For the record, your humble e-scribbler will refrain from making any comment on the substance of the statements of claim filed by Danny Williams and Alderon against the Sierra Club and Bruno Marcocchio on the one hand and Brad Cabana on the other.
CBC has posted pdf versions of both, linked below:
In general, your humble e-scribbler would humbly suggest that SRBP readers keep the following observations in mind.
While the case before the Supreme Court of Canada on Tuesday was about the federal Elections Act, two provincial chief elections officers have intervener status in the case.
Neither of them have court cases currently underway that challenge the results of an election.
What other province might you think would have sought intervener status on a case about a potentially controverted election?
What other province could that be?
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Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is ringing the bells, trying to alarm Canadians to the fact the federal government is trying to withdraw funding from areas that are generally provincial responsibility under the Constitution.
You can see a lengthy interview Dexter gave to Evan Solomon of CBC’s Power and Politics on the Mother Corp’s website. “They are pursuing what some people call a disentangled federalism,” Dexter warned. Dexter described the country in a curious way, where the federal government pays for things and the provincial governments do them.
It’s curious because that isn’t what the people who wrote the constitution had in mind.
Tim Powers is a local boy who has done good for himself as a lobbyist in Ottawa. Powers is a sharp guy who is very well-connected in Tory circles.
The provincial energy corporation employed Powers to lobby the federal Conservatives on behalf of their Lower Churchill project. While he has passed that contract off to a couple of other colleagues at Summa Strategies, Powers remains an ardent supporter of the Muskrat Falls project.
Powers delivered a keynote at the recent Expo Labrador mining conference. The title was Mining and Lower Churchill Falls.
Weird, huh?
In another great service to Newfoundland and Labrador, the country’s leading shit-disturber has translated poll results by Abacus Data into a nice table.
It shows the results for each province across a range of topics.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with Alberta Premier Alison Redford when the Pm dropped in for the Calgary Stampede.
As the Globe reported:
Carl Vallée, a PMO spokesman who was travelling with Mr. Harper during his Stampede stopover, wouldn’t talk about what was discussed during the Prime Minister’s meeting with Ms. Redford.
“He meets with premiers across the country when he travels out East, out West, everywhere,” Mr. Vallée said. “And he does do that, but we don’t comment on the content of the meeting.”
Last week’s Environics poll caused more than a few people in the province to have a few sleepless nights trying to find a way to prove it was a crock or nothing to sweat.
Those were the Tories.
The NDP wasted no time getting a fund-raising e-mail on the go.
Oddly enough, and as an aside, a couple of prominent Dippers – Jack Harris and Lana Payne – both joined the Tories in trying to dismiss the poll as a one-off. Maybe their love of Muskrat Falls is clouding their judgment.
Anyway, and meanwhile…
The Liberals were wondering if the poll was good (they were up overall) or bad (they were still polling frig-all of any consequence in the province’s vote-rich capital region.
For the rest of you, here are some further ruminations to help you sort it all out.
Trying to blow off the implications of last week’s Environics poll, former natural resources minister Shawn Skinner trotted out another line in this week’s edition of On Point with David Cochrane: it’s still early days. People don’t know Kathy Dunderdale yet. Give her another year and a half or two years for people to know her, or words to that effect.
Nice try Shawn, but Kathy has been Premier since December 2010. She’s been deputy premier since around 2008 and she’s been in cabinet since 2003.
Kathy Dunderdale is not new. In fact, Kathy has been around so long she was ready to quit politics back in December 2010. She’d done her thing.
If Kathy Dunderdale is having trouble making herself known to voters after a high-profile decade in politics, including winning an election as Premier after being in the job for the better part of a year, then imagine how much worse things will be 18 months from now.
Maybe the real answer, Shawn, is that people know Kathy too well already.
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Labour federation president Lana Payne tweeted last week about the latest labour force figures in the province.
And that’s true. According to Statistics Canada, the province recorded the highest ever participation rate in June: 62%.
Two Conservative supporters retweeted Payne’s comments, apparently because they fit the Conservative mantra that everything is wonderful under the Tories. Conservative policies produce results, which is why the Tories enjoy such huge support in the province.
Anyway, Tories and Dippers cheering the same thing isn’t really as odd a situation as it might seem.
A bit more work on Sunday morning and Frankenstein’s monster is done.
The colouring is unconventional. The instructions call for black or dark brown for the jacket and pants. A pre-painted figure, approved by Universal, in a slightly smaller scaled, appeared a few years ago with a colour scheme similar to this one. It works.
The figure is stock, from the box with one exception. The one hand that is turned incorrectly is fixed to imitate the original pose. Here’s a publicity still from the 1931 movie just to give you an idea of where the pose came from.
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Here’s a close-up of Moebius’ Frankenstein, the project currently on the old modeller’s workbench. The detail is a little fuzzy because the picture is via a cellphone not a real camera.
Moebius based the model on the scene in the 1931 Universal movie when you first see the monster. It’s stock from the box.
The base, door and back wall are finished, as is the body (jacket and pants). The latest work has been trying to get the face and hands right. The choice for the face is very light grey for the deathly pallor, with some splashes of pink and red.
Check online and you can find as many choices for the face and hands as there are people who have built this kit. In the movie, Karloff wore a pale green make-up because it gave the right colouring for the black and white movie. Somehow, it just didn’t seem right to make the monster a part Vulcan.
Incidentally, for those who might be curious, the jacket is Model Master Dark Green (FS34079) and the pants are Testors’ Dark Brown (in the small bottle).
Here’s the same shot adjusted to make it black and white.
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Leave it to labradore to come up with a new way to look at poll results.
He took the results of “satisfaction” questions in polls going back about a decade. he netted them out, meaning he subtracted the dis-satisfieds from the satisfieds.
What he got is very interesting.
Telling the world that tourism Derrick Dalley will attend a play – no matter what play it is – would not be considered news and it sure as hell would not be worthy of a full-on media advisory by any organization on the planet, including a benighted, backward-ass dictatorship in a movie starring Richard Dreyfus.
And yet on a Friday afternoon that is exactly what the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador spit out.
After the shock that evidently settled into the local Tories, the next most obvious thing about Thursday was the complete absence of any official provincial Tory anywhere saying anything about anything. The usual clan of Tory Twitter Spam Spitters – Sandy Collins, Steve Kent, Vaughan Granter, and Paul lane - were nowhere to be seen.
Normally these guys are everywhere spewing whatever bullshit talking point they have to spew.
Thursday?
Crickets.
or was it knobby knees knocking?
By now you have likely heard it all.
In one corner are the raft of people trying to dismiss the Environics poll as an outlier, an aberration, the logical result of a tough political month.
Nothing to sweat.
Real Chip Diller kinda stuff.
In the other corner, there are the New Democrats who are so effercited they are like the dog who caught the car.
Well, here’s another take for you.
A few employers have noticed changes to the province’s Labour Relations Act that slipped quietly through the House at the end of the last session.
A story in the Telegram on Wednesday focuses on the construction business but some others are quietly pissed off and trying to figure out what they can do about the bill.
As the country comes out of the long-weekend stupor, a few people noticed a poll released on June 29 by Environics. Nationally, it shows a very small lead for the New Democrats over the Conservatives. That’s a modest change from May when the Tories were slightly in front of the New Democrats.
What caught some local Twitter attention was the post by threehundredeight.com and the headline “Majority support for federal NDP in Newfoundland & Labrador?”
The question mark is there for a reason, as you will see in a moment.
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