The Sir Robert Bond Papers

Only a decade ago, voters turfed Roger Grimes and the Liberals from office as punishment for – among other things – signing a deal to develo...

When it needed a lobbyist in Ottawa to monitor the federal environmental review process for its Kami project, Alderon Iron Ore turned to Sum...

From the Chronicle Herald : In its letter, the board also points out that parts of the project have been delayed. That includes a 10-mo...

Writing good speeches is more art than science but even without much experience, you can tell when a part of a speech doesn’t ring true. T...

Justice minister Darin King bailed out of the Conservative Party leadership contest on Monday. King did it unceremoniously, on Twitter, de...

In 1979 and 1989, using pretty much the same party constitution as they have now, the provincial Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador ...

The provincial government announced on Thursday that it had directed the provincial energy corporation to build a new transmission line bet...

“Bullshit,” wrote philosopher Harry Frankfurt a few years ago, “is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowi...

Tuesday’s scrum with Danny Williams proved at least two things The first is that the Old Man will say anything that comes into his head an...

It seems like Danny Williams can’t go two weeks without getting his mug on the news so it wasn’t surprising that on Monday the Old Man calle...

When Nalcor needs a bunch of Quebec lawyers, one of the firms they go to is Fasken Martineau. Nalcor has been relying on FM for lots of thi...

Okay so it isn’t politics, but it is still cool. This happened last July . -srbp-

Timon and Pumbaa turned up at St. John’s City Hall for the rainbow flag raising on Friday. -srbp-

After Bill Barry  - the only declared candidate -  former cabinet minister Shawn Skinner is the least imaginary of the potential candidates ...

A day after the shocking news that Tim Powers is not going to be a candidate for Conservative Party leader in Newfoundland and Labrador,  an...

Dale Kirby and Christopher Mitchelmore shifted their desks in the House of Assembly on Tuesday from the independent or unaffiliated part of ...

A new poll by Abacus Data for VOCM shows the Liberals under Dwight ball leading the governing Conservatives in every region of Newfoundland...

This week we should find out when the provincial Conservatives will have their leadership convention. The talk around town late last week ...

Two separate e-mails plunked the same article in the SRBP inbox on Friday. Both highlighted the same quote from this National Post story ...

Premier Tom Marshall confirmed on Thursday that the provincial government will be doing the review of the provincial information and privac...

When they got up on Wednesday morning, everyone in the province who was paying attention knew that Bill Barry was going to launch his bid f...

What’s so striking about the race to replace Kathy Dunderdale as leader of the provincial Conservative Party is how spectacularly unspectacu...

Having tried to slide by without renewing their party,  the provincial Conservatives are now talking up the joys of change. They’ve talked...

The same people saying and doing the same things as they have always done won’t change anything A provincial Conservative started out the ...

Since Kathy quit and Tom Marshall taking over on Friday morning, people are wondering when we will go to the polls. There’s talk about a s...

If you have not read Kathy Dunderdale’s resignation speech , take a moment and do so now. What is most striking about the speech is that t...

Provincial Conservatives will get together on Wednesday morning and eventually admit the worst kept secret in local political circles:  the ...

Kathy is going. Tom Marshall gets to quit politics as interim Premier. That’s if the reports on Tuesday night hold through Wednesday mor...

In all the political chatter on Monday,  no idea got a stronger negative reaction than the one from your humble e-scribbler that Paul Lane h...

Paul Lane scored big on Monday. First, he secured his nomination and his seat in the next provincial election by running as a Liberal.  A...

If you want to understand what the provincial government’s audited financial statements really mean, you will have to skip Tom Marshall’s c...

It’s the sort of thing that leaps out at you.  As SRBP mentioned on Thursday, in her book Shopping for votes veteran political reporter ...

The Conservatives used to say that Newfoundland and Labrador was eastern North America’s energy warehouse.  Once Danny Williams ran for the ...

There is always something interesting in the province’s audited financial statements and – sadly – it is often at odds with what the politic...

The rolling blackouts on the island of Newfoundland could warn of bigger problems to come, if a new paper by the analyst JM is correct. Un...

Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador never think about the electricity into their homes.  They don’t know where it comes from and they c...

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The provincial government started its campaign to gain control of the political agenda on Thursday with its announcement that it would appoi...

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In January 2012, Ed Martin and his nasally drone ridiculed the idea of shifting demand for electricity from one part of the day to another ...

The action of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill once said, “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Some people in Newfoun...

Kathy Dunderdale did two major interviews on the first working day since the start of the Nalcor generation crisis. One was with registere...

Some observations: 1.  Yep.  It’s a crisis. When you have a major utility cutting electricity to people in a blizzard at random, for ran...

It all started on January 3, 2005 and as of today, the Sir Robert Bond Papers is nine years old. As your humble e-scribbler writes this on...

Government is about making decisions. In trying to understand what is going on,  how governments make decisions is sometimes more importan...

Federal provincial relations Cast your mind back to the early part of 2012.  Kathy Dunderdale was frustrated .  She couldn’t figure out ho...

The end of the calendar always brings the string of Best of, Top 10, and any other kind of year in review piece.  In the conventional media ...

For your reading pleasure as we head into the last weekend of 2013 is the list of the top 13 stories at SRBP, as determined by what the read...

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Some of you may have been surprised to find out this weekend that Nalcor has a scheme to import cheap electricity into the province. A cou...

The marine rescue sub-centre story is one of those things that typifies politics in Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s entirely the creation...

Two years. That’s all it took to destroy the provincial government’s historic fisheries policy that had been built on the highly successfu...

Three deputy minister appointments announced on Tuesday brings the number of senior executive appointments in the public service to 24 in th...

Someone organized a stunt designed solely to gain publicity and no one invited the Old Mullet Hisself to huff and puff and pose for the ...

The Liberal Party executive may have screwed up by failing to put in place any campaign finance rules during the recent leadership but the c...

In a letter last May to his federal counterpart, economic development minister Keith Hutchings described minimum processing requirements as...

1.  Nova Scotian customers protected; this province not. ( Telegram , December 11, 2013) by Ron Penney and David Vardy The UARB has be...

Cost estimates for the Muskrat Falls project have apparently jumped by 16% -  $1.0 billion  - in the past year.  That’s based on information...

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There’s something perverse about the way politicians these days use a memorial to the dead of two world wars in the last century as a backdr...

When Premier Kathy Dunderdale spoke to a St. John’s Board of Trade last May ,  she claimed the federal government had tried to tie the feder...

Two news stories last week reminded us once again of the nature of federal-provincial relations for Newfoundland and Labrador over the past ...

Just for the sake of looking at some numbers, here are some statistics on university enrolment in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past de...

Premier Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t govern by polls. That’s what she told reporters – yet again – as they asked her about yet another poll th...

Anyone who wants to understand the value of the House of Assembly need only look at Question Period on Tuesday. Liberal Andrew Parsons th...

If you accept the provincial government’s version of things, spending a half a billion dollars more than you are collecting is a responsible...

Finance minister Tom Marshall will present his mid-year financial update on Monday.  It is supposed to be a way of bringing everyone up to d...

According to a new commentary on the Muskrat Falls project by Memorial University economist James Feehan,  legislation passed in December 2...

In addition to the $17 million in public cash announced in 2011, the provincial government has given an additional undisclosed amount of pub...

Kathy Dunderdale told reporters on Tuesday, while the polls were still open mind you, that the by-election results would be no big thing. ...

There are times when the talk in the province sounds a bit like the soundtrack to a movie,  a comedy to be precise. On Monday, finance min...

Some old fellow by the name of Williams once said that there was no greater fraud than an unkept promise. He said that around the time he...

The Telegram noticed: By the end of question period on Tuesday, only an hour or so in, the words “Mr. Speaker” had been uttered 142 ti...

Glen Carter’s second novel has had an honoured place on the coffee table chez e-scribbler for the past few couple of weeks.  Dog-eared pag...

Truly effective communication is often more about what you do than what you say. That’s a notion that screws up lots of people. They get...

In early October, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board issued two new significant discovery licenses to Suncor and...

On Monday ,  Premier Kathy Dunderdale blew off any questions in the House of Assembly about Bill 29 with the comment that the centre for Law...

There’s no greater fraud,  former Premier Danny Williams once said, than a promise not kept. In the House of Assembly on Monday ,  his su...

(Continued from Part 1 ) On October 19 , Russell Wangersky wrote a column for The Telegram entitled "20 questions for the premier.&qu...

Dwight Ball is the leader of the Liberal Party. He now has a chance to lead by example when it comes to donations for his leadership campa...

On October 19 , Russell Wangersky wrote a column for The Telegram entitled "20 questions for the premier." Mr. Wangersky posed qu...

The news release that announced a provincial commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the First World War includes right at the start a pi...

Liberal supporters in the province elected Dwight Ball as the new party leader in voting that ended on Sunday. By the time this appears on...

No wonder the Conservatives are smiling a lot these days. Not only have the New Democrats imploded as an effective political force but the...

The provincial government announced plans to build two new ferries on Wednesday.  The first one will cost $51 million. The new ferry will ...

Part way through her interview with historian Margaret MacMillan last September, the Globe’s Sandra Martin turned the conversation for the ...

Trumpet virtuoso Mike Herriott has a new CD titled “off the road”,  available online from www.mikeherriott.com . Awesome music from an ama...

Amid all the new books hitting the shelves this fall, there are a few  worth adding to your list either for yourself or as gifts. Over the...

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A video by John Bonnell: -srbp-

With voting set to begin in the Liberal leadership campaign, Cathy Bennett took out newspaper ads that have stirred up a bit of controversy....

With the House of Assembly open again, the major topic of Question Period was Muskrat Falls and the second version of the deal to ship power...

Andrew Leach at macleans.ca took issue on Monday with the idea Canada’s economy is overly dependent on oil production. Leach notes that b...

A very smart guy scolded someone in a Twitter exchange recently with the observation that people don’t like it when others  - especially pol...

Make no mistake. This is not your New Democratic Party. For those who are active members, they cannot even say that it is “our party”. ...

There’s something wonderfully cute about the blind, unquestioning boosterism you get from some of the more aggressive groups of young politi...

A couple of weeks ago, the St. John’s media devoted huge amounts of of the reporting space to the death of a woman who spent most of her tim...

November is polling month in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Corporate Research Associates goes to the field for its quarterly omnibus and marke...

The way things go in Newfoundland and Labrador, you can sometimes think that some things only go on here.  Not so.  Take a short trip, i...