about a simple proposition: either the party changes or the voters will make a change for them.
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That upward traffic trend that started a couple of months ago continues to surge here at Bond Papers.
The number of visitors in October jumped 10% from September and then another 39% from October to November. Cumulatively, the jump is 53% from September to November. Page views are up by the same percentages.
What people were reading in November is an interesting mixture, to say the least. Just take a gander:
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The guy’s got bags of experience and he has a strong business and legal background. Here’s the blurb that went with a 2001 provincial honour he received:
Doug Moores has served as a volunteer for 30 years, contributing locally, provincially, nationally and internationally. He has held leadership roles in numerous sports, arts and culture, health care, and business and development associations. He has made significant contributions to the Conception Bay North Development Association, the Harbour Grace Board of Trade and Baccalieu Chamber of Commerce, among others.
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He thought about it in 2000 but never launched a campaign after Danny decided to go for it.
He might be a long-shot, but the guy who has trouble with geography at least knows what he’s fighting for: fairity.
Kevin O’Brien: a potential Conservative leadership candidate.
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labradore deciphers the references to Danny Williams in the coded diplomatic cables that someone leaked already.
Pretty boring, routine stuff.
Of course, that doesn’t mean there might not be other, much more interesting diplomatic cables that mention the Old Man:
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Debunking imaginary conspiracies update: CBC’s David Cochrane joins in…eventually.
CBC quotes Toby Couture, an energy specialist with with London-based E3 Analytics:
"The investment case for selling that power to New England is actually not looking very good, partly because they have more than enough natural gas — cheap natural gas — to meet their own electricity needs for the next decade, at least," Couture said in an interview.
Nalcor boss Ed Martin disagrees but doesn’t say how he plans to overcome the economics of Danny Williams very expensive project.
You can get an idea of the expense of the project from earlier Bond Papers posts:
As for what sort of windfall Martin may be counting on, consider that taxpayers in Newfoundland and Labrador will be shouldering the cost of this enormously expensive deal and, in all likelihood passing on the savings to energy consumers elsewhere. That’s an idea floated around these parts before Danny Williams announced his retirement.
And in case you thing Couture is wrong, some very influential people agree with him.
Maybe this all doesn’t matter because the Muskrat Falls was a vehicle for Williams’ retirement and not a way to build a generating plant.
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“Mr. Williams can take credit for negotiating the deals that led to Voisey’s Bay…”
That’s a pretty tough trick since the deals that led to the development were signed before Danny Williams took office in 2003 and he had nothing to do with them.
John must have fact-checked with Rex Murphy who recently had Williams in office in the late 1990s.
And, as with the rest of Ibbitson’s safari – population and math - the remainder of this article is no more accurate.
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Think of it as a bit of a record.
Advance polls in Conception Bay East-Bell Island attracted 551 voters over the weekend. Turns out that this a record for by-elections since 1999.
There have been a few by-elections where the advance poll attracted more than 400 voters, but for the most part, there hasn’t been a heavy advance turn-out the rest of the 21 by-elections since 1999.
Even in the Danny by-election only 333 voters cast ballots at the advance poll.
And in usually safe Conservative seats – like say Ferryland – or where the Connies are expected to win handily, the turn-out in the advance polls has usually been low. Topsail earlier this year had only 169 advance poll votes. Ferryland was 135 and Cape St. Francis was 112.
So what does it mean?
Well, it could mean that change gonna come. There’s an old political wives tale that says a heavy turn-out usually means the incumbent or the incumbent party are about to take a heavy knock or the government party is likely to lose.
But when you look at the the rests in Port de Grave, there was a heavy turn out in the advance and the incumbent party – which was also the government party – won the seat. In Exploits (2005), the government party won.
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In a placed where open confrontation is suppressed, humour sometimes takes a cutting edge.
Take a look at this post over at thescope.ca and give a listen to a mock traditional song about Danny Williams.
Sounds wonderful, right?
Then look at the lyrics:
Sure he’s as good as God,
He bought back all the cod,
Now the money’s flowin’ free,
There’s a dollar in it all for you and me.…
I bought three new Skidoos but winter is dry and I got nowhere to go,
But I’m not worried cuz I knows next year Danny’s gonna bring back the snow.Now he’ll take care a ya,
He invented Hibernia,
He lines our pockets with the nickel and oil,
Sure he even knows the fella from Republic of Doyle.
Then take a look at any piece in the conventional media the past couple of days - local or mainland – and the realise that the people who wrote the equivalent of “He invented Hibernia” and “he brought back all the cod” weren’t making a joke.
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From the same column in which the safari journalist from Toronto proved he could not count, labradore finds another factual claim that is – to say the least of it – wrong.
This time it is the myth that half the population of the province lives in or near St. John’s.
Anyone care to guess where John got the crap in the column?
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