Get me re-write!

The headline on the story is catchy:

Inquiry needed on centre closure:  advocate

At the start of second paragraph you find out that the advocate the headline writer is referring to is Merv Wiseman.  He is described as “Long-time Canadian Coast Guard employee…”.

But Merv isn’t just an impartial bystander in this little drama and he is a wee bit more than an “advocate”.

Wiseman is the shop steward for the union local representing the workers whose jobs are being moved to Halifax. You don’t find that little tidbit until paragraph three. 

In other media reports, Merv has been identified as one of the people affected by the coast guard decision.

Here’s the existing fourth paragraph and the logic Wiseman uses in calling for a provincial public inquiry:

"We've had provincial inquiries, provincial and judicial inquiries before because of marine tragedies. Here's an opportunity for the government now to show some real leadership."

Is the CBC story accurate?  Not by a long shot. Of course, if they had described Wiseman accurately, his claim would be a lot harder to sustain.  Try this on for size.

Instead of “advocate” in the headline, substitute “union rep”.

And instead of the existing front end of the story, try this:

The union representative  for coast guard workers whose jobs are being relocated to Halifax wants the provincial government to launch a public inquiry into the implications of the federal government’s decision.

Then drop in the existing third and fourth paragraphs.

Big difference in the story, wouldn’t you agree?

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A room with a view of the pork barrel

The provincial ambassador’s office in Ottawa costs the better part of a half million a year to run, hasn’t had an ambassador in it for the better part of the past two years and so Premier Kathy Dunderdale will keep it open because it is so effective.

The office serves a great purpose when it’s functioning the way that it should,” she told a Telegram editorial board [last] Wednesday. “And it’s important to me that we maintain that.”

The thing is the office hasn’t served any purpose except to demonstrate how completely useless it is or how crap Premier’s have been in finding people to occupy the sinecure.

The first incumbent -  former Liberal cabinet minister, former wannabe Conservative candidate, former Liberal candidate and soon-to-be-former radio talk show host Bill Rowe – stayed in the job for about half a year and accomplished exactly squat before packing it in and coming back home.

Rowe – who left politics in the late 1970s after a political scandal about leaked police reports – wrote about his complete waste of tax money in Ottawa in a book that became a national best seller last year.  The book is a litany of slapstick moments like making taxpayer’s foot the bill for shipping his used snow-tires to the nation’s capital or his inability to get Danny Williams’ political and public service bureaucracy to cough up a Blackberry and a laptop for weeks on end.

Your humble e-scribbler has described the book as an insider’s account of events the author wasn’t inside the room for.

As Rowe documents, Danny Williams offered Rowe a key position in the new administration before the 2003 general election. Rowe stayed in his job on-air during the election and took up his ambassadorial appointment as Williams’ personal representative to Hy’s early in 2004.

The second incumbent  - former Memorial University professor John Fitzgerald  - reportedly spent most of his time not meeting with federal officials, that is when he wasn’t hanging out in the Commons visitors gallery.  His tenure in Ottawa coincided with Danny' Williams’ endless feuds with Ottawa for something or other and after a certain point he reportedly had a hard time getting in to see anyone. Regular readers will recall him as Our Man in a Blue Line Cab.

Fitzgerald quietly left Ottawa when his contract ended.  Williams gave him another contract in St. John’s in the classic patronage holding pen of the protocol office.  His official title is “special advisor.”

Before Bill Rowe, the provincial government never maintained an office in Ottawa.  The job of dealing with the federal government fell to officials and ministers, including the Premier.  And more often than not over the past 30 years there has been an office called Intergovernmental Affairs intended to deal specifically with – you guessed it – relations between and among governments in Canada.

So there you have it.  The office has been vacant for more time than it’s been filled, a point labradore makes succinctly.  And when it has been occupied, the incumbents apparently accomplished nothing.

And yet the current Premier wants to keep spending money on an office that has never worked because it is great when it works.

Says more about Kathy Dunderdale’s judgement than anything else, apparently.

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Payback is a mother: Conservative edition

“…rationality has little to do with political myth making…”

Tim Powers, Conservative backroom guy and Ottawa lobbyist, wrote that in a recent post over at the blog space he has alongside Rob Silver at the Globe and Mail.

He was venting some frustration over some political smoke being blown at his friend the Prime Minister over a handful of jobs at a call centre that the federal government wants to shift from St. John’s to Halifax. 

Political opponents of the federal Tories have tried to make the debate about the Prime Minister and their manufactured view that he has some sort of disdain for the province.

Political myths have absolutely nothing to do with rationality, facts or any other sign of higher mental function that is supposed to distinguish humans from pond slime.

We are not talking of the rather harmless fairy tales like chopping down cherry trees.  We are talking about beliefs about people or events that are simply not true.

Tim is right:  there are a bunch of people who would have you believe that these 12 jobs are yet another sign that Stephen Harper and his band of knuckle draggers just don’t understand [insert the topic here]. They will screw Newfoundland (and Labrador) sometimes out of malice, sometimes out of stupidity.  But those nasty Conservatives will screw “us”

There is no evidence for any of it, of course.  But that doesn’t matter.  political myths, as Tim noted, have nothing to do with rationality.   Still, that hasn’t stopped a few thousand people from believing it as surely as they believe in sunshine.

A lot of people in Newfoundland (and Labrador) believe Stephen Harper is some sort of demon merely because Danny Williams told them so a couple of years ago. That idea was at the heart of his now legendary “Anything but Conservative” campaign during the 2008 federal election.

To savour the truly dry cosmic humour in that,one has to know a bit of back-story. Danny Williams’ is a political legend.  That is, so much of what people think about him and what they believe he accomplished as a ,politician is simply a matter of myth.  As your humble e-scribbler noted when the old guy skedaddled out of politics last December, the tributes to him praised him for :

• things he never did;
• things other people did but credited to Danny
• things that never happened, and,
• stuff he did but that still had to roll along enough so people could see if they were good, bad or indifferent.

And that was all they included.

Take the Muskrat Falls deal that Tim mentions in that same column.  Danny grabbed a bunch of people together and had them scribble names on an agreement to keep talking about maybe coming up with a deal.  He didn’t actually sign the final deal that will actually see a couple of dam and a bunch of hydro lines built in Labrador.  But that hasn’t stopped reporters from praising it then and now even though it really doesn’t exist at the moment beyond a lot of talking.

Tim helped to bolster the Danny myth  - or a fairy tale Danny was spreading - on more than one occasion.  And that, as they say, is really what really makes Tim’s post a delicious display of Karma in action.  This lack of rationality…

unfortunately does a great disservice to the serious discussion that should be taking place about marine rescue co-ordination on the East Coast.

Indeed it does, Tim.  And on everything from the provincial government’s sorry fiscal state to the Muskrat falls debt project, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador have been done serious harm by the myths foisted on them by Powers and his  political friends in the province.

The danger for the Conservatives is that the myth is becoming the symbol, which could present major challenges for the federal government with the province in future.

Absolutely true, again, Tim Powers, but the verb tense is wrong.  Danny the Myth cemented the symbol years ago. What we are seeing today is just a sort of cosmic payback being visited on the Conservatives who after 2001 in this province never met a myth they wouldn’t monger.

Karma is a bitch.

Looks good on ‘em.

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Fortis fighting two tin-pot bureaucracies

Newfoundland and Labrador based Fortis is seeking compensation for electricity production assets seized by two governments half a continent apart.

The company is seeking payment for its interest in a Belize electricity company seized this week by the government of that tiny central American country.

It is still locked in talks with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador for the 2008 seizure of its assets in that Canadian province.

Odds are Belize will settle up first.

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Saturday Snickerfest

After her communion scrum, Premier Kathy Dunderdale led reporters in a brief prayer in which she asked for divine help to get her out of the political quagmire she’d made for herself over the call centre jobs.

 

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Traffic that transcends the overpass

1. Well, did she know in advance?
2. Minister Chickenshit
3. Kremlinology 36:  Thinking with your ass
4. Will one of them change parties?
5. Like Momma says, stupid is…
6. Penis Envy
7. Belize dannys Fortis
8. Making the most of our electricity resources – Part I:  Electricity Reform
9. US has surplus electricity
10. Dunderdale dunder-fail on SAR call centre

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Phriday Photo Phunny

Reporters took the time to ask her a few questions as a confused Premier Kathy Dunderdale lined up for communion outside the House of Assembly.

Got a better caption?  Send it along.

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Like Momma says, stupid is…

It takes an especially keen political genius to take someone else’s political problem and make it yours.

It takes an even rarer form of political genius to take a guaranteed loser issue and stake your entire political future to it with loopy rhetoric.

But that is exactly what Kathy Dunderdale has done with a decision by the federal Conservatives to shift 12 jobs at a search and rescue call centre from St. John’s to Halifax.

The Premier spent almost 19 minutes today scrumming with reporters to discuss a 15 to 20 minute telephone conversation she had with Prime Minister Stephen Harper about the transfer.

You can see the raw video of the scrum embedded in CBC’s online story.

Dunderdale told reporters that the “full force” of the provincial government will now be brought to bear to get the Prime Minister and his cabinet to change their minds.  She said she has tasked two cabinet ministers and their senior staff to take “every opportunity” to pursue the issue with their federal counterparts over the next year.  In addition, Dunderdale said she is also going to be doing the same thing, spending every available minute of the next year fighting to keep the 12 jobs in the province.

Now while Dunderdale acknowledges that she didn’t make this decision, she has decided to make this the singularly most important issue of her administration.  In effect, she is staking her political reputation on this single issue.

And for that reason, she has now taken what could be Stephen Harper’s problem and made it her own.  Dunderdale appears to be doing this for the same reason that Roger Grimes tried to foment political rows with the federal government before 2003:  she has the naive understanding that people will park their brains and back a Premier who is fighting a foreign oppression. 

What’s worse she seems to think this will bolster her political standing in rural areas.  That the sense you get when you hear Dunderdale tell reporters that “the vast majority of the people working in this province” making their living on the water.

That simply isn’t true.

Dunderdale should know and you can bet the Prime Minister and his officials know it as well.

But consider for a minute that Dunderdale has effectively made this the single issue that will occupy – using her own words – every minute of her time over the next year.

This trumps fishery reform.

It trumps talks to implement the Wells inquiry report recommendations into offshore safety.  Just think about that for a second when Dunderdale says “safety trumps all.”

And it trumps her precious loan guarantee for Muskrat Falls.

How did she get into this mess, aside from the naive belief about local politics?  Well, it’s the sort of ass-thinking that led Dunderdale to offer to pay the federal government to keep the jobs in the province.

That’s despite a point Dunderdale acknowledged during the scrum, namely that the federal government has been accused of offloading federal responsibilities for years.

It’s despite the fact that when pushed on it, Dunderdale had to admit that taking over the role 12 months from now is a big, complex issue that needs further study.

And that’s despite the fact that this is clearly a federal responsibility. 

Think about it:  if there’s a tragedy that can be linked to the decision, Harper and his people will wear it. That risk alone would cause politicians to run from the decision. odds are that if they’ve already ruled out the idea that where a phone gets answered won’t materially change the time it takes a helicopter to fly or for a ship to steam to a rescue site.

And if you look at the comments coming from this province since the feds made the decision, no one has yet pointed to how this decision would threaten lives.  Even Dunderdale hasn’t been able to explain simply and clearly how this puts lives at risk.

The best they’ve come up with is the rather silly claim that mainlanders can’t understand our incomprehensible dialect or that mainlanders might be too stupid or irresponsible to know which North Harbour someone might be talking about.

If a mainlander relied on such racist stereotypes of dumb newfies, we’d be manning the barricades and running up the battle flags. Why should we treat it any differently when locals use the same garbage?

Both of these arguments rely on preposterous claims. If you are to believe them, search and rescue professionals who already routinely deal with people from this province cannot understand their impenetrable accents or be bothered to learn what towns or headlands are where on the map.

If this was actually the case, then we could turn the former AbitibiBowater mill at Grand Falls-Windsor into a coffin factory the work would be that steady. Not only would the locals be drowning in droves but  so too would the Chinese, Filipinos, Bulgarians, Japanese, Russians, Portuguese and a world of other seafarers who don’t even speak English in the first place, let alone who have a local dialect and an accent to boot. and who pass our shores daily.

And when Dunderdale adds the laughable claim about the vast majority working on the water – check the labour stats – then you know that there is no comment too silly for Dunderdale to make.

Where these 12 jobs get done might be an important issue.  But Kathy Dunderdale knows the federal government will not change its decision.  As a result she knows the outcome is failure before she pledges to put this issue before all others on her agenda for dealing with Uncle Ottawa and fight it every second of every minute of every day in the full glare of the media who will be following it intently for the whole time.

What a better position could she be in with an election coming this fall?

We will get to see her evident political impotence. every day

The voters will be reminded of her poor judgment every day.

And Dunderdale runs the very serious risk of being goaded by her self-imposed impotence of having to ramp up the rhetoric to ever more ludicrous levels.

Yep.

Forrest Gump’s mom had it right.

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Experts warn of external threats to recovery

Along with population statistics, here’s another one you can bet the current provincial Conservative crowd won’t be holding out quite as enthusiastically as the fabricated version of Bank of Canada' governor’s remarks they were using until recently.

As the Globe reported:

Top policy makers indicated Wednesday that they are on heightened alert for a deeper crisis in Europe that spreads beyond Greece and, potentially, hurts Canadian banks or the wider economy. Though the direct exposure of Canadian banks to countries such as Greece is low, the Bank of Canada warned that Canada’s financial institutions are vulnerable through links to the United States and other countries that are much more exposed.

Those top policy makers include analysts at the Bank of Canada and federal finance minister Jim Flaherty.

The question that remains is what economic problems in the United States and Europe would do to demand for oil – our new chief export – and other commodities as well as what it might do to prices for them as well.  Anything that drops the price and the demand will also drastically affect provincial government revenues.

That won’t be good on a go forward basis, to use another of a recently famous politician’s famous phrases.  Since the provincial government doesn’t even have an imaginary protective bubble this time, that could make what one analyst forecasts as a bad deficit and debt situation get much worse.

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Like sands through the hour glass…

Adios John Hickey, the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost.

The ever-troublesome labradore offered a fitting tribute to Hickey as leaves politics.

The staunch defender of the Muskrat Falls megadebt project won’t like people being reminded of his position a decade ago when another Premier had a better deal, at least as far as the taxpayers of the province would be concerned.

labradore offers a copy of the letter then-Goose Bay mayor John Hickey sent to then-Premier Roger Grimes conveying the position of the town council on Grimes’ potential deal.

Among Council’s reasons for rejecting the development of Gull Island and Muskrat Falls together without saddling the province with massive debt, jacking up domestic electricity prices and shipping discount power to people outside Newfoundland and Labrador?

For starters, they wanted a written guarantee 500 megawatts of power would be available for development in Labrador.   In the Muskrat Falls plan, there is no written guarantee and the thing won’t produce enough power to ship to Nova Scotia for free, to the island and still give Hickey 500 megs for Labrador.  It’s not possible.

Then they wanted direct industrial development in the Lake Melville region from the project.  Again, the Muskrat Falls project offers exactly nada on that one.

Lastly, Council wanted to make sure that ALCOA would have what he termed a “competitive opportunity” to build a smelter in Labrador. 

Again:  goose egg.

Wasn’t Leo Abbass a member of Council back then?

Maybe someone should ask him if that 2002 letter still represents his resolute position.

 

 

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Dunderdale dunder-fail on SAR call centre

Kathy and Steve had a nice chat on the phone, but Stephen Harper’s biggest Newfoundland and Labrador fan couldn’t persuade her guy to change his mind about shifting a search and rescue call centre from St. John’s to the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax.

So much for raising expectations, Kath when you know you can’t deliver.

Luckily for the people of the province, Harper wasn’t interested in [Premier Kathy]* Dunderdale’s idiotic suggestion that the provincial government take over the call centre and pay to keep the jobs in this province. So much for that ass-thought.

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*  added for clarity.

Updated:  Premier Kathy Dunderdale will play out the last act in the bizarro local political drama that comes with telephone calls when she scrums with reporters on Thursday.  This should be a doozy.

And if you want a simple description of the Newfoundland political life cycle of the telephone call, refer to nottawa.  He relies on his considerable experience to map it out for you.  .

Population drops in NL again

Recent population figures from Statistics Canada suggest the recession is over and things are getting back to normal.

Population in Newfoundland and Labrador dropped in the last quarter primarily due to out-migration.

Regular readers of these e-scribbles will be familiar with the point.

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Cross Putin off your list

Add the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost to the list of provincial Conservatives who won’t be seeking re-election come the fall.

John Hickey won’t be running again, since apparently two terms are enough.  Did someone leave off the “to be pensionable” part of that? Your humble e-scribbler had him in the doubtful pile some time ago although last December he appeared to be readying for a run at federal politics.

So much for the story circulated to the ever-gullible last December that all incumbent Tories would be seeking re-election.

If you believed that you likely also believe that there was no December Deal to keep Kathy Dunderdale in place until after the next general election when the Tories will hold the real race to replace Danny.

Hickey will be remembered for many things, not including the photo, above, from The Labradorian.

In his most illustrious moment, though, Hickey launched a lawsuit against former Liberal leader Roger Grimes for comments Danny Williams made and attributed to Grimes.  The law suit died a quiet, but embarrassing death.

Don’t be surprised if Goose Bay mayor Leo Abbass seeks the Tory nod in the upcoming election.

As for the Liberals, Danny Dumaresque dropped a flyer in the district but has since started sniffing around seats on the island.  Among the most recent likely targets for Dumaresque:  Lewisporte and Tory incumbent Wade Verge. No word on another potential Liberal candidate in Menihek yet.

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Expectations

Having jacked expectations through the ceiling, Kathy Dunderdale better convince Stephen Harper to commit to halt the transfer of the jobs at the coast guard search and rescue co-ordination office in St. John’s to Halifax.

If she gets nothing, then she will bear responsibility for the failure.

The only worse outcome will be if harper takes Dunderdale’s commitment to have the provincial government pay for the federal operation.

Dunderdale and Harper will speak by telephone this evening, apparently but Dunderdale has already said she won’t be available to brief reporters on the call afterward.

Local media are hyping the crap out of it based on Dunderdale’s babbling in front of reporters on Tuesday.

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Belize dannys Fortis

Almost three years after Danny Williams’s Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador expropriated Fortis’ electricity assets in the province, the government of Belize has taken a leaf from Williams’ playbook and seized Fortis’ interest in Belize Electric Limited.

Fortis held a 70% interest in the company at the time of the seizure.

Compensation for the expropriation has yet to be determined.

In related news, Standard & Poor’s is warning the Belize government that it may downgrade the country’s credit rating in the wake of the move.  According to Reuters:

"The final details of the acquisition and its impact on the government's debt burden and fiscal flexibility are uncertain. However, based on the information currently available, we believe that there is significant likelihood that we could lower the ratings to 'B-minus' upon the conclusion of this transaction," S&P said.

In its statement, S&P said Belize's general government debt as a portion of gross domestic product is already a high 85 percent, with the interest burden around 15 percent of its revenues.

“The proposed bill would allow the government to take over Fortis's share, with an estimated book value of $100 million," S&P said, which noted Fortis holds 70 percent of the company's equity.

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Well did she know in advance?

The shipyard that supposedly had so much work it didn’t know what to do just laid off 250 workers.

Makes you wonder why the company dropped out of a lucrative shipbuilding contract and – equally – why Kathy Dunderdale took the news without batting an eyelid.

Did she know in advance?

And why exactly did they drop out of the multi-billion dollar JSS contract competition?

Say it ain’t so Update:  This story from voice of the cabinet minister certainly looks like we have a major problem at Kiewit, that the provincial government has known about the problems for some time, and that their only solution is to try and rush through a provincial government ferry contract to keep the yard open, at least in the near term.

So how long has the provincial government known about the problem?

How bad is it?

And why did the provincial government keep the story from the people who will likely be paying to keep the yard going?

The VOCM story before it gets disappeared:

The MHA for Grand Bank is questioning Peter Kiewit Infrastructure Company's commitment to the people of the Burin Peninsula. Labour Minister Darin King calls the layoffs at the Marystown shipyard unfortunate, but he says the government has been working studiously with Kiewit and the union to develop a new ferry strategy that could greatly assist the community's shipyard.

 

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Penis Envy

I’ll share a quote with you now from Canadian marathon runner Peter Maher that I found interesting: "Running is a big question mark that's there each and every day. It asks you, 'Are you going to be a wimp or are you going to be strong today?’"

My answer is I am going to be strong today, and looking around this room, I can see that’s your answer as well.

That’s a bit of Kathy Dunderdale’s speech to delegates at the NOIA oil and gas conference in St. John’s on Tuesday.

Odd choice of words, isn’t it?

Forget that the quote is actually only attributed to the Canadian-born marathoner.  Think about the implications of the words.  It isn’t about the internal struggle to find the inner strength to start a race and finish it or to challenge yourself to go that extra mile. It isn’t about growth and perseverance.

Nope.

Every day she faces the choice between being strong or being a wimp.

Of manning up or being a pussy.

Dunderdale used a quote that is almost self-consciously masculine in a room where most of the people in it were men.

Men don’t talk like that, of course.  Well, not unless they want to make sure everyone knows how insecure they are. 

It’s like sex.  The more you talk about it, the less you are getting it.

Strength is like power.  If you talk about it, you don’t have it.

Dunderdale talks like that a lot.

She likes to draw distinctions between herself and others.

Stark opposites.

Opposition politicians are too stunned to understand something, but she is smarter.

She could on the steps of Confederation Building be ranting and raving or throwing stones but she is better than that.

It’s part of a theme she’s been on since earlier this year:  Kathy is different.  Politicians need to do that, of course. You win elections by being different from the others in the pack. This is different. These comparisons are something she does even when it doesn’t really fit with the topic.

That’s what tells you she has a need to send this message over and over.  The thing you start to wonder after a while is why she feels that need.  Conventional political wisdom is that she is safely enthroned as both Premier and leader of the provincial Conservatives.  And while her polling numbers are dropping she is – supposedly – way ahead of her rivals. She shouldn’t be feeling quite safe.

Strength and power and the need to point out how she is different are for Kathy Dunderdale what books and reading are for Sarah Palin and Danny Williams.

How she is different might not always be clear, even to Kathy, but she goes to great lengths to point out she is something-er than someone else.

And that’s really part of the problem for Dunderdale.  She winds up defining herself in terms of the person or group she’s dealing with at a particular time. What you are left with is the sense that Kathy Dunderdale cannot define her ideas, her values and her approach to leadership on her own.

The result gets convoluted sometimes like it did back in February when she was the same as Danny but different all at the same time, the more she talked. 

You can see this need to bring up inappropriate comparisons if you can stand listening to her entire scrum with reporters outside the NOIA conference.  It’s only seven and a bit minutes in total.

Dunderdale starts out by saying she and her staff are pressuring the Prime Minister as hard as they can. Then she tosses in the comparison about how she could be scoring political points by grandstanding but she isn’t.  That’s a gratuitous line but note that it’s there as the second point.

Then Dunderdale goes into a list of how she and her staff and getting a message through to this one and that one in Ottawa.  She’ll keep it up as long as she keeps it up.  The goal is to get the federal government to reverse the decision to close a local search and rescue call center.

Then Dunderdale says that while all pressuring and pushing to get the feds to change their mind is going on, she and her officials are talking with Uncle Ottawa about taking over this supposedly essential service from the federal government. Well sort of taking it over, maybe, if they don’t mind,  because in between the message sending thing, they are doing the idea thinking thing.

But having now started out by saying the whole thing was about getting the feds to keep the thing running here in the province, Dunderdale says that right at the moment they are on another tack entirely.  “The piece is, though,” says Dunderdale, resorting to her trademark  way of using jargony words to try and sound smarter, that she and her officials are trying to find solutions.

Then she’s back talking about how she could be out there throwing rocks at the federal government but she is thinking long-term here. And all that dissolves in a speculative bit about how medievally stone-throwingy she might get when or if the federal government doesn’t do one or maybe both of the two clear messages Dunderdale is sending despite the fact the Prime Minister won;t return her telephone calls.

All those shifts from the conciliatory and diplomatic to the possibly blustering and two different, contradictory policy threads in about the time it takes to hard-boil an egg.

Amazing, isn’t it?

If nothing else changes between now and next October, Kathy Dunderdale will likely keep her current job.  How long she keeps it would be anyone’s guess.  If you want to put a bet, try something measured in months, not years.

But once the campaign starts,  Kathy is going to have a hard time of it up against any politician – leader or not – if she can only define herself by reference to who she is talking about at any given moment.  And in a televised debate up against two different leaders with different styles, Kathy might get herself into an even greater identity crisis than she seems to be having already.

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Kremlinology 36: Thinking with your ass

We’d all like to think that political ideas come out of politicians’ heads after careful thought and lots of research.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, government ideas tend to spring from the ass.

A whole bunch of people in the province are not happy with federal plans to close a coast guard emergency call centre and shift the work to the Joint Regional Search and Rescue Centre in Halifax.  Those people think the federal Conservatives pulled that idea out of someone’s ass.

Organized labour in the province is screaming blue murder about the decision.  The opposition parties in the provincial legislature are raising a stink.    They wanted to have an emergency session of the legislature and pass a resolution condemning the action.  Kathy wouldn’t do it.

Meanwhile, Premier Kathy Dunderdale has been taking her time trying to figure out out to get in front of this issue politically while not pissing off the guy on whom she is dependant for a loan guarantee to help finance her mega-debt project slash election gimmick, better known as Muskrat Falls.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale told reporters last week that someone in her office was trying to get a telephone call through to the Prime Minister. 

And a week later, she had to stand in front of reporters and tell them she was still trying to speak with her pal Steve on the telephone.

Well, either that or arrange a meeting whichever came first.

But on that most 19th century of technologies?

Nada on the telephone hooking up thingy.

The message is getting through, though, Kathy assures us.

And pressure is being applied using that passively voice sentence.

How, exactly is it getting through asked the brazen fish broadcast host Brian Callahan of fish minister Clyde Jackman?  No call.  No meeting.  How is the word getting through from the provincial government to the federals?

Jackman didn’t know.

He just said we’d all know soon what the feds decided to do for sure on the call centre. 

Now just to put that in perspective for those unfamiliar with anything that happened in the world before say 1999, that isn’t the way these things work usually. 

Even in the darkest hours after the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, Brian Mulroney would still answer the phone even if he knew Clyde Wells was on the other end. 

The day Igor ripped through the province, Stephen Harper called Danny Williams to offer up whatever help Dan-o wanted.  That’s right.  Dan didn’t even have to wait to get his call returned.  he got one free from Steve.  Now Dan might have reportedly said no thanks because he didn’t want Peter Mackay to horn in on the credit for saving Danny’s bacon, but at least he actually did get the Prime Minister himself on the horn.

So Kathy’s message obviously isn’t getting through to the federal government on anything.  Her loan guarantee is looking a bit more dodgy than before, she doesn’t really have anything to offer as a distraction and her poll results are still sucking worse than the St. John’s sewerage treatment plant on full reverse.

Not a good place to be in politically, especially for a party that used to thrive on issues just like this. 

So what to do?

Offer to take over some bits of search and rescue in the province from the federal government.

Never mind the constitution.

Never mind that for decades provincial premiers have been fighting to keep the feds from dumping their responsibilities into provincial laps free of federal charge.

Never mind the cost to the public purse.

Never mind the fact mismanagement by Kath and her predecessor have left the government in a rough financial spot despite unprecedented government revenues  such that the next decade could make everyone look longingly on the 1930s.

Never mind, even, that Kath and her mates buggered up the Igor thing that looked suspiciously like an emergency of the searching and rescuing type so that you’d wonder if they could actually find each other in the dark, in a closet with both hands and a flashlight.

No.

Faced with being outflanked politically by her local opponents, Kath opted to show how much she is different from every other politician in a long, sorry line of politicians in this province.

She decided to think with her ass.

In the past week, she could have fired off a strongly worded letter to Ottawa.

She could have sent a fax to Peter Penashue, the regional minister who is also the intergovernmental affairs minister.

She could have told reporters that she had made clear the views of her government that this was just not on.

When asked about it, she could have gone for the sophisticated answer and pointed out that the loan guarantee was another issue and that she would always look out for the best interests yada, yada, yada.

Instead, she opted for the ass-thought.

And to make matters worse, Kathy blathered on in public to reporters about her blatant political impotence by telling them that she has been a week trying to figure out how to get Steve to call her back but without success.

You don’t have to look at her possible motives for offering to take federal responsibilities off their hands and pay for them with provincial cash to boot.  Nor do you have to look very hard to find the considerable numbers of flaws in her political bungling of what should have been a relatively small political issue.

What you can see pretty clearly is that Kathy Dunderdale and her political staff came up with this idea on the fly in a desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something on the issue.  All they’ve really done in the process is show seasoned observers that they really don’t have a clue.

It is also pretty clear that they really don’t have any sense of direction, generally.  That’s not surprising, mind you, given that when Danny did a runner, Kathy was only supposed to keep the office warm for a few months until his permanent replacement showed up. They’ve been coasting for a while.

But you would think that when the governing Tories decided to keep Kathy on a bit longer than originally planned, they’d have given her a set of ideas and some people who could actually manage these sorts of issues for her. That’s what experienced, seasoned political parties should be able to do after only seven years in office.

Should be able to do, but can’t in this case.

And just other other governments that couldn’t manage the small stuff, they went to the usual repository of Newfoundland political brilliance:  the ass.

After a mere seven years in office.

Not a good sign.

Not a good sign at all.

- srbp -

US has surplus electricity

A conference in Halifax last week heard a tale of electricity demand in the United States that you certainly aren’t hearing from proponents of mega-debt projects north of the border.

Massachusetts-based consultant Danielle Powers said that the New England states have enough capacity to meet anticipated demand in the near term.  At the same time, Powers said the situation could change if up to 8500 megawatts of existing generation in the United States wound up out of production.

But still:

"When you look at (natural gas) prices right now, I don't know how the case is made financially to bring the resources in," she responded. "In the near term, unless I'm missing something, I don't see it working."

Price seems to be the key.  Another American consultant quoted in the same New Brunswick Business Journal article put it the same way.  John Kerry is policy director for the Conference of New England Governors:

"There will be, at some point in the future, the need for reasonably priced Canadian power," he said at the Atlantic Power conference. "The lower the price, the greater the chance they will purchase Canadian power."

Something says Kerry wouldn’t think that 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour plus wheeling charges through three Canadian provinces and up to five American states will wind up with “reasonably priced” power in New England.

- srbp -

This week has 22 e-mails

The controversy over the provincial government’s bungling of the emergency response to Hurricane Igor got a bit more curious on Monday when labradore released a series of e-mails he obtained from the provincial government under access to information laws.

The e-mails document a part of the record of how Danny Williams wound up recording a segment of This Hour has 22 Minutes the same week as the disaster.  Coupled with documents released to the Packet in April, they undermine the provincial government’s contention that they needed three or four days to figure out how bad things were before they asked the federal government for assistance.

CBC was originally scheduled to record the Williams’ appearance on September 21.  They put that off until later in the week, but here’s where things get really interesting. 

At 11: 00 AM the day of the storm, Danny Williams’ publicist sent an e-mail to an unidentified person at 22 minutes  that included the following comments:

We've cleared his schedule as we will be going around the province visiting sites. Destruction is widespread already and the storm hasn't even hit full force yet.

At that point they knew things were very bad.  They also knew they’d be “visiting sites”.  They obviously didn’t need to assess the situation since the provincial government’s emergency response organization had all sorts of sources of accurate information on roads, hospitals, schools and anything else going on in the province.  Williams and his crew were planning the standard politicians’ sight-seeing tours of disaster areas.  

Now the official explanation for the four day delay in calling in federal assistance is that the provincial government needed to figure out how bad things were and what they needed to do.    Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale, Tom Hedderson,  the municipal affairs minister at the time and the current municipal affairs minister, Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien all have tried on variations of that same argument.

But before noon on the day the storm hit, the Premier’s Office already knew that “Destruction” was widespread.

Later on the same day,  Williams’ publicist wrote this:

State of emergency being declared in a few places already. Major damage and flooding. The place is a mess.

But what really stands out is what you get when you cross reference the comments by Williams’ publicist with situation reporters released to the Packet by the federal government about its response to Igor. For some reason they are on the CBC’s website and not available from either the packet or its daily big-brother, the Telegram.

In an e-mail giving the situation as of 13:15 PM September 21, a federal situation report contained this note:

Highway infrastructure is profoundly impacted. Of all events, Fire and Emergency Services NL (FESNL) has stated that this is by far the worst disaster that they are facing.

The note refers to a death that happened.

But bear in mind this information came to the federal emergency co-ordination team from the provincial government’s team at FESNL.  Public Safety Canada and the National Defence both had liaison officers at the FESNL emergency operations centre to make co-ordination easier.

So if the provincial government had such a handle on the scope of the problem, why did they hesitate to call in extra resources?

Good question.

So far there hasn’t been a good answer.

- srbp -