Review faces stiff competition from province’s politicians #nlpoli

If Paul Davis and his beleaguered band of provincial Conservatives started the week on a high,  it didn’t last very long.

They opened the House on Monday to debate a bill that would reduce the size of the House of Assembly by 10 members.  They had the instant support of the Liberals and, going into the session, they knew that Ball and the Liberals had already agreed that the fall election would now come sometime in 2016.

They announced another ridiculous twist in the already ridiculous fight over European free trade.  The media reported the whole thing positively at first, although before the day was out major economic groups in the province had slammed the provincial government for their anti-trade stance.

On top of that,  the three maritime premiers were in town for a meeting of the Atlantic premiers council.  Reporters asked them about the feud.  We’d be ticked off too, in the same position, they agreed, but if there’s federal cash to be had, we want a piece as well. That does nothing except highlight why the provincial government was just plain dumb when they passed on the original deal and tried to turn it into something else.

Okay, so Monday wasn’t really all that high, but when this time last year,  the Conservatives were being burned in effigy for heat and light as people sat around in a blackout caused by the provincial energy corporation, Monday was pretty damn good.

Then Tuesday came and, in the hideous cliche of hack television reporters,  things went horribly wrong.

Abbott and Costello meet the Trade Deal #nlpoli

If you are confused by the provincial government’s struggle over free trade with the European trade, find comfort in the fact you are not alone.

Pretty well everyone is confused by what the government is up to. 

That includes, incidentally,  intergovernmental affairs minister Keith Hutchings and industry minister Darin King, who announced on Monday that the provincial government was pulling its support for every free trade negotiation Canada has going at the moment except for the European trade agreement.

Ballsiness #nlpoli

Before Christmas, Liberal leader Dwight Ball had been calling for an election as soon as possible.  After Christmas, faced with the chance to chop a few seats from the House as he had already pledged to do, Ball was quick to agree both to the cuts proposed by the Conservatives and to a delay in the election at least until November. 

Ball’s hasty decision will cause him two very serious problems, as we have already noted.  Now that the bill is in the House there are new dimensions to the problems faced by Ball and the Liberals. 

Not fit for it #nlpoli

It’s not surprising that the provincial Conservatives and their supporters want to reduce the representations the people of the province have in the House of Assembly.

After all, the plan to cut 10 seats from the House of Assembly and make other changes in the interest of “modernisation” fits their pattern of behaviour over the past decade.

But there’s a bit more to it.

Anti-democratic, regressive, and unprincipled #nlpoli

The idea of reducing the size of the province’s legislature because the provincial government has a massive financial crisis didn’t get any smarter when the provincial government announced its plan on Thursday to slash the House from 48 seats to 38.

People who want to start government cutbacks at the top should expect a reduction in the number of departments and a cut to the size of cabinet and the senior ranks of the public service. 

What the government is proposing is to slash the board of directors in response to a problem with the company caused by lousy management.  In other words, they want to start by cutting the people responsible for keeping an eye on management in the first place.  That sounds just as screwball an idea as it is… if your goal is to get the company back on a sound financial footing.

Cutting the House to save money – the government’s goal, endorsed wholeheartedly by opposition leader Dwight Ball – is anti-democratic, regressive, and unprincipled.  The New Democratic party’s outgoing leader may be screaming now but she’[s already on record supporting the cuts for the same reasons.  She’s equally guilty of backing an anti-democratic, regressive, and unprincipled move.

SRBP dissected the idea on Tuesday.  That post still says it all.

-srbp-

Separated at birth: Boyle edition #nlpoli

 

Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle

NDP leadership rules screw local businesses #nlpoli

Any of the small, local printing companies who usually make a fair bit of cash from political campaigns can keep their printing presses chilled during the upcoming NDP leadership campaign.

Any candidates who make it past the other restrictions must print any campaign materials like flyers and householders in unionized printing plants. The campaign rules released on Wednesday are plain:

“Candidates shall not use non-unionized companies for the production of any campaign material.,  where such services are available.”

That’s great for the largest printer in the province but it shuts out pretty every other shop. 

Dictatorship of the CEO

The party executive will appoint a chief electoral officer to oversee the leadership contest.  Under section 13,  the CEO has the unrestricted right to expel a candidate based on nothing more than a written complaint that a written complaint from a candidate or party member who feels “feels aggrieved by the words or actions of another candidate.”

The CEO can “deal with the complaint in whatever manner she feels is appropriate, including, in severe circumstances, the disqualification of a candidate from the leadership race.”

There is no right of appeal for any decision by the CEO.

Membership

The campaign rules refer to a list of “active” members of the party.  Each candidate will get a list once they’ve been approved.

There’s no definition of “active” member in the party constitution. That leaves the door open for a Cabana-style manoeuver in which party insiders invent conditions and rules to suit their own purposes.

There’s no word yet on the convention itself and how that will run.

-srbp-

NDP votes for “More of the Same” #nlpoli

Gerry Rogers is smiling again now that Earle McCurdy has agreed to be the NDP Kevin Aylward.

If Earle had decided to stay retired,  Gerry was the substitute leader the key inside factions of the party had tapped to fill-in until after the next election.  Rogers would have had to take one for the team, just like her Liberal namesake did in 2007.

Now that McCurdy is in, the party executive will announce some leadership process that either completely avoids a convention (like the Conservatives in 2010) or puts up a sham competition (as in the NDP 2014 leadership review).

Drew Brown recently likened the next NDP leader to the Liberal’s last-minute substitute in 2011.  Fair enough.  Any possible change for the party will come in the future.

All NL parties agree to anti-democratic, regressive cuts to legislature #nlpoli

Whenever the provincial government gets into financial trouble, someone will suggest that one great way to save money would be to cut the number of members in the House of Assembly.

Some people make the suggestion because they think members of the House doing nothing anyway. Others suggest that cutting the House is a way of sharing the pain of cuts coming to government generally.  And others justify proposed cuts to the House of Assembly because other places with a larger population have fewer politicians to represent them.

None of those are valid reasons to cut the House budget.  Reform of the House of Assembly should be about representing the people of the province more effectively. It should be about reducing the control of monied interests, including unions, and increasing the influence of ordinary people.

Cutting the number of members  as proposed by Dwight Ball, Lorraine Michael, and Paul Davis, is solely bout appearing to save money or share the pain of government cuts.  In truth,  such a move will only serve to concentrate power in our province into the hands of an ever smaller group of individuals, many of whom are unelected and unaccountable.  It is as regressive and anti-democratic idea as one may imagine.

Roger Grimes: savage political attack dog #nlpoli

Maybe it was the headline on John Ivison’s opinion piece in the National Post that threw them off.

Spat over $400M N.L. fund could make federal government look bad to European trade partners

Provincial Conservatives, their patronage clients, and their paid staffers were all over Twitter all weekend tweeting touting the support in Ivison’s piece for their fight with the federal Conservatives over a federal cheque for $280 million.

Pay up feds, says Ivison, and end this dispute because it looks bad.

The problem for the Conservatives is that if you read the whole Ivison column, this is not a great endorse of the provincial Conservatives’ desperate political ploy.  It offers sensible advice in that both sides need to get this dispute settled now,  but Ivison gets there based on all sorts of half-baked ideas.  That much of it shows the extent to which observers both at home and outside the province don’t really understand what’s going on here. 

And if you follow the piece through to the end, you see just exactly how bad a position Paul Davis and his crowd really are.

The challenge of Hebron and old people #nlpoli

The C.D. Howe Institute released a policy brief on Thursday that argues that demographic changes will hit the people of Newfoundland and Labrador very hard in the years ahead.

This is not a new issue, as the report notes right at the beginning.  In fact,  the crowd at the C.D. How Institute make it pretty clear everyone knew the problem was coming.  The only question was whether the impact would be gradual over time or we’d hit it like a wall.

Pay attention to this little report. If you have been asleep for the past 10 years take the few minutes to skim the words, charts, and graphs.

Cluck, cluck, cluck #nlpoli

Say what you want about Lorraine Michael,  but you have to admit that she knows what she wants to do.

Lorraine has spent her adult life as an advocate.  That’s another word for someone who talks about things.  She’s done it quite a bit and, as she made clear Tuesday, Lorraine intends to keep talking about stuff.  Lorraine doesn’t want political power.  She just wants to advocate stuff.

When other people do something Lorraine has been talking about, then she counts that as on of her accomplishments.

And if someone threatens Lorraine’s position as an advocate, she has been remarkably adept at screwing them up.  She did it again on Tuesday.

Lorraine says good-bye, sort of #nlpoli

Her voice tinged with emotion,  Lorraine Michael announced to a gaggle of reporters and her supporters at Confederation Building on Tuesday that she would step down as party leader as soon as the party could find a replacement.

Lorraine would stay on in politics, though, and promised to run in the next provincial election. 

Interestingly enough, there have been rumours of growing discontent within the party with Michael’s leadership since last spring.  And in December, rumblings started that some within the party wanted Lorraine to go.  They were supposedly shopping around the idea of an interim leader.  Other versions, as turned up by the Telegram’s James McLeod on Twitter had Michael thinking about quitting.

Whether or not any of that scuttlebutt was even remotely true, Lorraine Michael’s decision puts the NDP in a rough spot, as if being a political void wasn’t bad enough.

Comparative Hydro Costs #nlpoli

Konrad Yakabuski’ s column in the Monday Globe is an interesting one for people in Newfoundland and Labrador for a couple of reasons.  ‘

First of all,  Yakabuski pointed out the “broader credibility problem facing all of Canada’s provincially owned electric utilities.”

Second of all,  for all those people in this province who are complaining that the Liberals won;t release any of their policies before the election, we have had lots of time to debate the energy policy of the current administration for a decade.

For all of that time, the people currently bitching about the lack of policy debate didn’t want to debate that energy policy despite the mounds of evidence that what the provincial government was doing with the former hydro corporation was headed for bad policy.

Fishing for support #nlpoli

When the going gets tough, the tough go fishing.

In this case,  a bunch of politicians in a tough spot with voters are fishing among a small bunch of politicians in Ottawa for support in their campaign to turn a deal achieved in 2013 into something else entirely.

This isn’t really news, by the way, but in the world of the provincial government these days, intergovernmental affairs minister Keith Hutchings sent out a news release on Friday to tell  everyone what was reported before Christmas.  That is,  Keith and Premier Paul Davis are trying to get federal members of parliament and senators a from Newfoundland and Labrador to back the provincial government in its latest war with Ottawa.

10 years later #nlpoli

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the first Sir Robert Bond Papers post.

In July 2004,  I wrote and released a paper that tried to “examine offshore oil revenues and the Atlantic Accord in light of what the Accord actually provides.It was an attempt to evaluate the provincial government's proposal based on what had been made public to that point.”

Which is to be master?  was supposed to be the first of a series of papers on different public policy issues.  Each would have a different author.  They would appear from time to time in order to foster “public discussion of issues affecting Newfoundland and Labrador.”  The title of the series was going to be The Sir Robert Bond Papers.

The Void #nlpoli

For its last editorial of 2014,  the Telegram decided to discuss the fate of the province’s New Democrats.

A quick summary:  things were good for the Dippers.  Now things are not so good.  This isn’t just a local thing.  It’s happening nationally.  Lorraine Michael has said in year-end interviews she likely won’t be around for long after the next election.

Lorraine has been wonderful, the editorial says. It good that she’s going to leave.  After all , why “would Michael want to obscure her legacy by presiding over such lean times?”

Talk about ending on a wrong note.

The Legacy of Faulty Assumptions: Hebron Revisited #nlpoli

Hebron is the last of the four, big, offshore discoveries from the 1980s.

It’s due to come into production in 2017 based on a development agreement reached initially in 2007 with the provincial government and finalised in 2008.  There’s a potential problem with current production schedule.  The topsides fabrication is delayed in Korea but we won’t know until the middle of 2015 whether or not there will be further delays that would impact the planned date for first oil in 2017.

Hebron plays a big role in the imagination of the people currently running the province.  Their reaction to the provincial government’s financial problems is based, in part, on the expectation that Hebron will bring huge amounts of new cash into provincial coffers.

But with oil prices down,  people are starting to consider that those assumptions about an imminent return to insanely fat oil royalties might be a bit off base.  With that in mind, let’s revisit the Hebron development agreement and see what turns up.

The Legacy #nlpoli

There is a lengthy list of political stories in contention to be the top political story of 2014.

Start the year with #darnknl, the failure of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Hydro generation to supply the capital city and surrounding communities with electricity last January.

It led to Kathy Dunderdale’s resignation as Conservative leader and Premier, which in turn led to the appointment of yet another interim Premier. That was followed by the Conservative leadership, the brief and ultimately ruined political career of Frank Coleman, and finally the second Conservative leadership contest that ended with the selection of Premier Paul Davis.

The year ended with a political crisis as Paul Davis, launched a political war with the federal government over a promise supposedly broken. And then there has been the string of by-election victories by the Liberals and losses by the Conservatives.

Or the financial mess,  triggered by the 40% drop in oil prices.  It promises to produce one of the worst deficits on record this year – unless the Conservatives have been bullshitting, like they have done so many times before – or a very harsh budget next year.

Either of these stories alone could be the top political story of 2014.  But the big political story of 2014 is the element that links them all together in one.

Great Unposted Predictions #nlpoli

Sometimes you find the strangest things among the draft posts.

Here’s a sample from a January 2012 draft post that never saw the light of day that offered a forecast for the political times ahead: