labradore takes issue with a letter to the editor by justice minister Felix Collins.
He systematically demonstrates that Collins’ claim about the “frivolous and vexatious” provisions in Bill 29 are wrong.
labradore calls it a convenient omission on Collins’ part.
To be fair to Collins, you cannot omit what you likely did not know in the first place.
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“[M]ega-projects”, writes political scientist Will Jennings,” exhibit a ‘performance paradox’ …being prevalent and popular among planners despite suffering from extremely poor track records in terms of completion times, cost escalations and shortfalls in projected revenues and economic benefits.”
Jennings looked at several projects to see why the projects tended to take a long time to finish or experienced huge cost over-runs or generally didn’t live up to expectations.
This week SRBP is looking at Muskrat Falls using Jennings’ four categories of factors that affect project performance. The first of these is “high politics”.
When announced in November 2010, the Muskrat Falls dam, the line to the island the connection to Nova Scotia were supposed to cost $6.2 billion.
The dam and the line to the island were priced at $5.0 billion. The Nova Scotia line was supposed to cost $1.2 billion.
As it turned out, those numbers were wrong.
Here’s what we have learned since then.
The attitude towards Muskrat is increasingly one of both NL and NS being locked in. A course change would be prohibitively expensive.A similar comment turned up in his story for the Friday edition of the Telegram, illustrated by a quote from Premier Kathy Dunderdale at her scrum after meeting with Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter:
“What’s the alternative? To either ration energy or sit up in the dark. We have to pay for energy. Where’s the least-cost alternative?” Dunderdale said.Dunderdale’s comments are preposterous, of course. There are plenty of alternatives, some of them considerably less costly than the one she has fixated on. That fixation is cause for concern about the way the provincial government is barreling ahead with this project.
When it comes to the Hebron project, Premier Kathy Dunderdale should know exactly what went wrong with the development deal between the province and the companies.
She should know every give-away in it. After all, she was natural resources minister at the time.
Lots of words came from Premier Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy in their dispute over construction of a major module for the Hebron project.
What became pretty clear – if you listen - is that the provincial government is trying to squeeze some resolution to the dispute outside the provisions of the Hebron Benefits Agreement.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Muskrat Falls lover, from a scrum on Thursday:
Dunderdale said due diligence is more important than artificial timelines but that the two sides are "considerably closer" to an agreement. A deal will be done before her government debates Muskrat Falls this fall, she said, "sometime before November, I hope."
November, hopefully.
For the debate or the deal.
Whatever.
That would be a deal that was supposedly so close last winter that they didn’t need to set a new deadline after they blew through the first two.
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The controversy at the Innu Development Limited Partnership developed some political overtones on Thursday.
CBC reported that federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue borrowed $25,000 from the partnership to finance his campaign in 2011.
Darrell Dexter, Nova Scotia Premier:
"We've already looked at that and we've done studies that look at the delivery of power to Nova Scotians," he said in Halifax."And the most effective way of doing that is through a project like the Lower Churchill."
Like the Lower Churchill.
So if it turned out that a hydroelectric project in Quebec could meet the need, Darrell could go with that option and still be correct.
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Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter, in a scrum after meeting with Premier Kathy Dunderdale about cost over-runs on Muskrat Falls:
"Here is this project that we have that can provide stability because we're going to know what the input costs are upfront. And that will provide stability for many, many years."
For 35 years, Nova Scotians will get free electricity from Muskrat Falls.
Any cost over-runs on the project are solely the burden of taxpayers in Newfoundland and Labrador.
That is stability any Nova Scotia premier would love.
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The Mighty Ceeb ran a story on Thursday about a block of three houses in downtown St. John’s. Tourists and some residents are upset by a set of wires that one of the local phone companies has installed in front of the houses.
They quoted Les Cuff, who lives in one of the houses.
"Instead of having the three houses nicely unbroken, now you have three houses with a big bundle of wires in the middle, he said. "It just looks unsightly."
The guy lives there and he never noticed this stuff before?
All the Twitter commentary on Thursday about Muskrat Falls and mining prompted your humble e-scribbler to go back and do some checking about who said what when.
Sure enough, the initial announcement did mention that any electricity from Muskrat Falls that wasn’t used in the province would go off to any place that Nalcor might sell it. Still, it would be available to call back for “industrial development” in Labrador.
But that wasn’t really the focus of the discussion about Muskrat Falls.
Two posts, quite a distance apart touch on the same basic political (science) issue: the role of the local, get-out-the-vote effort in any political campaign.
For the record, your humble e-scribbler will refrain from making any comment on the substance of the statements of claim filed by Danny Williams and Alderon against the Sierra Club and Bruno Marcocchio on the one hand and Brad Cabana on the other.
CBC has posted pdf versions of both, linked below:
In general, your humble e-scribbler would humbly suggest that SRBP readers keep the following observations in mind.
While the case before the Supreme Court of Canada on Tuesday was about the federal Elections Act, two provincial chief elections officers have intervener status in the case.
Neither of them have court cases currently underway that challenge the results of an election.
What other province might you think would have sought intervener status on a case about a potentially controverted election?
What other province could that be?
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Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is ringing the bells, trying to alarm Canadians to the fact the federal government is trying to withdraw funding from areas that are generally provincial responsibility under the Constitution.
You can see a lengthy interview Dexter gave to Evan Solomon of CBC’s Power and Politics on the Mother Corp’s website. “They are pursuing what some people call a disentangled federalism,” Dexter warned. Dexter described the country in a curious way, where the federal government pays for things and the provincial governments do them.
It’s curious because that isn’t what the people who wrote the constitution had in mind.
Tim Powers is a local boy who has done good for himself as a lobbyist in Ottawa. Powers is a sharp guy who is very well-connected in Tory circles.
The provincial energy corporation employed Powers to lobby the federal Conservatives on behalf of their Lower Churchill project. While he has passed that contract off to a couple of other colleagues at Summa Strategies, Powers remains an ardent supporter of the Muskrat Falls project.
Powers delivered a keynote at the recent Expo Labrador mining conference. The title was Mining and Lower Churchill Falls.
Weird, huh?
