Atlantic energy co-operation: where Lower is higher

Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner is in Halifax talking energy co-operation with his counterparts in the Maritime provinces.

Odd that the provincial government didn’t play it up more than issuing a few lines in a media advisory on Monday, the day the meetings started.

After all, New Brunswick energy minister Craig Leonard is interested in some of Skinner’s Lower Churchill electricity.  As Leonard told the Telegraph Journal:

"There will be a considerable amount of energy that's moving through the province," Leonard says.

"That's an opportunity for us. That's clean, renewable power that will be moving through our transmission system, whether it's en route to New England or we could utilize it ourselves."

Now as regular readers of these scribbles know, the Muskrat Falls proposal is a hugely expensive proposition that Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her Conservatives expect Newfoundland and Labrador residents to pay for. The cost to produce the power, according to Dunderdale back before Christmas will be at least 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour.

Now that is interesting given that the old NB Power deal with Hydro-Quebec was supposed to lower electricity rates in the near term. When the New Brunswick government unveiled the deal, consumer electricity rates were around 11 cents per kilowatt hour.  Hydro-Quebec had oodles of electricity, some of it from very low-cost operations and could have made a tidy sum off New Brunswick customers even at reduced current rates.

Leonard and his colleagues campaigned against the deal and if they now buy Muskrat Falls power, they’d be doing exactly the opposite from what the Shawn Graham deal would have delivered.

Maybe the crowd in Fredericton will just settle for making some cash off the power that Nalcor will wheel through to the United States.

Oh.

That’s right.

There’s a power glut south of the border.

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Layton will cave

Just a gut feeling.

Jack Layton will not trigger an election this spring.

Forget the tough talk.

Heard it before.

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What it means to be an energy warehouse

Governors of New England states come to visit you looking for more juice.  In this case, Vermont’s top political leader took a two-day trip to Quebec to discuss power and transportation.  Governor Peter Shumlin wants to route a New York to Montreal high speed rail line through Vermont.  He also discussed electricity and natural gas pipelines.

"Everyone's trying to sell us power," Shumlin said. The New England market has excess generating capacity, and Vermont utilities have been approached with several offers, he said.

"It's a buyer's market," Shumlin said.

Let’s get that Muskrat Falls in production soon to take advantage of that buyer’s market.

Yeah.

Right.

So when are Pete and his buddies making a pilgrimage to sit at Kathy Dunderdale’s feet?

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Connies torquing Bev Oda

The Globe and Mail carried an exceptionally well crafty effort by someone to counteract the fairly obvious problems federal cabinet minister Bev Oda created for herself recently.

It is not just spin, however.

It is beyond mere spin.

It is torque.

Pure torque.

It is such a heavy load of torque this piece should be accompanied by the whine of one of those wrenches they use in garages to change tire lugs.

Bev Oda is a former senior executive in the communications industry who, we are to believe, is now a “serious minded minister” who has one tragic flaw – she simply can’t explain what she means.  She cannot communicate effectively. 

Someone was so concerned to get that message that they made it the headline of the piece.

The lede then reframes the entire controversy and ascribes it to “sketchy paperwork”.

But here’s the simple truth:  Bev Oda lied to parliament.

The paperwork was not sketchy.  it’s there and plain and as Oda herself acknowledged she directed someone to insert the word “not” in a document and thereby change its meaning.

The lede of the Globe piece is factually incorrect.

It is, to use a simple word, untrue.

In case you missed it, the lede is based on an entirely false premise.

The rest of the article describes Oda’s desk piled high with papers and cases where decisions were left to the last minute.  The article refers to former staffers who attribute this to her penchant for reading each document thoroughly. Oda is, we are assured “a stickler for details and a pains-taking reader of files.”

Sure she is.

What the article describes is a person who actually appears to be overwhelmed by her responsibilities and who is working well above her ceiling.  Delay of this sort is not an attention to detail;  it is likely an avoidance of making a decision and that comes from only one source:  insecurity.

Ministers who are on top of their files, as the phrase goes and who are, at the same time, sticklers for detail tend to keep their desks cleared with an endless flurry of paper coming and going.

They do not hesitate to make decisions.

They are constantly making decisions.

They are the ones who, after a very long day,  take home a bunch of hundred page tomes and skip the one page briefing notes to dive into the detail.  The books comes back the next morning with hand-written notations on page after page in the middle.

Your humble e-scribbler can say this because he has worked for or with a bunch of them and knows a bunch more by reputation.

Oda served as a senior vice president at CTV but she is, according to the sources in this article, beset by a communications problem.

Again, a nose-puller of Mulroney-ego-esque proportions.

Bev Oda lied to parliament.

She should go.

And if the Prime Minister and his crew had half a clue they’d have punted this fairly obvious inept minister a long time ago.  Surely there’s a sinecure somewhere for her other than sitting in cabinet.

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Never heard that before

Memorial University’s political science department is undergoing a reinvigoration of the kind not seen in the department in nearly 40 years.

You can credit it to a crop of bright, aggressive and curious professors like Alex Marland and Matthew Kerby.

In the second part of a series on the department, the Telegram’s Dave Bartlett interviews Kerby and Marland and the pair discuss three myths that affect Newfoundland and Labrador politics.

Marland and Kerby also discussed some of the accepted — but not necessarily factual — beliefs in this province’s political culture, which they’ve discovered through their research and by observing local politics.

“What bothers me about Newfoundland politics is, the more I research … the more I realize that things (are) repeated, and it’s not necessarily always for good reasons,” said Marland.

And the three myths?

One, that the pro­vince would be better off if it didn’t join Canada in 1949. Two, the reason for the collapse of the fishery, and three, that it’s not the pro­vince’s fault it was ripped off by the Upper Churchill agreement.

Bond Papers readers will find this discussion fascinating if not just a wee frickin’ bit familiar.

Don’t expect some of this corner’s regular commenters to take too kindly to the professors’ ideas.

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Romantic Traffic

1. Humber West post mortem
2. From 61% to 44% since August:  NTV poll shows Tory support slides further
3. Kremlinology 32:  the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
4. Signs of the Granterdannerung
5. Think federal equity stake
6. Dunderdale admin awards lucrative government legal work without tender
7. Low Turn-out
8. Kremlinology 31:  AG report on offshore board mysteriously vanishes
9. Cheryl Gallant sinks
10. Twitter or huckster:  the political uses of social media

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Low Turn-out

As the Telegram editorial pointed up on Thursday, the winners in a series of recent by-elections took what is ostensibly one of the province’s most important and prestigious jobs based on the endorsement of the less than 30% of the eligible voters in the districts involved.

The Telegram blames the voters for this problem:

If you couldn’t even get off your backside to vote, you have no right to complain about how lousy, venial or downright pathetic your representation turns out to be. Heck, if they steal from you (as some of our politicians recently did), you hardly have a right to complain; you took no part in picking them, so they hardly betrayed your trust.

With possibly one brief period, politics in Newfoundland and Labrador has never been based on mobilisation of voters around a common goal or agenda based on their fundamental equality and on their shared and equal right to determine the future of the province.

Typically politics in Newfoundland and Labrador is based on the idea that citizens surrender their power to the patron who will deliver such benefits to the district – in the form of jobs and public spending – as he might be able.  Typically that sort of idea is reinforced by the sort of politics we’ve seen in the recent by-election in Humber West. 

In his campaign foray, Danny Williams took pains to remind voters how good he and his colleagues had been to the region.  That’s none-too-subtle coded for “look how much pork we brought” and now pay us back with a vote for my guy.  That’s pretty much the same sort of thing he said after the embarrassing defeat in the Straits.  Williams famously expressed disdain that voters could be so ungrateful to him – perhaps personally – for not electing his candidate after all the money that Williams and his colleagues had delivered to the district.

That basic message in provincial politics is what lay at the heart of the spending scandal.  Individual politicians got to distribute pork to their districts or to withhold it as they saw fit.  No one pretended to distribute the money fairly.  No one, including a former auditor general, thought that government programs – administered impartially by departments – were the right way to handle health and social services assistance of the kind many politicians claimed to be delivering out of money meant to maintain constituency offices and the like.

The current Conservative administration isn’t doing anything radically new in comparison to most of their predecessors. Like poll goosing, they are just doing it more aggressively and much more blatantly.  Fighting public disclosure of information? Discouraging public debate?  Closing and restricting membership in a supposedly open party?  All reflect the basic attitude that the majority of citizens have no role to play in the political system except to obey and acquiesce.

It is hardly surprising in that sort of political environment that people don’t participate in by-elections:  they aren’t supposed to turn out, beyond the identified party faithful.  And beyond the incumbent party, it takes a certain level of courage to swim against the stream.  The shouts of quisling and traitor aren’t designed to encourage discussion and it isn’t surprising that this sort of thuggery and intimidation has been as prominent as it has been during one of the most paternalistic regimes in the province’s history.    

It’s also not surprising that the most recent general election produced one of the lowest participation rates in the province’s history, right in line with the last time a paternalistic and patronage riddled party ruled the province.

So perhaps the next time the telegram editorialist is penning a finger-wagger, he or she might explain how it is the voter’s fault for not being braver when  the local political culture discourages participation.

Well, discourages participation beyond tugging the forelock.

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From 61% to 44% since August: NTV poll shows Tory support slides further

For those who have lived by the provincial government’s polling as proof of how popular the governing Conservatives have been, the most recent provincial public opinion polls offer no comfort.

An NTV/Telelink poll released Wednesday [link to NTV report] shows support for the governing provincial Conservatives is currently at 44.3% with 37.9% undecided.

NTV is reporting those figures as being not much different from the last provincial government poll in November, but that’s not the case.

A straight comparison – using the Telelink approach – shows that support for the province’s Tories is down from 51.8% in the CRA poll.  Undecideds in the Corporate Research Associates poll conducted last November stood at 31% on the party support question.

Danny Williams didn’t announce his resignation until the end of CRA’s polling period and it is unlikely his departure significantly changed the poll results.  in other words, undecideds in November increased despite the fact Williams was still the premier at the time CRA conducted the poll.

And in case you missed the point,  support for the province’s Tories has plummeted in the past six months from 61.8% to 44.3%. 

While CRA polling has some very serious credibility problems, Telelink has been notoriously more accurate by comparison.  Their September 2007 poll nailed the Conservative share of eligible voters smack on the money. CRA was 20 percentage points off.  For those counting, CRA was out by something like 32 percent, not the margin of error cited in the poll at the time.  Telelink also got within seven percentage points of the undecided/will not vote (31% polled versus 38) while CRA was basically OTL (18% polled versus 38% actual)

What’s going on?  You can get a good sense of this by looking at the undecideds. Over the past 20 years or so, local polls tend to see a change in “undecideds” when people are unhappy with the incumbent party. They may not be so disgruntled that they switch to the major opposition party;  they may not see the opposition as a viable alternative at that moment.

In this survey, NTV/Telelink did something CRA never does:  they probed the undecideds and asked them which way they might be leaning.  The Tory number climbed but the undecideds were still around 25% according to the NTV report.

That’s still pretty high and it cannot be very encouraging for the Tories.

In Newfoundland and Labrador politics, there are cadres of dedicated party voters.  They turn out and vote the same way pretty well every time.  But the biggest chunk of voters are swing voters.  They are not ideological or overly wrapped up in one party affiliation or another and they are the prize for any party wanting power. When polling in the province changes significantly, odds are the swing voters are swinging. [new sentence added for clarity]

For those who accept CRA polls, you’d have to be worried about the change that showed up last November. This most recent change happened under Danny, the supposedly invincible. he’s gone and the slide is still there. Now the decided party support for the Tories is down again by about 18 percentage points.

Now look at the vote results in the by-elections off the Avalon since 2007. In Humber West, Tory support dropped about 24%, the largest percentage since 2003.  The Liberal vote climbed by a comparable percentage for a combined swing of 45%. That’s in the heart of the Tories’ west coast base.

Remember Danny Williams’ comments right before the by-election about how good Tories have been to the entire west coast?  Yeah, well here’s the payback on that investment.  In the Straits, they rejected the Tory candidate altogether and the Tories retaliated or appear to have retaliated with the air ambulance move.  That couldn’t have helped their overall position on the peninsula.

And in case you are wondering, the swing in Humber West was larger than the 2011 swing in the Straits and St. Barbe that heralded the rise of Danny Williams.

Take Humber West as the example of a trend.  Even when the Tories win, it’s getting pretty clear that they are losing some of their voters.  Some may be core Tories who are getting getting complacent.  Some might be Tories who are just tired of the internal war with their federal cousins.  More likely, they are losing independent or swing voters owing to nothing more radical than fatigue. 

Now consider that in the face of this fairly obvious weakening of Tory support, their most recent decision is to play all-defence with virtually no change in the fundamental direction of the party.  Premier Kathy Dunderdale told reporters in Corner Brook that there’s no change in the overall make-up of her administration until sometime after the fall election.

A defensive game might win.

However, that strategy depends very much on what the Liberals do.  it smacks of the same sort of conventional wisdom slash complacency that led them to count on Danny being around for another one and then some.  Shit happens, as they say.

If the Tories can hold it together, keep a lid on internal fractures, avoid making any controversial decisions, spend like drunken sailors and run a Humber West-style hide ‘em if ya got ‘em campaign, they might  hang on to most of the seats they currently hold.  

That assumes, though, that the Liberals just stumble their way along as they did in 2007.  If the Liberals shift their direction just a bit a lot can change.  Solid local candidates, for example, can make local races competitive in districts outside the metro St. John’s region.  There are plenty of districts that went barely blue in 2007 and there are undoubtedly plenty of polls within districts that reverted – as in Terra Nova – to their former, Liberal voting patterns. It doesn’t take much to swing a poll or a district as the Tories and those familiar with the province’s long electoral history should know.

In the current political environment, small changes can produce disproportionate results. There’s more than enough time between now and October for one change or a combination of changes to produce the sort of political upheavals that happened in the last week of November and the first week of December last year.

2011 could be one of the most interesting political years in Newfoundland and Labrador history.

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Barnes to tackle Tory incumbent

Former conservative member of parliament Rex Barnes announced today that he will be challenging Conservative incumbent Ray Hunter for the nomination in Grand falls-Windsor-Green Bay South.

Hunter will apparently seek the nomination again;  at the very least Hunter doesn’t look like he’s ready to pack it in.

Some observations:

• Hunter’s never been tight with anyone in the Tory caucus.  Danny used to keep him by the door and that was not to guard it.
• Barnes evidently has a good idea Ray is vulnerable and that his candidacy will garner some favour from the party backroom.
• Don’t be surprised if Ray crosses the floor or that the backroom persuades him to retire.
• Don’t be surprised if there are more challenges to incumbents or floor-crossing.

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Humber West post mortem

Granter won. 

Watton lost.

Myers came a distant third.

Tories held the seat and they still do.

That’s the simple result and for the truly simple, that’s all they will see:  no change.

Take a deeper look, though, and  you have a really interesting set of results. The figures used in this post are from Elections Newfoundland and Labrador’s website.

Over the three Danny elections, he polled an average of 3728 votes.  In the 2001 by-election, Williams polled 3606.  In 2003, Williams polled 3823 and in 2007, he actually polled fewer votes:  3755.

Vaughn Granter polled 2109 votes.  That’s 56% of Danny’s average over three elections.  He took 63% of the turnout but consider that Granter left home almost one Tory vote for every Tory vote he got.

Of course, it wasn’t Granter who left them home although the results suggest this was not any great endorsement of the local high school principal.  This by-election was really about Tom Marshall, Danny’s West Coast organizer.  Marshall campaigned hard for Granter, right down to an attack on ACAP debate organizers and their integrity.  And then there was the curious decision to leave the Premier home and bring out Danny Williams for some last minute campaigning. 

But still, for all that the Tories only managed to get 56% of Danny’s vote to the polls.
Meanwhile, Liberal Mark Watton garnered 1097 votes in his first time out.  That’s actually larger than the three-election average of 1088. The Liberals turned out 79% of the average for 2001 and 2003, their best results during the Danny Williams period.

Turnout was also down, coming in at  slightly less than 40%.  Turnout in the two general elections and the 2001 were – chronologically – 53%, 61% and 60%.

So sure, on the surface things look the same now as they did last December as far as seat count goes.

Just below the surface, though, lots of things seem to be changing.

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Think federal equity stake

So the provincial Conservatives are still looking to Uncle Ottawa for a loan guarantee to build the Danny Williams Memorial Money Pit, a.k.a Muskrat Falls and a bunch of transmission lines. This is a really old story.

Danny Williams claimed he had a commitment at one point but for some reason the provincial Conservatives have to keep asking for it.

In the latest version, Kathy Dunderdale – Williams’ chosen heir – is asking again, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is carefully examining the whole project that he supposedly already committed to fund.

Well, at least that’s what Kathy told us what Stephen said which is basically what happened before when Danny told us over an dover again that Stephen gave a loan guarantee which he apparently never did since Danny and Kathy have to keep asking for it.

Yes, yes, it is just more of the same but let’s just make this really simple.

Let’s remind everyone of what Stephen Harper said in 2006 when Danny Williams asked him to finance the Lower Churchill:

A Conservative government would welcome discussions on this initiative and would hope that the potential exists for it to proceed in the spirit of past successes such as the Hibernia project.

Hibernia project.

1992.

8.5% Equity stake.

How big a piece of the Muskrat Falls pie is Kathy willing to sell to Stephen Harper to build Danny Williams’ legacy?

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Kremlinology 32: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

Since 1949, not a single Premier has left office and then come back later to campaign on behalf of a by-election candidate for his party while his party was still in power.

Not one.

Once they resigned, they were gone.

They handed over the keys to the eight floor washroom and buggered off to the sun or the Wet Coast or whatever they were up to after quitting.

But not the Old Man.

In Humber West, the Conservatives under the curious leadership style of Kathy Dunderdale flew Danny Williams out to campaign for their hand-picked candidate.

Vaughn Granter seems to be having some tough sledding in the by-election in Williams’ old seat.  Granter is usually seen practically running from door to door, bundled up against the cold like some blue-clad moustachioed gnome.  CBC’s Doug Greer caught Granter on one portion of his frenzied campaign and heard yet again about Granter’s extensive experience in dealing with parents and students.  This is not surprising since Granter is a teacher but it does not logically follow that a high school principal is a natural community leader ready to step into the shoes vacated by one Danny Williams, Q.C (Quixotic Conservative).

Hisself’s sudden appearance smells of concern in the Connie bunker about Granter’s chances. Put that with Tom Marshall’s appearance on open line trying to claim the environmental debate his candidate buggered was somehow tainted.  Then add Tom’s unexplained cancellation of a budget consultation on polling day and you have some pretty solid clues that all is not well with Danny’s legacy in Corner Brook.

The fact that Danny tried to claim the seat is still his – he left it vacant on December 3 – seems all the more curious.  What really demolished any lingering doubts about Granter’s current status on the leaderboard was Danny’s use of The Phrase:  “Nothing could be further from the truth” to deny troubles for the provincial Tories in the mill town. More often than not that phrase used to signal that one could not be, in fact, any closer to the truth.

Danny’s sudden appearance in Humber West may do more than signal Vaughn Granter’s in trouble and may lose the by-election.

His appearance suggests Kathy is not up to the job or, much worse, that maybe she is merely the premier for show.  The real leader had to come out of hiding to finish the job for his ersatz replacement.  On the face of it, one can easily think that Dunderdale and her entire team can’t win a by-election in a supposedly safe seat without Danny.  You have to wonder why. 

One must also wonder why Kathy Dunderdale spent so little time campaigning in Corner brook.  Dunderdale did make a brief appearance in the campaign early on and a couple of cabinet ministers showed up.  For the most part, though, Kathy hasn’t been out running around with the candidate she wants in the House with her.  She hasn’t even been heard talking him up all that much.  What gives with that?

In a manner of speaking, Hisself’s sun-tanned appearance is a bit like taking a Tommy gun to Kathy Dunderdale’s leadership.  He’s shot it full of holes. 

If Mark Watton wins on polling day or even comes a decent second, people around the province will start to wonder about her her ability to lead the party and the province.  Sure the faithful and the pitcher plants will cheer and pretend all is well.  But  among the politicians and the politically inclined, the view may be decidedly different. 

There may well be questions about Dunderdale’s ability to do the job.  In a caucus where her leadership does not have deepest of deep support, there could be a move to replace her before she gets to wear the crown officially.  Political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t known for their internal stability when unfettered ambition smells the stink of weak, ineffectual leadership.

Just think of it this way:  unless Vaughn Granter blows Mark Watton into dust at the polls, Danny’s trip to Corner Brook will be seen as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of Kathy Dunderdale’s political credibility and maybe her career.

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Signs of the Granterdannerung #hwblxn

First Danny Williams emerges from his hiding place to campaign in Corner Brook on behalf of the hand-picked Conservative candidate in Humber West.

Then Tom Marshall suddenly  - and for no apparent reason – cancels his budget consultation in Goose Bay originally set for polling day in Humber West.

No weather excuses.

No real explanations at all.

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Kremlinology 31: The Auditor General’s examination of the offshore board mysteriously vanishes

The year:  2008.

The case:  Auditor General John Noseworthy suddenly took it in his head that the offshore regulatory board fell within his jurisdiction.

Boom.

Right out of the blue without any warning.

And it was odd too, because despite mounds of evidence that the board wasn’t subject to the provincial auditor general and that Noseworthy’s office didn’t think it had the legal right to audit the board (it has only recently been added to the list of entities subject to audit), Noseworthy threw a major-league tantrum. 

In the end, Noseworthy quietly started to review the board in 2009.

In early 2011 – three full years after the racket started – Noseworthy still hasn’t issued a report on the board nor has he indicated when - if ever -  it might appear.

How very odd.

2008?

2008.

Something about that year stands out.

What could it be?

Oh yes. 

That was the year of Danny Williams’ jihad against Stephen Harper if memory serves.

Hmmm.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Wonder where John’s report is?

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Dunderdale admin awards lucrative government legal work without tender

Danny Williams’ former law firm got potentially lucrative provincial government legal work without competing in any way. 

The information is in Telegram editor Russell Wangersky’s weekend column. The Telegram didn’t turn it into a news story.

Last week, the Dunderdale administration announced that Roebothan, Mackay and Marshall would head up a law suit against the tobacco industry.

According to Wangersky, there was “no tender call, request for proposals or other competition. As for whether other law firms were considered or offered a chance to bid on the work, the Justice Department replied:

The province felt Roebothan McKay Marshall was the local law firm that best met the requirements for this work. As well, a number of local firms are conflicted as they represent the tobacco industry.”

The Dunderdale administration also refused to disclose the financial aspects of the deal.  The provincial government has new contractual arrangements with both Roebothan, Mackay and Marshall and an American firm retained in 2001 to handle the litigation.

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Twitter or Huckster? Political uses of social media

Front page of the Telegram with a glorious picture. 

Way better advertising than he could ever buy with cash and Steve Kent nailed it.

Of course, Steve Kent is one thing above anything else:  a marketer.  He knows how to sell you something and the commodity he sells best his himself.  You can tell Steve Kent is good at it because he has done very well for himself in a relatively short period of time.

You can also tell because he uses the textbook lines to describe his interest in social media:

Twitter is really about having a dialogue. It’s about engaging people in conversation and it’s not just another approach to communicating messages in the traditional sense

The front page Telegram story would have you believe that Kent is a keen political trendsetter using social media like Twitter in order to “have ‘more human’ interactions with his constituents.”

Here is an example of those “more human” interactions, the dialogue, the conversations:

-  The Provincial Government is investing $2 million so schools across Newfoundland and Labrador can receive 1,450...

-  Storm has started, but dinner theatre is a go at Reid Centre for @mount_pearl Frosty Festival!

There’s some stuff about a pothole and a flat tire, lots of repeating of other people’s messages – called re-tweeting – and a few sports scores. Not very deep or detailed and all pretty pedestrian stuff.  If this is “more human”, then you’d hate to see the other “interactions.”

Still, good on Kent for going with this sort of thing.  He’s not alone;  he might be the only provincial politician to embrace twitter professionally but there are plenty of others out there.  Most locally tend to use Twitter this way:  very sterile and pretty much for putting on the official face.

Not all of them are like that, though.  Take Tony Clement, the federal cabinet minister.  this guy is on Twitter and he and his personality are right there.

And these guys are distinctly different from other high-profile people who are using Twitter.  News media types are especially notable for just putting themselves and their distinctive personalities out there for people to take or leave as they see fit. They don’t just tweet news or mundane lines teasing up a story on the conventional media for television or radio. Sports, movies, personal comments, jokes are all as much part of the twitter mix as something about what stories they are working on. Two that come easily to mind are Kady O’Malley from CBC Ottawa and David Cochrane, CBC’s provincial affairs reporter in  from Newfoundland and Labrador.

The contrast between the pols and the media is night and day.  One is carefully packaged and guarded, by and large, while the other is more natural.  Guess which one better reflects the online, social media world? 

Yeah.

It’s the news media types.  They have no less at risk than the pols but the ones who are using successfully have come to understand that a key part of their overall success is rooted in them being anything but a coif and a voice. Their personality and their personability has become part of the overall package that draws loyal followers. They aren’t “more human”, they are just human.

Authenticity, it seems, is like sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made in politics. Odd thing is, most politicians real don’t need to fake either.  Why some do remains a mystery.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to see how Twitter turns up in some election campaigns. In Humber West, Liberal Mark Watton has been using his Twitter feed to push out campaign-related information.  He’s tweeted at least once a day.  Conservative Vaughn Granter tweeted on Sunday but hadn’t done anything with Twitter since Tuesday of last week. The NDP candidate – Rosie Meyers – doesn’t appear to have a Twitter feed.

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Canada’s SAR system: an insider view

Ottawa Citizen defence columnist David Pugliese posted this comment from a former Coast Guard employee on search and rescue.  Interesting to see the quote from the Ocean Ranger inquiry report.

Some people like to quote selectively from it to suit their purposes.  The helicopter basing discussion  - the St. John’s base recommendation from the report was supposedly not implemented - is a classic example of an issue that was essentially invented by someone based entirely on a misrepresentation (deliberate or otherwise) of that report.

Pugliese’s correspondent offers a useful and possibly provocative perspective.

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Traffic that needs no loan guarantee

1. Cheryl Gallant sinks
2. Here’s hoping… (political campaigning in Humber West)
3. The road not taken (public debt, Conservative fiscal mismanagement)
4. If only… (Search and Rescue)
5. Humber West:  Mark Watton on CBC Morning Show
6. Will the fake Premier Dunderdale please stand up?
7. A rose by any other name would still stink to high heavens (patronage politics)
8. Abuse and power
9. Taking the voters for grantered
10. The Force

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If only…

One of the most tragic and despicable beliefs to come out of the Cougar 491 crash in 2009 is that the outcome might have been different except for search and rescue service in Canada.

These days, politicians and others are latching onto is something they call “response time”.  Now we’ll get back to that term in a minute but let us establish right from the outset that the most recent version of the search and rescue belief, whether from a grieving family member or a politician, is rooted firmly in the claim that search and rescue helicopters made the difference or could have made or will in the future make all the difference,  “if only…”.

That basic idea has been there from the beginning:  if only a helicopter from the Canadian Forces had been in St. John’s then more people might have been saved that day. If only the squadron -  or a helicopter – had been in St. John’s, then more might have been saved.  If only search and rescue didn’t have two different response times, then things would have been different.

The Transportation Safety Board report issued Wednesday is the most thorough and technically proficient examination of the crash to date. It identifies 16 factors that contributed to the disaster.  Altering any one of them may have saved lives.

Not one of the factors identified was search and rescue “response” time or anything else related to search and rescue helicopters.

There’s a reason for that.

There is not now nor has there ever been a single shred of evidence that anything – absolutely anything -  related to search and rescue response would have made the slightest bit of difference in this case or one comparable to it.

This brings us back to the idea of response time.  People are using that term to mean the time it takes a helicopter crew to receive an order to go, to board the aircraft, warm up, do pre-flight checks and then launch the aircraft from the airport where it is. 

That’s really “launch time”.  Right now 103 Squadron in Gander launches within 30 minutes during daytime working hours and up to 120 minutes at other times.  In practice, the launch time is much lower during “off hours”.

What people with the SAR fixation need to realise is that in order to deliver a response time of 30 minutes (as they are demanding), Canada would have to spend every penny of public money and even then there’d be no guarantee it could deliver that response time in all cases at all times.

You see, response time is really about the distance from the helicopter or ship to the incident. 

Take a look at any map of Canada and the surrounding ocean and you’ll get an idea of the magnitude of that demand and why it is ludicrous. Just think how many ships, helicopters and crews would it take to have someone ready at any given location with 30 minutes of a crash, all day long, all year long.

That’s what a 30 minute response time means.

And if you want to talk about 30 minute launch time you can understand that the Canadian Forces currently hits that time to launch helicopters more often than not.  Even after normal working hours, the sorts of launch times are not – apparently – trending toward that extreme time of 120 minutes.

Families whose loved ones died in a tragedy can be understood for their beliefs and their actions both as a natural part of grief and out of a human desire to ensure no one else feels the sort of soul-wrenching pain they have endured. Theirs is tragic belief in ever sense of the word tragedy

But for others, for the politicians and journalists, the ones who, even inadvertently, feed the belief in falsehood despite all the evidence, it isn’t so easy to find any generosity for them.

And the men and women who provide search and rescue service across Canada when the rest of us are fat and happy in our cozy beds?

They can only look in amazement at the ignorant critics, shake their heads and mutter how much better off we’d all be “if only…” as they head back to do their duty.

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Cheryl Gallant sinks

Youtube is a deadly instrument.

- srbp -