Good to the last vote #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Two fish plant operators in the province want to see if they can make a few bucks making something to eat out of sea cucumbers.

For those who may not be familiar with the creatures, know that they are not some sort of undersea plant. 

They are a long tube of flesh with a hole at both ends (mouth and anus) and a tube in between connecting the two.  The creature pulls seawater in one end, extracts what nutrients it can find and pushes the water – and its own refuse -  it out the back end.

People eat these things.  Well, some people on the planet do  - mostly in Asia – and some of those people consider it a delicacy, apparently.

The provincial fisheries department has been eyeing sea cukes and urchins as potential species to exploit for well over a decade. The federal fisheries department produced a study in 2009 on the sea cucumber potential in the fishing zone on Newfoundland’s south coast that also encompasses St. Pierre and Miquelon.

What is striking about that study is how much biologists  - any biologists, not just DFO ones - don’t know about the little creature:

There is limited information on the life history of sea cucumber on the St. Pierre Bank (So 2009).  Most of the knowledge on this species in eastern Canada was obtained from studies in the St. Lawrence Estuary (Hamel and Mercier 2008). While some of this information may be relevant to  the St. Pierre Bank, more in-situ observations are required. Spawning time, for example, occurs from late March to early May on the St. Pierre Bank, which is earlier than in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Size at sexual maturity on the St. Pierre Bank is ~ 9-11 cm (Grant et al. 2006).  Growth  rates, age-at-maturity, recruitment processes and natural mortality are unknown; thus productivity and renewal rates are unknown.  Due to the plastic shape and variable water  content of the sea cucumber body, basic metrics such as size-at-age cannot reliably be  obtained. Dry and immersed weights are the most accurate measures of sea cucumber size.

All the stuff you would like to know in order to manage any fishery effectively?  Not one has a friggin’ clue.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the DFO paper recommends

“that fishing be limited  to the western region of the specific fisheries management zone covered by the study], maintaining the eastern region as a reserve until the effects of fishing can be evaluated. The exploitation rate is currently very low and it is likely that it could be increased without causing serious or irreversible harm.” 

The biologists admit they don’t know much and advise that no one should do anything too hasty for fear of repeating past mistakes.

A United Nations report issued in 2008 said that Pacific stocks of sea cucumbers with a high commercial value had already been decimated. The report covered all the known sea cucumber fisheries,. including the exploratory one off Newfoundland.

Now the potential industry we are talking about here in newfoundland and Labrador is currently less than 1,000 tonnes with a total value – according to the Telegram article linked at the front of this post – some somewhere around $500,000.  This is not very big, by any measure.

But the fact that some local companies want to go to commercial production on a species that has already been over-fished elsewhere is a sign of just how little some people in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and Labrador have learned in the 19 years since the cod moratorium.  How striking is the contrast between the scientists and the industry.

Read the reports from the fisheries departments, especially the federal one an you will see an abundance of cautious language.  If we’ve learned anything from the cod collapse – to paraphrase the report – we ought to go very carefully at fishing a species we know little about.

In the local fishing industry, that knowledge doesn’t seem to have penetrated some skulls.  It’s also yet another sign of what your humble e-scribbler ranted about last August when local media gave province-wide attention to a story on the possible commercial production of sea snails:

There are still way too many of them – plants and plant workers – for them all to make a decent living from what fish, and now snails, there is to turn into frozen blocks. The only thing that has changed in the better part of a decade since that report is that the workers are finding it harder and harder to collect enough weeks of work to qualify for the EI.

Oh yes, and the prospect of a fish plant adding up to 15 jobs for a month stuffing slimy globs of flesh into tins makes province-wide news as a positive thing.

A year after those caustic words appeared, the province is in the grips of a second election in a year, this one a provincial type.  The incumbent Conservatives have a report that shows rare agreement in the industry on the need to cut down the number of plants, plant workers and fishermen.

The Conservatives want nothing to do with it both for the financial cost implications and for the political cost implications as well.  Their current plan seems to be to talk and talk until time solves the problem for them.

The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs.  Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.

All three parties – Liberal, Conservative and New Democrat – have one goal:  reform the fishery in such a way that at the end of it, the whole thing is exactly like it is now.

The fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a problem of anything but politics and anyone other than politicians.

And in yet another great cosmic coincidence, noob Bloc NDP member of parliament Ryan Cleary held a news conference on Monday to tell everyone that he will do as he promised a few short months ago and introduce a private members bill in the federal parliament. 

Cleary wants to spend untold millions of tax dollars on an investigation into what happened to the cod and why they haven’t come back. he wants to find blame and lay, most likely at the feet of culprits he has already identified.  None of them are in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and labrador.  The bad guys are people in Ottawa.

In pushing for his Kangaroo Court, Cleary uses language that is colourful and evocative. He claims we do not have facts.

In truth, there is is no shortage of facts.

Cleary just refuses to accept them and act accordingly.

The problem is not that we are lacking in information.

The problem is that Cleary - like a raft of other self-appointed saviours of rural Newfoundland and the fishery from Smallwood to Rideout to Efford to Sullivan and Hearn before him - is running on precious little besides bullshit and ego.

Sure they are all compassionate and passionate in their dedication and commitment to the raggedy-arsed artillery of the best small-boatmen in the British Empire who will secure the future of the universe once the oil is gone yadda yadda yadda.

Big friggin’ whoopidy do.

Once you get past the stock rhetoric these guys toss out, you pretty quickly realise that Cleary is just the latest and windiest wind-bag in a very flatulent lot.  They all lack either an appreciation of the problem in the fishery or what genuinely needs to be done to sort it out. 

And if they know what needs to be done and why, then they lack the stones to do it.

You see, if fixing the fishery was a matter of passion, then the whole thing would have been done decades ago. God knows the fishery has attracted more passion over the years than you’d get from a bunch of lifers at Kingston Pen hopped up on saltpeter and Viagra.

Da byes have loved the fishery to death.

And still men and women are breaking their backs splitting fish and making slave wages for their efforts.

Men and women who are now pretty much done with their working lives and yet who can’t afford to retire.

Who some politicians won’t pay to retire even though that would be the decent thing to do.

And they struggle in an industry that lacks the technology to compete and the capital to buy the technology to sort itself out because…ah sure you’ve heard it all before.

You want some ideas on fixing the fishery? 

No problem.

The first idea is:  get the politicians out of it.

Cleary could be the single bravest politician in this province’s long history and scrap his election pledge. Stand up, Ryan, and be the first politician to say that people like you are full of it and need to stop pretending they can fix the fishing industry.

Find something else to rant about.

People will understand. 

He can take the money he’d waste on an inquiry and put it in a fund to help fish plant workers hobble away from the splitting tables with something vaguely approaching human dignity.*

Otherwise, the fishery will be for politicians what it has been since long before the collapse of Responsible Government in this place:  good to the last vote, and nothing more.

- srbp -

* edits for clarity

The Popeye Algorithm #nlpoli

"I am who I am.

That’s Premier Kathy Dunderdale speaking to reporters about comments her benefactor Danny Williams made on Monday about Elizabeth Matthews and the botched effort by Williams, Dunderdale, Matthews and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to get Matthews a six year appointment to the offshore regulatory board.

Williams told CBC on Monday:

In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.

Dunderdale quite rightly blew off Williams’ barb on the aspect of this story that Conservatives are obsessing over.  Dunderdale looked stressed in the photo accompanying the CBC story on her scrum.  That’s likely because the Matthews debacle has only served to bring to the surface again the internal cleavages in her party.

There’s the Danny-lovers who aren’t happy with Dunderdale’s actions toward their beloved former Saviour.  There’s the local Tories who still loathe the federal Tories and resent Dunderdale’s efforts to cuddle up to them during the last federal election.  And then there’s the bunch who would just as soon heal the rifts, play with the federal buddies and move along.

And somewhere in there are the wannabe leaders who went along with the temporary ceasefire in the suspended leadership campaign.  They are just itching to get it over with so they can get Dunderdale gone.

Somehow, the answer to all that doesn’t seem to be “I yam what I yam and dats all what I yam.”

A pointed rejoinder to Williams would have been for Williams to point that she’s nobody’s baby.  Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Dunderdale her nomination.  Bullshit, Dunderdale could have said. The former party president didn’t need  Williams help to get a nomination.  She did it in 1993.  She was active in the party during the years when Danny had sent Dean over to the Liberals to help cut some deals.

Lots of things she could have said.

Even a trademark Williams “pfft.”

Truth is, though, Dunderdale knows she sits atop a seething pile of egos, old wounds, resentments and just plain politics. That’s what happens inside any governing party after a while. The fact Danny Williams suppressed the egos and ambitions for seven years screwed the lid on the pressure cooker that much tighter than usual.  That’s why the Conservatives who’ve reacted publicly to Williams’ comments have picked up on the Danny gripe.  They are looking internally because that’s where things seem to be most unsettled.

The rest of the province is likely looking at what your humble e-scribbler and CBC both saw separately in the same documents:  a trio of Tory political types named Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner who could not get their stories straight or match the stories with the facts.

It is as though they never imagined that the whole story might emerge. Complacency kills, they say.  Think of it as the eighth deadly sin for bomb disposal experts and political types who manage controversial issues.  A moment’s inattention, one skipped step or one unfounded assumption and suddenly you are sailing through the air wondering what the loud noise was.

Think it doesn’t happen?

Consider Dunderdale’s comment about the draft letter Danny Williams had prepared that offered Matthews the job.  Dunderdale told reporters she only became aware of it when an access to information request went out.  Or worse, as CBC reports it, Dunderdale only knew the letter existed on Monday.

In other words, after it appeared here and CBC broadcast their story.

Those familiar with the goings-on at offices as high as Dunderdale’s will look on that and stare in disbelief.

No amount of spinach can make that sort of thing go away.

- srbp -

An ex-Premier scorned #nlpoli

Not content merely to discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews for a seat on the offshore regulatory board, Danny Williams took some pretty heavy shots at his former cabinet members on Monday in a 10 minute interview with the CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates.

In my opinion, Elizabeth Matthews – of all the women I have met in politics including my ministers – was the most competent woman I had come across.

Williams went further. 

He claimed to have significantly advanced the place of women in politics in the province during his term of office.

Williams claimed he was instrumental in getting Joan Burke and Kathy Dunderdale nominated, claiming that “in those days it was more of a man’s world.”

You don’t have to read hard to between the lines to see Williams was making a very pointed jab at two key cabinet ministers in his administration.

The fact he is full of crap  - as if 2001 was the political stone age in this province - is largely irrelevant.

Interesting too that he mentioned a recent comment about the fact there are very few women seeking office in this election.

Great minds think alike, eh?

But that comment about Matthews and the implicit idea that Dunderdale and Burke owe their place to Williams is not going to sit well with a great many Tories.

Heck, it was so bad that even talk show caller and Danny fan Club charter member Minnie H burned Bill’s ears on Monday night calling Danny down to the dirt for his remarks.

Whatever Dunderdale and company did to Danny after he left, the Old man is certainly going to claim his pound and a half of their hides, one way or the other.

Payback is a mother.

- srbp -

To you with affection from Danny #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Anybody who is even vaguely aware of Danny Williams’ attitude to the CBC during his term as Premier will realise what an amazing thing it was for him to sit for 10 minutes on Monday and discuss his nomination of Elizabeth Matthews to sit on the offshore regulatory board.

CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates picked up the story  - the same one posted here Monday morning - and added significantly to what might turn out to be a new political mess for the Dunderdale administration.

The new mess though isn’t about a patronage plum Williams lined up for Matthews.

No.

Now the mess is found in the gigantic contradictions between what actually happened and what the major characters in the drama have said until now.

For example, there’s the issue of what Elizabeth Matthews knew about her nomination and appointment and when she knew it.  Williams is unequivocal in the full interview on Monday:  she would have known about the nomination when he put her name forward. 

That contradicts the impression left with a great many people.  On March 11, for example, CBC’s Provincial Affairs reported tweeted about a conversation he’d has with Matthews.  Cochrane wrote “EM says she has never been told of any appointment.”

After the Liberal opposition released a copy of the order in council Matthews had received making her appointment to the board, Matthews told CBC:

When I received the OC in the mail I contacted the premier's office immediately. I was told ... at the time that the OC was sent in error, and in fact the individual I spoke to was unaware of it,…

The cabinet order itself is unequivocal.  Under the first part, cabinet appointed Matthews to the board as a Newfoundland and Labrador representative starting on January 1. 

If Matthews was as knowledgeable about these things as Williams claims and if officials of the provincial government knew anything, they’d understand that part of the cabinet order did not need any approval from the federal government.

There’d be no reason for her to misunderstand that she had an appointment to the board when she got the OC in the mail.  And even if she and her provincial benefactors wanted to wait until she had the federal agreement on making her the vice-chair as well, that still wouldn’t explain why Matthews claimed she didn’t know about an appointment.

Heck, as your humble e-scribbler reported on Monday, Matthews sent her resume to the Premier’s Office on December 21, apparently in support of the letter to the federal government about her appointment. She knew what was going on.  And as Williams made plain on Monday, Matthews knew he was putting her name up for the job.

Then there’s the odd claims by Williams hand-picked successor  Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Shawn Skinner that they were responsible for Matthews’ nomination and appointment. CBC’s online story includes the quotes they gave in the spring.  They wouldn’t do any interviews with CBC on Monday.

Williams made clear that he discussed Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board with Dunderdale as part of the hand-over process. While he didn’t actually make the appointment himself, Williams left the clear impression he told his successor exactly what he wanted to see happen.

Technically, it was up to his successor to get the job done. But  there’s no doubt he wanted Matthews in that job and – given the way events unfolded in December over his succession – Williams had plenty of opportunities to push his views right up until the cabinet issued its order on December 21.

And Skinner and Dunderdale delivered for Williams.

Things just came apart in March after someone leaked the story to CBC’s David Cochrane.  That’s when Matthews, Dunderdale and Skinner started telling versions of events that didn’t jive with what happened.

Apparently, they never imagined the whole story would come out.

Surprise!

- srbp -

Word Clues

According to the St. John’s Board of Trade, “Newfoundland and Labrador’s considerable assets include …[a] captive consumer market worth over $10 billion annually.”

Interesting choice of words that.

“Captive”.

Prisoner.

Hostage.

As in can’t go anywhere else or do anything else.

At the mercy of others.

Take a look at a survey the Board did of a four member panel that they included with that news release.  Now bear in mind the panel is four members of the Board of Trade and only four. But still, if you look at the responses, you get another curious bit of information.

Top federal/provincial priorities:  “Building the Lower Churchill” got a vote from one of the four as the top priority.  But two others put “Building the Lower Churchill” as their second choice.

Not surprising really, that the Lower Churchill would be the favourite in this question and in another one later on about what the federal government needs to do for the province.

Many members of the Board of Trade have done very well as a result of the enormous increase in public spending over the past four years.  it may be fiscally unsound for the province, but for the Board of Trade members it’s been boom times.  The Lower Churchill would guarantee those booms for another decade.

Makes sense.

Makes sense too that the party currently in power is pushing something that means they can trumpet the jobs and the growth that will flow.  There’s a wonderful meeting of mutual interest, political and commercial. 

This alignment of interests is easily seen in the pattern of political giving in the province last year.  80% of donations come from corporations.  Most of that is focused on the northeast Avalon. Individual contributions make up a mere 20% and in some districts nobody  - other than the local member of the legislature - contributed anything at all to any political party.

Not surprisingly, either, the companies who have been doing perhaps the most phenomenally well from capital works spending have given in huge gobs to the Conservatives.

Nothing sinister or criminal.  Just a matter of common interests.

Meanwhile, the average ratepayer, err consumer,  err taxpayer in the province isn’t quite so positive about Muskrat Falls and the Lower Churchill.  In polls done by Corporate Research Associates for the provincial government over the past year, Muskrat is the top priority of a mere four percent of the population.

Consistently four percent.

Health care and jobs are way out in front as the major concern of 20-odd and 30-odd percent of the people surveyed.

Huge difference.

Now look at that word “captive” again.

Interesting choice.

Almost Freudian in its implications when you consider that having a captive market is the entire basis for Muskrat Falls.

The local consumers will be forced to pay for it all, carry the whole debt load and make sure that the companies directly involved don’t lose a copper.

They have no choice.

They are captive.

- srbp -

Williams set to offer comms director plum patronage job before he quit #nlpoli

In his final days as Premier, Danny Williams was poised to offer Elizabeth Matthews  - his communications director – a plum patronage appointment at the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

A copy of a draft letter for Williams’ signature, included in a package of information released under the province’s access to information law, bore the date “December 2, 2010”.  It concluded:

It is with pleasure that I offer you the position of full-time vice-chairperson of the C-NLOPB, upon expiry of the term of office of the incumbent.  Should you accept this offer of employment your appointment would take effect on January 1, 2011 for a term of six years in accordance with applicable legislation.

The letter turned up in the package as an attachment to an email exchange between officials of the Cabinet Secretariat at 10:00 AM December 3.

Williams’ last day on the job was December 3. The letter was never sent, apparently.

Usually, officials prepare a letter making a job offer of this type only after senior officials in the Premier’s Office have reviewed the appointment and discussed it – even if informally  - with the prospective appointee.  There would be no reason to draft such a letter unless the appointment was finalized.

CBC Provincial Affairs reporter David Cochrane broke the story of Matthews’ appointment on March 2, 2011, some three months later.  He didn’t indicate when the provincial government had made the decision to put Matthews forward. It doesn’t appear Cochrane knew.

Natural resources minister Shawn Skinner issued a brief statement the following day confirming that the provincial government had nominated Matthews.  Skinner didn’t attach any dates to the decision. 

The Liberal Opposition did put dates on it. 

On March 11, Opposition Leader Yvonne Jones issued a news release that included a letter from Skinner to his federal counterpart, Christian Paradis.  The date on the letter was December 21.  It included a three-paragraph biography for Matthews.

In a brief news release later on March 11,  Skinner confirmed the letter to Paradis had been sent.

Due to a gaffe in the Liberal office, the Liberal release went out originally without the letter attached. Before the Liberals had a chance to send out the letter, Cochrane posted a comment to Twitter:

(March 11) “Where are you getting this from? Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly. She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment. Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”. [Emphasis added]

That claim – that Matthews “had never been told of any appointment” - became a key element of the story in subsequent days.  In hindsight, another part of that comment now stands out as well:  “Do Libs have draft letter never sent?”

Matthews withdrew her nomination on March 14.  In a prepared statement, Matthews made no  mention of the discrepancies in versions of events surrounding the appointment.  She blamed her decision on efforts by Liberal leader Yvonne Jones to politicize the issue of her appointment.

In a scrum with reporters the next day, Skinner apparently picked up on the idea Matthews had no knowledge of the appointment.  He told reporters that an unspecified breakdown in communications led to a situation and as a result, Matthews apparently didn’t know about the appointment.

CBC’s online story of Skinner’s comments began with this sentence:

A communication breakdown left Elizabeth Matthews in the dark about her appointment to an offshore petroleum board late last year, according to Newfoundland and Labrador's Natural Resources minister.

It included Skinner’s comment:

"I signed the letter. I sent it off and I assumed that the rest of it would have happened as it should have happened, but I'll find that out. There was a communications breakdown in that regard," Skinner said Monday.

The Telegram version of the scrum appeared on March 16.  It included a comment from Matthews that she “received an [Order in Council] in the mail in January at which point I contacted the Premier’s Office to inquire about its contents.”

That’s not exactly the same as saying she had “never been told of any appointment”, as Cochrane tweeted on March 11. 

Matthews’ comment to the Telegram is vague about whether or not she’d known of the appointment before she got the letter in January.  At the time, some might have interpreted her Telegram comments to mean Matthews had been surprised to receive the letter in January and called the Premier’s Office for an explanation.

Existence of a draft letter for Williams’ signature addressed to his then-director of communications as well as the document trail released to the public changes all that.

The package of documents containing the December 2 letter also contained an e-mail exchange between Matthews and the chief of staff in the Premier’s Office and the chief of staff and the deputy minister of natural resources in which Matthews’ forwarded a copy of her resume.

The date of the e-mail exchange was December 21.

Cabinet met the same day to decide on Matthews’ appointment to the offshore board, among other things. 

Cabinet Secretariat issued an order in council, left,  as the official record of the decision. 

Elizabeth Matthews’ name is on the distribution list for the order.

That’s also the day Skinner wrote his federal counterpart advising of the Matthews appointment.

- srbp -

Political Gender Issues

Astonishing as it may seem to some, the supposedly progressive political party in Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t the one with the most women as candidates nominated thus far in the current election.

Nope. 

The Grits are tops with one in three.

The Dippers are in second place with one in five.

Both those parties have candidates in place in about half the total number of seats up for grabs in October.

The incumbent Tories have all their candidates in place and, at last count, they had something like one in eight who were women.  Six women among 48 candidates, and all of them incumbents who have been in office since at least 2003.

That’s rather curious development for a province where, not so long ago, people were marvelling at the fact that all three political party leaders in the province were women. 

Of course, no one seemed to notice that neither of them got their job as the result of an open competition, but that’s another subject for another day. Let’s just say women in politics is a touchy subject for some people.

For now, try pondering the fact that if the conventional wisdom holds, we’ll probably wind up with the same women – let alone the same number of them – back in the House after October as we have right now.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Yeah.

Right.

- srbp -

9/11/01

 

On missing the point

Mark Watton has been leading the charge against sections of the province’s election laws that allow people to vote when there is no election.

On the face of it, the idea is bizarre.

You’d think it is obviously bizarre.

And yet a political science professor at Grenfell in Corner Brook managed to miss the point entirely in a recent interview with The Western Star:

Meanwhile, Mario Levesque, a political science professor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, agrees it is a necessity which adds to the democratic process. However, he also says there are adjustments required to address issues around voting prior to the nomination of candidates.

“That is kind of an irritant, but is difficult to address,” the professor said. “It is pretty difficult for all political parties to have candidates in all the ridings two months before the actual election, and sometimes it is three weeks before an election date before a party has a candidate in that riding.”

For starters, Levesque confuses the idea of having allowance for people to vote who might be away from the district or the province on polling day with the idea that they could vote when there is no election.

His comment about parties having candidates in place also isn’t an issue.  Unless a candidate meets the conditions set out in the provincial Elections Act, he or she simply isn’t a candidate. And those are the rules that actually don’t put candidates in place until after the election writ is issued. 

Even then, the candidates are not finally – legally – in place until a week or so before voting day.

Seems ludicrous, then to put it mildly, that people are given ballots to vote two months or so before a likely election date.

This is not really the kind of stuff that should tax people’s faculties. In Levesque’s case, he obviously understands how things work, he just mixes them up.

He also skips over the fairly obvious point that the balloting system affects both voters and those seeking office alike.  The best illustration of that recently would be the case of John Baird.  He originally planned to run for the Liberals.  Then Baird walked away from the Liberal Party  and plans to run as an unaffiliated candidate.

That means that under the law as it stands right now, all those people who want to vote for John Baird can’t. And anybody in a situation like that who had cast a vote for the party because the system didn’t let them vote any other way would be – in effect – disenfranchised if they cast a ballot a couple of months before voting day and before their man switched parties.

Then there’s the scenario that Watton spelled out in the Western Star article.  What happens if an election in a particular district comes down to a difference in vote totals that is smaller than the number of special ballots cast upwards of two months earlier.  That is, people voted one way based on assumptions at the time but then would have voted another way later on.

You see there is a reason why voting takes place on a single day and in the case of advance polls, not much before that one day.  Absentee ballots are handled differently but the process often involves mailing the ballot back.  As long as it is postmarked no later than the actual voting day, the vote can be legally counted even if the mail system stakes a week or more to get the ballot to the voting officials.

Special balloting In Newfoundland and Labrador actually ends well in advance of polling day and not long after the last day for nominating candidates under the election law.  In other words, the system in this province pushes absentees away from voting for individual candidates and forces them to make choices before everyone else and before they actually have a chance to weigh fully what choices they actually have.

Absentee ballots aren’t a bad idea.  In fact, they are a very good idea since they enfranchise people.

The problem comes with the peculiar way the law is written in Newfoundland and Labrador.  That could be fixed with a few simple changes.  Those changes would be easy to make, just as easy in fact as the original changes were made that created the mess in the first place.

The problem is that the politicians aren’t interested in changing the system. 

And why should they?

It favours the people who already have the jobs.

- srbp -

SRBP on Radio: Muskrat Falls

For those who missed it, here’s the audio from your humble e-scribbler’s Labour day call to Open Line.

h/t to Dave Adey who has been relentlessly documenting Muskrat calls to OL among other things.

- srbp -

Traffic for September 5 – 9, 2011

ya know that something is going on when the traffic at ye olde e-scribbles starts jumping up by 25% from the previous month.

And that’s a real 25%, not an hyper-torqued NDP 25% that is actually just one percent. 

If you want to see more on  the story of the NDP’s deceptive news release on small business taxes, it hit the Number 8 slot on the top 10 Bond posts for last week, as chosen by the readers themselves.

Lots of “D”s in the Top 10 last week, including Danny, Desperation,  Donations,  Duff and Doyle, as in Republic of.  Even without putting the words in the headline lots of people found it and likely had a little chuckle as they went.

The week after Labour Day turned out to be highly charged politically and if the trend holds this will be one of the more interesting fall seasons in recent times.

So in case you missed these posts during the week, settle in and enjoy what caught everyone’s attention here at SRBP last week.

1. RCMP investigating SNC Lavalin officials over corruption allegations
2. And he is known by the company he keeps…
3. Democracy Watch:  Duff’s guff
4. Dateline:  Desperation, Newfoundland
5. The Joy of Political Giving:  punch in the bake edition
6. Danny, Gary and Steve:  old inconsistencies die hard
7. Rideout tags Tories for election pork-fest
8. The Politics of Cynicism;  even worse than thought edition and What you can see at the horse race…
9. The Joy of Political Giving:  Look for the union label
10. The Joy of Political Giving:  If you want to build it, they will give

- srbp -

Aylward questions Nalcor on choice of consultant

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward has sent a letter to Nalcor boss Ed Martin asking about Nalcor’s use of Navigant as the consultant the company chose for a review of the Muskrat Falls project.

The Liberals posted the letter to the party’s campaign website on Tuesday but apparently didn’t give it wide circulation.

In the letter, Aylward asks;

1. When was Navigant retained to produce a report on the Muskrat Falls power project?
2. What is their investigative mandate?
3. Who, outside of Nalcor direct employees and contractors, will be consulted?
4. When and where will Navigant be conducting public consultations, if any?
5. What is the contract price?
6. When is the report contracted to be received?
7. When will the report be issued to the public?
8. How many other “independent reports” hitherto unknown to the public have been  commissioned or are currently under way?

Aylward criticises Nalcor for keeping the name and mandate of the consultant public until after the release of the joint environmental review panel.

The provincial Tories have used Navigant before on politically-driven projects.

In 2006, then Premier Danny Williams used Navigant to try and audit the books on the Hibernia project as part of his war with the oil companies over the collapse of Hebron talks in April that year.

Two years later, Williams used Navigant in his war against AbitibiBowater that led to the botched expropriation of AbitibiBowater properties in the province. Then natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale told the House of Assembly in early 2010:

Mr. Speaker, there was in fact approximately $8 million spent on professional services related to the expropriation of Abitibi by my department last year. We paid a substantial amount of that money to CRA, to Navigant Consulting, to Weirfolds, a legal firm, and Enda Searching, to do particular work around the expropriation itself, around land registry consolidation; CRA, particularly with regard to the remediation requirements in Grand Falls. That work informed our budget, Mr. Speaker, where we budgeted over $9 million to deal with the mess left behind by Abitibi in Buchans.

Dunderdale and Williams hid their mistake in expropriating the Grand Falls-Windsor mill and other environmental liabilities until early 2010 when they admitted to the shag up under questioning in the provincial legislature.

Dunderdale told the legislature in 2010 that when the government realised the cock-up they considered introducing legislation to retroactively un-expropriate the properties they’d seized as part of the screw up.

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Dateline: Desperation, Newfoundland

Finance minister Tom Marshall called the province’s major radio talk show on Thursday to promote the Muskrat Falls power project.

He quoted from a book by Wally Read and L.J. Cole.  The quote runs down opponents of the Bay d’Espoir megaproject in the 1960s as ignorant, blind or politically motivated people of dubious character who lacked the foresight to undertake the marvelous project.

You can hear the whole call courtesy of Dave Adey.  Before going any farther, take a second and listen to Tom in all his persuasive majesty.  Then, when you are finished being awestruck, come back to these scribbles.

Fair warning:  if you are awestruck at Tom, you’ll be gobsmacked by the end of this post.

You were warned.

Now if you don’t know – and your humble e-scribbler didn’t know until he went looking – that book was in fact no book at all.  It was a 28 page pamphlet produced by the Newfoundland and Labrador Power Commission in 1972 to mark the inauguration of their new power plant at Bay d’Espoir. The Commission was the forerunner of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.

And if the words Marshall read sounded familiar, if they sounded as though you heard them before, if it struck you that the language used by Read and Cole resonated in a way you may have heard before, if the sentences seemed to come with bow tie and dark-rimmed spectacles, then you would be right.

The visionary Read and Cole were praising, the champion-in-chief of modernity, progress, and the future of His People, the one who stood out among the one or two the authors obliquely referenced in the text was none other than the Only Living Father of Confederation at the time.

Yes, Joe Smallwood.

So right off the bat, you have a fellow who got his current job as part of a crowd who campaigned against foolish megaprojects, gigantic wastes of money and enormous give-aways quoting favourably about the fellow who was chief among their targets.

And the fellows of low character and small minds the two others lambasted were Marshall’s political predecessors in the provincial Conservatives.

And if the full story be told, Tom probably campaigned for some of them and fulminated against Smallwood himself four decades ago.

Now if you are feeling a bit weak in the knees, we can all wait for you to catch your breath.

This is only the beginning.

You see, we are not dealing here with mere irony.

No.

That would be too common a theatrical device for people of such enormous vision and unparalleled ability.

This, my friends, is the stuff of Greek tragedy.

If someone among the current administration plucked out his own eyes after slaughtering his own father, bedding his sister, and marrying his own mother, you could not have anything more fundamentally twisted, demented and frigged in the head than Tories justifying themselves by borrowing words of praise for Joe Smallwood.

The whole thing enters another dimension when you realise that Bay d’Espoir was conceived and built in the 1960s not as a simple project to meet identified need as Tom Marshall would have you believe.

No, sir.

Bay d’Espoir was the centrepiece of yet another scheme by which the ratepayers of Newfoundland would give megawatts of power at bargain basement prices to create not one, not two, not three or even four or five, but something like eight new industries.

A paper mill for the east coast.

A hockey stick factory.

A refinery.

A petrochemical plant.

A phosphorus plant.

And on and on it went.

Joe Smallwood gives the thing a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of page 375 and the top of page 376 in I chose Canada.  After reciting the efforts to get companies to take power for the project, Smallwood writes on page 376:

The killer was the cost of the transmission line, but we agreed to build the line and charge Brinco nothing for it until after the enterprise had begun to make money.

You won’t find the full story of the Bay d’Espoir saga in the Read and Cole monograph of in Smallwood’s memoir.  You’ll get a much better sense of the dubious economics of the whole affair in a paper done in 2007 1974 by Peter Crabb.

Bay d’Espoir was supposed to do magical things.  Many of the same claims of magic Tom Marshall and his friends are using for Muskrat falls are the same ones Smallwood and his associates used for their mega-failures. As it turned out, the only new industry Bay d’Espoir attracted was the phosphorus plant at Long Harbour.  The scheme to attract new industry by providing heavily discounted electricity to industries was a complete bust.

Proponents of megaprojects grossly exaggerate the benefits and grossly underestimate the risks, in case you haven’t heard that one before.

Skip ahead 40 years and you have tom Marshall marvelling at how history is repeating itself.  Indeed it is, except not in the way Marshall supposes.  He and his colleagues are on the wrong side of the story.

Now just so that there is no one with any sense who thinks this is a conspiracy,  Randy Simms did a grave disservice to his audience during the conversation with Marshall when he tried to turn the arguments against Muskrat Falls into something they aren’t.

Undoubtedly, Tom Marshall and Kathy Dunderdale sincerely believe they are doing the right thing.  They have convinced themselves that this is the way to go, just as Smallwood did in the 1960s repeatedly.  Just as Brian Peckford and his crowd did with the cucumber factory. 

Desperation makes politicians – even normally sensible ones like Tom Marshall -  do strange things.

But make no mistake about it:  Muskrat Falls has absolutely nothing to do with a power need on the island just as surely as the Bay d’Espoir project and nothing to do with consumer power needs.  We know this because Nalcor could not produce figures that demonstrate their forecasts of an impending power shortage are real.

We also know it because this project has never, ever been justified on the basis of urgent need.

Tom Marshall and his colleagues pushed the development of the Lower Churchill in the beginning as a way to make money by selling power to people outside the province. 

Go back to January 2005.

Not a single peep about a need for electricity on the island.

The joint review panel found the same thing.

Muskrat Falls is not about need.

It is about want.

More specifically, it is about a political want.  Danny Williams wanted to cap off his term by saying he had a deal.  the economics of it had long since vanished.  The project – as originally planned – simply could not fly.  So he cut a deal for something that would look good in theory but that fails when anyone with half a clue looks closely at it.

Williams’ political want for an excuse to cover his exit became the political want of his successor to have something to tide her through an election.

We know this project is not driven by public need because neither Nalcor nor Tom Marshall nor anyone else pushing it ever more frantically down our collective throat has been able to give a simple, consistent and factual set of answers to a simple set of questions. They squirm and they dodge and they toss out red herrings and they attack their critics.

Tom and his associates spent two years with a hand-picked panel of five intelligent, sensible people looking over this Muskrat Falls thing. Those five people told Nalcor that the company had not made its case.

Not once, mind you, but twice.

Those five people on the joint federal-provincial review panel recommended giving the whole thing to someone without a vested interest in the project in order to make sure that all the evidence was there.

That’s as serious an indictment of Nalcor’s poor performance as one could get.

So the people Tom Marshall claims know so much about electricity needs and megaprojects couldn’t knock off a two year review process successfully on the crucial component:  the need for it in the first place to meet local energy demand.

And ultimately we know this project is driven by politics because of Tom Marshall’s obvious desperation that he would praise the Churchill Falls development and Bay d’Espoir as models to follow.

There is obviously no claim so ridiculous and no argument so transparent that Marshall and his colleagues would not toss it out to try and fight off the public worry about Muskrat Falls and what the project will do to electricity rates and the public debt.

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Joe Smallwood is looking down on this all.  He is sitting with John Shaheen and O.L. Vardy while Valdmanis plays waiter and freshens their drinks every now and then.  They are kicked back enjoying fine cigars and letting the sand scrunch between their toes.

And on that magnificent Panamanian beach beyond all time and care, Joe is shitting himself laughing. 

He is crapping his Bermudas at Tom and Kathy and Danny.

The rest of us could join him in the chuckle too.  We could bust open our pants with a hearty belly laugh. We could do that if only we were not faced with the embarrassing spectacle of Tom Marshall’s desperation.

We could maybe even manage a smile, were it not for the fact that – if the province’s Conservatives and New Democrats get their way -  we will be footing the bill for yet another megaproject give-away to rival the greatest ones of the last century.

And we will have to listen as our children and grandchildren as they ask us over and over again how some people could have become so utterly deluded that they could make the same miserable mistake twice inside a half century and use the first fiasco as proof of the genius in the second.

We could laugh except that some of us cannot explain it.

We only know that we will be paying for their folly.

Again.

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And he is known by the company he keeps…

With the anniversary of 9/11 coming, people seem to have forgotten an invitation that went out to President Barack Obama to come to the province for the anniversary.

As the CBC blog put it in mid-2010:

It might be a long shot for the president of the United States to travel outside his own country for such an important anniversary, but as the saying goes, if you don’t ask, it won’t happen.

True, but when the guy what sent the invite is known to hang out with wankers  big-name Republicans, that might not help either.

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Rideout tags Tories for election pork-fest #nlpoli

Former premier Tom Rideout didn’t mince words about the orgy of pork-barrel spending his former caucus colleagues have been pushing in the run-up.

On a political panel on Tuesday morning, Rideout told the audience for CBC Radio’s West Coast Morning Show that the public mood has changed over the past few decades and that people view these things differently now than the way they used to.

Rideout, who said he liked to think he had an independent mind, said he thought the provincial Conservatives can go too far with their announcements, and re-announcements and announcements of the same spending for the third and fourth time.

Rideout singled out municipal affairs minister Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien, saying that O’Brien had acted “like a buffoon”’ by going around the province “dropping off fire trucks” all over the place.  Rideout said that he could have left it up to the local member of the House of Assembly.

The issue wouldn’t be enough to defeat the government, said  Rideout, but he did feel there could be a backlash in some areas.

Wow.

Rideout basically confirmed what your humble e-scribbler has been picking up for months from all around the province.  Lots of people are miffed for lots of reasons.  The blatant pork-barrelling is just the latest thing.

The fire trucks have become a twisted symbol of the Conservative’s old-fashioned political mentality.

What’s really startling here is that Rideout openly laced into his political colleagues and tagged one minister in particular.

That’s a huge sign that the provincial Tories are not the invincible political behemoth they once were no matter what the townie media would want to read into CRA’s always dubious poll results.

Stable political environment? 

Try not to pee your new back-to-school pants no matter how hard it is to stifle the guffaws.

Kathy Dunderdale did say she thought the poll suggested the polling numbers had stabilised but that was just because the Tories have been in a pretty sharp decline for most of the last year.

But with the Tories having the support of 40% of respondents to a recent poll and the opposition parties at 18% and 16%, it wouldn’t take much to give Kath and Fairity a visit from the Old Hag.

There’s more to it than fire trucks. O’Brien could well be a liability in other parts of the province, too,  becoming the poster-child for perceived political arrogance in the face of some fairly obvious cock-ups over the provincial government’s response to natural disasters.

On the Great Northern Peninsula there are other issues.

On the northeast coast there are others.

Still more on the Burin peninsula and in central Newfoundland.

And then there is the threat of Muskrat Falls.

Look around.

The mood is anything but settled.

Rideout is right:  it might not be enough to bring down the government yet.

But when a prominent Tory takes such a smack at other Tories as Rideout did this past Tuesday morning, it is enough to think things in this province  could get quite a shake in October.

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There’s no greater fraud than a promise not kept … Goose Bay version

While one can argue about frauds and unkept promises, there’s certainly no greater laugh riot than listening to defence minister Pete MacKay try desperately to explain to a gang of reporters in Goose Bay why the promised hundreds of soldiers, UAV squadron and all the other promises about the air base the federal Conservatives have made to win votes in the Big Land just haven’t materialised after all these years.

Apparently, the soldiers didn’t show because of Afghanistan.

Well, that was the reason., but now it turns out that while Afghanistan is over, it isn’t over, so there won’t be anything just yet.

And then there’s Libya.

Oh yes.

And floods.

Fires.

G8

G20.

And honestly darling that’s never happened before. 

Must be something on my mind.

Okay well, that last one didn’t show up at the newser but it was about the only bullshite laden excuse Pete didn’t fling at reporters.

The only thing funnier than that was MacKay attempting to explain why 300 jobs he’d just finished promising might or might not, possibly go to people living in Labrador, depending on things, sort of.

Incidentally, speaking of massive loads of political shite, did anyone see John Hickey at the newser? 

Someone could have finished off the Conservative open mike comedy-fest by asking the soon-to-be-pensioned Pavement Putin of the Permafrost what ever happened to his lawsuit against Roger Grimes for something Danny Williams said.

Hickey might have patted his suit jacket and mumbled something about leaving it in his other jacket next to the signed contract for road paving money from his Conservative buddies in Ottawa.

That would have brought the house down.

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Danny, Gary and Steve: old inconsistencies die hard

Apparently your humble e-scribbler isn’t the only one who found it amusing that an anti-Harper former premier is campaigning in pro-Harper country for a Conservative who doesn’t share the Old Man’s animosity toward the prime minister.

Well amusing here, but out there apparently it struck one Tory leadership candidate as politically stunned-arsed:

PC party leadership candidate Ted Morton says his friendship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper will soothe the relationship between Ottawa and Alberta, while saying rival Gary Mar’s political alliance with outspoken former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams won’t do the province any good.

“I don’t think what Gary’s done in the last couple of days of palling around with Danny Williams is the right step,” Morton told the Herald’s editorial board on Tuesday.

As for Williams, this is the same guy who tried to secretly interest Hydro-Quebec in buying an ownership stake in the Lower Churchill, putting redress for the Upper Churchill to one side, while at the same time publicly lashing their collective perfidious Franco-hides.

Of course, two years after Kathy Dunderdale pissed Danny and his crowd off by letting the secret slip, the local media have still not reported on the five years of secret talks with Hydro-Quebec.

Two years later.

Not a peep.

Apparently the facts don’t fit the official narrative.

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The Joy of Political Giving: Look for the Union label

The single biggest political donation, bar none in 2010 did not come from any private sector business.

It came from the United Steelworkers of America (Toronto, On).

$20,000.

That’s from the most recent figures released by the chief electoral office for the province. They gave the same amount in 2009 while in 2008, the United Food and Commercial Workers, of Washington DC gave the provincial NDP $10,000.

If you barred corporate and union donations to political parties in Newfoundland and labrador and forced the parties to raise money from individuals, the entire political party system would collapse.

At least then we could rebuild it an an infinitely more democratic basis than the one that sits there today.

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The Joy of Political Giving: if you want to build it, they will give

Construction, design and engineering companies gave the provincial Conservatives $239,725 in political donations in 2010, according to figures from the province’s chief electoral office.

Companies in the design, engineering and construction field gave a mere $3, 950 to the Liberal Party and none to the New Democrats.

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RCMP investigating SNC Lavalin officials over corruption allegations

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigating officials of the engineering firm SNC Lavalin, according to media reports on possible corruption charges related to a $1.2 billion bridge project funded by the World Bank in Bangladesh.

A spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed for Reuters that the police had executed several search warrants as part of the investigation.

The Canadian Press reported some of those warrants were for offices in Toronto.  CP also reported that:

The search was conducted following a request from the World Bank, which is investigating allegations of corruption in the bidding processes for the Padma Bridge Project.

The agency signed a deal in April to lend $1.2 billion to Bangladesh to build the bridge over the Padma river but said the money won’t be doled out until the investigation is complete.

Shares of the Montreal-based company dropped 4.3% in Tuesday trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

In March 2005, SNC Lavalin joined with the Ontario provincial government and Hydro-Quebec for a proposal to develop the Lower Churchill. 

While the Newfoundland and Labrador government rejected outright  that proposal and all others it received, the province’s energy corporation subsequently awarded SNC Lavalin the engineering, procurement and construction management work for construction of the Muskrat Falls dam and the link from labrador to the island of Newfoundland.

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