The Wrong Tool #nlpoli

About two thirds of the people in the province who file tax returns earn less than $35,000 a year before taxes.

It’s the kind of detail that you cannot banish from your mind when you read about the politically popular economist Wade Locke.  The guy who directly and indirectly helped the provincial government create the current financial mess is on a leave from his university job to help with the new budget.

As the Telegram reported on Wednesday, Locke’s “contract with the government stipulates that he'll be paid $250 per hour for his consulting work to a maximum of $75,000.”  That would be on top of the 80% or more of his university salary that he is entitled to for being on what the faculty contract calls a “sabbatical” leave.

The Telegram also reported that Locke said he would only bill taxpayers one dollar at the end of his contract.  Let’s take him at his word.

Still, you have to wonder why he would sign a contract in the first place for more than twice what most people in the province make in a year.  Don’t misunderstand.  A consultant should get what he can earn and if Locke can get someone to pay $250 an hour for his services, then more power to him.  Given the context, though,  the contract is still rather distasteful.

Locke’s supporters will defend any amount of money because they value his advice. And that’s really where we can peel back the cover on this little can and see what is inside.

Land of Confusion meets World of Hurt #nlpoli

From Tuesday’s Hansard comes this chilling reminder that even the Premier has no idea what is going on with the province’s finances.

Mr. Speaker, I again have to implore the members opposite to stop pretending that you do not understand the fiscal structure of the Province. The $600 million that was earmarked in the Department of Natural Resources was not contained in the current budget, Mr. Speaker. That was contained in investment. There is a difference between a capital budget, the investment budget, and the current budget. 

Muskrat Falls has nothing to do with the deficit we are experiencing this year…

Let’s break it down.

The Ongoing Net Debt Fallacy #nlpoli

In a post that starts out about Muskrat Falls, the Telegram’s James McLeod does a fine job of laying out some basic information about debt, deficit, current account, capital account and other bits of the provincial budget.

Read it.  Unless you have been living this sort of stuff up close for years, you will learn something.  If nothing else, you’ll get some insight into how some local politicians have been buggering up this sort of stuff because frankly it is complicated and they don’t understand it.

Regular readers of these scribbles will know that SRBP includes Kathy Dunderdale and Tom Marshall among the people who get confused.  You can add others from all parties.

The Arse that Laid the Golden Turd #nlpoli

The provincial cabinet has been burning the midnight oil the past couple of nights. 

Literally. 

Late night sessions that ended God-knows-when, night after night.

Apparently, they are trying to figure out what to do in order to get out of the massive financial and political hole they have dug for themselves over the past decade.

As bizarre as that might seem to some people,  the politicians who created the mess have no idea yet what they are going to do.  All that Premier Kathy Dunderdale and finance minister Jerome Kennedy have been able to offer lately are lots of vague comments about when the budget might be or how many lay-offs there might be. Dunderdale put a number of 500 lay-offs out there a few days ago but frankly, that’s about as reliable as her forecasts from last year. 

And when Jerome told David Cochrane that they were still working out the Sustainability Plan, he was not bullshitting.  He meant it, even though he claimed they had already started implementing the plan last year.

If you are familiar with government budgets and how these things normally get sorted, then odds are you are reading this now that someone has been able to revive your unconscious form.  

Are you ready for this again? #nlpoli

It seems like only yesterday that the young man from the Pearl was the mayor of the cozy city.

-srbp-

Tories below 30 #nlpoli

By now you’d be living in a cave if you hadn’t heard any news of the latest Corporate Research Associates poll.

The NDP are slightly ahead of the Tories and both are about 10 percentage points ahead of the Liberals.  More people want Lorraine Michael as Premier than want Kathy Dunderdale.  And a majority are unsatisfied with the government.

Now this is an historic set of poll results as Don Martin tweeted to tease people about the release on Monday morning.  The release doesn’t make any reference to that, preferring instead just reporting the results blandly.  By contrast, Mills hyped the living crap out of poll results a few years ago that hit historic highs. 

More and Less #nlpoli

Finance minister Jerome Kennedy is supposed to know about the economy and stuff.

During an interview with CBC provincial affairs reporter David Cochrane for On Point, Kennedy said that in the 1990s the government was the main employer in the province.  The implication was that the public sector wasn’t what it used to be.  People laid off from the public service could find work much more easily in the private sector as a result.

Well…

Err…..

No.

Muskrat Falls weakness: the North Spur #nlpoli

The north side of the site of the future Muskrat Falls dam has a problem.  The soil is made up of clay that has a tendency to sheer away in landslides when it gets too wet. The North Spur, as it is known, is a key part of the reservoir.

Cabot Martin has documented the whole thing in a slide presentation based on documents released during the environmental reviews of the project.

According to Martin, Nalcor won’t have a potential solution to the problem or know the cost until sometime this year.

No adult supervision #nlpoli

Not even 24 hours after the Premier insisted that the daily layoffs would continue until finance minister Jerome Kennedy delivered his budget speech,  Jerome issued a news release  - at 1:30 PM - announcing that they would be holding off on further layoff announcements until he delivered the budget speech.

As it turned out, NTV’s Mike Connors had tweeted around noon that the “Premier says government has decided to stop the trickle of layoffs until budget day.”  CBC’s David Cochrane tweeted the same thing.

Cochrane and Connors also noted that -  as Cochrane put it -  “Premier says more than 500 jobs will be cut in budget. Not all layoffs. There is retirement incentive. No more cuts until budget.”

Meanwhile, 17 employees in a raft of departments got word today that they were headed for the door. 

Apparently, those are the last ones until the budget speech.

Body Count #nlpoli

“We've now confirmed 98 layoffs across government today,” tweeted CBC provincial affairs reporter David Cochrane on Thursday afternoon.  “Working on departmental breakdown…” 

Cochrane broadcast the casualty figures for each department later:

Breakdown by department: 10 Advanced education/skills. 6 CYFS. 13 Environment. 4 Finance. 6 Fisheries. 23 Health. …7 Exec Council. 2 IBRT. 10 Justice. 9 Natural Res. 2 Tourism. 6 Transportation. 62 of 98 jobs cut were union jobs.

That’s the way it has been for the province’s political reporters since the end of February. Cochrane, NTV’s Mike Connors, and the Telegram’s James McLeod tweet on how many layoffs happened on that day, the number in each department,  how many belonged to which union and how many were non-unionised.

No planning and priorities: Conservative cabinet committees - 2013 #nlpoli

There’s one little gem in James McLeod’s pile of censored orders in council that isn’t censored.

It dates from January 2013 and gives the current list of cabinet committees.

There’s the economic policy committee:

There’s the social policy committee:


There’s the treasury board:

And there’s the routine matters committee:

Charlene Johnson and Tom Hedderson also sit on that routine committee.

There’s a curious omission in this list and it doesn’t appear to be a case where the committee make-up didn’t change after the cabinet shuffle with Jerome Kennedy and Tom Marshall.

There’s no planning and priorities committee, apparently. That’s odd because P and P is usually the key cabinet committee chaired by the Premier and responsible for the strategic direction of government. Kathy used to have one in her cabinet.  Every cabinet in Canada uses a planning and priorities committee.  Most have had one for the past three decades or more.

At some point, the Newfoundland and Labrador one seems to have vanished without an effective replacement.

That would explain a great deal.

It would explain, for example, why the Premier often seems to be unaware of what is going on inside her government.  She wouldn’t know because she doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the running of cabinet.  And that, more than anything else, is what the Premier is supposed to be doing. 

Rather than being the boss, Kathy Dunderdale often appears to be nothing more than the government’s official spokesperson, the dead parrot as it were.

In the absence of a P and P committee,  cabinet would have to hope that the key committee chairs could sort out among themselves what to do.  They would be:

• Joan Shea, chair of economic policy,
• Susan Sullivan, chair of social policy, and,
• Jerome Kennedy, president of treasury board.

Whatever the government is doing, these three would know about it and approve of it. 
In December 2010, cabinet had a P and P committee.  It’s members were:

-srbp-

The New Secret Nation #nlpoli

On the front page of Wednesday’s Telegram was another instalment in James McLeod’s blockbuster on the provincial government’s policy of censoring public documents.

This one focused on the claim by a spokesperson for the public engagement office that orders in council were not covered by a section of the province’s access to information law that prohibits disclosure of cabinet decisions even though the orders are essentially cabinet decisions.

At the same time, the spokesperson said the orders were subject to other sections of the act that allowed government officials to censor them selectively.

Yes, that is exactly as screwed-up as it sounds.

Exploits on the Exploits #nlpoli

In Nova Scotia, the provincial government has to beat prospective woods companies with a stick to keep them in line in the rush to take control of lands from the former Bowater mill in that province.

Seven groups want to get some part of the 220,000 hectares, a power plant, a mill site and all the timber that used to go into the paper plant.

Pennies and Pounds #nlpoli

In May 2011, the provincial public works department issued a call for proposals to replace the lift bridge in Placentia.

In August 2011, the department scrapped the project and went back for a re-think.  They got only one proposal for $43.25 million, which upset them given that they had figured it would only cost $24 million.

In March 2013, they accepted a tender for $40.6 million to replace the bridge. The release noted that the new tender was $2.5 million less than the one they’d cancelled.

Nice thought, that, but it actually isn’t a true reflection of the situation, is it?

Budgeting Control and Resources #nlpoli

Shortly after the 2003 general election, the newly elected Conservative politicians accepted a proposal to cut down the number of health boards and education boards across the province.

Save money, they said.

Save money, the politicians repeated.

And so it happened.

As it turned out, the consolidation didn’t save any money.  It certainly didn’t reduce the public service payroll, a goal the Conservatives set out in their election platform.

Where once they stood… #nlpoli

Labour federation boss Lana Payne made an interesting comment on Twitter over the weekend:  “there is never a time for austerity.”

Never.

Ever.

You can hear all those Newfoundland politicians from the 1920s applauding her from the grave.  Those were the same politicians who spent the government into bankruptcy in about a decade.

-srbp-

Just when we needed new ideas… #nlpoli

There’s no small laugh to be had listening to Wade Locke, the government’s favourite economist.

He was all over the media on Monday talking about fiscal responsibility, cutting spending and all that sort of stuff.  You can find a tidy summary from the Telegram.

A couple of decades ago, Locke was advising the public sector unions.  Back then he was all in favour of borrowing and spending and spending and borrowing despite the crushing public debt and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. Fast forward and Wade’s singing a different tune.

The laughs Locke can generate get much bigger when you look at the rest of what he had to say to reporters.

Kent to preside at envelope opening #nlpoli

As we approach the umpteenth anniversary of the internationally-accessible Internet, a website is about as far from news as anyone can get.

That’s why it was so laughable last week to see the junior fart-catcher apprenticed to the province’s minister of secrecy and obfuscation issuing a news release and holding a news conference to herald a completely trivial event like the launch of a new front page (!) to a website..

The only thing left for Steve Kent to do is invite the representatives of the province’s news media to gather ‘round as he opens an envelope. Even the Voice of the Cabinet Minister might not attend that sort of snore-fest or the subsequent events in the series: Kent to check e-mail and Kent posts Twitter message.

Censoring Public Documents… or not #nlpoli

Not only does the provincial government now censor public documents called orders in council, they can’t get their own scheme right.

Public engagement minister Keith Hutchings published a letter to the editor claiming that government had always censored orders in council.  The Telegram dutifully went back and asked for some of the same documents they’d received before with censored sections blacked out.

A front-page story in this Saturday’s edition (March 2) lays out the details.

Party Spending on Polls #nlpoli

Over the past decade, the provincial Conservatives have consistently outspent the other parties in the province on polling and similar research in both election and off years, according to figures filed with the province’s elections office.

The table below shows the amounts each party reported as spending on research and polling. In general election years, the figures are the reported figures for the general election periods.  Parties also may have spent money outside the election period. That isn’t included here.