Public opinion polls are a really useful thing in politics.
The Liberals did a poll the weekend before the Liberals and Conservatives voted to slash public representation in the legislature. They bought into the scheme in largest part because it looked hugely popular.
The problem with the poll results is that they didn’t tell the Liberals anything useful. You can see the same fundamental problem in the poll commissioned by NTV from MQO.
Rising costs are forcing the government of St. Pierre to look at shifting health care for its residents to Moncton New Brunswick from St. John’s, according to Radio Canada.
The cost of having St. Pierrais treated by Eastern Health has risen 75% since 2010 despite a decrease in the number of people from St. Pierre and Miquelon seeking treatment in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Costs aren’t the only issue. Eastern Health has only two translators to help St. Pierrais admitted to Eastern Health hospitals for treatment. On top of that, the regional health authority is also not adept at identifying bilingual staff and making them available to treat the mostly unilingual French patients from the islands off the southern coast of Newfoundland.
Radio Canada notes concerns in the local business community at the loss of St. Pierrais coming to St. John’s for treatment. Money that would be spent in St. John’s is now going to Moncton and Halifax, according to Stephanie Bowring, an economic development officer with the Newfoundland and Labrador Francophone Economic Development Network St. John’s.
The francophone federation is also concerned about the potential decline of French language service at Eastern Health.
Health minister Steve Kent told Radio Canada that the increased costs were due to inflationary pressures. Kent said it made sense to suggest Eastern Health could provide bilingual staff when French patients seek care but doubted that it would be possible to provide bilingual care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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Three separate stories over the past three days highlight changes to the local media world.
On Saturday, Telegram editor Russell Wangersky slammed the publicly funded CBC Radio for turning its morning show into the sort of light, fluffy morning program heard on commercial radio.
(Is "We're broadcasting from Tim Horton's" really that much different than that old private radio staple, "We're broadcasting live from L&M Carpeting, your best carpet buy in the tri-state area"?)
There are stupid host and guest tricks: let's make the mayor of Mount Pearl, Randy Simms, wear a party hat for that city's 60th birthday. Let's make him blow on a party horn. Let's Tweet the pictures. Let's dress someone up as a turkey and film them doing tricks.
He’s right.
But Russell is also wrong.
We can have all the rules in the world about how political parties and political candidates receive and spend money in Newfoundland and Labrador, but they are useless without meaningful enforcement.
It’s been illegal since 2011 for municipalities to make political contributions. The association representing the province’s towns and cities knew about the 2011 amendment to the Municipalities Act.
The people at the electoral office didn’t.
“Nobody's really questioning that Justice Stack has the qualifications to do what he's being asked to do, it's about whether or not there are other connections that then make it a little more questionable.” [See new comment by Kelly Blidook at end of post]Insinuation and Innuendo aren’t evidence of anything except the exceedingly bad judgement of the people making the comments and the news media who are repeating them.
The Chief Justice has named Justice Robert Stack as the chair of the boundary commission appointed under the Electoral Boundaries Act.
We now have to get four other members of the commission, appointed by the Speaker of the House of Assembly so the whole crowd of them can start their 130 adventure.
Will it be done on time? And if it isn’t, will we be trooping to the polls on schedule in the fall to vote in 48 districts instead of 40, as NHTV reported on Monday night.
Amazing as it is, some people still haven;t quite sorted it through. Let’s save them further anguish and lay out the possibilities.
For as long as anyone can remember, some people in Newfoundland and Labrador have had a love of conformity.
They loathe discussion and debate.
They dislike democracy.
We already know that the provincial government won’t unveil its budget for the new year until late April or early May.
That’s not as unusual as it might seem. In 2012, for example, they introduced the budget on April 24. Five years before, Tom Marshall read the budget speech on April 26. The next year – 2008 – Tom again read the budget speech in the House in late April, the 29th to be exact.
The fact the Conservatives aren’t planning to release the budget until a month or so into the new fiscal year – it starts on April 1 – isn’t surprising. It isn’t unusual. And odds are very good it isn’t related to the fact the federal government has delayed its budget until around the same time.
In the fifth and final instalment in this series on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, SRBP looks at the latest move in continuing efforts by politicians in the province to make the House of Assembly irrelevant.If you want to understand politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, look no further than Bill 42. That’s the plan to cut eight seats from the House of Assembly before the next election.
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The politicians in the province share a lot of common views and tend to agree on most things despite being organized into political parties that are – theoretically - supposed to have some sharp differences among them. The House of Assembly itself is organized to minimise the chances that the government won;t get its way, quickly.
Yvonne Jones was the first woman leader of the Liberal Party.
In the fourth instalment in this series on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, SRBP looks how elections work.
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In the third instalment in the series, SRBP looks at the way the House of Assembly operates.Liberal finance critic Cathy Bennett’s recent op-ed piece in the Telegram said that the provincial government’s current financial mess is about more than unexpected changes in the price of oil.
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The plan to cut public representation in the House of Assembly has drawn public attention to more than just the plan to reduce the number of elected representatives in the legislature by eight.
In this new series, SRBP will examine politics in Newfoundland over the last 15 to 20 years The first instalment - “Making the rich richer” – and the second – “One Big Party” - look at the curious agreement among the parties on major public issues.
I always say that we're such a small province, when you've got three political parties, there's always a lot of energy and time and expertise spent in, I guess, staking out everybody's turf in the political arena...
Jones didn’t see any differences at all among the political parties. The members all believed exactly the same things. They wasted time and money “staking out everybody’s turf”, whatever that means. So Jones thought aloud that maybe it would be better if there were no parties, just a bunch of like-minded people, all working hard “strengthening policy for people.”
I used to say to myself, "maybe we're expending it in the wrong direction? [sic]"...Maybe if a lot of that was just put into strengthening policy for people, we might end up with a lot better result at the end of the day.
The plan to cut public representation in the House of Assembly has drawn public attention to more than just the plan to reduce the number of elected representatives in the legislature by eight.
The provincial government subsidises tuition fees at Memorial University for Canadian undergraduate students. They go to school for fees far less than the cost of providing the buildings, technology, and instructors need to educate them.
In this new series, SRBP will examine politics in Newfoundland over the last 15 to 20 years The first instalment - “Making the rich richer” – and the second – “One Big Party” - look at the curious agreement among the parties on major public issues.
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Gil Bennett, Nalcor vice-president in charge of the Lower Churchill project, took some exceptions to comments in yesterdays posts on Muskrat Falls and electricity prices.
Rather than go back and deal with his comments in a re-write of the original post, let’s deal with Bennett’s comments here and link the two together so people can get the full effect.
For those of you who didn’t read the original post, go back and do so. It will help. In this post, Bennett’s tweets are in bold print. Your humble e-scribbler’s reply is in regular type.
On the last electricity bill to arrive Chez Scribbler, the price per kilowatt hour was a little over 11 cents, all in.
On Wednesday, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro applied to the public utilities board for a six percent reduction in electricity rates pending a thorough review of electricity prices now that oil has dropped through the floor.
Nalcor claims that Muskrat Falls is the lowest cost way of meeting electricity demand on the island in the future. The truth is Nalcor didn’t produce any evidence that they compared potential sources of electricity before they decided to build Muskrat Falls in 2006.*
Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador, the umbrella organization that speaks for the province’s towns and cities, doesn’t like the plan to slash the number of representatives the people of the province have speaking for them in the House of Assembly.
“We believe that a reduction in representation will have serious implications for municipal governments and the communities they represent, “ MNL posted to its Facebook page on Monday.
Easy and frequent access to our MHAs is critically important to municipal leaders. So much of municipal work is done in partnership with the provincial government, and any erosion of this relationship would set us back - particularly in rural communities. Effective democracy comes at a price. We need to think long and hard before we decide that price is too high.
A group of university professors also released a copy of a letter they sent to members of the House of Assembly.
The usual round of Saturday chores this weekend brought with it the usual accidental meetings with all manner of friends and acquaintances. Even the least political among them wondered what went on in the House of Assembly last week.
Good news. There is help for them.
Your humble e-scribbler laid out the positions of the various players before the debates started. There was a comment on Tuesday, another on Friday, and a more detailed description of the political landscape the morning the debate started in the House of Assembly.
On top of that, two news reports appeared over the past weekend – from CBC and the Telegram - purporting to tell the inside story of last week’s emergency debate in the House of Assembly. They cover different aspects of the goings-on. The CBC one in particular adds a bit of detail but generally confirms what the Tories were up to.
Pull back from all the details, though and a much clearer picture emerges.
The latest Fraser Institute assessment of the financial management prowess of premiers is to sound economic analysis what homeopathy to curing cancer.
The Fraser Institute issued a news release on the first anniversary of Kathy Dunderdale’s departure from politics that declared her the best fiscal manager of all the country’s premiers.
That wasn’t sarcasm.
That’s what they said.
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.