On the first working day during August, 2015, the provincial government issued four news releases.
Two announced funding from the spring budget.
The other two warned reporters of two more funding announcements to be made on the second working day in August.
Corporate Research Associates will be in the field very soon.
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Anyone surprised by the news isn;t paying any attention to local politics at all.
Ross Wiseman has his pension. It cannot get any fatter. He likely won’t get re-elected in the November general election and even if he does, Wiseman has no interest in sitting on the opposition benches now that he has been in government.
15 years is long enough, sez Ross, so he won’t be running in the next election.
For those who are shocked and for the entertainment of the rest here are three moments from Ross’ political life over the past 15 years.
There are plenty of signs that the federal Conservatives will start the official campaign for the fall election earlier than scheduled. Earlier being as soon as Monday, rather than the usual federal campaign period of five or six weeks before polling day on October 19.
You’ve got to call it the official campaign because the fixed election date has meant that parties engage in an unofficial campaign months before the official campaign starts. All the Conservatives will do – if they drop the writ on Monday – is trigger some particular election rules and get the open warfare started a bit earlier than usual.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the early federal election will have a significant impact on the provincial election due in November. We are not talking about the strain on campaign volunteers. We are talking about public attention and money.
People thought that meant the Tories would do away with the practice of stuffing people into fat government jobs based solely on their political connections.
And so the Conservatives proved they were different by appointing failed candidate Joan Cleary to run the Bull Arm Corporation. Cleary had absolutely no relevant experience, but they owed her some pork and so she got the high-paid job.
In the late 1990s, the provincial government faced some tough financial times. The debt and the size of the economy were the same number. The government went through the usual rounds of layoffs and cuts, and the sorts of things they needed to keep the budget under control.
One of the things government did to help deal with the financial state was to get rid of a batch of provincial parks that it had built up since the development of the provincial roads system in the 1960s. They weren’t parks in the sense of the national systems in Canada or the United States. They were campgrounds and picnic sites.
In 1997, they billed the 21 sites as “business opportunities” for private sector or local not-for-profit groups. By the end of the year, they’d manage to get rid of the lot. “These parks were made available to the private sector, tourism minister Sandra Kelly told the House of Assembly, “because they offered viable business opportunities for rural Newfoundland. Government also realized that it no longer needed to play as large a role in the recreational camping industry as it once had in the 1970s.”
Recreational camping industry.
Heading into an election and with the three major federal parties within five or six points of each other in the opinion polls, the Prime Minister has decided that this is the time to talk about reforming the senate.
Stephen Harper said last week that he will not make any more appointments to the senate. His plan is to create a crisis and then either reform the senate or abolish it in the ensuing melee among and with the provincial premiers.
The New Democrats are flattered. They have already advocated abolishing the senate altogether. This is a popular idea in Quebec where the NDP are threatened by the resurgence of the Bloc Quebecois. The NDP won its current status as official opposition in 2011 with a surprising haul of seats in the province as the Bloc vote collapsed and its supporters looked for a politically friendly home.
The sovereignists found a welcome embrace from the NDP. To the extent that anyone else in the country thinks about the senate, it is likely only as the object of derision given the recent scandals over spending. Few have thought through the implication of the NDP plan. In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, it would cut in half the province’s representation in Ottawa.
For some time now, Nalcor has needed an extra line from Bay d’Espoir to increase the capacity across the Isthmus of Avalon.
They just kept finding excuses not to install it.
In January 2014, Nalcor chief executive Ed Martin told CBC’s Ted Blades that the line would be the most expensive option with additional generation on the Avalon being more cost-effective. Nalcor’s analysis, according to Martin, showed there was no justification for the extra line.
From the Financial Post, Tom Adams and Ed Hollett take a look at three issues that will hold up any development of Gull Island:
While Gull Island might have a modest edge over Muskrat Falls’ cost per unit of production due to its greater size and less challenging local geology, it’s highly doubtful that Nalcor would be able to offer Gull Island electricity at Ontario prices that are remotely competitive. That is, not without massive subsidies from somewhere.
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If nothing else, media coverage about energy talks between Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador shows just how much people don’t know about what is going on in the country.
Not a crowd for half measures, the National Post ran a story on Monday morning that was rife with basic factual mistakes. They even started the piece with a statement that had two facts in it, both of which were simply not true.
“Ontario is the latest customer to line up to purchase Newfoundland and Labrador’s growing supply of hydroelectricity…”
Ontario and the faltering Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador are talking about the possibility of developing Gull Island to supply Ontario with renewable energy.
CBC’s online story on Monday said exactly that:
Ontario eyeing Lower Churchill hydroelectric power from Labrador.
But if you listen to what grim-faced energy minister Derrick Dalley said to CBC’s David Cochrane during the supper hour news on Monday, there is a lot less to the announcement than first appeared.
Black women in the United States are twice as likely to die as a result of complications of pregnancy and childbirth as are white and Hispanic Americans, according to new research. The story turned up in The Economist over the weekend.
But there’s more.
The United States is one of only eight countries globally to see its maternal mortality rate head up in decade 2003 to 2013..”American women are now more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as their counterparts in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany or Japan,” according to The Economist.. The overall American rate of maternal death is 18.5 for every 100,000 live births.
Seven companies in Newfoundland and Labrador have reached a deal with Elections Canada in the Penashue illegal contributions case.
According to Canadian Press, the companies have reached an agreement with Elections Canada in which the companies admit to making illegal contributions and promise not to do so again.
“Executives of Air Labrador Ltd., Dee-Max Innu Tautshuap Ltd., Innu-Chiasson Construction Ltd., Kakatshu Construction Ltd., Labrador Sales Ltd. and N.E. Parrot Surveys Ltd. admit they directed their companies to donate $1,000 each to Penashue’s campaign.
The CEO of Pennecon Ltd. [the seventh company] admits that six of his company’s officers were involved in sending Penashue’s campaign a $5,500 corporate cheque.”
Federal election finance laws prohibit corporations from making political donations.
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Politicians help out with each other’s election campaigns all the time.
There’s nothing unusual for a municipal politician to work on a provincial or federal campaign or for a federal politician to help a provincial colleague. Sometimes the one politician will work as the campaign manager for another.
Usually, the politicians don;t broadcast the fact. There are many reason s for this. Not the least of the reasons is that the campaign is about the person seeking election, not the staffer, regardless of the fact that the staffer might be well-known publicly in his or her own right.
That’s one reason why it is so odd for Conservative Jonathan Galgay to be so vocal and public about the fact that Liberal candidate Paul Antle has taken Galgay on as his campaign manager.
All the country’s provincial and territorial leaders – except for Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia – are in Newfoundland and Labrador this week for their annual conference.
What an opportunity for Paul Davis in an election year. He gets to show himself off looking all leader-like and premieral or whatever the word is for it.
The first day of the meeting the premiers and territorial leaders discussed aboriginal issues in Goose Bay. In the afternoon, Davis laid on an all-expense-paid trip to the super exciting megaproject at Muskrat Falls.
And then everything went horribly wrong.
After days of intense talks, the Europeans apparently have finally reached a final deal to help Greece out of its latest financial misery.
Greece is broke. With a gross domestic product of about US$238 billion, the country had a government debt of about US$346 billion. Some of the country’s banks have very low reserves of cash. People have already made a rush and withdrawn their money from them. This has forced the government to impose a tight limit on withdrawals in order to avoid a bank collapse of the type that hit Newfoundland in 1894.
Under the new deal, the European Union will place officials in key parts of the Greek government in order to ensure that the Greeks actually implement reforms that are part of the bail-out deal.
It’s a tough response, but then again the Greeks are in a tough economic spot. The third tough spot, since 2009. For all that, though, there are people around the world who believe the whole problem is imaginary. They believe that something called “austerity” is the real culprit. If you just got rid of it, so this way of thinking goes, the Greeks could go back to the way things used to be.
Unnamed Conservative “insiders” have been talking about the Ches Crosbie nomination fiasco as if it was a rejection of a new Tory Jesus or something.
The way they talk you’d think people are waiting breathlessly for the pictures on Jane Crosbie’s Twitter feed of young Ches taking his first steps across Virginia Lake, just as his father and grandfather did at his tender age without getting so much as a bunion moistened.
Some of these nameless Conservatives - to use the words from the CBC story – .”believe Ches Crosbie could have raised at least $100,000 by now for his run in Avalon. Many of those donors will now sit on their wallets rather than give cash to another candidate.”
Now that’s an interesting claim.
Nameless Conservative Party insiders predict that without Ches Crosbie as a candidate, the federal Conservative party will be crippled in Newfoundland and Labrador in the next election.
Supposedly Ches could have raised $100,000 dollars already. But without Ches, they won’t raise a penny. Volunteers will stay home, too.
But here’s the thing:
CBC’s story on Thursday is essentially more of the same completely preposterous Ches-the-Saviour-of-the-Conservative-Nation fairy tale that John and Jane Crosbie have been shovelling since Canada Day.
Mostly, Ball said, the aim is to have a “grassroots” summer of meeting with people and talking about the issues that affect the province — and talking about how the current government is letting people down. [Telegram]Mostly, the tour will be about real consultation.
The public utilities board asked Liberty Consulting to review Hydro’s decisions in 11 projects.
Hydro is looking for a rate increase. The board wanted to make sure the increase was justified.
Of the 11 projects, the consultant found:
“Liberty found that the costs that Hydro could have avoided in the absence of the instances of imprudence found by Liberty were:
With that sort of report, you just know that Nalcor has just gotten everything exactly right at Muskrat Falls.
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