Leave it to labradore to come up with a new way to look at poll results.
He took the results of “satisfaction” questions in polls going back about a decade. he netted them out, meaning he subtracted the dis-satisfieds from the satisfieds.
What he got is very interesting.
Telling the world that tourism Derrick Dalley will attend a play – no matter what play it is – would not be considered news and it sure as hell would not be worthy of a full-on media advisory by any organization on the planet, including a benighted, backward-ass dictatorship in a movie starring Richard Dreyfus.
And yet on a Friday afternoon that is exactly what the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador spit out.
After the shock that evidently settled into the local Tories, the next most obvious thing about Thursday was the complete absence of any official provincial Tory anywhere saying anything about anything. The usual clan of Tory Twitter Spam Spitters – Sandy Collins, Steve Kent, Vaughan Granter, and Paul lane - were nowhere to be seen.
Normally these guys are everywhere spewing whatever bullshit talking point they have to spew.
Thursday?
Crickets.
or was it knobby knees knocking?
By now you have likely heard it all.
Nothing to sweat.
Real Chip Diller kinda stuff.
In the other corner, there are the New Democrats who are so effercited they are like the dog who caught the car.
Well, here’s another take for you.
A few employers have noticed changes to the province’s Labour Relations Act that slipped quietly through the House at the end of the last session.
A story in the Telegram on Wednesday focuses on the construction business but some others are quietly pissed off and trying to figure out what they can do about the bill.
As the country comes out of the long-weekend stupor, a few people noticed a poll released on June 29 by Environics. Nationally, it shows a very small lead for the New Democrats over the Conservatives. That’s a modest change from May when the Tories were slightly in front of the New Democrats.
What caught some local Twitter attention was the post by threehundredeight.com and the headline “Majority support for federal NDP in Newfoundland & Labrador?”
The question mark is there for a reason, as you will see in a moment.
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The guy who helped create the monster called Nalcor thinks Muskrat Falls is a great idea.
But Lieutenant Governor John Crosbie backs it for a completely wrong reason.
One of Kathy Dunderdale’s more obnoxious qualities is her love of insulting other people.
She couldn’t let the House close without doing it a few times just for good measure.
There’s nothing witty in Dunderdale’s insults. Nor is there anything that could pass for clever in her jabs. That’s part of what makes her comments obnoxious: they are just crude.
There’s another part to it that, like her predecessor who loved the same sort of crap-talk, Kathy is the Premier of the province. When she carries on like that she winds up setting an abysmally low standard of behaviour for public officials.
It’s undignified. It’s degrading to the province and to the people she should be honoured to represent.
Scan through the official record for the House of Assembly for the spring 2012 session and you will find example after example after example of a variation on this theme: “…our vision for a prosperous future is the use of our non-renewable resources to secure a renewable future.”
St. John’s West MHA Dan Crummell said those specific words on May 8. But over and over again, the provincial Conservatives in the legislature tied oil money to things like Muskrat Falls.
Steve Kent (Mount Pearl North) on May 8:
The returns from this non-renewable sector are actually being used to build a renewable energy future for Newfoundland and Labrador.
Wade Verge (Lewisporte), May 8:
That is one of the reasons that as a government we are looking at Muskrat Falls and we are looking at the Lower Churchill. We have a vision for the future. Muskrat Falls is one of those projects that will help us as we give up our reliance on non-renewable resources in the future.
Keith Russell (MHA Lake Melville), May 8:
By using our non-renewable resources, Mr. Speaker, as a means of catapulting us into a renewable resource-based economy, this will in effect liberate us from the dependence and exposures to the realities of oil and oil markets and pricing. This, Mr. Speaker, is what it takes to be successful.
But that flurry wasn’t the only time. Just look at these examples:
Municipal affairs minister Kevin O’Brien, Hansard, March 6, 2012:
I heard the Leader of the Third Party yesterday, as well, and I took it as an endorsement of Muskrat Falls, because she talked about moving from a non-renewable to a renewable economy. That is exactly one part of Muskrat Falls. Even though we have said categorically, time after time, that project has to – has to – stand on its own, it moves us from that non-renewable economy to a renewable economy. That is exactly what it does.
Paul Lane, MHA for Mount Pearl South, Hansard, March 12, 2012:
I will not sit on the fence. Muskrat Falls certainly is a great project for our future. It ties in to the Province's energy plan of taking the non-renewable resources we have and investing them into renewable resources for the future, for our children, for our grandchildren. I am pleased to be part of that. Again, it ties in to the great leadership that this government has shown right throughout the whole process.
Natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy, Hansard, March 13, 2012:
What we are doing, Mr. Speaker, we are taking our non-renewable resource monies, our oil money, we are building schools, infrastructure and hospitals leading with Muskrat Falls and Gull Island, hopefully, to the development of a renewable resource economy.
Natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy, Hansard, March 15, 2012:
As we utilize our oil, the non-renewable energy is used to develop a renewable energy economy, Mr. Speaker, consistent with the energy plan.
Glen Littlejohn, MHA for Port de Grave, Hansard, June 6, 2012:
Mr. Speaker, one of the central commitments in our provincial Energy Plan is to reinvest the portion of our non-renewable energy money into our renewable energy developments. Mr. Speaker, doesn't that make sense? Doesn't that make sense to us, and doesn't that make sense to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, that while we are reaping some of the best benefits we have, the resource we have now is non-renewable, so let's inject some of that non-renewable money into planning for the future and giving us clean, green, renewable energy, Mr. Speaker.
Still, for all those examples of what the Conservatives thought was their strategy, somewhere along the line they shifted their plan from using money from non-renewable resources to build Muskrat Falls to borrowing all that money.
Interesting.
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"It can be a loan, it could be cash, it could guarantees but you know that we've made it clear we are not going to fund operational losses."Well, you’ve got to admire a guy who is willing to spend public money to help out a bunch of people going through a hard time.
Open Line show host Randy Simms certainly did.
Martin’s piece isn’t available online but here (right) is a screen cap of a chunk of it that had Randy baffled. Writes Cabot Martin:
“…we have the equivalent of a provincial 'Heritage Fund’ of over $2.7 billion built up from ‘excess’ oil revenues over the last four years”.
Well, the amount is right but this isn’t a Heritage Fund of any sort.
There is a feeling, at least in government, that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians away are somehow a sort of flexible employment pool, skilled workers who are willing to give up their stable, long-time Alberta or Saskatchewan careers to move their families back here at the drop of a job hat.
It hit some new records in the best years of Danny Williams economic miracle. That's right. At a time when the economic miracle was taking hold people were flooding out of the Happy Province in near record numbers. The chart at left gives an idea of how big the problem has been.
There are parts of the province that are almost entirely dependent on migrant labour and remittance workers.
In others - like Stephenville - the economic disaster of losing a pulp and paper mill on the Premier's watch didn't materialize solely because the workers there could find jobs in Alberta.
But yes, you say, there has been more people coming back to the province since 2007, you say.
And yes, that's true, but it isn't because of great economic opportunities in this province.
Look around, especially outside the overpass. All those enormous, job-creating projects that were supposedly luring people back don't actually exist.
This graph will likely cause some people to scratch their chins or heads. The reason is simple: it isn’t the story they’ve been told, namely the one that holds that all our ills of outmigration and the like vanished after 2003.
In fact, if you look at it, outmigration from Newfoundland and Labrador to Alberta has been greatest over the last 10 years or so.
Hear what comfortable words Jerome! sayeth, back when he was finance minister (December 9, 2008):
The $4 billion six-year plan is as much as we can handle right now along with the Vale Inco, Hebron, and then hopefully the Lower Churchill. So we are at capacity, there are not enough workers, and there is simply no way that we can do anything more with infrastructure right now.
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