“In the fishery of the very near future,” SRBP wrote in February, “fishing subsidies like federal employment insurance wage subsidies, state-sponsored marketing schemes and the stalinist political control of the economy… will all go by the wayside. International trade talks are already laying the groundwork for massive change.”
The very near future arrived this week.
The CBC’s John Gushue has a tidy analysis of Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s recent suggestion that government employees could work from home in the future as a way of cutting down on government real estate costs.
Gushue notes that people have been talking about “telework” for a couple of decades. But where it was once an idea, today it is commonplace.
Unlike other employers that have looked to telework to improve productivity and employee lifestyle, Dunderdale’s interest in the concept is pretty simple and – for politicians in this province – typical and old-fashioned. As Gushue notes:
She suggested reducing the cost of the public service ... not by dwindling its numbers, but by shrinking the footprint of its office space.
The reason the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador costs more per capita than elsewhere in Canada is because provincial politicians use it for political purposes rather than just delivering government service to the people who pay the bills for the service. It’s patronage.
Since taking office in 2003, the provincial Conservatives have done what the Liberals immediately before them have done. Just as the Liberals transferred provincial paycheques to communities outside St. John’s, the Tories did the same thing in Grand Falls-Windsor and Stephenville when the local paper mill shut down. Overall, they swelled the provincial public service until it had become 25% of the provincial labour force.
Not surprisingly, the province’s public sector unions don’t like the idea of cuts to the number of people they represent. In an interview last week, the head of the province’s largest public sector union claimed that the current size of the public service was the result of “rebuilding” after a period of cuts. NAPE’s Carol Furlong said that “we really need to ensure that the people of this province have the services they need…”.
Of course, Furlong is full of crap. The number of people represented by public sector unions has nothing to do with delivering the services the public needs. There are plenty of ways to improve service delivery at a lower cost to taxpayers and with fewer members in Furlong’s union.
But, as you will see by looking at the Dunderdale and Furlong interviews, the politicians and the union leaders are in complete agreement on the question of the size of the provincial public service. Neither of them wants to see it any smaller.
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Leave entirely to one side the spectacle of the guy who gets paid as the consumer advocate sitting there on the CBC flailing his arms around explaining Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s latest rate request.
Tom Johnson sounded like a Hydro spokesperson as he went on about things called “puts” and how this sort of cost was up, and this was offset by something else. Prices on the island would go down, therefore, while in Labrador, where the issues are different, costs would go up.
Johnson did a better job of defending Nalcor than he did during Muskrat Falls.
Leave that to one side.
In a characteristically display of arrogance and entitlement, Kathy Dunderdale today reappointed two of her key political hacks – Len Simms and Ross Reid – to their patronage jobs in the provincial public service.
What makes the whole sordid business that much more distasteful is that Dunderdale tried to make it sound as if the whole exercise was legitimate:
In keeping with Provincial Government policy, they had resigned from their respective positions to work on the October 11 election campaign.
The two buckos resigned their positions knowing full-well they’d get them back inside a month.
Of course, if any other deputy ministers resigned in order to work for another political party, you can be damn sure Dunderdale would never have reappointed them at all, let alone do so as swiftly as she hooked her own two back up to the trough.
Those appointments got buried in another release on yet more changes to the senior public service.
The record-setting churn in senior management continues.
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Pretty simple idea, really.
Opinions, beliefs and ideas move around among like minded people in what is an essentially closed space.
The effect can be amazingly powerful just as it can be amazingly deceptive and distorting.
President Barack Obama talked about the echo chamber in American political coverage in early 2010 during a meeting with Senate Democrats:
"Do you know what I think would actually make a difference.... If everybody here — excuse all the members of the press who are here — if everybody turned off your CNN, your Fox, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics. The topic is politics."
In the United States, the problem Obama is pointing out is not just the idea of people from different political perspectives focusing on politics exclusively all the time.
This isn’t the Permanent Campaign* as all-consuming.
It’s about political polarization in the 100 channel universe. People chose what they want to pay attention to and, increasingly, that seems to be a matter of picking only the information - websites, radio stations and television news programs - that reinforce their existing beliefs.
Princeton University professor Cass Sunstein describes it this way in the 2001 digital book Echo Chambers: Bush v Gore, Impeachment and Beyond,
Many of these vices involve the risk of fragmentation, as the increased power of individual choice allows people to sort themselves into innumerable homogeneous groups, which often results in amplifying their pre[-]existing views. Although millions of people are using the Internet to expand their horizons, many people are doing the opposite, creating a Daily Me that is specifically tailored to their own interests and prejudices. Whatever the exact numbers, it is important to realize that a well-functioning democracy—a republic—depends not just on freedom from censorship, but also on a set of common experiences and on unsought, unanticipated, and even unwanted exposures to diverse topics, people, and ideas. A system of “gated communities” is as unhealthy for cyberspace as it is for the real world.
Slightly north of the great republic, and in a much smaller place, there’s another kind of echo chamber. The way it works may be slightly different but the concept is still the same.
The provincial government makes the noise. Other provincial opinion leaders – other politicians, key interest groups and news media – reflect the noise back.
The political parties themselves are semi-closed organizations dominated by self-selecting elites. The rules on who can get into the elites and how aren’t written down. Sure both the Conservative and Liberal parties have constitutions that set out rules about how they are supposed to work.
But as first the Conservatives and the Liberals showed in 2011, their constitutions are fictions. First the Conservatives twisted and turned before finally rejecting as illegitimate a candidate for leader of the party who followed exactly the same rules the party bosses themselves used. Then the Liberals switched leaders. The party executive may have created the process that ended with Kevin Aylward as leader, but what happened in the five weeks before that – secret offers to this one and that one – could only take place in a group where the written rules and the real rules are two different things.
And lest anyone thing the NDP is different consider the special role given to unions in its constitution. A party with the word “democratic” in its name was hardly democratic at all.
To see how all this works, consider a couple of examples.
Start with the fishery in the current election to see insiders talking among themselves.
Earlier this year, CBC released the results of an opinion poll they commissioned from Corporate Research Associates. CBC found that:
… 60 per cent of the province believes the fishery should be concentrated in fewer locations to be more efficient.
Only 23 per cent say it is well managed and doesn't need change.
The majority opinion is that a smaller leaner fishery would be more profitable.
That isn’t as surprising as it would have been even five years ago. Times have really changed in the industry. And such a poll result isn’t surprising given that the industry leaders themselves agreed that they have to reduce the number of people and plants in the province.
What is surprising is that – even though a clear majority of people in the province support downsizing and the industry representatives themselves seem to agree - both the provincial Conservatives and Liberals want to create a new version of the Fisheries Loan Board in order to get more people into the industry. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives mentioned that this idea came from the union that represents plant workers and fishermen, incidentally.
Amazing, though, this fisheries policy might be, Muskrat Falls remains the finest example of the echo chamber of local politics and the interconnections among the groups inside the chamber that help to reinforce the messages.
Over the past 18 months, poll after poll done for the provincial government showed that only three or four percent of respondents thought it was the most urgent issue for the province.
Health care was at the top of peoples’ list of major issues, across the province hands down. The economy and jobs came in second.
Nonetheless, Muskrat Falls has dominated provincial politics since Danny Williams announced his retirement deal in November 2010.
Muskrat Falls is the centre piece of the Conservatives’ re-election campaign.
The Liberals have a section of their platform devoted to hydro-electric development issues.
The New Democrats include it as well, although their comments are much more vague that the other two parties’ commitments.
A St. John’s Board of Trade panel selected the Lower Churchill overwhelmingly as the major issue for the election.
And lastly, a poll released last week shows that Muskrat Falls was a major issue for 13% of respondents.
But hang on a second.
As it turns out, the poll came from the firm that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation.
And that Board of Trade thingy. Well, the panel had only four people on it. While the BOT didn’t release the names of the panel members, M5 was so proud that Craig Tucker had made the cut, they tweeted about his work on the Board’s panel that put together some comments for the election.
Yes, gang, that Craig Tucker. Co-chair of the 2003 Tory election campaign, former Tory-appointed director of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro after 2003 and now the guy whose advertising firm is the agency of record for Nalcor.
Meanwhile, the CBC uses Nalcor’s lobbyist as an election commentator alongside their own provincial affairs reporter, as if the two were the same sort of independent political observers. They didn’t even bother mention that the guy is Nalcor’s lobbyist in Ottawa.
What’s most amazing about CBC and those who reported the poll last week without noticing the Nalcor connections is that they didn’t feel the need to notice the Nalcor connections.
For people inside the echo chamber, that sort of detail might be so well known they didn’t feel like it was an issue.
But outside the circle of au courante types, out among the audience?
Not so much information that they’d readily have those details or even that they’d feel the need to go check. They trust the news media to give their all the relevant information, after all.
More than two decades ago, political scientist Susan McCorquodale wrote about the relationship between the media and politicians in this province. She described it as '”symbiotic”, a close and long-term relationship that works to the benefit of both.
“News originates with the press release, the press conference or the daily sitting of the House of Assembly,” she wrote. These days she might have added twitter, e-mail or the Blackberry message from a political source feeding tidbits to reporters.
McCorquodale noted the lack of investigative reporting, something else that remains little change these days. And she also noted the “tendency of reporters to end up in comfortable PR jobs with government.”
What she could not have foreseen was the day when the president of the major commercial radio broadcasting firm would sit as a political appointee on the board of one of the provincial government’s energy companies.
Nor could McCorquodale have expected that this same fellow, so tight with the pols the could receive a patronage appointment, would call his own station to complain about media coverage of his patron’s health problems.
Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador occurs inside a large echo chamber. While in the United States, there are separate political echo chambers for people with differing political views, in newfoundland and Labrador, the echo chamber tends to separates the opinion elites from the majority of society.
To see it work, you only have to look at the general election campaign.
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In the wake of the latest revelations of financial mismanagement in the provincial government, SRBP has been looking at some of the possible contributing developments over the past decade or more.
Last week, SRBP noted that it appears the provincial government broke up the treasury board secretariat around 2007. They sent some of its bits off to one department and put the rump of its administration – about the size it had been in 1968 - under the finance department, as it had been before the 1973 reforms introduced by the Moores administration.
At around the same time, the provincial cabinet started a series of massive annual increases in public spending that Premier Kathy Dunderdale admits is unsustainable.
And the same cabinet also ballooned the size of the provincial public service. Again, it’s something that Kathy Dunderdale admitted was something she and her colleagues now had to sort out.
These three things are connected.
Even if the government loosened the constraints of its internal financial controls, there are other agencies that have a role to play in keeping an eye on the public treasury.
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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Conservative Party insiders are so desperate to block any leadership contest that they are willing to creatively reinterpret the party constitution so that only people they chose get to be members for the purposes of deciding who gets to lead the party.
CBC’s David Cochrane reported on Monday that the Conservatives evaluating Cabana’s nomination forms have decided that “members” are only the members of district associations and other similar people described in one subsection of Article 5 of the party constitution:
ARTICLE 5 MEMBERSHIP
1. All persons who are residents or domiciled in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador and who support the principles and aims of the Party are eligible to become members of the Party.
2. Subjects to Article 5-1 all individual members of affiliated associations and groups who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party.
3. Notwithstanding Article 5-1 and Article 5-2, all members of the Provincial Executive Council as defined in Article 7-1 who support the principles and aims of the Party shall be members of the Party. Any member of the Provincial Executive Council who ceases to support the principles and aims of the Party will automatically cease to be a member of the Provincial Executive Council and forfeit all rights and privileges associated therewith.
Now that’s not really ambiguous except to anyone lacking basic English language skills. The sub-section da byes are relying on is the third one but that only makes sure that the district and provincial executive people get counted as members and that resigning from such a position has a price.
The main bits of the section define membership pretty broadly.
But if the back-room boys succeed in disqualifying Brad Cabana because he doesn’t have any Sub-section 3 “members” on his nomination form, that might not be the only problem they cause. Cabana is reportedly planning a legal challenge to this bit of legal tomfoolery, and that would normally be enough of a problem.
The Conservative insiders who are trying to dictate who gets to be Premier may also cause themselves some other embarrassment if not real legal difficulties.
You see, membership also affects who can be candidates in elections. Plus, under Article 12 of the Conservative party constitution the definition of membership also determines who may vote in a candidate selection process:
Eligible voters entitled to vote for a person to be elected as the Party Candidate are those persons who are members of the District Association, ordinarily resident in the Electoral District at the date of the Nominating Meeting and who are not less than eighteen (18) years of age either at the date of the nominating meeting or at the date of the election, if the date of the election has been set.
So it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that if “members” are only people currently serving on a district executive, then the party will pretty quickly cease to exist. The only people they can nominate as a candidate to replace Danny for example are one of the people currently sitting on the Humber west executive.
Underneath it all, though, what people across Canada are really seeing here is the attitude some people have to political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador. The attitude is consistent with the sort of patronage-riddled, paternalism that has defined the past decade or so of provincial politics.
Under that model, the party is merely the handful of back-room brokers who rule over everyone and everything else. They are accountable to no one except themselves.
Listen to how many people who have said already that if the caucus is decided then Cabana doesn’t stand a chance. That reflects the old-fashioned view of a party and ignores the fact that even under the Conservative constitution, a significant chunk of the delegates to a leadership convention are supposed to be elected in each of the districts.
You can also see the old-fashioned notions contained in this if you look at the complete lunacy of the Conservative position. Danny Williams argued that Roger Grimes, elected by a convention of elected delegates couldn’t stay on as premier. To make sure that couldn’t happen again – supposedly – Williams and his colleagues set new rules with changes to the province’s Elections Act that would require a general election under certain circumstances.
Yet, under the Conservative Party’s own constitution, the caucus gets to appoint an interim leader. If by some chance Cabana’s nomination stands, the Conservative caucus will select not one but two caretaker Premiers in as many months. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have not seen such transient premierships since the 1920s when premiers came and went with the shifting coalitions within the legislature.
Politics in this province is in a parlous state. The fundamental rot of the whole structure could not be more clearly seen than in the circus that is the once-proud Conservative Party struggling to find someone who actually wants the job while fighting to exclude someone who apparently does.
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If the provincial government can actually get control on its spending and head down the road to management reform along the lines that Eastern Health’s Vicki Kaminski talked about on Tuesday, then they are headed down the right road.
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.
Elizabeth Matthews is bailing out of her controversial nomination to serve as vice-chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore petroleum Board.
It isn’t clear if she is also leaving her appointment to the board itself.
As CBC reports, Matthews is blaming the Opposition Liberals for politicising the entire matter. Matthews served as a communications director for the Liberal administration of Roger Grimes before she left quickly to work for Danny Williams in the Opposition office where he was infamous for slinging wild, political accusations. In another ironic twist, Matthews former boss said he got into politics because he was sick of all the patronage and corruption.
The big twist in the story appears to have come on Friday when the Liberals revealed a December 21 letter from natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to his federal counterpart appointing Matthews to the offshore with effect from 01 January 2011.
And then things went horribly wronger Update:
The Telegram has the full text of Matthews’ statement. For starters, try and find the clear statement where she says she is quitting her appointment. Then check and see if she has actually launched any defamation action given her references to defamation. This sounds suspiciously like John Hickey suing Roger Grimes for stuff Danny Williams said: a huge pile of smoke to cover the catastrophe everyone else sees.
If that wasn’t enough, note, among other things, the change in her title in the Premier’s Office from the bio sketch in the letter on the appointment – “Senior Policy Advisor” - to “a senior advisor”. There’s a huge difference in the two. That’s just the tip of that iceberg.
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Thursday’s announcement by fisheries minister Darin King should give you a pretty big reminder that the local political scene remains mired in the past.
The provincial government is giving a private sector company a $3.6 million. They are calling it a loan. In effect, the provincial government is going to pay a cash subsidy directly to fishermen to kill twice as many seals as the company involved could buy. That’s according to a company official at the news conference on Thursday.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly the type of subsidy that helped to decimate the cod stocks since it encourages fishermen to over-harvest the resource. The excuse for it is much the same as well: it is supposedly just bridge financing to help the industry get through some difficult times now. Things will get better in the future.
There’s no truth in it of course. There never has been. Those are just the official excuses the politicians need to avoid the decisions that are tough but that would actually improve the fishery.
Even more interestingly, there’s a growing international effort to wipe out these subsidies. Yet while people around the world are trying to change the behaviour that led to the loss of our fish stocks, the locals are just carrying on as if everything was just peachy.
This looming change in the fishery and the fish markets is part of the story behind the more recent fisheries crisis, by the way, but that’s another issue.
One sentence in the seal subsidy release leaped out. it’s down towards the bottom. It’s vague and written in the passive voice, which likely means the person who wrote the release was just filling up space. Here’s the claim:
The value of the industry to the provincial economy has been estimated at close to $100 million in total in recent years.
“has been estimated”.
By whom?
Well certainly not the provincial government. The fisheries department website gives information for three years. They are from a time before the most recent collapse of the markets:
The Sealing Industry contributed on average approximately $16 million to harvester’s income, and approximately $37 million to the provincial economy in the last three years:
- 2006: approximately $30 million in landed value and approximately $55 million to the provincial economy.
- 2007: approximately $11 million in landed value and approximately $32 million to the provincial economy.
- 2008: approximately $7 million in landed value and approximately $24 million to the provincial economy.
From $30 million in landed value and $55 million in total in 2006 to a mere $7.0 million in landed value and $24 million total value two years later.
So $100 million in total value to the economy? Only, if you add up a bunch of years and that doesn’t seem to be what they meant.
This province won’t have a viable, local fishing industry in the future as long as the provincial government sticks with bad policy ideas like doling out cash to fishermen and local companies as they did in the seal announcement on Thursday.
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You don’t make the kind of telephone calls Cathy Bennett has been making if you aren’t already headed toward an announcement you will go after a political party leadership.
What CBC got was the talking point, nothing more.
What NTV got was the talking point, written down.
Bennett has been calling Liberals like Dwight Ball and Siobhan Coady plus a raft of others. She’s been looking for support in some cases and in other cases, she has been inviting people to join her campaign team. That’s not what you do if you are still pondering the possibilities a week before the nomination deadline.
If Bennett is still on the fence about a run for the Liberal leadership, then Ed Martin is still iffy on Muskrat Falls.
Tory candidate Keith Russell must be in a desperate battle to win his seat.
He’s trotted out the old patronage card in a bid to boost his chances. The district better vote the right way, warns Russell or else no megaprojects for Labrador.
Here’s how the Telegram reported his comments:
we have to be on government’s side to access government coffers…
Candidates who trot out the truth of the way the Tories have been handling things like road paving over the past seven years usually get slapped down not for what they said but for saying it out loud.
Wonder what Kathy Dunderdale will do to Russell now that he has voiced the threat implicit in the Conservatives’ campaign pork-fest.
Incidentally, the Telegram notes that Russell – who used to work for the Innu nation – testified at the joint review panel hearings and raised concerns about the Muskrat Falls megadebt project. The Telegram didn’t do Russell’s testimony justice, but that’s another story.
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That upward traffic trend that started a couple of months ago continues to surge here at Bond Papers.
The number of visitors in October jumped 10% from September and then another 39% from October to November. Cumulatively, the jump is 53% from September to November. Page views are up by the same percentages.
What people were reading in November is an interesting mixture, to say the least. Just take a gander:
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Thursday was one of those days where you felt like you had dropped down the rabbit hole with Alice.
Or maybe had indulged a bit too heavily in some mind-altering substance.
There was Lorraine Michael on the radio complaining that Muskrat Falls would likely cause environmental problems through the release of methyl mercury. Let’s be clear: there is nothing we know about Muskrat Falls today on any subject that wasn’t known when Lorraine endorsed Muskrat Falls. Yet, there is Lorraine trying to make it sound like she never, ever supported this megaproject.