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.

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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.”

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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!

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Election Week Traffic, May 2011

Big week with lots of fascinating political developments, not the least of which was finding out that Al-Qaeda would admit what the Canadian deputy New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair could not:  Osama was dead.

They didn’t need pictures.

Tom wanted proof.

Parliament Hill will be a fun place this year.

Meanwhile, Bond Papers readers found these posts the most interesting ones of the week:

1. Why the Liberals lost…and the way ahead
2. Anyone seen John Hickey?
3. How do they elect these candidates?
4. This is just the beginning
5. Shocker:  local candidate not important
6. Election 2011 Witticisms
7. The Dunderdale Referendum, encore
8. The Dunderdale Referendum Election
9. Jack knows jack
10. St. John’s South-Mount Pearl:  some first observations

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Not keen on government subsidies

While it may have slipped by in the election hoopla on Monday, the people who decided to vote in a CBC online poll made it pretty clear they didn’t like the provincial government’s announcement of millions in subsidies for the remaining newsprint mill in the province.

67% of respondents picked the option “we’re throwing good money in the wrong place.”  The second most popular choice (14%) thought the company should pay the money back to the provincial government when it was able to do so.

Only 12% thought it was a good idea.  6.5% felt that subsidies were a fact of life.

Now this is by now means a scientific survey but it should give pause for thought.

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Crude drops below US$100

West Texas Intermediate crude oil for June delivery fell below US$100 in New York trading Thursday.

Brent crude, the benchmark for Newfoundland light crude, dropped $12 to trade at US$109 a barrel on Thursday afternoon.

Some analysts blamed weak European and American economic data for the drop. The security picture also changed recently.  While unrest in the Middle East threatens global supplies, the markets appear to have reacted strongly to the death this week of Osama bin Laden.

According to Reuters report carried in the the Ottawa Citizen:

“Crude oil is selling off sharply for two primary reasons: QE2 is coming to an end in June and without a QE3 behind it, it will take liquidity out of the market, hurting risky asset classes such as commodities,” said Chris Jarvis, senior analyst, Caprock Risk Management in New Hampshire, referring to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing.

“With Osama bin Laden dead, the market is adjusting the geopolitical risk premium down accordingly. Given this, speculative money is being taking off the table.”

The provincial government’s 2011 budget is based on oil prices average US$108 per barrel for the year. - srbp -

Shocker: local candidate not important

Canadian voters tend not to pay much attention to the local candidate.

Your humble e-scribbler made the point earlier on Thursday in a lengthy post.

And just for good measure, the Globe and Mail’s Jane Taber drops a little note on research done by one consulting firm right after the Monday election.  The conclusion:

“Participants told us they see this as proof that Canadians voted based on parties and leaders rather than their local candidate,” Ensight’s Jacquie LaRocque told The Globe. “Hardly a single participant across the entire country told us they voted for their local candidate.”

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Separated at Birth: two and a half men edition

Realtor Jim Burton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jon Cryer:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How do they elect these candidates?

Craig Welsh is a bastard who used be be from St. John’s. Now he lives in Iqaluit where he spent some time the other day pondering some of the candidates elected recently.

You can find his blog post here:  towniebastard.blogspot.com

All of which is a preamble to I'm sure there's a punchline to last night's election results in Quebec, but I've never really got French humour. For example, Ruth Ellen Brosseau won her seat despite:

A. Not living in the riding.
B. Going to Vegas in the middle of the campaign.
C. Her riding is 98% French and she can't really speak it that well.
D. Appears to have not even visited the riding during the election.

Yet she got 40% of the vote, won the seat and now gets a $150,000+ a year job, which is a bit of a step up from assistant manager at a pub.
So yes, there's a punchline here somewhere, I just don't get it. Can someone explain French humour to me, please?

A wise man, experienced in the arts of the campaign, once told your humble e-scribbler that a candidate in any given riding is basically worth about 5% of the vote total.  Monday’s night result was brutal example of just how true that is.  Any hint of scepticism left in this corner is gone.

The other chunk of the candidate votes in any given riding come from voting tradition, that is people who always or usually vote for the same party.  The other bit is driven by the campaign itself, usually at the national or provincial level.

Now there are individual candidates who can count for more.  We are talking averages here. So quick recap:  candidate:  a little.  Tradition and the campaign:  a lot.

Now in Quebec, as in Newfoundland and Labrador, voters also seem to make a distinction between provincial elections and federal ones.  They tend to pay less attention to federal campaigns.  Take a gander at some statistics on turn-out in federal elections by Memorial University professor Alex Marland and you can see the idea. 

People in this province typically don’t turn up in great numbers to vote for their federal representatives. In the 60 years after Confederation, turn-out in the province for a federal election cracked 70% exactly twice.  It hit the high 60s a few times but for the most part, turn-out has been less than 60% of eligible voters.

By contrast, provincial elections get turn-outs about 10 percentage points higher.

Marland puts this down to a bunch of factors including literacy levels.  That night be part of it, but frankly the one idea that really seems to explain the difference in turn-out  over time is proximity or familiarity.  Provincial ridings are smaller than federal ones. People may know the local candidate personally and odds are good they will get the chance to shake all the hands of everyone. 

The same can’t be said at the federal level.  And that is reinforced by the fact Ottawa is so far away both physically and mentally for most people.  Think of it as an extreme version of the old saying that all politics is local.

In other words, people don’t seem to see federal members as being as important as their provincial ones when it comes to affecting their lives. It’s hard to come up with a better idea to explain people trooping to the polls to vote for candidates with precious little life experience in some instances, let alone the kind of experience one needs to be an effective political representative in the national legislature.

There’s another notion you can add to this as well:  just as people don’t seem to be as personally connected to their federal candidates as they might have been once, the relentless message from the news media is that the individual candidate simply doesn’t have any kind of power and influence. Sure candidates make some promises but you have to wonder if people actually believe that, for argument sake, any of the newly minted parliamentarians will be able to do much now that the Harper gang have a majority.

Did the voters on Flower Hill mark their “x” for Ryan because he promised to relentlessly fight to get a n inquiry into the fishing industry or because Jack Layton promised to deliver more doctors and nurses?  Did they even know that Ryan  - himself  - thinks that is his main job now that he is off to Ottawa to spend more time with the kids?

In Newfoundland and Labrador,  people have an object lesson [on all this] right in front of them.  For the past seven years, local politicians counted for exactly zero compared to the Saviour of the Universe, attended by a raft of disciples who knew he crapped nuggets of pure gold every day, thrice a day. Now whether that is true or not on any level isn’t as important as the fact that some people seemed to believe it.

So if you have people getting this relentless message from politicians and from news media that everything is about Steve and Danny or Michael and Jack, and the local guy is just a placeholder or a bootlicker, you can see why people in Quebec and elsewhere might just look at what colour someone is and cast vote on that basis.

Disagree? In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the most visible campaign sign in the riding was a four foot by four foot sign bearing the name of Jack Layton.  This was no accident.  Nor was it an accident that smiling Jack was everywhere on NDP householders and in television and radio spots. Heck, even  Liberals like Scott Andrews are blaming the Liberal loss on the fact that Michael Ignatieff supposedly had no charisma and people didn’t like him compared to Jack and his accordion playing smile. 

There are a bunch of different reasons why people vote the way they do.  Tradition counts for much of it.  The dynamics of the campaign are part of it as well. But increasingly the evidence seems to be that local candidates don’t matter very much at all when it comes to voters making decisions about who gets their vote.

You can vote for a unilingual anglophone bar manager who has never visited your riding because she  - or by extension the federal political system - doesn’t count in the ordinary voter’s mind.

Now place-holder candidates aren’t new in politics.  England had its rotten borough and Newfoundland still has its seats where the party of choice can run a half-eaten Mary Brown’s snack box and the voters would send it off to St. John’s.  It just seems that these days, individual candidates seem to count for less and less.

This also doesn’t mean that everyone who does get elected these days is a previously chewed tater.  Politicians are a cross-section of society as a whole.  You get your good ones and your not-so-good ones.  You get your exceptional people and you get your oxygen thieves.

It’s just that we seem to be in a period where voters sometimes don’t seem to pay much attention to local candidates when they vote.  Good, bad or indifferent, local candidates don’t seem to count for much.

And incidentally, for the people on Flower Hill, the New Democrats want to take the tax off home heating fuel.  It’s just that they have also promised to back a provincial Conservative plan to make sure that anyone on fixed and low incomes will pay twice as much for electricity, guaranteed,  even without taxes, while people outside the province can get the same power for about what you are paying for it now. 

Not bad, eh?

The NDP aren’t alone.  The Liberals and the Conservatives in your riding promised basically the same thing.

You are forgiven if you missed that bit, though, in all the clips of Jack and the squeeze-box.

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[Proofed, edited to make sentences read more clearly]

This is just the beginning

People seem to forget that the federal New Democratic caucus was already made of people who seemed a little… what’s word… sketchy.

The latest:

The deputy leader of Canada's new Official Opposition party says he doubts the U.S. has photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.

Thomas Mulcair, who stands in for NDP Leader Jack Layton in the House of Commons when he is away, told CBC's Power & Politics with Evan Solomon that he doesn't believe photos exist of bin Laden following his killing by U.S. forces on Sunday in Pakistan.

"I don't think, from what I've heard, that those pictures exist and if they do I'll leave that up to the American military," he told host Evan Solomon.

And right behind that the party’s foreign affairs critic disowned the official Jack Layton stand-in.

"We have no reason to doubt the veracity of President Obama’s statement," Dewar wrote in an emailed statement.

This is just the beginning of the mess that is now the official opposition. 

Meanwhile, has anyone asked the party’s defence critic what he thinks of all this?

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The Dunderdale Referendum, encore

Pretty well every single conventional media outlet ran a story in the wake of the federal election about how the results might affect Kathy Dunderdale and the provincial Conservatives.

CBC has an online story about a possible “hangover.”  The Telly had a front pager on Wednesday on the same subject. NTV has a bit quoting Tom Marshall who denies there will be any backlash. 

Not surprisingly, the provincial Conservatives all claim things are rosy and wonderful.

But here’s what this is really all about

Kathy Dunderdale and her crowd joined with the argument federally that the provincial Tories have used relentlessly on their own since 2003.  It was all about getting behind the guys in power to get your goodies.  Voters in the province rejected that flatly.

Dunderdale and her team did not produce a single victory other than the squeaker in Labrador.  Everywhere else, their candidates got their asses handed to them. And that guy in Labrador is not one of Kathy’s crew.  He’s got his own mind and his own agenda and it may not match up with Kathy’s. This vote result is a major rebuke for Kathy Dunderdale by voters.

Politically, Kathy herself backed off her position as it became clear voters didn’t buy her endorsement.  She had members of her caucus who didn’t campaign with the rest or who did only the barest of bare minimums. Did Dunderdale herself make any campaign stops other than the one with Harper himself?

Dunderdale’s own statement on the results is exactly three sentences of bland platitudes. There is no reference to the loan guarantee and the Lower Churchill, at all. There is that line again about legitimate aspirations, whatever they are.  Sounds more like a hollow phrase cooked up  by the back-room brain trust rather than something that anyone  - including Dunderdale - actually understands.

Maybe she has finally looked at her own polls that show Muskrat is an issue for a mere three percent of voters.  The biggest issues for people are health care and the economy/job creation.  If she wants to create a connection between Muskrat and jobs, clearly people don’t see it.

But as referenda go, Dunderdale just took a huge political gamble and lost.

Badly.

Whether or not the Prime Minister delivers the loan guarantee actually doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Dunderdale launched a political campaign that, on the face of it, was the counter-part to ABC, and she couldn’t deliver.

That got noticed.

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Jack knows jack

Living in the west end of St. John’s out by working dairy farms you get used to the smell of cow manure and chicken crap.

Nothing however, compares to the hum coming off Jack Harris and Ryan Cleary who’ve been running around claiming that their victories in the federal election will translate into provincial gains.

A left-wing wave that is sending two St. John's New Democrats to Ottawa could keep rolling into the Newfoundland and Labrador election this fall, a re-elected MP says.

"Something that I believe firmly is that most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians actually have the same values and the same idea of what government should be about as New Democrats," St. John's East MP Jack Harris told CBC News.

Okay.

So for that to be true, people who usually and steadfastly vote for provincial Conservatives and who readily switch parties federally would have to abandon decades of practice.

Every single seat on the northeast Avalon – which Cleary and Harris as members of parliament in Ottawa - is a Tory seat and has been for seven years.

The NDP won Cleary’s seat by getting switch voters to switch.

D’uh!

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.

But here’s a second check on Harris’ prediction.  Jack won his riding handily in 2008. Again, massive Conservative vote switching, plus people who abandoned the Liberals at the same time.

There have been two provincial by-elections in Harris’ riding since then.  Both went to the provincial Conservatives by embarrassingly gigantic margins.  Jack Harris’s victory in 2008 and his electoral machine had zero discernable impact anywhere at the provincial level.

Now there are reasons for that we’ll get into for another post.

For now let’s just say that Jack and Ryan have a talking point that just laughable. Doesn’t matter though.  The boys have their work cut out for them in Ottawa so they’ll be a bit pre-occupied come the fall to try and live up to their predictions.

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St. John’s South-Mount Pearl: Vote Results Commentary

Take a look at the vote results in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl in the last four federal general elections and you can see the dramatic switch of Conservative votes to New Democrat votes.

Let’s start with the advance poll turn-out.  This is really just to remind everyone of the first sign something big was on the way.

The 2011 advance turn-out was 91% above the next highest, in 2006.  The advance vote turn-out in 2008  - the year of the Conservative civil war called ABC - was slightly below the range for the two previous elections but there was actually nothing radically out of line with it.

Now look at the results for the three major parties for the same elections.

First of all, the total vote for all three parties ranges from 33,137 in 2008 to 38,567 in 2011.  Leaving 2008 aside, total vote for the three parties in 2011 is only 4.2% higher than it was in 2006.

The Liberal 2011 vote total is 550 below the 2004 result and 3799 below the 2008 tally. On the whole, it is consistent with Liberal vote in the riding going back more than a decade. The 1997 Liberal vote in the old riding configuration, for example, was roughly 12,500. 

On the face of it, Siobhan Coady appears to have managed to capture and hold most of the usual Liberal vote in the riding over the four elections.  She gained about 2600 votes during the Conservative civil war, commonly known as the ABC campaign in 2008.

The most striking changes are in the Conservative and New Democrat vote.  Basically the two parties have traded places.

In 2004, when the provincial Conservatives held back from completely supporting the federal party, Loyal Hearn held the seat for the Conservatives.  Hearn increased his vote total in 2006 when the provincial Conservatives openly supported their federal cousins. In 2008, the civil war destroyed the connection between the two almost completely.

Take a look at the New Democrat number in that election and you can tell where the homeless Conservatives went. The bulk of them went to Cleary.  Some others stayed home.  A few went to Coady, likely the result of direct appeals by provincial Conservative cabinet ministers and members of the provincial legislature.

The 2008 vote total is the lowest of the four elections and the total for the four elections is actually fairly consistent over time. That strongly suggests that new voters didn’t enter the field suddenly in 2008.  Rather, existing Conservative voters opted for the New Democrats instead of the Liberals.

That same trend continued into 2011. The other part of the change was Loyola Sullivan who appears to have attracted old Conservatives back or pulled them away from Coady.  The new voters into the system were either old Conservatives who came back or some new voting from people who had not voted in the preceding four elections.

In 2011, the NDP vote increased by 4684.  Conservative vote increased by 4539.  That’s a combined total of  9,223. Liberal vote dropped by 3,799.  Total vote for all three parties increased by 5,430.  That’s a total of 9,229. 

There are a couple of things one can say about all this:

First, there is no way of knowing with absolute certainty which voters moved where and whether the increased total in 2011 came from new voters, old voters coming back or a combination of the two.  There just isn’t any information that would let anyone figure it out conclusively.

Second,  given the overall consistency in the total votes for the three parties, it is more likely that the changes in NDP support came from vote moving from the Conservatives to the New Democrats than from Liberals or from new voters.

Third, the result in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl isn’t part of any national trend toward the New Democrats. The 2011 result came from a trend that began before the 2011 campaign.

Fourth,  since the federal NDP voters in 2011 appear to be coming predominantly from provincial Conservatives, it is highly unlikely the New Democrats can translate their federal success into significant changes at the provincial level.

The party may have a good cadre of workers. They simply don’t have a reliable pool of voters who consistently vote for the same party federally and provincially.  The NDP won St. John’s South-Mount pearl by appealing to swing voters.  By definition, they are liable to swing in the future.  What could make them swing would be a good subject for further, detailed research.

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Why the Liberals lost…and the way ahead

You will read plenty of commentary on this election and the overwhelming majority of it will be complete and unvarnished horseshit.

Put it all out of your mind.

If you want to understand why Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals tanked so badly, read Rob Silver’s take on things.

Unite the left?  Rob puts it slightly differently that this but your humble e-scribbler is in the exact same neighbourhood: the two left-wing parties in this country at he federal level already got together to form the Bloc NDP.

Then read his ideas on what the party needs to do to come back.

He’s got that right, too.

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Election 2011 Witticisms

With a Conservative majority, odds are good senate reform will move along in the near future.

That could resurrect the idea of a Triple E senate: equal, elected and effective.

Add to that, according to one tweeter, that Peter Penashue’s win in Labrador could lead to a Triple P senate later in the year once Senator Bill Rompkey retires in a few weeks’ time.

Triple P?

Don’t look so confused.

 

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St. John’s South-Mount Pearl: some first observations #elxn41

1. Jack Layton is the new member of parliament for St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.  Remember those signs?  It wasn’t an accident the most visible sign was Jack Layton four bys.
2. Strategic plan.  Well-executed.  The NDP targeted this riding at a national level and drove the local plan according to the national need.  Their local communications materials played down the local candidate and played up the key messages that nationally targeted the issues research showed were important.  The local radio spots were classic local NDP:  top quality in every respect, right down to only mentioning the candidate when they had to.  otherwise they were right on the strategic point.
3. Warning:  Steep learning curve ahead.  Ryan Cleary may be the guy in the seat but there is no guarantee he understands how he got there.  His first media comments – talking about a provincial orange tide in October – tells you he has no idea who voted for him and why.  His second comments about priorities – fisheries inquiry – shows he really doesn’t have a clue as to how he got there.  This guy could be an accident waiting to happen.
4. You can’t hide him forever.  The follow-on to that is a warning to New Democrats that they can’t keep Ryan under wraps forever. In the run-up to the election, he didn’t have a platform to give him a high profile and with it his characteristic propensity to say things he inevitably would regret. That was a key to winning the seat.  The NDP brain trust better work hard on Number Three and hope it works before Number Four cuts in.  Go back and watch him during any of the debates during the campaign and you’ll see what an up-hill fight someone will have to get this guy ready for the Big Time.
5. Everyone missed it.  Outside of the campaigns, no one likely had a clue on voter trending in the riding.  Your humble e-scribbler ran with the pack on this one, labelling it a race that was too close to call.  We all got it wrong. 
6. The Blue Goes Orange.  What we all missed was the extent to which people who usually voted Conservative in the riding headed off to the NDP.  Not only did the Liberals lose votes, another block of voters who sat out in 2008 came back with a vengeance and headed for the NDP and Conservatives.   But it is important to know that Coady held the core Liberal vote over time.  What she lost were obviously the blue people who, especially in 2008 followed orders and went for the Liberals.  Left to their own devices they flooded to the Orange Team.
7. The NDH Play was a bust.  Remember what your humble e-scribbler said about provincial Tories not playing the Dunderdale game?  Well, here’s your proof.  If the awesome Tory machine in SJSMP had really backed the federal Cons with the vengeance some people would have you believe they did, then they could have elected the lead from Weekend at Bernies.  As it is, Loyola Sullivan tanked badly.
8. Look what happened last time.  Siobhan Coady was as organized as she has ever been and as aggressive as she could get.  Her campaign team deserves kudos for their efforts on the ground.  Unfortunately, Siobhan doesn’t seem to have figured out who she was really running against, ever.  Her messaging made that pretty clear what with the recycled 2008 talking points.  It’s really too bad.  Siobhan could have made a significant mark.

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The Dunderdale Referendum Election #elxn41

Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her team of provincial Conservatives decided to throw their weight behind the federal Conservatives in this election.

Talk about your epic fail.

Kathy made this a referendum on her Muskrat Falls policy, her leadership and her political potency.

Only one of her candidates took a first place finish.  Peter Penashue beat Todd Russell in a squeaker.

In Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, a last minute announcement in Corner Brook gave a flimsy cover for four cabinet ministers to get to the west coast to help Trevor Taylor against Liberal Gerry Byrne.  Waste of time and taxpayer-funded travel.

And in Avalon, where former incumbent Fabian Manning came frustratingly close, he can take the credit for most of that vote.  He worked hard after losing the seat in a close run in 2008 and Manning would have waged a tough campaign without provincial help.  Of course, he did get help, some if quite strong from people like Jerome Kennedy. It just wasn’t enough.

Then consider that the federal Conservatives – most of them former provincial cabinet ministers – all campaigned on the argument that you needed someone on the government side or else you’d starve.  It’s an argument the provincial Conservatives have used relentlessly since 2003.  They’ve waged a relentless and very old fashioned campaign of favouring districts they held and punishing opposition districts for things like road paving.

Voters across Newfoundland and Labrador  - including a raft of provincial Conservative voters - rejected that flatly.

The two changes in the province, one in St. John’s South -  Mount Pearl and the other in Labrador, have other implications that are worth their own posts.

But for now, the first-blush reaction to the federal result in Newfoundland and Labrador is that it doesn’t bode well for the province’s Conservatives.

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Dunderdale admin pours more cash into Corner Brook paper mill

On top of the millions in subsidies it has already provided to Corner Brook Pulp and Paper (Kruger), Kathy Dunderdale’s administration announced on Monday that it would pay $4.3 million over three years  to help workers at the mill upgrade their skills.

The only logical step next is for Kathy Dunderdale and her cabinet to give Kruger a receipt for the whole shooting match.

After all, taxpayers basically bought the mill piece by piece.

In related news, an economics professor at Memorial University thinks these sorts of subsidies don’t work:

[Michael] Wernerheim has high praise for the province's forest management strategy and for wanting to lay out a new path for an industry in decline, such as supporting smaller operations, like saw mills, and putting a greater focus on forests as ecosystems. 

But he found the government spends too much time, effort and money on continuing to support failing ways to protect jobs in the newsprint sector. 

"These short-term initiatives to protect jobs can retard the restructuring of the industry that we all want to see happening," he said.

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Bin Laden is dead!

From the New York Times account:

In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A.operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.

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Change is in the air… or maybe not #elxn41

In Election 2011, perhaps more so than any other recent election, people can see the shortcomings of national opinion polls.

They may capture an overall national picture but with horrendous margins of error and often limited information about voting behaviour they are all but useless in trying to project seat counts and even party standings. It’s not a problem facing one pollster;  it’s across the board.

You can also see the shortcomings of media commentary, especially as the electronic media seems to rely almost exclusively on reporters interviewing other reporters. There was a fine example of that last Friday on the CBC Radio Morning Show. There were penetrating insights into the fairly obvious: Avalon and St. John’s South-Mount Pearl might change hands.

And even some true head-scratchers like a version of the threehundredeight.blogspot.com seat projection that had Random-Burin-St. Goerges going Tory. John Ottenheimer coming on strong?  We’ll see.

There were also coments about “splits” and generalizations about how it all comes down to the “ground game”. That’s politico speak for getting vote to the polls. Again, it’s a bit like describing the intricacies of brain surgery by referring to a copy of Gray’s Anatomy of the human body.

What would have distinguished Friday’s commentary from the run-of-the-mill fare was any concrete information on what the campaigns actually look like on the ground.

And that’s where the local story starts to get interesting.  Anyone who believes that  Kathy Dunderdale’s people will be turning out en masse for the federal Conservatives, it just ain’t so. Some provincial Tory members of the House of Assembly have been working hard personally. Some have been doing only the minimum they had to in order to get by. A few more than Ed Buckingham have done exactly shag-all.

Now that may not be what you hear if you ask a Tory insider directly but the evidence of what actually happened will be clear once polling is done.

And as for the rank and file workers, that’s a whole other story. Kathy Dunderdale cannot direct them any more than Danny could actually get the blue people to vote Liberal in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl last time.  She quite obviously couldn’t lure them back from the New Democratic Party in St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, let alone brow-beat them threaten them or otherwise produce the outcome some people might have been expecting.

This will NOT be a reverse ABC.

This very much will be a referendum on Kathy Dunderdale.  If Fabian Manning wins Avalon, it is a seat he won largely on his own.  If no other seats turn blue, the Dunderdale failed.  And if the Tory vote doesn’t shoot up to levels along the lines of what they saw in 2004 or 2006, then Dunderdale failed.  Monday could be a very bad night for Kathy Dunderdale.

Knowing what is happening on the ground will also tell you what odds there might be that some sort of NDP surge might have a wider effect on ridings in this province.  The national New Democrats have targeted the South.  It is getting money and bodies. They appear to have taken a strategy of minimising their candidate’s profile and played up Jack Layton very strongly.  If they are half as organized on voting day as they appear heading into the last day,  Ryan Cleary will give incumbent Siobhan Coady a very hard run for her money.  He might win.  It is close.

One potential factor to cross off your list:  Loyola Sullivan.  His angry old Rain Man routine simply turned people off.  His ego campaign – big round Loyola heads in front of a flag – simply looked ridiculous. 

Outside of St. John’s,  the Avalon is likely the only riding that will go blue and the NDP have resorted to names on ballots in every other riding other than the South. Miracles do happen but with no money and no organization, the orange people don;t stand much of a chance. 

As for the Tories, they will come in second in every seat off the Avalon. Certainly in Labrador, John Hickey has been campaigning hard for a senate seat, errr his federal friends, but odds are that Peter Penashue won’t be the new Tory member of parliament for Labrador.  Stay tuned on the senate seat.

Take that sort of stuff as a good indicator of what could be happening elsewhere.  In Quebec, people are telling pollsters they love the NDP. Problem is that the NDP only had the resources and committed the resources to Quebec that reflected their earlier appraisal that they could maybe hang on to one seat. Unless they have suddenly turned up hordes of volunteers in the past few weeks, they will have a devil of time turning those stated intentions into actual marks on a ballot. 

Again, stranger things have happened, but don’t be surprised if election results tonight coming out of Quebec don’t live up to advance billing.

The two places to watch nationally outside Quebec are the Greater Toronto Area and British Columbia. The Conservatives have targeted their energy into ridings  where they can turn them over and they could wind up squeaking out a comfortable minority or even a slim majority.

Change could be in the air.

But then again, it might not be.

You’ll only know for sure once the whole thing is done.

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April Showers Traffic for 2011

A fascinating month of April for traffic at ye olde e-scribbler’s corner of cyberspace shows a wind range of stories.

There’s the surprise first place honours for a post about rather sleazy piece of editing in order to fabricate a political attack.  One media outlet got suckered into using it.

Not surprisingly, most of the posts in the Top 10 in April are about Muskrat Falls and the possible implications of the federal election on Kathy Dunderdale’s leadership.

The really amazing thing is that a post on the last day of the month hit Number 10.

If you think this is all curious stuff, though wait until next month.  There’s a federal election on Monday and then the provincial government has to struggle through three more weeks of the provincial legislature (plus its a polling period) before they can head off to the summer campaign runs.

2011 will be an amazing political year across Canada.

1. Invented story:  political appointee and CBC attack government political opponent
2. A new Sprung greenhouse in the wilds of Labrador
3. Average NL family to pay $1000 per year more for Muskrat Falls power:  former PC finance minister
4. Another cheaper, greener alternative to Muskrat Falls
5. Buckingham not only local Tory to buck Dunderdale line on Harper
6. NTV/Telelink poll:  close, closer, no cigar and a referendum on Dunderdale
7. Conservative householder a multilevel bust
8. Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted
9. One big happy Conservative family... maybe
10. A little perspective, people

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A little perspective, people #elxn41

Nanos Research produces polls that are usually deadly accurate for the entire country.

But…

If you look at the regional breakdowns it rapidly becomes obvious that the regional numbers are useless for anything but wanking material for the twitterati.

You’ve likely seen a lot of references to “statistical ties” when people talk about polling during this election.  Well, at the regional level, the margins of error have been so wide sometimes that all parties have been in a “statistical tie” for most of the campaign. 

For example, Nanos’ April 28 Atlantic results at an MoE of about 10 percentage points.  Basically, that means it is possible the actual result is somewhere within a 20 point spread.  In BC the range is about 16 or 17 points. 

You’ll find that Ipsos’ April 29 poll has exactly the same basic problem.

And speaking of wank material, your humble e-scribbler could not pass up the opportunity to point out that Jack Layton’s over-the-top performance with reporter’s about a Sun media report suggests there is something here the guy is definitely up-tight about. 

And it isn’t the pain of having to face unfounded accusations.

Obviously this pales in comparison to the persistent smear job at least one NDP candidate has been mounting against an opponent.  That’s just hypocrisy, the NDP stock-in-trade.

More importantly, though, Jack’s grumpiness and use of bizarro third person references with passive voice sentences sounds like an attempt to mentally distance himself from something he finds difficult to address:

"Absolutely nothing wrong was done; there's no wrongdoing here…”

People don’t speak about nothing at all in this way.  The story deserved a contemptuous sneer.  Instead it got treated to a swooning counter-attack but not a personal one. 

Who did absolutely nothing wrong?  Hard to tell.  And that’s an odd counterpoint to a TV spot in which Layton promises he personally won’t stop until the job is done.

Imagine how Jack will handle it if he starts reading Gilles Duceppe talking points in Question Period as leader of the Bloc NDP.

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Traffic for the WTF Election #elxn41

There’s a decent chance that Canadians will wake up on Tuesday morning having traded Stephen Harper and his crowd of federal Conservatives for Jack Layton leading a raft of new members of parliament many of whom were only names on a ballot before Monday.

Just think about it for a minute.

The entire country winds up where Ontario was in October 1990.  People woke up across that province, looked around and realised that a whole bunch of them had marked their ballot for the Dippers figuring that they were the only ones doing it.  It was a province-wide 11-beer beautiful moments too many of have discovered we had on the morning after the night before.

This one could make the Guinness book of records for most people doing a simultaneous forehead slap.

In more modern language, this could become “The WTF Election” as Canadians look at the news Tuesday and wonder what-the-f**k everyone else was thinking when they got to the polling station.

Nobody can say that elections are boring and no one should ever complain about democracy in action.

People get exactly the government they deserve, every time.

And they also get to tell us what posts are most interesting here in this corner of the cyber-universe.  This week is no exception:

1. Conservative householder a multi-level bust
2. Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position
3. Advance Poll turn-out comparison
4. The choice is clear
5. The cost of doing business:  Muskrat Falls version
6. The peter principle
7. “The prize is worth the fight”:  Hearn rebuts Skinner on Muskrat Falls
8. US diplomatic cable reveals Emera trepidation about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill Falls
9. Attack of the fluffy bunnies
10. Nail ‘em up I say

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Dipper sleazeball tactics refuted #elxn41

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The choice is clear #nlpoli #elxn41

This is one of those political pictures destined to go down in history.

In years to come, they’ll refer to it as one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Like posting the picture on Facebook from Las Vegas of you, drunk, a pair of panties on your head, taking a leak in the middle of some street on that wild post-graduation trip.

You know the one.

Kathy Dunderdale now has one of those pictures. Every household in the province will likely have one by Monday, courtesy of Kathy’s new buddy, Stephen Harper.

It’s hard to know if she was drunk with Harper’s charm,  if all the trappings of having a job she never, ever dreamed she could get went to her head or she just started to believe she really is all that and a bag of political potato chips.

But whatever the reason, there’s no taking this sucker back.

Come the fall, you can bet that this is just one picture Kathy Dunderdale will see over and over and over again in any place where voters can see it.

 

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US diplomatic cable reveals Emera “trepidation” about talks with Williams on Lower Churchill

A cable from the American consulate in Halifax relays concerns that Emera had about negotiations with Danny Williams on the Lower Churchill.

Dated 15 January 2010, the cable is a summary of a meeting between the American consul general and James Spurr, a senior executive with the Nova Scotia-based company. The cable is available from Wikileaks.

Emera and the Lower Churchill: "Are we being used here?"

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¶4. (SBU) Closer to home Spurr talked about another possible venture for Emera: transmitting power from the proposed Lower Churchill River project in Labrador to New England. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland-Labrador (N-L) have an MOU to explore this option which would require the construction of sub-sea and overland power lines to transmit the power. Money issues aside, there would be technological challenges to overcome in this scenario. However, Spurr emphasized that with Emera's experience in dealing with transmission systems, natural gas pipelines and its knowledge of regulatory processes, it would not be an impossible feat. The unknown factor, as Spurr explained, is N-L Premier Danny Williams. Spurr explained that N-L had been the victim of bad resource deals in the past which have left Williams very cautious if not suspicious in his business negotiations. Given that legacy, Spurr remarked that he and his senior colleagues are equally cautious in dealing with the premier, with knowledge it makes more financial sense for N-L to do a deal with Quebec than with them. In fact, Spurr indicated he wouldn't be surprised if William ended up doing just that, and leaving Spurr and colleagues to speculate that Williams might be using them to exert more pressure on Quebec to offer a better deal for N-L.

That would have been a pretty savvy guess for Emera, given that in September 2009 Kathy Dunderdale revealed publicly that she and Williams had tried unsuccessfully for five years to lure Hydro-Quebec into taking an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill.

Conventional news media in Newfoundland and Labrador have never reported Dunderdale’s comments or made any other references to talks with Quebec despite the audio of Dunderdale’s comments being readily available.

In 2010, as part of his political exit strategy, Danny Williams signed a term sheet with Emera that could lead to development of a dam at Muskrat Falls. Under the deal, Emera will receive 35 terawatt years of electricity from Muskrat Falls in exchange for the cost of building a transmission line from Newfoundland to Cape Breton. In a conference call with reporters at time the tentative deal was announced, Emera executives’ comments suggested they had balked at earlier versions of the deal in part because the cost of power from Muskrat Falls was too high.

The current proposal is based entirely on the sale of power within Newfoundland and Labrador at full cost plus a guaranteed rate of return for the provincial government energy company. Premier Kathy Dunderdale acknowledged in the House of Assembly earlier this year that Muskrat Falls power will be too expensive to sell outside the province except at discount rates.

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Conservative householder a multi-level bust

Someone on the mainland decided to design a campaign householder for the federal Conservatives.

Pretty picture.

Nice little headline there.

You can tell the person is not from the province where it got dropped this past week.  There are two rather obvious  - and related - problems.  See if you can guess what the problem is.

No?

The name of the province is Newfoundland and Labrador and that’s Problem One.

Bigger problem is that in Labrador – where this thing is going as well as on the island – there is considerable opposition to the project because it is all about power for Newfoundland…

and shag-all for Labrador.

Stunned enough that the provincial Connies conned their federal Connie cousins into backing something that only 3% of people think should be a major priority for the province.

Stunneder still is the fact that the Pavement Putin of the Permafrost and his crowd are attacking Liberal Todd Russell’s opposition to the project as if that was somehow going to work against him come polling day.

Stunnedest of all, the Harper Bunker drops this little gem across the province, especially in Labrador where it will go over like the proverbial fart in church.  Todd Russell will be laughing all the way to the polls.

There are no wounds as painful as self-inflicted ones.

- srbp -

Economy not sizzling in Tom Marshall’s home town

Finance minister Tom Marshall has always had a curious relationship with reality.

He likes to talk about debt reduction, for example, but he never really does anything about it, or as in his plan for Muskrat falls, he actually wants to increase the public debt by upwards of 50% of its current size.

When Marshall delivered the most recent budget – and set a record for public spending in the process – he told reporters that “our economy is sizzling right now.”

Tom must be referring to Bermuda or Barbados or wherever it is he takes the sun during the colder months.

He certainly isn’t talking about his own district of Humber East.

The Western Star reported on Thursday that the major container line serving the province is dropping Marshall’s home town of Corner Brook from its destinations.

Capt. Sid Hynes told The Western Star Thursday afternoon that export freight from Corner Brook has dropped by around 70 per cent and imported cargo has declined by about 30 per cent in the last five years.

Exports down by 70%.

Imports down by 30%.

Since 2005.

Now it surely doesn’t take an expert to tell that this is not an economy that is sizzling.

Anyone who claims it is sizzling might be fried though.

- srbp -

The cost of doing business: Muskrat Falls version

Building the gravity base structure and drilling production wells for the Hebron project are now estimated at $8.3 billion, according to news stories on Wednesday.  In its story, The Telegram cites documents filed as part of the Hebron consortium's development application.

That's two thirds more than the original estimate of $5.0 billion.

Okay.

So if a project estimate prepared by people highly experienced in these types of projects and who have a keen interest in cost control has climbed by 66% in such a short period, odds are good that we can also change any cost estimates for a bunch of people with a lot less experience in building gigantic projects.

Like say Nalcor, a company that has, contrary to its own claims, shag-all experience in megaprojects.

They tell the world that a dam on the Lower Churchill river and a bunch of transmission lines will cost exactly the same as it would have in 1998:  roughly $6.2 billion.

Yeah, sure, buddy.

Put a Hebron cost multiplier on that sucker and you get $10.2 billion. We have not even factored in any inflationary impact.

But that is bad enough.

We are not done yet.

According to Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Muskrat Falls power would cost 14.3 cents per kilowatt hour to produce.  That is based on the project cost of $6.2 billion.

So if we can reasonably increase project costs by 66%, you can increase the cost per kilowatt hour by a similar amount.

Do the math.

It isn't pretty.

- srbp -

Advance Poll turn-out comparison #elxn41

For the vote geeks out there, take a gander at this lovely chart showing turn-out in advance polls held in federal general elections from 2004 to 2011 for each of the ridings in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Some of the media reports have compared the 2011 advance polls votes to 2008.  That would be a misleading comparison since the federal Conservatives suffered from an unusual problem due to the Family Feud.  If you look at the two before that, you can get a better feel for recent trends.  2006 was a year of change nationally and it marked the last time the provincial Conservatives actually worked closely with their federal cousins.

Here’s what you can see:

Turn-out is up in every riding but the magnitude of the change is more dramatic in some cases than others. 

The easy number is in St. John’s East.  Lots of media reports have noted it had the highest advance poll turnout at 4474.  That corresponds to a 56% increase over the next largest turn-out in 2006. The rest of these numbers compare 2011 to the next largest turn-out.

St. John’s South-Mount Pearl is up 91% compared to 2006.

The lowest change in turn-out is Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor, up 2.3% compared to 2004 and Random-Burin-St. George’s, up 3.5% from the same election.

Avalon is showing a 47% increase compared to 2006.  That’s almost exactly the change in Labrador (48%).

What does it all mean?

That’s hard to tell. 

Look at the anomalies first.

On the face of it, there’s no reason why St. John’s East should show such a dramatic increase in total number of votes cast. The incumbent appears to be safely in his seat.  There is no heated contest in the riding.  While it looked potentially like a harder fight before the writ dropped, the reality has been that incumbent New Democrat Jack Harris could be vacationing in Las Vegas with his future Quebec caucus-mates and he’d still slaughter his competition. If there was some sort of surge toward the NDP, this would be a real sign since the seat is already orange.

Ditto Labrador.  There’s no sign of any dramatic change in the riding.  When you look at the riding with almost exactly the same rate of change – Avalon – it gets weirder.  

Avalon is the scene of a vicious fight between Scott Andrews for the Liberals and former Conservative incumbent Fabian Manning who Andrews beat in 2008. One would expect numbers there to be up way compared to another year when they had a hard-fought contest. 

So while those three seats looking odd, the other four seats,  the voter turn-out pictures look like what you would expect.  In the ridings where there’s been a really small change in turn-out, there’s no sense of a hard contest and the change in turn-out reflects that.  The numbers for Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte are up, but only 25%.  Again, that reflects a strong Conservative campaign, most likely, but it is hardly a sign of big change. In the absence of any other signs of revolution, this vote change looks relatively normal.

In St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, the blood feud between the New Democrats and incumbent Liberal Siobhan Coady has been intense since before the election started.  Seeing turn-out up by 91% is no surprise in what appears to be a tight race between two highly motivated and highly organized teams. The Conservatives don’t seem to be a factor, at least if the only publicly available poll is anything to judge by.  Any jump in turn-out is likely not coming from the Rain Man’s effort to get back in elected politics.

- srbp -

Pavement Putin of Permafrost falling down on the job #elxn41

CBC news reports that residents of Labrador are complaining about the poor state of provincial highways in their part of the province.

"It's insulting that they think it's fine the way it is and that we should accept it the way it is," said [Kristin] Pardy.

Hmmm.

Makes you wonder what John Hickey has been doing with himself.  He holds down a cabinet portfolio responsible for Labrador Affairs. 

Hickey – who once launched a law suit against former Premier Roger grimes for something Danny Williams said – is rather proud of the roads in Labrador.  When Hickey hasn’t been trying to claim to have contracts with the federal government that don’t exist, he’s been known to pose for publicity shots featuring him shovelling pavement.

The simple answer to what Hickey has been up to is shovelling something other than pavement on behalf of his federal Conservative buddies. 

You can find a clip of Hickey that someone posted to twaudio of one of Hickey’s lengthy calls to local talk radio on behalf of his buddies from up-along.  He’s in the middle if you really feel the need to listen to a provincial cabinet minister who has clocked more time campaigning for the federal Conservatives since 2003 than any other current member of the provincial Tory caucus.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.

- srbp -

Bloc NDP would change party’s NL position #elxn41

If the current trends hold, the New Democratic Party is poised to make record gains in Quebec.  EKOS is projecting that the NDP could win as many as 100 seats with a majority of those seats coming from Quebec.

The party’s new support in Quebec comes, of course, as a result of Jack Layton’s active campaign to court support from soft nationalists and sovereignists who had supported the Bloc Quebecois.

There’s no accident in this.  Layton knows exactly what he is doing and the model he is trying on is actually the one pioneered by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s.  Layton is even using the same language Mulroney used with his references to the idea that somehow Quebec is outside the constitution and needs to be brought in.

While national attention might be focused on the national implications of recent developments, there are some likely implications for people in Newfoundland and Labrador if Layton becomes leader of the opposition with a caucus half of whose members are from Quebec.

For starters, people who think the NDP will be able to represent interests of anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador on fundamental issues can think again. Such an NDP caucus would be driven by the fundamental division in its membership and the need to manage that relationship over time.

If people think the seven seats in this province count for little in the federal parliament any way, they can consider the implications of having an opposition leader whose position is based entirely on his seats in Quebec. 

Support for a loan guarantee? 

Gulf of St. Lawrence boundary?  

National electricity grid?

Money for energy infrastructure?

More federal money for Goose Bay?

Quebec soft nationalists and sovereignists would effectively control both the Bloc and the NDP on those issues.  Take three guesses how Layton and his crowd will stand on those issues.  The first two don’t count. That would be especially true on any initiative that couldn’t also be matched with a comparable cash outlay for Quebec.

T’would be interesting to see what happens if people in this province start asking politicians about these sorts of things.  Get ‘em on the record now.  Their comments could come back to haunt us all.

- srbp -