What’s so striking about the race to replace Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the provincial Conservative Party is how spectacularly unspectacular it is so far.
Maybe things will change once the Conservative Party executive meets to figure out the leadership contest rules. But so far the whole thing has been decidedly dull.
Having tried to slide by without renewing their party, the provincial Conservatives are now talking up the joys of change.
They’ve talked about everything else.
Change is the only thing they haven’t talked about.
So now it’s their new talking point.
Problem is that they don’t seem to be doing much to … well… change.
The same people saying and doing the same things as they have always done won’t change anything
A provincial Conservative started out the week explaining why he cut a deal with a couple of provincial Liberals so he could get re-elected.
As part of his speech on Monday, Paul Lane said:
While there are indeed many people doing quite well in this economy…there are still many people who are not experiencing the positive impacts of our economy. As a matter of fact for many people, this economy is causing many people to fall further behind…
Those people include seniors, people with disabilities, people on fixed and low incomes, and in many cases, children. Government must focus on matters important to these people and the “everyday person”, said Lane.
Another provincial Conservative changed his political life last week. On Friday, Tom Marshall became the 11th Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. After talking the oath of office, Marshall said:
So it is therefore very important to me that all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians shall share fully and fairly in the benefits of our newfound prosperity, and have a voice in the way it is distributed.
So let us ensure that the fight against poverty and inequality intensifies in our province and we never forget the needs of those who are aged, who have disabilities, who are infirmed [sic], and who live on fixed and low incomes.
The words may be slightly different but there is no make that they both said the same thing: government must now turn its attention to something new.
There’s also no accident that the two said pretty much the same thing. Tom didn’t figure out what to say after hearing Paul. Far from it. Much of what Paul said - like when he spoke about “our” government - sounded like a speech he had planned for a Conservative audience.
What they were both reciting is the last script the Conservatives are turning to in their effort to find the magic message that they think will make the polls bounce upward again.
There was a lot of that - reciting talking points - among provincial Conservatives last week.
Since Kathy quit and Tom Marshall taking over on Friday morning, people are wondering when we will go to the polls.
There’s talk about a snap election.
There’s talk about the clock starts ticking on Friday so the election has to be done within the next 12 months.
To help guide you through it, here’s an overview of the issue.
If you have not read Kathy Dunderdale’s resignation speech, take a moment and do so now.
What is most striking about the speech is that there is absolutely nothing anywhere in it that Kathy Dunderdale can claim as her personal accomplishment as Premier. There’s nothing she actually did during her three years in the most powerful political office in the province.
What Dunderdale talked about in the list of accomplishments are things that the Conservatives have done – supposedly – since 2003.
But look at the speech again. There is nothing that Kathy set out to do and can now leave office safe in the knowledge she accomplished it.
Instead, you will find a sentence toward the end, as she was clewing up, that mentioned something she hoped:
As the first woman to serve as Premier, I hope I have stoked the fires of imagination in young girls in our province and inspired them to consider standing for public office.
That is the only part of the speech where Dunderdale spoke with some personal conviction. This was important to her.
Provincial Conservatives will get together on Wednesday morning and eventually admit the worst kept secret in local political circles: the local Tories will have a new leader before the next election.
Kathy always was an interim leader. The original plan was to keep her for a few months to keep the lights on and some heat in the office so the pipes didn’t freeze. Once the 2011 election came and went, the Conservatives were supposed to dump her, hold a leadership and carry on from there.
As it turned out, Kathy Dunderdale just lasted a lot longer than people originally intended.
Kathy is going.
Tom Marshall gets to quit politics as interim Premier.
That’s if the reports on Tuesday night hold through Wednesday morning.
Here are some quick observations:
In all the political chatter on Monday, no idea got a stronger negative reaction than the one from your humble e-scribbler that Paul Lane had secured himself a plum appointment in a future Liberal government, including a seat in cabinet.
For some reason, the idea of Minister Paul Lane just infuriated people.
Some said it was just not true.
Some said it was preposterous.
Others said that no one had made Lane any promises.
Let’s take a closer look at this.
Paul Lane scored big on Monday.
First, he secured his nomination and his seat in the next provincial election by running as a Liberal. As long as the party continues on its current track, Lane will win easy re-election not on his own merits but – as in 2011 – on the coat-tails of the party he was hooked up with at the time.
To be sure, Liberal leader Dwight Ball insisted Lane has no guarantee of a safe nomination, but in practical terms, that is a huge nose-puller. Incumbents are typically hard to unseat. Incumbents with a year and a half of profile before the nomination are that much hard to beat. And those with the enthusiastic and unqualified support of the party leader and the entire caucus likely could not be defeated with a crucifix, stake and a bathtub of Holy water. Paul Lane is safe.
And then there is the little bonus Lane garnered on Monday that few seem to grasp at this point. By convention, no party leader in Newfoundland and Labrador has ever left any of his opposition bench mates out of the fat once they win an election.
In 1989, the only incumbent who didn’t get to cabinet was Kevin Aylward. That was only because Aylward had blotted his copybook not once but twice over the leader and his seat. Aylward eventually got his reward. In 2003, Danny Williams rewarded all of his caucus mates with plum jobs of one kind or another.
These are the kind of rewards that require no overt promise. If asked, politicians can always quickly say they’ve made no promises. But everyone understands, with a figurative wink, that they’ll be looked after.
Dwight Ball will have a hard time breaking that tradition. It’s part of the unspoken constitution of politics. There are lots of things Ball and his people will say to justify Lane’s reward, when it happens. Some of it might even be plausibly true. But that doesn’t matter. The fix is already in. Paul Lane finished Monday with a guarantee of anything any ambitious politician would want: a secure future and, in all likelihood, a cabinet seat in a future government.
Evidently that is something the ambitious Mr. Lane he couldn’t get from the Conservatives.
If you want to understand what the provincial government’s audited financial statements really mean, you will have to skip Tom Marshall’s comments last week and look instead at the lengthy set of observations from the Auditor General released on Friday.
Paddon’s comments are especially important for two reasons.
First of all, Paddon is the former deputy minister of finance. He knows both the current situation and how the government got there. if he is speaking this plainly now about the government;s financial position, you can imagine what he was saying as the current administration got itself into a mess in the first place.
Second, Paddon explains a great many things in plain enough English so that anyone can understand his points. As you will see, they are not what the government has chosen to talk about.
It’s the sort of thing that leaps out at you.
As SRBP mentioned on Thursday, in her book Shopping for votes veteran political reporter Susan Delacourt put it in stark terms. Consumer spending has accounted for 60 to 70 percent of American gross domestic product since 1980. In Canada, it’s been more like 52 to 58 percent nationally. “So when politicians say that they are focused on the economy,” Delacourt wrote, “what they often mean is that they are focused on getting Canadians to buy stuff.”
Well, here’s a pretty chart to give you some local figures. They come from Statistics Canada CANSIM 384-0038 showing gross domestic product based on expenditure, in constant 2007 dollars.
The Conservatives used to say that Newfoundland and Labrador was eastern North America’s energy warehouse. Once Danny Williams ran for the hills and left Kathy Dunderdale in charge, she kicked everything up a notch.
Energy warehouse was too plain for Kathy, whose party ran on the slogan “New Energy” in the 2011 general election.
With Kathy running the place, it became a super warehouse. “We are an energy super warehouse,” said Kathy countless times.
The New Energy Party even clipped this bit of Kathy from the House of Assembly for its website back in 2011:
Mr. Speaker, this Province is an energy super warehouse. We have what the world wants. We will bring it to market. We will supply our own people, Mr. Speaker, and we will earn from those resources for generations to come.
“We will supply our own people, Mr. Speaker.”
There is always something interesting in the province’s audited financial statements and – sadly – it is often at odds with what the politicians have been saying.
On Tuesday, the provincial government released the audited statements for Fiscal Year 2012 (01 Apr 12 to 31 Mar 13) and they are no exception.
The rolling blackouts on the island of Newfoundland could warn of bigger problems to come, if a new paper by the analyst JM is correct.
Underestimating peak load and the potential impact on the Muskrat Falls solution
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Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador never think about the electricity into their homes. They don’t know where it comes from and they certainly don’t have any idea how it gets from the generating plants to their fridges, washing machines, and television sets.
People are thinking about those things a lot more these days, in the wake of the recent power supply crisis.
One of the issues you will likely hear a lot more about in upcoming hearings by the public utilities board is about a new power transmission line from the hydro generating station at Bay d’Espoir across the isthmus and on to Holyrood.
Here’s some additional information about the project.
The provincial government started its campaign to gain control of the political agenda on Thursday with its announcement that it would appoint someone to do something sometime in the future.
The conventional media outlets didn’t report Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s announcement that way. The Telegram, for example, called it an “independent” review but acknowledged in the second sentence of its brief story that Dunderdale “doesn't know the shape or scope of the review”.
CBC went farther in its online story, saying that the “independent review” would “look at the current electrical system in Newfoundland and Labrador; how it operates, how it is managed, and how it is regulated as the province moves from an isolated system to an interconnected system.”
But really, all of that is just an unsubstantiated claim, given that the news release includes these words in a quote attributed to the Premier:
…over the next six weeks my government will work to draft terms of reference and identify an independent body to conduct a review.
In January 2012, Ed Martin and his nasally drone ridiculed the idea of shifting demand for electricity from one part of the day to another so that his company wouldn’t have a problem meeting spikes in demand during the winter.
He dismissed the idea as “theoretical” even though it’s widely used across Canada in places where the electricity system is well managed.
Two years later, almost to the day, energy conservation and demand management are Martin’s best friend to help people get through what his Conservative friends are willing to concede was the current “inconvenience.”
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.
