Dunderdale using rigged deck against public on Muskrat Falls

Whenever anyone moans about the 1969 power contract with Hydro-Quebec they can thank the last four Premiers of Newfoundland and Labrador – from Beaton Tulk to Kathy Dunderdale – for guaranteeing Hydro-Quebec’s unaltered command of Churchill Falls power.

In order to hide her own financially disastrous Muskrat Falls megaproject from public scrutiny, Kathy Dunderdale is using a cabinet order issued in December 2000 when Beaton Tulk was the placeholder Premier between Brian Tobin and Roger Grimes.

Take a look at the order – Regulation 92/00:

3. Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro is exempt from the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 and the Public Utilities Act for all aspects of its activities pertaining to the Labrador Hydro Project as defined in section 2.

But how is the Labrador Hydro Project defined?

That’s where you get to see the gigantic mess that Tulk started and the rest have continued.

The exemption order doesn’t just apply to the Lower Churchill and all the transmission facilities associated with it, as most people assume.

Nope.

Here’s the very first thing included in the definition of  the “Labrador Hydro Project”:

… generation and related facilities at Churchill Falls , Labrador

In one clump of eight words, cabinet destroyed any power the Public Utilities Board had under the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 to manage electricity in the province to make sure that ordinary citizens get the cheapest possible electricity. 

Under the EPCA, 1994,  the PUB was supposed to be able to review electricity generation in the province to make sure consumers don’t get wallet-raped in order to have heat and light to their homes.  Newfoundland Power or Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro could ask the PUB to review demand and supply in the province.

As then-Premier Clyde Wells put it in 1994:

[The Electrical Power Control Act]  authorizes the Public Utilities Board to redirect any power - any power, no exceptions - to meet the needs of the people of this Province. Not expropriating anything from anybody. It is to manage the power that is generated in this Province in such a manner as to first and foremost meet the needs of the people of this Province. It makes no specific reference to Upper Churchill. It makes no specific reference to power companies. It makes no specific reference to any individual generator of power.

But with Churchill Falls exempt from the Act, those sections of the Act that would protect consumers are useless.

Kathy Dunderdale can get on open line and talk all she wants about legal opinions that warn against using powers under section 92a of the Constitution Act, 1982.  Truth is there is no risk:  there are no powers since she and her current cabinet colleagues decided to to uphold the December 2000 exemption.

Tulk and his cabinet may have signed them away, but every cabinet since then has endorsed them.  Kathy Dunderdale and her cabinet are actually proud of their decision.

It gets better, though.

In the fall of 2000, the provincial government issued a series of orders that exempted every major hydro-electric project on the island portion of the province from the EPCA.  Those exemptions still exist even though several of the projects are now owned entirely by Nalcor as a result of the 2008 expropriation bill.

What that means for consumers is that Nalcor alone can decide what it wants to do with those sites. Even if there was plenty of electricity available for Nalcor to meet provincial needs at the lowest possible cost without building Muskrat Falls, there is no way the Public Utilities Board could force Nalcor to halt the megaproject and do the sensible thing.

Once a line to Nova Scotia flows through, Nalcor can ship discount power out of the province from its island generating sites and force local consumers to use super-expensive Muskrat falls power all thanks to decisions dating from the fall of 200 and endorsed by every administration since.

So the next time Kathy Dunderdale talks about independent reviews or asking the PUB to do anything, just remember:  legally, the regulatory deck is stacked against consumers.  The whole thing is a giant set-up to favour Nalcor and its corporate partner Emera.  Beaton Tulk may have started it, but Kathy Dunderdale and the current cabinet have made it their own.

Just in case you think Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t like Hydro-Quebec, just remember that she and her predecessor spent five years trying to get HQ to take an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill. 

And she never said boo to anyone until long after her secret efforts failed.

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Victoria Day Weekend Traffic Report

Here’s what people were reading at Bond Papers last week:

1. Dunderdale and her desperation
2. Dunderdale to hide important Muskrat details from scrutiny/oversight
3. Dunderdale in action:  one Homer moment after another
4. No Dunderdale in Tory battle of Kilbride
5. Dunderdale flips and flops:  Muskrat Exemption Errata
6. Speaker Dunderbunny shows his bias again
7. Dundernomics 101
8. Talk radio on agenda for national political science association
9. Dunderdale opts for mid-level bureaucrat for CEO
10. Long awaited report still under wraps

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Shocker: Marois wrong on Penashue

Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois thinks federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue can’t be fair to Quebec.

Marois thinks Penashue is in conflict because of Old Harry and Muskrat Falls.

“We will not accept giving advantages to Newfoundland to compete with Quebec and our hydroelectricity,” Marois said, noting Hydro-Québec has never received financial support from Ottawa.

“Mr. Penashue is from Newfoundland,” Marois said. “One of the first questions is the Lower Churchill. We hope the prime minister will realize there is a conflict.”

Pauline needs better advisors.

Peter Penashue is not from Newfoundland.  He is from Labrador. 

There is a big difference.  For one thing, Peter is not tied to the sort of misery-guts rhetoric that Danny Williams used to trot out every once in a while when he felt a bit more dyspeptic than usual.  Nor is Peter likely believe the sort of tin-foil hat foolish about boundaries and such that some other like to get on with.

Peter is not beholden to Kathy Dunderdale and the rest of her Dunderbunnies for anything.  He’s crossed them before and he will do it again if need be.

Peter has other interests and other issues.

And as federal intergovernmental affairs minister, Peter answers to a completely different set of political interests than the crowd in St. John’s anyway.  Kathy Dunderdale has exactly zero cred with the current federal government. 

She can suck up to the Prime Minister all she wants.  The sorry fact is that her political impotence has been noted.

So if Pauline Marois had any clue at all, she’d have laid off the cheap and easy comments aimed at a federal cabinet minister who has some connection to political forces in her own province that she might want to connect to herself as the next provincial election draws nigh in Quebec.

And all of that is before we even to get to dealing with her comment, according to the Gazette, that “Penashue will also be involved in deciding the disputed boundary between Quebec and Newfoundland.”

Simple answer:  he won’t.

So maybe Pauline needs to get some better advisors, people who actually have a frickin’ clue about what is going on outside VDQ.

Peter Penashue is actually someone the Government of Quebec can deal with sensibly and without all the Sasquatch Hunter crap she thinks Penashue represents.

Just sayin’.

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Dunderdale in action: One Homer moment after another

Danny Williams used to talked in Sarah Palin-like terms about all the reading he did.  He could never say what it was he was reading but apparently he felt the need to let us know that – lawyer and Rhodes scholar that he was – reading was something he had down.

Kathy Dunderdale likes to make fun of Yvonne Jones for supposedly making mistakes.

Now in Danny’s case you could forgive him the odd failing  - and it is odd as in bizarro - like an insecurity about literacy.

But Kathy Dunderdale just lampoons herself time after time after time.

Take this exchange in the House of Assembly on Thursday.

When asked about her plans for appointing former Nalcor board chairman John Ottenheimer to his old job or maybe a new one, Dunderdale couldn’t resist trying to sound condescending:

Mr. Speaker, sometimes you have to be like Theseus with his ball of wool in the maze to follow the logic of the Leader of the Opposition. I do not know how you can reappoint somebody to a new position. Anyway, I think I got the gist of what she is asking, Mr. Speaker.

Dunderdale then offered that she would have no “compunction” about giving John another job seeing as he is such a great fellow.

And incidentally, John Ottenheimer is a gentleman of  great ability.

So it is odd that she would have any compunction at all.  Look up the word.  There’s no shame in doing so.  Your humble e-scribbler had to double check the meaning. 

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as a “pricking of conscience.”  Miriam-Webster gives a similar set of meanings but one that makes it clear the word is tied to an awareness of guilt at having done something inappropriate.  While Dunderdale said she would have no compunction  -  that is no sense of guilt - it is not exactly a common word.  Nor is it a clear way of saying what she seems to have meant in referring to Ottenheimer.

What she meant to say is that she would not hesitate.  She would gladly reappoint him again because he is so eminently qualified.

What she did was use a 50 cent word, apparently to try and sound smart, and in the process did what is essentially a case of damning with faint praise.

D’oh!

Then Kath used the word again.

In another comment, she said that opposition leader Yvonne Jones had no compunction about making a statement of fact that is factual.  Dunderdale was trying to accuse Jones of something else but, as tends to happen when Kath puts on airs, she tripped up in her own twists and turns of logic and her continual miss-statements of fact.

In this case, Dunderdale had a classic Homer Simpson moment by claiming that the Holyrood generating plant produced 37% of the province’s electricity in 2009.  The actual figure was 17.8%.

 D’oh!

That wasn’t Dunderdale’s only string of head-slappers.

Jones made a crack that Dunderdale liked to pattern herself after the federal Conservative leader, a man who is notoriously unpopular among people in this province including provincial Conservatives. 

Dunderdale replied:

Well, Mr. Speaker, let me begin by saying that I thank the Leader of the Opposition for saying that I follow in the steps of Mr. Harper and what happens to Mr. Harper happens to me, because I guess we are on path for a majority government in October.

D’oh!

But wait.

There’s more.

Jones asked why Dunderdale was going to block the Public Utilities Board from reviewing the Muskrat Falls project.

We are not, says Dunderdale, a few days after her natural resources minister confirmed she was.

That blocking was done in December 2000.

Dunderdale is bringing the PUB back in, according to the Premier’s tortured logic, even though Dunderdale herself has already said the PUB would not have the ability to review the Muskrat Falls proposal as they should under the Electrical Power Control Act because since she had decided not to amend, rescind or otherwise change that exemption issued in 2000.

In the tangled maze that is a Kathy Dunderdale argument, no ball of string could help anyone find their way through its twists and turns.  The only thing one can do is tumble around and be amazed that at the enormous pile of bull that sits at the centre of it.

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Dunderdale opts for mid-level bureaucrat as CEO

Not so long ago the province’s chief electoral officer was a career public servant usually of deputy minister rank.

Then Danny Williams decided he preferred partisans in what is supposed to be a non-partisan job.

With the unfortunate death of former Conservative Party president Paul Reynolds,  Premier Kathy Dunderdale had a vacancy to fill.

Her choice?

The current assistant chief electoral officer and director of election finance at the provincial elections office.

No sign of any change to current sorry state of the electoral office, but all the same, let’s wish Victor Powers well in his new job.

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Long awaited report still under wraps

The Danny Williams administration hired former Supreme Court Justice Bill Marshall to do a couple of reviews for them.

In 2005, they asked Marshall to review inland fisheries enforcement.

In 2008, the opposition asked about the report in the legislature.

They didn’t get much of an answer three years after Marshall started his work.

On Tuesday, justice minister Felix Collins got another question in the House of Assembly on the missing report.  Here’s what he said:

we received the report from Justice Marshall some time in late fall 2010. I am not sure of the exact date. In November or December, I think it was. I would have to check my notes on that.

Five years later.

Must be quite the tome.

But wait;  it gets better.

Collins explained that “because of the merger of wildlife and inland fish at this point in time and the transition that is going, we are still considering the report in that context.”

In other words, because the situation Marshall was supposed to report on five years ago doesn’t exist any more, we may have to think about this all again.

And for good measure, Collins tossed in this gem: 

We will release the report or the information from the report in a timely fashion.

This administration came to office in 2003 with a pledge to release reports within 30 days.

It took Bill Marshall five years to submit the report.

Collins has had it for more than five months.

And he still can only say he might just release some information from the out-of-date report at some unspecified time in the future.

Yes, friends, this is what Collins and his boss think counts as open, transparent and accountable.

Oh yeah, update:  There’s no word on whether Marshall finished the report into the prosecution service. That one’s been underway since June 2006.

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Dunderdale and her desperation

Kathy Dunderdale is trying desperately to hide  details of her Muskrat Falls megaproject from public scrutiny.

You can also tell she is trying desperately not to look like she is desperately trying to hide details of the project from public scrutiny.

You can tell she is desperate because as soon as word leaked out that she was trying to keep the Public Utilities Board from examining whether or not her pet project is the cheapest way to meet the province’s energy needs – Dunderdale’s major claim on the project – Dunderdale quickly claimed she would let the PUB pronounce on its cheapness even though she had already decided they would not have the time they ought to have – by law – to do their jobs.

And then in her desperation, Kathy Dunderdale drops this sort of foolishness onto the public record:

We have been open, we have been transparent, we have been accountable — something they knew nothing about when they were trying to develop the Lower Churchill…

To quote a famous politician Kathy might know:  nothing could be further from the truth.

Kathy Dunderdale and that famous politician spent five years trying – secretly – to lure Hydro-Quebec into taking an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill.

Five years.

Totally secret talks.

Dunderdale participated in both the secret talks and in hiding the talks from the public.

Some people know because Kathy Dunderdale spilled the beans, much to the chagrin of that famous politician, during an appearance on a local radio talk show long after it became plain that Hydro-Quebec just wasn’t interested in Kathy and her friend and what they had to offer.

The rest don’t know because none of the province’s conventional media reported Dunderdale’s stunning admission 18 months ago or at any time since.

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Dundernomics 101

All Dunderbunny Speaker Roger Fitzgerald has done is ensure the word “dundernomics” gains wide circulation.

Here’s what it is all about:  via The Independent.

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Speaker Dunderbunny shows his bias again

Roger Fitzgerald is undoubtedly one of the most incompetent Speakers ever to hold office in the House of Assembly.

He is also one of the blatantly biased Speakers to hold the chair.

That’s saying something given his chief rival for the ignominious historical achievement is his predecessor, the pompous, biased and incompetent Speaker Harvey Hodder.

As if his bias an incompetence weren’t enough, Fitzgerald displayed naked contempt for parliamentary practice recently by turning up at not one but two partisan events. 

He showed up at a Conservative nominating meeting during the recent federal election.  Not content with that bit of churlishness, anyone attending the recent provincial Conservative coronation for Kathy Dunderdale could see Fitzgerald hanging out with his buds.

Fitzgerald proved his bias and incompetence again on Tuesday with an unprompted ruling that a word was unparliamentary.

Here’s the way Hansard recorded his intervention during a session when his patron, the Premier, got increasingly hot under the collar over questions about why she is trying to hide aspects of the Muskrat falls deal from public scrutiny:

There has been language used in the last two days in Question Period by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition which is clearly unparliamentary when she references a certain type of economics and references a member’s name describing that process.

I ask the hon. member, that in the future if she would be kind enough not to be using unparliamentary language and reference her questions in a different way.

The word Roger didn’t like was “dundernomics.”

Opposition leader Yvonne Jones used it exactly once during question Period on Tuesday.

The facts are recorded in Hansard and as such, it is an unquestionably accurate rendering of the proceedings. The House of Assembly, like all Westminster style parliaments, has judged it so.

To be fair to the Speaker, there is no defined list if what words one can or cannot use in the House. Parliamentary practice in Canada, though, holds that unparliamentary language means the:

use of offensive, provocative or threatening language in the House is strictly forbidden. Personal attacks, insults and obscene language or words are not in order.

Dundernomics is not obviously in any of those categories.

The word – used just once, you will recall – did not disrupt proceedings or increase the heated temperatures in the chamber, the sort of result one might expect to bring a Speaker’s intervention.

And Fitzgerald certainly couldn’t object – as he apparently did – because the word uses the name of a member of the House.  As others have pointed out, Fitzgerald stayed rooted in his spot for years as Tory after Tory after Tory violated the century old (at least) parliamentary tradition to mention a certain member by name and to praise every portion of his anatomy as if he embodied the second coming of the Divine One.

Fitzgerald’s continued presence in the chair is an insult each day to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.  His performance is an ongoing display of contempt for parliamentary democracy.

 

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Dunderdale flips and flops: Muskrat Exemption Errata

Simple subject.

Mondo inaccuracies.

Ginormous confusion

Tuesday was not a good day for anyone trying to figure out what the provincial government is doing with Muskrat Falls.

First of all, let’s go with the basic stuff. 

CBC reported on Monday that the provincial government will use a 1999 amendment to two laws in order to exempt the Muskrat Falls project from scrutiny by the Public Utilities Board.  Specifically, the PUB won’t be able to look at Muskrat Falls and determine if it is the lowest cost project as provided in the Electrical Power Control Act (1994). CBC’s report included confirmation of the exemption from the province’s natural resources minister, Shawn Skinner.

That part is pretty clear.

CBC’s report on Monday and Tuesday night made a couple of references to changes to legislation tied to the Lower Churchill project. Take this one from the online story as an example:

The exemption actually dates back to 1999, when Brian Tobin's Liberal government passed legislation exempting any Lower Churchill project from PUB oversight.

*Insert nasty horn sound effect*

It is hard to imagine being more obviously wrong.

As your humble e-scribbler recounted in another post, the change Kathy Dunderdale and crew are relying on happened in December 1999.  Tobin’s project was pretty much dead by that point although the politicians still talked about it like the corpse could move.

Then-energy minister Roger Grimes made it clear the changes to the Public Utilities Act and the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 were intended to cover other projects  - not the Lower Churchill at all - that might have to come along to fill a gap if the line from the Lower Churchill to the island didn’t happen before the island needed extra power.

That ties to Kathy Dunderdale’s claim in the House of Assembly:

It was their government that exempted the Lower Churchill proposed project of Premier Grimes and at least two of the people opposite to have an exemption from regulatory review.

She’s talking about an order-in-council, apparently:  a cabinet decision.

But then Dunderdale claimed that previous Liberal administrations had exempted every hydro project since 1995.

Minor problem:  the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994 didn’t allow for any exemptions at all.  In fact, the 1994 legislation set the provincial energy policy and gave the PUB the power to make sure that, among other things, their decisions “would result in power being delivered to consumers in the province at the lowest possible cost consistent with reliable service…”.

The PUB got the power to reject a project, order producers to build the lower cost project or even reallocate power from existing projects like Churchill Falls to meet provincial needs.

Exemptions don’t fit with that commitment to protect consumers and to exercise proper control over provincial resources in the public interest.

You can tell Dunderdale was mightily confused on this whole matter because a few minutes after she made the claim about exemptions when exemptions didn’t exist, she said that:

“Mr. Speaker, not only in 1999 did they bring in the legislation allowing for an exemption; in 2000, they produced an Order-in-Council that exempted the Lower Churchill from review by the PUB, Mr. Speaker.”

1995 or 1999? 

Which is it?

Then there’s this contradiction from Skinner’s confirmation that the PUB will not be looking at this project to determine if it is the lowest-cost option:

We have engaged the PUB to review and to determine whether that is the case as well and make that information available to the people of the Province, Mr. Speaker.

So apparently the PUB will review the project but it also won’t review it.

Huh?

Let’s see if more accurate information surfaces in the next few days.

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Dunderdale to hide important Muskrat details from scrutiny/oversight #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale may like to tell people her Muskrat Falls project is the lowest cost option to supply the province with electricity but she is planning to use  changes to the Electrical Power Control Act and the Public Utilities Act made in 1999 to hide important details of the Muskrat Falls deal from public scrutiny.

Under the 1994 Electrical Power Control Act, the Public Utilities Board had a mandate to ensure that power generation came from the lowest cost option available to whatever company was proposing a new power source. 

As well, the PUB itself could direct a power company to supply energy destined for export to meet provincial needs.  That included recalling power from Churchill Falls beyond the power covered by the 1969 contract with Hydro-Quebec.

In 1999, Brian Tobin’s administration amended the two acts in 1999 to cover a situation in which the provincial might have to find additional electricity to meet anticipated demand on the island but didn’t have an a transmission line rom the Lower Churchill project to the island. 

Then energy minister Roger Grimes explained the entire situation in debate on the amendments in the fall 1999 sitting of the House of Assembly.

The [ 1994] legislation absolutely required that the only way Hydro or anybody else could consider bringing on new sources of electricity was to go to the PUB and prove that it was the least cost power, the lowest cost. That is the only thing allowed to be considered under the present legislation.

He then added:

…there will be circumstances where we will need electric energy - it will have to be generated because we do not have it available at the present time - sometime in the next decade or longer, while we are waiting for an in-feed from Labrador. If the only way you can bring it on is to go through a proposal where it has to be lowest cost, then there may be circumstances whereby a development that needs to occur because it is in the best interest of the Province, either for continued social development or continued economic development, that we need to be able to consider something, even though it might be marginally a little higher in cost than some other options that could occur that would not fulfill the immediate need but would provide energy to the grid but not necessarily fulfil an immediate need.

Of course, the situation changed dramatically in the dozen years since Grimes shepherded the amendments through the legislature. 

Despite that, however, the Dunderdale administration will be using the exemptions to make sure the Public Utilities Board doesn’t examine the project to see if it really is the lowest cost alternative. CBC’s David Cochrane reported the exemption story on Monday night but later tweeted this correction/clarification:

On Muskrat: exemption doesn't apply to PUB rate setting process. It applies to PUB cost benefit analysis. Means no public hearings. 1/2

Govt says it will consult PUB on project. But its oversight function will likely be restricted from its normal reach 2/2.

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Great Gambols with Public Money Update:  Having broken the exemption story on Monday, David Cochrane added some important details on the St. John’s Morning Show on Tuesday.

The biggest new point:  government is rationalising the exemption by claiming the projection is outside the mandate of the PUB.  The board is supposed to set electricity prices and regulate the industry, according to the debriefed account of government’s line. This project is about economic development and the poor old PUB shouldn’t be bothering with those things.

That’s bullshite, of course.  The board is supposed to be regulating the industry to make sure consumers are getting the lowest cost power.  By exempting Muskrat from scrutiny,  Kathy Dunderdale and her cabinet are specifically and deliberately keeping the PUB from doing its job of protecting consumers.

More importantly, the exemption rationale confirms that Muskrat Falls is definitely not the most economical way to bring new power to the island. 

Now the project is being sold as “economic development”.  Using the Sprung Greenhouse rationalisation, that’s government code for a project that makes no economic sense whatsoever.   Every provincial government in this province that wanted to build something that turned into a financial disaster insisted that the thing was about economic development and therefore worth all the spending, cost over-runs etc.

Taxpayers can get ready for a disaster of historic proportions.  All the signs are there.

Talk radio on agenda for national political science association

Memorial University political science professors Matthew Kerby and Alex Marland are looking at politics in the province and talk radio again.

This time they are delivering a paper at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association being held at the University of Waterloo this week.

Here’s the short version of their presentation titled “Government Behaviour and Talk Radio in Newfoundland and Labrador”:

Existing qualitative research on the relationship between talk radio and executive behaviour in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador highlights a number of key themes which set the province apart from its contemporaries. These themes include the following: line-stacking, the manipulation of scientific opinion polls and a strong sensitivity as far as purchased scientific opinion polls is concerned. This current research builds on previous efforts by conducting a first round of quantitative analysis on freshly collected data. Specifically, we examine provincial politicians' talk radio presence with respect to frequency, discourse content and opinion poll timing for the period 2003-2010. We also report on how the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador compares to other Canadian provinces as it relates to spending on public opinion data and collection. Our results shed further light on government behaviour in an often-neglected provincial case.

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No Dunderdale in Tory battle of Kilbride

Incumbent member of the House of Assembly John Dinn is facing at least one challenger for the Tory nomination for this fall’s general election.

Maryann Fleming dropped a small handbill in doors throughout the district late last week.  She’s touting her community leadership “passionate” advocacy” and the fact she has been “a power motivating force for change.” The link is to Fleming’s website. She’s also got a blog.

John Dinn should be safe, but the fact there is a challenge gives some weight to rumblings that Tories in the Goulds portion of the district are unhappy with his low profile approach.

Dinn dropped a householder as well last week.  It plays up all the pork he’s supposedly brought to the district.

Two things stand out.  First, neither of these candidates mentions current Premier Kathy Dunderdale anywhere in their literature.

Second,  Dinn’s focus is almost exclusively on things that are most definitely not the responsibility of the provincial government. Sidewalks, community centres, water and sewer services?  If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Dinn was just another city councilor looking for re-election.

Don’t forget that the Kilbride district Tory association is violating the party constitution by opening nominations to any eligible voter in the district.  They could also be breaking the provincial electoral laws if they are using voters lists prepared by the provincial electoral office to run the party nomination.  Someone should check that out to make sure everything is square.

The nomination is this Tuesday at three locations designed to favour the Goulds and Southlands portions of the district. 

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Friday the 13th Traffic Report

In a week of disruptions and hiccups at ye olde Bond Papers, let’s see what people were reading:

1. Fortis on Lower Churchill:  No thanks!
2. For the world is hollow…
3. How west coast Newfoundland could beat the Lower Churchill
4. Not a Mommy blogger…not that there’s anything wrong with that
5. Why columnists need editors
6. NB to seek offshore accord with feds
7. Court docket now online
8. Bell 206 crash – photo interpretation
9. Anyone seen John Hickey?
10. Paul Oram:  minister of revisionist history

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Offshore board opens bids on three parcels

From CNLOPB:

The Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board
(C-NLOPB) announced [on May 12] the details of the 2011 Calls for Bids in the Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Area. Calls for Bids NL11-01 (Area “B” Western Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Region), NL11-02(Area “C” Flemish Pass/North Central Ridge) and NL11-03 (Area “C” Labrador Offshore Region) will consist of eight parcels, which comprise 1,599,295 hectares.

Interested parties will have until 4:00 p.m. on November 15, 2011 to submit sealed bids for parcels offered in Calls for Bids NL11-01, NL11-02 and NL11-03. The sole criterion for selecting winning bids will be the total amount of money the bidder commits to spend on exploration of the respective parcel during Period I (the first period of a nine-year licence). The minimum bid for each parcel offered in Area “C” is $1,000,000 and for Area “B”, $100,000.

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How west coast Newfoundland could beat the Lower Churchill

Take a look around the energy markets right at the moment and anyone with half a clue will be wondering why Kathy Dunderdale and her provincial government are hell-bent on building Muskrat Falls.

The dam is the smaller of two always looked on before now as being the Lower Churchill project and it was always the optional dam.  The Gull Island power station was always considered the most cost effective.  The 2,000 or so megawatts from Gull Island would give enough cash in power sales to justify the cost of building it.

But the generator is only part of the equation.  Look at a globe and see where Gull Island and Muskrat are.

Then look at likely markets.

The Lower Churchill is pretty much as far as you can get from markets other than Quebec without leaving the continent.

As a result, the power lines to get from the dam to the market will be long.

And those long lines will be costly.

In fact, the power lines to get Muskrat Falls power to Newfoundland  - where we have cheaper alternatives the province’s energy company ignores in order to justify a financial pig of a project – and to Nova Scotia is actually more expensive than building the dam and the generators themselves at Muskrat Falls.

Try stringing the power to New York and you get power that is hideously overpriced for any market.

This is something Kathy Dunderdale has already acknowledged, by the way.

But even if all that were not true, any development on the Lower Churchill is going to run headlong into the competition.

Not Hydro-Quebec and its 8,000 megawatts of wind and new hydro, although that is a big enough competitor.

Natural gas.

The price is cheap.

There’s lots of it.

Natural gas is a relatively cheap and relatively clean way to make electricity from fossil fuels.

There are about 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore Newfoundland and Labrador.  Recent discoveries in Quebec and prospects along the Gulf of St. Lawrence basin will only add more natural gas to the pool that’s available in North America. The Quebec provincial government is already looking to attract international investment in natural gas, mining and other development.

West coast Newfoundland could wind up being a major source of natural gas within the next decade if prospects along the eastern edge of the Gulf and onshore pan out.

But for that to happen, the provincial government might well have to abandon its obsession with incredibly expensive power from Muskrat Falls.

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NB to seek offshore accord with feds

Via Canada East:

New Brunswick needs a federal-provincial agreement on offshore oil and gas exploration, along the lines of those signed by Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. And it must finalize such an agreement soon, before the east coast oil-and-gas rush moves into adjacent waters.

The focus is on natural gas.

Natural gas is pretty cheap these days but it can be used to generate electricity more cleanly than with other fossil fuels.

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For the world is hollow…

Okay so a bunch of people are spilling ink or pixels or whatever over a bunch of new members of parliament elected in Quebec as if they were somehow a special breed of politicians significantly different from any others anywhere else in the country.

Bar managers who have never visited their ridings and don’t speak the dominant language of the riding.

Four university students.

All New Democrats elected in Quebec.

You know the story.

And now a bunch of other people are pointing out that they really aren’t such an odd bunch after all.

Lysiane Gagnon has a column in the Globe that Bill Rowe would crib if he was still column-writing.  She rattles off the rather impressive credentials of some of the newly minted politicians.

Susan Delacourt has a blog post over at the Star that is a wee bit more cynical:

Forgive me for dashing any lingering  illusions, but the CV has almost nothing to do with winning and losing elections. And it has even less to do with how well MPs fare once they arrive on Parliament Hill.

Geography and gender are equal, if not more important considerations in choosing cabinet.  Good looks and an ability to repeat party talking points  will score MPs  those  sought-after spots in Question Period and on TV panels. Doing what you're told counts more than talking about what you know.

Gagnon and Delacourt and all the people who are gobsmacked at the greenness of some of the new MPs are each correct, in their own way.

Anyone out there who thought politicians have all been budding Nobel laureates are basically as full of crap as the cynics who dismiss them all as the progeny of several successive generations of first cousin intermarriage.

Hello, Canadians, these are the sorts of people you’ve been electing to represent you since at least 1867.

They are – not surprisingly  - no better than the rest of us. 

Nor are they any worse.

Bit of a shocker, eh?

They also aren’t necessarily any different from the politicians we’ve been electing at the provincial or federal level in the past decade or so, at least.  Since 2003 in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, we’ve had a steady stream of politicians whose previous interest in or knowledge of major issues affecting the province has been a bit sketchy.  Former cabinet minister Paul Oram demonstrated that pretty clearly in a couple of interviews during a trip to Georgia. 

He really isn’t alone.  You can find similar displays of fundamental ignorance from former finance minister Loyola Sullivan talking about Equalization or Danny Williams and Charlene Johnson discussing Abitibi’s history in the province or any of a number of pols talking about hydro-electric development in Labrador.

This is not like missing a question on Jeopardy. Politicians get to vote on the laws that govern our lives. Government spending. Criminal code.  Access to information.  If these politicians don’t really know how things work in the world, then you can figure out that – at least for a while – they are going to make a few mistakes.

Big mistakes, maybe.

Or they’ll be more likely to go with the flow rather than challenge dodgy ideas, like say spending public money without any accountability.

Like in the infamous House of Assembly spending scandal.  How many of the newbie politicians took to the improper spending like ducks to the proverbial water only to claim that the rules they found didn’t say you couldn’t do those sorts of things?  Pretty much all of them.

Now the people just elected to the House of Commons are, for the most part, a clever bunch.  Odds are that they’ll learn.  Odds are that many of them will successful politicians.

And in four years time, many of them will be ex-politicians looking for a new job. 

Just as they reach the point they should have been at when they started.

- srbp -

Fortis on Lower Churchill: No thanks

Fortis had a chance to join in the Lower Churchill project but passed on it because the company has a policy of [not] taking a minority interest in government projects. [edit]

According to the Telegram’s Saturday edition, Fortis chief executive Stan Marshall told shareholders that:

“One of those principles is that we will not get involved in minority situations with governments. That is an absolute rule I have observed.” 

Fortis is currently partnered in the Waneta hydro project with a pair of power companies owned by the B.C. government to build a $900-million power plant.

“You’ll note we own 51 per cent,” said Marshall. “We would not have gotten involved with less than … 51 per  cent.”

Following the  shareholder meeting, Marshall was asked why the company avoids minority stakes.

“Simply when things go wrong we’d like to be able to rectify them,” he told reporters.

“If you’re going to go in with a partner you’ve got to know that partner very, very well, have a lot of commonality.

“Governments … their agenda can be very, very  different than a private enterprise.”

- srbp -

Not a Mommy Blogger…not that there’s anything wrong with that

A few weeks ago, your humble e-scribbler stumbled across St. John’s Toddler, an exceptionally well done local blog by Erika Pittman. 

While it has ben very successful, it was pretty easy to see this blog deserved some wider exposure so I offered Erika this space with no restrictions.  She responded with the piece below.  It introduces the blog and Erika in a simple, frank way.

Then again, that’s what “mommy blogs”  usually are and why they have turned into both a popular form of online expression and a market force in the United States. Mom’s who blog are just one of the many way’s women express themselves online. 

If you want to see just how potent that market segment is, check out BlogHer:

Today, BlogHer is the largest community of women who blog: 25+ million unique visitors per month (Nielsen NetRatings). Engaged, influential and info-savvy, these women come to BlogHer to seek and share advice, opinions and recommendations. BlogHer’s team works hard to bring you the best and brightest conversations, writers and speakers – online and in person. That’s what we do best.

Engaged.  Engaging.  Info-savvy.  That’s pretty much what Erika’s blog is and influential is what we’d predict St. John’s toddler will become.

Enjoy!

EGH

_____________________________________________________________________

by Erika Pittman

I began writing St. John’s Toddler when I was on maternity leave two years ago. I was disappointed in the lack of local information about activities and services available to parents of young children in St. John’s. When I went to the internet in search of local activities and events for children it was hit or miss and most of the activities and services I knew about came from word of mouth. It seemed counter-intuitive to me that you already needed to know what you were looking for in order to Google it, so I started my blog.

St. John’s Toddler is not a ‘mommy blog’ in the typical sense. My intent in the beginning was simply to gather toddler-related information all in one spot. As the blog has grown that scope has expanded slightly, but it is still not a personal blog. I do a daily post, usually focusing on activities, products, events, services, or sometimes I just share a link I found useful. The common theme is parenting children under five years old in St. John’s. I chose to focus on that age group because, at this point anyway; that is my area of expertise. My son turns three this year.

Since the beginning I have tried to encourage people to send in their tips, ideas and reviews because I didn’t want this blog to be about me and my life. The whole personal blogging thing makes me uncomfortable in some ways; I can't seem to get over the 'all about me' thing or the sharing my life with strangers part.  That being said, I have noticed that the posts that are slightly more personal get the most feedback. For example, people were really interested in sharing their experiences and the challenges of taking their toddlers to restaurants after I wrote about which St. John’s restaurants I felt were toddler-friendly. Another interesting thing about the feedback I get is that a good portion of the email I get is from women new to St. John’s looking for things to do with their kids and how to meet other moms and children. I think this affirms my whole reason for starting the blog and I am happy to help them.

I am happy to say that in the two and a half years since I created the blog, a little community has formed around St. John’s Toddler, with loyal readers who send tips and regularly comment. This is exactly what I was striving for. I have begun to expand the blog a little too in recent months. I now have a local family doctor who contributes articles. I hold contests with prizes I buy myself or are generously donated by local businesses. I created an Amazon St. John’s Toddler bookstore for books that my readers or I recommend and I have set up a Twitter account.

This month I am holding the first St. John’s Toddler event; a children’s clothing swap. I am hoping this event will be an opportunity to take the St. John’s Toddler community from the virtual world to the real world and I am looking forward to meeting people I have been talking to by email for years.

I am not sure what will become of  St. John's Toddler when my child turns five, but I have a feeling the content and audience for St. John's Kid and particularly  St. John's Teen will be easy to find!

- srbp -