Via Canada East:
New Brunswick needs a federal-provincial agreement on offshore oil and gas exploration, along the lines of those signed by Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. And it must finalize such an agreement soon, before the east coast oil-and-gas rush moves into adjacent waters.
The focus is on natural gas.
Natural gas is pretty cheap these days but it can be used to generate electricity more cleanly than with other fossil fuels.
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Okay so a bunch of people are spilling ink or pixels or whatever over a bunch of new members of parliament elected in Quebec as if they were somehow a special breed of politicians significantly different from any others anywhere else in the country.
Bar managers who have never visited their ridings and don’t speak the dominant language of the riding.
Four university students.
All New Democrats elected in Quebec.
You know the story.
And now a bunch of other people are pointing out that they really aren’t such an odd bunch after all.
Lysiane Gagnon has a column in the Globe that Bill Rowe would crib if he was still column-writing. She rattles off the rather impressive credentials of some of the newly minted politicians.
Susan Delacourt has a blog post over at the Star that is a wee bit more cynical:
Forgive me for dashing any lingering illusions, but the CV has almost nothing to do with winning and losing elections. And it has even less to do with how well MPs fare once they arrive on Parliament Hill.
Geography and gender are equal, if not more important considerations in choosing cabinet. Good looks and an ability to repeat party talking points will score MPs those sought-after spots in Question Period and on TV panels. Doing what you're told counts more than talking about what you know.
Gagnon and Delacourt and all the people who are gobsmacked at the greenness of some of the new MPs are each correct, in their own way.
Anyone out there who thought politicians have all been budding Nobel laureates are basically as full of crap as the cynics who dismiss them all as the progeny of several successive generations of first cousin intermarriage.
Hello, Canadians, these are the sorts of people you’ve been electing to represent you since at least 1867.
They are – not surprisingly - no better than the rest of us.
Nor are they any worse.
Bit of a shocker, eh?
They also aren’t necessarily any different from the politicians we’ve been electing at the provincial or federal level in the past decade or so, at least. Since 2003 in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, we’ve had a steady stream of politicians whose previous interest in or knowledge of major issues affecting the province has been a bit sketchy. Former cabinet minister Paul Oram demonstrated that pretty clearly in a couple of interviews during a trip to Georgia.
He really isn’t alone. You can find similar displays of fundamental ignorance from former finance minister Loyola Sullivan talking about Equalization or Danny Williams and Charlene Johnson discussing Abitibi’s history in the province or any of a number of pols talking about hydro-electric development in Labrador.
This is not like missing a question on Jeopardy. Politicians get to vote on the laws that govern our lives. Government spending. Criminal code. Access to information. If these politicians don’t really know how things work in the world, then you can figure out that – at least for a while – they are going to make a few mistakes.
Big mistakes, maybe.
Or they’ll be more likely to go with the flow rather than challenge dodgy ideas, like say spending public money without any accountability.
Like in the infamous House of Assembly spending scandal. How many of the newbie politicians took to the improper spending like ducks to the proverbial water only to claim that the rules they found didn’t say you couldn’t do those sorts of things? Pretty much all of them.
Now the people just elected to the House of Commons are, for the most part, a clever bunch. Odds are that they’ll learn. Odds are that many of them will successful politicians.
And in four years time, many of them will be ex-politicians looking for a new job.
Just as they reach the point they should have been at when they started.
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“One of those principles is that we will not get involved in minority situations with governments. That is an absolute rule I have observed.”
Fortis is currently partnered in the Waneta hydro project with a pair of power companies owned by the B.C. government to build a $900-million power plant.
“You’ll note we own 51 per cent,” said Marshall. “We would not have gotten involved with less than … 51 per cent.”
Following the shareholder meeting, Marshall was asked why the company avoids minority stakes.
“Simply when things go wrong we’d like to be able to rectify them,” he told reporters.
“If you’re going to go in with a partner you’ve got to know that partner very, very well, have a lot of commonality.
“Governments … their agenda can be very, very different than a private enterprise.”
A few weeks ago, your humble e-scribbler stumbled across St. John’s Toddler, an exceptionally well done local blog by Erika Pittman.
While it has ben very successful, it was pretty easy to see this blog deserved some wider exposure so I offered Erika this space with no restrictions. She responded with the piece below. It introduces the blog and Erika in a simple, frank way.
Then again, that’s what “mommy blogs” usually are and why they have turned into both a popular form of online expression and a market force in the United States. Mom’s who blog are just one of the many way’s women express themselves online.
If you want to see just how potent that market segment is, check out BlogHer:
Today, BlogHer is the largest community of women who blog: 25+ million unique visitors per month (Nielsen NetRatings). Engaged, influential and info-savvy, these women come to BlogHer to seek and share advice, opinions and recommendations. BlogHer’s team works hard to bring you the best and brightest conversations, writers and speakers – online and in person. That’s what we do best.
Engaged. Engaging. Info-savvy. That’s pretty much what Erika’s blog is and influential is what we’d predict St. John’s toddler will become.
Enjoy!
EGH
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by Erika Pittman
I began writing St. John’s Toddler when I was on maternity leave two years ago. I was disappointed in the lack of local information about activities and services available to parents of young children in St. John’s. When I went to the internet in search of local activities and events for children it was hit or miss and most of the activities and services I knew about came from word of mouth. It seemed counter-intuitive to me that you already needed to know what you were looking for in order to Google it, so I started my blog.
St. John’s Toddler is not a ‘mommy blog’ in the typical sense. My intent in the beginning was simply to gather toddler-related information all in one spot. As the blog has grown that scope has expanded slightly, but it is still not a personal blog. I do a daily post, usually focusing on activities, products, events, services, or sometimes I just share a link I found useful. The common theme is parenting children under five years old in St. John’s. I chose to focus on that age group because, at this point anyway; that is my area of expertise. My son turns three this year.
Since the beginning I have tried to encourage people to send in their tips, ideas and reviews because I didn’t want this blog to be about me and my life. The whole personal blogging thing makes me uncomfortable in some ways; I can't seem to get over the 'all about me' thing or the sharing my life with strangers part. That being said, I have noticed that the posts that are slightly more personal get the most feedback. For example, people were really interested in sharing their experiences and the challenges of taking their toddlers to restaurants after I wrote about which St. John’s restaurants I felt were toddler-friendly. Another interesting thing about the feedback I get is that a good portion of the email I get is from women new to St. John’s looking for things to do with their kids and how to meet other moms and children. I think this affirms my whole reason for starting the blog and I am happy to help them.
I am happy to say that in the two and a half years since I created the blog, a little community has formed around St. John’s Toddler, with loyal readers who send tips and regularly comment. This is exactly what I was striving for. I have begun to expand the blog a little too in recent months. I now have a local family doctor who contributes articles. I hold contests with prizes I buy myself or are generously donated by local businesses. I created an Amazon St. John’s Toddler bookstore for books that my readers or I recommend and I have set up a Twitter account.
This month I am holding the first St. John’s Toddler event; a children’s clothing swap. I am hoping this event will be an opportunity to take the St. John’s Toddler community from the virtual world to the real world and I am looking forward to meeting people I have been talking to by email for years.
I am not sure what will become of St. John's Toddler when my child turns five, but I have a feeling the content and audience for St. John's Kid and particularly St. John's Teen will be easy to find!
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Big week with lots of fascinating political developments, not the least of which was finding out that Al-Qaeda would admit what the Canadian deputy New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair could not: Osama was dead.
They didn’t need pictures.
Tom wanted proof.
Parliament Hill will be a fun place this year.
Meanwhile, Bond Papers readers found these posts the most interesting ones of the week:
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While it may have slipped by in the election hoopla on Monday, the people who decided to vote in a CBC online poll made it pretty clear they didn’t like the provincial government’s announcement of millions in subsidies for the remaining newsprint mill in the province.
67% of respondents picked the option “we’re throwing good money in the wrong place.” The second most popular choice (14%) thought the company should pay the money back to the provincial government when it was able to do so.
Only 12% thought it was a good idea. 6.5% felt that subsidies were a fact of life.
Now this is by now means a scientific survey but it should give pause for thought.
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West Texas Intermediate crude oil for June delivery fell below US$100 in New York trading Thursday.
Brent crude, the benchmark for Newfoundland light crude, dropped $12 to trade at US$109 a barrel on Thursday afternoon.
Some analysts blamed weak European and American economic data for the drop. The security picture also changed recently. While unrest in the Middle East threatens global supplies, the markets appear to have reacted strongly to the death this week of Osama bin Laden.
According to Reuters report carried in the the Ottawa Citizen:
“Crude oil is selling off sharply for two primary reasons: QE2 is coming to an end in June and without a QE3 behind it, it will take liquidity out of the market, hurting risky asset classes such as commodities,” said Chris Jarvis, senior analyst, Caprock Risk Management in New Hampshire, referring to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing.
“With Osama bin Laden dead, the market is adjusting the geopolitical risk premium down accordingly. Given this, speculative money is being taking off the table.”
The provincial government’s 2011 budget is based on oil prices average US$108 per barrel for the year. - srbp -
Canadian voters tend not to pay much attention to the local candidate.
Your humble e-scribbler made the point earlier on Thursday in a lengthy post.
And just for good measure, the Globe and Mail’s Jane Taber drops a little note on research done by one consulting firm right after the Monday election. The conclusion:
“Participants told us they see this as proof that Canadians voted based on parties and leaders rather than their local candidate,” Ensight’s Jacquie LaRocque told The Globe. “Hardly a single participant across the entire country told us they voted for their local candidate.”
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Craig Welsh is a bastard who used be be from St. John’s. Now he lives in Iqaluit where he spent some time the other day pondering some of the candidates elected recently.
You can find his blog post here: towniebastard.blogspot.com
All of which is a preamble to I'm sure there's a punchline to last night's election results in Quebec, but I've never really got French humour. For example, Ruth Ellen Brosseau won her seat despite:
A. Not living in the riding.
B. Going to Vegas in the middle of the campaign.
C. Her riding is 98% French and she can't really speak it that well.
D. Appears to have not even visited the riding during the election.Yet she got 40% of the vote, won the seat and now gets a $150,000+ a year job, which is a bit of a step up from assistant manager at a pub.
So yes, there's a punchline here somewhere, I just don't get it. Can someone explain French humour to me, please?
A wise man, experienced in the arts of the campaign, once told your humble e-scribbler that a candidate in any given riding is basically worth about 5% of the vote total. Monday’s night result was brutal example of just how true that is. Any hint of scepticism left in this corner is gone.
The other chunk of the candidate votes in any given riding come from voting tradition, that is people who always or usually vote for the same party. The other bit is driven by the campaign itself, usually at the national or provincial level.
Now there are individual candidates who can count for more. We are talking averages here. So quick recap: candidate: a little. Tradition and the campaign: a lot.
Now in Quebec, as in Newfoundland and Labrador, voters also seem to make a distinction between provincial elections and federal ones. They tend to pay less attention to federal campaigns. Take a gander at some statistics on turn-out in federal elections by Memorial University professor Alex Marland and you can see the idea.
People in this province typically don’t turn up in great numbers to vote for their federal representatives. In the 60 years after Confederation, turn-out in the province for a federal election cracked 70% exactly twice. It hit the high 60s a few times but for the most part, turn-out has been less than 60% of eligible voters.
By contrast, provincial elections get turn-outs about 10 percentage points higher.
Marland puts this down to a bunch of factors including literacy levels. That night be part of it, but frankly the one idea that really seems to explain the difference in turn-out over time is proximity or familiarity. Provincial ridings are smaller than federal ones. People may know the local candidate personally and odds are good they will get the chance to shake all the hands of everyone.
The same can’t be said at the federal level. And that is reinforced by the fact Ottawa is so far away both physically and mentally for most people. Think of it as an extreme version of the old saying that all politics is local.
In other words, people don’t seem to see federal members as being as important as their provincial ones when it comes to affecting their lives. It’s hard to come up with a better idea to explain people trooping to the polls to vote for candidates with precious little life experience in some instances, let alone the kind of experience one needs to be an effective political representative in the national legislature.
There’s another notion you can add to this as well: just as people don’t seem to be as personally connected to their federal candidates as they might have been once, the relentless message from the news media is that the individual candidate simply doesn’t have any kind of power and influence. Sure candidates make some promises but you have to wonder if people actually believe that, for argument sake, any of the newly minted parliamentarians will be able to do much now that the Harper gang have a majority.
Did the voters on Flower Hill mark their “x” for Ryan because he promised to relentlessly fight to get a n inquiry into the fishing industry or because Jack Layton promised to deliver more doctors and nurses? Did they even know that Ryan - himself - thinks that is his main job now that he is off to Ottawa to spend more time with the kids?
In Newfoundland and Labrador, people have an object lesson [on all this] right in front of them. For the past seven years, local politicians counted for exactly zero compared to the Saviour of the Universe, attended by a raft of disciples who knew he crapped nuggets of pure gold every day, thrice a day. Now whether that is true or not on any level isn’t as important as the fact that some people seemed to believe it.
So if you have people getting this relentless message from politicians and from news media that everything is about Steve and Danny or Michael and Jack, and the local guy is just a placeholder or a bootlicker, you can see why people in Quebec and elsewhere might just look at what colour someone is and cast vote on that basis.
Disagree? In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the most visible campaign sign in the riding was a four foot by four foot sign bearing the name of Jack Layton. This was no accident. Nor was it an accident that smiling Jack was everywhere on NDP householders and in television and radio spots. Heck, even Liberals like Scott Andrews are blaming the Liberal loss on the fact that Michael Ignatieff supposedly had no charisma and people didn’t like him compared to Jack and his accordion playing smile.
There are a bunch of different reasons why people vote the way they do. Tradition counts for much of it. The dynamics of the campaign are part of it as well. But increasingly the evidence seems to be that local candidates don’t matter very much at all when it comes to voters making decisions about who gets their vote.
You can vote for a unilingual anglophone bar manager who has never visited your riding because she - or by extension the federal political system - doesn’t count in the ordinary voter’s mind.
Now place-holder candidates aren’t new in politics. England had its rotten borough and Newfoundland still has its seats where the party of choice can run a half-eaten Mary Brown’s snack box and the voters would send it off to St. John’s. It just seems that these days, individual candidates seem to count for less and less.
This also doesn’t mean that everyone who does get elected these days is a previously chewed tater. Politicians are a cross-section of society as a whole. You get your good ones and your not-so-good ones. You get your exceptional people and you get your oxygen thieves.
It’s just that we seem to be in a period where voters sometimes don’t seem to pay much attention to local candidates when they vote. Good, bad or indifferent, local candidates don’t seem to count for much.
And incidentally, for the people on Flower Hill, the New Democrats want to take the tax off home heating fuel. It’s just that they have also promised to back a provincial Conservative plan to make sure that anyone on fixed and low incomes will pay twice as much for electricity, guaranteed, even without taxes, while people outside the province can get the same power for about what you are paying for it now.
Not bad, eh?
The NDP aren’t alone. The Liberals and the Conservatives in your riding promised basically the same thing.
You are forgiven if you missed that bit, though, in all the clips of Jack and the squeeze-box.
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[Proofed, edited to make sentences read more clearly]
People seem to forget that the federal New Democratic caucus was already made of people who seemed a little… what’s word… sketchy.
The deputy leader of Canada's new Official Opposition party says he doubts the U.S. has photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.
Thomas Mulcair, who stands in for NDP Leader Jack Layton in the House of Commons when he is away, told CBC's Power & Politics with Evan Solomon that he doesn't believe photos exist of bin Laden following his killing by U.S. forces on Sunday in Pakistan.
"I don't think, from what I've heard, that those pictures exist and if they do I'll leave that up to the American military," he told host Evan Solomon.
And right behind that the party’s foreign affairs critic disowned the official Jack Layton stand-in.
"We have no reason to doubt the veracity of President Obama’s statement," Dewar wrote in an emailed statement.
This is just the beginning of the mess that is now the official opposition.
Meanwhile, has anyone asked the party’s defence critic what he thinks of all this?
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Pretty well every single conventional media outlet ran a story in the wake of the federal election about how the results might affect Kathy Dunderdale and the provincial Conservatives.
CBC has an online story about a possible “hangover.” The Telly had a front pager on Wednesday on the same subject. NTV has a bit quoting Tom Marshall who denies there will be any backlash.
Not surprisingly, the provincial Conservatives all claim things are rosy and wonderful.
But here’s what this is really all about
Kathy Dunderdale and her crowd joined with the argument federally that the provincial Tories have used relentlessly on their own since 2003. It was all about getting behind the guys in power to get your goodies. Voters in the province rejected that flatly.
Dunderdale and her team did not produce a single victory other than the squeaker in Labrador. Everywhere else, their candidates got their asses handed to them. And that guy in Labrador is not one of Kathy’s crew. He’s got his own mind and his own agenda and it may not match up with Kathy’s. This vote result is a major rebuke for Kathy Dunderdale by voters.
Politically, Kathy herself backed off her position as it became clear voters didn’t buy her endorsement. She had members of her caucus who didn’t campaign with the rest or who did only the barest of bare minimums. Did Dunderdale herself make any campaign stops other than the one with Harper himself?
Dunderdale’s own statement on the results is exactly three sentences of bland platitudes. There is no reference to the loan guarantee and the Lower Churchill, at all. There is that line again about legitimate aspirations, whatever they are. Sounds more like a hollow phrase cooked up by the back-room brain trust rather than something that anyone - including Dunderdale - actually understands.
Maybe she has finally looked at her own polls that show Muskrat is an issue for a mere three percent of voters. The biggest issues for people are health care and the economy/job creation. If she wants to create a connection between Muskrat and jobs, clearly people don’t see it.
But as referenda go, Dunderdale just took a huge political gamble and lost.
Badly.
Whether or not the Prime Minister delivers the loan guarantee actually doesn’t matter. What matters is that Dunderdale launched a political campaign that, on the face of it, was the counter-part to ABC, and she couldn’t deliver.
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Living in the west end of St. John’s out by working dairy farms you get used to the smell of cow manure and chicken crap.
Nothing however, compares to the hum coming off Jack Harris and Ryan Cleary who’ve been running around claiming that their victories in the federal election will translate into provincial gains.
A left-wing wave that is sending two St. John's New Democrats to Ottawa could keep rolling into the Newfoundland and Labrador election this fall, a re-elected MP says.
"Something that I believe firmly is that most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians actually have the same values and the same idea of what government should be about as New Democrats," St. John's East MP Jack Harris told CBC News.
Okay.
So for that to be true, people who usually and steadfastly vote for provincial Conservatives and who readily switch parties federally would have to abandon decades of practice.
Every single seat on the northeast Avalon – which Cleary and Harris as members of parliament in Ottawa - is a Tory seat and has been for seven years.
The NDP won Cleary’s seat by getting switch voters to switch.
D’uh!
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.
But here’s a second check on Harris’ prediction. Jack won his riding handily in 2008. Again, massive Conservative vote switching, plus people who abandoned the Liberals at the same time.
There have been two provincial by-elections in Harris’ riding since then. Both went to the provincial Conservatives by embarrassingly gigantic margins. Jack Harris’s victory in 2008 and his electoral machine had zero discernable impact anywhere at the provincial level.
Now there are reasons for that we’ll get into for another post.
For now let’s just say that Jack and Ryan have a talking point that just laughable. Doesn’t matter though. The boys have their work cut out for them in Ottawa so they’ll be a bit pre-occupied come the fall to try and live up to their predictions.
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Take a look at the vote results in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl in the last four federal general elections and you can see the dramatic switch of Conservative votes to New Democrat votes.
Let’s start with the advance poll turn-out. This is really just to remind everyone of the first sign something big was on the way.
The 2011 advance turn-out was 91% above the next highest, in 2006. The advance vote turn-out in 2008 - the year of the Conservative civil war called ABC - was slightly below the range for the two previous elections but there was actually nothing radically out of line with it.
Now look at the results for the three major parties for the same elections.
First of all, the total vote for all three parties ranges from 33,137 in 2008 to 38,567 in 2011. Leaving 2008 aside, total vote for the three parties in 2011 is only 4.2% higher than it was in 2006.
The Liberal 2011 vote total is 550 below the 2004 result and 3799 below the 2008 tally. On the whole, it is consistent with Liberal vote in the riding going back more than a decade. The 1997 Liberal vote in the old riding configuration, for example, was roughly 12,500.
On the face of it, Siobhan Coady appears to have managed to capture and hold most of the usual Liberal vote in the riding over the four elections. She gained about 2600 votes during the Conservative civil war, commonly known as the ABC campaign in 2008.
The most striking changes are in the Conservative and New Democrat vote. Basically the two parties have traded places.
In 2004, when the provincial Conservatives held back from completely supporting the federal party, Loyal Hearn held the seat for the Conservatives. Hearn increased his vote total in 2006 when the provincial Conservatives openly supported their federal cousins. In 2008, the civil war destroyed the connection between the two almost completely.
Take a look at the New Democrat number in that election and you can tell where the homeless Conservatives went. The bulk of them went to Cleary. Some others stayed home. A few went to Coady, likely the result of direct appeals by provincial Conservative cabinet ministers and members of the provincial legislature.
The 2008 vote total is the lowest of the four elections and the total for the four elections is actually fairly consistent over time. That strongly suggests that new voters didn’t enter the field suddenly in 2008. Rather, existing Conservative voters opted for the New Democrats instead of the Liberals.
That same trend continued into 2011. The other part of the change was Loyola Sullivan who appears to have attracted old Conservatives back or pulled them away from Coady. The new voters into the system were either old Conservatives who came back or some new voting from people who had not voted in the preceding four elections.
In 2011, the NDP vote increased by 4684. Conservative vote increased by 4539. That’s a combined total of 9,223. Liberal vote dropped by 3,799. Total vote for all three parties increased by 5,430. That’s a total of 9,229.
There are a couple of things one can say about all this:
First, there is no way of knowing with absolute certainty which voters moved where and whether the increased total in 2011 came from new voters, old voters coming back or a combination of the two. There just isn’t any information that would let anyone figure it out conclusively.
Second, given the overall consistency in the total votes for the three parties, it is more likely that the changes in NDP support came from vote moving from the Conservatives to the New Democrats than from Liberals or from new voters.
Third, the result in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl isn’t part of any national trend toward the New Democrats. The 2011 result came from a trend that began before the 2011 campaign.
Fourth, since the federal NDP voters in 2011 appear to be coming predominantly from provincial Conservatives, it is highly unlikely the New Democrats can translate their federal success into significant changes at the provincial level.
The party may have a good cadre of workers. They simply don’t have a reliable pool of voters who consistently vote for the same party federally and provincially. The NDP won St. John’s South-Mount pearl by appealing to swing voters. By definition, they are liable to swing in the future. What could make them swing would be a good subject for further, detailed research.
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You will read plenty of commentary on this election and the overwhelming majority of it will be complete and unvarnished horseshit.
Put it all out of your mind.
If you want to understand why Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals tanked so badly, read Rob Silver’s take on things.
Unite the left? Rob puts it slightly differently that this but your humble e-scribbler is in the exact same neighbourhood: the two left-wing parties in this country at he federal level already got together to form the Bloc NDP.
Then read his ideas on what the party needs to do to come back.
He’s got that right, too.
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With a Conservative majority, odds are good senate reform will move along in the near future.
That could resurrect the idea of a Triple E senate: equal, elected and effective.
Add to that, according to one tweeter, that Peter Penashue’s win in Labrador could lead to a Triple P senate later in the year once Senator Bill Rompkey retires in a few weeks’ time.
Triple P?
Don’t look so confused.
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Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her team of provincial Conservatives decided to throw their weight behind the federal Conservatives in this election.
Talk about your epic fail.
Kathy made this a referendum on her Muskrat Falls policy, her leadership and her political potency.
Only one of her candidates took a first place finish. Peter Penashue beat Todd Russell in a squeaker.
In Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, a last minute announcement in Corner Brook gave a flimsy cover for four cabinet ministers to get to the west coast to help Trevor Taylor against Liberal Gerry Byrne. Waste of time and taxpayer-funded travel.
And in Avalon, where former incumbent Fabian Manning came frustratingly close, he can take the credit for most of that vote. He worked hard after losing the seat in a close run in 2008 and Manning would have waged a tough campaign without provincial help. Of course, he did get help, some if quite strong from people like Jerome Kennedy. It just wasn’t enough.
Then consider that the federal Conservatives – most of them former provincial cabinet ministers – all campaigned on the argument that you needed someone on the government side or else you’d starve. It’s an argument the provincial Conservatives have used relentlessly since 2003. They’ve waged a relentless and very old fashioned campaign of favouring districts they held and punishing opposition districts for things like road paving.
Voters across Newfoundland and Labrador - including a raft of provincial Conservative voters - rejected that flatly.
The two changes in the province, one in St. John’s South - Mount Pearl and the other in Labrador, have other implications that are worth their own posts.
But for now, the first-blush reaction to the federal result in Newfoundland and Labrador is that it doesn’t bode well for the province’s Conservatives.
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[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.
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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