Common sense – the rarest element #nlpoli

There’s a tee-shirt. 

This one is from zazzle

And it is true.

Common sense is so rare these days it should be classified as a super power.

It would be subject to the Roommate Agreement’s friendship rider.

Just sayin’.

- srbp -

Time to end the despicable abuse #nlpoli

Through her shouting and bawling it is hard to know if Yvonne Jones does not know what she is talking about or does not care.

Either way, the result is the same.

On Wednesday, Jones kept up her shouting about the tragic death of Burton Winters.  She has been talking about it in the House of Assembly every day the House has held a session for the past month.  The only day Jones didn’t rise in the House was when she and two of her colleagues went to Ottawa for a media stunt with federal Liberal members of parliament and the two New Democrats from this province.

Jones asked the Premier – yet again - if she would hold an inquiry into Winters’ death.  A month ago, there might have been a reason to do so.  Jones and few other political ghouls first tried to pin the tragedy on  federal officials. While Jones and the ghouls went off in pursuit of their own political agendas,  no one asked a few simple questions to provincial officials.  After all, ground search and rescue is a provincial responsibility.

Now let us be clear. Just because people are responsible for conducting a search does not mean they must be responsible if the search ends with finding a dead body. Your humble e-scribbler has pointed to the provincial officials before, not because they screwed up, but because they had information that should have put to rest any questions, concerns or doubts about the events in Makkovik.

No one asked for and no one volunteered the information.  One media outlet had the man with answers in their lap and instead asked him about something else.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale was content, at first,  to play the same game and go off to Ottawa for answers for questions that were irrelevant to knowing what happened. She even worked the federal defence minister to cook up a protocol change about when someone made a telephone call, as if that mattered then or now. It was pure theatrics and nothing more.

Despite the political misdirections, the public did get a very good  picture of what happened over those fateful few days in late January,  They had a very good timeline on  CBC’s website very shortly after the tragedy.  On February 10, the federal government released an internal report by National Defence officials on the incident as well.  It had plenty of detailed information on the provincial government’s actions. 

On March 7, though, when the House debated a resolution on the Makkovik tragedy, someone finally gave an account of events from the provincial government perspective. To his great credit, municipal affairs minister Kevin O’Brien gave a simple and clear account of things.  Unfortunately, quite a few people - your humble e-scribbler included – never saw or heard O’Brien’s speech. 

There is no need for an inquiry. By March 7th at the very latest, anyone who earnestly wanted to understand what had happened in Makkovik in late January could have known. 

A young boy went missing.  Police and local volunteers went searching where they thought he might be.  As it turned out, they had support from a helicopter that was in the area.  The police called provincial officials who, as they always do, called on a contracted helicopter service to help.  They couldn’t fly because of weather conditions at that time but came as quickly as they could.

Provincial emergency officials tried to get another helicopter from National Defence.  An inspection turned up a problem with a fuel line which they corrected.  Other than that, they had the same weather problems the commercial helicopter pilots had.

When the weather cleared, the commercial helicopter arrived and joined the search.  The searchers turned up signs of the young boy hours later.  They asked for and got help from the joint rescue centre in Halifax.  They sent a helicopter from Goose Bay and a long range patrol plane with equipment that could find heat from a human body at great distances.

The helicopter found other signs before nightfall and weather forced them to call off the search.  The next day the commercial helicopter located the boy’s body.

There can be no question about what happened.  The events are now well known to anyone who cares to find out.  The accounts of the search are consistent and always have been.  Many people acted in good faith and in a sincere effort to find a lost boy. Through no fault of anyone, they did not find the boy before he died.

For some unfathomable reason, Yvonne Jones seems determined to smear the young boy’s blood on someone – anyone -  even though there is not a single shred of evidence to support her efforts. She is prepared to invent or imagine all sorts of faults and failings for all sorts of people. 

Premier Kathy Dunderdale is Jones’ latest victim on that account.  The Premier often has trouble getting things straight.  On this issue, she has done a great many things except cut to the simple and plain truth.  But to be fair to her, Dunderdale has not been misleading anyone or confuddled her accounts, as Jones claimed on Wednesday.

In her relentless blood-smearing efforts, Jones also tried on Wednesday to invent some delay by provincial officials in calling the federal government for help.  There was no delay and Kevin O’Brien was again right to call Jones out for her political grandstanding:

You are playing politics with a tragedy, I say to the hon. member. Appalling!

Amen to that.

Jones’ behaviour has been appalling.

But there is an even better word for it and no one should be afraid to tell it to Jones at every opportunity:  despicable.  Yvonne Jones’ behaviour is utterly despicable.  It is beyond contempt.

There are times for politicians to fight for their constituents.  And there are times when responsible political leaders must help a community to heal.  In this case, Jones should be helping people to come to terms with a tragedy.  Instead, Jones is tearing open their wounds each day.  She is abusing people who have put their trust in her to do the right thing. She is being grossly irresponsible.

And whether she simply has no idea what she is talking about or does not care, the end result is the same:  a young boy’s family, friends and neighbours and thousands of other sincere people across the province continue to suffer the most horrible mental anguish.  They should not have had to endure it for one second longer than necessary. Yet as a result of Jones’ actions, they have been deluded into looking for blame where there is none to be had. They have been misled into thinking there are some secrets  or mysteries yet to be discovered. They have suffered now for days and weeks and months longer than they needed to. There is no excuse for it.

Jones has had help in this monstrous abuse.  She received it from other politicians.  She has received it from the news media.  

And above all she has received it from her caucus colleagues and her party leader, Dwight Ball.  They have not just stood by and allowed her to carry on.  They have joined her, as Ball did for the Ottawa stunt. There are no words in the English language strong enough to condemn Jones for grandstanding over others’ grief or for Ball who has simply acquiesced to Jones at every turn.

Let Wednesday be the last day for this despicable abuse of Burton Winters’ family and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Jones and Ball should let people begin to find some small measure of comfort from their anguish. If instead, Jones and Ball persist on their current course, then they deserve whatever political consequences they suffer.

It’s time for them to stop the despicable abuse.

- srbp -

Offshore Board Lays Charges Against Suncor #nlpoli

From CNLOPB (with some style edits):

The Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB) has laid three charges against Suncor Energy Inc., Operator of the exploration drilling program at the Ballicatters M96-Z well located in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin on Exploration Licences 1092 and 1113, for alleged offences related to a spill of synthetic based mud (SBM) from the mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU) Henry Goodrich operating in the Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Area. SBM is a heavy, dense fluid used during drilling operations to lubricate the drill pipe and balance reservoir pressure.

The charges result from an investigation by C-NLOPB Conservation Officers following a report of a spill of 26,400 litres of SBM into the ocean on Monday, March 28, 2011 from the drilling rig.  The Operator is charged with causing or permitting a spill into the Offshore Area, failure to ensure that drilling fluids were stored and handled in a manner that would have prevented pollution, and failure to ensure that drilling fluids were handled in a way that did not create a hazard to safety or the environment.

The C-NLOPB is the independent joint agency of the Governments of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador responsible for the regulatory oversight of petroleum activities in the Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Area, including; health and safety for offshore workers, protection of the environment during offshore petroleum activities, management and conservation of offshore petroleum resources, compliance with the provisions of the Accord Acts that deal with Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador employment and industrial benefits, issuance of licences for offshore exploration and development, and resource evaluation, data collection, curation and distribution.

Sean Kelly M.A., APR, FCPRS
Manager of Public Relations
C-NLOPB
Tel:             709-778-1418     
Cell:             709-689-0713  

- srbp -  

The excitement is obvious #nlpoli

That’s a screen capture of the CBC online story about something srbp told you about last December.

It speaks for itself.

- srbp -

Remember these words #nlpoli

When asked in the House of Assembly about the company hired to look at some aspect of using offshore natural gas to generate electricity, Premier Dunderdale said this:

Mr. Speaker, this is not a study; it is a report.

Just remember those words when Dunderdale inevitably uses the report to claim that she and her officials have “studied” natural gas and dismissed it.

- srbp -

And if she was wrong about that, too… #nlpoli

There are two things in this world.

There is what actually happened.

And then there is what Premier Kathy Dunderdale says.

The two have very little to do with one another.

Last week, it was federal budget cuts.  Kathy said one thing.  Reality was something else.

This week, it is the public utilities board.

Kathy was so pissed at the board for not giving her the answer on Muskrat falls she wanted that she tore gigantic strips off them in the House of Assembly:

What they have come back and said – we are not prepared to make a recommendation unless we have sanction numbers, Mr. Speaker. The question is, when they asked for an extension at the end of December to the end of June, it was for public consultation purposes. …[emphasis added]

And what actually happened?

Check out a series of letters from the board to the natural resources minister  - Shawn Skinner, at the time - about the deadline the provincial government set for the review. 

September 22:

The Board is not formally requesting an extension at this time because we cannot provide a realistic alternate date until we have a better idea as to when Nalcor will answer the outstanding information requests and file the Submission contemplated in the Terms of Reference further outlining the projects.

Nalcor was having trouble getting information to the board so they let government know the board couldn’t meet the deadline.  They committed to propose an alternate date once they had a better sense of when Nalcor could get their stuff together.

Skinner’s successor finally answered the September letter... on December 12:

The House of Assembly is scheduled to open on March 5, 2012. During its sitting, the House will be busy with a throne speech, budget, and regular legislation. Therefore, it is imperative that we receive the report by March 31, 2012 to ensure that Members of the House of Assembly are not constrained in their ability to examine and debate the report.

Andy Wells replied four days later.  Here’s the first sentence in the second paragraph in which the board asked for a deadline in June:

The reason this extension is necessary is Nalcor's failure to provide the required information in a timely fashion.

The letter includes a timeline for province-wide public consultations, a technical conference and greater participation by the government’s appointee, called the consumer advocate.

So you can see already that what Kathy said and what happened are not on the same planet, let alone in the same room.  Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are closer together.

Andy got his reply from Jerome on December 23:  no.  March 31 is it.  Get ‘er done.

So no one would be surprised if, during the course of the next few weeks, the folks at the board didn’t bother to write back saying that they needed some up-to-date information from Nalcor.  They knew they wouldn’t get it and they certainly wouldn’t be allowed any more time.

You will note in Jerome Kennedy’s letter and in Kathy Dunderdale’s recent comments that they like to refer to the terms of reference the board followed.  This is important, you see because it shows that the provincial government was trying to force the board to look at only certain aspects of the project and deal only with certain information in order to arrive at one conclusion, the one the government wanted to hear.

And that’s important because of something else the Premier said on Monday:

We provided all of that information in the mandate to the PUB, the mandate they accepted to review those numbers…

To accept something suggests that you had a choice about it. 

Well, friends, that little comment by the Premier isn’t true either.

Under section 5 of the Electrical Power Control Act, 1994, the board had no choice but accept the terms of reference set by cabinet and report by the deadline government imposed.  The board didn’t have a choice.

So if Kathy Dunderdale is wrong about this, was wrong about the impact of federal layoffs in the province, and has been wrong about so many things so many times since 2003, what are the odds she is right about just one really big thing called Muskrat Falls?

What are the odds?

- srbp -

Credit rater gives Emera “negative” outlook #nlpoli

The Chronicle Herald reported Tuesday that credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s had changed its rating for Emera from “stable’ to “negative”.

The problem is the capital requirement in order to meet the Nova Scotia government’s green targets.  CH quoted Standard & Poor’s analyst Nicole Martin:

Meeting that renewables goal will require a “meaningful capital expenditure program,” according to Martin. The upshot: Nova Scotia Power’s ability to cover a growing debt load will depend upon the timing and size of rate increases granted by the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board, which sets power rates in the province.

That heightens what Martin calls “regulatory risk due to the potential for rate shock.” Last November, the board granted Nova Scotia Power an average rate increase of approximately 5.1 per cent for all customers effective Jan. 1.

The rating means the company will have to pay more in order to raise the cash for all those transmission lines it would have to build as part of any deal with Nalcor for Muskrat Falls.

Some observations:

• Odds are this is why Emera and Nalcor haven’t signed a deal for Muskrat Falls yet.
• This also explains why the companies gave themselves an indefinite deadline for finishing talks even though they were supposedly so close to getting one done two months ago.
• If Emera drops out, expect the chances of a federal loan guarantee to head to zero. 
• The Tories in Newfoundland and Labrador might still push ahead with the project – they are just that wacky – but it would be a much more convenient excuse to cut their political losses.
• Don’t forget that Emera will have to run its part of the Muskrat deal through their utilities regulator.  If rate increases are stressing Emera already, watch out when the Muskrat risk hits.

- srbp -

Arrogance, thy name is Tom Marshall #nlpoli

Speaking on VOCM’s Open Line on Tuesday, finance minister Tom Marshall explained what will happen in the House of Assembly during the Muskrat Falls debate coming up in June:

The opposition will get its say, then the government will get its way.  That’s how democracy works.

That pretty much sums up the fundamental problem in this province since 2003.

- srbp -

The Charge of the Lightweight Brigade #nlpoli

The provincial government got the public utilities board review on Muskrat Falls on Saturday.

Two days later, Premier Kathy Dunderdale didn't stand in the House of Assembly and deliver a ministerial statement laying out the government's response.  Instead, she waited until the opposition parties asked her questions about it.

Dunderdale said she'd now hold a debate in the House of Assembly.  Her exact words delivered somewhere around 2:00 PM:

When all of that information is in the public purview, Mr. Speaker, which we expect will not be until probably the end of June, we will call the House together for a full debate in case the House is not sitting at that time.

At 2:40 PM, her office issued a news release that purported to give government's official response to the PUB report.  The thrust of the release is that the provincial government is ploughing ahead to project sanction, otherwise known as Decision Gate 3:

The next steps will involve analysis of Decision Gate 3 information – the most up-to-date information on load forecast, fuel price forecast, defined capital costs, and system integrated studies.

Damn the torpedoes!  You can hear the Premier delivering those stirring words, shouting them over the great din in cabinet caused by the gnashing of teeth about the PUB. Full speed ahead! she cried in order to encourage her staff on in the face of growing adversity.

And the debate in the legislature?  Well, in the news release the "Provincial Government is prepared to have a special debate in the House of Assembly...".  Gone from "will call the House" to "is prepared" all in the space of a half hour or so.


Yeah.


Maybe less Farragut and more Cardigan. 


Half a league, half a league, half a league onward all in the valley of Muskrat rode the six hundred, or in Kathy's version, the 20 or 30.


Yes.


That's more like it.


The Charge of the Lightweight Brigade.

- srbp -

If she was wrong about this… #nlpoli

As we told you on Monday, the ever attentive labradore caught Kathy Dunderdale in a pretty outrageous comment last week on the impact the federal budget would have on the province.

‘Not much’ was the thrust of her comment.

And it was pretty much her comment to the Telegram’s James Macleod.  Here is the quote:

"We've got about 600 federal jobs here in the province," she said.

"If the cuts are going to be about five or six per cent, then that'll translate into between 20 and 30 jobs for us."

You see there are actually about 7400 federal employees in the province.  Cuts of five percent would work out to be a heckuva lot more than 20 or 30.

Well, New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael put the question to the Premier in the House of Assembly on Monday, as any opposition politician worth her salt would do:

How could she have been so wrong about the number of people working for one of the biggest employers in this Province?

It’s a good question.

To her credit, Kathy Dunderdale fessed up:

Mr. Speaker, I take full responsibility for the miscommunication. It was entirely mine. I meant to say 6,000, between 250 and 300. I omitted a very important zero in all of those numbers; the fault was mine, not the newspapers.

Unfortunately, Lorraine dropped it at that point and went for some questions about Muskrat Falls and the PUB.  She might have had more fun poking at just how the Premier could make such a monumental screw up. 

After all, if the Premier could be so completely out to lunch on the impact of the federal budget on the provincial economy, and well, like she’s been wrong like that more than a few times before, maybe her assurances about Muskrat Falls are equally reliable.

There are many ways to skin a muskrat, grasshopper.

- srbp -

The PUB and the MFers #nlpoli

Right off the start, the title goes back to a humorous tweet a few months ago.  It went something like this:

If Muskrat Falls is MF, then does that make its supporters MFers?

You gotta laugh at this stuff, folks, because if you didn’t you’d either cry or turn into Dexter. Based on her performance in the House of Assembly on Monday, if Premier Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t lighten up, she is gonna stroke out.  No amount of publicity in a running magazine that heralds her as a “celebrity” can change that.

Frankly, Kathy should laugh at the predicament she and her colleagues put themselves in.

It is pretty funny, after all.  First  Danny and the boys at Nalcor made up this “Build Muskrat First” project over the course of a few months in 2010 so the Old Man could get out of his political career with a flourish.   They had nothing to go on except a 30 year old study, so they cobbled together enough justifications to make it look good.

And off they went.

The joint federal-provincial review was about something else, so they could  - and did, as it turned out – breeze by whatever it found.  Since the Liberals exempted all Churchill River hydro projects from the public utilities board back in 2000, the project wouldn’t have to pass through any real scrutiny.  What Danny’s successor and her crowd wound up doing instead is hand the board a reference question carefully structured to deliver the answer the government and Nalcor wanted. 

In the event, the public utilities board asked for more time to do its work.  Kathy Dunderdale and Jerome Kennedy shut them down. End of March, they said. The opposition parties started talking about a debate in the House. Jerome and Kathy said no way.

That got to be a fairly consistent Tory talking point after a while:  Piss off.  There’s been enough talk.  Let’s get on with it.  This thing has been studied to death.  More problems turned up with the project.  More viable alternatives appeared.  More credible critics and opponents turned up.  The worse things looked for Muskrat Falls,  the more Kathy and Jerome and the gang wanted to stop talking and start spending.

“We need to get to sanction,” Dunderdale told NTV’s issues and Answers a few weeks ago.

Basically up to Monday, things were moving along the government’s chosen path. Then the public utilities board decided they wouldn’t play any more: 

The Board concludes that the information provided by Nalcor in the review is not detailed, complete or current enough to determine whether the Interconnected Option represents the least-cost option for the supply of power to Island Interconnected customers over the period of 2011-2067, as compared to the Isolated Island Option.

In the House of Assembly, the best Premier Kathy Dunderdale could work up was a load of nothing.  She and her staff had the PUB report for days.  On Monday, no one stood to announce the government response as a ministerial statement.  No one stood to talk about a debate, more studies and research or anything of the sort.  Had the Tories done that, they would have neutered the opposition questions immediately and regained control of the story.

Instead, they reacted and Kathy Dunderdale reacted with stuff that doesn’t matter:

Mr. Speaker, when you are looking for a full, independent analysis which is what we were trying to do with the PUB review …  the PUB walked away from its responsibility, the terms of its mandate, to give us a recommendation. A recommendation that had already been endorsed by Navigant, by Manitoba Hydro, by the Consumer Advocate Mr. Johnson and his expert Knight Piésold, and Dr. Wade Locke. They all concur that it is the least-cost and we need the power. The PUB was not able to arrive there.

Everyone knows the government cut off the PUB from its set-up, so there’s no way it was ever an independent review.  Navigant is a long-standing consultant for Nalcor. Independent?  Pfft, as the Old Man would say.  Political appointee Johnson an independent reviewer?  Double pfft.

And Locke?  He didn’t even do the calculations and everyone knows it.

All that’s left is Manitoba Hydro.  They did some work for the PUB and turned up more problems with the Muskrat Falls project than ever. One of the biggest failings MHI found was that Nalcor just didn’t do a major study they should have done – according to best industry practices – before they let the project through Decision Gate 2.

Then Dunderdale tossed out the gem:  she will now have a debate, a special debate in the House by the end of June.  Only a couple of days earlier, her natural resources minister flatly rejected the idea.  They really are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

After all that, if you aren’t chuckling at least, then you have no sense of humour whatsoever.

So Muskrat Falls will drag on for another few months.  The criticisms will mount.  The government will look ridiculous and incompetent and all as a result of its own bungling, its own miscalculations. In the end, it may die an ugly death, perhaps stabbed by the very people who helped create it.

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.

- srbp -

A fundamental lack of competence #nlpoli

One crowd can’t even successfully rig a process they set out to rig from the start.   So now the Premier wants to have a debate she earlier rejected as unnecessary in a legislature she once called dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, another crowd of politicians decides to frig off to Ottawa to support one individual’s personal campaign to be the next Labrador member of parliament when they should have been home working on a much bigger issue for the whole province.

Both speak to a fundamental lack of competence.

- srbp -

Electricity regulator balks at judgment on Muskrat project #nlpoli #nlpoli

From the report by the public utilities board on Muskrat Falls:

The Board concludes that the information provided by Nalcor in the review is not detailed, complete or current enough to determine whether the Interconnected Option represents the least-cost option for the supply of power to Island Interconnected customers over the
period of 2011-2067, as compared to the Isolated Island Option. (p. iv)

You can tell the provincial government isn’t happy.  In their media advisory, they posted the link to the general Muskrat Falls information page and not to the report itself. If they wanted you to read it, they’d have given you the direct link right up front.

This report likely also explains why On Point panellists Shawn Skinner and Lana Payne spoke about the project like it was already dead or dying.  When Skinner said the board’s report would have a watered-down impact as a result of government decisions, he wasn’t talking about overall impact.  He was talking about the potentially positive impact the report could have to persuade people Muskrat was the good choice.

- srbp -

Numbers and other information #nlpoli

People aren’t stupid.  They just don’t know stuff.

Politicians are no different.

In Kathy Dunderdale’s case, labradore had an absolutely devastating post last week about the Premier’s reaction to the impact that federal budget cuts might have on the province.  The Premier said that there were only 500 hundred or 600 federal employees in the province so the jobs losses might be only 20 or 30.

As labradore noted:

As per Statscan's CANSIM Table 183-0002, there was an annualized average of about 7400 full-time-equivalent (FTE) federal government jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2011.

A five to six percent reduction in federal employment, if applied uniformly across the country, would result in the elimination of about 375 to 450 fedgov FTEs in the province.

“Would result”  might be more accurately stated as “might result” since we still need to see lots of details to tell exactly how the federal budget cuts will work out in practice. 

But still,  Dunderdale was a long way off on the math.  The potential size of the cuts could be 15 times larger than Dunderdale projected, unless she has some inside information she isn’t sharing.  So yeah close, if by close you mean one fifteenth of the possible number.

For another tale of information and politics, consider Lorraine Michael and Dwight Ball on this week’s edition of On Point with David Cochrane.  Toward the end of their segment, Ball noted how much his view of Muskrat Falls has shifted in the past year.  He’s gone from support to something a little less than complete support.

Note two things.  First, Ball supports Muskrat Falls; not surprising, the entire Liberal caucus does.  He just thinks the government should wait a second and look at those other ideas before going ahead.  The only difference between Ball and Dunderdale is how fast he would approve the project.

Second, Ball  obviously trusts the provincial government completely and implicitly. Odds are, Ball assumed that he didn’t need to think about Muskrat Falls. He didn’t need to listen to the critics. Heck, he could just assume the critics were kooks and crackpots.  They had to be wrong because government has all those smart people working there. 

This sort of thinking doesn’t apply just to Ball and the Liberals.  You could say the same thing of Lorraine Michael and the New Democrats.

Heck, listen to the politicians on the panel that Cochrane assembled  for the weekend’s show and you’d hear much the same thing, in one version or another.  Shawn Skinner likes Muskrat Falls.  He just thinks the government may have undermined support for the project by the way they’ve responded to critics and sped along the public utilities board review. 

Federation of labour president Lana Payne said basically the same thing.  Splendid project undermined by a lousy sales job.  One representing the government view and the other representing an opposition party and both believe exactly the same thing.

Interesting.

Skinner used to be a provincial cabinet minister.  You expect him to love this project.  But the Liberals and the New Democrats can only muster up a minor criticism of the Tories based on process alone.

Seems odd.

Seems stunningly superficial, and to be frank, it is.

They accept the government’s contention about natural gas without question, as well.  None of the oil companies want to develop it, supposedly, because they can’t make money at it, therefore, natural gas sitting off our shores is unavailable to the people of the province to meet their own energy needs.

In any other place on the planet, the government would be pushing for the development of the cheapest source of energy for its own people.  In Newfoundland and Labrador,  all but a couple of politicians – literally no more than two at the moment - agree that people should have one of the most expensive forms of electricity available instead and give away some of it to other people.  The only quibbles are about things like how best to convince the public they should pay for their electricity through the nose.

Now given the earlier comments they made – Dwight Ball was surprised to find all these cheaper alternatives that hadn’t been explored – you’d think maybe that Ball, Payne and the others might start to wonder if everything else Kathy Dunderdale and the Tories have been saying but be less than accurate as well. Maybe the problem with Muskrat falls is a bit more complicated than just some lousy marketing decisions.

Evidently not.

Now when most of us don’t know stuff, that’s one thing.

But when politicians -  the people we trust to look after stuff – don’t know stuff, or don’t bother to learn stuff, that’s a whole other thing entirely.

And that whole other thing sure as heck ain’t good.

- srbp -

How stupid are voters, anyway? #nlpoli

Poke around some political websites over the past couple of months and you’ll find a few columns on the question of how much voters are paying attention to politics in the run-up to the American presidential election.

These will give you a good sample:

• Politico:  “Dylan Byers on Media” -  CNN’s John King suggests Americans are uniformed of world events
• Politico:  How much do voters know?
• The American Prospect – Most voters aren’t stupid

Take a few minutes and read those articles.  One of the things you’ll appreciate when you get to the last one is that, as Matt Corley points out, voters aren’t stupid. That is, they don’t lack the intellectual ability to figure something out and make a decision.  What they lack is information about some subjects.

The issue that those three articles all mention is gasoline prices.  American presidents can’t do much to change gasoline prices.  Most Americans apparently think he can. Not surprisingly, therefore, Republican candidates spend a chunk of their time bashing Barack Obama over American gasoline prices.

We’ve had the same issue here within the last decade.  The incumbent Liberals introduced something called Petroleum Products Pricing, a system that supposedly regulates the price of gasoline and other fuels and ensures they are “reasonable”.  The whole thing was a charade, of course, but the system stays partly because it is popular and partly because it has proven to be a cash cow for government. 

That’s not the finest example of public ignorance and the politicians who preyed on it, though.  To find that one, you’d have to look at the claim that the federal government took oil royalties from the provincial government through the federal government’s Equalization program.  The federal government never did any such thing but that didn’t stop a provincial royal commission and two successive Premiers from going to war with Ottawa to try and right the imaginary wrong.

The second premier started his administration with a jihad over the royalties.  They talked about cracking open the 1985 Atlantic Accord and renegotiating it.  Finance minister Loyola Sullivan held a news conference in which he announced the shocking news that as provincial government revenues from its own sources went up, Equalization went down.  He never bothered to mention that this was exactly how the system was supposed to work.

In the end, he and his boss settled for a $2.0 billion cheque.

And that was the end of it.

Still that didn’t stop a raft of politicians and a few other informed commentators like Wade Locke from suggesting it was much more than that.  Some people still believe that the cash windfalls that swelled the provincial treasury from 2006 onward all came from that deal.  They didn’t.  They came from the oil royalty regimes dating back to 1990 and oil prices that have skyrocketed to historic heights due to international political and economic uncertainty.

People in the province  - like people in any part of North America – don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics.  And there are a great many things, like the inner workings of Equalization or how oil royalties make money for the province, that they simply leave to other people to figure out.

Voters aren’t stupid.  They just leave those things to others, like politicians.

Voters expect those politicians to understand the details of complicated issues.  They expect them to look after things while the voters get on with taking the kids to school and hockey practice and all the other stuff that occupies a normal life.

They just don’t expect politicians to tell them things that aren’t true.  Sad to say, politicians sometimes seem to have a problem with that one. 

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Muskrat Three-some #nlpoli

Here are some treats to keep you up with the latest developments on the Muskrat falls front.

For starters, CBC’s Anthony Germain interviewed Tom Adams on Thursday about Adams’ contention that the Muskrat Falls project will add a significant debt load on the province.  It’s the third audio file from the top on that linked page, incidentally. 

How’s $12,000 per person for a significant debt load?

Adams points out that the industry standard way of figuring out costs for electricity projects makes Muskrat Falls hideously expensive.  Nalcor’s estimate, incidentally, is that the cost using the industry-standard means puts Muskrat falls at a cost of at least 21 cents per kilowatt hour.  When your humble e-scribbler and others said Muskrat would double the price of electricity for consumers, we were wrong.  it would actually triple it or worse.

Because Muskrat Falls is so hideously expensive, Nalcor Energy and its whole-owned subsidiary - the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador - plan to use a costing method that transfers the costs and the huge risks for the project into the future.  That makes it appear cheaper at the front but ensures that consumers get it in the end.

Clever, eh?

Adams’ comments are based on a post he made on March 21.

A couple of days later, Adams posted a link to slides from David Vardy’s presentation to the Rotary Club of St. John’s. That’s your second treat.

Most of this is stuff you may have heard before.  One of the things you might want to pick out, though, is a point Vardy makes at the bottom of slide 18:

Access to financing will depend on the form of the loan guarantee.

Federal officials have talked about delivering their loan guarantee in a number of forms depending on what works best for them.  Provincial officials haven’t really talked about this because it is a very delicate issue.  How the feds deliver their commitment will affect the cost of the project significantly.

It can also determine whether or not the provincial government can raise the cash they will need for this very expensive project that has no apparent chance of ever making a nickel from export sales.  Potential investors are looking at this project like hawks. They aren’t going to be fooled by Twittered bullshit about a 15% cost over-run and revenue streams that make it wonderful and viable.

Financing is the key to this project.  Note Vardy’s point.  You might also want to go back and check two old posts from this corner:  one from December 2010 and another from February 2011.

Your third treat is the presentation by Dr. Stephen Bruneau (March 28) on the potential for natural gas as a way to produce electricity in the province.  David Vardy noted this one as well as the availability of Churchill Falls power in 2041, incidentally.

Bruneau walked through the entire issue, including availability and potential costs. The slides are here in pdf.

He also looks at the risk of a pipeline rupture.  Interestingly enough, the proponents of the Muskrat project are grasping at that one to try and fight off the threat to their dream posed by natural gas. 

Bruneau estimates that the fuel costs for a Holyrood-sized gas plant would be one quarter of the cost of Holyrood.  That’s based on an assumption that we cost the natural gas at current American market prices.  The overall construction cost is in the neighbourhood of your humble e-scribbler’s estimates of under $2.0 billion.  Bruneau estimates construction would be two years or so.

One of the things that opponents of low cost electricity forget is that you actually need a mix of generation types to deliver a stable supply of electricity.  Natural gas would be the logical compliment to the existing hydro-electric generation on the island.

And, for those folks, that’s a significant issue.  They love Muskrat and criticise natural gas because it isn’t green enough.  What they fail to admit is that their plan for Muskrat includes more thermal generation from oil than the island current has.  The Green Fallacy is just another example of how Muskrat proponents have to cut corners on the facts in order to push their project along.

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Kremlinology 40: Word Search #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Go right through the 2012 federal budget.

Look anywhere you want.

Try the chapter that lists off energy projects and how the latest federal budget will help them.

Note the reference to Hebron:

Hebron Offshore Oil Development (Newfoundland and Labrador)

ExxonMobil Canada Properties’ Hebron Offshore Oil Development project is a 19,000 to 28,000 cubic metres per day offshore oil production proposal located in the Jeanne d'Arc basin, approximately 340 kilometres offshore of St. John's. The proposal consists of an offshore oil production system and associated facilities. A project description was submitted in March 2009 and the review was completed in January 2012.

Look at the picture – right – that includes a dot for the dam and some dashed lines for the transmission lines for it.

Go a bit farther down the page and find this reference:

Eliminating this tariff will lower business costs by $30 million annually, improve the competitiveness of the energy industry, including electricity generation in Newfoundland and Labrador …

Interesting.  The federal government is going to make it cheaper to bring certain things into the country – like say oil, coal, and natural gas? – that would make it cheaper for you to make electricity in Canada.

Now go back to your search.

Look high.

Look low.

Try and find the words “Muskrat Falls.”

Your humble e-scribbler couldn’t find them.

Couldn’t find “loan guarantee” or anything like it, either.

After that, it seemed kind of silly to look for phrases like “copper-fastened.”

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They’re baaaack #nlpoli

Last December, your humble e-scribbler told you about the Liberal party’s renewal committee.

Well, it’s back, or it will be back according to an anonymous source quoted by the Telegram on Monday.

The thing was going to involve Dean Macdonald, Siobhan Coady and Kevin Aylward.  They would travel around the province listening to people and then report back at some point in the future to the party’s executive board. And then at some point after that all that listening and reporting would produce something called “renewal”.

Now the idea is still alive but, according to the Telly’s source, …

sources in the party indicate since then the project has grown, and when the announcement happens, it will likely include more prominent party members, and representation from different regions of the province.

There’s no talk of a deadline or a timeline according to the source.  The committee will just go on a do whatever it is they will do.

Two things stand out. 

First – what your humble e-scribbler said before Christmas still stands:

If the Liberals knew what to do or had a general idea of where to go, they’d do it.  Instead, they have adopted – in essence -  the fisheries MOU process.  That was a committee by another name and look at how successfully that worked out.

Adding more people to the committee or putting different people on the committee doesn’t change the fact it is still a committee that apparently lacks a focus, direction or purpose. 

So while they are off listening, lots of things are happening while the Liberals reach around in the dark trying to find themselves. 

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky described the party’s performance in the legislature in stark but honest and accurate terms.

Truly effective oppositions not only know the questions they’re asking, but they often have some knowledge of the answers, too.

Then, when governments prevaricate or trot out a handful of off-point bluster, the opposition members go outside the House and give the media the answers the government has been avoiding.

It’s a pretty simple formula, really. The goal is to establish credibility so that voters will see the opposition as a viable alternative in the next election.  The problem for the Liberals is that – very obviously – they just aren’t interested in getting back into power.

Government backbencher or opposition member, the gig is pretty sweet.  No heavy lifting and you are in out of the weather.  And these days you don’t have to show up very often.  You aren’t expected to know much of anything about anything.  There’s plenty of patronage to hand out if you are a government member and that’s what helps to put the votes in the box these days. Wangersky notes the speeches about money for the district. Patronage is why. 

There’s a good reason why the Tories went along with the House allowances scheme the Liberals proposed in the late 1990s. And there’s a reason they not only kept it going after 2003 but didn’t slack off until the Auditor General’s boys tripped over it.

Leave aside the criminals and look at the rest of the members.  The House allowances scheme was all about patronage, about handing out goodies in the district, about bringing back the spoils.  Chief Justice Green nailed it in his report.  The Telegram did, too, even if the truth went up Kathy Dunderdale’s nose sideways.

And on the opposition benches, the motivation is basically the same.  You could be assured that the government boys would look after you, too, even if the amount was less than what the government boys got. They’d toss road work and other stuff your way as long as you stood up and thanked them loudly in the House.

Then you can turn around and issue a news release about the wonderful pork you’ve been able to bring back for your peeps from the big treasure pile in Sin Jawns. 

The same sort of co-operation among the incumbents explains a lot of things, including the special ballots scheme from 2007.  Anything that helps incumbents stay in office is good, regardless of what party the incumbent represents. 

That community self-interest among the insiders is why the people who have been fighting hardest against the anti-democratic trends of the past decade aren’t Liberals or Tories. The only politicians fighting about sitting days or special ballots are New Democrats.  In Newfoundland and Labrador politics, Dippers are the ultimate outsiders.

That might wind up working for them, but that’s all something for another time.  For now, just understand that the Liberals are in no danger of suddenly catching fire politically.  The party apparatus is going to have a committee jerking off across the province.  meanwhile, the caucus is impressing no one in the House.

Second - consider that all this news for the Telly came from an unnamed source.  Someone disgruntled or someone who fancies himself an insider bent on proving it?  Either way, this sort of anonymous leaking is the sign of an amateur act.  it’s a big clue that the Liberals lack the internal cohesion and internal discipline needed to form a viable political party. 

Without the kind of professionalism successful political parties display, the Liberals are destined to stay exactly where they are, even if by some miracle the “renewal” committee manages to do something useful.

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Coulda, woulda, shoulda: the Labrador hydro version #nlpoli

Sometimes completely separate events come together in a striking way.

Your humble e-scribbler and Jerome Kennedy, the provincial natural resources minister exchanged a couple of tweets on Tuesday.   The minister had called it an error that the 1969 Churchill Falls power contract included a clause that said the contract would be interpreted under the laws of Quebec.  If the contract was under the laws of this province, the government would be able to apply section 92A of the Constitution Act, 1867. Go back and read the Supreme Court cases, he suggested.

Well, let’s just leave that for another day without getting into the details.  The ongoing discussion among Labrador aficionados about 92A is long and complicated.

Let’s just look at the bit about an error.

Well, it is an error.

But it’s an error in hindsight.

And that’s hindsight with the benefit of section 92A that was added to the constitution in 1982 and not even dreamed about in 1969.  And that’s with the benefit of knowing what happened in 1976 when the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador effectively nationalised the company that signed the 1969 contract with Hydro-Quebec.

That company was Brinco and its subsidiary, the Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation. Brinco was a private company with its head office in Montreal. The guys who signed the 1969 contract had no idea that their company would all but vanish in 1976 and that the Canadian constitution would change or that this might somehow matter to them.

Meanwhile, earlier on Tuesday, your humble e-scribbler had a chat with someone else about Nalcor’s lawsuit against Hydro-Quebec over the 1969 contract.  You can find CBC’s online story about it on the New Brunswick CBC site.  They also posted the motion to start legal proceedings that Nalcor’s lawyers filed in Montreal against Hydro-Quebec.

The motion doesn’t argue that Hydro-Quebec screwed Brinco. It doesn’t say that the HQ boys used insider knowledge to gain some advantage improperly.  They didn’t use any of the usual descriptions people in Newfoundland and Labrador have for the 1969 contract.

Instead you see stuff like this:

13. When the contract was signed, neither party believed or had any reason to believe that the North American electricity markets would become more competitive, and
CFLCo in particular had no reason to believe that future US open access regulations would in effect enable CFLCo to transmit energy through Hydro-Québec's transmission network to the US or other markets;

14. Nor was there any reason to believe that the commercial value of the energy sold would increase over time. To the contrary, it was generally expected that with the advent of nuclear power plants, the value of that energy might well decline over time;

15. Thus, the contract contains no escalation clause but rather provides for a gradual reduction in the purchase price, a clear indication that the extraordinary increase in
energy prices to their present level was neither foreseen nor foreseeable when the Power Contract was signed;

No one saw anything coming.

Neither Brinco nor Hydro-Quebec “believed or has any reason to believe” their assumptions would turn out to be wrong.

And that declining price is not the result of some evil French plot to oppress the poor benighted folk of the Happy Province. Nope, it was the result of a mutual understanding of what would be fair given all those reasonable assumptions both parties had at the time they signed the deal.

Things changed after that and both parties to the agreement these days have recognised the need to change it.  Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to cut a deal.  So now, Nalcor is in court to get a Quebec court to order a resolution.

Without getting into any more of the argument than that, it is curious to see the extent that both the natural resources minister and the government’s lawyers use hindsight when talking about the 1969 contract. 

Jerome Kennedy used it in a fairly typical way.  Hindsight has been the usual way some politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador use to paint the 1969 contract as the Great Injustice or the Quebec Plot or the Great Give-Away or whatever injustice they pledge to avenge.  For Kennedy it was along the lines that if only they hadn’t made that big mistake back then, we could easily fix the problem.

For the lawyers, the deal was wonderful in the beginning.  Things turned out differently.  So in hindsight, we need to go back and rework the original deal because the situation is changed.  No one did anything wrong but we still need to fix things.

It will be fascinating to see how the courts in Quebec and later the Supreme Court in Ottawa deal with the Nalcor lawsuit.

And it will be really interesting in future years to watch as the Muskrat Falls gang deal with the impact of hindsight applied to their deal.

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Tory and Dipper leader in approvals tie in NL: poll #nlpoli

An unspecified number of people polled online in Newfoundland and Labrador by Angus-Reid approved almost equally of the job done by e Premier Kathy Dunderdale and New Democratic party leader Lorraine Michael.

The margin of error for the entire poll of more than 6,600 Canadians in nine province is given as plus or minus 1.2%.  There’s no indication of the margin of error for Newfoundland and Labrador.

What’s most interesting though is the matched approval ratings.  More respondents disapproved of Dunderdale than Michael but more respondents were not sure of their opinion of Michael compared to Michael.

	Approve	Disapprove	Not sure
Kathy Dunderdale	55	37	8
Lorraine Michael	55	32	13

Respondents were asked:

Do you approve or disapprove of the performance of each of the following people?

Dunderdale’s approval is down five percentage points from December 2011 and three points from August 2011.

That gets more interesting when you compare Dunderdale over a longer period.  For example, 35% of respondents were not sure about her in February 2011, the highest undecided result for any Premier in the survey.

One year later and those undecideds have moved to the “disapprove” column.  Her “approved” rating is at 55% in 2012 compared to 55%* a year ago.

Here’s how things looked last summer:

According to the latest Angus-Reid poll,  43% of respondents are satisfied with Kathy Dunderdale’s performance as premier down from 55% in February and 67% for her predecessor last November.

Undecided remains at 35% of those polled.

But here’s the thing:  Those who said they were dissatisfied with Dunderdale’s performance went from 10% in February to 23%.

Kathy Dunderdale may be Premier but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some serious political problems to deal with.

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*corrected number

The difference in lost lives #nlpoli #cdnpoli

In the past month, at least two people have died as a result of misadventure in the wilderness on motorized vehicles.

One was was a 23 year old young man who inadvertently rode his all terrain vehicle into the water, where he drowned.

The other was a 14 year old young man whose snowmobile ran out of gas outside his hometown on the Labrador coast.  He turned the wrong way to walk home and wound up, tragically, freezing to death.  Had he turned the right way, he walked far enough to be home twice over.

In both cases, the local police directed the search with the help from volunteers and from the provincial emergency response organization.  The emergency response agency called in helicopters from a civilian contractor to give the searchers the ability to cover more ground.  That’s what they do to help the people searching on the ground.

Here’s what you will find on the Fire and Emergency Services website:

Fire and Emergency Services – NL is called upon to assist the police forces (Royal Newfoundland Constabulary & Royal Canadian Mounted Police) in search and rescue activities. This assistance is usually in the form of air services support for lost and missing persons. The program is also utilized by FES-NL during emergency response activities.

Sometimes they call for help from the military search and rescue service.  But just so everyone is clear on who is responsible for what when it comes to search and rescue, here’s the mission as described on the website for the office that co-ordinates the military rescue service:

The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) Halifax is responsible for the coordination of all Search and Rescue (SAR) operations associated with aircraft and marine emergencies in eastern Canada.

All this is important because CBC’s Fifth Estate decided to ignore those and a great many other factual details in its ghoulish rush to grab some ratings. They spent most of their recent report reciting aspects of the story that are well known.  The weather issue was one everyone asked about early on and that National Defence addressed in detail.

They interviewed the president of Universal Helicopters.  When his company got the call from provincial officials, they were already committed to going he says, or words to that effect.  He did not add and CBC certainly didn’t bother to explain that Universal has the contract to fly those search missions for provincial authorities. 

And if Universal doesn’t anyone trained to provide much in the way of  emergency medical support on those flights, that is because the provincial government hasn’t put it in the contract.  They don’t have any infra-red equipment either, for the same reason.  But, no need to worry, the provincial government is taking care of that.

New information about problems with the Hercules aircraft fleet in Greenwood actually explains in much clearer terms why the joint rescue centre didn’t send a helicopter from Gander.  To do so, at a time when the weather was iffy, might have risked preventing them from responding to a marine emergency.  After all that is the first responsibility for military search and rescue.  As much as fifth estate tries to spin the story otherwise,  the people who did the searching in Makkovik were the people who were supposed to be searching.

But for all that,  the Fifth Estate story was good enough to get some politicians to ask questions in the legislature.

The CBC supper hour news led into the coverage of the House of Assembly session on Monday by noting that CBC’s reporting was one of the major topics of discussion.  Their online story tells us all that the Premier is demanding answers “to questions raised about the search for Burton Winters by The Fifth Estate.”  If you think pushing turkeys at Christmas is unseemly for a news organization, imagine what you’d think of such public masturbation.

In any event, opposition politicians asked the provincial government what they would do about the federal government.  And, as CBC reported, Premier Kathy Dunderdale was happy to stand up in the House of Assembly and insist that she was as fried as everyone else that those nasty federales weren’t answering questions.  Dunderdale did her best to out-posture Liberal Yvonne Jones about whose indignation was more righteous but in the end they both wound up in a tie. 

They should both be ashamed of themselves, all the ghoul-politicians who have feasted on this tragedy, should be ashamed of themselves.  The problem is that politicians from this province seem to have had the organ that controls decent, human behaviour surgically removed.  No search and rescue crew could find it. 

Otherwise, they’d have long ago stopped torturing the Winters family or figured out they they keep looking to the wrong people to provide answers to any questions they still have.

Incidentally, Jordan Wells is the other young man who died in a tragic accident earlier this year.

No politicians seem to care about Jordan’s family, though.  No one has asked any questions in the legislature about Jordan.  No one seems to wonder why he died, how he died and why the police and local volunteers searched for him.  There’s not much chance  a national television crew will show up to record his parents’ exquisite grief so that people in Sri Lanka can watch them bathe themselves with shards of broken glass over and over and over

There is apparently a difference between tragic deaths that only certain types of politicians and reporters can see.

It might be better to be blind.

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Related:

• Makkovik Fact Check
• Makkovik SAR Questions
• Response and Irresponsibility
• Response and Responsibility
• Perspective and the lack thereof
• Whither provincially-funded search and rescue?

Give us a caption, then: Jerome! edition #nlpoli

He’s a colourful fellow and attracts lots of attention.

So let’s see what this screen capture says to you.  Give us a caption for it.  Serious or funny, that’s your call.  Just keep it relatively clean.

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Tuition Fees and University Participation #nlpoli

The connection between tuition fees and university participation was a big subject in the summer run-up to the general election and then in the general election  last fall.

Just to give some additional food for thought on that topic, here are a couple of slices from a study done in September 2011 by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Some observations from the study (page 11):

• The data show that university participation for 23 year olds from low-income families was lower in Quebec and Newfoundland, the two lowest-tuition provinces, than in any other province.
• Manitoba, the remaining low-tuition province, had a low-income participation rate that was nearly identical with the
  national average.
• Nova Scotia, with the highest average tuition fees in the country, boasted the highest university participation rate for
  students from low-income families.
• Ontario, with the second-highest tuition fees in the country, had the second highest participation rate for young people from low-income families.

In the time period for the study – 2003 to 2007 – Newfoundland and Labrador had the second lowest tuition in the country and participation rates were in the middle of the pack.

Graph both of them and you get this:

Some people argue that low tuition fees make it easier for people from low income families to attend university.  maybe they do.  But according to this study, other factors seem to having an impact.  Here’s a chart that looks at participation and family income:

Just some food for thought.

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$#*! politicians say: Jerome! edition #nlpoli

Everyone’s favourite natural resources minister outdid himself last week for saying things that were just so far removed from reality that they were just funny.

He said them in the House of Assembly and if that wasn’t good enough he repeated them for this week’s episode of On Point with David Cochrane.

By the by, here’s the real take-away from Cochrane this weekend:  the Tories are in such political shape generally and are saying such complete rubbish that Cochrane looked like he was trying desperately not to break down laughing at Kennedy and David Brazil.

This is the hardest pounding Cochrane has delivered to any politician in years and he did it to two of them on the same program.  Make no mistake:  Cochrane was thoroughly professional and fair.  What he did was just refuse to let utter crap go unchallenged.

And it was crap.

Kennedy insisted he wanted to hear all sorts of criticism to point what is wrong with the Muskrat Falls project.  “Show us where we are wrong,” Jerome says.

But as everyone have seen over the past few months, the government simply attacks the critics personally (they are just politically motivated according to Kennedy) or dismisses the criticism.

And when they aren’t doing that, the government just makes shit up.

Like when Jerome claimed that Nalcor and the government had studied natural gas as an option and dismissed it. 

They dismissed it alright, out of hand. They’ve been stuck with all the assumptions they found in a 1980 study, long before anyone found natural gas offshore.  Read the feasibility study done in 1980 and notice the strange similarity to the current thinking about which two choices to think about and which one is cheaper.  You’ll be amazed.

But there’s absolutely no sign that anyone connected to the provincial government has ever given natural gas a moment’s serious thought for what it is:  a much lower cost alternative to Muskrat Falls that would actually produce more electricity than Muskrat Falls ever could.

A natural gas plant with 824 megawatts of installed generation could produce the full amount.  Muskrat Falls will produce – on average – about the equivalent of 570 megawatts or so. The cost would be considerably less than half the cost of Muskrat Falls and the line to Nova Scotia, which incidentally, is now $8.9 billion.

Perhaps the funniest new line Kennedy is using is that Muskrat Falls will be needed to generate electricity for new mining development in Labrador.

That’s a new one.  Until now, Muskrat Falls was supposed to be a replacement for Holyrood. But that’s only for three months a year   A bit of electricity will go off to Nova Scotia for free and the rest was supposed to be sent off to some unknown foreign lands.

During the environmental review process, Nalcor couldn’t produce a single concrete sale to show just how much greenhouse gas Muskrat Falls would displace.  The reason is simple:  MF electricity is too expensive.  No one will buy it.

So now Jerome’s got a new story:  Labrador mines.  The mines will need all of Muskrat Falls and then some besides.  So where we will get the electricity to replace Holyrood?  Someone should ask Kennedy that one so he can invent a new answer.

Last week in the House, Kennedy had another gem:

MR. KENNEDY: …

Gull Island is not possible because we cannot get through Quebec, Mr. Speaker, wind is not an option and we know that natural gas is not an option. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: What options are you talking about? What is it you want us to explore? We have explored everything. Muskrat Falls is the lowest cost and best option to secure the future of this Province.

“Gull Island is not possible because we cannot get through Quebec.”  That is exactly what Kennedy said, word for word.

And not a word of it is true.

Nalcor current sells electricity to New York by running it through Quebec.  They’ve been doing it since 2009.  If they had someone to buy any electricity from Labrador, they could move it through Quebec without a problem.  The reason they aren’t developing Gull Island is because they don’t have any customers for the power.

Full stop.

In fact, if they had customers to justify Gull Island, that’s the one they’d be building because it would be more cost-effective than Muskrat Falls.  In fact, if you look at Nalcor’s own information provided to the public utilities board, it appears they never started looking at Muskrat Falls as a stand-alone project until 2010.  It’s worth quoting a couple of paragraphs from that Nalcor document:

In 2010, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro was faced with a decision relating to generation expansion for the Island Interconnected System for the timeframe ranging from 2015 to 2020. As ensuing analysis indicated that the least-cost expansion option would involve a Labrador-Island HVdc (high voltage direct current) infeed, it was determined that priority should be given to the Muskrat Falls Development. This development would be sufficient to meet forecasted demand in for the Island Interconnected System, while providing some additional capacity for potential export to the Maritimes.

Based on this change, the proposed 1600 MW multi-terminal HVdc scheme would be replaced with a smaller point-to-point system from Muskrat Falls to Soldiers Pond. With an estimated annual plant capability of 4.9 TWh at Muskrat Falls and up to 300 MW of available recall capacity from the Upper Churchill, it was determined that the HVdc link should be sized for 900 MW.

Looking at what Jerome Kennedy said last week about Muskrat Falls, you’d almost think he was making this $#*! up as he goes.

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$#*! the Premier says, Open Line edition #nlpoli

I suggest that the members opposite do the same and they encourage our representatives in Ottawa to do the same, because the only time we hear from them is on Open Line shows here in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale, Hansard, March 22, 2012

Kathy Dunderdale was making fun of politicians who call Open Line shows.

Seriously.

Maybe she was making fun because they weren’t participating in an organized program of Open Line show stacking like Kathy and her colleagues have done since 2003.

Sure.

That would have to be it.

Because otherwise, she’d be like, ah, well, like the biggest friggin’ hypocrite alive.

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Cougar to replace gearbox on S-92 #nlpoli

Local media – CBC and Telegram for example – reported on Friday that Cougar Helicopters would “replace the  gearbox” on an S-92 that showed an indication of metal in the fluid of the Number 2 Input Module earlier in the week.

“Sikorsky analyzed data from its global Health and Usage Monitoring system and that analysis indicated an upward trend in a component,” she stated in an email to The Telegram this afternoon.

“This information, when combined with the information shown following an assessment of the elements related to the chip indication, reveal a possibility that this could be an early indicator of reduced performance.”

The Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) is operated by the aircraft manufacturer, Sikorsky.  It analyses information from sensors located on Sikorsky helicopters operating worldwide.   A photograph from cougar.ca shows the sensor locations:

HUMS can be used to detect changes in how different parts of an individual aircraft work in daily flight and compare performance across the entire fleet of aircraft. Both the pilot and the co-pilot can monitor HUMS read-outs during flights.  Daily maintenance procedures include downloading the information from the helicopter’s onboard computers and feeding the information Sikorsky Aircraft

In this case, it appears that the HUMS analysis by Sikorsky Aircraft showed a pattern of readings for this particular aircraft  - the “upward trend” – for the gearbox that might indicate a problem at some point in the future.  Cougar opted to replace the engine components involved. 

Cougar Helicopters did not release the aircraft serial number for the helicopter involved in this incident.

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Kathy Dunderdale and the “full force” of her political impotence #nlpoli

Okay, so the search and rescue sub-centre was never anything to go to war over anyway.

Still, that didn’t stop Kathy Dunderdale from pledging to do everything in her power to save all those really important jobs.

Remember?

Kathy had some kind of special new relationship with the Prime Minister since she and her caucus campaigned for the Tories in the last federal election.  She made no apologies.

Here’s how your humble e-scribbler summarised her scrum last summer when this issue first came up:

Dunderdale told reporters that the “full force” of the provincial government will now be brought to bear to get the Prime Minister and his cabinet to change their minds.  She said she has tasked two cabinet ministers and their senior staff to take “every opportunity” to pursue the issue with their federal counterparts over the next year.  In addition, Dunderdale said she is also going to be doing the same thing, spending every available minute of the next year fighting to keep the 12 jobs in the province.

She tried a telephone call to her buddy, Steve, although apparently that kept the two staffs busy trying to figure out how to do it so that Steve and Kathy were on the phone together talking to each other. 

She even wanted to spend provincial government dollars to keep the thing going.

The Premier plus two cabinet ministers,  all their staff, doing everything they could at every opportunity and with the full force of the entire provincial government.

Well, all that they came up with with less than a little poof of hot air.

Kathy delivered nothing.

Zippo.

Bupkis.

Nada.

Sweet Fanny Adams.

And, of course, zilch.

Kathy failed.

You can tell Kathy failed because now she is telling everyone to frig off and go ask someone else. 

Go ask the feds, she told Liberal leader Dwight Ball in the House of Assembly on Wednesday.

As you can see from that tweet CBC’s Jane Adey had later that same day, Kath was telling people to go after the federal members of parliament from Newfoundland and Labrador for answers.  Wednesday wasn’t the end of it. 

Dunderdale continued the foolishness Thursday by blaming Liberal members of parliament for her failure.  It’s like John Hickey taking Roger Grimes to court for defamation over something Danny Williams said:  obviously stupid. The federal Liberals wasted no time in lampooning Dunderdale anywhere they could in return.  Her ministers are going to be taking it in the neck as well.

She’s going to get roasted for failing.  She’s going to get hammered for her photo op with Stephen Harper.

And she brought it down on her own head. 

Here are the political take-aways:

Kathy Dunderdale has no political sense.  Smart politicians would never have been suckered into proclaiming the crusade in the first place. The issue wasn’t crucial to anything and the feds weren’t likely to reverse themselves given that no one could explain why the place was important to anyone for anything.

On the On Point panel last week, Liberal Siobhan Coady excused Dunderdale’s cock-ups.  She’s new in office.  Only a few months since the election.

That’s just crap and Siobhan should know it. Dunderdale’s been there since 2003.  She’s been Premier since the end of 2010.  Kathy’s got decades of municipal experience from before that.  For all that experience, Kathy Dunderdale has no sense of political judgment.

Big Problem.

She doth bestride her imaginary world like a Colossus… So why did she jump in with both feet?  Likely due to a completely unfounded but entirely unshakeable conviction that she can do anything, that she is all powerful and that she can do no wrong.  

That’s the most likely explanation. 

Dunderdale just got caught up in herself in her new job.  Think of it like John Efford in his famous “There it is, Mr. Williams.  There it is, Mr. Sullivan” news conference.  It’s not an act:  she displays all the same kind of prideful arrogance in other places.  And you know what they say about pride.

Stick to your own lane.  The root of this problem lies in Danny Williams’ stupid decision in 2008 to stake his entire political pile on the ABC campaign. 

He lost. 

Badly. 

And then he had to limp through another couple of years as a lame duck. 

Traditionally, federal politicians stay out of provincial politics and vice versa.  If they did campaign, they did it quietly.  No one took an official stand.

Courtesy might be one reason for it, but the real one lay in the simple and the pragmatic:  no matter who wins you might have to work with them.  Better to keep your mouth shut so you can have a productive working relationship.

Danny went one way and paid that price.

Kathy went the other way and will pay a different price. 

Her mistake was in getting involved in the first place.  Again it’s an amateurs mistake committed by someone  - supposedly – with decades of political experience.

How does Kathy legitimately criticise the guys she campaigned for?  What happens when they don’t come across with something you staked your reputation on? 

Kathy is going to find out and the lesson might be painful.  For the rest of us, we’ve already seen the full force of her political impotence.

- srbp -