The action of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill once said, “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Some people in Newfoundland and Labrador likely felt that way after Day Three of Kathy Dunderdale’s one woman crusade to deny that the province is experiencing a crisis.
Most people just cock their heads to one side and mouth the three letters W, T, and F.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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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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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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.
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.