A tale of two crises #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale did two major interviews on the first working day since the start of the Nalcor generation crisis.

One was with registered Nalcor lobbyist Tim Powers (# 777504-14002) who is currently holding down a guest spot hosting on VOCM.  The whole interview is actually online at vocm.com.  The second was with CBC’s John Furlong on Radio Noon.  As of Monday night, it wasn’t online.  She also had a media availability later in the day with Earl Ludlow from Newfoundland Power.

If you heard both great interviews.  If not,  listen to the VOCM one. Powers repeated the interview on Monday night when he co-hosted the night-time talk show with Jonathan Richler.  You’ll hear a whole lot that confirms the observations we made here on Monday.  Let’s walk through the day.

The Great Blizzard/Blackout 2014 #nlpoli

Some observations:

1.  Yep.  It’s a crisis.

When you have a major utility cutting electricity to people in a blizzard at random, for random periods of time because it cannot supply enough electricity to meet demand, you have a crisis.

That’s what it feels like to the people in it.  That’s what it is.

People never knew when their lights would be on or off, nor would they know for how long.  The Newfoundland Power and the NL Hydro operations people who briefed the public were straightforward and factual.  They did their jobs well.

The thing is that the public emergency system, including the politicians, didn’t clue in that randomly shutting off power to thousands of voters at a time over the course of several days might be a bit of a problem for the voters.

The SRBP 9th Anniversary #nlpoli

It all started on January 3, 2005 and as of today, the Sir Robert Bond Papers is nine years old.

As your humble e-scribbler writes this on Thursday evening, the gang at Nalcor have managed the provincial electrical system so ineffectively that on the coldest night of the year so far,  they are forcing people to live for unspecified periods in complete darkness without heat so that Nalcor can cope with the load on the island transmission grid.

These same people are now building a massive hydro-electric project that will produce some of the most expensive electricity in North America and force those consumers currently freezing in the dark to pay for it.

Someone actually tweeted on Thursday night that this was Nalcor’s worst case scenario.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nalcor gambled and got it wrong.

Taxpayers are bearing the cost.

It’s the same as Muskrat Falls. And as SRBP enters its 10th year,  there’s something fitting about that situation, given the post from 3 January 2011 pointed out that the fact that consumers in this province are taking all the risk and paying all the bills remains one of the fundamental problems with the entire Muskrat Falls project.  

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The 2013 SRBP Themes (Part 3) #nlpoli

Government is about making decisions.

In trying to understand what is going on,  how governments make decisions is sometimes more important than what decisions get made.

That’s why SRBP has highlighted things about the structure and organization of government.  The past year was no exception.

The 2013 SRBP Themes (Part 2) #nlpoli

Federal provincial relations

Cast your mind back to the early part of 2012.  Kathy Dunderdale was frustrated.  She couldn’t figure out how to deal with the crowd in Ottawa. 

Suck up to them. 

Attack them. 

Didn’t matter.

They still wouldn’t do what Kathy wanted.

The 2013 SRBP Themes (Part 1) #nlpoli

The end of the calendar always brings the string of Best of, Top 10, and any other kind of year in review piece.  In the conventional media it’s the season of the interview with leading politicians.

At SRBP this year we did a Top 13 for ‘13 list.  It just ran through all the posts and pages that attracted the largest number of readers during the year.

You get a bit of a different picture of the year when you go through the posts month by month to see what turns up.  Patterns emerge that aren’t as readily apparent when you are reading them – or writing them – daily.

The SRBP Top 13 for 2013 #nlpoli

For your reading pleasure as we head into the last weekend of 2013 is the list of the top 13 stories at SRBP, as determined by what the readers turned to most:

O Holy Night

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Sleigh Ride

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The Hollowmen of Newfoundland and Labrador #nlpoli

Some of you may have been surprised to find out this weekend that Nalcor has a scheme to import cheap electricity into the province.

A couple of Nalcor officials could barely contain their excitement in an interview with the Telegram’s James McLeod. Here’s the idea in a nutshell:

Essentially, Nalcor would slow down or shut off some of its hydro dams and let the water build up in the reservoir, while buying cheap power from the market. Then later, during peak demand times on the mainland, Nalcor would run the hydro dams flat out and turn a profit.

You are probably scratching your head because the provincial government has always insisted Muskrat Falls was the cheapest way to supply the province with electricity.

Well, now you know they lied.

But that’s really the smallest implication of the weekend story.

Ghouls, vultures, and a-holes #nlpoli

The marine rescue sub-centre story is one of those things that typifies politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.

It’s entirely the creation of a few politicians with their own agenda and a whole bunch of other sincere, well-meaning people have gotten sucked into what is – essentially  - a complete pile of shite.

Province abandons fisheries policy…quietly #nlpoli

Two years.

That’s all it took to destroy the provincial government’s historic fisheries policy that had been built on the highly successful state-controlled model pioneered by such economic powerhouses as the Soviet Union, Albania, and North Korea.

Record churn in senior public service in 2013 #nlpoli

Three deputy minister appointments announced on Tuesday brings the number of senior executive appointments in the public service to 24 in the second half of 2013, according to information from the provincial government’s Order in Council database.

That brings the total number of senior executive appointments in 2013 to 51.  Cabinet made 27 such appointments in the first six months of the year.  Cabinet made 12 of them in the first quarter.

Since one of the appointments was a temporary job for a senior deputy minister who retired in September, you could reduce the total to 50.  But that’s still a record, compared to the previous record 49 senior appointments made in 2012.

In the past decade cabinet has typically made a series of senior appointments in December.  That means there is still plenty of time to move the new record significantly higher.

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Related:

• Churn, churn, churn  (August 2013)
• The poster child for churn (August 2013)

Danny to fire publicists? #nlpoli

Someone organized a stunt designed solely to gain publicity and no one invited the Old Mullet Hisself to huff and puff and pose for the cameras.

Clearly, the people handling Hisself’s publicity should be fired.

S-H-O-T.

Fired.

Frankly <shoulder twitch>  I gotta tell ya.

</eyeroll>

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Leading by example #nlpoli

The Liberal Party executive may have screwed up by failing to put in place any campaign finance rules during the recent leadership but the candidates are putting it right.

Liberal leader Dwight Ball and three of his four fellow candidates released information on their campaign expenses on Monday.

Ball committed to release information immediately after he won the leadership but his disclosure went one better than he’d originally indicated.  Not only did Ball ask donors for permission to release their names and the amounts, he refunded money his campaign had received from people who wanted to remain anonymous.

Ball leads by example.

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Inertia #nlpoli

In a letter last May to his federal counterpart, economic development minister Keith Hutchings described minimum processing requirements as the “only policy instrument within provincial jurisdiction that ensures fisheries resources adjacent to the province result in processing jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

For those who do not know what they are,  minimum processing requirements are a condition that the provincial government sets on the licenses it gives to companies that process fish in the province.  The name says it all:  the companies have to process a certain amount of the fish in order to create jobs in fish plants around Newfoundland and Labrador.

There’s been a fairly steady row about processing rules over the past decade as the companies struggle to stay financially viable.  There are way too many plants for the amount of fish available and there are way too many people in the province drawing pathetically small wages slicing up the fish that comes ashore.  Companies can’t process fish profitably here and yet the provincial government insists they keep at bit.

The provincial politicians and bureaucrats know perfectly well that they need to change their ways. The politicians knew about it when they set about to destroy the only truly globally competitive fish company in the province.  They’ve known about it as the fought over exactly the same issue with the company the government’s policy favoured over exactly the same issue.

And yet the politicians persist with their bankrupt idea.

Friday Foursome #nlpoli

1.  Nova Scotian customers protected; this province not. (Telegram, December 11, 2013) by Ron Penney and David Vardy

The UARB has been empowered to protect the interests of consumers against their public utility, Nova Scotia Power Inc. (NSPI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Emera. Emera is a publicly traded corporation working in partnership with Nalcor Energy, a non-regulated Crown corporation, to build the Maritime Link. The government of Nova Scotia allowed the UARB to balance the interests of ratepayers and the proponent, a privately owned company, at arm’s length from government.

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador took a divergent course of action. They joined hands with their Crown corporation and made it immune from regulatory control.

They took away the powers of our own PUB, so it could not protect the interests of ratepayers. They sanctioned the Muskrat Falls project prematurely and weakened the ability of Nalcor to negotiate a better agreement with Emera. The result is that we are exposed to a one-sided agreement, tilted in favour of Nova Scotia and decidedly disadvantageous to this province’s ratepayers.

 

Muskrat Falls costs jump by $1.0 billion #nlpoli

Cost estimates for the Muskrat Falls project have apparently jumped by 16% -  $1.0 billion  - in the past year.  That’s based on information released by the provincial government on Tuesday and the details of the federal loan guarantee.

The new price appears to be $7.2 billion.  The Decision Gate 3 estimate, released in October 2012, was $6.2 billion for the Muskrat Falls dam, a tie to Churchill Falls, and the line to Soldier’s Pond on the island of Newfoundland.

The new cost is 44% more than the $5.0 billion cost estimate for the dam and island link components of the project when it was approved in late 2010. 

The First Shot of 2015 #nlpoli

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Moments #nlpoli

There’s something perverse about the way politicians these days use a memorial to the dead of two world wars in the last century as a backdrop for their own political spectacles.

That’s what Kathy Dunderdale did – yet again – on Tuesday night to tell Newfoundlanders and Labradorians about something she regards as truly wonderful.

“This is one of those occasions we should tell our children about,” said Premier Kathy Dunderdale on province-wide television Tuesday night, “and help them understand how important this moment is for them and their future.”

She’s right.

It will be important to mark this moment in time.  We’ll have to help generations of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians not yet even born understand the magnitude of what Dunderdale and her associates have done.