Dip-Flop Fly #nlpoli

Twitter flame wars between cabinet ministers and Dale Kirby over Muskrat Falls.

Surely Darin, Jerome and Clyde have better things to do with their days.

Then again, maybe not.

But at the heart of the whole flare up was Lorraine Michael’s theatrical delivery of a letter to the public utilities board on Tuesday explaining she would not be making a presentation on Muskrat Falls.

Like they really gave a flying frig in the first place.

Right after she handed the envelope to someone from the utilities regulator, Michael took some questions from reporters.

Michael is in a bit of a political jam, you see.  Tuesday’s little bit of a show was a way to try get out of it.  Michael campaigned during the last federal election alongside Jack Layton.  The provincial and federal NDP supported a loan guarantee for Muskrat Falls.  Good for Newfoundland and Labrador (votes), as it seemed at the time, and definitely good for some votes in Nova Scotia.

That was then.

This is now.

In the meantime, public sentiment in the province has shifted against the project.  Lots of people - lots of significant people – have turned up lots of significant problems with the deal. While Michael went along with the whole thing back in 2011 when she was the lone Dipper in the provincial legislature, she now has a caucus to contend with.  Some of them don’t like Muskrat Falls.

Hence the softening of official Dipper support for the project.

But Michael still can’t get away from the unions.  They love the project.  Lots of public dollars to employ lots of unionised members and potential union members. 

Want to know how strongly the union support the project?  Check any comment by federation of labour boss Lana Payne. And when the unions want something, their political wing – Lorraine’s bunch – will have a hard time opposing them.  All of this allows for big internal divisions in the NDP caucus and that’s without getting into the egos and the ambition.

Part of what you saw in the Twitter fight on Tuesday was the Tories pounding on a wedge issue: the NDP position on da Falls.  And they were hammering the wannabe leader, Dale Kirby.  He gets on Tory nerves, big-time, for a whole raft of reasons.  There were lots of school-boy taunts about getting him in the House where people would see the Dippers for what they are.  Yada, yada yada, blah, blah, blah.

All that bravado doesn’t get away from the fact that the only caucus more fractured than the Dipper one is the Tory crew.  They’ve got splits over the fishery and the budget and Muskrat Falls.

What’s more, Kathy Dunderdale has no control over her cabinet, let alone her caucus. One day after she says that people have to put their egos aside and stop playing the blame game so everyone can sort out the fishery, former fisheries minister Clyde Jackman is out there playing the blame game on province-wide radio. 

So amid all the bluster and fury on Tuesday between the Tories and the Dippers lots of things were not as they seem.

Go read Lorraine’s letter, for example.

In effect, it is a submission to the commission review of the Muskrat Falls project.  You see, if Lorraine really didn’t want to participate in the whole exercise she just wouldn’t have shown up in the first place.

Instead she says that a presentation wouldn’t allow her to outline the NDP concerns. Then she outlines them without having to face any questions from the panel or Nalcor. 

Oddly enough, the Liberal Party’s natural resources critic managed to sit in front of the commission and lay out substantive concerns.

In the letter, Michael states the NDP criteria for a successful project;  economically viable, environmentally sustainable and beneficial to the province. Like anyone would propose an economically foolish and environmentally destructive project that would screw taxpayers to the wall.

And in the letter itself, she doesn’t say that the provincial NDP think the whole idea of the project is nutso.  Lorraine basically says that there isn’t enough information and that there should be time for a more detailed review.

“We are not yet convinced…”

She doesn’t say “not convinced”.

Lorraine says not yet convinced.

The Big Tories who have come out against the project are saying they want a proper process.  That’s so they can’t be accused of betraying the party.  No one can mistake their meaning though, even if the actual words are soft. They know Muskrat Falls is ludicrous.

The NDP use coded language, too.  But notice the difference between the Tory code and the Dipper code.  With the NDP, you really can’t see an unequivocal rejection of the project.  Lorraine left a hedge in her letter, the letter that is a submission to the review while claiming it isn’t a submission.

The one thing you can’t mistake though is the political turmoil in the province at the moment.  If any of it erupts into the open, this could be an amazing year in local politics.

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The Others, a.k.a the Ghost and Mrs. Dunderdale #nlpoli

Regardless of any change in the cost of other forms of energy,… we will have stability in this province that few parts of the world could depend on with the same reliability.

Did Premier Kathy Dunderdale say that? During the provincial election last fall, she told The Scope that Muskrat Falls is:

…i the way forward that will provide us a new energy we are going to need to run the place, but it will stabilize those energy prices because we don’t have the volatility of oil anymore.

In January 2012, she told the St. John’s Board of Trade that:

Our government firmly believes developing the hydro-power resources of the Lower Churchill is the key to a sustainable future for our province over the long term. Muskrat Falls is a venture that will pay for itself through lower energy costs, new export revenues and new opportunities for economic development here at home.

Maybe natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy tweeted it one day:

Hydro avoids the volatility of oil.

Might have been Nalcor’s Ed Martin:

Muskrat Falls translates to lower and stable rates for customers.

None of them did.

Premier Frank Moores said it in 1974 when local politicians first turned their attention seriously to developing the Lower Churchill. No matter what happens in other parts of the world, no matter what other technologies exist, hydro-electricity would be the future for Newfoundland and Labrador.

Economics had nothing to do with it, if you follow the comments from others involved in the project.  As Philip Smith notes in his account of the development of Churchill Falls*, the Lower Churchill generated more power than the island part of the province needed in total. Environment and technology made difficult the task of running lines across the narrow gap between Newfoundland and the mainland.

The provincial government found some of the finest minds of the time, American consultants, to look at the project.  They pronounced the scheme “economically viable and socially desirable.”  Advances in underwater transmission in Scandinavia made the underwater link to the mainland a better bet than it might have been a decade earlier.

Moores was sold:

It is the intention of the provincial government to use power created from the Lower Churchill within the province only.  It is clear to us that this position is in the best interest of all Newfoundlanders.

A second consulting firm, more smart minds from Winnipeg and Montreal, took on further studies.  They predicted that there were “excellent prospects” for new industries to use the power.  Their forecasts held that the whole 1800 MW output of Gull Island would be absorbed on the island by 1988.  With the federal government helping to underwrite the project, the Canadian consultants predicted that island consumers would get the power for 14 mills per kilowatt hour, at a time when the going wholesale rate for power if sold to or through Quebec was less than eight mills.

The past weighs heavily on the mind of politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador.  They go back to it regularly.  Kathy Dunderdale, Jerome Kennedy, finance minister Tom Marshall, and the crowd at Nalcor have invoked the historical totems of Churchill Falls and Bay d’Espoir to justify their Muskrat Falls project.

What they are talking about is not the actual events, of course, but rather the imagined version of events they or others hold to be true.  They are a form of cultural short-hand.  They are metaphors for other ideas. They are coded speech.

What we are talking about here is not an academic abstraction, nor is it about competing interpretations – narratives, if you will – of local history.  Newfoundland history, as used by politicians, is a living language.

But it is a language that has no basis on reality.  It is entirely fictitious. The people who speak about the past are, like Paul Oram, fundamentally ignorant of the past.  Oram was not an historical revisionist, as the title of that old post suggested.  To be a revisionist requires a familiarity with both the events themselves as real occurrences and the competing stories of what those events mean.

Rather, Oram was a typical political actor of the modern Newfoundland stage.  History for such an actor is not about concrete events involving people who behaved in the sort of complex world in which all of us live, simultaneously at the moment.

Their history is plastic. It can be moulded to suit any need.

Their history is not, to paraphrase Calvin, an exercise in interpreting the past to suit our current biases.  Nor is history solid.  Rather, history for them is air. 

Former Premier Brian Peckford intruded into the Muskrat Falls world on Tuesday.  His letter to Premier Dunderdale is a simple thing. The second sentence of the first paragraph is the basis for his understanding of the project and the issues:

Of course, as you know, I was heavily involved in this enterprise when I was Minister of Mines and Energy and as Premier.

Dunderdale dismissed Peckford with her characteristic arrogance:

But a message from afar, about a debate that you haven’t been engaged in, or public information sessions that you haven’t participated in, then you know it’s difficult for me to deal with.

But before she got to that she started from a very curious place:

I don’t know how close Mr. Peckford ever was to the energy files here in the province in terms of a new development. I know a great deal of work went into (Upper Churchill) redress.

This is not Dunderdale admitting her lack of knowledge of Peckford. Far from it.  That is Kathy Dunderdale dismissing Peckford out of hand as knowing nothing about the subject.

If he had something useful to say, then she’d listen. But he doesn’t know anything so just pay no attention to him.

But it is Dunderdale who clearly doesn’t know anything.  She is ignorant, both in the sense of not knowing anything and in the local sense of being rude.

The Premier is profoundly uninformed of events that happened in her adult lifetime.  She can’t be posing or pretending. One must be not only completely unaware of the truth but also assured of its irrelevance in order to make such an obviously ridiculous comment with such complete self-assuredness.

What is truly remarkable about Dunderdale, Kennedy and Marshall is that they speak of history.  They tie their decisions to the past. “We must learn from the mistakes of the Upper Churchill,” tweeted Kennedy last month.  “I don't want to spend my nights wondering if I'm going to be the new Joey Smallwood,” Kennedy told an audience in Corner Brook.

For all that sort of comment, Kennedy, Dunderdale, Marshall and the others have no sense that they are displaying exactly the characteristics – arrogance and tunnel vision, among them – that led to the events in the 1960s they wish to avoid.

Such is their understanding of what our history is.

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*  Philip Smith, Brinco:  the story of Churchill Falls, (Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1975)

NDP MHA not helping consumers #nlpoli

George Murphy is the NDP member of the provincial legislature best known for pushing the government gas price gouging scheme that forces consumers to pay prices for gasoline that benefits the provincial government and the gasoline retailers.

Murphy says he is on the side of consumers.

Now Murphy thinks that a jump in food prices is caused by ferry rates:

According to Voice of the Cabinet Minister:

The MHA for St. John's East says he's concerned about the latest inflation numbers from Statistics Canada, and says those numbers are linked to Marine Atlantic's rate hike. According to Stats Can consumer prices in January are up by 2.5 per cent in metro compared to last year. Murphy says the hike of 4.9 per cent in food prices can be directly traced to the four per cent increase in Marine Atlantic ferry rates.

He says it's time for the federal government to step in and keep Marine Atlantic rates low and stable so that the people aren't gouged at the grocery store.

A small increase in the cost of sailing on a ship for a few miles caused food prices to rise dramatically.

Not the fact that the food comes from places like California on the other end of the friggin’ continent, and is brought here in trucks that burn diesel fuel, the price for which is pretty high these days.

And the solution to that problem is for the federal government to pour tax dollars into lowering those evil ferry rates.

Murphy likes spending federal tax dollars to help people.

He also wants the federal government to support development of Muskrat Falls.

That’s the Newfoundland Tory/Dipper scheme to force the taxpayers of Murphy’s district to pay full cost plus profit for electricity so that the private sector company that sells electricity to people in Nova Scotia can get the juice for free.

Murphy likes spending public money to help people.

You just gotta know that those people Murphy winds up helping aren’t consumers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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Reminder: Jerry Bannister on political myths in NL #nlpoli

With the provincial government and its proponents deploying Churchill falls and bay d’Espoir as part of their arsenal of argument in favour of Muskrat Falls, there couldn’t be a better time for some old-fashioned myth busting courtesy of historian Dr. Jerry Bannister.

Wednesday, February 22, 7 pm at The Rooms

The Limits of Myth Busting:
Popular and Professional Histories of Newfoundland and Labrador

What is the relationship between myth and history? And are myths rooted in history? Join Dr. Jerry Bannister as he shares his thoughts on the role of historians and popular mythologies in understanding our province’s past.

Just a reminder.

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Partisan hypocrite? #nlpoli #cdnpoli

or just full of it?

Leo Abbass on news that no one wants to use Goose Bay as a supersonic flight training venue:

“From what we were told the base has a bright future, they're working to come up with that operational requirement,” Abbass told CBC News. “As long as they're working towards that, I'm content with that.”

For the record, you don;t have to work at finding an “operational requirement”.  It is usually so friggin’ obvious that only an idiot couldn’t find it.

Anything else would be bullshit.

A big, steaming pile of it, in fact.

Now this is not the first time that Leo has soft-pedalled a failure by his political friends to deliver on yet another of their promises to Goose Bay.

Leo’s boundless optimism about Leo’s federal friends is understandable. Their promises are sure, after all. Goose Bay doesn’t need flight training, what with those hundreds of soldiers now living and working in Goose Bay.

Or not.

And when he wasn’t cheering one crowd, Leo was changing his position from one deal to another.  The second one is the favoured one of Leo’s buddies.

Their promises are sure, too.

Nor is it the first time he has been rather obviously full of crap.

Leo Abbass:  partisan hypocrite or just full of shit?

Take your pick.

There’s no difference in the two.

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If she said that about the fishery… #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale, answering media questions about the future of the province’s last paper-making machine:

“[Kruger are] going to run their operation in consultation with the union on how they can manage their operations here in Corner Brook so that they can compete and compete globally because that's what they need to do,” she said.

Manage operations of the plant so they can compete globally.

Sensible idea.

And the provincial government isn’t going to interfere.

Watch the whole scrum.

Dunderdale talks about the company needing to run efficient, lean operations, “especially in this kind of a climate”.  She means a globally competitive business climate in which plants are closing up because they can’t compete.

Note as well that Kathy Dunderdale acknowledges that neither she nor natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy know about running paper making operations.

Then the scrum switches to the fishery and immediately Kathy Dunderdale changes her headspace.  Suddenly she knows so much about the fishery that she needs to have overwhelming control of the industry – by her account – in order to sort things out.

Dunderdale’s premise in the fishery is that everything should continue as it is, with the government presumably dictating how much companies should take in losses each year.  After all, that’s what fisheries minister Darin King was talking about recently when he told the world that he and his cabinet colleagues had rejected OCI’s processing proposal.  The provincial government looked at the company’s financial statements and made up its own mind about how much work needed to be done in the province.

Now neither Dunderdale nor King know more about the fishery than they do about forestry and papermaking. Yet,  King insists that when it comes to the fishery, the government is interested in getting the most out of the industry for the province.

Two resource industries.

Both facing significant economic pressures that come, ultimately, from the need to operate lean, efficient operations in an intensely competitive global economic environment.

And yet the provincial government follows a policy in one diametrically opposed to the policy they follow in the other.

No need to wonder for a moment why the fishery remains in a mess.  The current provincial government is just the last in a long line of cabinets that simply lacked the political will to come to grips with the fishery problem and fix the problems.  The simplest fix would be to treat the fishery the same way they treat the forestry.

Kathy Dunderdale knows, though, that if she said about the fishery what she said about the forest industry, the dinosaurs would lace into her from all sides.  When you listen to what King and Dunderdale told reporters and how they said it, you’d be making a pretty big ass of yourself if you assumed that King and Dunderdale even thought of doing such a thing in the first place.

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The future of Goose Bay, seven years later #nlpoli

Anyone following the ongoing saga of the Goose Bay air base could hardly be surprised to find out that no one is interested in supersonic flight training in the Big Land.

People have been chasing after this idea for years, just as they have been trying for years to keep the military in Goose Bay.  They are trying not because Goose bay is militarily relevant but because some people want to keep public money flowing into the town. Go back to February 2005 and you will find a post here at SRBP on exactly that idea of trying to keep the town firmly on the public tit.

So seven years later, the future of Goose Bay remains the same:  not with the military. 

When will the provincial and federal governments, and some of the people in Goose Bay get the message?

Seems like they are all – like the provincial Liberals – destined to be clueless on this issue.

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Protesting too much? #nlpoli

FFAW boss Earle McCurdy responded on Friday to comments by OCI’s Martin Sullivan that the FFAW, among other things, had threatened to shut OCI down and had proposed closing the Fortune plant in exchange for trying to get some provincial government money to help OCI refurbish the Marystown plant.

Here are Earle’s comments as reported by CBC:

“What Mr. Sullivan is saying is a total fabrication and misrepresentation of any discussions we’ve had…”

So it is entirely false.

But at exactly the same time, it is something FFAW representatives said taken out of context?

Then McCurdy went off on another tack:

“What you do when you don’t want to debate the issues is you start making personal attacks.  About the only thing he didn’t accuse us of is child molesting. …He’s making it up. He’s smoking something. I don’t know what he’s doing. But what he should do is stick with the issues."

Sounds a wee bit fishy, if you will pardon the choice of words.  you see, the other thing you do when you can’t deal with the comments is protest noisily that you have been abused and attacked.

You can hear both interviews on this week’s On Point Saturday at 7:30 PM.

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The Backdrop Problem #nlpoli

A picture from a recent Eastern Health news conference shows why at least a portion of their news conference backdrop needs to be tossed in favour of a new design.

Chief executive Vicki Kaminski looks like she’s in an advertisement for a freak show.  Kaminski appears to have a giant head coming out of her shoulder. Even without that big head over her right shoulder the pile of faces staring out is hideous and distracting.

Meanwhile,  another part of the back drop shows a different part of the background display that works reasonably well.

you can see Oscar Howell clearly.  He’s the focus of the shot and nothing distracts from him or his air of authority.

Vicki on the other hand looks like someone’s holding a small turd under her nose. Not a good image.

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Natural gas and electricity #nlpoli

Cabot Martin knows what he is talking about.  His speech to the St. John’s Rotary Club on Thursday opened a great many eyes to the potential for natural gas as a means to produce electricity locally.  By extension, martin also got at a key aspect of why the Muskrat Falls proposal is just wrong.

For an account of the speech check the Telegram.

“Nalcor has not conducted due diligence in its examination of this option, the White Rose option,” he said. “They can wave their options all they want, but they can’t produce one single study by a competent engineering firm to focus on this option. And White Rose gas happens to be probably the most viable long-term energy resource that we have in this province.”

For more on Martin’s background material, check his website;  muskratinfo.ca.

Meanwhile, in the same Telegram article,  Paul Barnes of the petroleum producers association says that the natural gas is being used to help produce oil. 

That’s true, but as Barnes knows, the White Rose operators are looking to get rid of some of their gas. They don’t need all the gas for oil production.  He also knows that the province can take the gas today and compensate the operators for it, regardless of the price.  Or the province can take it as part of their royalty.

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Fishery reform: the deeper story #nlpoli

NTV’s Thursday report on Loyola Sullivan focused on the union protests and accusations of a conflict of interest from Liberal Jim Bennett.

But the more interesting news on Thursday came from Michael Connors’ tweets about Sullivan’s speech to the employer’s council.

Sullivan is now talking about the economic problems in Europe. He says world's faltering economies are a result of living beyond means.

He's veering back to the debt issue now.

Sullivan talks about governments spending irresponsibly so they could get re-elected.

Sullivan now talking about his own tenure as finance minister. Proud that he brought down first balanced budget in 2006.

Now talking about how province can bring down per capita debt. Dunderdale wants to cut that number in half in 10 years

Sullivan raising concerns about province's debt to GDP ratio.

Sullivan says government should commit to balanced budgets and debt reduction.

Connors called it surreal but what he was really seeing here is a clue to some pretty big political backstories.

Go back in time and it doesn’t take too much imagination to think that Sullivan left the Tory cabinet abruptly in 2006 as a result of a huge disagreement over financial policy.  The 2007 budget – an election year budget  - that they would have been discussing when Sullivan quit saw a huge increase in pork-barrel spending and set the tone for the rest of Danny Williams’ tenure.

Sullivan wasn’t any great shakes when it came to sound fiscal [planning but his couple of years as finance minister are a model of tight-fistedness compared to the Dipper-esque spending sprees of the Danny Williams/Tom Marshall era.

There was something serious on the go at the time.  Danny Williams announced his resignation around the same time. In the months after Sullivan left, Williams got increasingly testier.  That’s when the Old man tossed a public threat at your humble e-scribbler and started musing about getting rid of free speech in the legislature.

Slide forward in time to the current day and you can see signs of a pretty big split in the local Tory party that just got a whole lot wider.  This OCI versus the government story is about more than the fishery.  The Sullivans are a crowd of Big Tories. The family has lots of friends and supporters across the province. Loyola’s a former leader of the party.

When Sullivan made some pointed comments about the current crowd’s lack of financial prowess, he was likely speaking for a large number of local Tories.  His comment about the debt was a very clear shot at Tom Marshall and Kathy Dunderdale.  You could also add a poke at the Muskrat Falls plan into Sullivan’s comment about the public debt.  Muskrat Falls, after all, is about increasing the public debt.

Things are not sunshine and roses inside Tory circles and they haven’t been for some time.

Loyola Sullivan’s speech on Thursday is a sign of how big a rift there is

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The Joy of Political Giving, By-Elections edition #nlpoli

Official election finance returns for two by-elections in 2010 and 2011 show an interesting pattern of political contributions.

The most interesting tidbit is that the Tories had to pull out all the financial stops to ensure Vaughan Granter won Humber West. The party transferred more than $17,000 to his campaign.

The single largest expense for the campaign was for workers’ travel.  The Granter campaign spent $14,000 paying for campaign workers’ travel. In addition, the Tory party spent another $10,000 of their own on worker travel. In total, the Tory party spent $28,000 on the by-election.

The returns are the by-elections in and Conception Bay East-Bell Island (2010) and Humber West (2011).  The table below  shows the contributions broken down into personal donations and corporate ones.  CBE-BI is on the top and Humber West is on the bottom.

It’s the mismatch between the personal and the corporate that stands out in Conception Bay East-Bell Island.  Tory David Brazil received 43 corporate donations averaging $470 each, but had contributions from only 18 individuals.  

Among the corporate donors to Brazil’s campaign was a numbered Ontario company that apparently operates an Italian restaurant.  1148305 Ontario Inc. (New Hope Properties) also donated to the Ontario Liberal Party in Cambridge Ontario in 2003 and 2007.

Brazil also got donations from OCI and the Pennecon as well as the gang of loyal givers from the Old Man’s old law firm.

Liberal Joy Buckle also had a large number of corporate donors.  The more interesting ones show a connection to the former leader of the Liberal party and the current one.

New Democrat George Murphy was the only one of the three by-election candidates who turned out more personal than corporate donations.  among his big benefactors was wannabe party leader and current MHA for St. John’s North Dale Kirby.

Check what they spent their money on and you can see the huge advantage incumbency gives you.  The Tories raised more than $37,000 compared to about $15,000 for the NDP and slightly more than half that for the Liberals.  But the Tories were able to transfer out of the campaign more money than the Liberals raised in total and almost as much as the NDP spent.

Out on Humber West, the story was different.  Liberal Mark Watton turned up 47 donations from individuals and 11 from corporations.  The geographic origin of Watton’s donors  - across Canada and one from France - attests to his wide personal appeal and connections.

While Watton’s successful Tory opponent netted a large number of corporate donations, a couple of them might be looking for his help these days.  Well, at least four members of the Corner Brook Firefighters Association, newly out of work thanks to Vaughan Granter’s Tory colleagues on the Corner Brook city council.  Maybe the boys can ask Vaughan to intercede on their behalf.  They did give him $500  - via the association - in the by-election.

Their spending and income statements, though are where things get really interesting.  Watton raised way more than Granter.  The Tory party had to transfer $17,000 into Granter’s campaign. Granter only raised $14,600 on his own compared to $25,000 for Watton.

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The fishery of the future, DFO version #nlpoli #cdnpoli

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is holding a consultation on the future direction of the commercial fishery in Canada. it builds off the sustainable fisheries framework announced in 2009.

Click on the picture to head off to the part of the website where you can leave your comments online.

Here’s how the DFO website describes it:

Canada is blessed to be rich in natural resources, including the longest coastline in the world. It is estimated that 80,000 Canadians make their livings directly from fishing and fishing related activities.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada is committed to supporting the economic profitability of those fisheries, while striving to ensure that fish stocks are healthy and abundant for future generations. The Department is modernizing the way it does business to enable the industry to address both current and future challenges. This will ultimately lead to fisheries that are more sustainable, more profitable and more globally competitive for the long term. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has already taken some important steps after considering feedback from industry, Aboriginal groups and others. But more needs to be done.

The Department is talking with Aboriginal groups, the fishing industry, non-governmental organizations and fisheries experts, as well as the Canadian public. We recognize the importance of transparency as we move forward with specific elements of fisheries management modernization. We also appreciate the value that diverse perspectives can bring to the development of these policies. Together, we will build a path towards a more sustainable, stable and economically prosperous fishing industry.

There’s also a consultation document [pdf] that lays out the basis for the discussion.  You can also find the bits of it and some presentations broken down for easier reading online at the DFO website:  here.

This will get you started.  Your humble e-scribbler will be looking at some specific aspects of this consultation over the next week or so as well as on some of the other issues that people in this province should be addressing but aren’t.

A warning:  if you think that this set of 1980s solutions to 1970s problems from the last provincial election represents the cutting edge of fisheries policy for the 21st century, you will probably not be too comfortable reading any of this stuff.

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In the democratic have-not province… #nlpoli #cdnpoli

For all those who have really been paying attention, here’s a simple question:

How many independent reviews of the project people call Muskrat Falls  will there have been have there been by April 1, 2012?

While you are pondering that one take a gander at what is happening in Nova Scotia.  On the second day that the gang from Nalcor was facing the public utilities board hearing, the front page of the Chronicle Herald carried a story in which the Nova Scotia Tories challenged that province’s ruling New Democrats to study the costs of Muskrat Falls.

Pursuing the megaproject to ship hydroelectric power to Nova Scotia from Labrador by subsea cable from Newfoundland would mean more money for the power company but might not be in the best interests of taxpayers, [PC leader Jamie] Baillie said. He said Nova Scotia Power has incentive "to build the biggest, most expensive project around" because its profit is based on a fixed percentage of its assets. If its asset base goes up, its profit rate also goes up.

"They're guaranteed a rate of return of 9.2 per cent on equity," Baillie said. "So they want to build as big a balance sheet as possible because they get 9.2 per cent of a bigger number.

"But that's their interest.

Premier Darrell Dexter blew that idea off by saying that Nova Scotia’s utilities regulator would be doing that job. The utility and review Board would have to approve the project according to Dexter.

An Emera spokesperson rattled off all the benefits of the deal.  Of course, there is no deal yet.  Emera and Nalcor are still talking.

Still pondering the poser from the beginning?

Let’s give you some more time and look at two more things going on in Nova Scotia.

The bluenoser provincial government issued two more news release on Valentine’s Day. One praised five new small electricity generation projects:

One of the applications in Cape Breton is a 5.4 megawatt large-wind project, jointly owned by Cape Breton University and Cape Breton Explorations Ltd. near Sydney.

"Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sources of electricity in Canada," says John Harker, president, Cape Breton University. "This project is a testament to CBU's commitment to foster innovation and offer unparalleled research opportunities and hands-on training for students interested in renewable energy technology."

The other proposals are:

-- a 3.5-kilowatt wind project owned by the Lemoine Development Association, the Harbour Authority of Grand Etang and SuGen Research Inc. in Grand Etang, Inverness Co.

-- a 50-kilowatt small-wind project on Brown's Mountain in Barney's River, Pictou Co., owned by Northumberland Wind Field

--a 4.6-megawatt large-wind project owned by Watts Wind Energy and the Mi'kmaq Rights Initiative (Kwilmu'kw Maw-klusuaqn) in Ketch Harbour, in conjunction with Brookfield Asset Management and Katalyst Wind

--a 500-kilowatt tidal project in Petit Passage,

Wind and tidal energy.  Innovative stuff. And all pretty affordable.

The other release was about a new tidal energy project getting underway in the Bay of Fundy.

And now to go back to our question.  Some of you may have already guessed that the answer is none and if Jerome and Kathy get their way, the Muskrat falls project will never be subjected to a thorough, critical, independent review.

The joint federal-provincial panel studied two dams – Gull Island and Muskrat Falls – tied back to Churchill Falls.  They didn’t look at the line to the island and they never got a look at the Nova Scotia feed.

The public utilities board is only looking at the plan to build a dam and a line to the island, with some discussion of later thermal energy.  The provincial government was very careful to set up the PUB reference in such a way that the PUB couldn’t do a thorough, independent review. 

What’s more, the provincial government structured the reference in such a way that the outcome is rigged.  The PUB has no choice but to say what the provincial government and Nalcor wanted them to say. 

You can tell the whole thing is rigged by looking at the number of questions submitted to Nalcor that the provincial energy company refused to answer.  Anything related to the Nova Scotia deal, the line, and the presence of Emera in the provincial market, all of which bear on the project and what it means to consumers gets the Nalcor stock answer:

Q. Consumer Question: Will Emera fully own transmission  lines located on the Island of  Newfoundland? If so, will they be subject to the regulatory authority of the PUB?

A. The information requested does not assist consideration of the Reference Question, as the neither the Terms of Reference nor Reference Question addresses matters related to Emera.

The PUB hearing is exactly what the provincial government wanted it to be:  a gigantic political fraud.  If Newfoundlanders and Labradorians want to find out what is going on in their own province, they’ll have to depend on the Nova Scotia utilities regulator. 

In this province, first one administration – Beaton Tulk’s – and then the two Tory ones wiped out any independent oversight of anything they do with public money.

- srbp -

The Fragile Economy: addictions management #nlpoli

The provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador spends more per person on delivering services for most things than does any other provincial government in the country.

Health care is the one the Premier highlighted a couple of weeks ago.  There are others.

This is not something new.  Here’s a snippet from a post in 2009 back when Paul Oram lit the issue up from inside the current administration.  Note, though, that the quote highlights the situation three years earlier:

That level of per capita spending [second only to Alberta] is unsustainable in the long run. As a recent Atlantic Institute for Market Studies assessment concluded:

“If the province fails to reign in its whopping per capita government spending (about $8800/person [in FY 2006]) and super-size me civil service (96 provincial government employees /1000 people) it will quickly erode any gains from increased energy revenues.”

The reason for all this spending and the generally high cost of government in this province is simple:  government spending is all about paternalism, patronage and pork. 

Note that the largest employer in Grand Falls-Windsor these days is the local hospital.  The town is also a centre for government services and, as in Stephenville, the major provincial government response to the mill closure was to push in more public service jobs.

Public spending is all about jobs.

The problem with public spending is that it is easy to get hooked on it.  Not surprisingly, a recent post at the Monkey Cage went with the title “The Narcotic of Government Dependency”.  It’s a pretty concise discussion of the issue from the American perspective with plenty of interesting links.  Follow the links and you’ll find plenty of stimulating stuff. 

Canadians might find it especially interesting to see reference to David Frum’s assessment of the inherent contradiction in conservative arguments.  While they rave and rant against public spending on a ideological basis, on a practical basis, American conservative constituencies are also among the biggest beneficiaries of federal government programs.

Now in this province, the local conservatives don’t really have an ideological basis to argue against public spending. They aren’t really caught in that trap.  But it is interesting to notice the gap between their self-image of being fiscally conservative, debt- fighting wunderkind and the reality of running up the biggest debt load in the province’s history and wanting to jack it higher.  Plus they’ve increased dependence on government spending and increased the public service to an unprecedented size.

looked at from that perspective, Kathy Dunderdale’s recent speech about the need to tighten public spending wasn’t so much about putting the province on some kind of methadone program for patronage junkies so you could get ‘em off the junk.  It seems more likely to have been about another type of addictions management, more like “b’ys we gotta lay off the pipe for a while and just do the oxys and some percs”.

- srbp -

Makkovik Fact Check #nlpoli

Simple truth:  fourteen year old boys are not supposed to freeze to death, alone,  on the ice.

Other simple truth:  in their grief and despair in such a situation, people are angry, and hurt.  They want to know why this happened and what could be done to prevent it.

Sometimes in those situations, people get hold of wrong information and go tearing off in the wrong direction full of great intentions but definitely on a fruitless quest.

In their joint news conference last week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Forces officials released a great deal of information about the events in the search for Burton Winters. 

The RCMP were the lead agency, since ground search and rescue for a missing person is their responsibility.  The Canadian Forces officials were there because so much mistaken information had led people to chase after the federal government for failing to do their jobs.

But still, there was a great deal of useful information.  Lots of it didn’t get reported, as it seems, or people missed it.

One of the most useful pieces of information you will find is CBC’s Timeline.  It’s on the provincial CBC website and it’s been there since at least the end of last week.  Walk through and you will have no trouble understanding what happened and when it happened.

You’ll also start to understand why sections of CBC’s online story “Call back protocol for searches to be reviewed: MacKay”  contains inaccurate or misleading information.  CBC’s not alone in making mistakes in this story, their errors happen to be glaring in light of the tick-tock they have online.

Take this bit for example:

When the military was initially called the morning after Winters was reported missing, weather and then mechanical problems kept two Griffon helicopters in Goose Bay grounded. Civilian choppers joined the search.

That makes it sound like the first-line responsibility belonged to DND but they couldn’t do the job.  As a result, civilian helicopters wound up carrying the ball.

Check the CBC Tick-tock:

January 30, 2012

9:00

Fire & Emergency Services NL (FES) requests Govt Air Services. Contract helicopter (Universal) unable to fly. FES contacts JRCC Halifax but SAR unable to assist due to "flying capacity and weather." [FES] Weather conditions were "below limits" for safe operations of aircraft. At CFB Goose Bay, one Griffon helicopter out of service, and problem with oil line discovered on the 2nd one. [JRCC - Admiral Gardam]

The usual government contracted helicopter service comes from Universal, a civilian company.  In these situations, their helicopter would get the job of providing air support.  They couldn’t fly for unspecified reasons.  So, then the provincial authorities called National Defence.

Then check the tick-tock one hour later:

January 30, 2012

10:00

Woodward Aviation's helicopter arrives on scene to volunteer. [RCMP/Vardy] Poor visibility, "It was like a wall...I could not see any landmarks." [Searcher Barry Anderson in helicopter] Woodward helicopter encounters mechanical problems and returns to base. [Edmunds]

This entry puts a helicopter on the scene by 10:00 AM on Jan 30, less than 24 hours after Burton Winters went missing.  Note the reference to poor visibility, a problem that plagued the search efforts, as well as the mechanical problems on the helicopter.

Then 40 minutes later:

January 30, 2012

10:40

RCMP advised Universal Helicopter now able to assist on behalf of Govt Air Services, "precluding a further request to the Canadian Armed Forces [RCMP/Graham]

The Universal helicopter arrived in Makkovik by noon that day, according to the tick-tock.

By that evening, searchers shut down their efforts.  The next day, (January 31), an RCMP fixed-wing aircraft arrived with equipment to help in the search of a spot of open water where searchers had found tracks.

Let’s flip back to the CBC story on MacKay’s announcement on Monday:

Under the current protocol, the onus then reverts to the searchers to call the military a second time.

In the Winters case, that didn’t happen until more than 48 hours after the boy was reported missing.

True in the first sentence, misleading in the second. In this case, the search team didn’t need the DND help – by their own judgment – since they had other air assets.  They didn’t call for additional help until the RCMP airplane spotted the snowmobile in an area the searchers couldn’t reach by land later on January 31.

The tick-tock:

January 31, 2012

16:54

FES requests air support from JRCC. A CH-146 Griffon helicopter from Goose Bay joined by Aurora plane stationed in Greenwood NS search through night (both) using "forward-looking infrared equipment" with no further success. [RCMP/Graham] [FES] [JRCC/Gardam] Vardy tells CBC, Aurora was conducting patrols in the St Anthony area.

The search shut down at about 0105 the next morning.  The aircraft had seen tracks but found no signs of the boy.

According to the tick-tock, a Universal helicopter joined the search on February 1.  They continued the air search and found the body, about 10 kilometres as the crow flies, east south east of the snowmobile, and headed away from the community.

- srbp -

Busting the boom in central #nlpoli

Headline:  “Grand Falls-Windsor growing without mill”.

Sounds marvellous.

Then you read the story.

Turns out that the central Newfoundland town is doing well without its major private sector employer because people are shifting there for the public sector jobs and services.

There’s a passing reference to mining, and then this:

But more importantly the community is a service centre for towns in the Exploits River Valley and communities on the northeast coast.

The hospital in Grand Falls-Windsor was already the town's largest employer before the mill closed and the community has a shopping mall, restaurants and car dealerships.

Some people from nearby communities have been moving in for those services.

Regular SRBP readers have seen this before, like in 2010.  The core of the story is still the same.  People – mostly retired people on fixed incomes – are headed for town where it is easier to shop and get medical attention when they need it.

Nothing surprising in that at all.  That’s what we’ve been expecting them to do, in fact.  Government demographic assessments dating back 20 years all pointed to this as one side-effect of the aging population. 

But any economic assessments at the time anticipated there’d be a large private sector employer that would be bringing new money into the economy from export sales.  That new money would help drive the economy in the form of wages and help pay for municipal services through various taxes.

That employer is gone and so central newfoundland, like so many parts of the province, is depending very heavily on the bloated provincial treasury to keep pushing out cash as it has been since the Tories took office.  There’s absolutely no question about the relationship between public spending and the local boom in central when the public purse is the source of the boom. Cuts to public spending, whether in Grand Falls-Windsor directly or in the surrounding communities, will have an effect on the town’s economy. 

The boom might soon start to bust, at least if the provincial government actually does what Premier Kathy Dunderdale says they’re going to do. Tighten those belts, folks.

- srbp -

PUB concerned about Nalcor capex and electricity rates #nlpoli #cdnpoli

The province’s public utilities board is concerned about the impact Nalcor’s capital works programs will have on consumer rates even without taking Muskrat Falls into account or considering any increase due to fuel costs for thermal generation.

The comments are in the board’s approval, issued January 24,  for Phase I of  Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s capital works application for 2012. Hydro is a Nalcor subsidiary.

On page 10 of its order the board expressed concern “about the impacts of the proposed and forecast level of Hydro’s capital spending on customers.”.  The board said that “this level of spending raises concerns as to whether this approach is sustainable given the significant impact on revenue requirement.”

Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro showed the percentage change in revenue requirement “as a result of the five-year projected capital spending”, a table the board reproduced on page 10 of the Phase I order:

The board then notes that even allowing for offsetting some of the costs through depreciation, “the impacts of the projected capital spending are significant.”

The board also noted that “these increases do not reflect increases in operational costs which may be expected in the normal course.” That’s code for the cost of oil used to generate electricity at Holyrood for three months of the year.

One of the main arguments in favour of Muskrat Falls has been steady increases in electricity rates due to rising fuel prices.  Natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy, for example, claims that electricity prices in the province will increase due to fuel costs and that Muskrat Falls will cost consumers less than if they stuck with oil.

However, neither Kennedy nor Nalcor have apparently included any of the costs for the proposed capital works program into their imaginary rate calculations they developed in late 201o and are still using today.  In its 2012 order, the board noted that it “is concerned that the significant increases in proposed and projected capital expenditures in 2012 and subsequent years were not forecasted by Hydro as recently as one year ago.” [italics added]

This new information suggests that any increases from Muskrat Falls would be on top of significant increases that neither Nalcor or the provincial government have forecast. 

Apparently not included in the Phase I order was more than $200 million in capital spending Nalcor wants to spend to upgrade the interconnection across the isthmus of Avalon.  The board separated that project out since it was a last minute addition by Nalcor.  It is now considered as Phase III of the 2012 capex application.

SRBP readers will recall that this upgraded line could actually delay the need for a Holyrood replacement.  The provincial government’s current plan is to replace Holyrood with Muskrat Falls and later add more oil- fired generation than the island system currently has at Holyrood.

- srbp -

Strengthening Search and Rescue, revisited #nlpoli

A couple of years ago, in the aftermath of Cougar 491, SRBP made some suggestions about how to improve search and rescue services on the east coast of Canada.

The recent tragedy in Makkovik had nothing to do with the Canadian Forces search and rescue service.  There’s been a huge public outcry aimed at Ottawa, egged on by politicians from all political parties who have misled people.  The Premier and the municipal affairs minister are just two of those politicians, even though they know or ought to know the rights of who was responsible for what.

The fact is that the ground search and rescue in Makkovik was all provincial.

Some of the ideas from that older post still apply, even if they likely wouldn;t have made a difference in Makkovik. If a major disaster occurred – like say an airliner crash – all the SAR and emergency response would have to come from the south, by air.  It’s a long way from Greenwood, Nova Scotia to Goose Bay and longer yet again to get up around Nain.

Some of those suggestions for improvements in the federal side still stand.  But what about the province?  Well, that’s where the people responsible could do a lot more than they have been.  The ground search and rescue system actually works quite well, despite the neglect or under-funding.  It largely works because of the huge number of volunteers, not because of the great attention paid to it by the political types.  Sure they are the first ones to claim credit but they are usually the last ones to do anything beneficial. 

So for starters let’s change that.  If Kathy Dunderdale really wants to do something in response to the tragedy in Makkovik, then here are some simple ideas. She should clean up her own act before she points fingers at anyone else.

Here’s the SRBP list for starters:

• The provincial government should create a system of volunteer SAR teams in all parts of the province. Right now it’s all volunteers who, like Rovers – have to ask for public donations to buy equipment and keep the lights on.  The provincial government should kick in some dedicated cash for ground search and rescue.
• The provincial government should beef up training support to these groups. 
• The provincial government should build and maintain GSAR operations centres, staffed by a cadre of Fire and Emergency Services personnel who keep the flashlights and radios charged up and ready to go.

 

- srbp -

Does he believe anything he says? #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Now that he’s safely latched on the public tit in Ottawa, Noob Bloc-NDP MP Ryan Cleary says that everything he ever wrote was just to stir debate.

Well, that’s what he says now when a journalist confronts him with some of past comments, like bashing the crap out of Quebec, the seal hunt,  the European Union, the New Democrats, the Lower Churchill or any of the other tubs Cleary’s thumped over the years.

The accident waiting to happen now tells the Globe and Mail that you gotta look at “the context”.

Before he went to Ottawa at public expense, Cleary used to bash “Quebec” as the bane of Newfoundland’s existence.  More recently, he was  lovin’ Thomas Mulcair to be the Bloc-NDP leader. 

These days he may believe something else. It’s hard to know. Maybe the context has changed. The context for Newfoundland, one wonders, or the context for Cleary?

Even that isn’t clear. 

The context of the context depends on the context, at least in the slippery world of the classic Newfoundland blow-hard politician’s most recent incarnation:  Ryan Cleary.

Ready for a better tomorrow, or maybe ready for a better tomorrow now?  They are truly all the same creature.

So in the end, does Cleary believe anything he says? Should Cleary’s constituents believe him?  And should they believe what he said then or what he says now?

That’s the thing, you see, you can never be sure if the guy really believes what he is saying at any one moment, anymore. After all, by his own admission, he wrote it or said just to stir up debate and it all depends on the context.

No wonder people are starting to call him Climb-down Cleary.

- srbp -