Day 3: #pandermonium roundup #nlpoli #nlvotes

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward promised Wednesday that as Premier he’d cave in and settle a class action lawsuit that is trying to pin financial responsibility for moose accidents on the provincial government.

The provincial Tories did their  pandering before the election with everything from fire trucks to moose fences.

NDP leader Lorraine Michael promised that her party would cut some tax on gasoline. The CBC story doesn’t make it clear which tax Michael was talking about. The NDP platform doesn’t make it clear either, referring only to the tax on tax.

But it sounds good and that’s really all old-fashioned pols like all the rest are looking for when it comes to the pure pandering parts of their platform.

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The Public Sector Pensions thing explained #nlpoli #nlvotes

People can’t understand the racket over provincial pensions, what the Liberals proposed, what the CBC reported but hasn’t explained and what the provincial Conservatives are attacking the Liberals over.

Here’s a simple explanation of the math, the policy ideas and the problems with what’s happened.

The Background

The issue is about some retired provincial public servants whose pensions are not indexed to inflation and who continue to receive the same amount today they received up to two decades after they retired.

These pensioners have been pressing for a cost of living increase for most of the past 20 years.

Here’s what the Liberals proposed on Monday:

A New Liberal Government will provide a one-time 2.5%
increase to Public Sector Pensioners and subsequently, annual increases equivalent to CPI, to a maximum of 2%.

We will  establish an arms-length Review Commission to examine long term, just and equitable solutions following the principles of fairness and natural law. [Paragraphed for clarity]

That first bit is clear enough.  The second bit is important.  Keep it in mind for later.

On the day the Liberals announced that policy, CBC contacted the provincial finance department for an analysis and for some inexplicable reason, the department offered a comment on a political issue in the middle of an election campaign.

CBC reported that:

…the Department of Finance told CBC News that the Liberals' plan would add $1.2 billion in additional liabilities to the pension plan.

You can find links to two CBC stories at this recent SRBP post

By Wednesday, provincial Conservative leader Kathy Dunderdale was saying:

Premier Kathy Dunderdale calls the Liberal Party's plans to provide a one-time 2.5 per cent increase to public sector pensions, and annual increases up to 2 per cent, "frightening". Dunderdale questions Kevin Aylward's ability to balance the books. She says the full 2 per cent indexing would add about $1.8-billion to the unfunded liability.

That’s from VOCM.  The story might be disappeared within 24 hours of this post.

The Liberals counter that the proposal will cost an additional $13 million or so to the existing annual public sector pension spending or so the first year and an additional $10 million every year afterward, maximum until the to review commission reports and government acts on the recommendations.

Discussion

The major difference in the Liberal and Conservative argument is over annual cost versus total liability.

A check with the Liberal campaign found that they used the latest annual report of the provincial pension investment committee.

Then they looked at the total payment in 2010 of $532 million and change.  That’s right there on page four of the report.

Now right off the bat that includes administrative costs and refunds to people who’ve taken their cash and gone elsewhere. The Liberals actually started with a figure higher than the actual pension payments in 2010 of $494 million but let’s take $520 million which is the actual budgeted pension benefits payment this current year.

If you do simple math, you will find that 2.5% of $520 million is $13.0 million. In the first year, the Liberal pledge will cost the $520 million already committed plus another $13 million or $533 million.

In the worst case scenario, the maximum subsequent add-on will be 2% of the year before. The figure in the next year would be $533 plus  two percent of that ($533 + $10.66 million). 

One question to consider is how much that will cost over time.  Well, how long is a piece of string?

Let’s take 10 years as our length of time. 

If you work that out over 10 years, what is costing you $520 in 2011 will cost you roughly $636 million in 2021.  That’s $116 million more than today.

In 2031 – or 20 years from now - the annual price would be a little over $250 million more than the government is paging out today.

The Conservatives – and the finance department – refer to the public liability.

What they are doing is taking all the extra money, the 2.5% and the 2.0%, and then they are adding up all the extras over time to give you a number.  Their liability number is the extra spending added up over time.

Based on this example, their figure of $1.8 billion would be the cumulative total of the extra money in about Year 17.  Why they picked that number is a mystery because so far no one has explained anything.

Issues

What you have here is exactly what is supposed to occur during an election campaign.  One party is proposing something.  people are going to criticise it.

People need to look at this proposal and discuss it in all its merits or de-merits.  the people doing that should be the politicians and the general public.

Public servants shouldn’t be weighing in on this stuff. As a matter of principle, it is wrong. 

It gets particularly troubling when you consider that the comment officials gave to CBC deliberately chose to put forward a large – and therefore frightening – number when it becomes associated with words like liability and debt.

It becomes disingenuous when the finance officials failed to note – apparently – that you can do the same thing with any government spending.  total up the cumulative increase in anything and you can get a scary number.

The question is whether the people who are making the decisions have full, and accurate information in front of them so that they can make an informed chose.  What is in the public domain right now from CBC and the finance department is misinformation.

.And therein lies the second problem.

The CBC, like all news media, have a duty to inform their audience.

On this one, so far, no one has done anything to inform anyone about the pensions issue. Covering the “he said, she said” doesn’t cut it. 

And it really doesn’t cut it if the news media outlet went in search of a comment in the first place and – in the process – injected themselves into the political fray.  It’s one thing to observe and report about the game.  It’s another thing to throw a puck on the ice. 

What you’ve got now is not an informed discussion of the policy issue and its merits. You’ve got a confusing melee in which the ruling Conservatives are getting a free ride:  they haven’t had to explain themselves.  They can simply build off the implicitly objective third party critique coming via the CBC.

Meanwhile, has anyone asked the finance department to figure out the public finance liability in the NDP election platform?

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Advertising group has Tory, Nalcor ties #nlpoli

MQO, the market research company that released an opinion poll on the second day of the provincial general election, is part of a group of marketing and advertising companies with ties to the provincial Conservatives and Nalcor, the provincial government’s energy company.

M5 is the agency of record for Nalcor, a spokesperson for Nalcor confirmed for SRBP on Tuesday.

Craig Tucker is listed as managing director of M5 on the company’s website.

In 2004, then premier Danny Williams announced Tucker’s appointment to the board of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. Hydro was the predecessor of Nalcor. It appears Tucker left the board when Hydro became Nalcor.

According to a 2005 CBC story, Tucker co-chaired the Conservative’s 2003 election campaign. That CBC story was about a $150,000 contract that M5 landed from the provincial government to promote the $2.0 billion transfer deal with Ottawa signed in January 2005.

M5 has also been an active contributor to the Progressive Conservative party in the province.  From 2003 to 2010, the company gave  $29,200 in political donations to the PC party according to information from the province’s chief electoral officer.

SRBP contacted Karen McCarthy, the media contact on the MQO news release, via Twitter and later e-mail.  McCarthy is president of M5PR and is listed on the M5 website as senior vice-president, communications.

SRBP asked:

Is M5 doing any work currently for Nalcor, the prov gov and/or the PC party. If so, what is it doing?

McCarthy replied:

MQO Research conducted the poll on the NL election over the past weekend independent of any other organization.  The company is a “research force” in the Atlantic Region and feels a responsibility to report on issues of interest to people in the four Atlantic provinces.  The company has done work for many governments, corporations and others throughout the region since its inception.  Whether or not the company currently has projects in play with the organizations you mentioned, I’m unaware.  It’s not something that MQO’s researcher’s would confirm for me due to client confidentiality.  In fact, the same is true for the entire group of m5 companies.  I can speak for the company of which I am President.  m5pr is not doing any work for the PC Party, Nalcor or the Province.

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Undisclosed risk: NDP version #nlpoli #nlvotes

Sometimes you have to read something over and over just to make sure you didn’t misunderstand.

Like say this line from CBC’s online story of the NDP election platform launch:

In total, New Democrats are promising $142 million in new spending — $74 million from what it  called "efficiencies" and $68 million from a petroleum royalty surtax of three per cent.

The Telegram version is not quite so emphatic that the entire NDP platform is so inexpensive. They make it clear the pledges cover the first year only.

And when you look at the New Democrat platform, that’s the one thing that leaps out at you:  they’ve only costed one year.

Then you notice that while they talk about five pledges, there are a crap load of other things in there that are apparently something other than pledges.

What they are – maybe statement of good intentions -  is another matter.

And what they cost is a mystery.

Some of them could wind being quite costly.

Like say the pledge to increase the presence of government services in communities.  That sounds suspiciously like the Liberals’ plan in the late 1990s to shift stuff into places other than St. John’s.  The Tories carried on the same idea. It’s been very costly in a number of ways, not the least of which has been the increased size of the public service beyond what is actually needed in a province this size.

Or how about:

Plan a universal, publicly-funded and administered homecare and long-term care program.

Sure it says “plan” but plans have a way of becoming more than that once people catch on to the idea. The plan is only limited to year one.  What happens in years two, three and four?

Then there’s the commitment to yet more hand-outs, bail-outs and policy cop-outs:

• Introduce a provincial adjustment fund to assist employees and communities affected by industry downsizing or closures.
• Partner with industry to expand shipbuilding in the province.
• Assist in forest industry diversification for domestic and export markets.
• Increase primary and value-added production of agrifoods for local and  export markets through aid to small-scale production, processing and marketing.

None of that will be cheap.

None of that is costed in the NDP promise book.

And then there’s the gem:

Ensure that development of Labrador’s resources, including Gull Island and Muskrat Falls, is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and beneficial for the people of the province, especially the people of Labrador.

Muskrat is viable because the punters like you and me will pay full freight for it.  The NDP platform statement is a cleverly worded dodge.

Some of the NDP ideas are good ones. 

The pledge to undo the things Lorraine backed before that restricted public accountability and limited access?  Good thing.

Initiatives for people with disabilities, for newcomers?  Good and good.

The costs likely wouldn’t be high and the benefits are almost incalculable.

Other bits just show a lack of imagination:

Conduct a review to assess the need for electoral reform.

Anyone who has been even half asleep in this province the last couple of decades will know that one doesn’t need study.

It needs action.

You can likely put that vague statement about electoral reform down to the fact that the NDP’s financial backers aren’t keen on reforming things like the provincial political finance laws.  hard to imagine a political party with the word democratic in its name that is wishy-washy about electoral reform.

But there it is.

Just like the cost of electing an NDP government isn’t.

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Ceeb spins story for Tories #nlpoli

Rather than correct a mistaken early report on the cost of the Liberal party’s pension proposal the CBC online decided to torque the story against the Liberals.

In a story on the Liberal election pledge to give retired public servants a 2.5% increase followed by 2.0% per year, the CBC included a claim from the province’s finance department:

Meanwhile, the Department of Finance told CBC News that the Liberals' plan would add $1.2 billion in additional liabilities to the pension plan.

That’s not accurate and the CBC didn’t explain what the finance officials meant.

The follow-on CBC story looked like this.

After a couple of paragraphs of Tory talking points, the Ceeb story didn’t deliver any facts to back up Dunderdale’s claim or explain the finance department’s assessment.

Instead, CBC included more detail on Aylward’s announcement.

And right at the end – where news stories stick the least important information – you get the Liberal’s accounting of costs.

Aylward said increasing payments to a long-neglected group will cost more than $13 million in the first year, and about $10 million extra for each additional year.

Even those readers who trudged on to the end would have already been told repeatedly that this promise is foolhardy and expensive.

And the combined effect of both stories sets readers up to be skeptical of the Liberal explanation before they even got to it.

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New Poll. New Result #nlpoli

Quick.

Where’s Kathy Dunderdale today?

A new poll by advertising agency M5’s opinion research firm will give you a clue.

The poll replicates the actual numbers for CRA’s August omnibus when both are adjusted to remove the distortion of reporting voter choice as a percentage od decideds.

The MarketQuest Omnifacts poll showed the provincial Conservatives with 42% of respondents, the New Democrats at 23% and the Liberals at 145 with the undecideds at 20%.

The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9%, 19 times out of 20.

The CRA corrected numbers were 40 Tory, 18 Dipper,  and 16 Grit with 26% undecided.

Run that through the Amazing SRBP Vote-a-matic and you get a possible seat result of:

• PC:  38
• Libs: 4 to 7
• NDP:  3 to 6

So contrary to what Kathy “New Energy” Dunderdale said on Day One of the campaign, the polling shows the Tories will lose seats.  The question is more one of where they’ll lose them and to whom.

if you want an idea, consider that on the basic math of it the Tories have gone from 70% of votes cast to 53% of decided voters.  Bear with this for a second and switch back to using the numbers everyone else is using.

That’s a drop of 17 points since the last general election.

If you look at the seats the Tories won by a margin of 17% or less in 2007, this is what you get:

• Lake Melville
• Bellevue
• Labrador West
• Bay of Islands
• Torngat Mountains
• Humber Valley
• Isles of Notre Dame

On the face of that list right now, your humble e-scribbler would add an extra New Democrat in Labrador West to a future House of Assembly with the other seats being ones where the Liberals are historically strong and would likely pick up.

That would give you 10 Liberal seats total and that’s outside the Vote-a-matic forecast range. Just remember that this is a highly inexact subject.  What you can take away from it are places to look for further signs or information. And after all, when the poll results have a variation of five percent give or take, you are really not dealing with scalpel-like precision anyways.

For those who want to quibble, too, that this result would show the Liberals gaining more seats with fewer votes than the New Democrats, you need to appreciate that this set of observations on seats is based on taking polling and applying it against history, against what happened before.

Add to that the concept of vote efficiency and how it works in the current system.

The best example to use is the 1989 general election.  The Tories got more votes, but the Liberals took 34 seats on election night.  The Tories, for example, tend to show very well in polls.  They rack up tons of support in districts in St. John’s but once they’ve gotten enough votes to win the seat every one after that is a waste.

Well, it’s a waste from the standpoint that they didn’t need it to win.

Meanwhile over in another district – most likely off the northeast Avalon – the Tories are starving for votes.  The Liberal vote is distributed such that lots of votes don’t get wasted racking up margins beyond what you need to win.

Same thing applies, essentially, for the NDP.  They’ve got a couple or three pockets of strong support. It’s been enough to win two seats, historically.  And that’s about it.

Historically, you’d translate those polling numbers out and get a result in which the Tories could drop seven seats to the other two parties.

You likely won’t see this from the conventional media, but then again, the conventional media can’t get much beyond the superficial horse-race commentary.

All you can do, dear reader, is take it all in,  weigh it out and make up your own mind.

Oh yes. 

And notice where Kathy Dunderdale is today.

Labrador.

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The NDP and Regressive Social Policy: education #nlpoli

those who are interested in education policy and the current election campaign will be fascinated by a chunk of one conversation that broke out on Twitter Sunday. 

Two of the participants were Mark Watton, former Liberal candidate in the Humber West by-election earlier this year and Brad Evoy, a New Democratic Party supporter and former vice president (academic0 of the Grenfell campus Student Union in Corner Brook.

They were discussing NDP policy that would make post-secondary education in Newfoundland and Labrador free to any students.

This is an edited version of the conversation, but one that tries to preserves both the flow of the exchange and the thrust of Evoy’s position.  Evoy starts off on accessibility and then morphs into a wider argument:.

Watton:  Just because something costs money, doesn't mean it is inaccessible. …a viable investment i.e. one which individuals, as well as the state, can make.

Evoy:  That's mighty well and easy for you to say, Mr. Watton, but it is not so for many NLers.

Watton:  on what basis do you make that statement?

Evoy:  Again, individual investment should not prohibit what is best for our common good. …Aside from knowing those who suffer under debt loads and turn away from PSE due to cost? … So there is some with the ability to be affluent, that doesn't mean all can….Question now, would you even dare suggest the same for Primary and Secondary Education… As in our society some level of PSE is now as needed just as well as those, in many fields…would it not be better to remove personal wealth from the equation all together? … Is it not more equitable for students to be judged on their merit and pay tax when…...they are all established well enough to do so? That's the idea here….Some form of PSE is quickly becoming an employment baseline...... in many professions. We require skilled persons in our economy.

Watton:  so if something is an employment baseline the state should pay for it for everyone?

Evoy:  Aren't we already doing so from the period when high school was exactly that? …And, again, it's a baseline for many professions and some won't have the academics…

Free or low tuition has been a popular idea for decades.  The arguments in favour f it usually centre on accessibility for people from lower income families.

The only problem for people who make accessibility their foundation is that there isn’t any substantial evidence to support the claim about accessibility and free tuition.

Take a recent study from Ireland as typical.  Kevin Denny of the Institute for Fiscal Studies released a paper in may that looked at the impact of the Irish government policy that wiped out tuition fees in 1996. His conclusion is that eliminating tuition fees had no effect on university attendance by students from lower income families.

What did it do?

The only obvious effect of the policy was to provide a windfall gain to middle-class parents who no longer had to pay fees. [p. 14]

In a footnote Denny indicates there is some reason to believe that these families wound up shipping their children to private schools.  that would likely have had the effect of improving their academic performance which further disadvantaged children from lower income families in the competition to enter university.

Overall, while the numbers of students from low incomes went up after 1996, so too did the number of students from other  family income levels.  The effect was such that the proportions of students in university did not change significantly for the better with the elimination of tuition fees.

Flip back up to Evoy’s comments for a second and look at this bit:

would it not be better to remove personal wealth from the equation all together? … Is it not more equitable for students to be judged on their merit and pay tax when…...they are all established well enough to do so?

The effect of free tuition is the opposite, according to Denny.  It doesn’t take personal wealth out of the equation.  Rather, free tuition delivers a windfall to those who could already afford to send their children to university or who can afford it moreso than those on low incomes.

Incidentally, you can find similar conclusions to Denny’s work in other studies.  A 1990 paper by Benjamin Levin titled  “Tuition fees and university accessibility” noted that university students in Canada tended to be from families where one or both parents had university degrees.  University graduates earned, on average considerably more than non-graduates.  As such, free tuition would tend to provide a disproportionate advantage to those who were better able to pay for education anyway.

That’s without considering that the cost of a university education in this province is already unconnected to the actual cost of the education.  This is especially true in medicine and the other professions where incomes are higher and the ability to repay substantial loans would be much better than say a typical Arts graduate. 

And the other thing these studies have in common is that they found that other factors  - besides tuition fees - affect access to post-secondary education.

If accessibility is the goal, there are other ways to deal with it.  Levin argued that targeted programs were a better way to go.  Means tested grants, for example, or changing the ratio of student loans and grants based on student financial circumstances would help to ensure that students from low income families would not be disadvantaged because of fees.  In the professions, governments can do more of what they do now with a variety of cash incentives as well as provide means-tested grants.

What’s most interesting about the New Democrats and free tuition is the ease with which they have adopted what is essentially a regressive social policy. 

While New Democrats like Evoy talk about accessibility and how the party represents “ordinary” Canadians,  their solution is a blunt tax cut or subsidy approach that appears to be better suited to Conservatives. That’s especially striking in the case of free university tuition where research shows that eliminating fees doesn’t improve accessibility. 

It does, however, provide financial advantage to people who are already better able to pay tuition or people who would be better able to pay in their future career.

The NDP.

Not Tommy Douglas’ socially progressive party any more.

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Dippers on point for first CBC political election panel #nlpoli

Give the new Democrats’ Dale Kirby full marks for nailing natural resources minister Shawn Skinner hard over the blatant abuse of taxpayers inherent in having two partisans step down from their cabinet appointments to work on the Tory campaign.

Kirby, Skinner and Liberal Barry Snow made up the partisan panel for David Cochrane’s election show On Point.

The pair – Ross Reid and Len Simms – will slide back into their six figure salaries without so much as a hiccup to their pensionable time. The practice of sticking partisan loyalists into cabinet appointments destroys the impartiality and professionalism of the public service.

Skinner flopped sadly by claiming the pair were following policy and Snow imploded by siding with Skinner over the gross abuse of public money.

That was Snow’s second goof inside 60 seconds.  He started by blithely dismissed talk of Danny Williams and the patronage scandal as nothing proper to talk about.  He missed the political angle that Kirby jumped on to stick the knife in either on the one patronage angle or the other.

Kirby sank the whole thing by challenging Skinner to commit that the two hacks wouldn’t get their plums back.

Snow dropped the ball again when Cochrane handed him an easy one about Navigant and Muskrat Falls.  People were hoping that at the end of day, Snow had something to say besides “at the end of the day.”

He didn’t.

Kirby jumped on the “shocking lack of transparency” from Nalcor. 

Skinner had some talking points to use in response but nothing new.

As a final question, Cochrane asked Snow how paying for the fishery restructuring given that the Liberals planned to cut gas tax as well.  Snow started with ‘at the end of the day” and pretty much blathered from there.

Kirby hammered the memorandum of understanding that remains sitting on a shelf. He didn’t give any Earth-shattering new commitments but Kirby delivered some quotable lines.

At the end of the day, the Liberals will need to do a lot better than this if they want to remain competitive. Give him some briefing notes an some basic coaching and Snow might recover.

The Tories are weak.  They are an easy mark for even a modestly prepared opponent.

NDP scored big on the panel because they were ready and political.

The only downside for the Dippers and the upside for the Grits and Tories is that the On Point audience was probably pretty small.

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The Damn-Fool Fisheries Policy

Yesterday’s man delivered yesterday’s ideas and claimed it was the future.

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward unveiled his party’s fisheries platform on Friday.  As a historical document, it would be wonderful for an election from 1975. But in 2011, the colourful pamphlet serves only to remind everyone just how far out of touch its authors are with the province and its people 20 years after the collapse of the cod stocks.

The central problem of the fishery today is that stocks have been decimated by decades of overfishing as a result of government policies that encouraged too many people to enter the fishery than it could sustain economically or environmentally without hundreds of millions annually in federal and provincial government subsidies.

The Liberal policy for the fishery of the future is to return to the very policies that led to its current sorry state in the first place.

One can scarcely imagine anything more stupid. 

Take the cod stocks, reduced to the point that by 1992 the federal government had to shut down the fishery that brought Europeans to this place 500 years ago.  There were no fish left, at least for any commercially viable industry.

The cod numbers – the biomass – are not appreciably larger in 2011 than it was in 1992.

Well, armed with that knowledge, the Liberals want to increase the total allowable catch for the endangered cod to more than double its current level.

There is not a shred of scientific evidence to back them up.

None.

Common sense would tell you to stop fishing altogether.

The Liberals are having none of that sort of talk.

They want to double the current slaughter.

They are not content to let professionals get the last codfish from the sea. The Liberals want to widen the Damn Fool Fishery to boot. 

And to ensure they can find every last fish, the Liberals want to continue the current Tory policy of spending provincial cash on “fisheries science.”

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea – more knowledge is good – but if you look at the end purpose, you realise what the Liberals want to do. 

Conservation and sound management are not the objectives the people who wrote this policy had in mind.  If it was, they wouldn’t advocate resuming the cod slaughter. This is a plan to find the last fish so someone can split it and freeze it into a block for export with taxpayers footing the bill for most of it.

And when the fish are gone, they’ll be on the sea snails,  the sea cucumbers and the krill.

The Liberals want to set up $250 million for what would likely be a batch of make-work projects. They call it a Fisheries Investment and Diversification Fund but those are code words, to be sure. 

The “employment rebate” for processors is nothing more than committing taxpayers to cover the salaries of fish plant workers in businesses that would not survive economically without more government handouts.

Worst of all, the Liberals want to bring back the Fisheries Loan Board.

To understand the significance of this, you have to go back to the 1970s.  With the 200 mile limit in 1977 cam policies designed to increase the number people in the fishery.  Fish that used to be taken by foreigners were available only to Canadians once the 200 mile limit came into effect.

Both the federal and provincial governments abandoned plans to reform the fishery.  Instead they created policies to draw more people into the industry.  In 1976, there were 13,376 fishermen in the province.  By 1980 there were 33,640.  Total federal and provincial subsidies added up to about the same as the landed value of the catch.

The Fisheries Loan Board – provincial money for boats and gear – went from $12,488,000 in outstanding loans in 1976 to $43,796,000 in 1980.  Most of the money was never repaid.

But as far as the goal of getting more people into an already over-stressed industry, the FLB was a stunning success.

The Liberals even resurrect the old chestnuts of co-management and joint management.  And for good measure they repeat the asinine commitment to pay for federal jobs and add a new commitment to support Ryan Cleary’s quest to have taxpayers foot the bill for his education, a.k.a. the judicial inquiry into the fishery.

They don’t need an inquiry. Read anything by Memorial University economist William Shrank. He can tell what happened to the fish and why.  A 1995 article in Marine Policy, titled “Extended fisheries jurisdiction:  origin of the current crisis in Atlantic Canada’s fishery” is as good as any.

As for new ideas, the Liberal policy has none. 

There’s just a vague reference to making sure the aquaculture industry has government financial support and that the Liberals will make sure that projects don’t harm the environment.

To be fair to the Liberals, and to the architects of their policy like Beaton Tulk, the Tories and New Democrats are pushing variations on the same pathetic theme.

But for people looking for some solution to the problems plaguing the fishery and the people who depend on it today, the province’s three political parties have basically left them with nothing to look forward to.  What’s worse, if any of the political platforms make through to government policy, taxpayers will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted spending.

We know it is wasted because none of the ideas will work.

We know they won’t work because they failed in the past.  Either that or,  as in the case of joint management, for example, they are solutions that might have helped 30 years ago or more.  But the problems they were supposed to fix simply don’t exist any more.

Today we face new problems created by the sorts of policies some people in the Liberal Party think are solutions to the problems those same policies created.

They couldn’t be any more wrong than they are.

On Friday, yesterday’s man delivered yesterday’s ideas and claimed it was the future.

He couldn’t have been any more wrong.

- srbp -

White Knuckles

Voting is Open Now… for NL Blogger’s Choice Awards!

If you are looking for a catalogue of local blogs there is only one place to go;  the Newfoundland and Labrador Blog Roll.

It’s the well-tended baby of Stephen Eli Harris,  a local blogger himself.

you’ll find the current blog list on the left hand side of the page.  Be warned;  it’s long.  There are lots of you out there in Newfoundland and labrador with something on your mind.  And the topics are diverse.  Everything from politics to food to babies.

While you are there, take time to check the NL Blogger’s Choice Awards and vote for the blogs you like in the different categories.  Remember:  it’s one vote per day. And you can vote every day until the end of September.

Sir Robert Bond Papers is nominated in the Political/Commentary Blogs category alongside The Fighting Newfoundlander and The Rural Lens.

towniebastard is up for the Mixed Bag category and gas and Oil is up for the Travel/Business prize.

SEH managed to pick out three blogs based on his criteria of design, longevity and frequency of posting.  It is an honour to be in the running but when you check the three competitors in this category, you will see, the choice will be tough.

A vote for these humble e-scribbles would be greatly appreciated.

And don’t forget, the national blog awards are coming up next month.

So vote, early, vote often and if you are so inclined, vote Sir Robert Bond Papers.

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Classical gas #nlpoli

Former Conservative policy advisor Cabot Martin knows a thing or two about energy.  The guy worked in the energy department in the 1970s and was involved in every major policy development in oil gas and electricity in the province for over a decade.

He’s got an op-ed piece in the Saturday Telegram that questions the wisdom of developing Muskrat Falls when the American markets are being shifted by cheap natural gas. Unfortunately, the thing isn’t online. The closest you can get is a reference in the editorial.

The editorial discusses the potential use of natural gas to replace Holyrood instead of Muskrat Falls.  The Telegram editorial and the Navigant report, released this week on behalf of Nalcor, mention a 2001 natural gas study done for the provincial government.

The gang at Navigant missed another important report study on the feasibility of bringing natural gas ashore from the Jeanne d’Arc basin.

2005.

Done for NOIA, the offshore oil and gas association by Dr. Stephen Bruneau.

Regular readers of these scribbles will recall this point from a post in July that discussed the natural gas option:

A 2005 discussion paper prepared for NOIA by Dr. Stephen Bruneau looked at six options for getting additional electricity for the island grid. Bruneau concluded that development of only 60% of the known gas reserves at Hibernia, White Rose and Terra Nova would give enough natural gas to power a Holyrood size generating plant at full capacity, 365 days a year for over a century.  That would displace 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Bruneau estimated the cost of a pipeline to bring the gas ashore to be $300 million. Another $400 million would build a natural gas generating plant, with another $112.5 million needed to build a short on-land pipeline and build natural gas handling facilities at sea.  Total cost would be less than $1.0 billion.

Nalcor didn’t study natural gas because it didn’t want to study it. 

They didn’t want to study it because their political masters had already directed them to pursue any development of the Lower Churchill.  Nothing else entered their collective skull.

The Conservatives and Nalcor started the most recent LC project in…wait for it…2005, the same year Bruneau did his work for NOIA.

Even as Danny Williams was launching down the road to the Muskrat mess, others were talking sensibly about alternatives to meet the province’s needs.

Three things to take away from this:

1. Nalcor did not make a decision on how best to meet consumer electricity needs in the province at the lowest cost for those consumers.  They followed political orders to build the Lower Churchill.  Period. Everything else got tossed in the bin.
2. Natural gas is a cheaper, viable alternative to Muskrat both for domestic needs, for electricity export and for industrial diversification.  Bruneau’s 2005 study put the cost at about a $1.0 billion.  Cabot Martin estimates $3.0 billion.  That’s still half the official estimate for Muskrat Falls. And frankly, since the official estimate of $6.2 billion is about 40% below the real cost they should be starting with, natural gas only gets better the more you know about Muskrat.*
3. People with way more experience in provincial energy policy that Kathy Dunderdale, Danny Williams and Ed Martin combined all think Muskrat is a big mistake.  Cabot Martin is just the latest.  Who would you trust:  the people who delivered the province’s oil industry or the gang that expropriated an environmental cesspool of a paper mill, by accident?

Think about it.

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*edit for clarity of reference to 40% and Muskrat.

Traffic without Danny Rolls

Danny Williams had no roll in this week’s traffic.

No buns.

No loaves either.

But as it turns out he had a big role in the posts that went to the top of the week’s list of the 10 most popular scribbles.

Just like he had a big role in pushing Liz Matthews as vice chair of the offshore regulatory board.

And that’s the top post from last week.

1. Williams set to offer comms director plum patronage job
2. The first big political story of the campaign
3. To you with affection from Danny
4. An ex-Premier scorned
5. Dipper candidate screwed by Tory election law mess
6. The Popeye Algorithm
7. @cbcnl using Nalcor lobbyist as election commentator
8. Privacy commish sues Dunderdale gov over “political” e-mails on gov comps, phones
9. Good to the last vote:  Grit version and The Arrogance Factor
10. Good to the last vote:  NDP paints own caricature

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There’s independent and then there’s Navigant #nlpoli

Nalcor chief executive Ed Martin told a CBC audience on Thursday that the Navigant report meets the joint review panel’s requirement for a complete, independent review of Kathy Dunderdale’s plan for saddling the provincial taxpayers with high electricity prices and unbearable debt.

Martin’s full of shite.

Like his claim that the report was independent.

The Navigant report is not independent.

Took five seconds to write.

One way you can tell Martin’s spewing crap? 

The Navigant guys who wrote the report used the word “independent”  89 times in an 79 page document.*

Another clue?

Kathy Dunderdale spent some ungodly amount of time on Open Line on Friday trying desperately prove Navigant wasn’t a set up.

Want another?

Then Tom Marshall called and had a go at the same thing.

Five seconds to claim. 

The better part of 30 minutes* for two senior cabinet ministers to try to disprove.

Methinks they protest too much.

To go back to Martin’s claim about the Navigant report and the joint panel requirement, here’s a table showing what the joint review panel recommended, what the public utilities board will be doing for its “independent” report and what Navigant just did:

Not the same.

Not even close.

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* typos corrected.

The Popcorn Calculation #nlpoli

From the Telegram’s editorial on Wednesday:

The problem is that, when the proposed appointment first came to light, Premier Kathy Dunderdale and Natural Resources Minister Shawn Skinner fell all over each other claiming that they — not Williams — were responsible for the appointment. …

Problem is, the only way to keep the glare from falling on Williams was to deliberately dissemble and mislead, and it appears that the politicians who remained in office were completely up to the task.

At the very least, the letter shows Dunderdale and Skinner have a facility in being less than candid.

That’s really the crux of the story that dominated political news coverage for the first three days of this week.

And you have to put that fact against a group of politicians who claim they came to office on a platform of openness, accountability and transparency.

What they’ve done is the opposite of what they’ve claimed they were about.

Skinner and Dunderdale opened up a huge credibility gap for themselves.  That’s bad news for politicians. 

Danny Williams managed to maintained credibility even when he said some absolutely incredible things.  People believed him no matter how big – or how obvious –the whopper.  And he told whoppers a lot more often than people admit.

Kathy is no Danny, not by a long shot.

So when she heads into an election  - even against the Liberals and the NDP as weak and disorganized as they both really are,  taking a blow to your credibility is never good.

Lots of people already have questions about Dunderdale.  The CRA polls, as fundamentally skewed as they are, still aren’t so crude that they missed the huge drop in leader support for Dunderdale compared to Williams.

What’s worse is the drop in party support.  It now stands at a mere 44% of respondents to the last CRA poll, once you take all the CRA torquing and massaging out.  In other words, it wouldn’t take much to put the Tories into a serious election problem.

How do people respond to claims about Muskrat Falls, for example, when the person who is telling them the whole thing is great is also the person who dissembled and misled – in the words of the Telegram editorialist – about something as comparatively trivial as Danny Williams’ role in the Liz Matthews nomination?

People looking at the current provincial government will also start looking at other examples like the Dunderdale Skinner performance.  Joan Burke on the MUN president, for example. 

Dunderdale on Joan Cleary and the Public Tender Act.

Kevin O’Brien.

Kathy Dunderdale and the Tories stand on the edge of the Gorge of Eternal Peril.  Dunderdale’s credibility is weakened. More people than before will think twice when she says something now.

The Tories aren’t likely to be swallowed up by the political chasm as a result. 

Amateurs think winning a campaign is about having a star leader.

It isn’t.

It’s about the ground game.

The logistics.

That’s still where the Tories have an advantage.  If the party district organizations hold, that alone will pull through seats the Tories might otherwise lose.  District level organization beyond one or two spots has been the traditional NDP weakness. If they’ve added some strength, they could have a stronger showing.

The Liberals have atrophied at the district level over the past couple of terms.  They’ve rebounded in a good few but overall the party is still far weaker than it ought to be.  You can put that all down to neglect of the basic party organization by the people right at the top.

And organization on the ground is what wins campaigns.

But if the internal splits and schisms evident in the Danny Williams outburst this week got wider…

Well, that might be a different matter.

Stay tuned. 

The election is only just starting in earnest. this could be a real Ginger- get-the-popcorn kinda show.

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Good to the last vote: Grit version #nlpoli

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.

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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.

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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.

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@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.

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