Unsound public finances: Tom Marshall’s travesty

 

"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."

That was finance minister Tom Marshall late last year when he released the provincial government’s financial update for Fiscal Year 2010. He made the comment to CBC’s Jeff Gilhooley during a live interview.

Auditor General John Noseworthy’s most recent report on the public accounts (for Fiscal Year 2009)  pretty much demolishes Marshall’s claims that he and his fellow Conservatives have been managing the province’s finances in a sound way.

The chart shows debt expenses by fiscal year over the past decade. Incidentally, just to make sure you don’t get screwed up in this and subsequent posts, notice that the Auditor General mislabels every fiscal year.  The period covered in this chart is from 1999 to 2009.  That’s the way your humble e-scribbler will refer to the dates.

This chart shows just exactly how much money the provincial government spends every year to service the public debt.  Very little of that is actually going to pay off a debt.  The overwhelming majority of that money goes just to pay the interest that comes due every year.

Take a good look at those numbers.

In 2009, the provincial government spent the better part of a billion dollars doing nothing but paying interest on outstanding debt.

Those figures also tell you that what the province’s finance minister and even the Auditor General call “net debt” isn’t really the measure of public debt that you should be fixed on. After all, if the provincial government really had reduced public debt by almost three or four billion dollars, we wouldn’t be back paying debt servicing costs the likes of which the government hasn’t seen since 2001.

The number you need to look at is gross debt, or, as the Auditor General labels it in the chart below:  “liabilities”

That shows the total amount owed now and in the future by the government and its corporations and agencies.  When it comes to figuring out interest payments and so on, that’s the figure the banks and other creditors look at.  Think about it for a second:  if you have a mortgage on your house, the bank doesn’t check every year to see how much cash you have in the bank or anything else to figure out the interest payments you need to make on the loan.  They just know how much you borrowed and what rate of interest they are going to apply.

So when you look at that line called “liabilities” you will see that the provincial government had $13.733 billion in 2004 – the first full year the Conservatives were in power – and owed $12.559 billion five years later.  Not surprisingly, the debt servicing costs in 2009 were not far off what they were way back before Tom Marshall, Jerome Kennedy and the rest of the provincial Conservatives worked their supposed financial miracles.

Take a look at these two charts and you’ll know why your humble e-scribbler has been harping on this point for pretty well the whole span of Bond Papers. Paul Oram’s resignation in the fall of 2009  - note the year! -just highlighted the issue.

Take a look at those numbers and you’ll understand why Tom Marshall simply has no credibility when he talks about his administration’s management of public finances.

And if you look at those figures you’ll understand that, even if the Muskrat Falls deal was brilliant – and it isn’t – the provincial government has far more pressing issues to deal with rather than build someone’s political legacy. That deal would take the gross debt from $12.5 billion to between $17 and $18 billion.

Tom Marshall’s already given us a judgment of his own performance as finance minister:  a travesty. They haven’t reduced the public debt to any appreciable degree.

So what would it be if the same guy and his cabinet colleagues then increased the public debt by another 50%?

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NL Auditor General notes poor fin mgt practice

From September 2002 until March 2009, Government had been preparing periodic financial statements to show the Province’s results of operations and financial position.  Officials of the Department of Finance indicated that these financial statements were only distributed to the Minister of Finance/President of Treasury Board, other Treasury Board Ministers, the Deputy Minister of Finance, the Comptroller General, various officials of the Department of  Finance, and the Auditor General.  Officials of the Department of Finance advised that for the year ended 31 March 2010, periodic financial statements
were only distributed to the Deputy Minister of Finance.

From the Auditor General’s report on Fiscal Year 2009.

No wind, please. We’re Nalcor.

The Telegram reported on Saturday that the provincial government’s energy company isn’t really interested in developing wind energy until after they get the hugely expensive Lower Churchill up and running.

Oh yes, and they also want to sell power to Ontario some day in the misty future despite the crowd up along having a bit of a glut of power.

Regulars readers of these e-scribblers will find the first one to be a gobsmacking revelation of the magnitude of finding out that Liberace was gay.

The second one’s just funny because it really a case of Nalcor putting a very brave face on a very badly bungled job.  After all, they rejected flatly Ontario’s interest in building the project five years ago. 

Then after another five years of trying desperately to interest Ontario, Quebec and anyone in northeastern North America with a electric socket in the power they came up with nothing other than this brilliant plan:

• make the people of Newfoundland and Labrador bear the entire cost of the project and,
• let Nova Scotians get 35 terawatt years of electricity for free.

And it is funny. 

Your humble e-scribbler doesn’t relish the thought of the New Brunswick- like electricity prices that are headed to consumers on the island – guaranteed to at least double within the decade – and the extra burden of hauling around all that public debt but what else can you do but laugh?

If you didn’t laugh at the sheer stupidity of the idea, you go completely off your nut.

Heck, you might even believe that the Conservatives were seriously interested in sound management of the province’s finances.

Right. 

Laughter it is, then.

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Watton to carry Liberal banner in Humber West

Corner Brook native Mark Watton wants to represent the people of Humber West in the House of Assembly.

He has the Liberal nomination.

And he’s got a pretty good line:

…do people want a PC government that’s going to be one seat bigger or do they want a PC government that’s going to be one seat more accountable?

 

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Black Smoke Traffic

For the week of January 17 to 21, the top 10 Bond Papers stories as chosen by the readers:

1. Tory angst may be well founded
2. Tim Powers?  Rick Hillier?  No thanks say NL Tories
3. AbitibiBowater properties up for sale
4. Ontario flush with electricity
5. Non-res building up 23% in Q4
6. No power cable for PEI?
7. Fin minister Tom Marshall talks debt reduction – audience pees in pants with stifled giggles
8. Fisheries agreement delayed again
9. Iceland opportunity lost
10. New gas find offshore Israel

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Mill shelves controversial tire burning proposal on eve of by-election

Corner Brook Pulp and Paper quietly shelved a controversial proposal to burn tires as part of the mill’s power generation on the eve of  a provincial by-election.

Word came late Friday in a routine statement from the provincial environment department on applications under environmental protection laws.

The provincial environment minister was supposed to rule in December on a proposal from the west coast paper mill.  The provincial government postponed that decision to January 15 claiming that it had received more public submissions on the project than it could handle by the initial deadline.

While the initial announcement of the proposal met with little public reaction, a series of protests, letters to the editor and a Facebook campaign made it clear some area residents strongly opposed the tire burning idea.

The second deadline came and went with the excuse that the minister newly appointed on January 13 needed time to review the proposal.  Shortly afterward, the minister’s office indicated he’d have an announcement by week’s end.

The decision to shelve the proposal comes on the eve of a by-election to fill a Corner Brook seat in the provincial legislature vacated by Danny Williams, who quit politics in early December.

Both opposition parties pledged to make the proposal a key issue in the by-election but by Friday only the Liberals had a candidate to face the Conservatives.  Mark Watton, a lawyer who had previously been a political staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office and chief of staff to cabinet minister Ken Dryden, is expected to be the only person to seek the Liberal nomination that closes on Friday.

On  Wednesday, high school principal Vaughan Granter won the Conservative nomination.

Friday’s decision by Corner Brook Pulp and paper doesn’t necessarily remove the tire proposal.  The mill could bring the proposal back after the by-election.  At the same time, the provincial environment department ships used car and truck tires to facilities in Quebec for burning.

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Fin minister Tom Marshall talks debt reduction - audience pees in pants with stifled giggles

According to voice of the cabinet minister, provincial finance minister Tom Marshall is interested  - again – in talking about the provincial debt.

Here’s a excerpt from the VOCM online story, quoted here since it may have been disappeared by the time this gets posted:

Marshall proposes several measures in doing so. First, the government needs to balance sustainable and prudent spending with the implementation of steps to lower taxes and net debt. He says the province has to maximize the benefits from its non-renewable resources now so that it is prepared for when they are depleted. Finally, he argues that it is important to diversify the economy, such as focusing on the Lower Churchill Project.

Marshall’s talked about sustainable spending before but only to the extent of making clear he wasn’t the teensiest bit interested in actually doing it. In fact, Marshall’s record is of a profligate spender who never met a deficit he didn’t like.

And just to get the point across, note that current provincial gross debt is about $12 billion.  That’s roughly where it’s been for the past four years and it higher than it was in 2003 when Marshall and his crowd took office. 

Tom mentioned lowering the net debt.  Well in order to do that he’d have to stop overspending as he’s done the past two years.  According to the most recent financial statements, the province’s net debt went up in 2009 and it is set to go up again in 2010 (the current fiscal year) if current trends hold.

So while that whole “sustainable and prudent spending” thing is a great objective, Tom and his friends haven’t done it yet.  After seven years, Tom’s got to have cajones the size of watermelons to talk about debt reduction and fiscal responsibility with a straight face, expecting the people in the province to take him seriously.

Ditto the part where he talks about maximising benefits from oil and minerals.  Tom and his former boss specifically rejected any suggestions to set aside sovereign wealth funds, real debt reduction and any other ways to accomplish the goal of putting the money from oil and minerals to work for the future.

And double ditto for the bit about diversifying the economy.  The current fragile state of the provincial economy is a direct result of provincial government policy since 2003. 

That leaves the Lower Churchill.

Reducing net debt, right?

Okay, Tom Marshall’s current plan is to force taxpayers to borrow at least $3.0 billion and put a total of about $6.0 on the provincial government’s gross debt load.

Tom also wants ratepayers in the province to accept electricity rates roughly double what they are currently to pay for electricity.  Can you say “uncompetitive” boys and girls? 

And he’d like to ship power free to Nova Scotia for 35 years.

Surplus power would enter the market at uncompetitive rates so the chances of export are pretty much slim and none as it now appears.

Given all that’s going on in the province and what Tom Marshall and his pals have actually done since 2003, the finance minister’s audience on Thursday must have peed in their pants with stifled laughter as he rambled on.

Surely no one would take Tom seriously, not with all the evidence against him.

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No power cable for PEI?

Federal transport minister Chuck Strahl said Thursday the federal government won’t be helping the province fund an electricity line from the island to the mainland, saying that the project didn’t make the province’s own Top 20 priorities.

The provincial government is trying to secure funding for the project through a federal green infrastructure fund.

According to the Charlottetown Guardian:

Prince Edward Island isn’t the only province looking for an electrical cable.

The $1-billion green infrastructure program has already funded an electrical cable in British Columbia at a cost of $440 million. The federal government picked up $130 million. The program also funded a $160-million power cable in the Yukon. The federal government picked up $71 million.

Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia have a joint application for a cable between those two provinces. That mega-project will cost between $800 million and $1.2 billion. They’ve asked the federal government for $375 million.

Strahl said he recognizes the province wants to construct the cable and the federal government is working to find the money to fund the project.

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Ontario flush with electricity

And so much for that market for Lower Churchill power…

Ontario residents were bemused to discover that on New Year’s Day 2011, on average, they were paid to use electricity.

If that seemed unusual – and it is – it’s only the start.

Within the next two years, the conditions that produced the bonus New Year’s power could crop up about one day in every seven, according to an analysis by the agency that runs Ontario’s power market.

A big reason: about 5,000 megawatts of wind powered generation is due to be connected to the Ontario grid in the next few years, producing surges of power that are more than the province needs.

via Toronto Star

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Fisheries agreement delayed again

Did anyone really expect that fisheries minister Clyde Jackman would actually tell the people of the province officially, with a news release that the long-awaited fisheries restructuring agreement would be delayed yet again?

Good because he didn’t.

Instead, Jackman dropped a comment to the Northern Pen, a weekly paper on the province’s Northern Peninsula.

A draft copy of Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishing industry MOU has been sent back for fine tuning delaying its release by another “two or three months”.

Speaking to the Pen on Monday, fisheries minister Clyde Jackman confirmed that he had read the 100-page document but it required some tweaking.

And if the rest of Jackman’s comments are any indication there’s no wonder the fishery is in a mess.  The fish minister doesn’t even have a sweet clue about incomes in his own industry:

One thing that really stood out was the difference in incomes for the different parties,” he said.

“In some places you have plant workers earning $10,000 and supplemented by EI while in others, they make multi thousands of dollars.”

The smart-arses can ignore the fact that ten thousand is multi-thousands.  Just note that those sorts of figures can be found readily in a report on the crab industry contained in a report government received back when Trevor Taylor was the fisheries minister.

Meanwhile, the province’s official opposition party did manage to get the story some wider coverage than Jackman may have liked.  A news release the Liberals issued did get picked up by the major media in St. John’s, likely much to Jackman’s chagrin:

“What that really means is that the plan is dead for the next year,” said [fisheries critic Marshall] Dean. “By taking another two to three months to ‘fine tune’ it, Jackman is removing the MOU from any consideration of funding in the next provincial budget, which is expected in March. If there is no funding for the plan in the budget, nothing can happen with the plan until the following year’s budget in 2012. That’s a full six months after this coming fall’s provincial general election. It looks like Minister Jackman has finally found a way to ground the MOU until after the election.”

Given this government’s handling of the MOU – which has now taken four years and gone through three different fisheries ministers – Dean thinks there is no will on the part of the PCs to deal with the fishery at all.

The story also wound up on CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast.

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Related

-   Good to the last fish:

At the same time, there are still thousands of people in Newfoundland and Labrador trying to squeeze a very meagre living from processing fish for a few weeks a year and then collecting government hand-outs for the rest.  A report delivered to the current administration when it was still young pointed out that the typical fish plant worker made less than $10,000 a year from labour, picking up another $5,000 in employment insurance premiums.

There are still way too many of them – plants and plant workers – for them all to make a decent living from what fish, and now snails, there is to turn into frozen blocks. The only thing that has changed in the better part of a decade since that report is that the workers are finding it harder and harder to collect enough weeks of work to qualify for the EI.

-  Tom Rideout meets the Bride of Frankenstein

-  Up the creek with Jackman and Rideout

New gas find offshore Israel

Funny the things that slip by.

Over Christmas the Globe and Mail ran a story on new oil and natural gas finds in Israel.  The twenty trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one set of offshore finds will reshape the Middle East and more energy finds could reshape global energy supplies.

Estimated to contain 16 trillion cubic feet of gas – equivalent to more than a quarter of Canada’s proven reserves and enough to meet Israel’s domestic demand for 100 years – the Leviathan field is believed to be the largest such deep-water gas discovery in a decade.

The find actually dates from  June 2010 as a story in the Jerusalem Post shows.

In January 2009, the discovery of the natural-gas field 90 kilometers offshore from Haifa, known as Tamar, in which Noble Energy has a 36% working interest, was made by the US-Israel consortium including the Delek Group, through its subsidiaries Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration, Isramco Negev 2, Dor Gas Exploration. Tamar is the largest exploration discovery in Noble Energy’s history, which last year also discovered a natural-gas field at Dalit with gas reserves estimated at 500 billion cubic feet.

“The Leviathan exploration has the potential of being twice the size of Tamar, which was the largest gas discovery globally in 2009,” Richard Gussow, a research analyst at Deutsche Bank, said Thursday.

In addition, there’s been a major oil discovery onshore as well of a field roughly the size of Hibernia with additional prospects offshore.

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AbitibiBowater properties up for sale

An advertisement appearing in the Telegram on Wednesday put the Stephenville and Botwood properties still owned by AbitibiBowater up for sale.

The receivers are inviting bids for six parcels, four of them associated with the former Stephenville mill and two for land, buildings and a deep-water dock facility at Botwood.

The ad was placed by Samson Belair/Deloitte and Touche, receivers for a numbered Newfoundland and Labrador company created during the recent restructuring of AbitibiBowater.

Any environmental liabilities would pass to the new owners with any sale of the properties in the same way that provincial taxpayers are now liable for the entire Grand Falls mistakenly expropriated in 2008 by the Williams administration.

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Non-res building up 23.% in Q4

The value of non-residential construction in Newfoundland and Labrador increased 23.6% in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared to the third quarter, according to figures released Monday by Statistics Canada.

Of the $103 million in industrial, commercial and institutional construction in the province, $62 million of it was in the metro St. John’s region.

That’s interesting given a recent comment by finance minister Tom Marshall that it was time for the private sector to step in a drive the economy for a while. BMO noted recently that provincial economic growth is driven currently by capital spending. 

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Tory angst might be well founded

Conservatives across Newfoundland and Labrador seem to be in a bit of a tizzy. Danny Williams’ sudden departure has the caucus so spooked they are trying to engineer a backroom deal to avoid a leadership contest.

On some level you have to wonder why they might be so uptight.  After all, to casual observers they would appear to be guaranteed an easy victory in October’s general election with or without the Old Man.

But then you see things like an online poll at The Western Star:  “If you were a Danny Williams supporter, are you less likely to vote PC now?”

So far, 46% of respondents are saying yes, they are less likely to vote Tory. 15% say they are more likely to vote PC and the remainder  - 39% – answered “no”.

Even in the government’s own polls, Danny always ran way ahead of the party.  In the most recent government poll, though, support for the party dropped about 10 percentage points compared to a poll done three months earlier. That wasn’t good even when people thought Danny would still be around for the fall election.

Now that he’s gone, things will likely turn out very differently.  People who barely won their seats at the peak of supposed Danny-mania in 2007 might not have such an easy time of it in 2011.  They might need a boost, like say from a cabinet appointment, to try and counteract the loss of Danny Williams’ entire coat.

Stop and think about it for a second, though, and the long term trend of Danny running in front of his party’s support and the Western Star online poll are pointing in the same direction.  It would make sense that people who had voted Conservative in the recent past would now be thinking about shifting their vote.  They were Danny Tories, as it were, not committed Tories.

All that would lead explain why Conservatives in the province are a wee bit out of sorts these days. 

And if the number of soft Tory votes is actually close to the 46% the Star found, then politics over the next eight or 10 months is going to be way more interesting than anyone suspects right now.

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Layton renews call for Conservative-style tax cuts

On a visit to St. John’s Monday, federal New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton renewed his call to cut taxes from home heating:

Layton called for the federal government to cut taxes to home heating in this year’s budget, and he called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend a program to provide subsidies to people who make their homes more energy efficient.

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The King’s Speech

Via the BBC, a short article on King George VI and his speech impediment.

The article includes the complete audio of the King’s speech in September 1939 that forms the climax of the recent movie.

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Rick Hillier? Tim Powers? No thanks, say NL Tories

Whatever is going on in Newfoundland and Labrador these days certainly is politics but it most certainly is not democracy.

What is dizzying, to borrow Tim Powers’ word, is the pace at which the province’s Conservatives are trying to keep a back-room political plot hatched over Christmas from exploding into a catastrophe as large as Danny Williams’ polling numbers.

“Everyone should have a right to put their name on a ballot assuming they adhere to the rules,” write Tim Powers in the Globe and Mail last week.  That is certainly true but it assumes that the rules are clearly known or, to be more accurate faithfully applied by the “officials” who, after exampling Brad Cabana’s nomination documents, “decided they didn't fit the criteria set out by the party.”

Perhaps the most useful way to look at this political farce is to use not Brad Cabana as our test subject but no less a person than Tim Powers. 

You see, when Danny Williams took to his heels and fed the Confederation Building, Tim’s was one of the first names some people offered up as a potential replacement.

Some other contenders, like finance minister Tom Marshall and then-education minister Darin King said they would take the time over Christmas to talk with friends and family.  They’d come back after Christmas end let the world know what they’d decided.

By Friday, December 24, though, that had changed.  Marshall, King and presumed heir-apparent Jerome Kennedy held news conferences to say that they’d be backing Kathy Dunderdale instead. Dunderdale, you may recall, was supposed to be the interim leader and had indicated she had no interest in the job. 

Off went everyone to Christmas holidays.

Another minister dropped out and by December 30, Dunderdale wanted the job. Virtually the entire caucus, she said, backed her.

Curiously that was the same day the party announced it would accept nominations for leader until January 10. 

Now if either Tim or Rick Hiller – living in Ottawa, were still pondering their future, they certainly wouldn’t have had much time to get their papers in order.  By the time the party announced that it would accept nominations, the race was effectively over. That’s exactly the point that cabinet minister Ross Wiseman and his executive assistant made to Cabana on January 5.  Since the entire caucus and their district associations backed Dunderdale, the odds of winning were very slim.

Besides, wrote Chick Cholock, Wiseman’s executive assistant, a contested leadership would put at risk Danny Williams’ legacy. “We do not want a Party [sic] divided now that Danny has moved on,” wrote Cholock in an e-mail.”

None of the arguments Wiseman and other Conservatives have offered about Brad Cabana had anything to do with following rules or his quality has a candidate. 

They had everything to do with an apparent desire within the caucus to avoid a contested leadership fight of any kind.  In other words had Tim or Rick decided to go all-in  now that the caucus made a decision, they would almost surely have been met with exactly the same arguments that faced Cabana:

1. They wouldn’t stand a chance since all the people now determined to be party members had already decided, and
2. a leadership contest in itself created the risk of fracturing the party beyond repair.

The Conservatives could lose the October election, as Cholock suggested in an e-mail he sent Cabana before nominations closed on January 10.

Wiseman and others did slide in another interesting qualification that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Conservative Party constitution.  Cabana hadn’t lived in the province very long, Wiseman noted in a scrum he gave after Cabana revealed Cholock had visited him on January 5 to try and discourage him from running. Nor had Cabana been very active in party functions, apparently.  There are two other grounds by which both Tim Powers and Rick Hillier would be disqualified.

If you are tired of the tedium that is federal politics, there is a drama unfolding in Newfoundland and Labrador.  But  the party that Danny Williams built is hell bent on showing that what they are up to is about as far from democracy as Parliament Hill is from excitement.

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Overture: “William Tell”

Sadly, split into two bits:

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Overture from “The Barber of Seville”

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Political blarney stone gone

Danny Williams’ political backside used to be like a blarney stone on legs.

Any politician of any stripe loved to kiss Danny’s hind bits in hopes some of Williams’ magic would rub off.  

The latest sign Danny’s butt is out of visible power comes from Jack Layton.  The federal New Democrat leader now claims he can get a better indication of what is going on in the province by meeting with ordinary people.

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