So after a teaser column in the Telegram last week that was more creative fiction than serious history or memoir, John Crosbie explained why he loves the Muskrat Falls project in this Saturday’s instalment of Geriatric Townie Pass-times.
It’s really simple.
The project will be splendiferous.
Phantasmagorical.
Amazingly, marvellously, Keebler-elves-kinda-magical.
If you are still mulling over the British Columbia election result and the polls, take a look at this post by Eric Grenier at threehundredeight.com. It includes a link to his piece in the Globe on Wednesday on the same topic.
Pollsters tend to weight their samples to match the population as a whole. Problem: that isn’t the same as the demographic profile of voters.voters.
Grenier shows how Ipsos, for example, weighted a poll equally across three age groupings. In the 2013 election, those age groupings didn’t turn out equally. The over-55s made up half the total voter turn-out, not one third.
All this talk of Senator Beth Marshall and her hefty annual stipend for chairing a committee that has met once in two years brings to mind the good senator’s role in the House of Assembly patronage scam, a.k.a. the spending scandal.
Marshall is credited with first sniffing something was amiss when she went hunting for Paul Dick’s expenses in 2001-ish. She was barred from the House by the legislature’s internal economy commission. The members were Liberals and Tories and, as accounts have it, they unanimously wanted to keep Beth’s nose out of their files.
But if you go back and look, you’ll have a hard time finding any indication Beth thought something else was on the go. While we didn’t know it at the time, subsequent information confirmed that members had been handing out public cash pretty generously by that point. Yet Marshall has never, ever indicated she felt something more than a few wine and art purchases might have been amiss.
That’s important because of Marshall’s record once she got into the House herself as a member in 2003.
For the first day back after a long weekend, here are some short snappers on some issues swirling around these days at the national scene.
As it turns out, Harris-Decima used household income not individual income for weighting the poll they did for NAPE. Keith Dunne, NAPE’s communications co-ordinator tweeted the correct information on Thursday morning.
Your humble e-scribbler thought it was individual income and therefore concluded – wrongly – that there was a skew in the poll toward higher income urbanites. That didn’t invalidate the survey results but it might have explained the strength of the rejection of the provincial government’s budget. The Tories might have had a chance to bounce back politically, especially among the lower income types out there.
Turns out that hope was pretty much dashed.
Two thirds of tax filers in Newfoundland and Labrador report incomes of less than $35,000 per year.
The Harris-Decima poll released by the Newfoundland and labrador Association of Public Employees on Wednesday has only 27% of the sample with an income less than $40,000 per year.
Still, the results show that the provincial government either didn’t have a communications strategy or whatever strategy they had failed miserably.
In fact, it was a stunning, utter, complete, abject failure of their entire communications effort.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale said on Tuesday that the province will have problems now that it doesn’t have a federal cabinet minister from this province.
As CBC quoted her from a scrum outside the House of Assembly, Kathy said:
“It always makes it more difficult when you don't have somebody inside the tent,…”
This is not just a difficult position, it is a stupid position, but it is exactly the stupid policy that Kathy Dunderdale advocated.
While an official with Corner Brook’s municipal government understandably has to say wonderful things about the economy in the west coast city, a look at some numbers shows the city is feeling the effects of a larger problem in the province.
SRBP took a look at newsprint production levels and the value of newsprint exports from 2003 to 2012. The numbers are all from the annual editions of the budget document called The Economy.
The picture is not pretty.
You can add another five changes to the record of senior executive appointments cabinet has made since the beginning of the year, according to orders-in-council posted to the provincial government’s website.
That brings the total for Calendar Year 2013 to 20.
Six the 20 are acting appointments, meaning that cabinet will either have to confirm the appointment or put someone new in the job.
Cabinet remains on track to make 60 such appointments in 2013, setting an all-time record for changes in the 121 deputy minister and assistant deputy minister positions in the provincial government.
-srbp-
In the wake of the tragic death last week of Joseph Riche, it shouldn’t be surprising that some people, including some politicians, are blaming the tragedy on the Department of National Defence.
That’s what politicians do in this province. Blame Ottawa is a time-honoured political strategy even if it is usually a political lie.
As with the Burton Winters tragedy, these provincial politicians are aiming public concern in the wrong direction.
The Kremlinology post on Trevor Taylor, Paul Oram and the apparent policy disagreement in cabinet in 2008/09 generated two contacts (a tweet and an e-mail) that are worth discussing.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Trevor Taylor left politics in 2009 in an unseemly hurry.
One minute he was there.
Next minute? Gone from cabinet and the House of Assembly.
Then right on his heels went Paul Oram, who muttered something about unsound financial management by the Conservatives as he ran from the Confederation Building.
A very big clue to what was going on at the time turned up on Tuesday in Trevor Taylor’s column in the Telegram.
Tom Marshall used to be the finance minister.
He’s the guy who consistently, year after year, spent more than the people of the province could afford. Tom didn’t do it by himself: he had the support of all his colleagues in cabinet.
And since 2009, Tom and his colleagues have admitted that they mismanaged the provincial government accounts by overspending.
Deliberately.
Along the way, Tom has claimed some things that aren’t true. Like saying that he and his colleagues lowered the provincial debt when they didn’t.
So now that he is natural resources minister, Tom Marshall is still telling people things that aren’t true. This time it is about the glories of the 2008 expropriation.
What Tom says.
The truth.
Two different things.
Last week SRBP noted that the provincial cabinet seems to be having some difficulty getting legislation into the House for debate.
Normally, we’d see upwards of 30 bills handled in the spring session. In 2011 they had almost all the bills introduced by the early part of May. In 2012, the provincial government had more than twice as many bills on the go as they do this year.
Well on Monday, finance minister Jerome Kennedy gave notice he has one more bill to add: an amendment to the Revenue Administration Act. He called it amendment number three.
Except it isn’t.