Williams set to offer comms director plum patronage job before he quit #nlpoli

In his final days as Premier, Danny Williams was poised to offer Elizabeth Matthews  - his communications director – a plum patronage appointment at the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

A copy of a draft letter for Williams’ signature, included in a package of information released under the province’s access to information law, bore the date “December 2, 2010”.  It concluded:

It is with pleasure that I offer you the position of full-time vice-chairperson of the C-NLOPB, upon expiry of the term of office of the incumbent.  Should you accept this offer of employment your appointment would take effect on January 1, 2011 for a term of six years in accordance with applicable legislation.

The letter turned up in the package as an attachment to an email exchange between officials of the Cabinet Secretariat at 10:00 AM December 3.

Williams’ last day on the job was December 3. The letter was never sent, apparently.

Usually, officials prepare a letter making a job offer of this type only after senior officials in the Premier’s Office have reviewed the appointment and discussed it – even if informally  - with the prospective appointee.  There would be no reason to draft such a letter unless the appointment was finalized.

CBC Provincial Affairs reporter David Cochrane broke the story of Matthews’ appointment on March 2, 2011, some three months later.  He didn’t indicate when the provincial government had made the decision to put Matthews forward. It doesn’t appear Cochrane knew.

Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner issued a brief statement the following day confirming that the provincial government had nominated Matthews.  Skinner didn’t attach any dates to the decision. 

The Liberal Opposition did put dates on it. 

On March 11, Opposition Leader Yvonne Jones issued a news release that included a letter from Skinner to his federal counterpart, Christian Paradis.  The date on the letter was December 21.  It included a three-paragraph biography for Matthews.

In a brief news release later on March 11,  Skinner confirmed the letter to Paradis had been sent.

Due to a gaffe in the Liberal office, the Liberal release went out originally without the letter attached. Before the Liberals had a chance to send out the letter, Cochrane posted a comment to Twitter:

(March 11) “Where are you getting this from? Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly. She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment. Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”. [Emphasis added]

That claim – that Matthews “had never been told of any appointment” - became a key element of the story in subsequent days.  In hindsight, another part of that comment now stands out as well:  “Do Libs have draft letter never sent?”

Matthews withdrew her nomination on March 14.  In a prepared statement, Matthews made no  mention of the discrepancies in versions of events surrounding the appointment.  She blamed her decision on efforts by Liberal leader Yvonne Jones to politicize the issue of her appointment.

In a scrum with reporters the next day, Skinner apparently picked up on the idea Matthews had no knowledge of the appointment.  He told reporters that an unspecified breakdown in communications led to a situation and as a result, Matthews apparently didn’t know about the appointment.

CBC’s online story of Skinner’s comments began with this sentence:

A communication breakdown left Elizabeth Matthews in the dark about her appointment to an offshore petroleum board late last year, according to Newfoundland and Labrador's Natural Resources minister.

It included Skinner’s comment:

"I signed the letter. I sent it off and I assumed that the rest of it would have happened as it should have happened, but I'll find that out. There was a communications breakdown in that regard," Skinner said Monday.

The Telegram version of the scrum appeared on March 16.  It included a comment from Matthews that she “received an [Order in Council] in the mail in January at which point I contacted the Premier’s Office to inquire about its contents.”

That’s not exactly the same as saying she had “never been told of any appointment”, as Cochrane tweeted on March 11. 

Matthews’ comment to the Telegram is vague about whether or not she’d known of the appointment before she got the letter in January.  At the time, some might have interpreted her Telegram comments to mean Matthews had been surprised to receive the letter in January and called the Premier’s Office for an explanation.

Existence of a draft letter for Williams’ signature addressed to his then-director of communications as well as the document trail released to the public changes all that.

The package of documents containing the December 2 letter also contained an e-mail exchange between Matthews and the chief of staff in the Premier’s Office and the chief of staff and the deputy minister of natural resources in which Matthews’ forwarded a copy of her resume.

The date of the e-mail exchange was December 21.

Cabinet met the same day to decide on Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board, among other things. 

Cabinet Secretariat issued an order in council, left,  as the official record of the decision. 

Elizabeth Matthews’ name is on the distribution list for the order.

That’s also the day Skinner wrote his federal counterpart advising of the Matthews appointment.

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Political Gender Issues

Astonishing as it may seem to some, the supposedly progressive political party in Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t the one with the most women as candidates nominated thus far in the current election.

Nope. 

The Grits are tops with one in three.

The Dippers are in second place with one in five.

Both those parties have candidates in place in about half the total number of seats up for grabs in October.

The incumbent Tories have all their candidates in place and, at last count, they had something like one in eight who were women.  Six women among 48 candidates, and all of them incumbents who have been in office since at least 2003.

That’s rather curious development for a province where, not so long ago, people were marvelling at the fact that all three political party leaders in the province were women. 

Of course, no one seemed to notice that neither of them got their job as the result of an open competition, but that’s another subject for another day. Let’s just say women in politics is a touchy subject for some people.

For now, try pondering the fact that if the conventional wisdom holds, we’ll probably wind up with the same women – let alone the same number of them – back in the House after October as we have right now.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Yeah.

Right.

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9/11/01

 

On missing the point

Mark Watton has been leading the charge against sections of the province’s election laws that allow people to vote when there is no election.

On the face of it, the idea is bizarre.

You’d think it is obviously bizarre.

And yet a political science professor at Grenfell in Corner Brook managed to miss the point entirely in a recent interview with The Western Star:

Meanwhile, Mario Levesque, a political science professor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, agrees it is a necessity which adds to the democratic process. However, he also says there are adjustments required to address issues around voting prior to the nomination of candidates.

“That is kind of an irritant, but is difficult to address,” the professor said. “It is pretty difficult for all political parties to have candidates in all the ridings two months before the actual election, and sometimes it is three weeks before an election date before a party has a candidate in that riding.”

For starters, Levesque confuses the idea of having allowance for people to vote who might be away from the district or the province on polling day with the idea that they could vote when there is no election.

His comment about parties having candidates in place also isn’t an issue.  Unless a candidate meets the conditions set out in the provincial Elections Act, he or she simply isn’t a candidate. And those are the rules that actually don’t put candidates in place until after the election writ is issued. 

Even then, the candidates are not finally – legally – in place until a week or so before voting day.

Seems ludicrous, then to put it mildly, that people are given ballots to vote two months or so before a likely election date.

This is not really the kind of stuff that should tax people’s faculties. In Levesque’s case, he obviously understands how things work, he just mixes them up.

He also skips over the fairly obvious point that the balloting system affects both voters and those seeking office alike.  The best illustration of that recently would be the case of John Baird.  He originally planned to run for the Liberals.  Then Baird walked away from the Liberal Party  and plans to run as an unaffiliated candidate.

That means that under the law as it stands right now, all those people who want to vote for John Baird can’t. And anybody in a situation like that who had cast a vote for the party because the system didn’t let them vote any other way would be – in effect – disenfranchised if they cast a ballot a couple of months before voting day and before their man switched parties.

Then there’s the scenario that Watton spelled out in the Western Star article.  What happens if an election in a particular district comes down to a difference in vote totals that is smaller than the number of special ballots cast upwards of two months earlier.  That is, people voted one way based on assumptions at the time but then would have voted another way later on.

You see there is a reason why voting takes place on a single day and in the case of advance polls, not much before that one day.  Absentee ballots are handled differently but the process often involves mailing the ballot back.  As long as it is postmarked no later than the actual voting day, the vote can be legally counted even if the mail system stakes a week or more to get the ballot to the voting officials.

Special balloting In Newfoundland and Labrador actually ends well in advance of polling day and not long after the last day for nominating candidates under the election law.  In other words, the system in this province pushes absentees away from voting for individual candidates and forces them to make choices before everyone else and before they actually have a chance to weigh fully what choices they actually have.

Absentee ballots aren’t a bad idea.  In fact, they are a very good idea since they enfranchise people.

The problem comes with the peculiar way the law is written in Newfoundland and Labrador.  That could be fixed with a few simple changes.  Those changes would be easy to make, just as easy in fact as the original changes were made that created the mess in the first place.

The problem is that the politicians aren’t interested in changing the system. 

And why should they?

It favours the people who already have the jobs.

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SRBP on Radio: Muskrat Falls

For those who missed it, here’s the audio from your humble e-scribbler’s Labour day call to Open Line.

h/t to Dave Adey who has been relentlessly documenting Muskrat calls to OL among other things.

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Traffic for September 5 – 9, 2011

ya know that something is going on when the traffic at ye olde e-scribbles starts jumping up by 25% from the previous month.

And that’s a real 25%, not an hyper-torqued NDP 25% that is actually just one percent. 

If you want to see more on  the story of the NDP’s deceptive news release on small business taxes, it hit the Number 8 slot on the top 10 Bond posts for last week, as chosen by the readers themselves.

Lots of “D”s in the Top 10 last week, including Danny, Desperation,  Donations,  Duff and Doyle, as in Republic of.  Even without putting the words in the headline lots of people found it and likely had a little chuckle as they went.

The week after Labour Day turned out to be highly charged politically and if the trend holds this will be one of the more interesting fall seasons in recent times.

So in case you missed these posts during the week, settle in and enjoy what caught everyone’s attention here at SRBP last week.

1. RCMP investigating SNC Lavalin officials over corruption allegations
2. And he is known by the company he keeps…
3. Democracy Watch:  Duff’s guff
4. Dateline:  Desperation, Newfoundland
5. The Joy of Political Giving:  punch in the bake edition
6. Danny, Gary and Steve:  old inconsistencies die hard
7. Rideout tags Tories for election pork-fest
8. The Politics of Cynicism;  even worse than thought edition and What you can see at the horse race…
9. The Joy of Political Giving:  Look for the union label
10. The Joy of Political Giving:  If you want to build it, they will give

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Aylward questions Nalcor on choice of consultant

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward has sent a letter to Nalcor boss Ed Martin asking about Nalcor’s use of Navigant as the consultant the company chose for a review of the Muskrat Falls project.

The Liberals posted the letter to the party’s campaign website on Tuesday but apparently didn’t give it wide circulation.

In the letter, Aylward asks;

1. When was Navigant retained to produce a report on the Muskrat Falls power project?
2. What is their investigative mandate?
3. Who, outside of Nalcor direct employees and contractors, will be consulted?
4. When and where will Navigant be conducting public consultations, if any?
5. What is the contract price?
6. When is the report contracted to be received?
7. When will the report be issued to the public?
8. How many other “independent reports” hitherto unknown to the public have been  commissioned or are currently under way?

Aylward criticises Nalcor for keeping the name and mandate of the consultant public until after the release of the joint environmental review panel.

The provincial Tories have used Navigant before on politically-driven projects.

In 2006, then Premier Danny Williams used Navigant to try and audit the books on the Hibernia project as part of his war with the oil companies over the collapse of Hebron talks in April that year.

Two years later, Williams used Navigant in his war against AbitibiBowater that led to the botched expropriation of AbitibiBowater properties in the province. Then natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale told the House of Assembly in early 2010:

Mr. Speaker, there was in fact approximately $8 million spent on professional services related to the expropriation of Abitibi by my department last year. We paid a substantial amount of that money to CRA, to Navigant Consulting, to Weirfolds, a legal firm, and Enda Searching, to do particular work around the expropriation itself, around land registry consolidation; CRA, particularly with regard to the remediation requirements in Grand Falls. That work informed our budget, Mr. Speaker, where we budgeted over $9 million to deal with the mess left behind by Abitibi in Buchans.

Dunderdale and Williams hid their mistake in expropriating the Grand Falls-Windsor mill and other environmental liabilities until early 2010 when they admitted to the shag up under questioning in the provincial legislature.

Dunderdale told the legislature in 2010 that when the government realised the cock-up they considered introducing legislation to retroactively un-expropriate the properties they’d seized as part of the screw up.

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Dateline: Desperation, Newfoundland

Finance minister Tom Marshall called the province’s major radio talk show on Thursday to promote the Muskrat Falls power project.

He quoted from a book by Wally Read and L.J. Cole.  The quote runs down opponents of the Bay d’Espoir megaproject in the 1960s as ignorant, blind or politically motivated people of dubious character who lacked the foresight to undertake the marvelous project.

You can hear the whole call courtesy of Dave Adey.  Before going any farther, take a second and listen to Tom in all his persuasive majesty.  Then, when you are finished being awestruck, come back to these scribbles.

Fair warning:  if you are awestruck at Tom, you’ll be gobsmacked by the end of this post.

You were warned.

Now if you don’t know – and your humble e-scribbler didn’t know until he went looking – that book was in fact no book at all.  It was a 28 page pamphlet produced by the Newfoundland and Labrador Power Commission in 1972 to mark the inauguration of their new power plant at Bay d’Espoir. The Commission was the forerunner of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.

And if the words Marshall read sounded familiar, if they sounded as though you heard them before, if it struck you that the language used by Read and Cole resonated in a way you may have heard before, if the sentences seemed to come with bow tie and dark-rimmed spectacles, then you would be right.

The visionary Read and Cole were praising, the champion-in-chief of modernity, progress, and the future of His People, the one who stood out among the one or two the authors obliquely referenced in the text was none other than the Only Living Father of Confederation at the time.

Yes, Joe Smallwood.

So right off the bat, you have a fellow who got his current job as part of a crowd who campaigned against foolish megaprojects, gigantic wastes of money and enormous give-aways quoting favourably about the fellow who was chief among their targets.

And the fellows of low character and small minds the two others lambasted were Marshall’s political predecessors in the provincial Conservatives.

And if the full story be told, Tom probably campaigned for some of them and fulminated against Smallwood himself four decades ago.

Now if you are feeling a bit weak in the knees, we can all wait for you to catch your breath.

This is only the beginning.

You see, we are not dealing here with mere irony.

No.

That would be too common a theatrical device for people of such enormous vision and unparalleled ability.

This, my friends, is the stuff of Greek tragedy.

If someone among the current administration plucked out his own eyes after slaughtering his own father, bedding his sister, and marrying his own mother, you could not have anything more fundamentally twisted, demented and frigged in the head than Tories justifying themselves by borrowing words of praise for Joe Smallwood.

The whole thing enters another dimension when you realise that Bay d’Espoir was conceived and built in the 1960s not as a simple project to meet identified need as Tom Marshall would have you believe.

No, sir.

Bay d’Espoir was the centrepiece of yet another scheme by which the ratepayers of Newfoundland would give megawatts of power at bargain basement prices to create not one, not two, not three or even four or five, but something like eight new industries.

A paper mill for the east coast.

A hockey stick factory.

A refinery.

A petrochemical plant.

A phosphorus plant.

And on and on it went.

Joe Smallwood gives the thing a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of page 375 and the top of page 376 in I chose Canada.  After reciting the efforts to get companies to take power for the project, Smallwood writes on page 376:

The killer was the cost of the transmission line, but we agreed to build the line and charge Brinco nothing for it until after the enterprise had begun to make money.

You won’t find the full story of the Bay d’Espoir saga in the Read and Cole monograph of in Smallwood’s memoir.  You’ll get a much better sense of the dubious economics of the whole affair in a paper done in 2007 1974 by Peter Crabb.

Bay d’Espoir was supposed to do magical things.  Many of the same claims of magic Tom Marshall and his friends are using for Muskrat falls are the same ones Smallwood and his associates used for their mega-failures. As it turned out, the only new industry Bay d’Espoir attracted was the phosphorus plant at Long Harbour.  The scheme to attract new industry by providing heavily discounted electricity to industries was a complete bust.

Proponents of megaprojects grossly exaggerate the benefits and grossly underestimate the risks, in case you haven’t heard that one before.

Skip ahead 40 years and you have tom Marshall marvelling at how history is repeating itself.  Indeed it is, except not in the way Marshall supposes.  He and his colleagues are on the wrong side of the story.

Now just so that there is no one with any sense who thinks this is a conspiracy,  Randy Simms did a grave disservice to his audience during the conversation with Marshall when he tried to turn the arguments against Muskrat Falls into something they aren’t.

Undoubtedly, Tom Marshall and Kathy Dunderdale sincerely believe they are doing the right thing.  They have convinced themselves that this is the way to go, just as Smallwood did in the 1960s repeatedly.  Just as Brian Peckford and his crowd did with the cucumber factory. 

Desperation makes politicians – even normally sensible ones like Tom Marshall -  do strange things.

But make no mistake about it:  Muskrat Falls has absolutely nothing to do with a power need on the island just as surely as the Bay d’Espoir project and nothing to do with consumer power needs.  We know this because Nalcor could not produce figures that demonstrate their forecasts of an impending power shortage are real.

We also know it because this project has never, ever been justified on the basis of urgent need.

Tom Marshall and his colleagues pushed the development of the Lower Churchill in the beginning as a way to make money by selling power to people outside the province. 

Go back to January 2005.

Not a single peep about a need for electricity on the island.

The joint review panel found the same thing.

Muskrat Falls is not about need.

It is about want.

More specifically, it is about a political want.  Danny Williams wanted to cap off his term by saying he had a deal.  the economics of it had long since vanished.  The project – as originally planned – simply could not fly.  So he cut a deal for something that would look good in theory but that fails when anyone with half a clue looks closely at it.

Williams’ political want for an excuse to cover his exit became the political want of his successor to have something to tide her through an election.

We know this project is not driven by public need because neither Nalcor nor Tom Marshall nor anyone else pushing it ever more frantically down our collective throat has been able to give a simple, consistent and factual set of answers to a simple set of questions. They squirm and they dodge and they toss out red herrings and they attack their critics.

Tom and his associates spent two years with a hand-picked panel of five intelligent, sensible people looking over this Muskrat Falls thing. Those five people told Nalcor that the company had not made its case.

Not once, mind you, but twice.

Those five people on the joint federal-provincial review panel recommended giving the whole thing to someone without a vested interest in the project in order to make sure that all the evidence was there.

That’s as serious an indictment of Nalcor’s poor performance as one could get.

So the people Tom Marshall claims know so much about electricity needs and megaprojects couldn’t knock off a two year review process successfully on the crucial component:  the need for it in the first place to meet local energy demand.

And ultimately we know this project is driven by politics because of Tom Marshall’s obvious desperation that he would praise the Churchill Falls development and Bay d’Espoir as models to follow.

There is obviously no claim so ridiculous and no argument so transparent that Marshall and his colleagues would not toss it out to try and fight off the public worry about Muskrat Falls and what the project will do to electricity rates and the public debt.

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Joe Smallwood is looking down on this all.  He is sitting with John Shaheen and O.L. Vardy while Valdmanis plays waiter and freshens their drinks every now and then.  They are kicked back enjoying fine cigars and letting the sand scrunch between their toes.

And on that magnificent Panamanian beach beyond all time and care, Joe is shitting himself laughing. 

He is crapping his Bermudas at Tom and Kathy and Danny.

The rest of us could join him in the chuckle too.  We could bust open our pants with a hearty belly laugh. We could do that if only we were not faced with the embarrassing spectacle of Tom Marshall’s desperation.

We could maybe even manage a smile, were it not for the fact that – if the province’s Conservatives and New Democrats get their way -  we will be footing the bill for yet another megaproject give-away to rival the greatest ones of the last century.

And we will have to listen as our children and grandchildren as they ask us over and over again how some people could have become so utterly deluded that they could make the same miserable mistake twice inside a half century and use the first fiasco as proof of the genius in the second.

We could laugh except that some of us cannot explain it.

We only know that we will be paying for their folly.

Again.

- srbp -

And he is known by the company he keeps…

With the anniversary of 9/11 coming, people seem to have forgotten an invitation that went out to President Barack Obama to come to the province for the anniversary.

As the CBC blog put it in mid-2010:

It might be a long shot for the president of the United States to travel outside his own country for such an important anniversary, but as the saying goes, if you don’t ask, it won’t happen.

True, but when the guy what sent the invite is known to hang out with wankers  big-name Republicans, that might not help either.

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Rideout tags Tories for election pork-fest #nlpoli

Former premier Tom Rideout didn’t mince words about the orgy of pork-barrel spending his former caucus colleagues have been pushing in the run-up.

On a political panel on Tuesday morning, Rideout told the audience for CBC Radio’s West Coast Morning Show that the public mood has changed over the past few decades and that people view these things differently now than the way they used to.

Rideout, who said he liked to think he had an independent mind, said he thought the provincial Conservatives can go too far with their announcements, and re-announcements and announcements of the same spending for the third and fourth time.

Rideout singled out municipal affairs minister Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien, saying that O’Brien had acted “like a buffoon”’ by going around the province “dropping off fire trucks” all over the place.  Rideout said that he could have left it up to the local member of the House of Assembly.

The issue wouldn’t be enough to defeat the government, said  Rideout, but he did feel there could be a backlash in some areas.

Wow.

Rideout basically confirmed what your humble e-scribbler has been picking up for months from all around the province.  Lots of people are miffed for lots of reasons.  The blatant pork-barrelling is just the latest thing.

The fire trucks have become a twisted symbol of the Conservative’s old-fashioned political mentality.

What’s really startling here is that Rideout openly laced into his political colleagues and tagged one minister in particular.

That’s a huge sign that the provincial Tories are not the invincible political behemoth they once were no matter what the townie media would want to read into CRA’s always dubious poll results.

Stable political environment? 

Try not to pee your new back-to-school pants no matter how hard it is to stifle the guffaws.

Kathy Dunderdale did say she thought the poll suggested the polling numbers had stabilised but that was just because the Tories have been in a pretty sharp decline for most of the last year.

But with the Tories having the support of 40% of respondents to a recent poll and the opposition parties at 18% and 16%, it wouldn’t take much to give Kath and Fairity a visit from the Old Hag.

There’s more to it than fire trucks. O’Brien could well be a liability in other parts of the province, too,  becoming the poster-child for perceived political arrogance in the face of some fairly obvious cock-ups over the provincial government’s response to natural disasters.

On the Great Northern Peninsula there are other issues.

On the northeast coast there are others.

Still more on the Burin peninsula and in central Newfoundland.

And then there is the threat of Muskrat Falls.

Look around.

The mood is anything but settled.

Rideout is right:  it might not be enough to bring down the government yet.

But when a prominent Tory takes such a smack at other Tories as Rideout did this past Tuesday morning, it is enough to think things in this province  could get quite a shake in October.

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There’s no greater fraud than a promise not kept … Goose Bay version

While one can argue about frauds and unkept promises, there’s certainly no greater laugh riot than listening to defence minister Pete MacKay try desperately to explain to a gang of reporters in Goose Bay why the promised hundreds of soldiers, UAV squadron and all the other promises about the air base the federal Conservatives have made to win votes in the Big Land just haven’t materialised after all these years.

Apparently, the soldiers didn’t show because of Afghanistan.

Well, that was the reason., but now it turns out that while Afghanistan is over, it isn’t over, so there won’t be anything just yet.

And then there’s Libya.

Oh yes.

And floods.

Fires.

G8

G20.

And honestly darling that’s never happened before. 

Must be something on my mind.

Okay well, that last one didn’t show up at the newser but it was about the only bullshite laden excuse Pete didn’t fling at reporters.

The only thing funnier than that was MacKay attempting to explain why 300 jobs he’d just finished promising might or might not, possibly go to people living in Labrador, depending on things, sort of.

Incidentally, speaking of massive loads of political shite, did anyone see John Hickey at the newser? 

Someone could have finished off the Conservative open mike comedy-fest by asking the soon-to-be-pensioned Pavement Putin of the Permafrost what ever happened to his lawsuit against Roger Grimes for something Danny Williams said.

Hickey might have patted his suit jacket and mumbled something about leaving it in his other jacket next to the signed contract for road paving money from his Conservative buddies in Ottawa.

That would have brought the house down.

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Danny, Gary and Steve: old inconsistencies die hard

Apparently your humble e-scribbler isn’t the only one who found it amusing that an anti-Harper former premier is campaigning in pro-Harper country for a Conservative who doesn’t share the Old Man’s animosity toward the prime minister.

Well amusing here, but out there apparently it struck one Tory leadership candidate as politically stunned-arsed:

PC party leadership candidate Ted Morton says his friendship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper will soothe the relationship between Ottawa and Alberta, while saying rival Gary Mar’s political alliance with outspoken former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams won’t do the province any good.

“I don’t think what Gary’s done in the last couple of days of palling around with Danny Williams is the right step,” Morton told the Herald’s editorial board on Tuesday.

As for Williams, this is the same guy who tried to secretly interest Hydro-Quebec in buying an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill, putting redress for the Upper Churchill to one side, while at the same time publicly lashing their collective perfidious Franco-hides.

Of course, two years after Kathy Dunderdale pissed Danny and his crowd off by letting the secret slip, the local media have still not reported on the five years of secret talks with Hydro-Quebec.

Two years later.

Not a peep.

Apparently the facts don’t fit the official narrative.

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The Joy of Political Giving: Look for the Union label

The single biggest political donation, bar none in 2010 did not come from any private sector business.

It came from the United Steelworkers of America (Toronto, On).

$20,000.

That’s from the most recent figures released by the chief electoral office for the province. They gave the same amount in 2009 while in 2008, the United Food and Commercial Workers, of Washington DC gave the provincial NDP $10,000.

If you barred corporate and union donations to political parties in Newfoundland and labrador and forced the parties to raise money from individuals, the entire political party system would collapse.

At least then we could rebuild it an an infinitely more democratic basis than the one that sits there today.

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The Joy of Political Giving: if you want to build it, they will give

Construction, design and engineering companies gave the provincial Conservatives $239,725 in political donations in 2010, according to figures from the province’s chief electoral office.

Companies in the design, engineering and construction field gave a mere $3, 950 to the Liberal Party and none to the New Democrats.

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RCMP investigating SNC Lavalin officials over corruption allegations

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigating officials of the engineering firm SNC Lavalin, according to media reports on possible corruption charges related to a $1.2 billion bridge project funded by the World Bank in Bangladesh.

A spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed for Reuters that the police had executed several search warrants as part of the investigation.

The Canadian Press reported some of those warrants were for offices in Toronto.  CP also reported that:

The search was conducted following a request from the World Bank, which is investigating allegations of corruption in the bidding processes for the Padma Bridge Project.

The agency signed a deal in April to lend $1.2 billion to Bangladesh to build the bridge over the Padma river but said the money won’t be doled out until the investigation is complete.

Shares of the Montreal-based company dropped 4.3% in Tuesday trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

In March 2005, SNC Lavalin joined with the Ontario provincial government and Hydro-Quebec for a proposal to develop the Lower Churchill. 

While the Newfoundland and Labrador government rejected outright  that proposal and all others it received, the province’s energy corporation subsequently awarded SNC Lavalin the engineering, procurement and construction management work for construction of the Muskrat Falls dam and the link from labrador to the island of Newfoundland.

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.

The Joy of Political Giving: punch in the bake edition

It’s always interesting to see who gives to political parties. 

The province’s chief electoral office quietly released the 2010 summary of political donations by individuals and corporations.

Interesting to see that the production company for Republic of Doyle – doing business as Republic Season II Inc. – coughed up $250 for the provincial Conservatives.

And zip for everyone else.

The provincial government – currently managed by the Conservatives – coughed up much better for Jake and Malachy.  The province’s tourism department has dropped $7.5 million into the series since it started.

 

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What you can see at the horse race…

Horse race polls are the heights of political journalism* in some circles despite the fact they tell very little about what is happening in voters’ heads.

But since this is all there is, let’s look at the latest Corporate Research Associates poll and see what it tells us.

The provincial Conservatives are at 40% of respondents down from 44% in May.  The New Democrats are at 18%, up from 15% and the Liberals remain at 16%.  Undecideds are up to 26% from 23% in May.

The Liberals and NDP have swapped places but all of the changes are well within the polls horrendous margin of error of plus or minus 4.9%.

For those unfamiliar with the numbers, what you just got was the CRA numbers adjusted as a percentage of poll respondents, not as the very misleading percentage of decideds that CRA uses.

Let’s try some observations:

• All that Tory poll goosing – unprecedented in volume and timed to match CRA’s polling exactly – was a complete waste of time.
• You can also put the jack boots to any suggestion that the NDP had a Jack Boost and are on their way to replacing the Liberals as the official opposition. The Dipper torque machine will be in hyper drive but this is really nothing to write home about…yet.  The local NDP still have not produced the kinds of polling numbers you’d need to see in order to confirm any switching to the Orange as the leading opposition party.
• The Liberals experienced no change despite having a new leader for the entire polling period and attracting consistent news coverage for a week or so beforehand.  This poll should be a massive wake-up call for them. The only question at this point is whether or not they will hit the snooze button.

Now let’s try something a bit more complicated.

Even if you accept CRA polls, we know that there’s been a fairly steady slide away from the Tories for most of past 18 months.  Since Danny left, the slide stopped, reversed course and carried on downward again. 

We also know that CRA polling seems to pick up about 15 to 20 percentage points for the Tories that doesn’t show up at the polls.  Their Liberal and NDP numbers seem to be spot on or close enough for government work.

So here’s where the fun can start.  Shave 15 to 20 points off the stated Conservative number in the adjusted CRA poll results and you start to see Tory support down around 25% in May and 20% in August.

You can tell the Conservatives are edgy because of the orgy of politicking with public money they’ve all been doing.  Kathy Dunderdale has been campaigning already in areas where the Tories are perceived as being weak, namely the Burin Peninsula and central Newfoundland.  The Tories don’t have a lock on things in several places in the province and they know it.

So just for the heck of it, let’s imagine what might happen if the CRA results we see in August are pretty much what turns out in October.

Here’s one scenario run through an amazing, colossal supercomputing vote-a-tron machine kept hidden at a secret location, and offered here purely for entertainment purposes.

Using these most recent, corrected CRA results, you could still have the Tories forming a comfortable majority of more than 34 seats and as many as 37.  The Liberals would pick up seven or eight and the NDP could win as many as three or four.

Bay of Islands, Humber Valley, Isles of Notre Dame and Torngat Mountains would swing Liberal in that scenario.  The NDP could pick up Burin-Placentia West and Labrador West.

There could be close races in Grand Falls/Windsor-Buchans, Lake Melville, Placentia and St. Mary’s, St. Barbe and St. John’s East.

There’s still a long way to go before polling day and lots can change between now and then.  Voters appear to be ripe for a significant change.  Too bad none of the parties are offering one.

Just remember:  in the scenario we just walked through, the number of people staying home rather than voting would be at a historic high level.  No political party in Newfoundland and Labrador could crow about that.

Horse race polls - as they are normally used -  are no fun.

But if you look beyond the normal, all sorts of amusing things suddenly appear.

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Ya gotta chuckle update: CBC’s lede is classic:

The governing Tories are holding a strong lead heading into October's election, while the NDP is challenging the Liberals for second place, a new poll shows.

Gal-o-war is way out in front and Townie Pride is nose and nose with Western Boy for second.

Total crap, of course.

Like this line later on that adds more turds to the total crap offered up front:

The fact that the NDP, not the Liberals, are in second place appears to set the stage for a competition for the Opposition.

That would be true if it wasn’t for the fact that it is false.  The only way such a proposition floats is if having the second biggest number of decided respondents to a CRA poll question actually translates into seats.

It doesn’t, but that obviously isn’t important.  Twenty-four is bigger than 22 so the NDP must be in second and challenging for official opposition status.

To make matters much worse, CBC misrepresents CRA’s quarterly advertising poll as a tracking poll.  It isn’t. Tracking polls are repeated much more frequently than once every three months.  They are averaged over time to give a moving picture of trends.  As that 1998 link to a CNN piece notes, a daily tracker will show fluctuations for specific events on a daily basis.  A weekly tracking poll will wipe out some of those daily blips to show longer trending.

CRA’s poll once every three months, with only three questions and with a margin of error that borders on the laughable tells you very little worthwhile. In 2007, CRA missed the vote result for the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points.

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We can always sell it…

You can tell the gang pushing Muskrat falls are having trouble meeting the arguments against their scheme to jack up power rates and the public debt.

They are now talking about selling it off.

Yes, you got that right.

Selling it off.

Someone named T.E. Bursey wrote an opinion piece for the Telegram that appeared last Saturday.  He wrote:

Others have complained our portion of the $6.2 billion cost will add significantly to our public debt, which is true, but what is not mentioned is the financial community consider hydro assets to have a long-term resalable value in addition to revenue generation.

Now for starters, T.E. Bursey talks about “our portion” of the debt.  The taxpayers of the province are on the hook for the whole shooting match, give or take. Given the likelihood of massive cost over-runs, $6.2 billion would be the very smallest amount taxpayers of the province will owe.

But look at that bit at the end.

Long-term resalable value.

T.E. Bursey thinks Muskrat Falls is a wonderful idea, so wonderful in fact that if it turns out to be a gigantic bust we can hock it.

After all that’s the only reason you’d consider selling it again.

Or, in the way T.E. Bursey is talking about it here, if the provincial government and Nalcor couldn’t keep up the payments on the Great White Retirement Elephant, the creditors could hock it and get their cash back.

Oh yeah.

Selling it off in the event we went bankrupt.

There’s a thought to warm your heart.

Sounds familiar though.

Someone very famous talked about fattening up Nalcor and then selling off the assets for cash.  He said it April 2008 in the House of Assembly but the local media didn’t report that for the rest of the world to know:

…This particular government wants to strengthen Hydro, wants to make it a very valuable corporation: a corporation that will ultimately pay significant dividends back to the people of this Province; a corporation that perhaps some day may have enough value in its assets overall as a result of the Hebron deal and the White Rose deal, possible Hibernia deal, possible deals on gas, possible deals on oil refineries and other exploration projects, where hopefully we might be able to sell it some day and pay off all the debt of this Province, and that would be a good thing.

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Election 2011 and the Resource Curse

During the current provincial election you are going to hear a lot about natural resources and the need to spend the money that comes from it on all sorts of things.

The province’s New Democrats wasted no time in bitching that oil money isn’t being poured into rural Newfoundland and Labrador:

"We have to have a plan in rural Newfoundland to make sure that our fishery is maintained as the backbone of rural communities," she said.

The Dippers are also hopped up on spending the cash on education, mostly likely to help Nova Scotians get a cheaper education.

Of course, the province’s Conservatives have been on a spending spree these past couple of years.  They’ve dropping dropping money on everything anything from road paving to hockey rinks.

The provincial Liberals are on much the same sort of kick, especially for the fishery. All three parties want to take over federal responsibilities like the dozen or so jobs at a coast guard marine rescue call centre.  The local pols want to buy the jobs just to keep them in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In fact, if you look at most major issues in the province, the only disagreement among the three parties is how much is enough to spend.  On any given issue and any given day, the incumbent Tories will announce cash for something.  The other two parties will scream:  “not enough!”

Democracy Watch: Duff’s guff #nlpoli

Let’s get it simply stated up front:  Democracy Watch is the most inappropriately named organization on the planet, bar none.

They don’t watch for one thing.

And on the specific issue of fixed election dates in some provinces, they are bitching about something, for some unexplained reason but it evidently has frig all to do with democracy.

Here’s the quote you’ll find in a CBC story on the Prince Edward island election.  it’s Duff Conacher, the guy who founded Democracy Watch:

"There's no good reason to have it so early in the fall. It also gives an advantage to the ruling party because it allows the ruling party to, sort of, come off a summer when people aren't really paying attention and get right into a campaign and have it over before people really have a chance to determine whether they want to question the ruling party's ongoing governing."

The Canadian Press story elaborates a bit:

The group says the elections should be set back to the last Monday in October or even early November.

It says parents busy getting children settled in school in September have little time to participate in election campaigns or even pay them much attention.

University students are also tied up in September and may have difficulty establishing residency at their school location until later in October, which keeps them from voting.

Voter turn-out and people getting involved in campaigns has been a problem for years.  Long before fixed election dates.

And the idea that Mom can’t think about anything as important  as an election in October because the kids are back in school the first week of September is just laughably silly.

Establishing residency ain’t a problem either.  Elections offices in the country have had rules in place for decades to handle the thousands of people who move in between elections, fixed date or moveable feast.

If Duff Conacher has a problem with fixed election dates, he needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out what the real problem is.

One of the real problems he might consider is that Duff doesn’t actually talk about problems with democracy across Canada.  Take a look at the Democracy Watch website.  Search for “newfoundland and labrador” or any combination of the words.  Duff’s taken a few e-mails about the shenanigans going on in these quarters over the past decade so he ought to know what’s been going on.

Not a peep from D-watch.

You can hear the crickets chirping and there are no crickets in Newfoundland and Labrador, at least on the island.

No Duff Conacher either.

Not a peep about the ludicrous changes to the provincial election laws in 2004 that created, among other things, a situation where people can vote when there is no election and where independent candidates are disenfranchised.

Not even a whisper when the premier of the province muses aloud about the need to wipe out free speech in the province’s legislatures.

Nothing that Duff Conacher moaned about to the media this weekend is an issue caused by or made worse by having a fixed election in October.

Duff’s out there about fixed election dates, but basically all he is saying is pure guff.

And maybe if he spoke up about real problems affecting democracy across the country, people might take this more seriously.

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