Tom Marshall has a few days left as premier so he figured the best thing to do would be to name the courthouse in Corner Brook after Danny Williams, Marshall’s patron.
One of the reasons Marshall gave for his decision was that the province has not done as well as the time when Danny Williams was Premier.
Marshall couldn’t have found a more fitting legacy for Danny Williams if he had really tried. After all, The courthouse and Williams go together
Justice minister Terry French announced on Thursday that he’d be resigning in a couple of weeks time to take up a job in the private sector. French’s announcement looked like an effort to get in front of rumours that have been circulating for a while in some circles and that intensified in the past couple of days. It didn’t look like a well rehearsed or planned thing.
This was also the same day that Charlene Johnson confirmed she is quitting politics to go live in Brunei where her husband has been working for an undisclosed period of time. Johnson told reporters that she and her husband had actually decided over a year ago that she would leave politics. It’s still curious that with all the work- and health-related reasons Johnson offered for taking a year or more to leave actually, she couldn’t manage to hang on for just a couple of days or weeks longer.
In any event, we found out that Johnson really wasn’t leaving now for family reasons after all. There was some other reason for her to go, not that it matters at this point. What does matter is that she has gone. In a couple of weeks, Terry French will go and that means the provincial Conservatives will face three by-elections before Christmas.
When Kathy Dunderdale jumped or was flicked out of office in the first part of 2014, CRA boss Don Mills issued a release covering his company’s February 2014 self-promotion poll that claimed that Tom Marshall was doing wonders for the Conservative party because public satisfaction with the government was up in the poll.
“NL government satisfaction improves with new leader” said the headline. Unfortunately for Mills and CRA, that headline connected up two things - government satisfaction and new leader – in a way the poll data didn’t support. You see, satisfaction went up the quarter before that as well, with the old leader.
There’s just no connection between “satisfaction” and the public choice for best party to form government or for best premier. The Conservatives have strong satisfaction numbers and yet a clear majority of respondents want to vote for some other party to run the government and someone other than Tom to be Premier.
Skip ahead six months and Mills is at it again.
Finance minister Charlene Johnson will be leaving politics on Friday, September 5.
Under changes that Johnson and her colleagues made to the provincial election laws, that means the Premier - whoever it is at the time - will have to call a by-election no later than November 5 and have the by-election over by later than December 5.
He’ll also have to call one in the seat the current Premier Tom Marshall has said he will vacate as soon as is humanly possible after the Conservative leadership convention on the weekend of the 13th and 14th of September.
Johnson’s resignation really put the screws to her soon-to-be former colleagues. They went from having to fight one by-election – which they stand to lose unless its Ottenheimer the Premier – to having to fight two, pretty much at the same time. The problem is, the Conservatives don;t have the resources to fight two by-elections at opposite ends of the province on the same day. Unless Ottenheimer takes the leadership and runs in Humber East, the Conservatives are likely to lose both by-elections before Christmas.
So much for morale.
Meanwhile, the double by-election makes it even less likely the new Premier - whoever he is – will have a fall sitting of the House. He’s more likely to put off the sitting until the spring, then unveil a new throne speech and a budget before heading to an election, if the polls turn around. The official excuse won’t be about the by-elections: it’s more likely to be some guff about having to give the new cabinet (and an off-the-street appointee or two) the chance to come to grips with their new jobs.
Everyone will be waving to Charlene on Friday but in a few weeks time, they’ll be likely giving her back the finger she’s giving them this week, family reasons, and all.
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Three things:
1. The agreement to deal with the unfunded pension liability is a good thing for workers and for taxpayers. It deals with a substantial financial problem, which is the bonus for taxpayers, while preserving defined benefit pension plans for workers, which is the big win for them. The costs are relatively modest in terms of increased premiums, averaging, and early retirement age.
2. This is only part of the province’s financial problem. It’s the easiest one to deal with. The others – Muskrat Falls and the embedded unsustainable overspending – are much larger financially and it will fall to the next administration after the Conservatives will have to deal with. Coming to grips with them won’t be easy by any means.
At least Tom Marshall took care of the problem he created. In an interview with CBC on Tuesday, Marshall tried to blame others for the problem and claim credit for fixing it for himself, but as with pretty much everything a provincial Conservative politician says, nothing could be further from the truth.
Efforts to deal with the unfunded liability started in 1997. A decade later, the problem with less than half the size it is today. Instead of dealing with it then, Marshall began the program of fiscal mismanagement that ballooned the unfunded pension liability and added all the other financial mess that we’ll be cleaning up for decades to come.
3. The St. John’s Board of Trade, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and other similar lobby groups should be ashamed for providing false information to the public while pretending it was truthful and unbiased. Even in an election year, some politician would be doing a public service by issuing an appropriate tongue-lashing to the crop of bullshit-mongers running those two groups. The Board of Trade in particular has a lot to answer for. They have screwed taxpayers twice; first by being party to the Muskrat Falls mess and then by attacking public sector workers with falsehoods.
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Over at Uncle Gnarley, JM’s at it again with the first of a two-parter on Nalcor and its problems with forecasting for Muskrat Falls.
Nalcor assumed that they would get 830 megawatts of electricity out of Muskrat Falls in the winter months when demand is highest. That’s the number they gave everyone else and, as you can tell by the language Nalcor uses, it was an assumption, not a solid forecast. Now they say they should be able to get 673 MW at Soldier;s Pond from Muskrat Falls. That’s a difference of 157 MW, not an inconsiderable difference.
The story flopped out on Friday morning, broken by VOCM, based presumably on information that came directly from Charlene Johnson herself.
We can presume that because as the rest of the newsrooms caught up to VOCM, Johnson confirmed that the story was generally true. As CBC reported, “Johnson said she wants to leave because of family concerns. Her husband now works overseas. As well, she is the mother of a young daughter.”
The eulogies for her political career were quick and generally laudatory. Some picked up on the line from her commentary that she was leaving because of family considerations and pronounced it entirely right and just. Her husband was working out of the country and her young daughter was just five years old.
Good for you, girl, they clucked in paternalistic approval. Someone claimed out that Johnson had broken new ground by being the first politician to give birth while in office. She’d challenged the conventions, so the claim went, and forced the legislature to consider new rules about parental leave and responsibilities. The political panel assembled for this week’s On Point over at CBC all thanked Charlene for her years of service and wished her well.
All wonderful stuff, except that “family reasons” is an excuse so worn out from over-use and, as in Johnson’s case, misuse, such that it is not a cliche. “Family reasons” is beyond that. It is now a code word for something else.
And everyone knows it is bullshit.
It’s the Friday before a long weekend.
Enjoy some music.
And if you like Morgan James, you can find more of her work at her website: www.morganjames.com.
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The day after the by-election in St. George’s-Stephenville East, federal New Democratic Party member of parliament Ryan Cleary showed an interest in provincial politics some might find curious.
“The question is not how to stop NL Liberals,” Cleary tweeted, “but how to boost provincial New Democrats. Status quo not working.”
Status quo means Lorraine Michael’s leadership, of course.
Cleary’s right. Lorraine’s leadership has proven to be a dismal failure. Not only did she and her supporters fail to capitalise on the strong showing in 2011, they’ve obviously failed to gain any ground as the support for the province’s Conservatives has collapsed. The by-election on the west coast confirmed that the New Democrats under Lorraine are staying firmly where they were. They aren’t losing ground, but they also aren’t growing, either.
Conservative leadership candidate Steve Kent may be running in third place in the race, but the guy makes bold promises.
His energy policy includes the pledge about Muskrat Falls that he will “bring this project in on time, and on budget.”
That’s a rather silly promise considering that the project – originally budgeted at $5.0 billion - is already officially estimated to cost $7.0 billion and will more likely cost something well above $8.0 billion before everything is done. For those of you doing the math, that puts the project officially at 40% more than when the project was approved in 2010 and more likely about 60% over budget.
Jessica Valenti, a columnist at the Guardian newspaper argued in her column in early August, that women should get free feminine hygiene products.
Consider these points from Valenti’s column:
Valenti doesn’t make her argument on cost, but on basic health care policy.
Amanda Marcotte at slate.com took a more blunt approach:
Valenti is asking audiences to really think about how the right to move about in public without bleeding all over yourself, a no-brainer for men, is a privilege for women that depends all too much on their ability to afford sanitary products.
It boils down to the same basic idea, though.
Take that idea.
Kick it around in your own mind.
We’ll come back to it another day and work it through as a potential public policy issue.
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From the blurb:
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Poor Sandy Collins.
The Minister (of the Moment) of Public Engagement and a gaggle of senior public servants went to meet the access to information review committee on Tuesday. Supposed to be half a day chatting about this whole letting people have access to government information thing . Turned into a marathon grilling.
Not pretty.
There is no limit to how selectively provincial Conservatives will read a document in order to find some microscopic filament that might possibly confirm that they have really been running the most magnificent administration in the history of the galaxy.
They still insist, for example, that they are the tops in leadership and accountability even though the most recent poll shows that 77% of the people in the province don’t think so.
Conservatives also insist they have done financial miracles. No less a personage than the party’s vice president took to the Twitter on Monday to tell everyone that:
According to Fraser Institute, SK and NL are the only provinces that reduced their public debt since 2007.
Well, they said a lot more than that, but evidently Mark Whiffen and didn’t need to read anything but that. Since the rest of us are not obliged or inclined to such delusions, let’s see what the gang at the Fraser Institute actually said.
Who was the first Newfoundlander elected to the Canadian House of Commons?
What party did he represent?
What year was he elected?
What riding did he represent?
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The Liberals are touting their latest campaign-style television spot featuring Dwight Ball talking about accountability and connecting with voters. In the spot, he’s driving somewhere in the driving province and as he talks the thing cuts to shots of him talking to people.
Remember that the latest poll shows that the Liberals own the accountability and leadership issue (48% to the Conservatives’ 13%). This tidy little spot reinforces the Liberal strength and highlights the Conservatives’ weakness.
When you are done watching that, flip over the the Mother Corps’ online archive and watch a 1971 current affairs documentary on the provincial election that year. Your mind will bend about a lot of things, not the least of which is the comment from New Democratic Party leader Jim Walsh.
Yes, friends, that Jim Walsh. He’s out west somewhere now, a long way removed in every way from that 1971 election.
But when your mind gets back on its even keel again, notice the portion of the documentary where Frank Moores is driving along a stretch of newly paved highway talking about the problems of the faltering Smallwood administration. While it’s highly unlikely the producers of the new spot remembered or knew about the old documentary, some would say there is a fitting parallel in there.
Let that be your Freak Friday political thrill for the week.
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Wednesday morning started with an intriguing but hardly surprising story.
CBC’s David Cochrane tweeted that sources in the John Ottenheimer camp believed that Conservative leadership candidates Steve Kent and Paul Davis were working together to thwart Ottenheimer’s bid. Kent quickly replied via Twitter, writing that “I am not teamed up with any camp.”
NTV’s Mike Connors tweeted a couple of hours after Cochrane that former cabinet minister and Ottenheimer campaign co-chair Shawn Skinner told him that Kent and Davis had started “combining slates” of delegates at some delegate selection meetings. Connors also tweeted the Kent denial that he was teaming up with anyone. Connors also added Skinner’s assessment that Ottenheimer was leading the delegate count or was tied with Davis while Kent was in third place.
Bu then Connors added some detail that made it clear Kent’s denial earlier just wasn’t true.