A tonic for NDP Amnesia #nlpoli

When he was a member of the House of Assembly in Newfoundland and Labrador,  NDP member of parliament Jack Harris  double-billed the legislature for more than $2,000 in expenses and made $27,066 in "donations" from money originally intended to operate a constituency office and inform voters about his activities.

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Related:  Jacks and the Auditor General

The cost of out-dated ideas #nlpoli

The Barry Group plant near Corner Brook pays a better price for crab than a competitor in New Brunswick.

New Brunswick fishermen can't steam across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and sell their product in Corner Brook because of restrictions on their license.

They are same sort of restrictions that apply to local fishermen and which lay at the heart of regressive measures like minimum processing requirements.  The result is that fish processors in this province lose out on product for their plants and fish plant workers can't get enough work.

Don't believe it?

Check out a recent story in l'Acadie Nouvelle. [translation by google and SRBP]

"They are interested. They saw the quality of .my crab and they asked me how they could do to access other crab like that. I replied that the best way would be to open a factory in the Acadian Peninsula. Sure, between showing interest and actually doing it, there still has work to do, but at least they can learn," he said.

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Deaths in Modern Conflict

The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

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The Politics of Menses #nlpoli

Until now, we had no idea how our governments valued menstruation.

Some of you might be surprised to think this was a question but now we have an answer.

Both the federal and provincial governments decided last month to remove the harmonised sales tax from tampons, napkins, and other feminine sanitary products.  In Newfoundland and Labrador, that added 13% on every purchase.

The government in Newfoundland and Labrador refused to put a value on the tax, but your humble e-scribbler is willing to take a shot at it.

A lot can change in three months #nlpoli

The Liberals and the Conservatives dropped in the most recent Corporate Research Associates poll and all that vote went to the New Democrats.

Let’s look at the party choice numbers without the skew of looking only at decideds.  Here’s a chart showing the CRA results since the last general election, including Monday’s numbers.

Red = Liberal

Orange = NDP

Blue  = Conservative

Thin blue/black = Undecided,  do not know,  won't answer.

Small ball, election dates, and other minutae #nlpoli

Later today, Premier Paul Davis will introduce a bill in the House of Assembly that, among other things,  sets the next provincial general election for the last week of November. The most likely day for voting is November 24, with the official campaign starting 21 days before that.


There’s no surprise in this. The Conservatives have been talking about November as an option since January when they introduced the plan to cut public representation in the legislature. Reporters asked Liberal leader Dwight Ball at the time if he thought the election should be delayed to November to avoid a clash with the federal election set for October 19. Ball said he didn’t have a problem with the delay.

For the past couple of weeks, Ball has been insisting that the Conservatives need to have the election done by the end of September. That’s the anniversary of Paul Davis’ election as Conservative leader. It’s also the third different position, incidentally, that Ball has taken within the past six months on the timing of the next election. At the end of last year, Ball told the CBC he thought people should go to the polls in February in order to let a new government deal with the provincial government’s financial problems. A couple of weeks later, Ball had no problem with a November. Now, he wants it all done by the end of September.

Q2 2015 Poll Speculation #nlpoli

Corporate Research Associates boss Don Mills has done a good job of teasing the results of his latest poll, due Monday.

"Significant" change in voter intentions, Mills tweeted on Friday and repeatedly over the weekend.

It's all fed a great deal of speculation.  Someone fed the self-styled Hydroqueen internal Liberal polling numbers and she has blogged them and tweeted about them repeatedly. Your humble e-scribbler jumped into another conversation based on the foggy early-morning memory and since that memory was so horribly wrong,  here's a review of the recent poll numbers based on more than memory.

So are those Hydroqueen numbers the sort of results CRA will release?

About how the predictions of further Liberal decline or of a Conservative rise?

Will CRA show any of that?

Probably not.

Politicians and other damn fools #nlpoli

On Wednesday, politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador condemned the federal minister of fisheries for making a decision about the fishery in a province based on politics instead of economics or science.

The politicians were so upset with Gail Shea that they passed a resolution demanding that she allocate a quota of fish to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians based on political rather than economic or scientific reasons.

There was no sense in their resolution that what was sauce Prince Edward Island goose was also sauce  for the Newfoundland gander, if that’s what you are thinking.  Nor was there any sense of hypocrisy or irony or whatever self-awareness it would be that makes one criticise someone else for doing what you then do.

The fact that some of the politicians explained their support for the resolution using false memory only sweetened the humour in the whole affair.

The Persistence of False Information: free electricity version #nlpoli

An exchange on Twitter reminded your humble e-scribbler on Wednesday evening of the power of false information to persist despite either being disproven or, in this case, being an obvious nonsense.

Not surprisingly, the discussion was about Nalcor, Emera,  the Maritime Link and a block of electricity that Nalcor gets under the Muskrat Falls deal.  There is a lot of false information about these subjects that just won’t die.  Let’s just deal with the free block of electricity.

Duff in the Hole #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Dwight Ball’s announcement last week about Liberal Party funding was a good example of how relatively simple mistakes can turn a good-news announcement into a major public relations problem.

Another aspect to the story is a good example of how false information can make the story worse.

Politics, CETA, and the fishery #nlpoli

The European trade deal came up in the House of Assembly on Monday.

Everyone kept to the same lines they've been kicking around for months.

Believe it if you want,  but if you want to find out what is really going on,  check out the interview your humble e-scribbler did with Jamie Baker of the Fisheries Broadcast last week.

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Related:

• Province increase CETA demands after crucial agreement (December 2014)
• Abbott and Costello meet the trade deal (January 2015)
• Conservatives abandon ridiculous position on European deal (May 2015)

For want of a nail... #nlpoli

Dwight Ball demonstrated last week how very simple things can turn into problems very quickly. He handed his political opponents a stick they can use to beat him with. The fact they really don;t have much more than innuendo and speculation doesn’t matter. He’s given them a weapon.

Ball confirmed on Friday that the Liberal Party could have released relevant information on the party’s debt repayment on Wednesday.

Ball named the three banks involved in the debt forgiveness deal and indicated the total amount involved.  On Wednesday he had balked, noting there was a non-disclosure agreement in place.

What Ball also confirmed in the process is that he and his team simply weren’t ready on Wednesday for the announcement.  That’s not the first time Ball and his team have made this kind of a simple cock-up.  The simplest way to fix it would be to re-organize the senior end of his office.  Ball needs to bring in some new people, especially ones with significant political experience.  to augment his existing team.

Parting Gifts #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Peter MacKay may have quit federal politics but that didn't stop him from porking up the federally-appointed courts before he left.

On Friday, MacKay appointed former provincial Conservative Party president Cillian Sheahan from Corner Brook to the Trial and Family Division of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador.

That was one of about a dozen appointments MacKay made on his last day in office.

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More delays in taking out the trash #nlpoli

On Monday,  municipal affairs minister Keith Hutchings announced that the provincial government was setting back the clock on the provincial waste management strategy.

Well, they sort of announced it. 

You see, the news release posted by the government uncommunication elves buried the news under a lot of self-congratulation.

And what they didn’t bury they just left out altogether.

Yesterday #nlpoli

The news should have been good.

Party leader Dwight Ball announced on Wednesday that the Liberals had rid themselves of the debt the party has carried around since the 2003 election. As Ball explained it, the party negotiated with the three banks involved and persuaded them to write off the interest and penalties. The party had then paid off the $500,000 that remained.

The Liberals’ opponents have used the debt as a rod to beat Grit backs. Can’t manage the province’s accounts if you can't handle your own, the Conservatives joked.

As it turns out, that joke was on us: the Conservatives couldn’t handle the public accounts themselves. They promised to pay down the debt and make everything right. Instead, and starting from Danny Williams, they racked up debt after debt. They spent every nickel the provincial coffers could suck in and borrowed more besides.

The party debt was a big cloud hanging over the Liberals’ heads. Getting rid of it was supposed to be great news.

And it would have been had Dwight not buggered up the announcement.

Conservatives abandon ridiculous position on European trade… again #nlpoli

In January, trade minister Darin King wrote a letter to his federal counterpart about the European trade deal.
King said the provincial government would:

1. withdraw from any trade talks OTHER than the one about the European trade deal, and,
2. should “the federal government fail to honour the terms of the June 2013 agreement to establish a fisheries fund, you will appreciate that the Province will reconsider its support for CETA.”

On Tuesday, King announced the provincial government would:

1. resume participation in all the ongoing trade talks, and,
2. accept the European trade deal, but not the bit on minimum processing requirements.

That last one will leave Canada open to a challenge by Europeans if - and only if - the provincial government ever invokes minimum processing requirements in dealing with a European company. There’s not much danger of that since the provincial government has been granting more and more exemptions from the out-dated policy.

Besides, the federal government is already working on a mechanism to pass the cost of any damages from a trade dispute on to the province that caused them. They started work on that little gem after the current Conservative administration in this province violated the North American free trade deal and seized hydro-electric assets belonging to three companies under an entirely false pretense.

When Darin King said the government would “let the chips fall where they may” he knew full well that the provincial government would take it in the neck if it ever used the minimum processing requirements provisions of current legislation.

What you have here is a climb down. The provincial government position was always a transparent pile of nonsense. As CBC’s access to information research confirmed last week, the provincial government has been granting more and more exemptions from the minimum processing regulations. In practical terms, that means they have already abandoned MPRs and won’t use them to trigger any CETA problems.

What local media still haven’t reported is that the heart of this dispute has been a political fraud by the provincial government. It tried to radically alter the deal in 2014. The federal government rebuffed the provincial government’s effort to rejig the deal. Faced with no prospect of success in its scam, the provincial government abandoned its ludicrous position.

Both the Liberal and NDP criticised the government for submitting to federal perfidy. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but the truth never stopped a politician in this province from opening his mouth before. Tuesday was no exception.

Incidentally, the letter from King to his federal counterpart as well as the news release that King issued on Tuesday are both pretty vague about what the provincial government is actually doing. King explained the details to reporters.

This is the second time the provincial Conservatives have abandoned a stupid position on the European trade talks. The first was Danny Williams’ refusal to take part in the talks in the first place Williams claimed he needed to protect the seal hunt.

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The party is over #nlpoli

There are times when you wonder why anyone pays attention to a crowd like the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council.

They showed up in St. John’s on Monday to tell us that the major projects that have been driving the economy are winding down.

And they charged $230 to anyone who wanted to show up for that insight or for the other one quoted in the CBC online story:  the “party had to end.”

APEC?

No.

Try PIFO.

Penetrating Insight into the F**king Obvious.

Everything will be fine. Or not. #nlpoli

This pretty picture shows a very ugly problem.

Look at the point (2008) where the red and blue lines separate.  The area in between represents the annual deficit the provincial government has been running. It is the difference between the amount government spent (the blue line) and the amount of income the government had from everything that wasn’t oil and minerals.

All that space in between those two lines is debt.  It is either borrowing from the banks and other lenders or it is borrowing from ourselves through spending all our one-time oil money. If the government spends as they indicated in the budget, about two thirds of that gap on the far right is borrowing from the banks.  One third is from oil money.

Just for a bit of fun,  let’s project ahead into the future a bit to see what might happen.  We’ll use the oil price projections the government used.  And we’ll use the most recent oil production figures from the offshore board. You might be surprised at the results.

A week of truth for the Conservatives #nlpoli

Not that we didn’t know the provincial government had already granted exemptions to its supposedly sacred minimum fish processing requirements, but CBC this week gave us an insight into just how often the government has waived the MPRs.

In 2010,  the provincial government approved 11t exemptions out of 19 requests.  In the last six months of 2014 alone,  it approved 27 out of 29 requests. 

That’s quite a jump.

The wild spurt of exemptions came at exactly the same time  - ironically enough - that Premier Paul Davis was insisting that MPRs were an essential part of the government’s efforts to keep fish processing jobs in the province.

They were so important that he and his colleagues would only give them up for a $280 million slush fund of federal cash controlled by the provincial government.

TBT: a cabinet divided #nlpoli

The latest case of the Premier and one of his ministers saying different things can’t be put down to brain farts.

You also cannot dismiss this because fisheries minister Vaughan Granter can’t speak in short spurts or whatever the heck that line was from last weekend’s On Point.

This one is a case of two cabinet ministers saying two different things.