It’s an unknown amendment to the Hydro Corporation Act.
Natural resources minister Derrick Dalley gave official notice he’d be introducing the bill at the start of the current sitting of the House of Assembly and then… nothing.
So where is it?
What is it?
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On Wednesday, Premier Paul Davis announced that Ken Marshall had been appointed chair of the board of Nalcor and an unspecified number of Nalcor’s subsidiaries.
Danny Williams’ old business buddy has been on the Nalcor board since 2004 and he’s been the acting chair of the board at Nalcor since earlier this year.
Note the date: 10 December 2014.
Now check out the order in council issued on 04 November 2014:
Exactly one year ago, the provincial government was in a controversy over its part in the European free trade deal. The Conservatives were heralding the great deal, including a $400 million fisheries development fund.
The opposition Liberals asked for details. The provincial Conservatives and then-Premier Kathy Dunderdale wouldn’t release any information. On December 5, 2013, Premier Kathy Dunderdale relented and released 80 pages of letters and e-mails between federal and provincial officials about the talks.
A year later, the provincial Conservatives are still in a political quagmire over the deal. This time the problem is that there isn’t any deal. Premier Paul Davis said on Monday that the whole thing was just a matter of crossing a few tees and dotting some eyes. On Tuesday, , Davis and a gaggle of his cabinet ministers said the negotiations on the fund were going no where. He needed to take it to the Prime Minister and so Davis and Stephen Harper would meet on Wednesday.
That was fine except that the Prime Minister’s Office said there’d been no meeting scheduled. Harper was scheduled to be in Montreal for Jean Belliveau’s funeral.
Some people are making issue lately out of the fact that – supposedly - the Liberals have not released any policies. The Liberals will be government soon and no one knows what they plan to do.
There are two types of people talking like that. One are partisans, mostly Conservative, but with a few New Democrats. The Conservative interest in this idea is pretty obvious. They want to shift the pressure of their team and onto the Liberals. They want to change the channel. But more than that, they want to expose the Liberals for the frauds they are.
CBC news reported on Thursday that the topsides module for the Hebron project won’t be delivered on time.
Rather than arriving in 2015 for mating with the concrete base, the entire structure for the living, drilling, and support spaces won’t arrive until sometime in the middle of 2016.
The original project timelines called for the topsides to arrive in early 2015 for mating to the concrete base. That would allow time to float the structure to the site, fix it in place, and start drilling the production lines into the field. The original plan called for first oil in early to mid- 2017.
The one year delay in topsides fabrication will likely mean a one year delay in first oil. it’s hard to imagine how it could be any different.
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Prompted by Wednesday’s post on Muskrat Falls costs, a couple of readers drew your humble e-scribbler’s attention to a tidy little briefing note posted on the Nalcor website.
It’s not really obvious – some might say it is buried - but if you going looking you can find it and a lot of other useful information. That’s a shame, really because this little two-pager was far more informative than anything that’s actually come out of the mouths of the Nalcor brass or provincial cabinet ministers.
As it turns out, Ross Wiseman did a bit more than bugger up his fractions. And your humble e-scribbler was off by a bit in trying to unravel Ross’ version of things, too.
Twitter sometimes produces some gems.
Like on Tuesday when Tom Baird, a mathematics professor at Memorial pointed out that the province’s finance minister had a wee bit of a problem with basic math.
“Just do the math,” Ross Wiseman told Liberal leader Dwight Ball during Question Period on Monday. “ Based on the current projected cost of that project of $6.9 billion, our investment over time, over the life of that project, the construction of that project, will be about $2.3 billion…”. And that $2.3 billion, according to Wiseman was the 25% investment the provincial government had always said it would put into the Muskrat Falls project.
The fact that Premier Paul Davis refused to give a simple answer to a simple question should send a chill up your spine.
MR. J. BENNETT: Mr. Speaker, at least thirty-five children have died while receiving service from this Province since 2009.
I ask the Premier: Has he been briefed on these deaths? If so, will he provide a report to the House of Assembly?
PREMIER DAVIS: Mr. Speaker, any time a person loses a loved one, I cannot think of anything that would be more difficult, challenging, and have a greater impact on a family. If it be a family who has a child who has a relationship with a government department, is either under a program or receiving services – because many of those children that the member opposite is referring to were not in the care of the government, were not in the care of Child, Youth and Family Services, but may have been receiving some supportive services from government or have had other relationships with government.
Any time those types of incidents happen –
MR. J. BENNETT: Have you been briefed?
PREMIER DAVIS: I am sorry, I say to the member opposite; this is very important, so just please bear with me.
These are very, very important to us as a government. I know how important it is to the minister, I know how important it is to the staff, and we take every step possible to ensure the safety of all children in Newfoundland and Labrador.
[via Hansard]
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Back at the start of the current Conservative administration in 2003, they were very sharply aware of the problem with using one-time revenues for day-to-day spending.
They were so concerned about using that one-time money that they tried to get the federal government to do the impossible, namely give the provincial government here a permanent handout equal to oil revenues, in addition to the oil revenues that the provincial government collected.
Then they tried to get the federal government to exclude those one-time revenues from the Equalization formula so the provincial government could get the oil money and the hand-out at the same time. That didn’t work either.
The one thing the Conservatives didn’t do – for all their rhetoric about independence – was to act like a responsible, independent government. They didn’t manage public finances for the long haul.
Putting a freeze on any discretionary spending is the very least that the provincial government could do in light of the dramatic – but entirely predictable – volatility in oil prices that have made the government’s huge budget deficit even larger.
The fact that Premier Paul Davis finally admitted on Thursday that oil prices are likely to remain low for the foreseeable future – something that has been clear for some time now – is a pathetically small sign that the provincial cabinet is finally starting to realise the depth of the problem the provincial government currently faces.
As small and as pathetic as it is, we do at last have a sign.
Paul Davis wasn’t around on Tuesday night to talk to reporters about the by-elections. He had a family medical problem to deal with.
So the job of speaking for the government fell to Steve Kent, the self-promoting wonder from Mount Pearl whose fan club makes Danny’s look like a bunch of slackers. No biggie, said Kent of the losses. we are hard at work. Lots to do. Look how far we have come. Yada. Yada. Yada. Gotta keep our stick on the ice.
Steve Kent spews clichés so often he has become one. His buddy, Sandy Collins called the night time talk show on VOCM after the votes were in. No biggie. Lots to do. Keep our stick on the ice. They are all so scripted someone said to your humble e-scribbler. Not scripted, sez your scribbler: sharing a mind.
They all think alike.
Like Susan Sullivan, who backed John Ottenheimer in the leadership, and the guy who won, Paul Davis.
“What does Paul Davis do now?”
That was the start of the conversation. A serious question after the latest in a string of by-election losses for the provincial Conservatives deserved an equally serious answer.
Well, said your humble e-scribbler, that assumes he and his fellow Conservatives actually want to do anything. Davis was the leadership candidate who promised to keep the party on its existing course in every respect. They firmly rejected not only making changes but even appearing to make changes.
Everything we can see – poll results, talk around town, you name it - says that voters want some changes in politics. The Conservatives refuse to change. And so it is that they have lost by-election after by-election after by-election.
It’s not rocket science.
In the 1980s, local entrepreneur Craig Dobbin bought a batch of helicopter service companies across Canada and merged them with his own company - Sealand – to form Canadian Helicopters.
By the time Dobbin died in 2006, CHC was one of the largest providers of helicopter support services in the world.
Not just Newfoundland and Labrador.
Or Canada.
Or even North America.
The world.
People are looking back a century to the start of the First World War so, on the political side, it’s interesting to take a trip back and see what things were like then.
The Prime Minister was a guy named Edward Patrick Morris. He was a lawyer, popularly known as Ned. By the time he got to the Prime Minister’s Office, in 1908, he’d been in the House the better part of 30 years and he served in cabinets under different premiers going back to the late 1880s. Morris’ predecessor – Sir Robert – had pretty much the same sort of background.
Compare that to recent Premiers in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We’ve got a provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador that has been budgeting for years to spend more than it brought in.
Way back in the beginning, way before the oil money cut in suddenly and largely unexpectedly, Loyola Sullivan said that people should expect the Conservatives to run deficits annually of half a billion dollars or more. The logical implication of what he’d said in 2005 was that it might have been 2014 until the Conservatives balanced the budget.
Now to be fair, Sullivan was speaking about the magnitude of the provincial government;s financial problem as he and his colleagues found it in 2004. But at the same time, by 2005, we were also talking about how the Conservatives intended to run things themselves.
They were clearly not as concerned about public debt as they had been in 2003. Part of that might have had something to do with this idea they had of making a killing selling cheap electricity into the United States, but frankly, Sullivan’s forecast of a debt of about $17 billion – which the Conservatives delivered on – suggests they really had something else in mind.
A post last week offered a quick confirmation that, as finance minister Ross Wiseman said, provincial government spending accounts for about 30% of the gross domestic product measured as spending.
A couple of people on Twitter took issue with that idea, apparently. They also took issue, as it seems, with the contention around these parts that the situation Wiseman described was a matter of government policy as opposed to the random changes in the economy.
Let’s dig into this in more detail. It really is quite important as the government has a very serious financial problem to deal with, what with the growing deficits and the weakening income. Wiseman mentioned the impact of government spending on the economy, incidentally, as a reason why he could not cut spending very much, if at all.
You really do have to wonder how anyone could be expected to keep things straight when the people they rely on to help them understand keep changing their statements.
Take, for example, the fight between the provincial Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador a decade ago over offshore oil royalties and Equalization.
