When Premier Kathy Dunderdale spoke to a St. John’s Board of Trade last May, she claimed the federal government had tried to tie the federal loan guarantee on Muskrat Falls to the European free trade talks.
There’s no evidence that her claim is true, at least based on the selected documents Dunderdale released last week in the House of Assembly on the negotiations.
The documents actually show something else.
Two news stories last week reminded us once again of the nature of federal-provincial relations for Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade.
A story in the Chronicle Herald reported on recent comments by Danny Williams about a sharp personal exchange he supposed had with Stephen Harper before the later became prime minister.
The second story was the release late in the week by Premier Kathy Dunderdale of some documents about the provincial government’s position on the Canada- European Union trade agreement. The 80-odd pages of e-mails and letters include an effort by the provincial government to tie search and rescue, an offshore safety agency, and the federal government’s Hibernia shares in a deal between the federal and provincial governments.
Just for the sake of looking at some numbers, here are some statistics on university enrolment in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade.
The figures are from Statistics Canada.
Premier Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t govern by polls.
That’s what she told reporters – yet again – as they asked her about yet another poll that showed the provincial Conservatives aren’t doing so well with eligible voters.
Then Kathy explained to reporters that the polls told her that she and her colleagues must do a better job of communicating with the people of the province. Oh yes, and she’d happily “take” the improvement in the satisfaction with her administration.
Dunderdale wasn’t the only one having some problems with the results of the Corporate Research Associates November poll numbers. New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael blamed her party’s dramatic drop on the two guys who left her caucus. Never mind that the Dipper problems showed up in the polls well before this past quarter.
Let’s dig into this latest set of polling numbers though and see if we can help Kathy and Lorraine figure out what the polls results mean.
Anyone who wants to understand the value of the House of Assembly need only look at Question Period on Tuesday.
Liberal Andrew Parsons threw question after question at child, and family services minister Paul Davis about a report by the Child and Youth Advocate into the case of a young man, aged 16 years, who went to jail a couple of years ago for killing a man in a fire. The young man was living alone, unsupervised, at the time, having been taken into custody by government officials.
Parsons asked question after question and Davis through out anything but a direct answer in reply, time after time.
The value of the House in this instance is not in getting important information. Rather, the value lay in exposing Davis’ weakness in not having good answers in reply to the Advocate’s damning report.
If you accept the provincial government’s version of things, spending a half a billion dollars more than you are collecting is a responsible decision.
That’s the headline the government’s communications people put on the news release covering the release of the fall budget update.
And if you look at either the Telegram or the CBC version of the story, the biggest thing to notice is that the provincial government deficit is $100 million less than originally forecast.
Let’s take a deeper look and see what is there.
Finance minister Tom Marshall will present his mid-year financial update on Monday. It is supposed to be a way of bringing everyone up to date on how the annual budget is going. It’s an accountability thing.
Since the government’s fiscal year starts in April, the middle of the year was September. So December is well past the mid-year. As we all know, December is the last month of the calendar year so this mid-year report is a bit late there, too. The only calendar that puts December in the middle of some year or other seems to be the provincial Conservative one.
The whole idea of a mid-year financial up-date winds up being a bit of a farce, then. It’s much like having a consultation about what to put in the budget after the cabinet has already decided on the budget in secret beforehand.
Farce is not a word you associate with good government. It’s more the type of word you’ll find to describe something like the annual Mummer’s Parade. For those who don’t know, mummering is a bit of Christmas entertainment when people pretend to be something they are not. Mummering is foolishness in a good sense of the word. In politics these days, as with the Mummers’ Parade, it seems that foolish is the new normal.
And that is not good.
According to a new commentary on the Muskrat Falls project by Memorial University economist James Feehan, legislation passed in December 2012 shields Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro from competition, thereby “reducing efficiency and innovation and preventing wholesale access to American consumers” by violating the open market principles on which the American electricity market is based.
Feehan concludes that potential gains for the province and consumers from unimpeded trade and the development of a competitive market will be blocked.
“Instead, Island ratepayers will be forced to pay for this expensive project, whatever the cost.”
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In addition to the $17 million in public cash announced in 2011, the provincial government has given an additional undisclosed amount of public money from several departments to a company trying to re- open a fluorspar mine on the Burin Peninsula.
Justice minister Darin King made that apparently unwitting disclosure in answer to questions in the House of Assembly from Liberal leader Dwight Ball. King was answering a follow-up question from Ball on the $17 million. He’d originally posed questions that fisheries minister Keith Hutchings answered. Hutchings said the company had drawn down $300,000 of the public money. When Ball asked King to clear up the obvious discrepancy, King said emphatically:
I said zero of the $17 million has been drawn down because it is targeted toward the wharf project. There are other sources of funding from Natural Resources and other departments where the company has availed of to move the project forward. The $17 million was targeted specifically to that particular project. [Emphasis added]
Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday, while the polls were still open mind you, that the by-election results would be no big thing.
Life would go on.
The world would turn.
And the Conservatives had two years left in their mandate.
That’s when everyone in the province understood that the provincial Conservatives had already conceded defeat in the Carbonear-Harbour Grace by-election.
Unfortunately for Dunderdale, though, the election result means something. Here’s what.
There are times when the talk in the province sounds a bit like the soundtrack to a movie, a comedy to be precise.
On Monday, finance minister Tom Marshall sounded a bit familiar: “This is a golden age, Mr. Speaker,” Marshall said, “a golden age.”
Recall only a few years ago, Marshall was talking about Muskrat Falls like it was Bay d’Espoir: build a hydroelectric facility to supply lots of cheap electricity for industry that can create jobs for the people who will pay for it all. Now Bay d’Espoir is another story altogether, but there’s a bit more to the history that makes this click together.
Some old fellow by the name of Williams once said that there was no greater fraud than an unkept promise.
He said that around the time he promised to bring in a law that would protect public servants who protected the public interest by disclosing wrongdoing.
Well, he never kept that solemn promise to protect whistleblowers.
The Telegram noticed:
By the end of question period on Tuesday, only an hour or so in, the words “Mr. Speaker” had been uttered 142 times. One of the worst offenders? Premier Kathy Dunderdale answered 11 questions that day, with 31 “Mr. Speakers,” including lines like “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition has a terrible time with facts. He really does, Mr. Speaker, because I certainly do not mind at any time in this House or anywhere else having a debate upon the facts.”
There is even a tee shirt.
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Glen Carter’s second novel has had an honoured place on the coffee table chez e-scribbler for the past few couple of weeks. Dog-eared pages and bits of paper marked the progress through the story that moves smoothly from continent to continent and country to country as it unfolds.
And then the book went on the missing list.
No sign of it anywhere.
No sign, until finally on Sunday evening around suppertime, 15 year old daughter asked her frustrated father what he was looking for. Oh that, she says. It was the anniversary Friday and I started to read it.
You know you have a winner when it grabs two readers as different as a middle-aged father and a teenaged daughter.
In early October, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board issued two new significant discovery licenses to Suncor and Statoil, partners in Ballicaters.
On November 18, CNLOPB updated its offshore resource estimates to include the estimated 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural in the Ballicaters SDLs.
That makes it the third largest gas field in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin after Hibernia (3.1 TCF) and White Rose (1.98 TCF)
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On Monday, Premier Kathy Dunderdale blew off any questions in the House of Assembly about Bill 29 with the comment that the centre for Law and Democracy said the province was third in the country for transparency.
Well, as regular readers well know, the Premier is not usually right about many things and this is a fine example.
(Continued from Part 1)
On October 19, Russell Wangersky wrote a column for The Telegram entitled "20 questions for the premier." Mr. Wangersky posed questions about the development of the Muskrat Falls project.
On November 9, Premier Kathy Dunderdale replied.
Unfortunately, the Premier did not provide much factual information. In the interest of informing Newfoundlanders and Labradorians on this important issue, here are 20 clear answers to 20 clear questions. The information presented here comes from the provincial government and Nalcor as well as publicly available information, such as electricity markets across northeastern North America. The post includes links to background information.
The Second 10 Questions
Dwight Ball is the leader of the Liberal Party.
He now has a chance to lead by example when it comes to donations for his leadership campaign.
Ball told CBC News that he spent somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 on his leadership campaign. Even though the party executive failed to provide any rules for campaign financing – as SRBP told you in July – Ball should set an example and publish a list of all donors over $100 and the amounts they gave.
