Like clockwork, about two weeks after Danny Williams last got his mug on the news, the most thin-skinned media hound on the planet got himself a ton more ego-stroking attention.
Every two weeks or so.
Like clockwork.
If you don’t believe it, just do some google searching.
A recent article in The Atlantic looked at the infant mortality rate in the United States and why it appears so high in comparison to the rest of the world.
After all, the Untied States is one of the richest countries in the world with some of the most sophisticated medical care in the history of mankind. It seems a bit odd that the infant mortality rate is about 6.1 for every one thousand live births. That puts the Americans somewhere on par with the Poles and the Slovaks, incidentally.
As The Atlantic piece notes, a recent paper at the University of Chicago explains the numbers. About 40% of the difference between European and American infant mortality numbers comes from a difference in reporting babies born before the 24th week of gestation. In other words, Americans report births for premature deliveries that aren’t reported elsewhere.
The biggest difference, though, came from babies after the first 28 days of life. In particular, the paper shows that infant mortality for white children is comparable to European data. Infant mortality among non-white children, from predominantly lower socio-economic circumstances, is much higher and therefore the overall American infant mortality rate is higher than in Europe.
So what about Newfoundland and Labrador?
Unelected cabinet minister Judy Manning was “surprised” that her personal relationship with Paul Davis’ political bagman came up in a recent CBC interview.
Surprised?
That’s an interesting choice of words.
Just like it is interesting for Manning to say that:
“Quite frankly, in terms of my predecessors, I don't recall the media ever approaching any of our previous cabinet ministers or our previous premiers about with whom they were sleeping.”
A complete unknown, with a relatively limited experience practicing law and no public profile at all suddenly turns up as an unelected attorney general, states emphatically that she will violate a fundamental constitutional convention, and then says she is surprised that people wonder who she is and where she came from.
She is surprised?
“CHC Helicopters Canada is establishing a presence in St. John’s.”
There is something about that comment from a spokesman for a company that, not so very long ago, had its international headquarters in St. John’s that makes you want to either laugh or cry. It’s hard to know which one would be the right response.
It’s pathetic that a spokesman for a company with such a rich history makes a statement that sounds like the company never operated here before. The official history of the company makes no mention of Craig Dobbin at all and his company – Sealand – is an incidental part of a story that claims the company grew out of British Columbia’s Okanagan Helicopters.
That tells you that CHC considers this province to be just another dot on a map where their helicopters fly and the company makes money. It’s no big deal. In other words: St. John’s doesn’t really matter.
Well, since CHC obviously doesn’t really give a crap about St. John’s, the local business community, local politicians, and local citizens should treat them the same way. As fast as they “establish a presence” in a city where the company once had a frigging global headquarters, CHC will be gone again. So while they are here, charge them full fare, cut ‘em no slack, and make whatever you can off them all in the name of free enterprise.
And no one will shed a tear when they leave again.
It’s not personal.
It’s just business.
-srbp-
The St. John’s Board of Trade is about the only business advocacy group in the world that doesn’t actually believe in free enterprise.
The Board doesn’t believe that government should control public debt. They claim they are worried about it, but in practice the Board will shout with joy the more the government spends.
That sounds ridiculous, but it is true.
The Board of Trade supports the Muskrat Falls project, for example. The project involves a massive increase in public debt. There’s no evidence it is the cheapest way to meet the provinces electricity needs. The only way it can work has been to create a complete monopoly in electricity production in the province that will force locals – including businesses – to bear the full cost plus profit, so that the provincial government’s energy corporation can sell discount electricity everywhere else except inside Newfoundland and Labrador.
The Board of Trade likes Muskrat Falls for two reasons. Above all else, the Board’s members want a piece of the construction phase for the project. It’s pretty simple. Right behind that, the Board is notoriously sycophantic. It doesn’t actually advocate for business – like you might expect - as much as follow whatever line the provincial government lays down.
Bizarre, yes. But simple to understand.
The Board is also a pretty funny organization, too. Not funny as in bizarre or weird, aside from that anti-free enterprise thing, but funny as in roll on the floor and pee your pants laughing.
The local chapter of the International Plastic Modellers Society will be having its annual model show and competition on November 9 at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s.
You can find more information at the chapter website along with some samples of what the talented local modelling community produces.
-srbp-
The first week of October is World Breastfeeding Week.
Check out babyfriendlynl.ca and you can find information on some of the activities going on across the province.
Breastfeeding is the SRBP cause, for those who don’t know. Check out this post from 2009 that proposes a provincial goal for breastfeeding that we can achieve: 66 at 6 in 2. 66% of newborns need to be breastfeeding at six months old. We can get from where we are to that 66% target in two years.
The current rates are way lower than that.
We can turn that around.
All we have to do realise it’s more important to get more of our babies on the tit instead of more local politicians.
-srbp-
The day after she took the oath of office, Judy Manning, the province’s new attorney general and minister of public safety, and Premier Paul Davis, her boss, are facing intense public criticism.
It’s hard to tell whether people are more upset by her evident, and admitted, lack of experience practicing law or the fact that neither she nor her boss are too fussed about getting her a seat in the House of Assembly any time soon.
Either one alone would be enough to call in question Davis’ fitness for the job. The two combined are damning. On top of that, you have to add in the completely unnecessary appointment of Keith Russell to cabinet. Then the day before, you have the latest twist in the Humber Valley Paving saga: it’s really as rough a first couple of days as any politician has had.
There are so many things to discuss but to keep things manageable let’s down on the Manning Mess.
March 13, 2014 was a Thursday.
Normal cabinet day.
According to Auditor General Terry Paddon’s report on the Humber Valley Paving contract, Nick McGrath, then minister of works and transportation called his deputy minister at 8:45 AM and asked him whether he’d heard that HVP wanted to get out of their Labrador paving contract. (p.39) He hadn’t.
There’s no indication of how McGrath became aware of HVP’s problems. According to Paddon’s report, McGrath told him that he “may have” heard about HVP from colleagues. (p.54) It’s all pretty vague.
The deputy called Gene Coleman at 9:15 AM, according to Paddon. Coleman, son of the erstwhile Conservative leadership candidate McGrath claims he had not heard of, confirmed the company “would not be going back to Labrador” (p. 54) in 2014, at least not without compensation. Coleman indicated that without compensation, HVP would want a mutually-agreed termination of the contract with the government. (p.39)
The Fairity Intervention
At 9:30 AM, the deputy got a call from Kevin O’Brien. He was calling about the HVP contract, too, even though O;Brien had no reason to be involved. (p. 39) Asked by Paddon later how he became aware of the issue, O’Brien - who was also an organizer for Frank Coleman’s leadership campaign - said that he had heard “colleagues” talking, wanted to speak with the deputy about other issues but raised the HVP issue because of the potential connection to forest fires in Labrador. (p. 54) O’Brien was minister of fire and emergency services
Paul Davis will get a lift down to Government House this afternoon and swear the oath of office so Tom Marshall can finally get out of politics.
It’s been about two weeks since Davis won the Conservative Party leadership and that’s a fairly typical period of time between election and taking office. What hasn’t been normal is that Davis has been doing something in the Premier’s Office since last week. He’s been standing in for the real Premier and we don;t know for sure what else he has been doing.
Davis doesn’t have a cabinet yet. He’s going to name the cabinet and get them sworn in next week. As for office staff, Davis has named a chief of staff but there’s no sign yet of other names for other jobs. One of the key jobs that is going begging is the person to run Davis’ public communications.
There’s talk Davis will run a national competition for someone to take the job. What would happen in the meantime – if he really goes that idiotic route – is anyone’s guess. By the time they find someone to take the communications job, Davis’ political goose may already be cooked.
Someone sent a request to the Premier’s Office for access to all “Email [sic], memos, letters, notes between Elizabeth Matthews and the premier’s office [sic] between June 1, 2013 and June 1, 2014”.
The Premier’s Office sent the person a couple of e-mails. They deleted some information under section 30 (personal information) and section 7(2) of the Access to Information and Protection of Personal Privacy Act. That second section basically allows government to sever information that is exempted from disclosure.
Read the completed access request and you will see the only thing they deleted was Matthews’ e-mail address.
Problem: the entire disclosure violates section 30 of the ATIPPA.
One of the big changes Bill 29 made to the province’s access to information law was to give a list of documents that could not be released under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act because they were cabinet documents.
Before then, the law in Newfoundland and Labrador, like the similar laws in the rest of the country merely said that people couldn’t get anything that would make public what the cabinet ministers talked about, in private, among themselves. A British Columbia government policy manual explains why:
Premature disclosure of Cabinet deliberations inhibits the ability of Cabinet members to debate issues openly and freely, thereby reducing the effectiveness of Cabinet’s decision making role.
One of the reasons no one bothered to define a cabinet document and bar that from disclosure is that no one could really say what a cabinet document is. People who’ve never dealt with cabinet or who have never had occasion to think about these things wouldn’t understand that how cabinet operates can vary widely from first minister to first minister. The changes made in Bill 29 reflect how cabinet operates these days but Paul Davis or any of the ministers who come along later may run cabinet in such a way that most of those mandatory exemptions of certain pieces of paper won’t matter a bit.
There’s no firm rule as to who may sit in the room with cabinet. Some administrations have allowed only the clerk of the council and a deputy clerk into the room to provide administrative support. Other people may come into the room and make a presentation but they get shuffled out of the room before cabinet discusses anything. In other administrations, they’ve had all sorts of hangers-on sitting in the room. Most often, the extra bodies are senior political people from the first minister’s office.
At times, the Executive Council hasn’t included everyone with a ministerial portfolio. And on occasion pretty well every cabinet will throw everyone out of the room and discuss something entirely among themselves. But there might never be a paper for them to read in advance, a note, a presentation or anything of the sort.
Even the form of the minute varies. These days, it includes a list of people who get a copy. There’s a number on it and the actual statement of the decision includes all sorts of references to the authority cited for making the decision.
Go back a hundred years and you will find piles of these minutes. They might be as little as a sentence or two. The certified minutes, the ones that needed the Governor’s signature, were written out long-hand in a book the Governor kept.
That’s where things get interesting. Note that the minute above refers to a meeting of the committee of the Executive Council. The ones a century ago that your humble e-scribbler has been reading lately say pretty much the same thing. That’s the another way of saying the Executive Council without the lieutenant governor present for the meeting. These days it is unheard of for the Queen’s representative to attend any meeting of the council, federal or provincial, here in Britain or anywhere else. A century ago, a committee of the council – cabinet ministers without the Governor - met to discuss all sorts of routine things, including budgets.
Back then, there were meetings of the Executive Council. They took place at Government House and, as near as your humble e-scribbler can figure, they included the Governor. A good example was the meeting held at 3:30 p.m. August 7, 1914 to decide on the Newfoundland contribution to the war. You can hunt for any record of the meeting in the cabinet papers and you’ll never find a mention. We know it happened, though, because the Governor refers to to it in letters. There’s a specific note in his type-written daily diary and the Prime Minister mentions it in a letter or two written around the same time. We know they discussed a proposal drafted by the Governor two days beforehand, apparently based on discussions with the Prime Minister. The version cabinet approved is not exactly what the Governor proposed.
There’s no record of that meeting, though, just as there is no record or any other meeting of the whole council during the period from about 1908 to 1914. There might be others but YHE-S hasn’t gotten to them yet.
There’s nothing odd about that, by the way. The British cabinet didn’t keep any record of decisions until after the war started. There could sometimes be a huge gulf among ministers about what, if anything, they’d discussed and decided. The only formal record of any sort through most of the 19th century was a letter written weekly by successive Prime Ministers to the Queen, for her information. Even then, what the Prime Minister said cabinet discussed and agreed on might not be what ministers recalled.
Incidentally, for those who might be wondering about the endless trips to Government House to appoint ministers lately, you need only check the Executive Council Act to see that it wasn’t necessary: “The Lieutenant-Governor in Council” – meaning the whole cabinet – “on the advice of the Premier may appoint a minister as acting minister for another minister during the absence or incapacity for any cause of that other minister, and all acts of an acting minister shall have the same effect as if done by the minister in whose place he or she is acting.”
They’ve appointed acting ministers countless times over the past decade, most often to cover off Charlene Johnson when she was on one kind of leave or another. Tom Marshall could have done exactly the same thing as ministers quit for one reason or another. The only question is why he chose to swear in new ministers and shuffle his cabinet around all the time.
-srbp-
Anyone who was paying attention to these things has known for about 25 years that the province would face a demographic crunch starting ‘round about now.
Anyone who has been reading Bond Papers for any length of time will know that demographics have been a big issue your humble e-scribbler has been banging on about pretty much since the beginning in January 2005. Go over to labradore and you will find what is known in the professional analyst trade as a shitload of posts, graphs and other sorts of information about demographics.
Collectively, we’ve got a good handle on both the magnitude of the problem and the implications. The problems are already here and the deliberate lack action by successive provincial governments means we are substantially behind where we need to be to cope with the consequences of a rapidly aging population.
So it is that after studying all the stuff that people have already produced about the problems the province is facing, the good folks at the Harris Centre at Memorial University have concluded that we need – brace yourself – “additional research” in order to “get ahead” of these changes.
Ye frackin’ gods.
Some people have been reporting problems getting SRBP through their Internet service provider or IT support team.
It isn’t clear what’s going on, but one of the problems seems to be a unique one confined to the provincial government’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.
If you are having trouble getting SRBP, drop a line to ed underscore hollett at Hotmail dot com. Once your humble e-scribbler has a sense of the bigger picture we might be able to figure out how to fix the problem.
-srbp-
Political conservatives like to talk about how government ought to be run like a business. They talk about it so much that it’s odd, then, that they never actually do it.
Part of it has to do with language. They use words that appear to mean the same thing when, in fact, they actually have two distinctly different meanings.
Danny Williams is a good example of how that peculiar breed of politician. The Old Man talks about the public money his buddies on city council gave to his hockey team as an investment. As a businessman, though, Williams means something different when he talks about investing his own money.
Perhaps it is just Danny Williams’ ingratitude that pisses people off.
The multi-millionaire hockey team owner just got a massive subsidy from the taxpayers of St. John’s so that he won’t suffer any lost revenue. It should be a no-brainer for the guy to say thanks to the people who have made him wealthy for the cash Williams’ buddies on city council handed him this week.
A simple “thank you” wouldn’t have hurt him.
it was a no-brainer.
But no.
Instead, Ole Twitchy called the media together on Wednesday to whine, moan, bitch, and complain about those who don’t like giving tax dollars to people like Williams who don’t need it.
What a douche.