The Spectators and the “Me” Generation #nlpoli

The official media advisory describes the event at Confederation Building this morning as an opportunity for Premier Tom Marshall to thank public servants “for the support provided by their work over his time as Minister and Premier.”

In reality, this is another one of the grandiose celebrations that have become the trademark of Conservative Premiers first elected in 2003.  Danny Williams gave himself an enormous going-away show when he decided to leave office suddenly and unexpectedly in 2010.  Kathy Dunderdale, Williams’ hand-picked successor, did much the same thing when she decided to leave office suddenly and unexpectedly earlier this year.

And now the third member of the Williams dynasty,  his trusty and well-beloved right hand, is going to make a grand spectacle of his own in the main lobby of the Confederation Building on this the occasion of his imminent departure from office.

At last! #nlpoli

Without a doubt,  this is the most interesting, entertaining and revealing thing to come out of the Conservative leadership campaign.

This could probably use a bit of writing and editing to tighten it up, but fundamentally, it’s the kind of thing that distinguishes John Ottenheimer in a positive way in the leadership campaign.  Where Steve Kent came off looking a little desperate and nasty in his most recent debate appearance and Paul Davis has just flat out flat-lined,  The Big O just gave everyone a real glimpse of himself.  it’s the kind of thing that could swing some people his way, especially if it is part of a trend.

At last, there’s some sign of freshness and life in the Conservatives.

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Ragging the puck #nlpoli

The Conservatives will have a new leader this weekend. 

Tom Marshall will resign as Premier not long after and the new guy will take over. Terry French announced last week that he will resign from cabinet and leave politics “later this month.”  That fits too, because the new premier will need to swear in a new cabinet.

And at some point we’ll have an election

So when will that election happen?

Good question.

Everything has a price #nlpoli

Danny Williams famously once said that at some point,  “principle converts to cash.”

When his old friend Tom Marshall named a court house after Williams,  the former Premier said this to reporters about his emotions: "I can't put a price on it."

He may not be able to convert his emotions to cash at this point, but how curious that he ties the two things together so effortlessly.

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A fitting reminder #nlpoli

Tom Marshall has a few days left as premier so he figured the best thing to do would be to name the courthouse in Corner Brook after Danny Williams,  Marshall’s patron.

One of the reasons Marshall gave for his decision was that the province has not done as well as the time when Danny Williams was Premier. 

Marshall couldn’t have found a more fitting legacy for Danny Williams if he had really tried. After all,  The courthouse and Williams go together

Trash, Give-aways, and Conservative Policy #nlpoli

Friday is trash day in the world of political communications. It’s the day when you slip out stuff that is unpleasant in the hopes people will miss it.

If you can slide in another story, like say the completely unnecessary appointment of a finance minister who will have the job for a mere two weeks or so, it’s possible you can bury one load of trash under another.

That’s what happened last Friday in St. John’s.

They’ve got a little list #nlpoli

Justice minister Terry French announced on Thursday that he’d be resigning in a couple of weeks time to take up a job in the private sector.  French’s announcement looked like an effort to get in front of rumours that have been circulating for a while in some circles and that intensified in the past couple of days.  It didn’t look like a well rehearsed or planned thing.

This was also the same day that Charlene Johnson confirmed she is quitting politics to go live in Brunei where her husband has been working for an undisclosed period of time.  Johnson told reporters that she and her husband had actually decided over a year ago that she would leave politics.  It’s still curious that with all the work- and health-related reasons Johnson offered for taking a year or more to leave actually, she couldn’t manage to hang on for just a couple of days or weeks longer.

In any event, we found out that Johnson really wasn’t leaving now for family reasons after all.  There was some other reason for her to go, not that it matters at this point.  What does matter is that she has gone.  In a couple of weeks, Terry French will go and that means the provincial Conservatives will face three by-elections before Christmas.

Voter Choice #nlpoli

When Kathy Dunderdale jumped or was flicked out of office in the first part of 2014,  CRA boss Don Mills issued a release covering his company’s February 2014 self-promotion poll that claimed that Tom Marshall was doing wonders for the Conservative party because public satisfaction with the government was up in the poll.

“NL government satisfaction improves with new leader” said the headline. Unfortunately for Mills and CRA,  that headline connected up two things  - government satisfaction and new leader – in a way the poll data didn’t support.  You see, satisfaction went up the quarter before that as well, with the old leader.

There’s just no connection between “satisfaction” and the public choice for best party to form government or for best premier.  The Conservatives have strong satisfaction numbers and yet a clear majority of respondents want to vote for some other party to run the government and someone other than Tom to be Premier.

Skip ahead six months and Mills is at it again.

Johnson to give colleagues the finger on Friday #nlpoli

Finance minister Charlene Johnson will be leaving politics on Friday, September 5.

Under changes that Johnson and her colleagues made to the provincial election laws, that means the Premier  - whoever it is at the time - will have to call a by-election no later than November 5 and have the by-election over by later than December 5.

He’ll also have to call one in the seat the current Premier Tom Marshall has said he will vacate as soon as is humanly possible after the Conservative leadership convention on the weekend of the 13th and 14th of September. 

Johnson’s resignation really put the screws to her soon-to-be former colleagues. They went from having to fight one by-election – which they stand to lose unless its Ottenheimer the Premier – to having to fight two, pretty much at the same time.  The problem is, the Conservatives don;t have the resources to fight two by-elections at opposite ends of the province on the same day. Unless Ottenheimer takes the leadership and runs in Humber East,  the Conservatives are likely to lose both by-elections before Christmas.

So much for morale.

Meanwhile, the double by-election makes it even less likely the new Premier  - whoever he is – will have a fall sitting of the House.  He’s more likely to put off the sitting until the spring, then unveil a new throne speech and a budget before heading to an election, if the polls turn around.  The official excuse won’t be about the by-elections:  it’s more likely to be some guff about having to  give the new cabinet (and an off-the-street appointee or two) the chance to come to grips with their new jobs.

Everyone will be waving to Charlene on Friday but in a few weeks time, they’ll be likely giving her back the finger she’s giving them this week,  family reasons, and all.

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Pension deal = good news #nlpoli

Three things:

1.  The agreement to deal with the unfunded pension liability is a good thing for workers and for taxpayers.  It deals with a substantial financial problem, which is the bonus for taxpayers, while preserving defined benefit pension plans for workers, which is the big win for them.  The costs are relatively modest in terms of increased premiums, averaging, and early retirement age.

2.  This is only part of the province’s financial problem.  It’s the easiest one to deal with.  The others – Muskrat Falls and the embedded unsustainable overspending – are much larger financially and it will fall to the next administration after the Conservatives will have to deal with.  Coming to grips with them won’t be easy by any means.

At least Tom Marshall took care of the problem he created.  In an interview with CBC on Tuesday,  Marshall tried to blame others for the problem and claim credit for fixing it for himself,  but as with pretty much everything a provincial Conservative politician says,  nothing could be further from the truth. 

Efforts to deal with the unfunded liability started in 1997.  A decade later,  the problem with less than half the size it is today.  Instead of dealing with it then, Marshall began the program of fiscal mismanagement that ballooned the unfunded pension liability and added all the other financial mess that we’ll be cleaning up for decades to come.

3.  The St. John’s Board of Trade,  the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and other similar lobby groups should be ashamed for providing false information to the public while pretending it was truthful and unbiased. Even in an election year, some politician would be doing a public service by issuing an appropriate tongue-lashing to the crop of bullshit-mongers running those two groups.  The Board of Trade in particular has a lot to answer for.  They have screwed taxpayers twice;  first by being party to the Muskrat Falls mess and then by attacking public sector workers with falsehoods.

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Nalcor and the Eff In Way #nlpoli

Over at Uncle Gnarley,  JM’s at it again with the first of a two-parter on Nalcor and its problems with forecasting for Muskrat Falls.

Nalcor assumed that they would get 830 megawatts of electricity out of Muskrat Falls in the winter months when demand is highest.  That’s the number they gave everyone else and, as you can tell by the language Nalcor uses, it was an assumption, not a solid forecast.  Now they say they should be able to get 673 MW at Soldier;s Pond from Muskrat Falls.  That’s a difference of 157 MW, not an inconsiderable difference.

Family reasons #nlpoli

The story flopped out on Friday morning,  broken by VOCM, based presumably on information that came directly from Charlene Johnson herself.

We can presume that because as the rest of the newsrooms caught up to VOCM,  Johnson confirmed that the story was generally true.  As CBC reported, “Johnson said she wants to leave because of family concerns. Her husband now works overseas. As well, she is the mother of a young daughter.”

The eulogies for her political career were quick and generally laudatory. Some picked up on the line from her commentary that she was leaving because of family considerations and pronounced it entirely right and just.  Her husband was working out of the country and her young daughter was just five years old. 

Good for you, girl, they clucked in paternalistic approval.  Someone claimed out that Johnson had broken new ground by being the first politician to give birth while in office.  She’d challenged the conventions, so the claim went, and forced the legislature to consider new rules about parental leave and responsibilities.  The political panel assembled for this week’s On Point over at CBC all thanked Charlene for her years of service and wished her well.

All wonderful stuff, except that “family reasons” is an excuse so worn out from over-use and, as in Johnson’s case, misuse, such that it is not a cliche.  “Family reasons” is beyond that.  It is now a code word for something else.

And everyone knows it is bullshit.

Postmodern Jukebox: Maps

It’s the Friday before a long weekend.

Enjoy some music.

And if you like Morgan James, you can find more of her work at her website:  www.morganjames.com.

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Shockwaves #nlpoli

The day after the by-election in St. George’s-Stephenville East,  federal New Democratic Party member of parliament Ryan Cleary showed an interest in provincial politics some might find curious.

“The question is not how to stop NL Liberals,” Cleary tweeted, “but how to boost provincial New Democrats. Status quo not working.”

Status quo means Lorraine Michael’s leadership, of course.

Cleary’s right.  Lorraine’s leadership has proven to be a dismal failure.  Not only did she and her supporters fail to capitalise on the strong showing in 2011,  they’ve obviously failed to gain any ground as the support for the province’s Conservatives has collapsed.  The by-election on the west coast confirmed that the New Democrats under Lorraine are staying firmly where they were.  They aren’t losing ground, but they also aren’t growing, either.

Big Dams and Empty Promises #nlpoli

Conservative leadership candidate Steve Kent may be running in third place in the race, but the guy makes bold promises.

His energy policy includes the pledge about Muskrat Falls that he will “bring this project in on time, and on budget.”

That’s a rather silly promise considering that the project – originally budgeted at $5.0 billion  - is already officially estimated to cost $7.0 billion and will more likely cost something well above $8.0 billion before everything is done. For those of you doing the math,  that puts the project officially at 40% more than when the project was approved in 2010 and more likely about 60% over budget.

Free Tampons #nlpoli

Jessica Valenti, a columnist at the Guardian newspaper argued in her column in early August, that women should get free feminine hygiene products.

Consider these points from Valenti’s column:

• “UNICEF estimates 10% of African girls don’t attend school during their periods”
• “One study showed that in Bangladesh, 73% of female factory workers miss an average of six days – and six days of pay – every month because of their periods.”
• “In the United States, access to tampons and pads for low-income women is a real problem, too: food stamps don’t cover feminine hygiene products, so some women resort to selling their food stamps in order to pay for “luxuries” like tampons.”

Valenti doesn’t make her argument on cost, but on basic health care policy.

Amanda Marcotte at slate.com took a more blunt approach: 

Valenti is asking audiences to really think about how the right to move about in public without bleeding all over yourself, a no-brainer for men, is a privilege for women that depends all too much on their ability to afford sanitary products.

It boils down to the same basic idea, though.

Take that idea. 

Kick it around in your own mind.

We’ll come back to it another day and work it through as a potential public policy issue.

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Mystery Meat #nlpoli

The Telegram’s exceedingly generous headline said that Conservative leadership candidate Paul Davis put meat to the bones of his  campaign on Friday by announcing details of his policies. 

In reality,  Davis offered vague platitudes for the most part with very little substance to any of his plans.  There’s nothing surprising in that.  Pretty well all the provincial politicians and parties have kept their plans and ideas vague.

You can see the vagueness in Davis’ financial priorities.

Summer reading: Command and Control

From the blurb:

“Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years.  It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policymakers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust.  At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.”

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Identity Crisis #nlpoli

Newfoundland is changing, Michael Crummey writes in the Newfoundland nationalists’ newspaper, the Globe and Mail.  House prices are climbing in St. John’s.  There are plenty of expensive restaurants around and people to eat the food and drink the wine sold there.

“But,”  says Crummey,  “while oil execs tuck into their gourmet fish, much of rural Newfoundland is falling deeper into a crisis that began with the cod moratorium in 1992.”

The whole province – Newfoundland and Labrador – is changing.  There is a difference between the changes around the provincial capital and the rest of the province.  Crummey says that a “generation from now,  what it means to be a Newfoundlander will be something altogether different” from what he calls the traditional Newfoundland of “isolated, tightly knit communities that relied on the fishery and each other for survival.”

All true stuff.  The place and its people are changing.  The problem with Crummey’s commentary is that he gets his timescales wrong and misidentifies the root of the change and its implications.

Information Underload #nlpoli

Poor Sandy Collins.

The Minister (of the Moment) of Public Engagement and a gaggle of senior public servants went to meet the access to information review committee on Tuesday.  Supposed to be half a day chatting about this whole letting people have access to government information thing .  Turned into a marathon grilling. 

Not pretty.