Emails, government business, and ATIPPA #nlpoli

During the Ed Martin fiasco,  an email turned up from Ken Marshall - then chair of the Nalcor board - to Premier Dwight Ball and natural resources minister Siobhan Coady about the board's decision to send Martin out the door in a way that maxed out his severance and other entitlements.

Marshall used his gmail account to send the message to Ball's government account and Coady's gmail.

Some folks raised a question about the appearance that Coady was using her gmail account for official business.  Coady denied she was doing it but now the Telegram's James McLeod has an access to information response that includes 70 pages of material sent from Coady's government email account to her gmail account.

The "new" Newfoundland #nlpoli

Every once in a while,  SRBP has featured a list of suggested books either for summer enjoyment or as in April 2006,  for anyone interested in reading about Newfoundland and Labrador.

A recent email reminded your humble e-scribbler that it was time to update the recommended list of books on Newfoundland and Labrador.  There are more than five and even more than 10 books you should read.

To get us started, here are some suggestions from a faithful support of the Bond Papers,  historian Jerry Bannister.  We'll feature some other lists as the summer wears on.

Two Solitudes #nlpoli

"Newfoundland and Canada, separate countries for so long, exist as two solitudes within the bosom of a single country more than 65 years after Confederation. They do not understand each other very well.  Canadians can be forgiven if they do not know much about Newfoundlanders beyond caricatures in popular media, let alone understand them.  But Newfoundlanders do not know themselves.  They must grapple daily with the gap between their own history as it was and the history as other Newfoundlanders tell it to them, wrongly, repeatedly."

That's an excerpt from " Two solitudes,"  my thoughts on Newfoundland, Canada and the Great War.  You can find it in in the latest Dorchester Review  now available.  [Available as a per issue purchase]

Check it out.

-srbp-

On came the Newfoundlanders...

"On came the Newfoundlanders,  a great body of men, but the fire intensified and they were wiped out in front of my eyes."

Private F.H. Cameron, 1st battalion, the King's Own Scottish Borderers,  watched the Newfoundland attack from a nearby shell hole. His battalion had been part of the initial attack by the 29th Division that had failed as German soldiers recovered from the initial barrage and manned their trenches and machine guns.

The Newfoundland battalion attacked alone across open ground from reserve trenches as the communications trenches and front lines trenches were already full of wounded.  Many fell dead or wounded before reaching their own front line and many more died trying to get through the few gaps in the wire that had been cut by the preparatory bombardment.

The battalion war diary recorded 26 officers killed or wounded and 658 other ranks killed or wounded.  Private Ron Dunn lay bleeding for most of the day from a pair of leg wounds and a chest wound before crawling back to his own lines later in the evening. He staunched the bleeding with his own field dressing and with clumps of bright green grass he pulled from the earth within his reach.  Dunn made it back to his trenches,  survived the war, and died in 1993.

Owen Steele was a young lieutenant and the officer commanding D Company.  He and 16 of his men survived the assault uninjured.  Steele was wounded by German shellfire within a week of the attack and died of his wounds.

The 29th Division, of which the Newfoundland battalion was a part, was a Regular Army Division made up of overseas service battalions recalled for active duty.  The Newfoundlanders joined the division in Gallipoli in September 1915 and covered the withdrawal from the beaches on two occasions in January 1916.

The Newfoundlanders were the only Dominion troops to take part in the attack on the opening day of the Somme offensive.  The South African 1st Infantry Brigade served as part of 9th (Scottish) Division and was in reserve on the first day of the Battle of Albert (1 to 13 July 1916).  It first took part in action on July 7, 1916.

-srbp-

The scribes on all the people shove

and bawl allegiance to the state,

But they who love the greater love 

lay down their life; they do not hate.

Wilfred Owen

"At a Calvary near the Ancre"

Interprovincial migration for morons #nlpoli

Some people got really excited on Wednesday by a report from the Fraser Institute that claimed this province had seen its first population loss due to outmigration in a decade.

There ya go, they cried:  proof the budget sucks and is driving people out of the province.

Well,  err... no.

The little savory details #nlpoli

Nalcor chief executive Stan Marshall said so much last Friday about Muskrat Falls, it's probably true that most people couldn't possibly take it all in.

One of the folks having a hard time understanding all this is Tom Johnson.  He's the guy the Conservatives appointed to serve as consumer advocate at public utilities board hearings.  In practice he has sided with Nalcor and the Conservatives on everything, including their plan to force consumers to bear the full cost of Muskrat Falls, no matter how much it cost in the end.

The past few days he's been turning up in the media saying that the government will keep the cost of electricity down so consumers don't see much of an increase.  Not much like supposedly what the Conservatives promised.  Even Nalcor hasn't been pushing that nonsense for a year or more so it's astonishing that Johnson sounds like he is still taking orders from Danny Williams' missus.

Friends and enemies #nlpoli

Craig Westcott tells a story from his short stint as communications director for the Liberals in opposition in the last days of Danny Williams and the early days of his handpicked successor, Kathy Dunderdale.

"I kept after the very small caucus we had to keep asking questions,"  Westcott said in an email to SRBP, "hoping that even if the media ignored us, some of the folks watching at home would cotton on to how bad the deal was.  That might generate some heat. It kept the flame of criticism and skepticism alive."

"We looked at everything from the lack of documentation to support Nalcor's demand projections, to the big question of water rights, the actual usage of Holyrood as part of the island's power supply for the previous 20 or so years, the free power to Nova Scotia, the privatization of the Labrador to Island transmission line to give [Emera] a cut,  the free block of power to Nova Scotia, the likely cost of Muskrat Falls-generated power, which early on we pegged at over 20 cents per kWh, and on and on. The deal was so flawed it was difficult to find anything positive in it."

One major problem Westcott ran into was that the local media weren't interested. "[CBC's David] Cochrane tired pretty quickly of the Opposition asking questions on Muskrat," Westcott said.  "He complained several times that we weren't asking anything new. Some days he walked out of the legislature after Question Period and made a point [of saying] that he wasn't going to scrum our guys because we were still on Muskrat. The other legislative reporters would follow him out."

A foundation of lies and deceit #nlpoli

You could feel the shock among the local media on Friday as Stan Marshall carefully dissected the insanity that is Muskrat Falls.

Didn't matter if you heard the voices on the radio,  watched them on television or read them online.   The reporters' emotional reaction transferred through whatever medium it was that conveyed their words.  Here it was laid out in stark detail:  billions over budget,  years behind schedule,  a financial burden for the province its people will be sorely pressed to bear and all of it built - in essence - on a series of false statements,  faulty assumptions, and anything but facts and reason.

Never mind that all of what Stan Marshall said was - in effect - already widely know and had been known for most of the preceding decade.  Here you had someone as rich or richer than Danny Williams telling them that Muskrat Falls was utter shite.  By the unspoken law of Newfoundland politics,  the poor benighted scribblers now had no choice but report it.

11 minutes and 11 seconds #nlpoli

Dwight Ball was at Memorial University on Thursday morning to represent the provincial government in a joint announcement with Judy Foote on some capital funding to finish the new science building on campus.

The announcement is good for the university,  good for the economy, and good for everyone involved.  It's the kind of good news story Ball desperately needs after a hideously bungled couple of months

And Dwight Ball spent all 11 minutes and 11 seconds in a scrum with reporters afterward talking about emails, one of which was triggered by this tweet on June 5 by CBC's Jeremy Eaton.

Ball's message through the whole scrum was to deny any responsibility in his office for a relatively minor incident two weeks ago in which government spent a couple of hundred dollars tearing down a few hundred crappy signs.

The truth behind the key message #nlpoli

Paul Lane, left (not exactly as illustrated),  says both the Liberals and Conservatives trained him to deliver scripted messages.  People are tired of that, Lane says.  "I believe people want the straight goods."

Straight goods.

The truth, in other words.

Interesting.

But did Paul actually say he would speak the truth?

Foundations #nlpoli

Natural resources minister Siobhan Coady was the latest in a long line of energy ministers from this province who have done the annual pilgrimage to the offshore technology show in Houston in early May.  "With our unique location," Coady said of Newfoundland and Labrador, " we have built a solid foundation, have incredible prospects, and look forward to the many opportunities for exploration and development on the horizon."

Those foundations must have been built by the same crowd that were pouring concrete in Muskrat Falls.  Not even four weeks later the whole shooting match is caved in.

Public interest served by contract disclosure #nlpoli

There's no small irony that NAPE is fighting to increase public disclosure of government spending while other public sector unions are busily trying to drag the public back into the Dark Ages by hiding the names of union members earning more than $100,000 a year in pay and benefits.

NAPE is trying to get access to contracts awarded by Eastern health to two privates companies.  The union appealed to the information commissioner and last week the commissioner issued rulings that Eastern Health should release the contracts.

NAPE is right:  it is in the public interest to have the contract details in public.  That's why the access law  says that it isn't an invasion of privacy to reveal the financial and other details of a contract to provide goods and services to the public.

That doesn't mean that NAPE is right that the public sector can supply the services in this case more efficiently than the private companies can. In fact,  there's good reason to believe that the public sector has a great deal of difficulty providing many services as cost-effectively as a private company can.

Regardless, the public has a right to know how its money is being spent and to make sure that citizens are getting the best return on their spending.  Competition between the public sector and the private sector might be a way of injecting some life back into the bloated, ineffective public sector and getting managers and workers alike to rediscover that it is is supposed to be about serving the public.

-srbp-

Developing a sustainable, diverse economy #nlpoli

When it comes to developing a successful economic development strategy, Edsel Bonnell has advice worth heeding.

He co-chaired the team that developed "Change and Challenge," the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan. The SEP "called for a transformation of culture, away from a dependence on government initiatives and government control and toward one based on individual initiative and private-sector entrepreneurship.

"The plan did not promise easy answers, nor did it fixate on one sector of the economy or on large megaprojects. Change and Challenge represented the result of a long development process that was itself crucial. The long period of discussion and consultation both inside and outside government helped to develop a consensus among those who took part in the discussions."  

Everything in the SEP represented a departure from the unsuccessful approaches we had already tried in the province,  all the ideas we knew were unsuccessful and yet the ones that the  Conservatives put back in place after 2003.  In many respects, it's how we got into our current financial mess... again.  

The process  - "the long period of consultation and discussion" - was an important part of the SEP's success.  The discussions helped build a strong agreement throughout the province about what needed to be done to develop a sustainable, diverse economy.  Not surprisingly,  Edsel recommends we try the same thing again.  He's described the approach very simply in two recent letters to the Telegram:  June 13 and June 18.   

Edsel may be a bit optimistic about how fast we might develop the plan:  this fall would be very fast.  But there is is merit in the idea of bringing all the parties together to set an apolitical task force on the track to build a plan to get us out of the very big hole in which we find ourselves. The politicians can't do it alone.  The bureaucrats can't,  and the business community can't. Nor can ordinary citizens fix things all by themselves.

-srbp-

Core Public Service Numbers #nlpoli

Somebody requested the number of public servants through Access to Information and the folks in the department answered only half the question.

But that's okay because the figures for the core public service are worth looking at anyway.

Regular readers will recognise the trend.  Starting in 2006,  the Conservatives went on a hiring spree.  They took the core public service from 6,792 in 2005 to 9,090 by 2011.  Bit of a steep drop between 2011 and 2012 and a steady decline since then.  As of the middle of May this year, there were about 7,978 people in the core public service. 

The Budget and the Economy #nlpoli

The Conference Board of Canada says the recent budget has tipped the provincial economy into a recession next year.

Finance minister Cathy Bennett says that's bollocks.

Let's see which is right.

Making the best of a bad deal #nlpoli

Here's the short version of  the implications flowing from Nalcor's announcement on Wednesday:

1.  Continuing Muskrat Falls is a political decision already made by Dwight Ball despite the evidence. It's like Ball's inexplicable desire to keep Ed Martin despite the incontrovertible evidence that Martin had mismanaged Nalcor generally and Muskrat Falls specifically.

2.  That said,  Stan Marshall is at least making the best of a bad situation.

Cash Debt and GDP #nlpoli

For those who find this stuff interesting, here are some numbers to mull over.

You may have heard of comparing the net debt to the gross domestic product. Somebody gave Tracy Perry a bunch of numbers to read out during the recent waste-of-time filibuster.  One of the problems with her numbers was that she wasn't always comparing apples to apples.  The numbers she used from the 1990s compared cash debt to GDP while the more recent figures use a completely different accounting basis to make comparisons.

There are problems with this, as we've noted before, not the least of which is that oil revenues tend to cloud the picture.So just for the sake of making a comparison,  your humble e-scribbler took the GDP figures presented in The economy, a document released with the budget.  For debt,  let's use the cash debt figures from the Estimates.  That'll make it easier to compare apples to apples over the next few posts as we wade through this.

It's all in millions of dollars.  In other words, the 31 thousand million means $31 billion.

Marc "Two Engines" Garneau and Bad Decision-Making #nlpoli

Cast your mind all the way back to the last time Canada bought new fighter jets.​

Ooop. 

 Lost most of you already.  

No memory back that far.

Well,  it was the late 1970s.  Canada needed new jets to replace the F-104 Starfighters doing duty for NATO,  the F101 Voodoos handling the defence of Canada role, and even the old F-5 Freedom fighters doing a stint on ground attack.

The finalists were the single-engined F-16 and the F-17/F-18.  The -17. for those who don't recall, was the land version of the -18.  Same aircraft just lacking the reinforced landing gear and other bits the navy aircraft needed to slam into carrier decks.

In the end,  the air force picked the -18, in no small part because it had two engines.  Lots of pilots said that when you are flying long stretches over the vast and largely empty North,  you needed the second engine in case one of them crapped out.

Now as we look at replacing those F-18s,  we are hearing precisely the same criticism levied by some like Marc Garneau at the air force's preferred choice, the F-35.  Only one engine.  No good.

The curious thing about that old F-16 argument is that it doesn't hold up.  The F-16 has proven to be a very successful aircraft still flown and loved by all sorts of pilots around the world 40 years after its introduction.  It's performed well in combat,  including in heavily defended hostile airspace where its many critics used to think it wouldn't survive.   The F-18 is also a very successful aircraft.  Available statistics suggest that the aircraft loss rates due to engine failure is comparable for the two aircraft.

Prejudices bolstered by misinformation is no basis for making decisions that affect people's lives. The story that a bunch of cabinet ministers will sort out the purchase of Canada's next generation  of fighter aircraft is troubling on two accounts.  First there is the prejudices issue.  Second, and just as important is that the cabinet ministers are unqualified to make such a choice. \

 To see how unsuccessful this approach can be we need only look at the Sea King replacement.  Close to 25 years after the air force picked the right aircraft, we are still struggling to get a new ship-borne helicopter in service.  The right choice - the EH-101 - fell victim to the political interests and whimsical decisions of the Liberals before the 1993 federal election. They not only cancelled the EH-101 purchase,  they delayed a decision on an alternative for years, needlessly. As it stands now,  the derivative of an air frame that first flew in the 1970s won't all be in service until 2021.  That's almost 30 years after the cancellation of the EH-101s.

Had the federal government gone ahead with the EH-101s at the time or had we bought EH-101s under a revised contract,  we'd have a proven, successful aircraft in service today.  As it is,  bad decisions have cost taxpayers billions in wasteful procurement and delays only to wind up with an aircraft that simply won't ever be able to do the job properly.  It would be hard to find a better monument to stupidity than the EH-101 cancellation and the subsequent helicopter procurement.  The current federal cabinet is in danger of making the same sort of bone-headed decision again with the new fighter aircraft.

-srbp-

What's wrong #nlpoli

As with a lot of things in local politics,  the most interesting thing wasn't the fact that Steve Marshall barred Roger Grimes from a hockey rink Marshall owns.

What was fascinating was the response of plenty of folks in the province.  Some just blew it off as childish or small.  And at least one even tried the old game of blaming "both sides" for being a good example of what's wrong with local politics.

And in the process, they all approved of the behaviour.

Turning Point #nlpoli

The Great Filibuster of 2016 came to an abrupt end on Thursday afternoon as the two opposition parties decided to pack it in, having gaining precisely nothing of any substance.

The filibuster confirmed the NDP are as politically impotent as they have always been.  Meanwhile, the Conservatives lack punch, depth, and direction.  The Liberals left themselves vulnerable and rather than do them lasting damage,  the opposition parties flinched at the crucial moment.  The result is that the Liberals now get to regroup and come back stronger, having learned powerful lessons out of the spring.

To give a sense of how ineffective the filibuster was, consider that on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Liberals were able to get two crucial pieces of legislation through the House.  In both the school boards election bill and the new greenhouse gas emissions bill, the Liberals got to calmly and rationally lay out the arguments in favour of their position.  The opposition meekly listened.

Environment minister Perry Trimper came away stronger in the public eye as a result.  Education minister Dale Kirby can be abrasive when riled but on this occasion he spoke eloquently about the bill the NDp had spent the earlier part of the session hammering him over.  Kirby also got to explain why full-day kindergarten was so important as part of the government's agenda.

Now with that in mind take a look at the CRA poll released on Thursday.