Cost over-runs and delays in Placentia #nlpoli

On Monday,  the provincial public works department put a limit on the size of trucks that can go over the left bridge at Placentia.

This came after someone inspected the bridge.

Interestingly enough,  the same department had a tender call out last May to replace the bridge they just put restrictions on.

A few months later - In August, 2011 to be exact - the department cancelled the tender because the only bidder came in almost $20 million above that they budgeted.  Here’s what the release said would happen:

With the bid for this tender coming in so high, the department will immediately begin a full review of the existing bridge to provide more details around the exact condition of the current structure, and costing and potential years of service life for a rehabilitated structure. The review will also help determine whether the scope of work for a replacement structure can be revised to make the project more cost-effective.

Now being off budget and behind schedule is not new for provincial public works.  In fact, since 2003, this sort of stuff is the norm.

- srbp -

Campaign Spending and Efficiency #nlpoli

Two of the three political parties in this province are spending more, on average, and getting less, on average in by-elections.

That’s one of the things you can see in an assessment of a decades worth of by-elections from 2001 to 2011.

Last week, SRBP gave you a teaser of a look at the idea of cost per vote, as measure of campaign efficiency and effectiveness.  As the name implies it tells you how much each campaign spent for each vote it received. The information for the assessment comes entirely from financial reports and by-election vote reports issued by the province’s chief electoral officer.


There were 21 by-elections during that time.  You can break them up into three phases or time periods.  Phase One covers the by-elections between 2001 and the general election in 2003.  Phase Two covers the by-elections from 2004 to 2007.  Phase Three runs from 2008 until the 2011 general election.

The charts below show the average spending and votes received by the three main parties with the resulting cost per vote in each of the three  phases.  We’ll look at the phases individually in other posts.



From Phase One to Phase Two, average Liberal spending on by-elections dropped 64% from an average of around $37,000 to about $13,500. In Phase Three they were spending about $20,000 less per by-election than they were when they were in power.

In the shift from being the opposition to government, Conservative average spending climbed from about $27,000 to $40,700.  It’s a jump of about 51%.

The average NDP spending over the same two periods went up from $2118 to $10,069.

The NDP and the Conservatives spent more in Phase Three than they did in Phase One.  Even the Liberals, who dropped significantly by the second phase had boosted their spending by the third phase to hit $17,663 per by-election on average.

What they got for their efforts is shown in the comparison of average votes received.



The most dramatic changes are at the beginning.  Both the average Tory and average Grit vote per by-election dropped precipitously from Phase One to Phase Two.  The Conservatives went down 30% while the Liberals went down 42%.

Dipper support climbed from 132 votes, on average, to 576.

The Liberal slide continued into Phase Three.  They dropped another 200 votes and took an average 1,000 per by-election in Phase Three.



The line that stands out is the orange one.  The NDP are getting more votes and they are spending more money on average to get them.  But the cost per vote is also climbing.  In the third phase, the NDP was spending $20.23 per vote compared to $16.05 before 2003.

The Conservatives saw a huge increase in their cost per vote by the second phase.  Incumbency effectively doubled their CPV from $8.15 to $17.65.

In Phase Three, the Tory CPV was $15.70.  It’s the lowest of the three parties, but not by much. By Phase Three, the Liberals are back close to their pre-2003 CPV with $17.64.  That’s nothing to cheer about.

Those Phase Three CPV numbers suggest that all three parties have problems getting their messages across or aligning with public opinion.  Remember, the lower the CPV is, the better you are doing.

Still, you can see some indication of what came in the 2011 general election if you look at Phase Three compared to Phase Two:

• The Tories spent 8% less and got 3% more votes. They’ve got a relatively better position than the others and that helps keep them in power.
• The Grits spent 31% more and got 17% less in the vote department.  That’s all sorts of bad news.
• The Dippers spent 5% less and got 18% less in votes.  Again, that should be all sorts of news, most of which isn’t good. 

Once Elections NL releases the 2011 general election financial reports, SRBP can do a comparison for all three general elections since the turn of the century.  We can also cross reference the general elections with the by-elections to see if there are any things that turn up.

In the next post on CPV, we will take a look at the three phases broken down by urban and rural by-elections.

- srbp -

*edited to correct typos

An energy strategy or tunnel vision #nlpoli

For those who may have seen natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy’s handful of tweets selectively paraphrasing bits of the American president’s speech, here’s the whole thing, via whitehouse.gov.

Take a few minutes and listen to the speech.  Read the transcript.  The context of Obama’s words are important if you want to get the full and correct meaning. 

…high gas prices are like a tax straight out of your paycheck…

That’s the central problem as Obama lays it out right at the beginning.  High gasoline prices hurt Americans.  They hurt them at home and they hurt them at work.

Obama proposes a strategy:

If we’re going to avoid being at the mercy of these world events, we’ve got to have a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.  Yes, oil and gas, but also wind and solar and nuclear and biofuels, and more.

Rather than develop just one energy source, Obama wants to develop a range of energy sources.

And then he points to the need for efficiency and conservation:

We need to keep developing the technology that allows us to use less oil in our cars and trucks, less energy for our buildings and our plants and our factories -- that’s the strategy we’re pursuing.  And that’s the only real solution to this challenge.

Conservation is a route that the current Conservative administration and Nalcor specifically reject as part of a package of ideas to meet the province’s energy needs.

Just like they specifically reject balanced budgets and reducing the debt as a way of reducing the debt.  Sounds stupid when you say it like that, but that is their policy. They want to keep spending more than we are taking in.

Their solution to the province’s energy needs is a megaproject that will increase the public debt.

Go on a little further in the speech and you’ll see something else:

We’re taking every possible action to develop, safely, a near hundred-year supply of natural gas in this country -- something that experts believe will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

Newfoundland and Labrador has enough natural gas offshore to run a Holyrood-sized electricity plant everyday, all day for a century.

The gas is cheap and it’s readily available. A natural gas plant that could produce more electricity than Muskrat Falls would cost less than half as much. 

The natural gas plant would produce electricity when we need it and more besides.  Muskrat Falls will produce its peak in two months of the year when we don’t need it and no one else will buy it.  In the mid-winter when we need the electricity, Muskrat Falls won’t be able to meet provincial needs and supply the commitment to Nova Scotia.

When you are an energy-rich province with abundant natural resources, you use the cheapest ones to meet your own needs.  The only people who don’t want to develop natural gas offshore Newfoundland and Labrador are the oil companies…and their best friend, the provincial government.

Obama calls it the “all of the above strategy”.

The provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador has an idea.

They’ve got a vision.

Unfortunately, it’s tunnel vision.

- srbp -

Adams is at it again #nlpoli

Energy analyst Tom Adams is at it again.

He’s sent a bunch of technical questions to the consumer advocate to ship along to Nalcor about the Muskrat Falls proposal.

Let’s see what happens.

- srbp -

Release the budget now! #nlpoli

Headline on a news release issued on Wednesday by the provincial government:

Budget 2012 Investments Will …

And in the first paragraph, you get this line:

Budget 2012 will allocate $1.4 million…

So if they can announce some budget details in February, they can release the rest of it, too.

No excuses.

Let’s have it.

- srbp -

Own goal: Muskrat Falls edition #nlpoli

Jack Swinimer is a resident of Holyrood.

He’s a  retired bank official.

He’s also a big Tory supporter who calls open lines shows regularly to talk up his team or, more importantly, talk down anyone else.

With Muskrat Falls on the go at the public utilities board, no one was surprised to see Swinimer on the line-up for the last day of the board’s public hearings on the set-up question Jack’s pals sent over to the board.

Jack admonished the board not to be swayed by ex-politicians, bloggers and…wait for it…open line callers.

Not content to blow his own foot off with that one, Swinimer also decided to tried some facts and logic.

Sadly for the enthusiastic Swinimer, his other comments got no further than the open line caller thing.

Jack used his career in banking to solemnly declare that borrowing money to build a thermal replacement for Holyrood would be a bad idea.  On the other hand borrowing for his friends’ favourite would be good.  Muskrat Falls would pay for itself, he declared because it would generate revenue.

Sadly for Swinimer, nothing could be further from the truth.  Either Muskrat Falls or a thermal replacement for Holyrood would generate revenue and “pay for itself”.  That’s because both projects would sell their power in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Swinimer went off the rails because he paid attention to his Tory talking points and ignored those other sources, all of whom have explained – in detail – how Jack’s pals propose to generate “revenue at Muskrat Falls. 

Some of the sources Jack ignores have actually demonstrated why no one is interested in buying Muskrat Falls power:  It’s too expensive, especially when compared to what they get from really cheap and plentiful …yes, you guessed it…natural gas.

Jack also claimed that while natural gas might be useful one day, right now it isn’t available.  He didn’t cite any evidence to back his claim.  He just stated it as if it was true.

Too bad for Jack that natural gas is available today and it is cheap.

Cheaper than Muskrat Falls.

Tune in later this morning when Jack will likely be on open line again.

Don’t ignore him.  Jack’s comments are always interesting, even if they have an alarming tendency to blow up in his own face.

- srbp -

$#*! politicians do: pancakes edition #nlpoli

A year ago, he was running down politicians who host town halls for their constituents.

He called himself a s#*t-disturber for saying it.

Now that he’s got the job, noob Bloc-NDP member of parliament Ryan Cleary is all there for hosting them.

What does that make Ryan now?

- srbp -

Cost per vote: by-elections #nlpoli

One measure of campaign efficiency and effectiveness is comparing the amount a campaign spends for the number of votes it receives.

It’s called cost-per-vote.

Here’s a comparison of the cost per vote for each of the three political parties in a string of by-elections over the past three years.  From left to right, they are:

• Straits-White Bay North
• Terra Nova
• Topsail
• Conception Bay East-Bell Island
• Humber West

Basically you judge CPV this way: the lower the number, the better. No matter whether your party is the incumbent or one of the outs, you want to spend as little money as possible to get your votes in the box.  That just reflects a basic notion about spending money efficiently.  Money, like people and time, is precious.

Just so that you don’t get turned around here, we are not talking about winning or losing.  Spending the most per vote doesn’t necessarily guarantee success at the polls. In fact, you can spend the most per vote and get clobbered.

In the four by-elections they won, the Tories spent the least amount per vote compared to the other parties. In three of the by-elections, the variation was marginal. In Humber West, for example, the Conservatives spent $21.50 per vote compared to the Liberals $23.48. The New Democrats spent $28.29.

In the one by-election in this series they lost (Straits-White Bay North in 2009), the Conservatives spent $30.96 per vote compared to $19.61 per vote for the Liberals.  The NDP spent $37.50.

Take a look at the three by-elections in between those two extremes and you’ll see other extremes.  The Tory CPV  in Topsail was a mere $6.15.  In Terra Nova it was $11.53.

One of the reasons for this is that the Tories didn’t have to ship in large numbers of campaign workers a long distance from St. John’s in order to effect the win.  In both Humber West and the Straits, the Tories’ centrally controlled campaign system meant they had to pay cash to cover the travel and accommodations of their workers.

They didn’t have to do that in the two by-elections closest to Sin Jawns.  And not surprisingly, that’s the two where the Tory CPV was less than 10 bucks.

As noted here after the Humber West by-election, the Tories poured a heavy effort into hanging onto the seat.  Now that we have actual financial details, we can see that the Tories were relatively more efficient in CPV terms. 

But notice how close together the three parties were.

That’s interesting.

It will get more interesting when you look at the trends in cost-per-vote over the past decade and a bit.  That’s for another post.

- srbp -

Related:

• Buzzfeed:  How much did each Republican candidate spend per vote in Iowa?
• The Atlantic:  the price Rick Perry paid for each vote in Iowa.
• The cost per vote in 2010 Texas state primaries.

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.

- srbp -

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.

- srbp -

*  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.

- srbp -

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.

- srbp -

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.

- srbp -

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.

- srbp -

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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