Don’t remind her, Tommy #nlpoli

The townie Tories are all a-twitter over federal Dipper leader Thomas Mulcair’s endorsement of Sheilagh O’Leary for mayor of Sin Jawns in the next municipal election.

On Monday, reporters asked Premier Kathy Dunderdale about Mulcair’s comments.  Here’s a bit of what she said, via CBC:

"I don't know how somebody who doesn't live here, is not on the ground, doesn't appreciate the demographics to start with and the particular issues, could be offering advice on who is best suited," said Dunderdale outside the House of Assembly Monday. [capitalization corrected]

“So the frig what?” would seem like a better, i.e. appropriately dismissive, response.  Instead Kath used a comment that begs for the retort that she does it all time:  talks about stuff when she doesn’t “appreciate the demographics” or understand what is going on.

The Old Wooden Guitar

An innovative cover of “Somebody that I used to know”…

And, the inevitable parody of the creative cover that is creative in a whole other way…

-srbp-

The Old Wooden Mace #nlpoli

The Telegram’s James McLeod took some time during a recent Estimates committee hearing on Monday to dash off a post at his blog about the ceremonial aspects of the legislature proceedings.

He mentions the number of items in the House of Assembly chamber that came as presents from other provinces after Confederation.  He finishes off with this bit:

Arguably the coolest gift of them all came from B.C. They gave us a massive gold mace. The mace is so cool, it actually gets a parade every day when the House is sitting - it's a small parade, just the Speaker, and a handful of other folks, but still, a parade! You can read more about the mace here, including the old wood one that sits outside the public galleries.

The wooden mace on display in the public gallery of the House of Assembly is the one used in the first parliament in Newfoundland in 1832. How it got there is a story in itself.

The Zen of Political Disasters: Becoming A Hole #nlpoli

As SRBP noted in an earlier post, the first step in getting yourself out of a hard political spot is to recognise that you are in a hole.

What often happens – as seen in the provincial Conservatives and the Burton Winters tragedy up to now – is that they cannot see that they are in a hole in the first place.

On Monday, the local Connies took it a step further.

Nanny State 2: Yes, Kathy. You are in a hole. #nlpoli

When you are in a hole, the old political saying goes, you should stop digging.

That is wonderful advice.  Many the politician could have saved himself political grief by following it.

The only problem with such good advice is that it is not as easy to take as it seems.

Workload Measurement #nlpoli #nspoli #cdnpoli

One of the most telling indicators of what government does is how much legislation they put in front of the legislature for approval.  After all government can only do what it is allowed to do by the House of Assembly.

Active governments that are doing lots of work usually have lots of new laws or amendments to existing ones.  They are called bills until they are approved by the members of the legislature.

Compare Newfoundland and Labrador with Nova Scotia and you can get a striking contrast between two neighbouring provinces

The Nanny State #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale refused to meet with Burton Winters’ family to talk about the boy’s tragic death last winter.

The explanation offered by both the Winters family and the Premier herself is that the family wanted to talk about details of the search effort.  As such, the Premier would not meet with the family.  She referred them, instead, to municipal affairs minister Kevin O’Brien who is also the minister responsible for fire and emergency services.

The Premier’s lingering political problem just got worse.

The Comprehension Constant #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale seems to have a chronic problem of saying things that are not correct and also saying things she does not mean.

This is not just a poor imitation of George W. Bush.  Kathy Dunderdale is in a league of her own.

How to make bad decisions: The Self-Delusion Problem #nlpoli

Politicians don’t set out to screw up but their good intentions are no proof against making bad decisions.

The Twitter Perspective #nlpoli

Tories on Twitter act like twits. Then they complain in the House of Assembly that other people are misbehaving.

Yes, they are hypocrites.

The Difference Between Their Dippers and our Tories #nlpoli

When it comes to transparency and accountability for megaprojects, the New Democratic government in Nova Scotia is light years ahead of the Progressive Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador

The Poster Child for Useless #nlpoli

One of the rationales the provincial government has used to justify Muskrat Falls is the idea that the island will have electricity shortages starting in 2015 and by 2020 there’ll be blackouts, brownouts or some sort of unspecified catastrophe.

If you missed it, here is one official version, from The Economy, 2011:

After years of planning and analysis, Nalcor’s subsidiary, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro (Hydro), determined that developing Muskrat Falls is the least-cost solution to a looming electricity shortage in the province, which is expected in the next five to 10 years.

In 2015, Newfoundland and Labrador will reach a capacity deficit when, at peak times, capacity needs may not be met. By 2019, the province will experience an electricity deficit, where the province’s overall electricity demand is greater than what is available.

It’s the worst kind of fear-mongering but it is what they’ve been saying. 

The solution to that looming crisis is pretty simple, according to the provincial government.  Again, here’s what The Economy 2011 lays out:

Hydro assessed the options for new generation sources to avoid the capacity and electricity deficits. The Muskrat Falls project, coupled with a transmission link project to the island, was determined to be the least-cost option.

So with all that as prologue, consider this question posed by Dean MacDonald stand-in Dwight Ball in the House of Assembly on Tuesday:

… what is the government’s plan to those energy blackouts that residents will experience between 2015 and 2018?

You can guess what the answer was from natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy.

Mr. Speaker, the answer to the question is quite simple. What will prevent the brownouts and the blackouts between 2015 and 2020? Muskrat Falls.

If you are not either banging your head against the table or crapping your pants with laughter at this point, then you are just not paying attention.

This is funny stuff.  You could not possible script a more ridiculous line of questioning at this point in the public debate over the hydro-electric megaproject.

You could not make this stuff up.

Given the Premier’s penchant for telling us that Nalcor is filled with geniuses of other-worldly origins, one might more sensibly ask how it could be that the rocket scientists at Nalcor managed to let the island get into the state where we are on the verge of catastrophe.

After all, that is the logic of their argument.  In 2010, they noticed that the power needle was flirting with the edge of the red zone and the Big E. 

How in the frack could they have missed so obvious a thing?   After all, it is their job to keep an eye on that stuff.  They are supposed to make sure the people who pay their bills have a stable, reliable and low cost supply of electricity.

Now, as a politician, you’d ask the aggressive question because it shows pretty clearly that what Kathy Dunderdale says about Nalcor and  their actual demonstrated managerial competence are two different things.  After all, an opposition political party is supposed to ensure that the government accounts fully “for the management of the public affairs of this province…”.

By contrast, Dwight Ball asked questions  on Tuesday that would normally come from a Tory backbencher sucking around for a promotion to cabinet. For the leader of the Opposition, the questions  were amateurish and reeked of incompetence.

The other questions that Ball asked on Tuesday, like pretty well everything he’s done so far this session, have shown Ball to be the poster child for everything that is politically useless and ineffective. With only one exception, the rest of his caucus have been no better.

Small wonder that the Tories spend all their political energy attacking the province’s New Democrats. The Tories know that the Liberals are more a political threat to themselves than they are to anyone else.

-srbp-

A river runs through it #nlpoli

Jerry Bannister’s paper “A river runs through it:  Churchill Falls and the end of Newfoundland history” is now available in the latest issue of Acadiensis.

“A new Sprung Greenhouse”: one year later #nlpoli

Since May 8 was the 25th anniversary of the announcement that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador were going into the cucumber business, it seemed fitting to give a link to a post of April 5, 2011.

The title of the old post was “A new Sprung greenhouse in the wilds of Labrador.” 

Note how little has changed in a year:  Kathy Dunderdale is still insulting people left and right.  The reasons for her reliance on endless personal digs remain the same.  That reflects badly on her even more now than it did then.

her grasp of economics and the economics of her pet project remain today as abysmal as they were then.

And yes, the goal is still to have the people of Quirpon and Flower Hill pay the full cost for the electricity.  Any others will get it free (Nova Scotians) or far below the cost of producing it.  That’s what Kathy Dunderdale meant when she said:

They are not going to buy it from us, Mr. Speaker, for 14.3, so we have to go into the market and sell at what the market can bear.

The markets in the United States and elsewhere in northeastern North America cannot bear Muskrat Falls electricity even at the artificially-deflated cost of seven cents a kilowatt hour.  That is without the cost of getting it from eastern Labrador down the thousands of kilometres of transmission lines to wherever the crowd at Nalcor might want to sell it. 

To put that in perspective and to explain the connection to the Sprung cucumber fiasco, consider the basic economics of the project as laid out by the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage website:

A single Sprung cucumber cost $1.08 to produce, but sold for 63 cents in Atlantic Canada and just 25 cents (US) in Massachusetts.

That’s exactly the same concept as Muskrat Falls.  Well, exactly the same except that Sprung was actually able to sell product outside Newfoundland and Labrador.

And if you go back and look at all the controversy that swirled around the project and the defences of it mounted by the provincial government, you’ll likely start to feel decidedly uneasy.

It will all be too familiar.

- srbp -

Related:

• Great Gambols with Public Money:  Sprung Cukes
• Great Gambols with Public Money:  Sprung Cukes 2
• Great Gambols with Public Money:  Sprung Cukes 3
• Great Gambols with Public Money:  Sprung Cukes 4

The politics of logic and history #nlpoli

“Government does not work on logic,” a wise man once told your humble e-scribbler.  “It works on the basis of history.”

When faced with a new problem, people tend to do what they did before, not what might make sense in the new circumstances.

You can see that the preference for history over logic in Kathy Dunderdale’s comments on Monday about what she and her colleagues would do for communities where the town fish plant had closed.

Mr. Speaker, we are doing the same thing for these workers, and will do for others the same thing we did in Stephenville, Grand Falls-Windsor, and Harbour Breton.

That would include moving in some provincial government jobs to stuff some cash into the local economy.  So if adding more provincial government employees is an integral part of Kathy Dunderdale’s response to the problems in these six communities, you can be damn sure she won’t be chopping any jobs.

Then again, regular readers of these scribbles already knew that claims to the contrary were bullshit.

The rest of Dunderdale’s comment are just routine political drivel:

We are committed to communities in this Province that find themselves in economic distress. We do not always have the answers at hand. There are not easy answers to be found by anybody, but we walk the walk with communities, Mr. Speaker. We do not just talk the talk.

And when she was done with drivel, she just popped out some truly vacuous bullshit:

Wherever the journey takes these people, their government will be there with them, and we do our best to diversify the economy and meet their needs in the meantime.

Diversify the economy.

Yeah.

Well, the economic development record of the current crowd is exactly zilch.  They spent so much time obsessing over polls and the Lower Churchill after 2003 that they simply didn’t do anything to diversify the economy.  And what they did try – giving away public cash by the bag-full – simply didn’t work. They haven’t been able to pay people to create jobs here.

Here’s how SRBP put it a couple of years ago comparing government spending in the mid-1990s with the current practice:

The province’s business development and economic diversification efforts – ITT then and INTRD and Business today – take less of a share of the budget now.  That’s despite government claims that it has a plan to expand the economy and that the plan is in place.

Mind you, the amounts spent have increased.  For example, the cost of operating the departments has gone from about $50 million for the Industry, Trade and technology department to about $66 million spread over Business and Innovation, Trade and Rural Development today.

The amount available for business investment is also up:  $18 million then compared to $29 million. Even then, though, the province’s business department -  the vehicle through which Danny Williams was once supposed to personally reinvigorate the provincial economy – actually doesn’t do very much with the cash in the budget.  Sure there are plenty of free gifts – like Rolls Royce – or the apparently endless supply of cash for inflatable shelters.

But as the Telegram discovered two years ago, the provincial government spent nothing at all of the $30 million budgeted for business development in 2007. And earlier this year the Telegram confirmed that in the past three years, less than one third of the $90 budgeted for business attraction was ever spent.

The result is that we have a very fragile economy.

Government does not work on the basis of logic.  They go with what they did before.

Like that has worked so well  for them so far.

-srbp-

Pots and Kettles #nlpoli

Pots and kettles are a staple of Newfoundland politics.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale in the House of Assembly on Monday, May 7:

We have had the Member for Torngat Mountains this morning on every media outlet in the Province talking about a cover-up of the Burton Winters tragedy, Mr. Speaker, in the face of the correction put out by the RCMP, propagating incorrectness for political advantage, I suggest, Mr. Speaker, instead of a pursuit for the truth. It is very offensive, Mr. Speaker, and then he wants an all-party committee.

Pay attention to those words:

“Propagating incorrectness for political advantage…instead of a pursuit for the truth.”

Okay?

Got the image?

Then there’s Kathy Dunderdale talking with Randy Simms about her Muskrat Falls megadebt project:

…the expertise that's at Nalcor, one of the finest companies, state-owned companies, in the world I would submit to you, the best brains, the expertise, built the Upper Churchill, running the Upper Churchill for 50 years without a hitch, …

None of the people at Nalcor built Churchill Falls.

None of them.

Not a one.

And strictly speaking Nalcor’s predecessor  - Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro – didn’t build it either.

So Dunderdale’s comment there would be pretty firmly in the category of “not true”.

It gets worse for her.

The Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation commissioned Churchill Falls in 1971. That would be 41 years ago. 

Not 50. 

The date people use for the purposes of the figuring out when the 1969 contract expires is 1976, though, which is, 36 years ago.

Again:  not 50.

And at the end of her little rant, Dunderdale said this about the people at Nalcor these days:

…these people just get dismissed...

That would be another entry in the “not true” category. 

People don’t dismiss the lovely people at Nalcor and all their expertise.  Some of us just don;t agree with them when they make certain unsubstantiated claims about Muskrat Falls .  There’s a none-too-subtle difference.

On the other hand, Kathy Dunderdale dismisses the opinions of people who disagree with her just because they disagree with her.

And, of course, she has a record of getting stuff wrong.  Call it “propagating incorrectness” if you wish.

Whether or not she does this stuff for political advantage, political gain, to support her political agenda or just because she thinks she is doing the right thing – like Randy Edmunds likely does – it all pretty much comes out to the same thing in the end.

-srbp-

The Black Letter of the Law #nlpoli

You’d think that someone who approves laws, including this amendment to the Highway Traffic Act in 2010, would understand  what the words mean:

Cellular telephones and other communication devices

176.1 (1) A person shall not drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding, or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, email or text messages.

The penalty for a conviction under this section of the Highway Traffic Act is a minimum of $100 or two days in jail and a maximum of $400 and 14 days in jail.

Politicians elected since 2003 should be familiar with this offence since one of them was done for it in 2008, before they broadened the scope of the section.

- srbp -

More pork for the buck #nlpoli

The CBC’s John Gushue has a tidy analysis of Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s recent suggestion that government employees could work from home in the future as a way of cutting down on government real estate costs.

Gushue notes that people have been talking about “telework” for a couple of decades.  But where it was once an idea, today it is commonplace.

Unlike other employers that have looked to telework to improve productivity and employee lifestyle, Dunderdale’s interest in the concept is pretty simple and – for politicians in this province – typical and old-fashioned.  As Gushue notes:

She suggested reducing the cost of the public service ... not by dwindling its numbers, but by shrinking the footprint of its office space.

The reason the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador  costs more per capita than elsewhere in Canada is because provincial politicians use it for political purposes rather than just delivering government service to the people who pay the bills for the service.  It’s patronage.

Since taking office in 2003, the provincial Conservatives have done what the Liberals immediately before them have done.  Just as the Liberals transferred provincial paycheques to communities outside St. John’s, the Tories did the same thing in Grand Falls-Windsor and Stephenville when the local paper mill shut down. Overall, they swelled the provincial public service until it had become 25% of the provincial labour force.

Not surprisingly, the province’s public sector unions don’t like the idea of cuts to the number of people they represent.  In an interview last week, the head of the province’s largest public sector union claimed that the current size of the public service was the result of “rebuilding” after a period of cuts.  NAPE’s Carol Furlong said that “we really need to ensure that the people of this province have the services they need…”.

Of course, Furlong is full of crap.  The number of people represented by public sector unions has nothing to do with delivering the services the public needs.  There are plenty of ways to improve service delivery at a lower cost to taxpayers and with fewer members in Furlong’s union.

But, as you will see by looking at the Dunderdale and Furlong interviews, the politicians and the union leaders are in complete agreement on the question of the size of the provincial public service.  Neither of them wants to see it any smaller.

-srbp-

Political Effectiveness #nlpoli

As these things go, George Murphy’s two days of news about compliance with the province’s ban on pesticides was a tidy and effective bit of political theatre.

The provincial government announced the ban in 2011.  They set May 1, 2012 as the day for the ban to take effective.

Like any enterprising politician, Murphy trucked off to a local store a day or two after the ban took effect.  He found some of the chemicals for sale.  He took some pictures and asked the environment minister about it in the House of Assembly.

The next day Murphy turned up on CBC.  The chemicals had disappeared from the first store but they were still available at one other store CBC featured by name.

“You know we have to see some action on this,” said Murphy. “If the government is going to do something, then go ahead and do it ...get to the job that's supposed to be done here, get these products off the shelves,” he told CBC News.

Simple message.

Effective delivery.

Backed with an example of a department that failed the simple task of doing what they said they would do.

For his part, environment minister Terry French looked like a slack-assed, slack-jawed goof. Here’s what he said in the House of Assembly in response to Murphy’s question:

I just want to remind the hon. member, he seems to have bought them recently. I hope they were not on the black market, Mr. Speaker. I also hope he does not use them, because if he uses them, he will be facing a significant fine.

What you don’t get there is the joking tone French had. It conveyed a sense that French didn’t take the issue seriously.  French came across dismissively, as if saying yeah, we banned it, frig off ya little twerp.

In itself, the story may be relatively small. 

Add enough of these hits together and they will have an impact.

- srbp -

Something to look forward to… #nlpoli

Natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy in the House of Assembly on Thursday:

It breaks that geographical stranglehold of Quebec. I do not have time today to address Ed Hollett’s theory that we can send all our power through Quebec and get it back through Quebec, because that is just wrong.

This should be most interesting. 

We’ll all just have to wait and see what the minister says about the amazing appearing and disappearing stranglehold.

- srbp -