Dunderdale admin pours more cash into Corner Brook paper mill

On top of the millions in subsidies it has already provided to Corner Brook Pulp and Paper (Kruger), Kathy Dunderdale’s administration announced on Monday that it would pay $4.3 million over three years  to help workers at the mill upgrade their skills.

The only logical step next is for Kathy Dunderdale and her cabinet to give Kruger a receipt for the whole shooting match.

After all, taxpayers basically bought the mill piece by piece.

In related news, an economics professor at Memorial University thinks these sorts of subsidies don’t work:

[Michael] Wernerheim has high praise for the province's forest management strategy and for wanting to lay out a new path for an industry in decline, such as supporting smaller operations, like saw mills, and putting a greater focus on forests as ecosystems. 

But he found the government spends too much time, effort and money on continuing to support failing ways to protect jobs in the newsprint sector. 

"These short-term initiatives to protect jobs can retard the restructuring of the industry that we all want to see happening," he said.

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Bin Laden is dead!

From the New York Times account:

In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A.operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.

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Change is in the air… or maybe not #elxn41

In Election 2011, perhaps more so than any other recent election, people can see the shortcomings of national opinion polls.

They may capture an overall national picture but with horrendous margins of error and often limited information about voting behaviour they are all but useless in trying to project seat counts and even party standings. It’s not a problem facing one pollster;  it’s across the board.

You can also see the shortcomings of media commentary, especially as the electronic media seems to rely almost exclusively on reporters interviewing other reporters. There was a fine example of that last Friday on the CBC Radio Morning Show. There were penetrating insights into the fairly obvious: Avalon and St. John’s South-Mount Pearl might change hands.

And even some true head-scratchers like a version of the threehundredeight.blogspot.com seat projection that had Random-Burin-St. Goerges going Tory. John Ottenheimer coming on strong?  We’ll see.

There were also coments about “splits” and generalizations about how it all comes down to the “ground game”. That’s politico speak for getting vote to the polls. Again, it’s a bit like describing the intricacies of brain surgery by referring to a copy of Gray’s Anatomy of the human body.

What would have distinguished Friday’s commentary from the run-of-the-mill fare was any concrete information on what the campaigns actually look like on the ground.

And that’s where the local story starts to get interesting.  Anyone who believes that  Kathy Dunderdale’s people will be turning out en masse for the federal Conservatives, it just ain’t so. Some provincial Tory members of the House of Assembly have been working hard personally. Some have been doing only the minimum they had to in order to get by. A few more than Ed Buckingham have done exactly shag-all.

Now that may not be what you hear if you ask a Tory insider directly but the evidence of what actually happened will be clear once polling is done.

And as for the rank and file workers, that’s a whole other story. Kathy Dunderdale cannot direct them any more than Danny could actually get the blue people to vote Liberal in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl last time.  She quite obviously couldn’t lure them back from the New Democratic Party in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, let alone brow-beat them threaten them or otherwise produce the outcome some people might have been expecting.

This will NOT be a reverse ABC.

This very much will be a referendum on Kathy Dunderdale.  If Fabian Manning wins Avalon, it is a seat he won largely on his own.  If no other seats turn blue, the Dunderdale failed.  And if the Tory vote doesn’t shoot up to levels along the lines of what they saw in 2004 or 2006, then Dunderdale failed.  Monday could be a very bad night for Kathy Dunderdale.

Knowing what is happening on the ground will also tell you what odds there might be that some sort of NDP surge might have a wider effect on ridings in this province.  The national New Democrats have targeted the South.  It is getting money and bodies. They appear to have taken a strategy of minimising their candidate’s profile and played up Jack Layton very strongly.  If they are half as organized on voting day as they appear heading into the last day,  Ryan Cleary will give incumbent Siobhan Coady a very hard run for her money.  He might win.  It is close.

One potential factor to cross off your list:  Loyola Sullivan.  His angry old Rain Man routine simply turned people off.  His ego campaign – big round Loyola heads in front of a flag – simply looked ridiculous. 

Outside of St. John’s,  the Avalon is likely the only riding that will go blue and the NDP have resorted to names on ballots in every other riding other than the South. Miracles do happen but with no money and no organization, the orange people don;t stand much of a chance. 

As for the Tories, they will come in second in every seat off the Avalon. Certainly in Labrador, John Hickey has been campaigning hard for a senate seat, errr his federal friends, but odds are that Peter Penashue won’t be the new Tory member of parliament for Labrador.  Stay tuned on the senate seat.

Take that sort of stuff as a good indicator of what could be happening elsewhere.  In Quebec, people are telling pollsters they love the NDP. Problem is that the NDP only had the resources and committed the resources to Quebec that reflected their earlier appraisal that they could maybe hang on to one seat. Unless they have suddenly turned up hordes of volunteers in the past few weeks, they will have a devil of time turning those stated intentions into actual marks on a ballot. 

Again, stranger things have happened, but don’t be surprised if election results tonight coming out of Quebec don’t live up to advance billing.

The two places to watch nationally outside Quebec are the Greater Toronto Area and British Columbia. The Conservatives have targeted their energy into ridings  where they can turn them over and they could wind up squeaking out a comfortable minority or even a slim majority.

Change could be in the air.

But then again, it might not be.

You’ll only know for sure once the whole thing is done.

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April Showers Traffic for 2011

A fascinating month of April for traffic at ye olde e-scribbler’s corner of cyberspace shows a wind range of stories.

There’s the surprise first place honours for a post about rather sleazy piece of editing in order to fabricate a political attack.  One media outlet got suckered into using it.

Not surprisingly, most of the posts in the Top 10 in April are about Muskrat Falls and the possible implications of the federal election on Kathy Dunderdale’s leadership.

The really amazing thing is that a post on the last day of the month hit Number 10.

If you think this is all curious stuff, though wait until next month.  There’s a federal election on Monday and then the provincial government has to struggle through three more weeks of the provincial legislature (plus its a polling period) before they can head off to the summer campaign runs.

2011 will be an amazing political year across Canada.

1. Invented story:  political appointee and CBC attack government political opponent
2. A new Sprung greenhouse in the wilds of Labrador
3. Average NL family to pay $1000 per year more for Muskrat Falls power:  former PC finance minister
4. Another cheaper, greener alternative to Muskrat Falls
5. Buckingham not only local Tory to buck Dunderdale line on Harper
6. NTV/Telelink poll:  close, closer, no cigar and a referendum on Dunderdale
7. Conservative householder a multilevel bust
8. Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted
9. One big happy Conservative family... maybe
10. A little perspective, people

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A little perspective, people #elxn41

Nanos Research produces polls that are usually deadly accurate for the entire country.

But…

If you look at the regional breakdowns it rapidly becomes obvious that the regional numbers are useless for anything but wanking material for the twitterati.

You’ve likely seen a lot of references to “statistical ties” when people talk about polling during this election.  Well, at the regional level, the margins of error have been so wide sometimes that all parties have been in a “statistical tie” for most of the campaign. 

For example, Nanos’ April 28 Atlantic results at an MoE of about 10 percentage points.  Basically, that means it is possible the actual result is somewhere within a 20 point spread.  In BC the range is about 16 or 17 points. 

You’ll find that Ipsos’ April 29 poll has exactly the same basic problem.

And speaking of wank material, your humble e-scribbler could not pass up the opportunity to point out that Jack Layton’s over-the-top performance with reporter’s about a Sun media report suggests there is something here the guy is definitely up-tight about. 

And it isn’t the pain of having to face unfounded accusations.

Obviously this pales in comparison to the persistent smear job at least one NDP candidate has been mounting against an opponent.  That’s just hypocrisy, the NDP stock-in-trade.

More importantly, though, Jack’s grumpiness and use of bizarro third person references with passive voice sentences sounds like an attempt to mentally distance himself from something he finds difficult to address:

"Absolutely nothing wrong was done; there's no wrongdoing here…”

People don’t speak about nothing at all in this way.  The story deserved a contemptuous sneer.  Instead it got treated to a swooning counter-attack but not a personal one. 

Who did absolutely nothing wrong?  Hard to tell.  And that’s an odd counterpoint to a TV spot in which Layton promises he personally won’t stop until the job is done.

Imagine how Jack will handle it if he starts reading Gilles Duceppe talking points in Question Period as leader of the Bloc NDP.

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Traffic for the WTF Election #elxn41

There’s a decent chance that Canadians will wake up on Tuesday morning having traded Stephen Harper and his crowd of federal Conservatives for Jack Layton leading a raft of new members of parliament many of whom were only names on a ballot before Monday.

Just think about it for a minute.

The entire country winds up where Ontario was in October 1990.  People woke up across that province, looked around and realised that a whole bunch of them had marked their ballot for the Dippers figuring that they were the only ones doing it.  It was a province-wide 11-beer beautiful moments too many of have discovered we had on the morning after the night before.

This one could make the Guinness book of records for most people doing a simultaneous forehead slap.

In more modern language, this could become “The WTF Election” as Canadians look at the news Tuesday and wonder what-the-f**k everyone else was thinking when they got to the polling station.

Nobody can say that elections are boring and no one should ever complain about democracy in action.

People get exactly the government they deserve, every time.

And they also get to tell us what posts are most interesting here in this corner of the cyber-universe.  This week is no exception:

1. Conservative householder a multi-level bust
2. Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position
3. Advance Poll turn-out comparison
4. The choice is clear
5. The cost of doing business:  Muskrat Falls version
6. The peter principle
7. “The prize is worth the fight”:  Hearn rebuts Skinner on Muskrat Falls
8. US diplomatic cable reveals Emera trepidation about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill Falls
9. Attack of the fluffy bunnies
10. Nail ‘em up I say

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Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted #elxn41

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The choice is clear #nlpoli #elxn41

This is one of those political pictures destined to go down in history.

In years to come, they’ll refer to it as one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Like posting the picture on Facebook from Las Vegas of you, drunk, a pair of panties on your head, taking a leak in the middle of some street on that wild post-graduation trip.

You know the one.

Kathy Dunderdale now has one of those pictures. Every household in the province will likely have one by Monday, courtesy of Kathy’s new buddy, Stephen Harper.

It’s hard to know if she was drunk with Harper’s charm,  if all the trappings of having a job she never, ever dreamed she could get went to her head or she just started to believe she really is all that and a bag of political potato chips.

But whatever the reason, there’s no taking this sucker back.

Come the fall, you can bet that this is just one picture Kathy Dunderdale will see over and over and over again in any place where voters can see it.

 

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US diplomatic cable reveals Emera “trepidation” about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill

A cable from the American consulate in Halifax relays concerns that Emera had about negotiations with Danny Williams on the Lower Churchill.

Dated 15 January 2010, the cable is a summary of a meeting between the American consul general and James Spurr, a senior executive with the Nova Scotia-based company. The cable is available from Wikileaks.

Emera and the Lower Churchill: "Are we being used here?"

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¶4. (SBU) Closer to home Spurr talked about another possible venture for Emera: transmitting power from the proposed Lower Churchill River project in Labrador to New England. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland-Labrador (N-L) have an MOU to explore this option which would require the construction of sub-sea and overland power lines to transmit the power. Money issues aside, there would be technological challenges to overcome in this scenario. However, Spurr emphasized that with Emera's experience in dealing with transmission systems, natural gas pipelines and its knowledge of regulatory processes, it would not be an impossible feat. The unknown factor, as Spurr explained, is N-L Premier Danny Williams. Spurr explained that N-L had been the victim of bad resource deals in the past which have left Williams very cautious if not suspicious in his business negotiations. Given that legacy, Spurr remarked that he and his senior colleagues are equally cautious in dealing with the premier, with knowledge it makes more financial sense for N-L to do a deal with Quebec than with them. In fact, Spurr indicated he wouldn't be surprised if William ended up doing just that, and leaving Spurr and colleagues to speculate that Williams might be using them to exert more pressure on Quebec to offer a better deal for N-L.

That would have been a pretty savvy guess for Emera, given that in September 2009 Kathy Dunderdale revealed publicly that she and Williams had tried unsuccessfully for five years to lure Hydro-Quebec into taking an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill.

Conventional news media in Newfoundland and Labrador have never reported Dunderdale’s comments or made any other references to talks with Quebec despite the audio of Dunderdale’s comments being readily available.

In 2010, as part of his political exit strategy, Danny Williams signed a term sheet with Emera that could lead to development of a dam at Muskrat Falls. Under the deal, Emera will receive 35 terawatt years of electricity from Muskrat Falls in exchange for the cost of building a transmission line from Newfoundland to Cape Breton. In a conference call with reporters at time the tentative deal was announced, Emera executives’ comments suggested they had balked at earlier versions of the deal in part because the cost of power from Muskrat Falls was too high.

The current proposal is based entirely on the sale of power within Newfoundland and Labrador at full cost plus a guaranteed rate of return for the provincial government energy company. Premier Kathy Dunderdale acknowledged in the House of Assembly earlier this year that Muskrat Falls power will be too expensive to sell outside the province except at discount rates.

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Conservative householder a multi-level bust

Someone on the mainland decided to design a campaign householder for the federal Conservatives.

Pretty picture.

Nice little headline there.

You can tell the person is not from the province where it got dropped this past week.  There are two rather obvious  - and related - problems.  See if you can guess what the problem is.

No?

The name of the province is Newfoundland and Labrador and that’s Problem One.

Bigger problem is that in Labrador – where this thing is going as well as on the island – there is considerable opposition to the project because it is all about power for Newfoundland…

and shag-all for Labrador.

Stunned enough that the provincial Connies conned their federal Connie cousins into backing something that only 3% of people think should be a major priority for the province.

Stunneder still is the fact that the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost and his crowd are attacking Liberal Todd Russell’s opposition to the project as if that was somehow going to work against him come polling day.

Stunnedest of all, the Harper Bunker drops this little gem across the province, especially in Labrador where it will go over like the proverbial fart in church.  Todd Russell will be laughing all the way to the polls.

There are no wounds as painful as self-inflicted ones.

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Economy not sizzling in Tom Marshall’s home town

Finance minister Tom Marshall has always had a curious relationship with reality.

He likes to talk about debt reduction, for example, but he never really does anything about it, or as in his plan for Muskrat falls, he actually wants to increase the public debt by upwards of 50% of its current size.

When Marshall delivered the most recent budget – and set a record for public spending in the process – he told reporters that “our economy is sizzling right now.”

Tom must be referring to Bermuda or Barbados or wherever it is he takes the sun during the colder months.

He certainly isn’t talking about his own district of Humber East.

The Western Star reported on Thursday that the major container line serving the province is dropping Marshall’s home town of Corner Brook from its destinations.

Capt. Sid Hynes told The Western Star Thursday afternoon that export freight from Corner Brook has dropped by around 70 per cent and imported cargo has declined by about 30 per cent in the last five years.

Exports down by 70%.

Imports down by 30%.

Since 2005.

Now it surely doesn’t take an expert to tell that this is not an economy that is sizzling.

Anyone who claims it is sizzling might be fried though.

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The cost of doing business: Muskrat Falls version

Building the gravity base structure and drilling production wells for the Hebron project are now estimated at $8.3 billion, according to news stories on Wednesday.  In its story, The Telegram cites documents filed as part of the Hebron consortium's development application.

That's two thirds more than the original estimate of $5.0 billion.

Okay.

So if a project estimate prepared by people highly experienced in these types of projects and who have a keen interest in cost control has climbed by 66% in such a short period, odds are good that we can also change any cost estimates for a bunch of people with a lot less experience in building gigantic projects.

Like say Nalcor, a company that has, contrary to its own claims, shag-all experience in megaprojects.

They tell the world that a dam on the Lower Churchill river and a bunch of transmission lines will cost exactly the same as it would have in 1998:  roughly $6.2 billion.

Yeah, sure, buddy.

Put a Hebron cost multiplier on that sucker and you get $10.2 billion. We have not even factored in any inflationary impact.

But that is bad enough.

We are not done yet.

According to Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Muskrat Falls power would cost 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour to produce.  That is based on the project cost of $6.2 billion.

So if we can reasonably increase project costs by 66%, you can increase the cost per kilowatt hour by a similar amount.

Do the math.

It isn't pretty.

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Advance Poll turn-out comparison #elxn41

For the vote geeks out there, take a gander at this lovely chart showing turn-out in advance polls held in federal general elections from 2004 to 2011 for each of the ridings in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Some of the media reports have compared the 2011 advance polls votes to 2008.  That would be a misleading comparison since the federal Conservatives suffered from an unusual problem due to the Family Feud.  If you look at the two before that, you can get a better feel for recent trends.  2006 was a year of change nationally and it marked the last time the provincial Conservatives actually worked closely with their federal cousins.

Here’s what you can see:

Turn-out is up in every riding but the magnitude of the change is more dramatic in some cases than others. 

The easy number is in St. John’s East.  Lots of media reports have noted it had the highest advance poll turnout at 4474.  That corresponds to a 56% increase over the next largest turn-out in 2006. The rest of these numbers compare 2011 to the next largest turn-out.

St. John’s South-Mount Pearl is up 91% compared to 2006.

The lowest change in turn-out is Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor, up 2.3% compared to 2004 and Random-Burin-St. George’s, up 3.5% from the same election.

Avalon is showing a 47% increase compared to 2006.  That’s almost exactly the change in Labrador (48%).

What does it all mean?

That’s hard to tell. 

Look at the anomalies first.

On the face of it, there’s no reason why St. John’s East should show such a dramatic increase in total number of votes cast. The incumbent appears to be safely in his seat.  There is no heated contest in the riding.  While it looked potentially like a harder fight before the writ dropped, the reality has been that incumbent New Democrat Jack Harris could be vacationing in Las Vegas with his future Quebec caucus-mates and he’d still slaughter his competition. If there was some sort of surge toward the NDP, this would be a real sign since the seat is already orange.

Ditto Labrador.  There’s no sign of any dramatic change in the riding.  When you look at the riding with almost exactly the same rate of change – Avalon – it gets weirder.  

Avalon is the scene of a vicious fight between Scott Andrews for the Liberals and former Conservative incumbent Fabian Manning who Andrews beat in 2008. One would expect numbers there to be up way compared to another year when they had a hard-fought contest. 

So while those three seats looking odd, the other four seats,  the voter turn-out pictures look like what you would expect.  In the ridings where there’s been a really small change in turn-out, there’s no sense of a hard contest and the change in turn-out reflects that.  The numbers for Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte are up, but only 25%.  Again, that reflects a strong Conservative campaign, most likely, but it is hardly a sign of big change. In the absence of any other signs of revolution, this vote change looks relatively normal.

In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the blood feud between the New Democrats and incumbent Liberal Siobhan Coady has been intense since before the election started.  Seeing turn-out up by 91% is no surprise in what appears to be a tight race between two highly motivated and highly organized teams. The Conservatives don’t seem to be a factor, at least if the only publicly available poll is anything to judge by.  Any jump in turn-out is likely not coming from the Rain Man’s effort to get back in elected politics.

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Pavement Putin of Permafrost falling down on the job #elxn41

CBC news reports that residents of Labrador are complaining about the poor state of provincial highways in their part of the province.

"It's insulting that they think it's fine the way it is and that we should accept it the way it is," said [Kristin] Pardy.

Hmmm.

Makes you wonder what John Hickey has been doing with himself.  He holds down a cabinet portfolio responsible for Labrador Affairs. 

Hickey – who once launched a law suit against former Premier Roger grimes for something Danny Williams said – is rather proud of the roads in Labrador.  When Hickey hasn’t been trying to claim to have contracts with the federal government that don’t exist, he’s been known to pose for publicity shots featuring him shovelling pavement.

The simple answer to what Hickey has been up to is shovelling something other than pavement on behalf of his federal Conservative buddies. 

You can find a clip of Hickey that someone posted to twaudio of one of Hickey’s lengthy calls to local talk radio on behalf of his buddies from up-along.  He’s in the middle if you really feel the need to listen to a provincial cabinet minister who has clocked more time campaigning for the federal Conservatives since 2003 than any other current member of the provincial Tory caucus.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.

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Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position #elxn41

If the current trends hold, the New Democratic Party is poised to make record gains in Quebec.  EKOS is projecting that the NDP could win as many as 100 seats with a majority of those seats coming from Quebec.

The party’s new support in Quebec comes, of course, as a result of Jack Layton’s active campaign to court support from soft nationalists and sovereignists who had supported the Bloc Quebecois.

There’s no accident in this.  Layton knows exactly what he is doing and the model he is trying on is actually the one pioneered by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s.  Layton is even using the same language Mulroney used with his references to the idea that somehow Quebec is outside the constitution and needs to be brought in.

While national attention might be focused on the national implications of recent developments, there are some likely implications for people in Newfoundland and Labrador if Layton becomes leader of the opposition with a caucus half of whose members are from Quebec.

For starters, people who think the NDP will be able to represent interests of anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador on fundamental issues can think again. Such an NDP caucus would be driven by the fundamental division in its membership and the need to manage that relationship over time.

If people think the seven seats in this province count for little in the federal parliament any way, they can consider the implications of having an opposition leader whose position is based entirely on his seats in Quebec. 

Support for a loan guarantee? 

Gulf of St. Lawrence boundary?  

National electricity grid?

Money for energy infrastructure?

More federal money for Goose Bay?

Quebec soft nationalists and sovereignists would effectively control both the Bloc and the NDP on those issues.  Take three guesses how Layton and his crowd will stand on those issues.  The first two don’t count. That would be especially true on any initiative that couldn’t also be matched with a comparable cash outlay for Quebec.

T’would be interesting to see what happens if people in this province start asking politicians about these sorts of things.  Get ‘em on the record now.  Their comments could come back to haunt us all.

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Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies #elxn41

You can tell we are in the final week of a federal election campaign.

The attack ads are out.

Everybody has one.

Some people are whining about them.

Some candidates are trying to distance themselves from them, as in NDP candidate Ryan Cleary:

The NDP is distributing a flyer questioning Ignatieff's trust and attendance in Parliament.

The party's candidate in St. John's South–Mount Pearl, Ryan Cleary, said the negative advertisements are coming from the national NDP campaign, not his.

"I've seen that and that's one of the strategies they want to take, so, yeah," he said.

There’s no small measure of hypocrisy in the NDP attacks, of course.  Cleary’s supporters have been whining about since 2008 about some material Liberal incumbent Siobhan Coady circulated in the last election about Cleary.

There’s a reason why campaigns use so-called attack ads or negative ads:  when they are done properly, they work and they often work better than anything else.

“Done properly” means factual comments that address a concern voters have about a candidate, a party or a leader.

A campaign team will figure out the voter concern through polling.  Forget the horse-race stuff.  That’s just bumpf for the people who need to feed their tweets.   A well-organized campaign can turn around the run-away races or quickly eliminate a close race using solid research coupled with good communications and a willingness to use the tools correctly. 

Make no mistake:  it isn’t that simple or formulaic. Campaigns are as much about the battle between teams as anything else. Teams are made up of people. People make decisions and sometimes they make bad ones.  But given the situation, most campaigns will use the tools they have, including negative or attack ads.

What makes the spate of local attacks ads curious is that they seem to be bizarre.

According to the Telegram, the NDP dropped a postcard in St. John’s East this weekend that, like its counterpart in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl attached Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff because of his poor attendance in parliament?

Okay people.

Jack Harris needs to run attacks ads to fend off the Liberals?  According to the only poll publicly available, the Liberal contender in that riding is running at less than five percent of the vote.  The thing can’t have an spill-over because it was delivered to households.

But then there’s the issue. People loved Danny Williams all to pieces and he had such naked contempt for the legislature he set new record lows for sitting in the legislature by a serving Premier.  On the face of it, this is not what you would call a vote-determining issue.  But hey, maybe they have some sooper sekrit research that shows people in Kilbride and Torbay are parliamentary channel nerds.

Then there are the Conservative ones.  Loyola Sullivan is hammering away at the idea that without a Conservative government in Ottawa the loan guarantee for Muskrat Falls is a goner.

In February, 2011 CRA’s polling for the provincial government showed that three percent of respondents thought that the Lower Churchill should be the top priority of the provincial government in the next few years.

3%.

That’s not a typo.

That’s all.

Even if Loyola was running in Labrador, his Lower Churchill scare piece would appeal to only the 4% of respondents there who thought it was an issue.  Again, not exactly what you would call a topic that is going to drive voters to the polls, let alone make them pick a particular candidate.

For their part the Liberals, their bizarreness is the absence of any local negative pieces this time out. That’s not to say there aren’t;  maybe there are.  It’s just that your humble e-scribbler hasn’t seen or heard anything. 

Not like there isn’t plenty to hammer away at for either the Conservatives or the New Democrats and their candidates just like their could be for blue and orange to toss at red. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect in a race like St. John’s South-Mount Pearl that is, supposedly, too close to call.

Maybe the clue is the way all the candidates and all the media are fixated on Muskrat Falls. Grits and Dippers are talking about it because the Connies made it an issue. The media are covering it because the pols keep telling them it is big. But there is no sign the voters give a tinker’s damn about the dam.

Bizarro.

No one should be surprised if – in the end - the Newfoundland negative ads in this federal election are likely to fall completely flat.  The reason is simple: they obviously aren’t driven by what voters are interested in. 

As a result, they may look aggressive but they are the equivalent of hitting your opponent with fluffy stuffed bunnies. 

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When the rubber hits the road…

The current provincial government discovered innovation as a word they could use to describe something they thought might sell well with the punters.

You can reduce the thing down to a word because, as much as they talk about innovation, the current provincial government seems to be incapable of doing anything novel.

New.

Different.

Take, for example, the problem of recycling tires.  The current crowd inherited a problem from the crowd before them:  mounds of tires stockpiled at a couple of sites in the province and nothing that apparently could be done with them.  A couple of ideas cropped up but the companies behind them never got anywhere.

So the current crowd shipped them off to Quebec where they burn them for fuel.

Last week, the provincial government unveiled another contract to ship a few million used tires to Quebec, entirely at government expense, so that a couple of coal-fired cement plants there could supplement coal with tire bits.

Newfoundlanders paying to ship energy to Quebec in a deal where they get the benefit and the locals get to pick up the tab.

Churchill Falls.

Muskrat Falls.

Tires.

Same pattern.

Or burning them in Quebec before. 

Burning more in Quebec now.

More of the same, no matter how you look at it.

The cost for shipping the tires in the new contract is apparently about $3.0 million or more and while the provincial government has billions of dollars in cash, it hardly seems sensible that someone couldn’t figure out a way to use the tires productively in this province for less than six or seven million bucks it is likely costs to ship tires all told.

Heck, just for good measure, let’s make the figure $10 million. If we cannot do something within the province with our tires for less than $10 million and an environmental bonus, then shipping them is a good idea.

Right off the bat, we can scratch anything involving burning the tires.  Sure there are studies saying it is okay and yes, it is better than coal.  But there is something about burning tires in a place where we don’t burn coal any more that just doesn’t make sense.

And there are only so many blast mats you can make so there’s got to be something else out there.

Hmmm.

Google search!

Try a few possibilities and you can wind up at the website maintained by the Nova Scotia government’s recycling agency.  They had a problem figuring out what to do with their used tires.  After a report  identified serious questions about using tires as fuel, an expert committee recommended shredding the tires and using them in road construction and similar applications.

They call it tire-derived aggregate or TDA. It’s a pretty lightweight and inexpensive substitute for gravel in some construction.  In places prone to frost, TDA can actually help improve the lifespan of pavement.  There are some questions about TDA.  For example, some people regard using it as aggregate to be the same as burying the tires.  On the whole, the Nova Scotia committee thought that TDA was the way to go.

Then there’s the cost.

One presentation on the tire recycling site comes from an American company with experience in shredding tires. The presenter put the cost for the trucks, storage facility and shredders – the infrastructure – at about US$1.6 million.  You’d have to add labour costs in there to get the likely total cost but that hardly seems very costly to get started shredding tires.

And that’s just one alternative to shipping the mounds of used tires in Newfoundland out of the province and paying someone else to burn them.

- srbp -

The peter principle #elxn41

What is about Conservative candidates and their tackle?

One provincial Conservative used a bunch of elections signs that touted the viability of his equipment.  He was  - or had? – the sign assured us “a member that works.”

Now the Conservative candidate in Labrador seems to be …  ummm… err… generous.

Yes.

That’s it.

Generous.

His signs carry the slogan “Peter for all.”

- srbp -

Nail ‘em up, I say

The provincial government’s human resources, labour and employment department started a neat little promotion early last year to encourage young people to take a look at skilled trades.

It’s called Try the Trades.

So at the Telus Cup game this past Friday night, three provincial cabinet ministers took part in a little demonstration to draw some attention to it. 

Wonderful stuff. 

Great idea.

Except maybe the timing was a wee bit inappropriate.

This past Friday.

Driving nails.

Think about it for a second.

- srbp -

“The prize is worth the fight”: Hearn rebuts Skinner on Muskrat Falls

Former Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro director Ed Hearn rebuts natural resources minister Shawn Skinner’s claim that anything other than doubling electricity and adding to the per capita debt load in the province by developing Muskrat Falls is too risky a venture:

While there would undoubtedly be a legal challenge to such legislation, a court challenge is not a valid reason to fail to pursue this initiative.

If the province’s right to reserve energy from the Upper Churchill were confirmed, the province would have access to sufficient energy to meet all its future needs on the island and in Labrador with energy priced at approximately 1/5th of a cent per kilowatt hour at cost.

The prize is worth the fight.

Hearn sensibly suggests that Skinner and his colleagues could refer a question to the Court of Appeal for an opinion before introducing any legislation on Churchill Falls power.

It really is that easy so one must wonder why Skinner and his colleagues are hell-bent on the other course.

- srbp -