Moody's warns NL government on finances #nlpoli

Moody's Investor Services is the second rating agency to give the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador a negative trending  in light of the government's financial problems.

In a release, Moody's said that the "negative outlook for the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador reflects the rising risk that the province's fiscal position will deteriorate further than previously expected in an environment of protracted low oil prices and reduced economic activity. Without corrective fiscal action, this will lead to significant deficits, resulting in rapid debt accumulation across the medium-term."

Moody's expects oil to sell at US$33 a barrel in 2016 rising to US$38 a barrel in 2017 and US$43 a barrel in 2018.  The company expects that this will lead to significant deficits, with the deficit for the current fiscal year expected to reach 32% of revenue.  

"The outlook could be revised back to stable if the province introduces and implements a comprehensive fiscal plan that limits debt accumulation and debt service at levels in line with similarly rated peers, or exceeds these levels for a short period only."

Although the company describes the provincial debt level as low compared to its rating peers,  the company cautioned that "a lengthy period of consolidated deficits, along with a long-term expectation of recording debt in excess of 200% of revenues ... could result in negative pressures on the rating."

Gross debt is already more than 200% larger than anticipated revenues and net debt is almost guaranteed to hit or exceed that trigger, if the company includes consideration of the financial implications of Muskrat Falls.  

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Revelation: Labrador hydro edition #nlpoli #cdnpoli

“I wonder how I would feel if a province or a region in another province prevented Hydro-Québec from building its transmission line. I would feel exactly like the people in the West do now. I understand them.”  

Quebec City mayor Regis Lebeaume had a revelation.

Great.

Let's have a chat about another transmission line, shall we?

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Jerry Earle won't retweet this post #nlpoli

Apparently the surest way to piss off a couple of university academics a.k.a the NDP policy brain-trust is to point out how their take on the government’s financial crisis is out to lunch.

Short recap:  Math prof and Indy columnist Tom Baird got hold of an access to information response that explained the calculations behind a comment by cabinet minister Susan Sullivan on Twitter in March 2015:

In 2014 NL taxpayers will pay $744 million less as a result of tax deductions – affordable?

The ATIP request asked for a breakdown of that $744 million figure. Tom left off the cover page from the response when he posted a link to it in his Independent column in 2015.

“Tax cuts made during the Williams-Dunderdale era now cost the government $744 million in revenue each year,” Baird wrote, “ according to a recently released document from the Department of Finance obtained through an access to information request. This accounts for more than two-thirds of last year’s $1.1 billion budget deficit.”

That just doesn’t look right

Revenue problem #nlpoli

Jon Parsons  has an interesting take on the provincial government's financial mess.  It’s worth taking a few minutes to go through it.  Follow some of the links he offers as well.  Altogether they form what you might call a different perspective on things:

 The current deficit and debt…are the result of decisions that were made by a small number of people, and also because of the whims of the global trade in oil.

The key element of Parsons’ argument is that we are not dealing with a spending problem but a revenue problem.  We don’t bring in enough money largely because local elites have given away gigantic benefits to the local rich and to multi-national corporations.

The idea we have a revenue problem isn’t new and it certainly isn’t unconventional.  The province’s three political parties and the public sector unions all basically say the same thing or have made the same claim over the past year.

Turmoil tamed #nlpoli

Few people would be brave enough to start out a book on politics in  Newfoundland and Labrador with the words “Paul Lane.”

Fewer still could bring it off successfully.

Telegram political reporter James McLeod does both and more in a deftly written and insightful new book, Turmoil, as usual.

DBRS downgrades government rating #nlpoli

DBRS issued a revised rating for the provincial government on Thursday.  It remains "A" but a change to trending from "stable" to "negative" for long-term debt.  DBRS' short-term debt rating remains R-1 (Low) with a stable outlook.

In a news release, "DBRS has also confirmed the Guaranteed Long-Term Debt ratings of Newfoundland and Labrador Municipal Financing Corporation and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro at “A” and has changed the trends to Negative from Stable."

"...DBRS believes that the Province’s ability to implement a fiscal response sufficient to slow the deterioration in the credit profile is limited. Without a material improvement in the fiscal and debt outlook supported by a credible multi-year fiscal plan, a one-notch downgrade is likely."

A chasm they can't ignore #nlpoli

That didn’t take long.

The fundamental strategic political problem Dwight Ball and his senior advisors have been busily building since last year exploded on Wednesday with the leak of a treasury board directive to departments, agencies, boards, and Crown corporations.

Ball has been promising that he would deal with the provincial government’s mess without layoffs.  As recently as last week Ball said that attrition – job vacancies due to retirements – were the only way he’d consider job reductions in the public service.

Yet,  the ministers of the treasury board have recently sent a note to departments, agencies, boards and Crown corporations asking them to come up with options to reduce spending by 30% over the next three years. There is no commitment that government will cut that much.  This is an exercise in generating options for the cabinet to consider.

Will DBRS re-do its rating for Newfoundland and Labrador? #nlpoli

Premier Paul Davis was proud of the fact that a bond rating agency had confirmed the province's credit rating.

Curiously, he never told anyone which rating agency it was and, as it seems,  very few if any news outlets reported on the release issued on November 19 by Dominion Bond Rating Service.

DBRS confirmed the provincial government's rating at "A" for long-term debt and "R-1 (Low)" for short-term debt.  They also confirmed Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro at 'A' for long-term debt and "R-1 (Low)" with stable trending.

What's interesting, though, is that DRBS doesn't seem to have had access to up-to-date financial information even though they issued the rating in late November 2015.  Here's the basis for the stable rating,  according to the news release:

Updating the Alternative Spending Plan #nlpoli

In April 2013, SRBP ran a series of posts about public spending. The goal was to show how the government could have avoided its serious financial problems by having a financial policy more sophisticated than “spend it all.”

 A couple of very dramatic years have passed since then.

 Let’s update the projections and see what we get.

Process Question #nlpoli

Finance minister Cathy Bennett told CBC that "everything is on the table and we have to make sure that we don't leave anything that potentially could help us move to the destination that we all want to get to...So, my answer would be everything is on the table."

Soooo, my question would be "where is that destination?"

‘Engagement’ can be an excuse for avoiding action #nlpoli

by Craig Westcott

The Ball administration is off to a shaky start. Actually, it seems afraid to start at all. Tuesday’s press conference announcing 15 months of public consultation on how to handle the deficit is another indication that this administration is afraid to act. To use a tired cliché, the Liberals are like the dog that caught the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.

 Granted, the party has only been in power about a month, with much of that month being down time due to Christmas and the New Year’s holidays. But the Liberals had plenty of time to prepare an action plan. It has been obvious for the past two years that they would inherit the new government. That’s why the lack of a transition plan is so perplexing.

 Ball and his ministers need to send signals, already overdue, that they are changing the way we “do government.”

Thank you, Danny Williams #nlpoli

Rob Strong has been a key player in the local oil and gas industry pretty much since the earliest days.  He knows what he is talking about.

Strong pointed out to VOCM on Wednesday that the Hebron field won’t be the cash cow for the provincial government some people hoped/pretended it would be.

Analyst Rob Strong says he fears that on the front end of a project, that will have a 25 year life, this province won't reap any benefit for being a partner in the development.
Strong says when oil was at $100, Hebron type crude was being discounted by $35. He says that means in the short term, the picture does not look as bright for Hebron owners. This province has a has a 4.9 per cent share in the development.

What Strong is pointing to is a deliberate cut in the provincial royalty offered as a gift to the oil companies by Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale in 2007.  Dunderdale, the natural resources minister at the time, said that she and Williams wanted to give the multi-national oil companies “some downside protection if the price of oil went very, very low.”

Clarity #nlpoli

From the announcement of "intense" public consultations to solve the provincial government's financial crisis:

Question:  Health care spending eats up as you were saying  almost 40% of the budget, you must have some idea some clue as to why that is, why are we paying more per person than on average?

Premier Dwight Ball:  Well the interesting thing about what we... Minister Bennett mentioned this in her comment, the thing about health care in particular,  I spent quite a number of years and we are certainly very pleased to have Dr. John Haggie and other many resources that we have within government and outside of government feeding into a process , Minister Bennett mentioned the aging population that we have in our province right now, so given where we are,  you'd anticipate an even higher portion of the budget but what we are not getting is as we spend money in health care we are not seeing the improvement in health outcomes aso that's going to be our focus... how we improve the health of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians...

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Pressure #nlpoli

A curious thing happens in societies where a huge amount of the collective income derives from outside the local economy and the local tax base.

They do not see a connection between the money they receive and the action of earning it.  The money that flows into the collective pot – the government treasury – seems to appear by magic.

That might sound a bit odd but if you think about it this way, you may get the idea.  Whatever you did for your first paying job, you could see a direct relationship between the labour you expended and the cash you received in exchange.  Painting a fence earned you an amount of money. 

Paint two fences and you could get twice as much money. Or paint another bigger fence and you could get a bit more, Depending on how big the fence was and how much more paint you needed and how much more time it took you to finish painting, as a result,  you could get more money for painting the fence.

And if everybody in your community painted fences or had the same basic connection between labour and reward,  you could all understand it when someone asked you to give a bit of your fence-painting money so that you could buy a fire-truck to fight fires in your town.  That extra bit of money for the community is a portion of your individual earnings from fence-painting or ditch-digging or tree cutting, or whatever it was that you did to make money. 

But what about a place where, in addition to that cash, you all shared in something like money that came from producing oil?

Enough #nlpoli

You can easily lose track of the number of former cabinet ministers who will tell you the same thing.

Ask them about the one lesson of government and budgets that stands in their minds.  They’ll likely all tell you some version of the same thing.

There is never “enough.”

No matter how much money you put into a department,  that department will always want more or have a way to spend more.  Doesn’t matter the department.  You can never spend “enough” such that you can safely say you can then turn to another department and start trying to give it “enough.”

Equalization... again #nlpoli

Equalization is a really simple idea.

In order to ensure that Canadians across the country have access to comparable services regardless of where they live,  the federal government sends money to provinces that don’t make enough on their own.

The federal finance department website describes the scheme pretty well.  We’ve reformatted the website version to take out the bullets.

St. John's Land Prices 1997 - 2015

An argy-bargy erupted on Twitter Wednesday involving a bunch of Danny Williams Fan Klubbers on the one side and a couple of people who have a few issues with the recent plan by some folks at St. John’s city council to buy land from Danny Williams that Williams had purchased over the years from the provincial government at pretty cheap prices.

One of the Klubbers raised the issue of the change in land prices since Williams first started the land assembly for what became Glencrest and then Galway.  The idea – apparently  - was that Williams’ asking price for the land was justified since prices had climbed a lot since 1997.

That leaves out a whole whack of details that we’ll return to in another post.  For now, let’s take a look at the change in land prices since 1997.  The source for the information is Statistics Canada’s monthly report of house prices, that breaks down the price for the house and land in a typical parcel.

Let's hear it for the Fraser Institute geniuses #nlpoli

A year after Kathy Dunderdale left office, the Fraser Institute said she was one of the best fiscal managers of all the Premiers in Canada.

Provincial Conservatives repeated the story anywhere and everywhere they could, just as they had done the other time the Fraser Institute said Kathy was a financial genius.

Sound fiscal management was a big thing for the crowd that just finished up their latest term running the place.  Danny Williams listed “sound fiscal management” as one of his big promises when he announced his first cabinet.

In his first budget speech,  Conservative finance minister Loyola Sullivan reminded everyone of the promises he and his colleagues made in the 2003 election.

Prior to and during the election, we outlined a number of commitments to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. I would like to focus today on three major commitments: 

First, to balance the Budget on a cash basis in four years and restore sound fiscal management; 

Second, to expand the economy and create jobs; and 

Third, to ensure that our health and education systems meet the needs of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and are sustainable into the future.

In hindsight, it all looks like some kind of sick joke.  And it would be finny too if we all weren’t the ones living through the awful truth of just how badly wrong the Fraser Institute and all the rest of them were.

Metrics #nlpoli

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky tried on Monday to put the government’s financial mess into some shape that people could understand.

The simple fact, to put a shortfall of $2 billion into perspective, is that if the provincial government wanted to cover those costs outside of oil revenues, it would have to not only double the province’s income tax rates, but double the provincial share of the HST as well. (Given the current five per cent federal and eight per cent provincial breakdown of the 13 per cent HST, that would bring this province’s total sales tax to 21 per cent.)

If we could do that, we’d break even, says Russell.

Well, ummm,  no.

Russell’s got the right idea.  He just missed another billion dollars of borrowing in the budget for capital spending.  The way the government reports its spending that capital works borrowing keeps getting left out but it is stuff we have to pay for. 

And that  $3.0 billion is just to cover this year.  Next year,  the problem is due to get worse again.

The Bridge to Ottawa #nlpoli

Premier Dwight Ball said everything is on the table to deal with the massive financial problem facing his administration.

And then, in a string of year-end interviews,  Ball immediately took everything off the table.

No cuts to spending as that would slow the economy.  Ditto for tax increases.  Even “efficiency” went out as Ball told the Telegram’s James McLeod that you couldn’t deliver existing services without the existing staffing levels.

Ball told NTV’s Mike Connors that we “need to find a way to bridge us [from] where we are currently until the commodities rebound and be [sic] the significant contributor we need them to be."

The bridge Ball wants to take is a familiar one.  According to McLeod, Ball is “ counting on infrastructure money from the federal government to help out some, and he’s also taking a close look at the equalization formula, to see if the province can wring any more money out of Ottawa.”

What are Ball’s options in Ottawa?