A study published in 2014 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal projected that 71 percent of people in Newfoundland and Labrador would be overweight or obese by 2019.
Think about and then reconsider comments by a Norwegian writer working for the New York Times.
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Has anyone noticed a small problem in all the discussions about next year’s budget?
On Point’s David Cochrane had both NAPE’s Carol Furlong and the Conservative’s pet economist Wade Locke on the show to talk about the next budget. Carol was warning against cuts. Locke was talking about a request by Tom Marshall last year to reform the provincial income tax system. Locke and his students – are busily working them up, in close co-operation with the provincial finance department.
Can you see the elephant in the room?
“Increasing taxes is not about solving the deficit, it’s about maintaining our programs and services that we have.”
That’s what Labrador and aboriginal affairs minister Keith Russell told the handful of people who showed up for the government’s pre-budget consultation in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
The Conservatives are perturbed that the turnout for these sessions has been small. Part of the problem was the tight timeline: they only announced the dates last week and started the first session on Monday. Another part of the problem is that everyone knows that the things are a farce. They aren’t interested in wasting their time.
People should turn out to these things, though, if only for the entertainment they offer, not to mention the practicality of it.
As part of its deal with Nalcor, Emera will get its electricity from Bay d’Espoir, not Muskrat Falls.
The Business Post’s March 2015 edition reported that confirmation of the arrangement came from Emera Newfoundland and Labrador chief executive Rick Janega following a speech to the St. John’s Board of Trade on February 23. Janega took the view, though, that the company will get power from whatever source of generation was operating at the time.
As the Business Post reported, the “deal between Nalcor and Emera is not specifically to supply Nova Scotia with Muskrat Falls power, but
rather to supply the equivalent of 20 per cent of Muskrat’s generating capacity from any source.”
Cast your mind back a couple of years and you will probably remember finance minister Jerome Kennedy told us a couple of things.
One was that he expected the government would run deficits for three years, totalling about $1.6 billion.
The other was that surplus would follow after that.
Well, here we are three years later and the latest finance minister – we’ve had four in three years – is now saying we can expect to see another five years of deficits before maybe, possibly, getting the budget into surplus in Year Six ALE.
That’s ALE as in “after the latest estimate.”
The annual budget consultation farce started on Monday with a couple of sessions.
This year the provincial government has turned out a budget simulator that is supposed “to illustrate the tough budget choices” the provincial government is facing and “to promote a public dialogue on how we can set a sustainable fiscal course.”
The simulation can’t really do either of those things. The information is relatively recent but the options to adjust income and spending don;t cover the full range of policy choices the government can make. The ones it does offer are artificially limited to presented increases or decreases. That’s a programming choice as much as anything else, but the reason for the artificial limitations is not important. The fact is that the choices are deliberately limited.
The result is that people can’t really see what sorts of choices the provincial government might make to set a “sustainable fiscal course.” In that sense, the current “consultation” is as artificial as all the other ones the provincial government has run over the past decade or so. People aren’t stupid. They can handle the truth.
The politicians and bureaucrats can’t.
People are talking about the budget.
People are talking about Bill 42, the politicians’ decision to cut public representation in the House.
People are talking about the recent polls.
People are talking about the next election.
People have predictions about how this one or that one will play out.
But they are not looking at everything.
They are not looking at the whole board.
And you gotta look at the whole board, Sam.
The whole “Paul-Davis-Decisive-Leader” thing doesn’t seem to be working for the provincial Conservatives.
The latest NTV/MQO poll puts the Liberals at 42, the Conservatives at 20 and the NDP at seven, with 30% undecided.
In October 2014, it was Liberals 37, Conservatives 16, NDP six, and undecided at 40.
In October 2013, the Liberals were at 35, the Conservatives at 20, the NDP at 12, and the undecided at 32.
You can see the trend there of Liberal growth – up seven points - while the Conservatives hover around 20. The undecided is down. Most of them won’t vote anyway. And the New Democrats have dropped from 12 to seven.
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.