The story of the 2014 provincial Conservative Party leadership contest is a study in politics on its most basic level.
It is a story of those with influence and of those who have less of it or none at all.
It is a story of how politics actually works inside the Conservative Party, instead of how we imagine it.
It is a fascinating story.
The provincial government will be establishing a committee of senior public servants to co-ordinate information on Muskrat Falls for cabinet.
VOCM faithfully reported Premier Tom Marshall’s comments to reporters outside the House of Assembly. The people want more, says Tom, so the Conservatives are going to give the public more oversight. The new committee will receive monthly project updates and quarterly financial updates from Nalcor, according to the VOCM story. The committee will issue an annual report.
All new stuff supposedly.
Except it isn’t.
“Province to deliver on promise of whistleblower law” read the headline for the CBC’s online story about the provincial government throne speech read Wednesday in the House of Assembly.
About half way down the story, it says that “Premier Tom Marshall is fighting back against the perception” that the government he’s been a part of since 2003 is secretive.
You’ll see the same idea in the Telegram’s story:
In today’s throne speech, Premier Tom Marshall made his most significant signal so far that the government is doing everything possible to be more open and transparent.
Last week, everyone told us that public satisfaction with the Conservative administration went up because of Tom Marshall. Corporate Research Associates certainly credited Marshall with the boost in the news release that covered the release of their poll data. The panel on CBC’s On Point with David Cochrane [March 8]all agreed that Marshall might play a significant role because, after all, he was the guy who boosted that satisfaction number.
What’s interesting about this idea, that Tom Marshall alone did all this, is simply not true.
by JM and EGH
The BBC online news magazine carried an article on March 10 that should be of interest to all those following the Muskrat Falls debate.
“Do massive dams ever make sense?” summarizes the work of researchers at Oxford University. They studied more than 245 large dams completed between 1934 and 2007.
A large dam is one with a wall height of more than 15 metres. Muskrat Falls would meet the study criteria
The researchers found that dams ran 96% over their approved budgets, on average. One Brazilian dam went 240% over budget. With few exceptions, the researchers found that the dams were not economically viable.
“On the outside, Shawn Skinner and John Ottenheimer are still mulling it over, “wrote Des Sullivan last Thursday. “The price tag of running a credible campaign still daunts them; if Frank Coleman confirms his candidacy, both will fold.”
VOCM reported on Monday afternoon that Frank Coleman would make his final decision on Wednesday. CBC’s David Cochrane reported that same information on Monday evening and added an interesting extra bit of information: unidentified Conservative Party insiders told Cochrane that it is looking less and less likely that Coleman will run.
Cochrane also reported what he and others had been reporting since Monday morning. Former natural resources minister Shawn Skinner and municipal affairs minister Steve Kent - right showing maturity and judgment - were collecting signatures for their leadership nomination.
Neither would declare they were in the race until, respectively, Thursday and Friday.
[Includes Hamlet update]
If David Cochrane’s sources are right, Danny Breen won’t be running for the Conservatives in Virginia Waters after all.
That means that unless the Conservatives come up with an amazing and currently unknown candidate, they will likely not only lose the upcoming by-election but run the risk of coming in third place behind the New Democrats.
Breen has impeccable Conservative credentials. He’s already well-known having done the impossible: been a strong, solid, and visible performer on St. John’s city council without succumbing to the drama-queen antics of some of his colleagues.
You’ll hear Conservatives, Corporate Research Associates, and some commentators play up the fact that public satisfaction with the governing Conservatives has gone up in CRA’s most recent quarterly poll.
That’s wonderful but that poll and a couple of bucks will get you a nice hot coffee at Tim’s. Other than that, the satisfaction numbers don”t mean much.
Just to give you a starting point, here are the Conservatives’ satisfaction numbers since the last general election in October 2011.
As laughable as it is for the Premier’s Office to insist former Premier Kathy Dunderdale received only 46 e-mails in a single week and sent none, there are some other things in this little episode that are worth noticing.
Put ‘em all together with other information and you might have something interesting. Not necessarily huge, but interesting and revealing.
How odd that the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador – arguably the busiest job in the province, bar none - received only 46 e-mails in a one week period in January.
And how extremely odd that none them – apparently - came from any of her staff, senior public servants, cabinet ministers or other politicians.
And how completely bizarre that in that same period the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t send a single e-mail of her own to anyone about anything.
A tale out of Ottawa reveals the extent to which access to information problems crop up in lots of places.
CBC News asked for a copy of a memo from the commander of the Canadian Army about leaks of information within the army. CBC apparently had a copy of the memo or someone had seen it and so they formally requested a copy.
The tale gets interesting because of the internal dispute over how to respond to the request. Most public affairs officers advised the commander to direct the CBC to file an access to information request. Only one public affairs officer – a former political aide to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – advised against that action and, ultimately, refused to be the one to tell CBC what to do.
The army relented, largely due to that refusal, and released the letter to the media without forcing them to go through the access process.
Think back to last December.
A couple of Nalcor guys bragged about the company’s strategy of importing electricity when they needed during the months when prices were low and then exporting our own electricity when electricity prices were high.
Brilliant idea. It worked for Hydro-Quebec for most of the past 50 years.
There’s only one problem: it won’t work any more.
In the fall sitting of the House of Assembly in 2008, the provincial government repealed an old law regulating the practice of midwifery.
Then-health minister Ross Wiseman introduced the repeal bill at second reading and promised to replace it with a new law:
We envisage under the new legislation midwifery being an autonomous profession, separate and apart from nursing. [Hansard, 01 Dec 08]
The Health Professions Act – passed by the House of Assembly in 2010 – made it possible for government to set up midwives as a small, self-regulating profession.
After another four years, you’d think we might be a bit closer to what Wiseman originally promised. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.
With all the talk the past couple of days about the relationship between the provincial government and the provincial energy corporation, it might be a useful time to ask a fairly simple question:
What does Nalcor do?
Might seem like such an obvious question that it you are laughing, but hang on a second and let’s see what turns up if we go back and look at what the Conservatives said in the past about the energy corporation.
Nalcor Energy is running the Muskrat Falls project without any independent oversight from the provincial government.
In two interviews with the Telegram’s James McLeod natural resources minister Derrick Dalley identified Nalcor boss Ed Martin as the government’s chief source of information on the project. According to Dalley, Martin passes information to the deputy minister of natural resources who passes it to Dalley.
Additionally, noted Dalley’s communications director in an e-mail sent between the two interviews, the “Departments of Finance and Natural Resources work in close collaboration with Nalcor Energy and have regular meetings and exchanges of information…”.
McLeod asked Dalley repeatedly about any use by the provincial government of its own independent sources to vet Nalcor’s work. Dalley replied that the department didn’t have the expertise to duplicate that of Nalcor. What’s more, Daley asked rhetorically, “why would we duplicate within the department [of natural resources]” the work going on at Nalcor to develop the project.
Dalley cited external contractors - such as Manitoba Hydro - hired by Nalcor to vet work at each decision gate for the project as an example of work that “we have done” to validate Nalcor’s project management.
This year it is Charlene Johnson’s turn to host a series of meetings across the province that the provincial Conservatives cynically tout as a way for people to have some input into the provincial budget.
It’s cynical because – as the Conservatives know – the major budget decisions are already made before the finance minister heads to the first of these meetings. They are a waste of time.
The people who show up at these sessions have no idea what the actual state of the province’s finances are. The provincial government hides the real numbers until budget day. Therefore the people who show up can’t offer any sensible suggestions, anyway. Instead, they wind up begging like a bunch of serfs for more cash for this and more cash for that, even though the cash isn’t really available.
Digging through a set of files in the provincial archives once upon a time, your humble e-scribbler came across a particular file in a set bequeathed to the archives decades ago by the fellow who wrote the original legislation that helped create the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in the Great War.
The hand-written title on it was “unconscious press humour.” The file contained a raft of clippings from the local newspapers where the headline made an inadvertent joke when placed in the context of the story. We are not talking about “Stripper bares all”, the now legendary Telegram headline from the 1980s that wound up in the National Lampoon’s “True Facts” page thanks to Liberal member of parliament Dave Rooney. We are talking stuff where some earnest headline writer had put together a groaner entirely by accident.
These days, you’d title the file on your computer something like “inadvertent media jokes” or if you haven’t grown tired of it yet and wanted to stay true to the original name, “Bob Wakeham, Volume 15.”