The Last Weekly Traffic Report for 2011 #nlpoli

1. The reality of her world
2. Making the world safe for sexism
3. Monkey Cage Round-up
4. The Top Ten for Eleven
5. Undisclosed risk
6. Familiar Furrows
7. The Scribbler’s Picks for 2011
8. Tory angst might be well founded
9. The Zazzy Substitution
10. The Wheel of Fish

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Familiar Furrows #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale spent most of her time in year-end interviews lamenting her critics.

No accomplishments.

No vision thing.

Just a lot of carping.

Lots of grousing about her critics and even a reference to the problems free speech in the legislature are causing her.

She said she kept the House of Assembly closed because it was dysfunctional, and a waste of time, and everyone else was useless.

Can’t ask proper questions, dontchya know. Kathy-approved intelligent questions.

Now, as the Telegram’s James Macleod puts it, the story is a little different:

Dunderdale has said repeatedly that there’s a simple reason for leaving the House closed: the government had no legislation to pass.

All that and the glories of Muskrat Falls, even though she  - herself – spends more time griping about everyone else rather than explaining the whole thing to people.

It is all just so boringly familiar.

The relentless negativity, that is.

Follow that second link if you haven’t already.  It will lead you to a quote from the Old Man Hisself circa November 2009:

But Williams said he's not going to stick around forever "to beat a dead horse" if a deal cannot be sealed, nor will he sign a bad deal [to develop the Lower Churchill] for the sake of getting one done while in office.

Hmmm.

In an interview with CBC to be broadcast Friday evening, Williams says he left office suddenly in late 2010 because he couldn’t handle the criticism anymore. 

His skin got thin again, apparently.

When Williams left office he said it was because he had just inked a deal with Nova Scotia to develop the Lower Churchill that was by no means a give away.

And as for that promise about no deal just to get out of the job?

Well, let’s just say that Harvey’s has salt for sale by the bucket load down at the waterfront. 

Buy lots.

You’ll need it.

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The Scribbler’s Picks for 2011 #nlpoli

National Political Story:  The Conservatives finally won a majority government in 2011.  They turned out to be not-so-scary after all for enough Canadians.


Provincial Political Story:   OCI’s unilateral start to changing the fishing industry beats anything else.  What they have started will have a profound effect on the province well into the future.

Many the politician is scared shitless of the whole thing.  You can see the fear in their eyes every time they speak of it.

None was more fear-filled than Kathy Dunderdale who tried to claim in one year-end interview that all she could do was facilitate discussions among other people.  Yeah, right,  as if Kath and her fellow pols of all political stripes haven’t been intimately involved with creating the current mess or won’t be affected by the sea change that is coming.

Try the SRBP post “The Wheel of Fish” if you want to read some of this corner’s observations.

High Point for the Scribbler:  The 15 Ideas series. Start here.  Close second:  The series on politics, polls and the media starting with the Echo Chamber which goes back to a 2006 series that changed the way many people look at politics and the news media.

Recurring Theme to Remember:  You can’t slide a single sheet of paper between the three political parties on most issues.  The Tory leadership fiasco at the start of the year is as good a place as any to start your review. Try “A Hugh Shea for our time” from January.

What Theme  Keeps Repeating Like Greasy Fish and Chips?  Irresponsible government spending. Start with “The Four Horsemen and government finances”.  Notice how familiar the issues are.  Regular readers will recall that SRBP flagged the Tories’ spending habits in 2006. 

A story that will drag into the New Year:  The death throes of the provincial Liberal Party.   “The Zazzy Substitution”  will get you started.  Don’t worry if you haven’t been paying attention.  There’ll be plenty of opportunities to catch up over the next couple of years.

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The reality of her world #nlpoli

Some people are trying to make a controversy out of Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s recent comments that public sector unions should “expect a more modest increase” than the salary rises they’ve been used to from the Conservatives since 2003.

Look at “the reality of the world”, Dunderdale admonishes everyone.

Well, a look at the world she lives in  - as opposed to the one people imagine exists - reveals a great deal.

Revelation One:  As labradore has noted repeatedly, the provincial Conservatives are responsible for expanding the public service both in absolute numbers and as a share of the provincial labour force.

In his most recent version, labradore notes both the size of the public sector: 25% of the provincial labour force.  Then he adds Revelation 2: the growth in the total value of the pay packet.  Since 2006, the total public sector pay cost has gone from about $1.9 billion to about $2.65 billion by January 2011.

Revelation 3 really puts it in perspective. Scan down through David Campbell’s commentary in the Globe on December 28 and you’ll find plenty to knock your eyeballs out about the growth of the provincial economy. Take the bits rom labradore and put it together with this on the relative position od the public sector pay envelope compared to the national average:

In 1998, the average weekly wage in the public administration sector in Newfoundland and Labrador was more than 22 per cent below the national average. Now it is 3.3 per cent above. That is a monumental shift in wages over a short 11 year period. A similar, but less pronounced story is found in both the health care and education sectors.

Most of that increase came since 2006.

So for anyone who is still harbouring any misapprehensions, understand that the provincial public sector has been driving the provincial economy for the past decade.  Thousands of more employees making – collectively – hundreds of millions more year over year and you have the growth since 2006 focused on the northeast Avalon. 

Now add to that the sources of provincial government revenue, as laid out in the annual provincial budget Estimates. You start to see the role that taxes on individual incomes and consumption play in fuelling the explosion in government spending since 2006.

Mining taxes and royalties produced about $167.5 million in revenue in 2010.  Personal income taxes brought in $888 million and sales taxes brought in another $791 million. Even gasoline taxes brought in more than mining royalties ($168.45 million) in 2010.

The forecast for 2011 did include an increase in mining royalties and taxes to $343 million. But even with that, two of those three taxes will still produce well over double the amount for the treasury than will come from rent companies pay for the privilege of exploiting the province’s non-renewable mineral resources.

When you look at the reality of things, Kathy Dunderdale and the Conservatives can’t afford to chop into provincial spending without putting a gigantic chill in the local economy.  As much as Dunderdale likes to admit that she and her colleagues have been irresponsible in boosting public sector spending to unsustainable levels, they haven’t left themselves any real manoeuvring room politically.

Now this might seem a bit harsh to Kathy’s delicate sensibilities, but the reality is that Dunderdale can’t do anything but provide the public sector with some lovely increases in their coming contract negotiations. 

When Kathy Dunderdale says public sector unions should expect more modest increases, we should understand she is probably speaking relatively.  Compared to their last contract when they got an eight percent jump followed by three successive years of four percent, public sector employees should probably look for something like four years of four percent. or four percent followed by three over the subsequent years.

But any serious confrontation?

Don’t count on it.

The Tories don’t have the nuts for it, pea or otherwise.

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Undisclosed risk (September 12, 2007)

[Editor's Note:  This is a post originally scheduled for publication in September 2007.  For some reason, it never appeared. Here it is, as originally written.  Note that some of the links may not work].

Take a look at the energy plan consultation document released in November 2006.

Try to find any reference to changing the province's generic oil royalty regime.

You won't find one.

The Top Ten for Eleven #nlpoli

1. Tory angst may be well founded (January 2011)
2. Humber West post mortem (February 2011)
3. Connie leadership rigged? (January 2011)
4. Watton to carry Liberal banner in Humber West (January 2011)
5. From 61% to 44% since August:  NTV poll shows Tory support slides further (February 2011)
6. HMV (March 2011)
7. Rick Hillier?  Tim Powers?  No thanks say NL Tories (January 2011)
8. Anyone seen John Hickey? (March 2011)
9. Connie Leadership 2011:  Brad and Circuses  (January 2011)
10. Patronage, pure and simple (March 2011)

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Monkey Cage Round-up

From The Monkey Cage, some recent posts that also tie to local politics and events:

• Media “consumption”. A recent post by John Sides at the Washington Post discussed a study into how much radio news people reported they listened to with the amount they actually did.  Two things to take away from Sides in the WP:  First, there can be a huge discrepancy between what people report and what they actually do.  As a result, pundits and analysts may have a hard time connecting advertising, news coverage and other sources of political opinion to voter attitudes and behaviour.  Second, think about the technology used to collect the data.  They used a small cellphone that recorded ambient noise.  The researchers then compared the information to “radio and television programming in the participant’s media market to identify what, if any, programs they had listened to or watched.”
• The Partisan use of Public Money:  A new study published in the American Political Science Review established an undeniable connection between a recorded incident of political direction from the White House with changes in government contracting:  “Vendors in Republican districts labeled vulnerable [by the White House] experienced contracts an estimated 272% larger than those in their unmentioned counterparts.”  Yes, folks, in some parts of the world this sort of thing is actually considered to be wrong. In other places, political direction of capital works spending is considered “normal”.
• Tax rates and Corporate Investment:  “Utilizing dynamic tests for up to 19 OECD countries from 1980 to 2000 and isolating the impact of time-varying factors on FDI [foreign direct investment] inflows, I find no empirical relationship between corporate taxation and FDI inflows. Using a number of different tax rate variables, control variables, and estimation techniques, I find no relationship between corporate tax rate changes and FDI flows.” 
• Nonvoters:  The phrase “absentee ballots and early voting” caught your humble e-scribbler’s attention given the law suit the local Dippers have launched against the provincial special ballot laws.  Those “special ballots” are not really special but rather a way to allow people who will be absent from the province during an election to vote. Do a bit of digging, though, and you’ll find the original New York Times commentary on the differences between people who vote and those who don’t vote in elections.  That discussion gets to be especially interesting around these parts given that elections since 2003 are characterised by relatively low voter turn-outs (when compared to previous elections in this province.)
• Politics and polls:  “No one set of polls drives how Americans think nor how “the media” reports on politics. Neither does a single politician reap a unique advantage from polling. The signal is too diffuse.

The overall effects of polling are often neutralized in the cacophony of private and public surveys and the swirl of other media and campaign tactics. There are tremendous problems with American politics today; polls are not the cause.

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Making the world safe for sexism #cdnpoli #nlpoli

Year-end political columns and features do nothing if not go for the easy and predictable when it comes to picking the top political story.

Jeff Simpson, for example, known to many as the poor man’s George Will, picked women in politics to lead off his Christmas Eve column:

This being Christmas weekend, let’s give thanks for some encouraging developments in Canada in 2011.

First off, women in politics. Three women became premiers – Kathy Dunderdale in Newfoundland and Labrador, Alison Redford in Alberta and Christy Clark in British Columbia.

The venerable Canadian Press ran a story on women in politics as well for Christmas week.  Surely this is something not seen since maybe the 1970s.

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak looks forward to a shift in dynamics when provincial and territorial leaders gather next month in Victoria.

For the first time ever, three other women will join her at the male-dominated meeting: Kathy Dunderdale of Newfoundland and Labrador, Alison Redford of Alberta and Christy Clark of British Columbia.

“The three seas are guarded by women,” Aariak said with a laugh.

Flip around the newspapers and broadcast media and you are likely to find more examples.  These two just stood out for being among the the firs.

And not long after those comments both Jeff and CP went to exactly the same spot..

Canadian Press:

“I think it will be very exciting to come together as a group with more women at the table,” she said in an interview. “And I think they will contribute valuable information.”

[Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Kathy] Dunderdale agreed.

“I know it’s going to be different because women do approach it differently,” she said in an interview.

Women simply don’t experience life the same way as men, Dunderdale said.

“So that gives you a certain insight, a certain perspective.

“And certain issues that are extremely important to you.”

And Jeff:

… women often have a nose for issues that men miss, or they see the same things through a different prism, and that difference is useful and important. Political life is better with more women running or helping to run the show.

Women see issues men don’t see.  They see all issues “differently”.  As Dunderdale put it “certain issues” are extremely import.  She then chose employment insurance and how it is unfair to some types of workers, incidentally, but more on that later. Yes friends, women are more socially aware.  They focus on the softer issues.

And, darn it all,  politics is just “better” with women in it.

The only thing missing from these insightful journalistic comments is the open admission that the offices smell better,  that the chicks make great coffee when you ask them to bring you a cup and cabinet meetings are better because sometimes the babes will even bring cookies they baked themselves.  The boys will have to watch their waist lines and their cholesterol counts now that women are in higher places.

So let’s deal with the obvious. 

Women do see the world somewhat differently from the way men do.  Then again, so do black men and women, aboriginal people, and immigrants.  White middle-class men from St. John’s will have a different experience than their counterparts from Quebec or Edmonton. 

But when you get beyond these most general of generalizations, so what?

Well, not much.  The differences in politicians come now as they always have, in the individuals themselves.  Women – as a group - are not inherently any better at politics or any more sensitive to certain issues than are men. 

Kathy Dunderdale, for example, hasn’t been any better at promoting a more civilized, inclusive, and open form of politics than any of her male predecessors.  She is every bit as arrogant and condescending as her predecessor ever was. She just has less than a tenth the reason to behave so ignorantly.

Dunderdale may see issues differently than someone like Jerome Kennedy – a man – but that is because she seems to have difficulty grasping many of them, very much unlike Kennedy. That doesn’t come from the fact that Dunderdale is a woman and Kennedy a man. Finance minister Tom Marshall  seems to have as limited a grasp on public finance as Dunderdale does and, as you likely concluded from his name, Tom is one of the guys in the room.

Kathy Dunderdale is certainly just as committed to secrecy and keeping the legislature as dysfunctional as her predecessor.  Dunderdale’s had a year in office. Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador who read that CP article are likely dumfounded to find out that Dunderdale has some sort of personal stake in employment insurance reform. 

So far she hasn’t said much of anything about it beyond a news release issued last summer.  Eight years in politics and not a peep other than mentioning that people who receive regular benefits need fewer hours to qualify for parental leave benefits under the Employment Insurance system than others.

What has actually been remarkable about women premiers is that the average Canadian doesn’t seem to have noticed at all.  You just did not see letters to the editor and calls to open line shows gushing about the historic first of Kathy Dunderdale, the first woman premier of her province.  A few reporters and Dunderdale supporters have tried to play it up, but for the most part Dunderdale as the first elected woman premier is a non-issue.

Not an issue.

Sure people noticed.

They couldn’t help but notice, especially if they followed Dunderdale’s staged campaign events that posed her as the Great Nan, heir to the Great Dan.

But the ordinary Joes and Janes didn’t play up the “first woman” angle themselves beyond maybe a comment or two in passing. 

24 hours tops, after the election.

Gone.

Part of that may well be due to the fact that people are a wee bit more evolved that the crowd in newsrooms these days.  They understand that it was only a matter of time before we had women premiers.  It’s a numbers game.  Get more women in politics over a longer time, eventually one of them gets the top job.

A goodly chunk of the reaction in Newfoundland and Labrador likely had to do with the fact that Dunderdale slid into her job a year ago. People are used to her.  The novelty of her chromosomal structure wore off long ago.  And to be brutally frank, it was never an issue anyway.

If someone wanted to make an issue, they might note that Dunderdale  got her job on a man’s coattails, hand-picked by a man to succeed him.  What’s more, the provincial Tories could have run a cardboard cut-out and they would have been swept back into power. They sure didn’t run their campaign as if she made a difference.  The “Dunderdale2011” thing was more about cutting and pasting than the use of a campaign built around the party’s strongest marketing appeal. 

The Tories do Big Giant Head campaigns so naturally they ran lots of shots of a Big Giant Head.  But they ran a stealth campaign with Dunderdale:  a photo op here and there and not much beyond it. There was no wave of Dundermania.

Truth be told Kathy could have frigged off to Florida with Susan Sullivan and no one would have wondered where Kathy went.  That’s what actually happened after the election, incidentally, and – you guessed it – no one cared.

Unlike reporters and political pundits, Canadians apparently don’t really give a toss about whether their politicians are women or men.  People are just interested in how well the politicians do their jobs.

That’s pretty much how it should be.

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Best Political Blog – Final Round of Voting is On!

Okay gang, that was just the preliminary round.

Now we are in the finals, along with Fighting Newfoundlander, Gritchick, Impolitical and Dawg’s Blog.

Some of you may have skipped voting last time.  Maybe you got confused by Bong Papers and thought you were in the legalised marijuana blog category.

Nope.

It was just a typo.

Now you can vote for the Bond Papers in the final round.

As always, vote early and vote often.  That’s not just a joke.  Once a day will be sufficient.

Here’s the link:

Vote Sir Robert Bond Papers.

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Euphonium Christmas

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Connies grinch consumers on Muskrat review #nlpoli

Anyone who thinks the governing Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador are interested in anything but ramming their megadebt Muskrat Falls deal down the public throat, well, those fine people are just not paying attention.

From Friday’s Telegram, public utilities board chairman Andy Wells:

"Now we have to have the report by end of March and, of course, that's an order from the government and we shall do that," Wells told The Telegram Thursday.

"The public consultation is going to very restricted. I don't know whether we will be holding a technical conference. The consumer advocate role will be substantially restricted. There is not sufficient time."

"In order to meet the March 31 deadline, we have to start writing our report in mid-February. What we really are looking at is two to three weeks of work that we thought would require three months."

Talk about undisclosed risk.

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Happy Full Metal Jacket Christmas

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T’was the week before Christmas… #nlpoli

And all the loyal SRBP readers who haven’t voted in the Best Political Blog category can still do so.

Click here.

When you are done there, you might sample these top 10 posts from last week as selected by the readers themselves:

1. Federal Liberals fear SRBP
2. Nalcor and the Muskrat alternatives
3. Penashue – the third smack
4. Muskrat Falls PIFO
5. Political party finance:  much more to read
6. All I want for Christmas is a paradigm shift
7. Undisclosed risk:  putting the plan into action
8. Memorable Christopher Hitchens
9. Amen, brother, amen.
10. More Muskrat Fun:  HQ, NALCO and PEI

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Muskrat Falls: the PUB review story #nlpoli

The Telegram has the best account of the unsuccessful effort by the public utilities board to get an extension on its review deadline for Muskrat Falls.

The whole thing is worth reading, right down to the bit where natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy disputes the role of the consumer advocate in the PUB process.

Then read the Telegram editorial:

But Kennedy seems to have missed the point of the PUB’s letter to him concerning its ability to do the review, because board chairman Andy Wells wasn’t actually asking for time — he was telling the government the time was needed.

The Telly-torial writer then makes a neat transition from a talk of the reason for the delay – Nalcor can’t cough up information on time - to a discussion of Nalcor’s and Emera’s problems coming up with information full-stop.

That difficulty in providing information in response to simple, obvious questions is pretty much the main reason for the growing opposition to the project. 

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Amen, brother, amen #nlpoli #cdnpoli

nottawa asks a good question about politicians, university professors and journalists and discovery of a fairly obvious point about public life in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003.

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More Muskrat Fun: HQ, NALCO and PEI #nlpoli #nspoli #cdnpoli

The Ghosts of Hydro-Quebec and NALCO:  A pair of readers fired off separate e-mails to point out an alternate  explanation for the “anything cabinet decides they can do” clause from the energy corporation legislation than the tack SRBP took.

They both pointed to comments made over several years by different politicians about making the local energy corporation act like Hydro-Quebec.  In the province those same pols love to hate, HQ gets involved in all sorts of public works.

The HQ spending supplements what the provincial government is doing and, as some of those pols noted, helps to keep a raft of what is essentially provincial government spending from the prying eyes of the Equalization cops.  The result is that Quebec gets to collect more Equalization than it might otherwise get if they transferred the HQ cash into the provincial treasury and had it counted as provincial government income for the purposes of calculating Equalization entitlements. To paraphrase one e-mail, you can also bitch at the same time about Ottawa not doing enough for your province as you collect all this extra money.

Those readers are absolutely right.  Some politicians had that as part of their goal for the energy corporation.  Usually they tied it with nationalising Newfoundland Power to create One Big Crown corporation.

Just to refresh people who might not have followed the whole discussion going back five years, the SRBP view is that Nalcor was essentially supposed to be like the old NALCO.  That was a failed Smallwood-era plan to use one giant corporation that controlled all the province’s natural resources to broker development.

NALCO with an R tacked on the end might not be able to control all resources but it would be able to assume an increasingly stronger role in economic development.  You can look at the exploration program and incentive grants created under the 2007 energy plan let Nalcor use its financial power to foster a leading relationship with smaller, cash-strapped local companies.  The fibre optic deal has Nalcor and the provincial government as the larger partner in the deal.  Even offshore, Nalcor’s exploration program can be seen as a way to step into areas where the private sector isn’t interested at the moment and where Nalcor can assume a dominant role.

Basically, though, the Equalization dodge and the One Big Corp idea aren’t incompatible with the idea of having the energy corporation assume a NALCO-like role in the economy.  The two ideas fit together rather neatly.

In a related story, federal New Democratic Party leadership contender Thomas Mulcair showed up in Prince Edward Island garnering supporter for his campaign.  Part of the story in the Guardian included this rather curious reference by a prominent Island Dipper:

"Tom supports policies which are good for P.E.I. including federal support for the Lower Churchill development which will give us a third electric cable and support for a moratorium on hydraulic fracking."

What Joe Byrne seems to be talking about is actually not a Lower Churchill project at all.  It’s a plan to run another line from the mainland to PEI.  There’s an SRBP post on it from January 2011 when the conventional media reported the federal government wouldn’t fund the project as a green initiative.

Other than that, the only time anyone talked about PEI and the Lower Churchill in the same breath was in 2005.  Back then a British Columbia company was looking at the idea of running a cable to PEI  directly from Labrador.  If memory serves, Nalcor was also thinking about the same option.  Apparently it never got to the point where anyone discussed it officially with the people running Prince Edward Island.

Of course with the Emera deal, there’s no reason to run another bunch of underwater lines to PEI. 

However, if the Islanders are happy to pay outrageous prices for electricity, the gang at Nalcor would be happy to speak with them.  They have just the thing you are looking for.

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Federal Liberals fear SRBP #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Well, not just the Sir Robert Bond Papers but all bloggers.

Idiots.

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Undisclosed risk: putting the plan into action #nlpoli

The provincial government is dropping $11.3 million to string fibre optic cables from Goose Bay to western Labrador.

The federal government will plunk in $3.0 million with $9.7 million from Bell Aliant.

Of the provincial total, Nalcor Energy will cover $8.3 million.

Just do the math, though.  The provincial government has 47% of this project.  Both the federal and provincial government shares combined cover a majority interest in the project.

If that doesn’t hit you funny, it might be striking you a bit odd that an energy company is suddenly getting involved in telecommunications.  Here’s the quote the people who put the news conference together made up for the Nalcor representative:

“This is one of the many benefits that Labrador will see from the Lower Churchill Project,” said Gilbert Bennett, Nalcor’s Vice-President, Lower Churchill Project. “Nalcor is investing in this project to ensure that critical infrastructure required to build and operate the Muskrat Falls development is in place in Labrador.”

“This is one of the many benefits that Labrador will see from the Lower Churchill Project,” said Gilbert Bennett, Nalcor’s Vice-President, Lower Churchill Project. “Nalcor is investing in this project to ensure that critical infrastructure required to build and operate the Muskrat Falls development is in place in Labrador.”

Not that Nalcor is bullshitting the public or anything,  but of course, they are bullshitting. Nalcor has been on a heavy marketing campaign for Muskrat Falls for several months now in all sorts of ways.  If they gave money to put new public toilets in a town somewhere, the news release would credit the whole thing to Muskrat Falls.

So yeah, on the crudest level, this is just another version of Nalcor’s publicity efforts for Muskrat Falls. 

On another level, this is part of a trend the provincial Conservatives have been pushing since 2003.  A key part of the whole effort has been to allow Nalcor – a state-owned, politically directed agency – to use public money to assume an increasingly larger role in the provincial economy.

Weird as it might sound for a Conservative government, that’s part of what is going on here.  You can understand it better if you look at what the party does as opposed to importing labels or ideologies from other places.  Progressive Conservative is just a label.  In practice, the political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t ideologically based at all.  That’s why people can jokingly refer to the Danny Williams Tories as the first NDP government the province ever had and not really be making a silly joke at all.

This sort of project is why the province’s ruling Conservatives inserted clauses in the energy corporation legislation in 2007 that allowed an energy company to do anything the cabinet wants it to do. It was a pretty dramatic change from the old law that governed the provincial hydro corporation.

In fact, this clause was so far away from one one would expect for an  energy corporation that most people likely blew it off as being just a meaningless oddity.  The whole thing stands out, though, because the clause survived through some pretty significant revisions from the first version of the energy corporation laws in 2006  to the ones that currently govern the corporation dating from 2007. 

Cabinet obviously meant for the new corporation to take on anything at all.  They didn’t need a way of funnelling provincial government money to the private sector.  They already have dozens of ways to do that.  They also didn’t need to do this for Muskrat Falls. They’ve been running Churchill Falls, for example, since the 1970s with good old copper telephone lines. 

Muskrat Falls wouldn’t be the only new industrial venture that could use fibre optic communications.  There are some new mining businesses likely to start in Labrador soon that could claim a far bigger interest in these cables than Nalcor.

And for what it’s worth, Muskrat Falls might not even happen.

What’s going on here is a continuation of the policy laid down by the Conservatives early in their mandate.  They want to assume greater and greater control over the provincial economy.  Today,it’s fibre optic cables.  Tomorrow, it might well be another administration of any partisan stripe getting Nalcor into fish processing or marketing.

As your humble e-scribbler put it in 2006:

Williams' new Hydro corporation returns to an older model based on government subsidy and government dependence. Beyond the attractiveness to some businesses of relying on whatever contracts they can secure from the new Hydro corporation, the political and financial muscle of the state-owned company will likely make it considerably more attractive an investment than a private sector venture, since it will always carry with it a government guarantee of its operations and expenditures. The end result will almost inevitably be a weakening of the local private sector.

Weakening the private sector is one result.

Another is ensuring that local taxpayers pay the full financial cost and then some. Under the Electrical Power Control Act and the public utilities board legislation, the utilities board must set provincial electricity rates to ensure the financial viability of the provincial energy corporation.  The company can never lose.

It’s that same combination of powers, incidentally, that Nalcor is using to finance the Muskrat Falls project.  Local taxpayers will be forced – by law – to pay whatever rates Nalcor needs to ensure it recovers its costs, makes a profit and maintains its credit rating.

It was an undisclosed risk in 2006, but then again, that’s what the Lower Churchill is all about.  It’s what a 2009 Emera deal was all about. Heck, it’s what the provincial Conservatives have been all about since 2003.

No wonder they dropped it out there a couple of days before Christmas.

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All I want for Christmas is a paradigm shift #nlpoli

Here’s the difference between a province that is successfully tackling the challenge of labour shortages compared to one that is hopelessly adrift.

Saskatchewan is open to people from anywhere.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, meanwhile, the emphasis in every discussion seems to be on keeping local people in or figuring out – as with apprentices – in how to lure them back. 

Check that article from the Telegram – first in a series – and notice how fast they turn to talking about a labour shortage. That’s really code for “there won’t be enough of ‘us’ to get the work.”  Part of that sentiment goes unspoken, namely that letting more of “them” in would be, at worse, undesirable socially and culturally or at best an admission of some sort of ethnic failure.

In Saskatchewan, they don’t spend any time fretting that all this prosperity will mean a loss of the old.  They don’t seem to be quite so bothered dividing the world up into “we”s and “they”s.

All we need in Newfoundland and Labrador this Christmas is a massive shift in headspace for some people.

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Unsound financial management – the Dunderdale acknowledgement #nlpoli

It’s not hard to find the toad of truth in the swamp otherwise known as the ruling Conservatives’ record on public spending since they took office in 2003.

You can find it because since 2009 they like to admit every now and then that their spending habits are “unsustainable."

As nottawa reminds everyone, Premier Kathy Dunderdale has now acknowledged that:

“[o]ur spending at the rate that we've been doing over the last eight years — and it has been very necessary for a number of very good reasons to do that — is not sustainable in the long run.” [CBC online story]

But when Mark claims that “[u]p to now, Tories (and others) have disagreed with that assessment” he is not exactly right.

In 2009, Paul Oram was the first Tory cabinet minister to acknowledge publicly that “unsustainable” thing.

As your humble e-scribbler noted at the time, those words must have received the blessing of the Premier’s Office since cabinet ministers under Danny Williams couldn’t break wind without permission from Hisself’s posse.

Fnance minister Tom Marshall.chimed in with an unsustainability admission.*

And then they just kept up the same old habits.

It’s not surprising therefore that the public sector unions just won’t react to Kathy Dunderdale’s comments that the unions must not expect big wage increases in the upcoming round of negotiations.  Local CBC has been pounding away for a couple of days trying to make a story out of this but so far they’ve come up with zip.

The unions know the sad Tory record of saying one thing and doing another.  They also know that the Tories are still in a pre-leadership phase.  Danny’s gone.  Kathy’s a fill-in. 

If they thought about it for a moment, they’d also know that the local economic boom the Tories like to praise themselves for is actually a function of public sector spending.

That’s right.

It isn’t oil.

It’s a massive increase in the number of public servants since 2003,  fantastic wage increases, and unprecedented increases in  public spending. Roads and buildings are just part of it.

That unsustainable public spending is what has been sustaining the provincial economy. Under the Tories, the provincial economy is considerably more fragile than it’s ever been before. 

Any effort by the Tories to get their spending under control – to get it to sustainable levels - will put a chill through the place.  That will inevitably lead to a chill in the local economy.  The chill won’t just hit St. John’s where most of the public servants and the construction industry lives.  The chill will be felt everywhere and that will put a chill on the Tories’ political standing.

All that is the answer to Doug Letto’s questions in his essay on the “massive obstacles” Kathy Dunderdale is facing:

Can she and the government say no? Consistently?

No.

And no.

And everyone knows it, including Kathy.

Muskrat Falls, incidentally, is nothing more than the best example of a party addicted to unsustainable public spending.  The project will increase the public debt to new record levels but that is irrelevant to the province’s Tories.  They want all those jobs to keep the economy humming.

You can easily find the toad of fiscal truth in the swamp of Tory financial mismanagement since 2003. The truth is – as Kathy admitted herself – their spending is unsustainable.

The part Kathy didn’t say is that she won’t be able to do anything but keep it up.

- srbp -

* Changed wording to clear up sentence meaning in the context of the post.  Original post had wording left over from earlier draft.