Not to be outdone by the Dippers, the Grits and their leader Kevin Aylward will release their fisheries policy on Friday at 11:00 AM at the Delta Hotel in St. John’s.
This one should be a doozie.
- srbp -
15 September 2011
Good to the last vote: NDP paints own caricature #nlpoli
Your humble e-scribbler said it most recently just a few days ago:
The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs. Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.
The province’s New Democrats unveiled their fisheries policy on Thursday. It calls for increased government intervention in the fishery and an essentially open-ended commitment to public spending to keep plants open that are no longer financially viable or that are having problems due to excessive government intervention in the fishery already.
Here are some choice bits from the very brief NDP news release:
[NDP leader Lorraine] Michael says government must immediately reopen the plant [at Marystown] while the audit is going on, giving workers more employment.
The NDP wants the federal government to help fund the scheme in a perversion of the Employment Insurance system that looks more like make work than not:
In addition to demanding the immediate reopening of the plant, today the NDP is calling for the redirection of traditional Job Creation Partnership-type programs into the plant to ensure long term employment for fish plant workers.
And if that wasn’t enough, the New Democrats want to increase the government role in the fishery even more:
Michael also noted that since the plant is currently closed, the redfish concession given to OCI, which was agreed to by plant workers in order keep the plant open, should be revoked until the plant is reopened.
Now everyone should know that this specific release is aimed at a seat the NDP thinks they can win. But the principle behind it is exactly what your humble e-scribbler predicted. The NDP want to continue the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering begun decades ago with a return to the worst of the policies that helped create the current mess in the first place.
You couldn’t write a better parody of an NDP fisheries policy if you tried.
- srbp -
Privacy commish sues Dunderdale gov over “political” e-mails on gov comps, phones #nlpoli
The province’s access to information and privacy commissioner is taking the Dunderdale administration to court for its refusal to provide the commissioner with copies of e-mails on government computers and cellular telephones that government officials describe as “political in nature”.
Atlantic Business Magazine’s Rob Antle broke the story Wednesday afternoon on his blog at the magazine’s website.
At the heart of the suit are e-mails [that cover a period that would includes] related to accusations by erstwhile Tory leadership candidate Brad Cabana that a political staffer for then business minister Ross Wiseman attempted to bully him into quitting the leadership race. [There may be other political or party records involved as well.]
As CBC reported in January:
Cabana said the meeting with [Wiseman’s executive assistant Chick] Cholock happened in his [Cabana’s] home in Hickman's Harbour on Jan. 5 and his wife witnessed the exchange.
"They would marginalize me as a person. They would make me look like a quirk candidate and a glory seeker rather than someone who was really interested in the leadership and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador," he said.
An unidentified individual requested access to e-mails sent and received on government equipment by Cholock and Wiseman over three specific days in January. As Antle reported for ABM:
The Department of Business provided the requester with about five pages of records. But the department advised that other responsive records were “political in nature” and exempt from disclosure.
The privacy and access commissioner’s office contacted the department to investigate an appeal of the department’s decision. Under the province’s access laws, the commissioner has the legal right to review documents to determine if the department’s decision was correct.
The department refused the first request and ignored the second.
The commissioner then applied to the Supreme Court’s Trials Division for a review.
According to Antle, the provincial department appears to be relying on an earlier decision – currently under appeal – that barred the commissioner from reviewing many types of documents even if he did not subsequently recommend their disclosure.
In this case, according to Antle, the government is relying on a wide interpretation of a prohibition in the Access to Information and Protection of Personal Privacy Act that prohibits disclosure of constituency and political records.
That would be section 5(1):
This Act applies to all records in the custody of or under the control of a public body but does not apply to…
(c) a personal or constituency record of a member of the House of Assembly, that is in the possession or control of the member;
(c.1) records of a registered political party or caucus as defined in the House of Assembly Accountability, Integrity and Administration Act;
…
(
d) a personal or constituency record of a minister;
According to Antle the department described the records as “political”. There’s no indication of whether or not the department cited a specific section of the Act, as required by law, when refusing to disclose certain records.
In the past departments have used a fictitious category called ‘non-responsive” to cover information they did not wish to disclose but which they had no legal basis to withhold.
- srbp -
Updates: There are changes to this post to correct wrong information and some mistaken extrapolations of what Rob Antle wrote. Any errors and incorrect extrapolations are mine and mine alone.
Para 3: The initial request was a blanket one that covered a period of time. Some of the e-mails that are withheld and labelled political are likely related to the cabana affair however until someone reviews them, there is no way anyone knows specifically what they contain.
Para 10 (currently under appeal) deleted. Two decisions. One under appeal, the other not. Your humble e-scribbler confused the decisions.
Sections of the Act being cited by government are c and c.1 and not c and d.
There are no free lunches #nlpoli
Heard that before, right?
And it’s true.
Just because it is true - and most adults know it is true – doesn’t mean that all of them still aren’t willing to crave a free gnosh.
And not just lunches.
Free anything.
One of the oldest marketing ploys around is the old BOGOF: buy one, get one free. One of them really isn’t free. You just think it is.
Still.
See that BOGOF over there.
You know you want one.
Go on.
See? Told ya.
As in life, so in politics.
Free sells big.
Free education is the ticket for the province’s New Democrats in this election. They are aiming heavily at the student vote. The provincial Dippers hope young people will work voting miracles.
So they are promising them free education.
And when they’d finished announcing that policy, they announced that they would actually phase it in.
First would come more grant money.
And eventually education would be free.
Give the Dippers your vote, the one you got for nothing in the first place, and they will deliver you free education.
Eventually.
Like four or five years from now after you’ve finished your degree.
And only if they accidentally accumulate enough credits to form a government first.
But that’s just details.
Look.
Vote one, get one!
Free!
And free is really popular. You can tell because the Canadian Federation of Students - a completely impartial group the DNP loathes - released a poll on Wednesday confirming for those who remained doubtful that fully 84% of those surveyed in the province thought free tuition was an amazingly, wonderfully great idea.
Coincidences are wonderful too, aren’t they?
Anyway, this Harris-Decima poll is a penetrating insight into the friggin’ obvious. People love freebies.
Just so there’s no misunderstanding, you have to hand it to both the Dippers and the CFS for coming up with a bit of retail politicking that plays to a potentially important voter segment for them.
Education is one of the big issues for people. We know that from the quarterly government polling that some people have pried out of government under access to information laws.
And this fake free lunch thing is exactly the sort of freebie that can get some headlines, generate some interest and hopefully not cause people to think too hard. it’s simple enough that people can get the full impact of the NDP message in two words; free education.
They just have to pray to the deity of their choice – for those who aren’t atheists – that no one thinks about the whole thing for two long.
For starters, people would realise that the NDP have to win this election to collect on the vote sell-off implicit in the NDP offer. Since the NDP are actually campaigning for the Tories to win, that’s gonna be a hard one to collect.
Then there’s that whole free lunch thing. “Free tuition” would actually be paid out of tax dollars. And if it turns into increased cash to universities and colleges and grants to students for living allowances, that ‘free’ is going to get quite expensive.
Forget tax cuts.
Forget spending more on other areas people want to see action on, like health care.
And if that wasn’t painful enough, consider that at the heart of the provincial NDP policy, they are really talking about having taxpayers in this province give a free education to people from anywhere but here as well.
There really are no free lunches.
But marketing like the Dippers are using just wants you to turn off the rational part of your brain for a long enough to cast a vote.
Just think of the free education policy as the spindly super vacuum that runs on double A batteries but sucks better than a Dyson and didn’t break a few weeks after the Canada Post truck dropped it off.
You got two for the low price of $49.95 or whatever it was. You just had to pay the separate shipping and handling for both.
Same basic marketing premise.
- srbp -
@cbcnl using Nalcor lobbyist as election commentator #nlpoli #cdnpoli
CBC Newfoundland and Labrador will be using registered Nalcor lobbyist Tim Powers as an election commentator but Powers will apparently be commenting as part of a group of journalists and a political scientist, not as an identified partisan or lobbyist.
CBC’s David Cochrane will host the new TV program - On Point – that will air Sunday afternoons at 1:00 PM on the island during the provincial election. Cochrane described the show in an interview with St. John’s Morning Show host Anthony Germain on Tuesday.
Cochrane included Powers as part of a group comprising political scientist Amanda Bittner, Telegram editor Russell Wangersky and Germain. The show will also feature a partisan panel, made up of representatives of the three provincial political parties. Each Sunday show will also have a feature interview.
Great concept, great panel - including Powers - except for one enormous problem: Powers is in a blatant and undeniable conflict of interest. He’s a paid lobbyist for Nalcor. Work for Nalcor, you work – in effect for the provincial government. That means that the object of Powers’ lobbying work will play a central role in this campaign.
Blind people could see the ethical problems the CBC has created journalistically by including Powers on a panel discussing the provincial election.
Powers has been a registered lobbyist for Nalcor on the Lower Churchill project since at least 2007. According to the lobbyist commissioner’s office, Powers’ registration with the federal lobbyist registry expired in March 2011. He reactivated the registration in June 2011.
Powers has an impressive resume. A former political aide to John Crosbie, Powers holds degrees from four universities including the London School of Economics and Harvard University. He is well known as a media commentator on political issues.
But that doesn’t trump his obvious conflict of interest. The guy can’t even pretend to offer unbiased commentary in an election in which his client and his client’s sole shareholder are directly involved.
For some reason, Powers’ role lobbying on behalf of Nalcor in Ottawa is seldom mentioned publicly in his commentaries even when he speaks about his client’s business.
In the past, Powers has written about and commented on Nalcor issues on his blog at the Globe and Mail yet neither he nor the Globe disclosed his status as a registered lobbyist for the provincial Crown corporation in connection with the pieces.
Some people touted Powers as a potential successor to Danny Williams, but that was before the provincial Conservative Party sorted out its backroom deal for Kathy Dunderdale. He’s also commented about provincial politics, generally. In June 2011, Powers commented on the role of political myth in Newfoundland and Labrador.
- srbp -
14 September 2011
The first big political story of the campaign… #nlpoli
And it’s got legs.
- The story appeared first right here on Monday morning.
- CBC Monday night with a blockbuster interview with Williams. (Would he have done an interview with your humble e-scribbler?)
- CBC Radio Tuesday morning.
- VOCM on Tuesday, including the talk shows
- Dunderdale’s reaction Tuesday night on CBC and on VO
- NTV Tuesday night.
- The Telegram Wednesday morning, front page
- CBC Radio Wednesday morning on the political panel
- Can it go longer?
- Stay tuned.
- srbp -
The Arrogance Factor #nlpoli
Can Len Simms be far behind your humble e-scribbler asked back in June when deputy minister Ross Reid quit his job to run the Tory campaign.
Simms – a former Tory party leader – ditched his patronage appointment in 2007 to work the Tory campaign.
Both got reappointed to their jobs as soon as the Tories was back in office.
The answer to June’s question was an emphatic”yes” on Tuesday as the Tories announced Simms was quitting his job to play at politics for a bit.
For the purposes of analysis, assume both the existence of political arrogance and that the level of arrogance for an incumbent political party grows in proportion to the length of time it is in power.
Arrogance.
That’s about the only way you can explain the Tory sense of entitlements to treat public service jobs as partisan plums they can abuse in this manner, let alone to admit that Simms is a partisan hack and apparently see nothing wrong in what they are doing.
- srbp -
The Clinton Paradigm #nlpoli
Premier Kathy Dunderdale scrummed with reporters on Tuesday and right off the bat, CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates went at the Matthews fiasco.
Take a look at the entire scrum. It is worth the time and effort.
For starters notice that reporters don’t give a frig about the feud. that’s purely crap for Tories.
Reporters are on the core issue: what Dunderdale said last spring and what actually happened are two different things. They get on it and they don’t let go.
Note how quickly Dunderdale’s smile goes and then reappears in a fairly obviously forced way.
When asked about Williams role in the effort to get Matthews on the offshore board, Dunderdale claims Williams didn’t have any. She tries to pretend he was nothing more than a supplicant like all the others, tugging his forelock and begging the indulgence of the powerful. Would she please consider his friend for a favour or some such.
Her story is unbelievable. There’s no other way to say it.
Dunderdale is trying to deny Williams’ claims in order to assert her own authority. She doesn’t want to come off like John Turner.
So instead, she tries to take credit for the pork-barrelling herself and to dismiss Williams like he was just another schmuck.
Dunderdale goes on way, way way too long in her answers. That’s another sign, by the by, that what she is saying is likely at odds with the full story. Dunderdale seems to be trying very hard – too hard – to convince people.
Simple, straight, factual answers work best.
Q: Was Williams involved?
A: He made a recommendation.
That kinda thing
The fact Dunderdale can’t say it that succinctly is what looks to the reporters like blood in the water.
O’Neill-Yates shows her experience by not taking the bullshit – interspersed with fake smiles – and leave it there. Instead she goes back at Dunderdale, referring to a specific occasion when Dunderdale was asked several months ago about Williams’ role and Dunderdale said he’d had none.
Everything in the public domain since Monday makes false Dunderdale’s earlier claim that Williams had no role. Williams did have a role. He made a recommendation, as we now know.
When asked last spring, as Chris reminds her, Dunderdale said he had no role.
That isn’t true.
When she tries to downplay Williams role or claim he had no role, Dunderdale is using the Clinton Paradigm. That’s where Bill Clinton started to debate what the definition of “sex” was. To most people, making a recommendation was having a role. by denying the simple, Dunderdale looks deceptive. She may not be deceiving people. The problem is she looks like she is.
At that point, O’Neill-Yates reminded Dunderdale of the core problem the Premier now has: your credibility is garbage as a result of your own actions. The most recent revelations reinforce the earlier experience with this story: Dunderdale and her natural resources minister Shawn Skinner did not come clean then and they really haven’t come clean now.
Dunderdale even tries to claim that what she is saying now is the same as she has always said. And at 3:12, Chris immediately points out that Dunderdale’s comments are the same except for the fact that now Dunderdale acknowledges a conversation with Williams she never revealed before.
Dunderdale’s discomfort with the questioning is easy to see: her head bobs repeatedly and she shrugs and gestures emphatically. She carries on for a total of 13 minutes, repeating the same thing over and over: it was her choice, Williams had no role – even though he did. The more she sticks to what is at best a highly technical interpretation of “role” and insists she has always been consistent and clear when she hasn’t, the less convincing Dunderdale is.
Funny thing, that.
This is not the first time in her political career Dunderdale has been caught flatly saying something that wasn’t true and then denying it.
In December 2006, Dunderdale got into a pickle when a patronage appointee violated the Public Tender Act at the Bull Arm construction site. Dunderdale said one thing at one point and something dramatically different shortly after. To make matters worse., Dunderdale misrepresented what she’d previously disclosed and insisted she hadn’t.
Old habits die very hard, it seems.
- srbp -
Dipper candidate screwed by Tory election law mess #nlpoli
New Democrat candidate George Murphy is being accused of breaking the province’s election finance laws
Murphy’s chief financial officer sent out an e-mail soliciting donations for Murphy’s campaign in the upcoming election.
But that goes against section 282(3) that says only a registered party or a candidate can ask for donations. The problem is that as far as the Elections Act is concerned, Murphy isn’t a candidate because the election hasn’t been called.
People can vote for him, or his party and have been able to do so for weeks even though there is no election called.
But they cannot contribute to Murphy’s campaign.
Frigged up or what?
The election finance laws haven’t been updated since 1998.
The ridiculous bit about advance voting came along with fixed election dates under the Williams' Conservatives in 2004. But Williams and his gang had no interest in modernising the elections finance laws even though Williams promised to do just that as part of his election campaign in 2003.
There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept some famous politician used to say.
Anyway, if the CBC story on this is accurate the provincial elections office says it will insist that Murphy refund any money he raised.
Since a registered political party can legally fund-raise under the same section, the New Democrats need only change the organization doing the solicitation and everyone can happily reconcile the mess by fixed election date laws in an election finance section designed for a different situation.
No harm intended.
No real foul committed, especially when the provincial election laws are so woefully antiquated or - as in the special ballot provisions - are such an obvious mess.
What’s more, there are a bunch of ways people could contribute to Murphy’s campaign without triggering that section of the Act. it’s right there in black and white, if someone at the electoral office actually read the law they are supposed to enforce.
Instead, the same office that refused to investigate political work paid for by money obtained from the public purse through fraud when it involved the ruling Tories is going to punish a New Democrat for what could be – arguably – a misreading of the Elections Act by both the elections office and the candidate?
Something is very wrong in that.
- srbp -
Good to the last vote #nlpoli #cdnpoli
Two fish plant operators in the province want to see if they can make a few bucks making something to eat out of sea cucumbers.
For those who may not be familiar with the creatures, know that they are not some sort of undersea plant.
They are a long tube of flesh with a hole at both ends (mouth and anus) and a tube in between connecting the two. The creature pulls seawater in one end, extracts what nutrients it can find and pushes the water – and its own refuse - it out the back end.
People eat these things. Well, some people on the planet do - mostly in Asia – and some of those people consider it a delicacy, apparently.
The provincial fisheries department has been eyeing sea cukes and urchins as potential species to exploit for well over a decade. The federal fisheries department produced a study in 2009 on the sea cucumber potential in the fishing zone on Newfoundland’s south coast that also encompasses St. Pierre and Miquelon.
What is striking about that study is how much biologists - any biologists, not just DFO ones - don’t know about the little creature:
There is limited information on the life history of sea cucumber on the St. Pierre Bank (So 2009). Most of the knowledge on this species in eastern Canada was obtained from studies in the St. Lawrence Estuary (Hamel and Mercier 2008). While some of this information may be relevant to the St. Pierre Bank, more in-situ observations are required. Spawning time, for example, occurs from late March to early May on the St. Pierre Bank, which is earlier than in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Size at sexual maturity on the St. Pierre Bank is ~ 9-11 cm (Grant et al. 2006). Growth rates, age-at-maturity, recruitment processes and natural mortality are unknown; thus productivity and renewal rates are unknown. Due to the plastic shape and variable water content of the sea cucumber body, basic metrics such as size-at-age cannot reliably be obtained. Dry and immersed weights are the most accurate measures of sea cucumber size.
All the stuff you would like to know in order to manage any fishery effectively? Not one has a friggin’ clue.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the DFO paper recommends
“that fishing be limited to the western region of the specific fisheries management zone covered by the study], maintaining the eastern region as a reserve until the effects of fishing can be evaluated. The exploitation rate is currently very low and it is likely that it could be increased without causing serious or irreversible harm.”
The biologists admit they don’t know much and advise that no one should do anything too hasty for fear of repeating past mistakes.
A United Nations report issued in 2008 said that Pacific stocks of sea cucumbers with a high commercial value had already been decimated. The report covered all the known sea cucumber fisheries,. including the exploratory one off Newfoundland.
Now the potential industry we are talking about here in newfoundland and Labrador is currently less than 1,000 tonnes with a total value – according to the Telegram article linked at the front of this post – some somewhere around $500,000. This is not very big, by any measure.
But the fact that some local companies want to go to commercial production on a species that has already been over-fished elsewhere is a sign of just how little some people in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and Labrador have learned in the 19 years since the cod moratorium. How striking is the contrast between the scientists and the industry.
Read the reports from the fisheries departments, especially the federal one an you will see an abundance of cautious language. If we’ve learned anything from the cod collapse – to paraphrase the report – we ought to go very carefully at fishing a species we know little about.
In the local fishing industry, that knowledge doesn’t seem to have penetrated some skulls. It’s also yet another sign of what your humble e-scribbler ranted about last August when local media gave province-wide attention to a story on the possible commercial production of sea snails:
There are still way too many of them – plants and plant workers – for them all to make a decent living from what fish, and now snails, there is to turn into frozen blocks. The only thing that has changed in the better part of a decade since that report is that the workers are finding it harder and harder to collect enough weeks of work to qualify for the EI.
Oh yes, and the prospect of a fish plant adding up to 15 jobs for a month stuffing slimy globs of flesh into tins makes province-wide news as a positive thing.
A year after those caustic words appeared, the province is in the grips of a second election in a year, this one a provincial type. The incumbent Conservatives have a report that shows rare agreement in the industry on the need to cut down the number of plants, plant workers and fishermen.
The Conservatives want nothing to do with it both for the financial cost implications and for the political cost implications as well. Their current plan seems to be to talk and talk until time solves the problem for them.
The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs. Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.
All three parties – Liberal, Conservative and New Democrat – have one goal: reform the fishery in such a way that at the end of it, the whole thing is exactly like it is now.
The fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a problem of anything but politics and anyone other than politicians.
And in yet another great cosmic coincidence, noob Bloc NDP member of parliament Ryan Cleary held a news conference on Monday to tell everyone that he will do as he promised a few short months ago and introduce a private members bill in the federal parliament.
Cleary wants to spend untold millions of tax dollars on an investigation into what happened to the cod and why they haven’t come back. he wants to find blame and lay, most likely at the feet of culprits he has already identified. None of them are in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and labrador. The bad guys are people in Ottawa.
In pushing for his Kangaroo Court, Cleary uses language that is colourful and evocative. He claims we do not have facts.
In truth, there is is no shortage of facts.
Cleary just refuses to accept them and act accordingly.
The problem is not that we are lacking in information.
The problem is that Cleary - like a raft of other self-appointed saviours of rural Newfoundland and the fishery from Smallwood to Rideout to Efford to Sullivan and Hearn before him - is running on precious little besides bullshit and ego.
Sure they are all compassionate and passionate in their dedication and commitment to the raggedy-arsed artillery of the best small-boatmen in the British Empire who will secure the future of the universe once the oil is gone yadda yadda yadda.
Big friggin’ whoopidy do.
Once you get past the stock rhetoric these guys toss out, you pretty quickly realise that Cleary is just the latest and windiest wind-bag in a very flatulent lot. They all lack either an appreciation of the problem in the fishery or what genuinely needs to be done to sort it out.
And if they know what needs to be done and why, then they lack the stones to do it.
You see, if fixing the fishery was a matter of passion, then the whole thing would have been done decades ago. God knows the fishery has attracted more passion over the years than you’d get from a bunch of lifers at Kingston Pen hopped up on saltpeter and Viagra.
Da byes have loved the fishery to death.
And still men and women are breaking their backs splitting fish and making slave wages for their efforts.
Men and women who are now pretty much done with their working lives and yet who can’t afford to retire.
Who some politicians won’t pay to retire even though that would be the decent thing to do.
And they struggle in an industry that lacks the technology to compete and the capital to buy the technology to sort itself out because…ah sure you’ve heard it all before.
You want some ideas on fixing the fishery?
No problem.
The first idea is: get the politicians out of it.
Cleary could be the single bravest politician in this province’s long history and scrap his election pledge. Stand up, Ryan, and be the first politician to say that people like you are full of it and need to stop pretending they can fix the fishing industry.
Find something else to rant about.
People will understand.
He can take the money he’d waste on an inquiry and put it in a fund to help fish plant workers hobble away from the splitting tables with something vaguely approaching human dignity.*
Otherwise, the fishery will be for politicians what it has been since long before the collapse of Responsible Government in this place: good to the last vote, and nothing more.
- srbp -
* edits for clarity
13 September 2011
The Popeye Algorithm #nlpoli
"I am who I am.
That’s Premier Kathy Dunderdale speaking to reporters about comments her benefactor Danny Williams made on Monday about Elizabeth Matthews and the botched effort by Williams, Dunderdale, Matthews and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to get Matthews a six year appointment to the offshore regulatory board.
Williams told CBC on Monday:
In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.
Dunderdale quite rightly blew off Williams’ barb on the aspect of this story that Conservatives are obsessing over. Dunderdale looked stressed in the photo accompanying the CBC story on her scrum. That’s likely because the Matthews debacle has only served to bring to the surface again the internal cleavages in her party.
There’s the Danny-lovers who aren’t happy with Dunderdale’s actions toward their beloved former Saviour. There’s the local Tories who still loathe the federal Tories and resent Dunderdale’s efforts to cuddle up to them during the last federal election. And then there’s the bunch who would just as soon heal the rifts, play with the federal buddies and move along.
And somewhere in there are the wannabe leaders who went along with the temporary ceasefire in the suspended leadership campaign. They are just itching to get it over with so they can get Dunderdale gone.
Somehow, the answer to all that doesn’t seem to be “I yam what I yam and dats all what I yam.”
A pointed rejoinder to Williams would have been for Williams to point that she’s nobody’s baby. Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Dunderdale her nomination. Bullshit, Dunderdale could have said. The former party president didn’t need Williams help to get a nomination. She did it in 1993. She was active in the party during the years when Danny had sent Dean over to the Liberals to help cut some deals.
Lots of things she could have said.
Even a trademark Williams “pfft.”
Truth is, though, Dunderdale knows she sits atop a seething pile of egos, old wounds, resentments and just plain politics. That’s what happens inside any governing party after a while. The fact Danny Williams suppressed the egos and ambitions for seven years screwed the lid on the pressure cooker that much tighter than usual. That’s why the Conservatives who’ve reacted publicly to Williams’ comments have picked up on the Danny gripe. They are looking internally because that’s where things seem to be most unsettled.
The rest of the province is likely looking at what your humble e-scribbler and CBC both saw separately in the same documents: a trio of Tory political types named Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner who could not get their stories straight or match the stories with the facts.
It is as though they never imagined that the whole story might emerge. Complacency kills, they say. Think of it as the eighth deadly sin for bomb disposal experts and political types who manage controversial issues. A moment’s inattention, one skipped step or one unfounded assumption and suddenly you are sailing through the air wondering what the loud noise was.
Think it doesn’t happen?
Consider Dunderdale’s comment about the draft letter Danny Williams had prepared that offered Matthews the job. Dunderdale told reporters she only became aware of it when an access to information request went out. Or worse, as CBC reports it, Dunderdale only knew the letter existed on Monday.
In other words, after it appeared here and CBC broadcast their story.
Those familiar with the goings-on at offices as high as Dunderdale’s will look on that and stare in disbelief.
No amount of spinach can make that sort of thing go away.
- srbp -
An ex-Premier scorned #nlpoli
Not content merely to discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews for a seat on the offshore regulatory board, Danny Williams took some pretty heavy shots at his former cabinet members on Monday in a 10 minute interview with the CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates.
In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.
Williams went further.
Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Joan Burke and Kathy Dunderdale nominated, claiming that “in those days it was more of a man’s world.”
You don’t have to read hard to between the lines to see Williams was making a very pointed jab at two key cabinet ministers in his administration.
The fact he is full of crap - as if 2001 was the political stone age in this province - is largely irrelevant.
Interesting too that he mentioned a recent comment about the fact there are very few women seeking office in this election.
But that comment about Matthews and the implicit idea that Dunderdale and Burke owe their place to Williams is not going to sit well with a great many Tories.
Heck, it was so bad that even talk show caller and Danny fan Club charter member Minnie H burned Bill’s ears on Monday night calling Danny down to the dirt for his remarks.
Whatever Dunderdale and company did to Danny after he left, the Old man is certainly going to claim his pound and a half of their hides, one way or the other.
Payback is a mother.
- srbp -
To you with affection from Danny #nlpoli #cdnpoli
Anybody who is even vaguely aware of Danny Williams’ attitude to the CBC during his term as Premier will realise what an amazing thing it was for him to sit for 10 minutes on Monday and discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews to sit on the offshore regulatory board.
CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates picked up the story - the same one posted here Monday morning - and added significantly to what might turn out to be a new political mess for the Dunderdale administration.
The new mess though isn’t about a patronage plum Williams lined up for Matthews.
No.
For example, there’s the issue of what Elizabeth Matthews knew about her nomination and appointment and when she knew it. Williams is unequivocal in the full interview on Monday: she would have known about the nomination when he put her name forward.
That contradicts the impression left with a great many people. On March 11, for example, CBC’s Provincial Affairs reported tweeted about a conversation he’d has with Matthews. Cochrane wrote “EM says she has never been told of any appointment.”
After the Liberal opposition released a copy of the order in council Matthews had received making her appointment to the board, Matthews told CBC:
When I received the OC in the mail I contacted the premier's office immediately. I was told ... at the time that the OC was sent in error, and in fact the individual I spoke to was unaware of it,…
The cabinet order itself is unequivocal. Under the first part, cabinet appointed Matthews to the board as a Newfoundland and Labrador representative starting on January 1.
If Matthews was as knowledgeable about these things as Williams claims and if officials of the provincial government knew anything, they’d understand that part of the cabinet order did not need any approval from the federal government.
There’d be no reason for her to misunderstand that she had an appointment to the board when she got the OC in the mail. And even if she and her provincial benefactors wanted to wait until she had the federal agreement on making her the vice-chair as well, that still wouldn’t explain why Matthews claimed she didn’t know about an appointment.
Heck, as your humble e-scribbler reported on Monday, Matthews sent her resume to the Premier’s Office on December 21, apparently in support of the letter to the federal government about her appointment. She knew what was going on. And as Williams made plain on Monday, Matthews knew he was putting her name up for the job.
Then there’s the odd claims by Williams hand-picked successor Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner that they were responsible for Matthews’ nomination and appointment. CBC’s online story includes the quotes they gave in the spring. They wouldn’t do any interviews with CBC on Monday.
Williams made clear that he discussed Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board with Dunderdale as part of the hand-over process. While he didn’t actually make the appointment himself, Williams left the clear impression he told his successor exactly what he wanted to see happen.
Technically, it was up to his successor to get the job done. But there’s no doubt he wanted Matthews in that job and – given the way events unfolded in December over his succession – Williams had plenty of opportunities to push his views right up until the cabinet issued its order on December 21.
And Skinner and Dunderdale delivered for Williams.
Things just came apart in March after someone leaked the story to CBC’s David Cochrane. That’s when Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner started telling versions of events that didn’t jive with what happened.
Apparently, they never imagined the whole story would come out.
Surprise!
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12 September 2011
Word Clues
According to the St. John’s Board of Trade, “Newfoundland and Labrador’s considerable assets include …[a] captive consumer market worth over $10 billion annually.”
Interesting choice of words that.
“Captive”.
Prisoner.
Hostage.
As in can’t go anywhere else or do anything else.
At the mercy of others.
Take a look at a survey the Board did of a four member panel that they included with that news release. Now bear in mind the panel is four members of the Board of Trade and only four. But still, if you look at the responses, you get another curious bit of information.
Top federal/provincial priorities: “Building the Lower Churchill” got a vote from one of the four as the top priority. But two others put “Building the Lower Churchill” as their second choice.
Not surprising really, that the Lower Churchill would be the favourite in this question and in another one later on about what the federal government needs to do for the province.
Many members of the Board of Trade have done very well as a result of the enormous increase in public spending over the past four years. it may be fiscally unsound for the province, but for the Board of Trade members it’s been boom times. The Lower Churchill would guarantee those booms for another decade.
Makes sense.
Makes sense too that the party currently in power is pushing something that means they can trumpet the jobs and the growth that will flow. There’s a wonderful meeting of mutual interest, political and commercial.
This alignment of interests is easily seen in the pattern of political giving in the province last year. 80% of donations come from corporations. Most of that is focused on the northeast Avalon. Individual contributions make up a mere 20% and in some districts nobody - other than the local member of the legislature - contributed anything at all to any political party.
Not surprisingly, either, the companies who have been doing perhaps the most phenomenally well from capital works spending have given in huge gobs to the Conservatives.
Nothing sinister or criminal. Just a matter of common interests.
Meanwhile, the average ratepayer, err consumer, err taxpayer in the province isn’t quite so positive about Muskrat Falls and the Lower Churchill. In polls done by Corporate Research Associates for the provincial government over the past year, Muskrat is the top priority of a mere four percent of the population.
Consistently four percent.
Health care and jobs are way out in front as the major concern of 20-odd and 30-odd percent of the people surveyed.
Huge difference.
Now look at that word “captive” again.
Interesting choice.
Almost Freudian in its implications when you consider that having a captive market is the entire basis for Muskrat Falls.
The local consumers will be forced to pay for it all, carry the whole debt load and make sure that the companies directly involved don’t lose a copper.
They have no choice.
They are captive.
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Williams set to offer comms director plum patronage job before he quit #nlpoli
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.
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.
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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11 September 2011
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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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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10 September 2011
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.
- RCMP investigating SNC Lavalin officials over corruption allegations
- And he is known by the company he keeps…
- Democracy Watch: Duff’s guff
- Dateline: Desperation, Newfoundland
- The Joy of Political Giving: punch in the bake edition
- Danny, Gary and Steve: old inconsistencies die hard
- Rideout tags Tories for election pork-fest
- The Politics of Cynicism; even worse than thought edition and What you can see at the horse race…
- The Joy of Political Giving: Look for the union label
- The Joy of Political Giving: If you want to build it, they will give
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