Get worried-er #nlpoli

Here are a bunch of stories all of which would deserve a post of their own but that are presented here cut down to the barest of bare essentials.

King of the Keystone Kops Strikes Again:  Not content to demonstrate his incompetence with his earlier budget shag up, justice minister Darin King (Twitter:  @King_Darin) announced on Thursday that 25 fisheries officers his department had booted out the door in the 2013 budget cuts would be rehired to a man and/or woman in very short order.

What can King possibly do to top this besides light his own underwear on fire during a live television interview?

Hide the matches, Tory staffers.

The other king named Darin:  Darin Pike will head the new Anglo school board for the entire province come the fall, the head of the provincial selection committee announced on Wednesday.

Pike’s experience includes a stint running the Eastern School district, which was the bureaucratic trial project for the creation of a single board for all English-speaking students in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Pike’s appointment is the penultimate act in the bureaucratic plan to eliminate public oversight of public education and replace it entirely with a system run by education bureaucrats who answer to no one except a cabinet minister who has no meaningful authority within the department. 

The plan started in 2004 when education department bureaucrats pitched the idea to the noob provincial Conservatives as a way of saving money.  In the event, they didn’t save a penny, but that was never the real purpose of the scam, err scheme. 

The plan did successfully consolidate de facto power in the hands of the deputy education minister and his four key subordinates, the chief executives of the districts.  The four district boards created under the re-organization scheme were powerless to do anything except as they were told.  This was perhaps most evident in the Eastern District where, from the chair, down to the lowliest anonymous character the board was populated with faceless cowards intent primarily on avoiding any public accountability for decisions they rubber-stamped.

Pike’s experience in implementing the plan makes him the ideal candidate.  D‘uh.

Faithful readers will recognise the similarity between an unaccountable education bureaucracy and the unaccountable provincial energy corporation, Nalcor.

Parochial or what?:  Apparently IOC has laid off some people.  The company won’t say how many.  The CBC story only talks about events in this province. 

The Quebec weekly Le Nord-Cotier broke the story a couple of days ago.  SRBP linked to it a couple of days ago.  The Quebec paper mentioned all the towns and cities where people got the boot, including the ones not in Quebec.

The World Stops at Donovans:  In Nova Scotia, the province’s utilities regulatory board is up to its eyes in the Muskrat Falls controversy.  Search the Internet and you’ll find a raft of stories about the UARB hearings and on public debate about the project.  On this side of the Cabot Strait, you’d be hard pressed to know there is anyone living there. 

The only local mentions of the story have been questions posed to Nalcor boss Ed Martin, who was characteristically vague and uninformative. 

Nice to be wrong Update (7:50 AM):  Telegram.  Top of Page 4.  Canadian Press story on Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter’s lack of concern about the Nova Scotia opposition to Muskrat Falls and the Maritime link.

The Norwegian Model:  Norwegian energy giant Statoil announced this week that was reconsidering a major offshore project in part because of changes to Norwegian tax rules. 

"In addition, the Norwegian government has recently proposed reduced uplift in the petroleum tax system, which reduces the attractiveness of future projects, particularly marginal fields and fields which require new infrastructure. This has made it necessary to review the Johan Castberg project," says Øystein Michelsen, Statoil's executive vice president for development and production in Norway.

The Norwegian government is a majority shareholder in Statoil.  Norway manages its state-owned companies like all others, though, subjecting them to the same laws as private sector corporations. 

The Nalcor Model:  On May 31, Nalcor cleared the final bureaucratic hurdle for the Labrador-Island transmission link for Muskrat Falls with news that the provincial environment department had accepted the company’s environmental impact submissions. It’s all in the minister’s hands now.  He must recommend to cabinet whether to approve the project or not.

What are the odds Tom Hedderson would suggest to cabinet  that Nalcor stop work?

More than Muskrat Update (7:50 PM):  On the top of page three of the Friday Telly, there’s a second story by Ashley Fitzpatrick about the Nalcor AGM.  The headline:  “More than Muskrat discussed at Nalcor AGM”. 

Sure there was.

According to the story, Nalcor senior management talked about how Nalcor spending (i.e. cost) is up across the board. 

The reason they didn’t want to discuss as such? 

Muskrat Falls: it’s been driving up everyone’s costs and that’s going to get worse before it gets better.  "It would be easy to blame Muskrat," according to Nalcor vice president Derrick Sturge.

Easy, yes.

Accurate?

Absolutely.

What else wasn’t Muskrat Falls? 

Energy marketing, which, of course, has nothing to do with Muskrat Falls except when the gang at the AGM talked about selling surplus power from Muskrat and all these other sales into markets that are not there.…
that’s right there in the story with the “Not Muskrat”  headline.

Big sales potential over the next three or four decades, according to Ed Martin. 

Really?

Interesting then that Nalcor hasn’t been able to nail down any long-term sales already (hence the reason to force taxpayers to buy 100% of Muskrat for only notionally using 40% of the power.

Sure.

They talked about a lot that wasn’t Muskrat Falls.

-srbp-

Get Worried #nlpoli

Not surprisingly,  a band of familiar faces turned up at Nalcor’s annual public meeting to put questions about Muskrat Falls to Ed Martin, the man more and more people are calling the de facto Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.

And equally unsurprisingly, Ed Martin continued with the sort of uninformative or misleading comments of the sort he made most notoriously about water management and generating capacity in 2012.

The fact that Martin does not speak plainly and therefore honestly about anything Nalcor is doing should make people extremely nervous.

Rumpole and the Big Smoke #nlpoli

Here’s the official summary of a judge’s decision in a recent arson case:

Accused was charged with arson. The Crown failed to prove beyond a  reasonable doubt that the fire was deliberately set and, if it was, that it was the accused who did it. The accused was acquitted.

Failed to prove anyone deliberately set the fire in the first place, let alone that the accused did it.

That’s pretty much the definition of epic fail.

-srbp-

Fluidity #nlpoli

As a rule,  cabinet ministers should be able to tell you exactly what government policy is on any given subject.  They all sit at the same table and they each have an obligation to support the policy they collectively decide.

When two ministers say starkly different things, then, you can understand that people tend to notice the discrepancy.  The difference usually signals a major problem or controversy and that simply cannot stand.  The principle of cabinet solidarity means that in public they must all sing the same song..

It’s bad enough when two ministers disagree. But when the difference is between the Premier and a minister, the matter becomes very serious. If there is one person who must know what government is doing, that person would be the first minister.  If there is one person who gets to set government policy, it is the first minister. Everyone else just has an opinion.

IOCC cuts staff #nlpoli

The Iron Ore Company of Canada has made cuts to its offices in St.John’s, Montreal, Labrador City and Sept Iles, according to the weekly newspaper Le Nord-Cotier.

The company would not confirm how many positions were eliminated or how many people were affected.

IOC spokesperson Natalie Rouleau told the newspaper that the positions were redundancies and affected permanent staff, temporary employees and contract employees.

-srbp-

Off track betting #nlpoli

That big, ginormous phone-banging-up, trade dispute thingy with evil Ottawa?

So not happening any more.

"We seem to be back on track.  We have alignment," Premier Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday at an event announcing fitness grants to community groups.

Familiar tunes amid the Shifting Balance of Power #nlpoli

All the talk the past week or so about negotiations between the crowd in Confederation Building and the crowd in Ottawa  brought out the conventional wisdom about premiers using fights with the feds for political purposes.

The coincidence of a talk on nationalism the week before linked the two ideas together neatly for some people. Kathy Dunderdale was having a row with Ottawa, possibly to boost her polling and maybe as a show of nationalist fervour that we all love.

Yeah, maybe that’s true.

And then again, maybe it just isn’t.

No Surplus to Supply #nlpoli

Critics of the Muskrat Falls development pointed out over 18 months ago that the project would have problems meeting its electricity commitments.

Nalcor disputed that.

But this weekend, CBC’s Paul Withers told On Point host David Cochrane that Nalcor has refused to commit in writing to supply Nova Scotia with electricity beyond the original block of free electricity Emera will get as part of the basic deal.

That’s interesting. 

Very interesting. 

The original term sheet and the final capacity agreement basically commit the parties to work it out in the future on two conditions.  First, Nova Scotia has to want the power for the long term.  Second, Nalcor has to agree to supply it.

In the future.

If Nalcor had electricity to sell and Nova Scotia wanted it, then Nalcor should be locking them down and taking their cash.  After all, a long-term power purchase agreement for an export customer is exactly what the Lower Churchill was supposed to be about.

Instead, Nalcor has decided to force local ratepayers in Newfoundland to cover the full cost, plus profit and ship electricity to Emera in Nova Scotia, effectively for nothing.

What’s more, if they sell any electricity from the project to industrial customers in Labrador, Nalcor will sell the power at a huge discount.  According to Nalcor’s plan, everyone will get the benefit of Muskrat Falls except the people who will pay for it.

-srbp-

If they do it, it is wrong #nlpoli

On Monday, Kathy Dunderdale said it was wrong for the federal government to try and jam her up by connecting the federal loan guarantee on Muskrat Falls to free trade talks, Kathy Dunderdale acknowledged on Friday that she has been connecting the free trade talks to search and rescue.

When someone else does it, that would be wrong.

But when Kathy does it, she thinks it is sheer genius.

-srbp-

The Divide Deepens. #nlpoli

David Cochrane called it right the other day in the scrum with Kathy Dunderdale.  He asked if she was laying the groundwork for a failure at the trade talks, a failure of her personal position.

Dunderdale denied it in the scrum, but her latest claim – full of the same vague and largely unsubstantiated claims as on Monday – sounds like someone who is trying to blame someone else before the talks finish and the end result doesn’t match what she’s been personally staking out as a position.

There’s something to be said for eloquence #nlpoli

Russell Wangersky is a fine writer with a keen and insightful mind.

He is also an editor at the province’s largest circulation daily.

That’s the same place where former fisheries minister Trevor Taylor has been scribbling a column every week.

Dunderdale and Dalley tell different trade talk stories #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale (via NTV):

We’re looking for a ‘carve-out’ on the minimum processing regulations … so they’ll be exempted, and we want access to the European market on a number of our fish lines…

Carve out. 

Hideous jargon for “not going to trade away” minimum processing regulations.

Period.

Fisheries minister Derrick Dalley (via the Telegram):

Fisheries Minister Derrick Dalley was at a media event in St. John’s Tuesday, where he assured reporters that the provincial government is not going to give away minimum processing requirements unless it’s a good deal.

Not going to trade away minimum processing requirements.

Oh wait.

There’s more.

Kathy Dunderdale's Give-Aways #nlpoli

There is something about Kathy Dunderdale’s speech to the Board of Trade that leaves you decidedly uncomfortable.

Part of it is the mention of her grandson  - yet again - at the front end end of the speech.  Kathy told a story about the advice the little fellow gave her in case someone one should break into her house.  This was apparently back in the spring.

Another part of it is the story about the loan guarantee.  “I’ve got to tell you, I never worked for anything so hard in my life as I worked for that loan guarantee,” Dunderdale told reporters in the scrum after her speech. That quote is from the Telegram account by James McLeod.

Do we have it? #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale had a pretty easy audience on Monday for her relaxed, ambling speech about a whole bunch of stuff.

It was the St. John’s Board of Trade. 

As a rule, the townie business community have the guts of political guppies.  They’ll run along with whatever the government says and Monday was no different.  When the Conservatives were spending and spending beyond what the province could afford, the crowd at the Board of Trade cheered wildly.  And now on cue they are repeating the Conservative line on spending restraint – when there really isn’t any – and the glories of Muskrat Falls, which is the proof the government is continuing to spend beyond the public’s means.

The crowd at the aptly named BOT know what side their bread is buttered on so they applauded in all the right spots in the Premier’s stock speech.

Well, almost stock.

Like Father. Like Son. #nlpoli

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.

Lowest Cost Option #nlpoli

Note:  The words glory hole and shaft in this post are terms used in the mining and oil and gas industries.

The provincial government is almost finished “remediating” the environmental contamination left from the old American Smelting and refining Company (ASARCO) mine at Buchans.

According to a news release from Tom Hedderson, tenders are due to go out on May 25 for the final phase.

Read the release and the one thing you will notice is that there’s no description of what the provincial government is actually doing to reduce the environmental risk to residents from the mine tailings and other debris from the old mine.

There’s likely a reason for that.

Polling Voters #nlpoli

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.

It just doesn’t stop #nlpoli

There’s a new anti-Conservative picture around town. 

This one is via Twitter (@openionated ).

-srbp-

Beth and Expenses #nlpoli #cdnpoli

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.

There’s no crap like old crap #nlpoli

And John Crosbie’s recent column (May 18) in the Telegram about Churchill Falls contains some of the oldest  - and completely unsubstantiated – crap on the go.