A clear course to dangerous political shoals #nlpoli

Lots of political activists are looking at the latest CRA quarterly poll.  The Liberals think it is great that they are rebounding so quickly.  Supporters of the other two parties think it is wonderful the three parties are tied and Paul Davis thinks it is great he is doubling Dwight Ball in popularity.

And sure, you can see that if you look at the numbers.  Here's the usual SRBP chart, updated to include these figures.  Bear in mind,  we've given the party choice here as a share of all respondents.  That puts the Grits at 23 with the Dippers and Cons tied at 22.

Reporters have been talking up the Liberal numbers, saying the party has rebounded.  And Paul Davis is vowing to stay on and fight the next general election based on this poll.

All lovely stuff and all of it really superficial.

Dependence and Independence #nlpoli

For those who might be interested,  Tuesday's post on Churchill Falls and Wednesday's post on the road to Muskrat Falls are a summary of a draft on hydro-electricity development that's been in the works for a couple of years now. It was supposed to be the chapter of a book but it got out of control and might be worth turning into a book.

Sometimes you get caught up in the details of things so it's useful to take a step back and look at the broader themes that emerge from your writing.  One that hadn't appeared before now was the consistency that ran from Joe Smallwood in 1949 through Moores and Peckford in the 1970s and 1980s,  Wells and Tobin in the 1990s and finally Roger Grimes.  

Each of their administrations had as its goal the development of the provincial economy to the point that the provincial government would no longer be what Smallwood called a poorhouse. His vision was a "growing prosperous province of independent families."  That's not surprising if you know anything of Smallwood's experience in Newfoundland from the 1920s onward.  He had disagreements with the federal government, the most famous being the 1959 row over Term 29 payments.

Jerusalem, Eldorado, and Perdition #nlpoli

Part I:  The development of our country
_______________________________

The Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador website "aims to provide school students and the general public with a wide range of authoritative information on the province's history, culture, and geography. It is based at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Faculty, graduate students, and professional writers contribute articles, while undergraduate students provide support as research assistants."

That statement of authority is one of the reasons why the introductory sentence to its section on the impact of Churchill Falls is so intriguing:

The Upper Churchill Falls hydroelectric project remains one of the most notorious ventures in Newfoundland and Labrador's resource-development history.   

There is no such thing as the "Upper Churchill Falls" project.  There is no upper Churchill Falls or, indeed, a lower one.  There is simply Churchill Falls.

Flip. No. Flop. No. No. Wait. Flip. ... #nlpoli

01 August 2016 - "Continuing continuity"

“This is not about cutting,” Ball told reporters on Thursday morning at a news conference. “This is about where we can create new sources of revenue for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.” 

It may be different from what the budget said, or what people thought it said, but in truth abandoning cuts and looking for new money is what Dwight Ball promised he would do lst year. This is Dwight Ball's fetish for consistency even in the face of changed circumstances. 

This is the sequel to Continuity with Change.  

This is Continuing with Continuity.

22 August 2016 -  "Message Control"

Flip ahead three weeks from the big media briefing.  Ball does a bunch of media appearances the day after his political appointments' story broke.  He told VOCM that - hold on - we can expect more cuts in the fall from the mini budget.  "Expect service cuts" and "difficult choices"  the VOCM headline warned.   

Now, suddenly,  there's a return to the earlier plan. 

Which is it? 

When Dwight Ball says something,  how do we know what commitments we can believe and what ones we should doubt?

06 September 2016 -  No fall budget.  Just usual financial update:  Dwight Ball.

This is the sort of basic policy confusion that got Ball to 17% in the polls.  This is the sort of thing that will keep him there.  Ball's abysmal polling numbers will keep him mired in this sort of situation until he dunderdales* or until the caucus and party barry** him.

-srbp-

*  quits long after the party can do anything to change their own political fortunes.  After Kathy Dunderdale, who quit abruptly in January 2014, leaving her party another 22 months only to die at the polls in November 2015.

**  gets the flick.  After Leo Barry whose colleagues in the Liberal caucus ousted him as leader in 1987.

The development of our country #nlpoli

Today, the development of Churchill Falls is popularly perceived as a failure.  Newfoundland is portrayed as the victim of a shrewd and untrustworthy lot in Quebec.  They hoodwinked Joe Smallwood,  the Liberal premier of Newfoundland at the time, and have continued to steal from Newfoundlanders through the patently unfair 1969 power contract.

The Churchill Falls power plant cost a little over $1.0 billion (about $6.1 billion in 2015) to build between 1969 and 1971.  With an installed generating capacity of almost 6,000 megawatts,  it was one of the largest if not the largest hydroelectric plant in operation at the time.

Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation delivered the project on budget,  achieved initial operating capacity five months ahead of schedule and finished the whole project a year ahead of schedule.

Revenge for the humiliation of Churchill Falls remains at the centre of provincial politics, as it has since the late 1970s.  Redress of the grievance has been the most common term for the political goal of the Newfoundlanders, but as Danny Williams and the provincial Conservatives made it out in 2010, revenge was really their burning passion.  Muskrat Falls was not merely Williams' legacy.  It was the means by which Newfoundlanders would break what he called Quebec's stranglehold on his province's economic future in Labrador.

In this pair of posts, we will look first at Churchill Falls.  The second, coming tomorrow,  will look at the years since 1972, culminating in Muskrat Falls.

Switching feeds #nlpoli

Some of you noticed a problem on Monday morning with the Twitter posts from SRBP.  You sent me a message and I fixed the problem.

The solution was to switch the autoposting to a new service and that seems to work just fine. You can tell the difference, by the way, because Feedburner used the google name in the shortened URL, while the new autoposter uses bit.ly.

SRBP has used Google's Feedburner service to autopost the morning offering.  That worked fine until this weekend.  Maybe it had something to do with the Twitter feed I installed on the blog on Sunday. Maybe.  But it doesn't matter.  Feedburner is history for Twitter.

SRBP will continue to use Feedburner to support the folks who get the morning post in their email inbox but for other services, SRBP now uses Twitterfeed.

Hopefully, that fixes the problem.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

As a reminder, for the next couple of days we'll be looking at Churchill Falls (Tuesday)  and the reaction to the 1969 contract (including Muskrat Falls) on Wednesday.

At some point in September, we'll also take a revised look at Newfoundland "nationalism."  That one has been brewing for quite a while but the Churchill Falls story is a good way to lead into it.

Also coming this month:

• new installments in the Zero-Based Governing mini-series,
• an overview of the phases of Newfoundland economic development,
• Dwight Ball and the "we are learning" philosophy,
• some observations on the politics of salvation,
• the provincial government's role in the economy, and,
• access to information under the 2015 law...  how are things going?
• plus a few other juicy morsels as we head toward the Bond-iversary on January 3.  12 years coming up.

-srbp-

Supporting and Opposing #nlpoli

If you get any kind of enjoyment at all out of watching people tie themselves in knots,  point out to a New Democrat that their party supports Muskrat Falls.

Oooo - eee you are in for a ride.

But let's make it clear.  The provincial New Democrats most certainly do not oppose Muskrat Falls.

No sir.  Never have.

Two for Friday #nlpoli

There's a long weekend coming up, so here is a simpler post.

There'll be an SRBP post on Monday but the biggie for the week should be Tuesday.  There's been so much talk about the Churchill Falls contract renewal on Thursday that we really need to take a look at Churchill Falls and compare and contrast the situation with Muskrat Falls.  Hopefully,  we can do that in one post.  If not, there'll be two back-to-back on Tuesday and Wednesday.

There are few more posts coming this fall that have been brewing for a while.  They are also related to one another, as it turns out,  although the connections might not seem obvious at first.

For those who wondered about it and who found the Zero-Based Governing post interesting,  there will be two more coming.  In the follow-up, we'll have a go at the Phase 2 part of the process for a couple of departments.  That's the more detailed functional analysis that will reveal the extent to which the number of departments as such is not an indicator of how big the government is.  After that,  a regular reader's experience in another province inspired a third post in that series that will look at the areas where federal and provincial jurisdictions overlap.

For today, though,  let's highlight some posts on other local political blogs.  labradore had a go at the electoral office on Thursday over the absolutely ludicrous amount of time they take to issue election reports.

When you've done with that,  Uncle Gnarley gnawed at Muskrat Falls and water management on Thursday as well.  Lots of detail.  Regular readers of Gnarley or here will find a lot of it very familiar but it is useful to bring it all back now and again, as Des does in fine style in this post.

-srbp-

We won't walk to a nearby walking trail #nlpoli

The Town of Happy Valley-Goose Bay commissioned a consultant to look at possible future development of a sand pit in a residential area of the town. You can read the report at the town website.

The consultants first held a public meeting open to all town residents.  Then they tried other ways of soliciting opinions, like setting up a booth in the local mall. Then they did a survey of a sample of town residents.

Out of all that, the consultants figured out two interesting things.  First, they "determined that the individuals which would most effected [sic] by the development would live within a 400-meter radius of the area of interest."  Second, they community feedback through all those means told them that 400 metres was also "the maximum distance that the average person would walk to reach a park or recreation area."

Who does he think he is fooling? #nlpoli

New England states need electricity.  They have a preference for green sources of energy,

"What we have to offer, both in hydro and in windpower, can be part of [a green energy] solution," Premier Dwight Ball told his eastern Canadian counterparts and the governors of the New England states at their annual international meeting.  CBC reported Ball's comments, which is where that quote came from.

Wonderful words.  

All wonderful.

Except for one teensy problem.

Ball's comment is a gigantic pile of crap.

And the governors know it.

Big News or something #nlpoli

Yes it is a slow time of the year for news.

But you do have to wonder about some of the Big Stories lately:

1.  What precisely did Kathy Dunderdale say that was worth three days of CBC television, radio, and online coverage plus a Pam Frampton column?

Did she say even one thing that was new?

Interesting?

2.  Is it news that yet another premier from Newfoundland and Labrador has gone off to yet another conference flogging the Lower Churchill... with nothing to show for it but a news release?

Seriously.  

• 1997:  Brian Tobin
• 2006:  Danny Williams
• 2007:  Rhode Island MOU
• 2009:  Danny Williams
• 2009:  Danny and Ahnold
• 2010:  Danny Williams
• 2011:  Kathy Dunderdale and a tour of the construction site
• 2011:  New England-Canada business development group
• 2011:  KD and the governors' "keen interest"
• 2013:  KD and the NEG
• 2015:  Paul Davis and the national meeting of American governors.
• 2016:  Dwight Ball

And that isn't the result of a serious search.

3.  Will it be news that those premiers didn't sell one electron from the damn dam because even totally subsidised by all those people on low and fixed incomes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Muskrat Falls is still too friggin' expensive?

So far it hasn't been  - not even in 2009 - which would actually make that a genuinely new story.

4.  Critch does a Dwight impersonation and Dwight appears on stage.  We are thisfaraway from a string of guest appearances on 22 minutes that drags on like an hour.

-srbp-

Tourism Indicators #nlpoli

These days,  Chris Mitchelmore does what Steve Kent used to do:  hype tourism numbers.

More people.

Tourism is big.

Yay.

Hooray.

Yeah, well, take a breath.

Zero-based governing #nlpoli

The provincial government has been going through a spell of something called zero-based budgeting as part of its ongoing efforts to cope with the massive government financial problem.

ZBB, as it is known, examines the budget in detail, justifying each expenditure,  not just the changes from year to year that would be considered in the usual way of budgeting.  You started from a base of zero,  as the name implies.  If the government makes any changes in the budget this fall, they will be out of this ZBB approach.

When he chucked a few deputy ministers overboard a week or so ago,  Premier Dwight Ball said that these extremely small changes in the organisation of his administration came out of the realisation they had enough deputy ministers to run the Ontario government.

Quick aside:  This is a common Ball-splanation for his actions.  "We" have learned something.  They ditched Cathy Dornan as a communications advisor because "we" had learned enough so "we" didn't need her services any more.  "We can do it all in-house.  Changes in government organization:  "after seven or eight months in office,  "we" know more now than we "we" did earlier.  Just flag that whole idea in your mind.  There's an SRBP post coming on it just because it is a rather curious  - but revealing - way of looking at the world.

For our purposes, though,  let's just notice that what it obviously means is that Ball and his folks don't have anybody thinking about the basics of government organization.  They have a former ACOA boss running Government Renewal Initiative - called GRIM in-house - but whatever he is doing,  it seems to be largely an out-placement service for recently retired ACOA senior executives.

So if nobody else is doing any big picture thinking about government,  we should give it a try.

Late Summer Reading #nlpoli

From the University of Toronto Press:

"The years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to transform the lives of rural Newfoundlanders.

"At Memorial University in St. John’s, a new generation of faculty saw the province’s transformation as a critical moment. Some hoped to solve the challenges of modernization through their rural research. Others hoped to document the island’s 'traditional' culture before it disappeared. Between them they created the field of 'Newfoundland studies.'

 "In Observing the Outports,  historian Jeff A. Webb illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars of lexicography, history, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and geography laid the foundation of our understanding of Newfoundland society in an era of modernization. His extensive archival research and oral history interviews illuminate how scholars at Memorial University created an intellectual movement that paralleled the province’s cultural revival."

Contents

• Introduction 
• Chapter One: Viewing the Universe Through Newfoundland Eyes: The Dictionary of Newfoundland English 
• Chapter Two: Writing History 
• Chapter Three: Herbert Halpert and Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland: Collecting Folklore
• Chapter Four: Cat Harbour: Anthropologists in Outports 
• Chapter Five: Peopling of Newfoundland: Mapping Cultural Transfer and Settlement
• Chapter Six: Communities in Decline: The Study of Resettlement 
• Conclusion

-srbp-

Same circus #nlpoli

Somewhere in Newfoundland and Labrador,  someone may not have heard the news.

There is oil and natural gas in the ground under water off our coast.

Never mind that this has been widely reported since the 1960s when someone first started exploring seriously out there.  Never mind, either, that we have had oil fields producing oil and filling the provincial government's bank account with billions of dollars since the late 1990s.

Some people might have missed that we have oil and has.  And we have a lot more than anyone is currently producing.

It is out of concern for these couple of folks living in a cave possibly in the Annieopsquotch Mountains that the provincial government has held a news conference to announce the latest estimates of how much more oil might, possibly, theoretically be out there.

Well, either that or it is polling month and the politicians are in deep political trouble this year, like their predecessors were last October when they held a news conference to announce last year's estimates of theoretical future gloriosity lurking somewhere underground. Maybe.

Wanna talk loopholes? #nlpoli

Regular readers shouldn't be surprised to discover the Liberals put a giant loophole in their independent appointments commission law that said, in essence, that they didn't have to use the commission if they didn't want to do so.

Danny Williams did exactly the same thing in 2004.

In fact,  the very first words in the fixed-election section of the House of Assembly Act say that nothing prevents the Lieutenant Governor from calling an election or proroguing the House of Assembly whenever he or she wants.  So election dates are fixed except when they are not fixed, which is all the time.

The Headpiece of the Staff of Ra-Ra #nlpoli

The provincial New Democrats claim the Liberals broke their own independent appointments commission law when they appointed a bunch of folks to senior executive positions in the provincial public service last week.

Right off the bat, let's be clear:  the appointments didn't break the new Liberal signature law.

That's because the law has a gigantic loophole built into it.

Section 4 of the Independent Appointments Commission Act says that the lieutenant governor-in- council or the minister making an appointment "shall consider the recommendations of the commission in making an appointment."  The definition of an appointment is one made under another Act or to a position listed in the schedule at the end of the IAC Act.

Pretty clear.  This is the purpose of the new Act, right there.  Appointments get made based on recommendations of the new commission.

And having read that, the Dipper geniuses wrote their news release.

But this is like the headpiece of the Staff of Ra and the Dippers only had one side of the headpiece.

The very next section of the IAC Act is the loophole.  It's the bit where they take back everything the law said they had to do.

Message Control #nlpoli

Memorial University professor Alex Marland has a new book on the market.  Brand Command is about political communications.  Marland interviewed a lot of people and did a lot of research for this very big book that lots of people should read.

One of the big ideas in the book is that politicians these days are very keen on something called message control.  They have a fetish for consistency so that everyone is singing the same things from the same hymn book, as the metaphor goes. It's an old idea and there are many reasons why politicians like to be consistent.  For one thing,  repetition across many means of communication increases the likelihood the message gets through.

On another level, though,  consistent messaging means ultimately that actions match words.  The message of the words must match the message in the action that makes those words real.

In that sense,  message consistency is about credibility and values and trust. Politicians like to tell people what they believe in and  how they will make decisions. Voters don't spend a lot of time thinking about government so they want someone they can trust to make decisions they agree with or can generally trust are the right ones.  When political analysts talk about "connecting with voters"  that's what they are getting at. 

The real connection voters need to see is the one between the words used to make promises with the actions that follows.  That connection makes the words credible 0 literally, believable - the next time there are words about what the politician will do.

Anything that attacks a politician's credibility is bad and when - as in Ball's case - the wounds are all self-inflicted, then you know there is a huge problem.

So why did Dwight Ball fire John Ottenheimer?

Being from there #nlpoli

Some people are very agitated at the prospect that the next justice of the Supreme Court of Canada might not "represent" Atlantic Canada like Justice Thomas Cromwell does.

How exactly does one represent a region on a court or anywhere else for that matter?  Do you have to come from there, for argument sake?  Born there?

Well, Justice Cromwell is from Ontario.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is touted by some as a sure bet to get the appointment.  From Saskatchewan. Taught law at Dalhousie,  University of Toronto,  Notre Dame and a few other places her bio doesn't mention.  Does that sort of thing count in her favour, seeing as she has experience living and working across the country?

The next person appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada should get the job based on merit that is related to the law and justice.  Everything else - including facility with French - should be secondary.

-srbp-

The word is "curious" #nlpoli

B'y, it is really hard to call the changes announced on Wednesday as a "shake-up" of the public service or any kind of major change to anything really.

Aside from chucking a very small number of people out the door,  this change to the structure of government didn't do much of anything but leave you wondering what the point was.

There have been rumblings of these changes going back months.  Folks looking for some sort of massive shake-up in the fall might be disappointed to discover this was it.  Most likely the next big news we will get is in the budget next spring.

But let's run through Wednesday's head-shaker-upper-whatever.