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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99253112014-11-21T06:00:03.386-03:30The Sir Robert Bond PapersAnother week. Another crisis. What will it be this time?Ed firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-79892463469647655862014-11-21T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-21T06:00:03.394-03:30The Apprenticeship of Constable Davis #nlpoli
People are looking back a century to the start of the First World War so,  on the political side, it's interesting to take a trip back and see what things were like then.

The Prime Minister was a guy named Edward Patrick Morris.  He was a lawyer, popularly known as Ned.  By the time he got to the Prime Minister's Office, in 1908, he'd been in the House the better part of 30 years and he served in cabinets under different premiers going back to the late 1880s.  Morris' predecessor – Sir Robert – had pretty much the same sort of background.

Compare that to recent Premiers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

 Politics and public life has changed considerably in the hundred years since Morris and Bond, but even by more contemporary standards  the premiers since 2003 have been relatively inexperienced.  Danny Williams had no political experience before getting a seat in the House in 2001.  He'd owned a small local cable company,  but Williams had no experience in managing a multi-billion dollar operations with tens of thousands of employees.

Kathy Dunderdale, Williams hand-picked replacement had a long career in municipal politics before getting to the House of Assembly.  She served in Williams' cabinet for seven years, including a stint as his deputy before vaulting to the top job.  For all that, she seemed to have problems in grasping the nature of the job, especially when it came to connecting with the public or, as with the federal government, with other politicians.

Tom Marshall was a place-holder, but like the others, he had no experience of provincial politics before getting elected in 2003.

Now we have Paul Davis.  A decent, and earnest fellow, Davis was a police constable before getting into provincial politics.  He'd been a municipal politician, but like most municipal politicians,  Davis had little knowledge of issues at the provincial level.  He's had a short stint in cabinet, in a number of portfolios.  Davis hasn't really been in any one department long enough to demonstrate that he can manage a department and a problem.  And now he's the Premier.

You can see the result of that in Davis' performance during the first week in the House.  Asked about the European trade deal,  Davis was obviously not that familiar with the deal.  Rather than let the minister responsible for the deal take the lead,  Davis did it himself.

"We have not progressed to where we would like to have it at this point in time,"  told the House, in response to a question from opposition leader Dwight Ball.  Davis then switched to talking repeatedly about the "five pillars" of the deal. Outside the House, Davis told reporters that the lack of progress was "troubling."

The next day, Davis turned the questions over to Kevin Hutchings,  the minister who has had the lead on the deal since the provincial government got heavily involved in the talks.  Hutchings took the line that the talks were underway, nothing was in jeopardy and the whole thing was still about two years away from being in place, anyway, what with the vagaries of international trade diplomacy.

That's actually the answer to all this, by the way.

Before Hutchings got into that, though, Davis dodged questions from ball about whether Davis had met with the federal regional minister.  Clearly, he hadn't.  You have to wonder why.

Wednesday night, Davis spoke with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  Davis told everyone about the call in the House on Thursday:

I can tell the hon. member opposite, the members of the House, and the people of the Province that I had another discussion yesterday with the Prime Minister regarding CETA. We had a very good discussion.

Davis got himself into trouble on the first of this by getting sucked into a ridiculous strategy of pretending he knew everything about everything.  Then, he got sucked into the old ploy of accepting the thrust of the questions that the deal was in trouble. That's a classic amateur mistake, especially for people who don't have a grip on the issue and who are more used to following than leading. They try to blend in with what appears to be the dominant opinion.  Davis knew enough to avoid accepting Ball's question entirely but he gave into it enough to cause a problem.

The next two days wound up being about the Conservative effort to un-eff what Davis had effed up the first day.

But here's the thing:  note that Davis hadn't met with the regional minister even though, as it appears from some sources,  he had an opportunity.  Instead, Davis had to hear from the Prime Minister.  Now everything is okay.

This doesn't make Davis look very leader-like in that he didn't seem to have a clue about what was going on.  He should be able to decide for himself if everything is fine or not based on his own administration's goals. Instead, he had to hear from the Prime MInister that everything is okay.

There's a more troublesome aspect to this, too.  It has to do with the fact Davis would only speak to the Prime Minister.  There is a general rule that like deals with like but, in truth,  the complexity of relationships with very large organizations like the federal government  often means that you can't rigidly adhere to that rule.

Unless you are a complete knobby amateur with an ego problem.   Danny Williams tried that crap on during the 2004 racket, but even he settled down and dealt with someone other than the Prime Minister when he had to.  Williams, though, is a bit more complex because he also had a problem that only he could do everything and anything.

In Davis' case, you'd expect him to let ministers lead files.  That's commendable.  The overall responsibility remains with Davis as first minister, so, you'd expect that given the chance to chat with the federal minister with regional responsibility for the province,  Davis would take it.  The fact that Davis didn't have the meeting suggests his head is in the wrong place or that he's getting crap advice.

For those who want to turn up their nose at this idea, recall that Davis' efforts to avoid the question about the meeting are evidence that he is sensitive to the implication that by not meeting with the minister, Davis did something wrong.  if he thought that blowing off the meeting was a good idea, he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to avoid saying that he'd not met with anyone about the deal.

Things didn't go well for Davis in his first week in the House as Premier.  After Ball got off the trade talks on Thursday, he asked about the environmental liabilities for the old paper in mill in Grand Falls-Windsor that Davis and his colleagues seized in 2008 as part of Danny Williams' scheme to grab hydro-electric assets for Nalcor.  it's a big subject for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that they figured in the Auditor general's most recent report on the provincial government's finances.

Davis' reply to Ball was that the environment is important, the mill is important, but that he didn't have the current figures handy, so he'd get them for Ball.  All wonderfully vague and a clear sign Davis just wasn't up to speed.

The first week in the House did not go well for Davis, at all.

Experience counts, you see.  And the lack of experience can become painfully obvious.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-29059394185136155162014-11-20T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-20T15:17:10.094-03:30The Federal Boogeyman #nlpoliThe Liberals kept poking at Premier Paul Davis in the House of Assembly on Wednesday about the European free trade deal announced last year.

Specifically, Liberal leader Dwight Ball asked Davis for the second day in a row about a joint federal-provincial fund under the deal that would see the federal government spend $280 million and the provincial government drop in $120 million on something to do with fisheries.  We say "something to do with fisheries" because there really hasn't been much substance to go with the announcement in the year since the provincial government announced the thing.

Tuesday's questions led to Davis admitting there was some kind of unspecified problem with the talks.  As the Telegram reported,  Davis told reporters outside the House that he "wouldn't say [the funding deal was] falling apart, but having not been able to reach a finalized agreement yet is troubling."

  On Wednesday,  Ball asked if Davis had met at any point with the federal minister responsible for the deal with the Europeans or with the regional minister for Newfoundland and Labrador in the federal cabinet.

The thing about Davis' reply is that he didn't give a straight answer.  Instead, he said that the provincial minister responsible could answer questions.  So Ball tried again.  This time, Davis stayed in his chair and let the provincial minister give a long-winded answer that just said everything is fine and the whole thing is still on track.

It took a third question to get Davis to say that he had "already had one discussion with the Prime Minister since I took office here. The Prime Minister and I intend to have further discussions on CETA."  Not exactly clear, eh?  That one discussion could have been a congratulatory telephone call.  The promise of future talks would be the promise to talk later on, at some unspecified time.

The fuzzy language on Wednesday seemed to be an effort to counteract Davis' comments from Tuesday.  And that's what is both troubling and confirmation that something is amiss in the provincial government and its relationship with the feds.

Still.

To be sure,  no one should be surprised that the trade deal isn't finished yet.  These things take a while to sort out.  Nor should anyone be really surprised that the federal and provincial governments haven't got all the details ironed out on an aspect of an international trade deal that, itself, isn't finished yet.  There'd be no reason on the face of it to think that anything is amiss.

Well, no reason to worry unless the premier were to say to reporters that he was troubled by the lack of progress on a deal one day while the next day he refused to talk about it and left it to the leading cabinet minister to insist everything is fine.  This sounds suspiciously like the difference we saw in 2013 between Kathy Dunderdale and her ministers over the deal.

What you are left with is the sense that there's some sort of dispute within the ministry.  There's also a problem between the provincial and federal governments.  That's not so surprising.  The provincial Conservatives seem to have a chronic problem getting anything done with the federal government.  Kathy Dunderdale herself complained at one point she didn't know how to deal with the crowd in Ottawa.  It left her frustrated.

What's ironic about that statement is that Dunderdale and her cabinet were much more successful in managing federal-provincial relations than the same crowd were when Danny Williams was around.  That might run against what you think, but a bit of review would tell you that this is correct.

Let's start with the European trade deal itself and work out way backwards.  The Conservatives actually managed to get in on the deal and squeeze a few hundred million bucks out of the federal government to help the fishing industry in the province take advantage of the trade deal when it comes.  There's no question the European deal will be good for the province.  It gives local industry access to a huge new market.  It gets rid of European tariffs that kept local fish products from gaining any foothold in the market.  The federal cash will come in handy.

Then there's the federal loan guarantee.  Even with the bit of foolishness right at the end,  the fact is that the provincial Conservatives were able to land a significant deal to build Muskrat Falls.  They got it from Stephen Harper, the supposedly evil anti-Newfoundland demon.

The business about search and rescue was a bungled bit of political management.  Kathy Dunderdale and Fairity O'Brien foolishly went along with the move to blame the Burton Winters tragedy on the federal government when it was just a tragedy that was really nobody's fault.

Before that, things were pretty much a mess.  But what you have probably noticed is that the period of the biggest mess is the time when Danny Williams was running things.  No accident, that.  Williams' highly aggressive, highly mercurial,  acidic,  nasty, and miserable approach just didn't work.  he made everything personal, all the time and never missed a chance to get nasty and miserable about it.  As his interviews for the ridiculous NFB film about him shows, he is still more concerned to puff up his own ego than actually accomplish anything.

The story about the meeting he had with Stephen Harper  in October 2006 is about Danny the Great Fighter, not about the truth of what occurred. We only have Danny's account and, as history teaches us, Danny Williams is nothing if not a great teller of fairy tales. Nor was Williams' actions really about the provincial interests since, the result of Williams' relentless campaign was failure.  He set out, for example, pledging to mount a national campaign to defeat Stephen Harper.  By the time the whole thing was over,  Stephen Harper had a comfortable majority and Williams completely reinvented his campaign to try and distract from Williams' is total failure. ABC was a complete bust.

Williams wrote letters to federal political leaders in every election during the time he was Premier.  The letters contained great lists of what were supposed the provincial government's big issues.  They are, if nothing else, a record of Williams' impotence.  Aside from the routine funding agreements that sometimes got in there,  Williams got nothing that he was looking for.  There was no early retirement package for fisheries workers, for example.  On Equalization, Williams never got anything he went looking for, no matter that he argued at one point both for the complete inclusion of non-renewable resources in the formula and for the complete exclusion of the same resources.

Then there is the great war with Paul Martin that started Williams' tenure.  Williams set out looking for something that was a nonsense.  No one with half a clue could ever have tried to get the federal government to let the province receive 100% of offshore royalties, as it did,  and at the same time collect an Equalization payment equal in dollar value to oil.  it was an insanity.

Yet Williams persisted in his campaign for a year.  Paul martin and the federal Liberals put the basic outline of a deal in front of Williams in the spring of 2004.  Williams ignored it in favour of asking for something he already had, namely 100% of offshore royalties.  By October, Williams had a better outline of a deal.  Loyola Sullivan spoke glowingly of it but a mere two days later, Williams was on another of his venomous tirades.  After another rounds of talks, Williams was ripping flags from flagpoles and refusing to go back to talks until the federal government caved in.

His flag stunt failed utterly.  And with Nova Scotia on the verge of a deal, Williams made a panicked telephone called to the prime Minister's Office to get talks going again:  all his demands were unmet.  Williams walked off with a cheque and deal that was actually worse than the one he had spat on the previous October.

The reason for Williams' persistent failure was Williams himself.  He arrogantly believed he alone knew anything. He dismissed anything that didn't fit with his views.  Williams could never negotiate but preferred instead to dictate.  And when that didn't work he insulted people and threw childish tantrums.

That's not the popular perception, especially among people who wrongly believe that Williams won in 2004 and subsequently.  There's no small irony that the same Conservatives who peddle the Danny Williams Myth are screwing over his successors in the process.  There's no chance that Davis can compete with the Williams Myth, no matter that Davis and his colleagues have generally been far more successful in dealing with the federal government than Danny Williams ever was.

-srbp-

*Apologies for the mix-up in days for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-75390402721463569662014-11-19T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-19T06:00:00.727-03:30When the budget comes… #nlpoli
We've got a provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador that has been budgeting for years to spend more than it brought in.

Way back in the beginning, way before the oil money cut in suddenly and largely unexpectedly,  Loyola Sullivan said that people should expect the Conservatives to run deficits annually of half a billion dollars or more.  The logical implication of what he'd said in 2005 was that it might have been 2014 until the Conservatives balanced the budget.

Now to be fair,  Sullivan was speaking about the magnitude of the provincial government;s financial problem as he and his colleagues found it in 2004.  But at the same time,  by 2005,  we were also talking about how the Conservatives intended to run things themselves.

They were clearly not as concerned about public debt as they had been in 2003.  Part of that might have had something to do with this idea they had of making a killing selling cheap electricity into the United States, but frankly,  Sullivan's forecast of a debt of about $17 billion – which the Conservatives delivered on – suggests they really had something else in mind.

Your humble er-scribbler would suggest that by 2005,  the Conservatives had abandoned the restraint message from 2004 that had proven so politically disastrous for them.  Sullivan himself stayed around for another 18 months and then left suddenly so this suggests that even he had abandoned his earlier ideas.  Sullivan was a bit more of a voice of financial restraint so this debt talk was significant at the time.  After he was gone,  the team of Danny Williams and Tom Marshall – driving the annual budgets themselves – that opened the taps and just spent and spent.

The never did reduce the debt as they promised originally.  Instead, the Conservatives met Sullivan's debt forecast.  If you add in the debt for Muskrat Falls, as you should, the current  total public debt is actually higher than the figure Sullivan allowed it might hit by 2014.  The Conservatives also failed to balance the books, and to really drive the point home, they have no reliable idea when they might actually manage to get the cash coming in and the cash going out to match up, let alone produce a surplus.

The government made up of politicians who plan to continue overspending are low in the polls and headed for an election.  All of that would be enough to guarantee a budget coming in the spring that will call for even more spending than the revenues will support.

But if that was enough, we've got a rather gloomy forecast for the provincial economy.  No, we aren't talking about the great article by Adam Walsh over at CBC online.  Memorial University's economics research collaborative is forecasting negative growth in the provincial economy next year.  The drop isn't just oil prices.  The labour market is set to shrink by a little over two percent.  Housing sales are forecast to drop by more than 21%

Don't expect any politicians to address the provincial government's financial problems any time soon.  Well, at least not to try and lessen them.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-26129904627796564602014-11-18T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-18T06:00:02.712-03:30Government Spending and the Economy – Again #nlpoli
A post last week offered a quick confirmation that, as finance minister Ross Wiseman said,  provincial government spending accounts for about 30% of the gross domestic product measured as spending.

A couple of people on Twitter took issue with that idea, apparently.  They also took issue, as it seems, with the contention around these parts that the situation Wiseman described was a matter of government policy as opposed to the random changes in the economy.

Let's dig into this in more detail.  It really is quite important as the government has a very serious financial problem to deal with, what with the growing deficits and the weakening income. Wiseman mentioned the impact of government spending on the economy, incidentally, as a reason why he could not cut spending very much, if at all.

The Idea

And that's really the first big clue at the start that what we are talking about is not some sort of accidental situation.  The finance minister is acutely aware that provincial government spending is a big part of the overall economy.  A cut in spending will cause problems in the economy.

Second clue:  Premier Paul Davis' speech to the board of trade last week.  When Davis pointed out that $6.0 billion in "infrastructure" spending produced lots of jobs,  he was acknowledging the extent to which the government spent money beyond that needed to replace critical infrastructure as a way of driving the economy.  Davis mentioned the "stimulus" spending during the recession after 2008.  Davis didn't say that he and his colleagues started spending then as a temporary measure.  No.  Davis said that the Conservatives continued to spend.

Third clue:  the "Prosperity" plan announced in 2012 was basically a plan to continue high levels of government spending, despite very large deficits,  rather than adjust spending down to what the provincial government revenues can support.  In itself, that's a pretty clear statement of a deliberate policy.

Plus, we know that the Conservatives have been aware that their spending was unsustainable. Paul Oram raised the issue as he left cabinet in 2009.  Danny Williams and Tom Marshall have acknowledged their spending plans were unsustainable.  So too, did Kathy Dunderdale.  They have excused this high level of spending and the debt and deficits with a variety of reasons.  They needed to stimulate the economy according to one set of explanations.  And when the stimulus excuse wore out,  they said every government before had neglected the province so the current Conservatives were just playing catch up.

What's more, the idea that government spending affects the economy is such an old idea in economics that it is a bit of a head scratcher that someone might actually doubt that a modern government in Newfoundland and Labrador is not only aware of the economic impact of government spending but is actually using it as part of their economic policy.

Put all that together and it's pretty clear you have a government that is aware of the economic impact of government spending. And, they are committed to sustained government spending at levels beyond what government revenue would support. They've offered lots of different reasons for it: the one consistent thing is the high spending.

The Slide – Constant Dollars

Now let's turn our attention to the slides.  Here's the one SRBP used last week.  It shows government spending as a share of the economy (gross domestic product) measured by spending.  In the slide,  the numbers from Statistics Canada are given in constant 2007 dollars.  That means that SC has converted the 1981 dollars and the 2013 ones and all the others in between into the equivalent value in 2007 dollars.

These are not the actual amounts, incidentally.  They are a percentage.  They show the relationship of one thing – government spending – in terms of another (GDP).

Between 1981, the first year for which we have figures and 1997,  government spending was between 30 and 35% of GDP.  The increase through the 1980s and the jump up in the early 1990s are all explained by the relative weakness of the provincial economy.  That's particularly obvious in that big spike in the early 1990s during the Great Recession.  The economy shrank and the result was that government spending was a bigger part of a smaller GDP, measured in constant dollars.

Starting around 1997, there's a fairly steady drop.  That doesn;t mean spending dropped.  It means that spending didn't grow at the same rate as the economy.  The steady line from 2003 through to about 2008 doesn't mean spending stayed the same, either.  It means that the relationship between GDP and spending stayed the same.  They could have stayed the same, grown proportionately or declined proportionately.

The Slide – Current Dollars

There's another way to do the comparison, using the value of dollars at the time.  This one might actually be a bit more intuitive for people because it reflects what the actual  numbers were at any given time.

In this chart you can see that, at the time,  the government used to play a much bigger part in the economy than it does even today.The place continued right up to 1995 by which time government spending restraint during the recession really took hold.

As with the constant dollar chart, government spending declined as a share of GDP starting around 1997.  Look what happened in 2005, though.  There's a big jump in the share of the economy held by government spending.  That changed ratio coincides with the boost in spending by the Conservatives.  The dip in 2008 was caused by the massive spike in oil prices right before the economic collapse in mid-2008 coupled with a cut in government spending in the back half of the year.

The decline in the back end of the chart reflects a growth in the economy larger than the growth in government spending.  We don't know the basis the finance officials used to give Wiseman his briefing, but wither using current or constant dollars, government is somewhere between 25% and 30% of the provincial economy these days.  That's not as big a share as it used to have but, as you can see especially in the current dollars chart,  starting in about 2005,  the Conservatives increased spending more than the economy grew.

The Slides – Spending and GDP

For those who want more, here is the actual spending and GDP using constant and current dollars.  The red in each slide is government spending, shown on the left vertical axis.  The blue line is the GDP, measure don the right vertical axis.

Here's the one in constant 2007 dollars.

You can really see the deliberate government policy in the current dollars chart.  Just look at that massive jump upwards in 2006, right on the heels of the closure of the Stephenville mill,  the fish plant problems at Harbour Breton,  and the first disastrous year of falling polls in 2004.  There's a slight drop in 2007,  another tinier drop in 2008, what with the immediate fear struck by the recession mid-year.

But look at how rapidly spending got back up to the 2006 level and beyond.  The big difference is that while the government produced surpluses in those years in between, thanks entirely to oil prices,  the more recent spending is sustained by sizeable deficits.  Well, deficits or drawing down some of the accumulated surpluses from 2007 and 2008 and not replacing the cash in the notional savings (surplus) account.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-58887629724336270882014-11-17T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-17T06:00:00.047-03:30Myths, then and now #nlpoli
You really do have to wonder how anyone could be expected to keep things straight when the people they rely on to help them understand keep changing their statements.

Take, for example,  the fight between the provincial Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador a decade ago over offshore oil royalties and Equalization.

Just to remind everyone,  the first one is set entirely by the provincial government as a result of the 1985 Atlantic Accord. That unprecedented agreement lets the provincial government here treat offshore oil as if it was on land and, therefore, entirely within provincial jurisdiction.

The second one is a federal transfer scheme to provinces that takes federal government cash and shifts it to the provinces who fall below a national average.  It's a top-up arrangement, meaning that as a government has more money of its own, the payment goes down.  Once a government is above the average – so-called "have: status – the money cuts off.

Well, here's what the Telegram said in its editorial on Friday:

…oil royalties weren't even up for negotiation. Because the province already received every last cent of oil revenues through the original Atlantic Accord. The issue was equalization payments, or rather, the lack thereof.

Absolutely true.

Oil royalties are one thing.  The provincial government received every penny, without reduction of any kind.

The fight was about Equalization,  Specifically, the provincial Conservatives wanted to get an annual payment from the federal government equal to -and in addition to - the value of oil royalties in that year.

So what was the Telegram editorial line at the time?  Well, that's where it gets interesting.  In December 2004,  at a supposedly crucial moment in the talks, the Telegram waved its editorial handkerchief at the Glorious Leader of the province as he rode off to do battle with the evil federal government:

And what is just is to award this province 100 per cent of the royalties due from its offshore, none of it clawed back in a complex equalization formula, none of it capped in a deal based on Ontario's economy.

You can see the two things don't match. The Telegram crowd will have to explain why they argued one thing then and another thing now.

What we do know is that the position the Telegram supported in that editorial 10 years ago was the position presented by the provincial government.  It was also the popular position.  Lots of people believed that the federal government took away provincial government money, that is, the royalties. They believed it because politicians said it was true.  They believed it because supposed experts supported the provincial government.  And they believed it because – as we can see plainly in that 2004 editorial – the editors of the province's major daily newspaper told them it was true.

Except that it wasn't true.  The provincial government claim was a lie. As they subsequently admitted in January 2005, the provincial government set and collected all the royalty from the offshore without a single penny in reduction  - ever - by the federal government.

That wasn't a secret.  Plenty of people knew it, including your humble e-scribbler, who said so publicly at the time.  The problem was that everyone else, especially those in positions of authority and influence, were repeating the lie over and over that the federal government was taking away something from the province to which it was entitled.

The repetition of false information didn't stop in 2005.  You can see plenty of false information in the Friday editorial.  For example, the editorialist created a new version of what happened back then:  "Williams, among others, argued that the loss of Equalization] negated the advantage of oil wealth."  The editorial even likened the combination of royalties and Equalization to an effort to keep getting unemployment insurance while having a job.

That's a pretty accurate analogy, accurately.  But back then,  anyone who said that sort of thing publicly could expect to get attacked pretty swiftly for being a traitor.

More importantly, that description of what Danny Williams and the provincial government argued back then just isn't true, either.  Williams claimed consistently that the federal government actually took provincial royalties.  That's what the whole "claw-back" argument meant.  The provincial government was entitled – according to Williams and the Conservatives – to get both Equalization and royalties at the same time.  Instead, the provincial government got its oil royalties and then the federal government clawed the money back – took it away, in other words – by reducing Equalization.

To try and get around the obvious effort to get EI and keep their salary at the same time – to borrow the Telly's own analogy – the provincial Conservatives insisted that the new payment they wanted wasn't Equalization. It was something else  covered in a deal strictly between the provincial government and the federal government. They never did say what it was, except that it was an offset, which was an offset to Equalization drops, of course, so they wound up hoist on their own clever petard.

"It was a defensible argument,"  the recent Telly editorial claims, because "[u]nlike other provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador lacked jurisdiction over its primary resources."  Under the Terms of Union, Newfoundland had complete control over all the resources it control before Confederation. The 1985 Accord gave the provincial government control over resources offshore that weren't in its jurisdiction at all either before 1949 or after.

The supposed lack of jurisdiction remains a popular argument for some people, especially people who want to justify provincial government decisions of one kind or another.  But, like the thing about royalties, it just isn't true.

The position Williams argued wasn't defensible. It wasn't plausible and it never stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny.  That's why it never worked, ultimately.  What happened in January 2005 was that Williams got essentially what the federal government had offered about a year earlier.  There was an additional set of payments like the offsets from the 1985 Accord and, like the original offsets, they were tied to Equalization.  Once the province didn't qualify for Equalization, the offsets would stop.

That's not what Williams set out arguing for and what he ranted and shouted and pulled down flags about.  The only major difference between the federal government's October offer and the one in December, both of which Williams rejected, and the final deal was the amount of money Williams got up front as a sort of lump sum settlement.  The federal government used one assumed price for oil in October and used another one in January.

That wasn't a "down-payment" as the Telegram editorial last Friday termed it. Nor did Williams "broker" a deal.  Williams had started the new year of 2005 flatly rejecting any federal proposal.  He'd also hauled  down Canadian flags in what proved to be one of the most disastrous political blunders in Canadian history.  The flags wouldn't go back up and he wouldn't resume talks until the federal government caved in to Williams' demands.  As Williams, own polling revealed,  though, Canadians firmly disapproved of his flag stunt.  And even in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the public almost unanimously supported his effort to get more cash from Ottawa,  they did not support his flag stunt  with equal vigour.

With the Nova Scotians busily negotiating an agreement, and with his public support largely gone, Williams made a frantic telephone call from his winter retreat in Florida to the Prime Minister's Office begging the federal government to restart talks. The deal Williams accepted in late January was the one he'd rejected three weeks earlier.

The cheque Williams got as part of the deal was a lump sum settlement.  It represented roughly what the provincial government would have collected between the time they signed the deal and the time the provincial government expected the provincial government would hit "have" status.  In the end,  Williams and his associates could only apply the internationally recognised salve of the loser to their wounds:  they claimed a moral victory.

Historian Jerry Bannister noted in a comment on a post last week that when it comes to Danny Williams, "the point has been reached where there isn't anything to say that hasn't already been said."  That's certainly true.  Since his time in office is over, we've actually got all the major bits of it done with.  As far as SRBP is concerned, you can go back to the beginning in January 2005 and see that your humble e-scribbler has dissected all those details.  So yes,  there likely isn't anything to say that hasn't already been said time and again.

There is a need to state the rights of things yet again, though, so long as people continue to repeat the misrepresentations from the past or, as in the Telly editorial on Friday, invent new misrepresentations about the recent past and what happened.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-17090444358810731442014-11-14T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-14T06:00:01.316-03:30The Ego-mentary #nlpoli
Danny Williams' hockey team tried a little marketing ploy this week.  They sent out a bulletin to news media disguised as a news release.

They claimed the hockey team was locked in some kind of record breaking attempt with a crowd of mainlander for the most sold-out games.  While everything was going well, apparently, there was a chance that this week's first game would fall short of the glorious goal of yet another sell-out.

What's interesting about this pretty transparent marketing ploy is that it worked with the CBC.  Popular opinion, including among the crowd at the Mother Corp is that they just don't do that sort of thing.  Well, the opinion is wrong. The folks over on the Parkway are as big a bunch of suckers for a good "us versus them" narrative as the rest of the crowd in the province.

Danny Williams' entire political career was built on an "us versus them" narrative.  He didn't invent it.  Someone else did that.  But by the time Williams came along, the thing was so deeply ingrained in people that he just had to hint at a foreigner and the knees would reflexively jerk right across the province, from St. John's to Corner Brook (he wrote hoping people get the joke.)

The experience was Pavlovian. Or at least Larsonian.

The other hallmark of Williams' political career was the ruthless suppression of any contrary voices.  Inside his party.  Outside his party.  Didn't matter.  Anyone who was not lock-step in line with the official Williams view of the universe got the jab in the ribs or, in the case of people like Fabian Manning, the mighty heave-ho.

Macleans magazine captured that quite accurately in their little piece on the National Film Board's Williams' new film titled "Danny".  He keeps a "stranglehold on his own narrative" the subtitle insightfully declared.

To illustrate the point, Macleans notes that  people like Williams' ex-wife are conspicuously absent from the film.  The only people featured in the film are those who love Danny at least as much as Danny loves himself.  For such a crime, the crime of mentioning that Williams and his wife are divorced, Macleans earned a sneering dig from Old Twitchy himself at the townie premiere of the little feature.  His shoulder twitches when Williams gets riled but the love from the audience at the show,  the adoration he craves desperately, seems to have calmed his shoulder enough during the scrum that he didn't risk knocking himself unconscious

Anyway, Macleans started their piece with a bit of the film that is much more to the point. There is a confrontation with Stephen Harper.  It includes quotes of things that "Williams recalls Harper telling him."

Williams recalls.

That's the key point.

The Danny Williams legend is entirely one of Danny Williams' construction.  He remains the master of his own narrative.  This not metaphorical.  Williams does not decide his fate or determine his future.  Williams literally tells us his own story as he sees it.

This movie by the studio that invented the documentary as an art form is the story of Danny Williams told by Danny Williams.  And a fine story it is.  The problem is that most of the story isn't true.  It's made up, either in whole or in largest part, out of the vivid imagination of the subject or his acolytes.

In the process, the National Film Board has invented a new form:  the fake-umentary. It is a hagiography,  a story that idealizes its subject.  In less polite terms, it is a pack of lies to . What the producers delivered is exactly the work of fiction they promised.  It is similar to the mock documentaries about rock bands or folk music or dog shows except that "Danny" is not supposed to be a parody.  The people behind it take it all very earnestly.

No one takes it more earnestly that Williams himself, of course.  In the advance publicity,  Williams offered that the film would help the people of the province understand their own history. There is no history in the film as near as anyone can tell.  This film is all about Williams himself.  So what was he on about?

Aside from Williams' tendency to inflate his own importance in the universe, this is just a version of Williams' claim after the 2007 election to the CBC's Rex Murphy.  "I believe in my heart and soul,"  offered Williams without the slightest sense of self-awareness, "that I embody the heart and soul of Newfoundland and Labrador."

L'etat, c'est moi, indeed.

 "Danny" is political porn.  There is no shortage of felating. Most examples are trademark selfies, courtesy of the flexible, if geriatric, star. Others are from his fan club.  All celebrities have a fan club and Williams is no exception.

In places, "Danny" is parody.  Williams is reduced to talking about a political confrontation with public sector workers.  In "Little fellow from Gambo" NFB cameras were actually at Confederation Building for a protest by university students.

"Danny" is also psychological cliche.  There is part of the film, as Macleans recounts, where Williams talks about surpassing his father.  In another sense,  even in the NFB film itself, Williams seems to be struggling to surpass his other father.  That would be the political nemesis his revered mother fought as a dedicated anti-Confederate, anti-Smallwoodite Conservative. "Oedipus, schmedipus," as Robin Williams used to say, "I love ya mom."

A fair-sized bunch of townies turned up to watch the premiere.  They staged the show not at a movie theatre but, in keeping with the oedipal subtext, across the province at the government-owned centres built during the last days of Smallwood's reign.  Sure, most of the audience were charter members of the worshipful gang of Williams' arse lickers and boot kissers, but they were there in considerable numbers.  That's the key point.  Williams is gone from the political stage,  firmly rejected even by Conservatives in Virginia Waters, but there are still some who want to believe in all the old stories.

There's some symbolism in the fact that this fanciful account of Williams' time as Premier appears just as the problems resulting from his key policies  - massive debt, chronic financial mismanagement,  Muskrat Falls - are coming plain.  The reality of Williams legacy and the fantasy narrative pushed by Williams and his toadies are vying for public attention today, as they did day after day, week after week while Williams was Premier.  And now, as before, the local media were more likely to help out with the Williams narrative rather than challenge it.  That job fell to the mainlanders, like the crowd at Macleans.

There's no small irony in that either.  One of Williams first interviews Williams gave as Premier was with Canada's national news magazine. It revealed a great deal about him that was borne out by the experience.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-23369678638267639192014-11-13T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-13T06:00:01.756-03:30Take a closer look #nlpoli
Premier Paul Davis hasn't delivered any speeches, issued any news releases, or done anything else to explain who he is and what he wants to accomplish as Premier.

The guy has the job.

But he hasn't told anyone anything about his plans.

On Wednesday, Davis had the perfect chance.  He delivered a luncheon speech to a few hundred people at the St. John's Board of Trade.

"Between now and next spring we'll let our plans be known," Davis told reporters after the speech.  "We're planning as we're moving along," he added,  sounding suspiciously like an admission that they are making it up as they go along.

So what did he talk about in the speech?

Davis spent his entire speech telling people at the board of trade about all the wonderful things that he and his party have done since 2003.  It was basically the same speech that Danny Williams, Kathy Dunderdale, and Tom Marshall have delivered a thousand times on a thousand occasions to a thousand audiences over the years.

Yes,  the Conservatives have spent billions upon billions upon billions of dollars that will only come once from oil revenue without putting a cent of it away, but look at all the jobs that came as a result.

We did it and we are proud of it, said Davis.  And give us a chance and we will do it again.

Unlike those evil Liberals, Davis warned, without actually naming the Liberals and Dwight Ball.  They have no ideas of their own. they just make things up.  Danny and Kathy and Tom all said the same thing and still the Conservative Party drops in the polls and the Liberals rise.

You could almost hear Paul struggling not to yell "Take a Closer Look."  follow that link.  It's worth the time.  Back in 2003,  the government-leading fellow told us that – in Peter Boswell's description for CBC -  "not only is the economic position of the province very strong, but that even better times are just around the corner. He almost sounds as though he's got Joey Smallwood's illusory optimism and Brian Peckford's "have not will be no more" bravado rolled into one."

Meanwhile, the not-government fellow whose party led every poll, "perhaps mindful of the budgetary deficits of recent years, is less enthusiastic about the province's current finances and considerably more cautious about what the future may hold."

The advertising agency that ran the government-leading fellow's campaign back then went tits up, only to have huge chunks of itself absorbed into the current government-leading party's advertising agency. Perhaps, that is just a coincidence.

Davis's people tweeted out some highlights of his speech as the boss read the thing, uncomfortably.  "We made it government policy that any further offshore development has at least a 10% royalty to Newfoundland and Labrador."

Small problem.

The provincial government royalty regime, established when Paul was still  walking a beat as a constable on the local police force, never settled for as little as 10% royalties from offshore oil development.  They decided long ago that once the companies paid off their development costs,  the provincial government would get the better part of half the money the oil companies sold each barrel for.

Darin King, business minister, retweeted the quote about 10% royalties.

Your humble e-scribbler asked WTF the pair of them were talking about.

Neither replied.

Perhaps they were talking about the thing in the energy plan where the Conservatives promised to get 10% "equity" in every future project.  Equity and "royalty" are not the same thing.  The people of the province – who own the oil – let oil companies develop it in exchange for that royalty system that peaks out around 50%.  The people of the province don't have to pay a cent for it because they own the oil already.

The Conservatives came up with a brilliant idea.  They would make the people of the province buy 10% of the oil they already owned and then fork over even more money to develop the projects as the very junior partner with multi-national oil companies.  Rather than take the money from oil sales and use it to pay down public debt or build schools and such,  the Conservatives gave it as a free gift to a company they made up out of the old hydroelectricity company the government owns.

Those folks at Nalcor would do what they wanted with the oil cash.  The most important thing was to use it to build a dam at Gull Island to sell electricity into the United States at a huge profit.  Along came the recession and then the explosion of shale gas and oil that dropped the price of electricity in the United States.  Gull Island was no longer profitable.  Unhindered by such petty annoyances, the Conservatives decided to build a much smaller dam at Muskrat falls and force the people who owned the oil and who just had to buy the oil they already owned and force them to pay the full price for this new, smaller dam.  They would also pay a handsome profit to the investors – all from outside the province – who put the government-guaranteed loans up to pay the cost of the construction.

The taxpayers would pay for their own project and then pay for it again, while others got the electricity at a huge subsidy.  "Hoover Dam"  says Paul Davis,  who like each of his predecessors has been forced to find yet another historic metaphor for the bit of insanity called Muskrat Falls.  The project is nothing like Hoover Dam at all, on any level.  The closest to the truth anyone came was Bay d'Espoir.

But the absolute truth is that Muskrat Falls is a project on its own.  There is nothing in recent memory like it and future generations will look and wonder what Paul and his buddies were ingesting to cloud their minds so badly.  After all,  the economist they all used to justify their decision recently looked at the drop of oil prices and admitted he had never considered it a possibility. Never saw that drop in prices coming.

It's like his study of iron ore prices.  Those prices would spur the development of iron ore deposits in Labrador to be powered by that glorious Muskrat Falls project. The economist's "low price" scenario for ore was US$85 a ton.  Current forecasts are for ore to hit an average of US$72 a ton next year with a low of US$60 in there somewhere.  One big mine in Labrador has already shut down after 60-odd years of operation.  A major new development is having trouble raising cash.  No one has asked The State Economist if he saw that coming, but we can guess the response and be dead on in our predictions.

If Darin and Paul were talking about those "equity" stakes and not "royalty",  someone should ask the state-owned energy company, Nalcor.  They already made it clear they won't be taking any equity in any future projects unless the thing looks pretty low in the risk department. The folks at Nalcor unilaterally dumped the 2007 energy policy a year ago October.

And in other news,  Nalcor is also busily rejecting any sort of outside investment to develop more renewable energy, this time from wind.  The energy plan is defunct but the Premier is still talking about it like it was real.

Paul may want to rethink that idea of telling people to take a closer look at his party and the other one before the next election.  If his speech to the board of trade is any sign,  the result might be like a Wade Locke economic forecast:  didn't see that coming.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-1733695531395811272014-11-12T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-12T06:00:02.471-03:30Government Spending and GDP #nlpoli
A couple of weeks ago, finance minister Ross Wiseman said that he can't cut government spending because it is such an important part of the economy.

Wiseman said government spending amounted to about 30%  of the province's gross domestic product.  He was absolutely right, if you measure the gross domestic product based on expenditures within the province.

As regular readers of this corner know, provincial government spending has become an increasingly important part of the provincial economy under the Conservatives. This reverses a very clear trend that has been underway for some time.   When you look at the numbers, it's pretty clear.

Here's a table showing the percentage of the provincial gross domestic product represented by provincial spending, including capital accumulation. The figures on which these charts are based used constant 2007 dollars.

What's interesting about this chart is that, with the exception of a blip at the onset of the recession in the 1990s,  government spending was a fairly steady percentage of gross domestic product calculated on expenditures from 1981 about 1997.

Starting in 1997,  it declined. That was the year of first oil production.  Then it stayed constant only to start climbing again around 2009 as government increased its spending and GDP declined.  Intuitively that makes sense.  Successive provincial governments tried to hold the line on government spending, even as the economy grew. Public debt was growing s a share of the provincial gross domestic product.  There's a big drop as oil production and price started to pick up in the early part of the new century.

Things stabilised at around 26%. Then in 2009, the share of the GDP represented by provincial government spending shot up. That's around the time that Tom Marshall fretted that the provincial economy was fragile. While we don't figures for 2014 yet, you can tell from Ross Wiseman's comments that the trend since 2009 has continued.

Compare those figures with this sample of Canadian provinces and the Canadian national average.  it covers the 20 years from 1988 to 2008.  It's not exactly the same as the chart for this province, but you can see enough common points to compare.  The chart was prepared by the Ecole nationale de l'administration publique.

Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial spending is a larger share of the provincial GDP than three of the four provinces in this chart and the national average.  Only Quebec's government spending is a larger share.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-21528429722960475122014-11-11T12:05:00.001-03:302014-11-11T12:06:28.284-03:30The Funeral by Dave Adey
Originally left as a comment on the post about Remembrance Day,  Dave sent this along as an attachment to an e-mail because it was too long for a comment.

Here it is, as sent, unedited.

Last night I got the urge to look up a couple of my relatives who were killed in World War 1. I've always been interested in genealogy so I had a small amount of info, including a couple of pics on one but very little on the other. One of them was my father's brother and the other was my grandfather's brother on my mother's side.

I guess right off some of you must think I'm 80 odd years old myself. Nope, I managed to defy the normal generations of time...lol, not my doing, my old man was 60 and my mother was 40 when I was born. In fact, I only had one grandparent born in the 20th century.

Anyway, I knew a little bit about my Uncle Alonzo Adey or (Eddy) as the name he signed up with. We all found that strange and one of my brother's said he was too young so he used a false name. Years later I dismissed that as I knew when he was born but last night I discovered the real reason why. I found a pdf online that contained some of his documents from when he was enlisted to when he had died.

He had signed his name "Eddy" yup, a real signature. Why I thought? Then right before my eyes I saw another document where my Grandfather had also signed his name that way as well. I knew they weren't ignorant people contrary to what many believe about our ancestors back then, even though many had little schooling, they did learn to read and write. I knew that all official records had used the spelling "Adey" so my grandfather should have known the difference, especially when a census taker had spelled his, my grandmother and their children's names as "Adey" I also knew that census takers sometimes bastardized names...I have seen a couple of docs from the early 1800's where the spelling "Eddy" was used on occasion. Anyway, solve one mystery and discover a new one.

My uncle Alonzo joined the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in 1916, got some training, was shipped over seas and on April 14, 1917 at Monchy-le-Preux, during the Battle of Arras; he was killed. Not only killed but nothing was found of him. A month later a rather crudely worded message which is not identifiable was addressed to his father saying merely that his son was missing.

Uncle Alonzo had given authorization to the pay office to deduct 60 cents per pay to be set aside for his benefactor, my grandfather. The sum that was paid out after his death was $18.80. Was it a lot of money for him? Who knows but I do know he had to go to the trouble of requesting and providing proof of who he was to get it.

In August 1921 my grandfather received the Victory Medal for his son, Alonzo Adey (Eddy) who had participated and died in the Great War.

I was going to write about my great Uncle William Luther Marsh who had served and died in Europe as well but I don't want to bore anyone. The story is about the same as my uncle Alonzo's...died at a different time in a different place. He was born and lived at Deer Harbour, Random Island...a resettled community. They likely never knew one another and served at different times. He had left his father the tidy sum of $19.72. The only similarities are their ages, the length of their service, their height and their weight. Both were short at 5' 6" and weighed 120 lbs. Maybe someday I'll honor my Great Uncle much better than this short paragraph.

Before I go, I have to say that there were many in my family who have served in peace and war. I can't go before World War 1 as I'm not sure if anyone served in army, navy or war. Perhaps and likely there have been but I have no names to inspire me to search deeper into time and history.

In World War 1 I had 2 uncles serve, one was killed and one was wounded. One great uncle who was killed. One Cousin who was wounded and in POW camp for a year until end of the war. A Cousin who was with the Overseas Forestry Unit in Scotland. And my Grandfather Marsh who served in the Royal Navy Reserve; he told me that he made 16 cents a hour. He lived until he was 97 and attended every Remembrance Day parade in Clarenville at least up into his late 80's, I left home mi 80's so I'm not sure after that. I do know he never said he was going to a parade or anything like that...he called it "The Funeral".

I had one Aunt who married a Nfld soldier of World War 2 and another Aunt who married an American serviceman probably in St. john's during World War 2...they had sons who also served in the American military. Those 2 Aunts also had a brother (my uncle) who served in the CAF...I have to check on something because one of my brother's told me he was the only Sargent Major in the CAF, he's also the same one who told me my Uncle Alonzo used a false name because of his age.

Of my 3 brothers in my family, 2 of them served in the CAF...our other brother had the mumps or measles when he was young and he had bad eyesight, if not for that he probably would have signed up as well.

In 1984, a few days after my mother died I went into the Recruitment Center on Water Street...less than a month later I was in Nova Scotia doing basic training. The day before I left Clarenville I went around to visit my family; I went to visit my Uncle Fred who was the last of my Father's siblings to be alive. He was well into his 70's and many years before he had suffered some very powerful strokes that left him very helpless. I remember going into his house and he was sitting at the table crying, I asked my Aunt what was wrong and she said that he was afraid I was going off to war. As I reflect back now the helpless old man I held in my arms who cried for me was a little boy when his older brother went off to war and he never did see him return. I feel sad because he never saw me return either, he died some months later.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-47611307944075531102014-11-11T11:00:00.000-03:302014-11-11T11:00:01.916-03:30Velox Versutus Vigilans #nlpoli

Corporal Kenneth Chad O'Quinn, 2 Canadian Mechanised Brigade Group Headquarters and Signals Squadron, killed in action, 03 March 2009

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 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-75076626250781951952014-11-11T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-11T06:00:02.936-03:30Lest we Forget #nlpoli
More people will pay attention to Remembrance Day this year than usually might.  The murder a few weeks ago of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, and to a lesser extent, the murder of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, are enough to remind a few more of the memorial day for those who have died in military service.  The rest will wear a poppy in their lapels or come out to the parade because this is the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.

Thirty-odd years ago, you wouldn't have seen this level of interest.  The passage of years since the end of the Korean War made military things too distant from most people's lives to have a personal impact.  And for many others, the anti-American, anti-war views that came as a reaction to the Cold War kept them not merely indifferent to Remembrance Day but openly hostile to anything that smacked of positive feeling toward anything and anyone connected to the military.

That changed with the end of the Cold War.  Within a year after the Berlin Wall was gone,  Canada was at war in the Gulf.  Through the rest of the 1990s, Canadians took on increasingly difficult and dangerous jobs in places like Bosnia and Croatia.  As the dangers of war service became more personal to Canadians, so too did their interest in in commemorations like Remembrance Day.

This year,  the anniversary of the the day the wall fell in Berlin came on the same Sunday that the British marked Remembrance Day.  The British follow their old custom of marking the armistice that ended the Great War not on the day itself – November 11 – but on the nearest Sunday before the day. It's been that way since the first ceremony in 1919.

Newfoundland's war commemoration day dates from 1917.  Like the British, Newfoundland's day is officially to be marked on the Sunday nearest to the day.  At some time in the past,  most likely after 1950,  someone decided to move the day of commemoration so that it coincides with Canada's national holiday.  The law passed in 1917 is still in force.  The only change has been to mark the day as being in the province instead of the Dominion or country.  The purpose of the day remains, as it was, to ensure that "the deeds and sacrifices of those men and women of the province who took an active part in the World War of 1914-18 shall be kept in remembrance with honour and respect."

These days,  Commemoration Day doesn't exist. People mark something commonly called Memorial Day to recall the slaughter on the first day of the Somme battle in 1916.  Our attitude to these sorts of events can change dramatically over time.

While the Canadian view of Remembrance Day has changed,  events in Newfoundland reflect a much deeper,  much more substantive alteration in the relationship of an entire group of people to their own past.

An academic paper on the "cultural memory" of Beaumont Hamel, written in 2006,  for example, missed entirely the point that the current remembrance and what began during the war are substantially different.  The author even calls the day "Memorial Day" while citing articles referring to the day by its official name. Even confronted by the contradictions,  they go unnoticed.

The distance between modern Newfoundlanders and the war is even greater than that.  There are two new books, both by historians that touch, in part on Newfoundland and the Great War.  Death on Two Fronts, by Sean Cadigan, is an effort to connect two national tragedies with the subsequent loss of self-government in newfoundland in the early 1930s.  This is an old theme in the way Newfoundland historian's viewed the war. As Cadigan notes, an early interpretation was that the British and Canadians imposed Commission government on Newfoundland as a response to the country's crushing debt, a significant portion of which was due to the war.

Cadigan doesn't actually create a new interpretation so much as offer up a mixture of old stories with new, entirely invented events.  In Cadigan's account, the decision to commit soldiers rested entirely with the Governor.  The British Admiralty ordered an increase in the size of  the naval reserve division on August 7.  Prime Minister Edward  Morris went along with the Governor, Cadigan claims, as part of Morris' political feud with the supposedly prescient William Coaker.  The fisheries activist opposed the creation of a citizen's committee to administer the war effort because it was a supposed abrogation of political responsibility.  Coaker's opposition to a military commitment – as opposed to the naval reserve – was prescient, since Coaker apparently foresaw the cost to come in blood and treasure. The decision to commit soldiers came on August 10, in Cadigan's account, then cemented after a public meeting on August 12.

The reality, well established even in the accounts that are currently available, is that the cabinet as a whole  - the elected Newfoundlanders - decided on August 7 to commit sailors and soldiers.  They decided to increase the size of the naval reserve division, not the Admiralty.  And the citizen's committee was, even to a cursory reading, nothing more than a political cover, a way of co-opting as many social leaders as possible into taking responsibility for the war effort.

Cadigan reduces the events of a century ago to a one-dimensional tale of exploiters and exploited,  of evil capitalists and their stooges set against noble workers and peasants and their bayman revolutionary leader, Coaker.  Cadigan's account is only slightly better in the telling than Gwyn Dyer's version in Canada and the Great Power Game, 1914-2014, but only because Cadigan got the Governor's name right.  It was Walter Davidson, not Basil.

What's truly conventional about Cadigan's account is that is places one event at the centre of everything.  Beaumont Hamel is the other front in his book, with the first being the death of sealers in the disaster at the hunt in the spring of 1914 and the loss of another ship, with all hands, that was returning from the hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Beaumont Hamel is the lynchpin of Cadigan's interpretation.  Without it,  Coaker cannot have the gift of foresight to oppose the Establishment's reckless war.  Cadigan's capitalist/labour frame is merely a variation on the "Newfoundlanders-as-victims" frame that has sustained the currently popular view of the war and what came after:  a foreigner dictated Newfoundland's entry to the war and committed the soldiers who were slaughtered on the Somme.  The debt from the war that resulted from the foreigner's decision led to the collapse of self-government in 1934 that was, itself, part of an elaborate conspiracy by Canada and Great Britain that reached its fulfillment with Confederation 1949.

Even for those not imposing post-1949 political or ideological views on the past,  the magnitude of the slaughter at Beaumont Hamel has been enough to draw extraordinary attention.  It figures in virtually everything written or produced about Newfoundland and the Great War.  In their 2012 paper on the production of an official history of the country's involvement in the war,  historians Mel Baker and Peter Neary list the books and articles about Newfoundland and the First World War in a footnote.  The number that deal with Beaumont Hamel in one way or another is staggering.

Incidentally, G.W.L. Nicholson's 1964 book, the Fighting Newfoundlander, is not an official history of Newfoundland in the war as are the French, Canadian, British or German histories.  It is a history of the battalion that fought in the war, nothing more, and in that Beaumont Hamel assumes a very large place in the story.  But what went before the war, how the government decided to get involved,  the role of the citizen's committee and the development of government administration, or even a detailed discussion of the financial impact of the war on the country are beyond its scope.

Beaumont Hamel is like a naked light bulb in the inky blackness of our past.  It draws our attention naturally.  The brilliance of the glow shows us events before or after only in the reflected light, not as they are.  And it blinds us to much more.

Newfoundland a hundred years after the Great War is like a country of amnesiacs. They want to know who they are,  where they came from, and how they got to this place.  As they struggle to remember, though, they meet other amnesiacs  - like Greg Malone, for one - who fill in the gaps between vague and elusive memories with fantasy and invention or who describe the world as best they can through the glare of one or two of those blinding spots.

The result for our democracy is not limited to the end of self-government or Confederation. It remains with us today.  Our collective amnesia is not confined to the distant past.  It is one of the characteristics of who we are, right down to the premiere of a work of fiction,  premiered the night before Remembrance Day to an appreciative audience, and presented as a factual account of the past decade.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-30167585412446580682014-11-10T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-10T06:00:02.604-03:30Rodent Intercourse #nlpoli
If you want to see a fine example of the political management of a potentially devastating scandal,  take a close look at how Justin Trudeau and the Liberals handled the accusations against two caucus members.

One news conference stripped the New Democrats of a political issue they could have – and likely would have  - used against Trudeau in the run-up to the next general election.  Trudeau positioned the Liberals as the champions of the fight against sexual misconduct in the workplace.  And to cap it all,  Trudeau's statement effectively shifted the focus of the story from the salacious details onto the fact that the federal parliament has no means to deal with harassment.

That last one turned out to be highly advantageous.  Within two days of the Trudeau news conference,  a former New Democratic Party staffer launched a law suit against an NDP member of parliament over allegations of harassment.  The best that Thomas Mulcair could muster is the claim that, as reported by Canadian Press, that the MP "would not face a reprimand because a management-union committee had already reviewed the matter."  The MP said "he took all the right steps, and believes the matter will be dismissed."

Trudeau kicked two MPs out of caucus pending an independent investigation.  Meanwhile Mulcair looks like he did nothing except shuffle the potentially sordid and damaging story through a secretive internal NDP bureaucratic process that might well be biased in favour of the politicians.  That's part of the story that already surfaced on Parliament Hill in the immediate aftermath of Trudeau's announcement:  there are no rules and parliamentarians can be a law unto themselves.

The day before that, the New Democrats tried to blame Trudeau for attacking the victims by going public with the accusations.  Investigating the accusations and dealing with the problem would "make them victims a second time" according to Mulcair.

The problem with Mulcair's claim is that it isn't true.  Trudeau did not identify the individuals or the party to which they belonged.  The letter from Liberal whip Judy Foote to the Speaker of the House of Commons didn't identify the individuals or their party either.

Mulcair did.

As we head into the week after the revelations, the New Democrats are up the political creek without an issue and the Liberals are insulated.

That's skilful issues management.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-54093184848359289952014-11-07T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-07T06:00:01.060-03:30Cycling through Newfoundland Politics #nlpoli
A couple of recent posts included the invented word "stragedy".  As some of you figured out, it's a deliberate combination of strategy and tragedy that reflects the strategic tragedy and the tragic strategy that the provincial Conservatives have been following lately.

That's what it is, really:  a tragedy.  A political party that only a few years ago was untouchable in any respect is now teetering along on the brink, presumably, of political annihilation.

You'll hear more and more people talking about this turn of political events as being a cycle.  The Conservatives now are in the same place the Liberals were just before 2003.  Whenever the next election comes, the Liberals will win, just like the Conservatives did in 2003.

The people who hold this view look at the string of by-election victories point to the victories as proof of the cycle.  And as the Liberals mount up the victories,  other people are persuaded that there must be some truth to the story.

It's inevitable.

That's all wonderful, except that it isn't inevitable, really.

What that view of cycles reveals is more about the people and the local political culture than the actual fact of things. You see,  public opinion changes over time. We know that because there has been decades of research and experience here and elsewhere in the world.

People can and very often do change their minds about things. The issue in politics is how the politicians respond to those changes.  They can accept them and change their own behaviour.  They can try to persuade people to change their minds.  Or they can ignore public opinion.

What the provincial Conservatives have done is ignore public opinion.

They've refused to change.

They've kept things the same.

And the the result is hardly surprising.

Staying the Conservative Course

Over the past few weeks, your humble e-scribbler has been talking about what Paul Davis and the Conservatives would likely do or should be doing if they wanted to start shifting their polling results.  In almost every instance,  they did exactly the opposite.

Take opening the House of Assembly this fall as a good case in point.  They don't have too many winning options, admittedly.  Just look at it this way:  if they didn't open the House, they'd get a couple of days of bad press and then people would be into Christmas.  In the meantime, Davis and his cabinet could be working feverishly to get ready with some sort of great announcement in the spring after a Throne Speech.  The strategic plus from this approach is that you minimise the damage while setting up for a bigger event later on;  short term pain for hopefully a longer term gain.

Instead they are going to open the House.  The Conservatives will avoid the criticism in the short –term.  But they will be handing the Liberals a couple of weeks of more to hammer away at them in full view of the news media.  Every day there could be a question for the justice minister…oh, wait,  she doesn't have a seat in the House.  Then there will be all the questions about government over-spending.  And the dead kids.  And whatever else comes up.

Don't forget that Corporate Research Associates is back in the field this month.  It's already started off badly for the Conservatives. Before the month is out, they will have two more by-elections over.  There will be one more Liberal across the floor from them and before the session  is over, the Conservatives might face one or two more.  That should all be a mighty boost for the Conservatives' own psychology, let alone what it will do to their supporters. And all that bad news and hard times for Davis and his followers will be reflected in the CRA poll.

You see the point about choices and results and how nothing is inevitable.

In some respects, it's the flip of what SRBP used to talk about in 2007. People insisted the Conservatives were invincible.  There was no way the Liberals could shift them.  And of course, there wasn't, as long as the Liberals were disorganized,  actively co-operated with the Conservative agenda just like the NDP did under Jack Harris and Lorraine Michael, and generally just sat around and let things happen.  They seemed to take the view that the other guys would eventually lose.

Events in 2011 showed just how much opportunity there can be in politics, if you are ready for it.  The Conservatives had one of the worst election responses from voters in their history.  The only reason they won the majority of seats was that the other two parties  - especially the Liberals – were completely unprepared to fight an election.  They'd simply fallen apart.

The NDP Blip

The New Democrats profited from the Conservative weakness but almost certainly by accident.  You can tell it was accidental because they didn't do anything to capitalise on their good fortune with five seats in the House of Assembly.  Then came the split in the party, when the people interested in building the party and winning an election packed up and left after a racket with the group around Lorraine Michael.  They just wanted to keep Lorraine in the leader's job.  They've been hugely successful at it.

As the by-election on Wednesday showed, though, the party leadership – Lorraine and her acolytes – were solely interested with keeping Lorraine as the centre of some sort of low rent personality cult.  The party has otherwise fallen to pieces.  Not surprisingly, there are more rumblings of discontent within the ranks of New Democratic Party supporters.  Lorraine will inevitably blame the party's latest problems on Dale Kirby.

The Slow and Steady Liberals

Meanwhile, over in the Liberal camp things are looking good these days.  The party has managed to put together an organization that is capable of winning elections. They can identify supporters and get them to the polls with admirable success. They've won four by-elections in a row from the Conservatives. Two of them have been in the Conservatives' base of metro St. John's.

Those two have had the closest results of all, but they show that the party is well on its way to forming the next government.  After all, the Liberals has gone head to head with the Conservatives in two seats where the Conservative base is relatively strong and where the Conservatives have been able to get scores of workers – many on full government salary -  into the field.  And still, the Liberals pulled it off.

 The Liberals didn't win single-handedly.  They had help.  In Conception Bay South,  they had a bit of help from Paul Davis' decision to put Judy Manning in cabinet and to completely frig up anything to do with that decision after he'd made it. The most recent MQO poll for NTV showed that about 60% of respondents didn't like the Judy Manning decision.

With a number like that, you know that at least some of the people who disagree with Davis' decision are Conservatives.  Aside from anything else, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine that the Manning decision alienated enough people from the Conservative Party to make the difference between victory and defeat in the by-election.   After all, the Conservatives obliterated their opposition in the 2011 general election.  The loss this week is a pretty dramatic change.

Still, though, the Liberals didn't completely flip position with the Conservatives. That's important.  The Liberal organization was enough to win, but the near exact split of the votes cast suggests that the Liberals were missing something.

Maybe what's missing is the firm definition of what the party stands for under Dwight Ball.  We are not talking "policy" here.  The demand for the Liberals to release their policy platform is a weak effort by the Conservatives and their supporters to get at the Liberals in a way they can;t otherwise. The implication in the Conservative call is that the Liberals could slide into power without fighting an election.  That's nonsense, of course, and the Conservative complaint is just an expression of their frustration at losing popular support.  They are afraid.

But just because the Conservatives are frightened that they will lose power doesn't mean they aren't pointing to a potential weakness for the Liberals. Winning any battle – including a political struggle – requires a willingness to close with the enemy and defeat him decisively.  What that means in political terms is that, at some point,  you have to confront your opponent assertively and advocate strongly for your own point of view.

You do have to define yourself, not in areas of policy, but in terms of values.  People don't pay attention to details.  But they do want to be sure that their leaders look like leaders and have a defined world view they can support.  That's where the Liberals are still lacking.  Dwight Ball has done a fairly good job of presenting himself.  People who have met him or who have heard him speak at a luncheon or dinner usually come away impressed.

What's been missing, though, is the direct confrontation with the Conservatives.  Ball has been running "Meet Dwight" ads.  They pop up online at VOCM, for example.  But basically, they are in nuisance spots. They turn up in places where people click them closed or turn off the sound until they are done.  As nicely produced as they are,  those ads are like all ads;  they are scripted and contrived.  People understand that they are designed to make people look a certain way.

What people want to see is the real person, in action.  The Liberals won't be able to win by running some nice ads and by generally staying silent.  They will have to start pointing firmly at Conservative failures not as failures, but in order to assert how they will be different.  Here is the value,  the Liberals need to say:  here is the way the Conservatives are failing.

As long as they avoid that sharp contrast, the Liberals will be missing a key ingredient of ultimate success. It's the element that draws people to them firmly and weakens their opponents.  The Liberals might win a general election with a good organization.  But the problem is they won't win decisively that way.  An indecisive win, even with a majority of seats after the next election, can cause all sorts of problems as the government tries to deal with the big decisions every government has to face.

There's nothing really cyclical about public opinion.  There's nothing inevitable about any election.  What happens at the polls is about choices made not just by voters but by parties as well.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-4703013830216601772014-11-06T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-06T06:00:00.518-03:30Spending Comparisons #nlpoli
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) released its annual summary of health care spending health care last week. This is a pretty basic collection of numbers that show how much money we spend on health care, whether it is from provincial, federal, or private sources.

The report made the news, as it always does.  The Globe and Mail reported that spending on health care was growing at its lowest rate in 17 years.  fair enough.  They also did a story on how much seniors are costing the health care system.

In that second one, the Globe asked why it is that some provinces pay more per person for health care than others.  Some provinces – like Newfoundland and Alberta – have more money because of oil, said the Globe's expert.

And if you really didn't know what was going on, you'd think that made perfect sense.

You see,  Newfoundland and Labrador has been consistently among the top five provinces in per person spending for all sorts of government services. An SRBP post from 2010 used some figures from RBC economics to demonstrate the recent pattern.  What you have to remember is that 2005 was after oil money started flowing but well before the big money started coming through the door in 2007 or so.

Go back before that even, and you can see overall government spending is as high in Newfoundland and Labrador as anywhere else in Canada.  Here's a chart from the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation that starts in 1991. No oil money and the start of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

And there's Newfoundland and Labrador right up there at the head of the pack.

Lesson One:  Be sceptical of any pronouncement by any mainland expert about what is happening in this province.  Odds are they don't have a sweet loving clue.  You will get the same thing sometimes from crowds of experts like the ones at the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council or the Fraser Institute.  They are not always right any more than they are always wrong.

Why is program spending in Newfoundland and Labrador higher than other places?  Well, the simplest answer is that public spending here isn't about delivering services in and of themselves.   Government spending is about all sorts of other things, including substituting for private sector economic development.

Newfoundland and Labrador isn't alone in this.  In fact, there's a global pattern that connects this sort of high spending with governments that depend heavily on external sources for their money.  Transfers from another government and oil money work basically the same.  There's no connection to the local society so governments tend to treat the cash like it is always there.

Government spending is extremely politicised in places like Newfoundland and Labrador.  The result is that governments don't moderate spending.  The idea of living within their means or saving a bit for a rainy day are completely foreign concepts. Governments in these sorts of places never thinking they spend too much. They always think they just don't have enough income.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-39483275593962131522014-11-05T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-05T06:00:02.766-03:30Mind-Numbing Sameness #nlpoli
The Conservatives were looking to the by-election in Conception bay South to break their losing streak.

As it seems now as voters in the district head to the polls on Wednesday,  Premier Paul Davis is already conceding that CBS is heading Liberal.  He spoke to reporters [CBC Here and Now, 40 mins in] after announcing a $20 million venture capital fund and tax credit scheme.  Davis said that "one of the disadvantages [in politics is that] it takes a long time for people to have an opportunity to identify with the new government,"  what they have done, their work ethic and all that.

Some of you are undoubtedly wrinkling your nose up at that one.  Well you should.  It's a ridiculous claim given that Davis has just come through a leadership contest and he's been in office a while. People know all about him and his team and what they are on about.

What Davis is doing here seems to be a bit of pre-emptive excuse-making.  Davis and the Conservatives called the Conception Bay South by-election first in the hopes they could win it.  The recent MQO poll for NTV suggests that the Conservatives are trailing the Liberals badly. The party choice results in that poll were Liberals at 37,  Conservatives at 16, with the NDP at six.

Davis himself is running behind Liberal leader Dwight Ball.  The two are close together, but frankly, the experience of publicly available polls over the past few years suggests that the only number we should really be watching is the party choice one.  The "satisfaction" and the leader choice numbers seem to move on their own and neither has an impact on party choice.

What Davis also admitted to reporters – likely without intending to – is that his approach so far has been a dismal failure.  Well, a dismal failure if he actually intended to change public attitudes toward the Conservatives.  Regular readers will be all too familiar with the suggestions your humble e-scribbler has made that would help Davis and his political friends improve their standing.  All of it was about making a change or at least the appearance of a change.

Well,  Davis has steadfastly resisted doing anything that anyone could possibly mistake for change. Take the opening of the House of Assembly as a good example.  Here we have a new Premier looking to turn around his party's sagging political standing. What a perfect time, then, to mark a change of direction for his party. Bring in a new throne speech and a revised budget to support it.  Davis might have even considered postponing  the sitting of the House until the spring, when he could work up a huge event to mark the start of the Davis era.

Instead, Davis told reporters on Tuesday that he'd be getting the House back in session before the end of November.  And rather than actually make any change, he'll be just carrying on with the government plan laid down in the spring.

Big whooppee ding.

The man the Conservatives elected because he offered the least threat of change is delivering on his promise of mind-numbing sameness despite the unmistakeable evidence that the public are totally effed off with more of the same.

Davis is a man of consistency, right down to the excuses for failure.  Since 2010,  the Conservatives have blamed their collapse in the polls on some failure of what they call communications.  Kathy Dunderdale went through more communications people than any other Premier in the history of the province going right back to 1855.  Still, the Conservatives dropped in the polls.

They embarked on some kind of communications overhaul that cost a chunk of money but did little other than alter the format of government news releases.

Down went the polls.

"Communications problem" is such a common refrain it is now the cliche excuse for Conservatives.  In fact, it's such a common excuse that even Judy Manning trotted it out at one point with David Cochrane last weekend during her interview for On Point.  She needed better media training, supposedly.  That's almost as funny as her claim that we've all been picking on her because she's a girl.

And equally untrue.  manning had lots of people to help her, all of whom have been handling communications for the Conservatives for long enough to know how to handle problems like Manning. Either they gave her bad advice or she refused to listen to their good advice.

As much as the Conservatives use "communications problems" as their favourite excuse, there's a funny thing, though.  They haven't really done anything to change. They've even kept most of the people around who have been making all the great communications decisions that have supposedly been wrong.  In his most recent move,  Davis even moved the most senior communications person  - from the batch hired in 2003 – into his office to handle communications.

Talk about keeping things the same.

Well, here's the thing:  the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and yet expecting a different result each time.  The Conservatives have a by-election, a new leader, and everything they've done is like the stuff they've done before.  In other words, by Wednesday evening, we'll know whether the Conservatives are nuts.

God knows, they keep doing the same thing over and over and over and yet expect that, for some unfathomable reason, things will turn out differently this time.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-23467497783953240372014-11-04T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-04T06:00:00.677-03:30More political stragedy #nlpoli
Paul Davis started out as Premier talking about his plan to run a national competition to find a communications director for his office.

There's been no mention of Davis' missing communications director as he and his office blunder through the Manning mess.  Then suddenly, on Monday, the talk of a national competition was gone.  Davis appointed one of the departmental communications directors to the job.  Davis also announced a bit of old news, namely that he'd hired Peter Morris from the university to handle something called "strategic communications" in his office and Donna Ivey to handle the media inquiries.

Whatever Morris has been doing, clearly it had nothing to do with strategic communications.  The political disaster doing business as unelected cabinet minister Judy Manning has been proof of that. What you've probably got there, as much as anything else, is the current fashion to label everything as "strategic" even when it isn't.

Davis' new communications director is Heather MacLean. if she wants to make any big changes,  MacLean's got a tough job ahead of her.  After all, Davis and his crowd have been ploughing ahead without much sign that they want to change anything.  Inertia is the biggest political enemy the Conservatives have but the Conservatives just like the sameness of it all.

Some of you may recall that Davis was the leadership candidate most committed to keeping things pretty much as they are.  It's not surprising, then, that when time came to find a director, Davis found one who has been with the Conservatives since the beginning.

That communications news wasn't the only shift on Monday.

Trinity-Bay de Verde and Humber East

Davis called the two by-elections he has avoided calling until now.  Trinity-Bay de Verde has been empty since Charlene Johnson quit politics and left the country.  Her father was the only one who expressed any interest in running for the Conservatives and, as it seems, they waited to call the nomination to see if someone else – anyone else – would turn up.  The rumoured candidate, Jerry Byrne, bailed on the whole venture so the Conservatives were left with Charlene's dad.

As it worked out, Davis wound up calling the by-election in Conception Bay South first, even though it was the second seat vacated by a cabinet minister who decided it was time to leave politics. Davis set the date for the vote in CBS around the time he had to call Trinity-Bay de Verde. It looked like Davis was going with CBS first so he could win one close to his own seat.

Along with the long-delayed Trinity-Bay de Verde vote, Davis also called the by-election in Humber East.  That's the seat held by former Premier Tom Marshall.  If you recall, Marshall had been moaning about wanting to get out of politics for months.  When he finally had the chance to go,  Marshall didn't.  In fact, he stayed around so long your humble e-scribbler, among others, figured Tom was going to be hanging around until the spring so that the Conservatives could avoid fighting few others.

Well, no, as it turned out.  Tom started campaigning with his former executive assistant last week and then quit on Monday. The timing of the two by-elections seems to be part of a plan by the Conservatives to give themselves a fighting chance to win at least one by-election of the two. They'll probably be putting their greatest effort into Humber East, which is likely their best shot at winning a seat.

Less Machiavelli, please

It's tempting to think that the Conservatives are trying to split the Liberals' resources between the eastern part of the province and the western.  It's a tempting thought, but don't forget that the same split of resources applies to the Conservatives as well.  That might hurt the Conservatives more than the Liberals.

Remember that the Liberals have a campaign organization that has shown itself to be considerably more flexible and scalable than the Conservative one.  They put a lot of store in early voter identification, followed by repeated voter contact.  The Liberals have already been campaigning hard in CBS and in Trinity-Bay de Verde doing exactly that.  They've also been doing work in Humber East as well.  Whatever the Conservatives are doing,  they are going to be as taxed as anyone fighting a two-district war as anyone.  Given that they are also late getting into the game, they are actually working from an organizational disadvantage.

 In the end,  all of this may be less part of some great Machiavellian strategy than just a series of individual decisions.  They called CBS to give more time to find a better candidate in Trinity. Over in another corner, they asked Tom to hold off on his resignation for a while until they got things sorted out.  So he did.

They couldn't talk Jerry Byrne into running and no one else wanted the seat, they wound up with Charlene's dad in a by-election they had to call before the CBS vote.  Meanwhile, the Liberals were already campaigning and the Conservatives just had to go with what they had  if they wanted a shot at all.

Since there was no advantage in delaying any longer, they also sorted it out with Tom and called two by-elections for the same day.  The Conservatives didn't have the resources to fight three by-elections on the same day.  This way, they fought one and then fought two.  It gets the by-elections over, if nothing else.  If in the process they pick up one,  then it might possibly stop the appearance that the Conservative ship is foundering and the water is slowly lapping over the gunwales.

Special Ballot Voting

The one thing that is noticeable about Humber East and CBS is that the Conservatives called the by-elections so quickly, there's been no period of advanced special balloting as allowed in the Elections Act.  Make no mistake, the 2007 special ballot rules insanely provide for voting for a political party up to 30 days before the election is called.  Not voting day.  Before the election is even called.   The whole thing needs to be swept away for the monstrosity it is, but for the time being, it is the law.

In practice, there's no way of knowing when the government will call an election so, logically,  there's no way of knowing when 30 days before that is. The elections office has arbitrarily decided that they will start handing out special ballots 30 days before the last possible day a by-election could be called.  Don't worry if that sounds convoluted.  You don't really need to follow all the permutations.  Just know that the elections office has arbitrarily chosen a date.  They'll argue black and blue they haven't made anything up – your humble e-scribbler has had the conversation with the elections office via Twitter – but the truth is they just arbitrarily picked a date.

Anyway,  there has been a period when people could vote in a by-election in advance of the actual campaign. In some elections those special ballots have played an important role in determining the outcome.  A well-organized campaign can ensure voters who know they won't be around on voting day can still cast a ballot.

Except in CBS and Humber East.

Because the Conservatives called the elections before the date the elections office started special balloting, they have actually cut off a bunch of people from voting. Organized campaigns, like say the Liberals, haven't been able to get some of their voters' choices in the ballot box.  That could just be a coincidence. It could be part of a tactical move.  These days,  it is getting harder and harder to tell.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-67655952650267204132014-11-03T06:00:00.000-03:302014-11-03T07:54:19.108-03:30A renaissance feast for Christmas #nlpoliFans of politics in Newfoundland and Labrador have two excellent books that should be at the top of their Christmas gift lists this year.

First among unequals: the premier, politics, and policy in Newfoundland and Labrador is a collection of 12 essays on different aspects of recent politics with an introduction, and an opening and closing chapter by Dr. Alex Marland, who, along with Dr. Matthew Kerby, edited the collection.

Newfoundland's last prime minister by former CBC executive producer Doug Letto is subtitled, not surprisingly, "Frederick Alderdice and the death of a nation."

People will - and should - buy both these books. They are well written and researched and represent, in their own way, two firsts in local political writing.

First among unequals is the first exploration of politics devoted exclusively to Newfoundland and Labrador. It brings together author from different academic disciplines. The two editors, Marland at Memorial, and Kerby, now at Ottawa, have been among the more prolific writers in what has been a recent resurgence of publication devoted to local political science.

The chapters examine major policy topics (education, health care, the fishery, the economy, and energy), the provincial political culture (nationalism, political branding, and party politics), and the structure and operation of government (the public service, cabinet management, and the use of the judiciary as a substitute for politics and the bureaucracy in policy development). Marland's book-end chapters examine executive authority and policy development.

First among unequals consists of chapters that follow a common format. They are cleanly and concisely written, offering a discussion of comparative theory, followed by some background, then on to a "case study", namely the period from about 2003 to 2010, and then offer a short comment on "political decision-making".

Newfoundland's last prime minister is the first biography of this key figure in the country's political history. Alderdice was, as the title says, the last prime minister of Newfoundland before the introduction of commission government.

Alderdice was also one of the first three local commissioners. The commission that replaced the elected Newfoundland government consisted of six appointees: three from Newfoundland and three from the United Kingdom. Alderdice has figured in a number of broader examinations of the period but no one has offered a book-length treatment of Alderdice until now.

This is Letto's fourth book. He successfully combines his story-telling skills as displayed in Run, his account of the 1999 general election with the research skills from Chocolate bars and rubber boots, Letto's account of Joe Smallwood's economic development program.

This is not to say that the book is problem-free. Letto notes that Newfoundland political figures seldom left memoirs or collections of papers behind. As a result, the sort of original material that would be available elsewhere simply doesn't exist for someone writing local history.

All the same, the British administrative records are accessible, even if there are no copies available at the university or the provincial archives for ant time after 1911. Letto might have found useful material there that hasn't previously been brought to light. This might have been especially helpful in fleshing out the two years Alderdice served on the Commission Government before his death in 1936.

As it is, Letto speeds through the time, relying on a couple of secondary sources for his account. One of them – Sid Noel's Politics in Newfoundland - is 43 years old and showing its age badly. The result is that a period that is not particular well-known popularly in Newfoundland and Labrador is given a bit of a short-shrift in a book that otherwise does an admirable job of making a very important part of our collective history better known to a wide audience. That is, after all is said and done, why people should buy this book.

Most topics in Canadian history have only been done one, some historian once said. Well, in Newfoundland and Labrador, most topics in politics and political history haven't been covered at all. That makes books like Letto's biography of Alderdice and the Marland and Kerby collection all the more important.

It also proves to be a weakness that is especially evident in some parts of the latter book. In Marland's introductory essay, for example, he describes the way that two recent premiers - Frank Moores and Beaton Tulk - supposedly ran their cabinets. His only reference is one for Frank Moores and that is John Crosbie's 1997 memoir that was written 25 years after the events. Kerby has no reference for Tulk not only because he held office as a care-taker but because no one has written about the way cabinets in the province have operated. In another case, Marland mentions Clyde Wells' supposed "autocratic style". He has two sources this time, but if you track them both back, you discover that the sources are comments from the same person – Lynn Verge – who never set foot inside the cabinet room while Wells was premier.

Marland and Kerby's publisher – McGill-Queen's University Press – says the book is about how "political elites shape public policy, viewed through the lens of Premier Danny Williams' headline-grabbing tactics." The publisher's blurb, Marland's introduction, and some of the initial publicity claimed that the book "suggests that the power of the premier is exaggerated" in other analyses and in popular impressions.

Unfortunately, First among unequals doesn't really give us enough to say that. For one thing, they have no comparative material. We don't know how other provincial administrations worked because no one has really done the basic academic spadework on it. For another, they didn't fill in the gap with this project. Chris Dunn offers us a very broad overview of the the public service in his chapter but this is, at most, an introductory essay. It offers nothing on the public service and how it actually operated during the Williams years.

To give you a sense of this, consider that Nalcor is little more than a footnote in Dunn'[s chapter. Likewise, the Cameron inquiry revealed a great deal about Williams' administration for many of the aspects that would be crucial to a discuss of the political power and influence of the Premier's office. Yet, in this book, the inquiry figures most prominently in a chapter that holds it out as an example of "judicialization" of public policy. It isn't really: as the authors' conclude, Williams used a public inquiry to manage the breast cancer scandal. But except for the fact that Williams used a judge to chair the commission, there's nothing here to make this more than a public inquiry. And that is a basic technique that is as old as the hills in the world of political management of crises and problems.

The problem seems to be that Marland's book-ends try and put a single narrative thread through the book that the components don;t support. Separate out Marland's introduction, though and what you have left are a dozen excellent essays on different aspects of local politics. Marland's chapter on political branding and Kerby's chapter on cabinet changes stand out, as does Jim Feehan's overview of efforts to develop the Lower Churchill. Maria Matthews' survey of health policy and Gerald Galway's look at education are also well worth the price of the book as a whole. The rest have their individual strengths. Be warned, though, of one of the biggest weaknesses: some of the chapters will tax anyone's willingness to sift through dense and entirely unnecessary argon to find the nuggets of value. If you want an analysis of the Conservative administrations since 2003that address the subject of the book's publicity, though, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Writing about politics has been going through a bit of a renaissance in the past decade or so of a kind not seen since the 1960s and 1970s. Letto's biography of the last prime minister of Newfoundland and Alex Marland and Matthew Kerby's compilation of essays on provincial politics from 2003 to around 2010 are to fine entrees in that renaissance feast. If you haven't read them already, get both on your Christmas list for yourself or as gifts for the political fan in your circle. You won't go wrong.

-srbp-

For those who are interested, your humble e-scribbler has a review of First among unequals coming in the next issue of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies.

Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-29716056625193453252014-10-31T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-31T06:00:02.082-02:30The Devil's Snare #nlpoli
The latest eruption of  the Manning political controversy volcano is evidence of many things.  Not the least is that Premier Paul Davis and his team have a monumental problem in their organization.  It's the one that steps in to manage political crises. Davis and his crew don't have one.

So far, they've let Judy Manning wander in front of cameras,  call radio open line shows, and continue to do everything in her power to defend herself and justify her actions. She did all of that on Thursday, starting with VOCM's Fred Hutton,  followed by a call to Open Line with Paddy Daly and finishing up with an interview on NTV.

Manning gave reporters a couple of e-mails that showed she had, in fact, submitted a couple of draft decisions. Everything else has been a personal attack on her.  Manning even managed to get in a slam at James McLeod from the Telegram over a piece he did a while ago that showed Manning hadn't finished her master's program.

All that probably makes Manning feel really good.  It's possible that the great minds at the Confederation Building think that Judy is doing the right thing. The Conservatives have got a record of handling political problems in this way.  The reality is that they are just making the whole thing worse.

You see, Judy's goal has been to prove she's right.  She is defending herself. She claims everyone else is attacking her. No one cares about that. The only one concerned about Judy is Judy.

People have already decided she's wrong or, at least, could not be right. After all, she got a cushy job.  NTV's poll shows that a substantially majority has already decided she shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place and shouldn't be allowed to stay unelected. The massive shag-up that the Conservatives made of the appointment laid the foundation for what's happening now a month later.

Zero Sign of Compassion

Meanwhile, 19 injured workers and their families are left in the lurch. Nowhere in Judy's tortured language with CBC or in her self-defence on Thursday did we get any apparent concern for the people whose hearings are now in limbo.  Sure she said something about it with NTV, but those were just a few words said after the first interview.

In that one, we heard without any doubt that it was all about Judy.  She pronounced herself satisfied with how she'd handled things:  "I'm entirely comfortable with how I've discharged my duties as a review commissioner and certainly to date I'm entirely comfortable with the energy and the enthusiasm that I've brought to this position."

And for the 19?

Not really much concern, apparently.

That doesn't mean Manning doesn't have some compassion for the people who are now in a tough spot as a result of her appointment to cabinet.  It's just that she has shown no sign of any concern for them.  She'd resigned.  She'd handed all the materials over to the review commissioner and she was "entirely comfortable" with herself.

She quit to go to cabinet, but she was planning to quit anyway, according to Manning. That's because she couldn't make enough money as a review commissioner. See?  There's that focus on herself and her own interests, again:  "I don't apologize for one moment in saying that I had a profit-seeking motive."

Problem-solving versus Ego-focus

Manning's egocentric focus is a huge part of the difficulty she is having.  It makes her think of every issue in terms of how it affects her, rather than in terms of how she can resolve a problem, even if she had a hand in creating it.

Take a look at how she approached this business with the workers' compensation review committee.  She had the job.  She did some of the work.  By all signs, the chief commissioner and her people were taking their time with Manning to help her get up to speed.

Manning was planning to leave the job, according to her own account.  Had she resigned for any other reason,  the chief review commissioner would have reasonably expected her to finish the cases she had outstanding before leaving.  It's part of that professional obligation Manning mentioned.

As things turned out, Manning had a better offer,  this time of a cabinet job.  She resigned  - as anyone would have - and wouldn't have been able to deliver the appeals decisions even if she had wanted to do so.  That doesn't mean that Manning could just walk away and pronounce herself satisfied that her obligations ended.

If the review commissioner was short of funds and staff,  Manning could have done something about it in her new position.  Alternately, Davis and his staff should have been aware of this issue when they appointed Davis. Political common sense would have told them to get on top of this quickly in order to avoid the very problem they are now facing.

That's what a problem-solving focus would get you.  Ego-centric decision-making or some other major flaw led the Conservatives to this spot.  And that major flaw is still at work, as Manning proved on Thursday.

 Going Defensive is Deadly

The usual practice in healthy political organizations is for somebody very high up to take control of crises like Judy Manning in order to get them off the news cycle.  Obviously, that hasn't happened.

The people who are good at this sort of thing know that going defensive never works.  If they didn't fix the problem before it started, their next best answer would be to fix it now:  get some resources in there and get these cases solved.  Manning would be a secondary consideration, and her scripted lines might well include an expression of regret or even an apology.

When it comes to crisis management, an apology is like an atomic bomb.  Once you drop it, there's nothing else.  People can get as angry as they want.  They can call you names.  But you've taken responsibility for your actions and for the injury – real or perceived – that you may have caused or inadvertently made worse.  And all those resources now to solve the problem makes things right.

Going defensive is deadly.  It's like the Devil's Snare. The more you struggle by defending yourself,  the more trapped you'll become.

Attacking the media makes it worse, again.  You can't win a fight with someone who buys their ink by the gallon or who gets their airwaves and pixels for free.  When you start quibbling about whether you finished one or two cases,  as Manning did on Thursday,  as you do is acknowledge that the core story was right.  If you slam the reporter because they failed to mention you were a good student,  as Manning did in her attack on McLeod,  you'll just win smiles because you are missing the point of the story.

Compassion and Responsibility

It all boils down to compassion and responsibility.  Those are the two things missing from anything Manning has done over the past couple of days.  She showed no compassion for others, no sense that she was aware of the impact her actions had on others.  Manning also didn't take responsibility for anything that had gone wrong and she certainly didn't take any responsibility for fixing or helping to fix the problem.

Even if there was no way to avoid the difficulties, Manning has certainly be in a position to help lessen them.  Fixing the problem, not defending herself, was the best response.  And just so that no one forgets this,  Manning and the people in Paul Davis' office have been aware of this problem for a month.  They didn't do anything to deal with consequences of Manning's resignation as review commissioner until CBC contacted her.  Even then,  the planned response was defensive and ego-centric.

Had Manning demonstrated compassion and responsibility, perhaps in the way your humble e-scribbler described above,  there'd be no story.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-48385414115776981362014-10-30T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-30T06:00:03.776-02:30Public Service and Bad Judgment #nlpoli
Shortly after she was appointed to cabinet,  Judy Manning told CBC that she was taking a significant cut in pay from her solo law practice to take the new job as an unelected minister.  "I'm doing this from a public service perspective,"  Manning said at the time.

That was part of her planned responses to questions about Paul Davis' controversial decision to appoint an unelected minister and break the long-established political convention that unelected ministers seek a seat in the House at the earliest opportunity.

Manning portrayed herself as nobly taking on the job despite the financial hardship.  We should feel sorry for her, presumably, rather than question the arrogant fashion in which she and her boss were breaking the rules.

A couple of weeks later,  in another set of planned replies to questions, Manning blew that noble image to pieces.

As it turns out, Manning had a public service job before her cabinet one.  Manning's Conservative friends appointed her earlier this year as a commissioner to review appeals on cases involving injured workers.  The workers' compensation law states flatly that decisions on these appeals must be delivered within 60 days of the hearing.

Manning heard 19 cases from the time she began to hear appeals in June and the time she resigned the part-time job on September 25.  She didn't deliver a decision on a single one of the cases.  It doesn't matter how many cases she heard and should have decided within that period.  The thing is the law states flatly that she had 60 days to deliver a decision.  Manning broke the law not once, but presumably multiple times.

When asked about the fact she'd missed the deadline repeatedly, Manning gave a rather curious answer.  Lots of review commissioners missed the deadline.  It's rather curious because the fact lots of people do something doesn't make it right.  Lots of people speed but it's still against the law.  A number of people cheat on their taxes.  Doesn't make it okay, morally or legally.

In a statement she issued later on Wednesday, Manning added a lengthy explanation of her actions. It's worth reading if only for the wordiness of it, on top of the cumbersome wordiness of her comments to CBC in a 13 minute sit-down interview (linked above.)  In fact,  her written statement repeats what Manning said in the full interview that CBC posted in its entirety.

Manning's statement includes mention of just how serious some of the review cases are.  They all involve some sort of personal injury and some can involve deaths.  It's serious stuff.  And the legislature, in its wisdom, slapped a 60 day limit on the review commissioners because this is serious business.  The rest of the explanation that Manning offers for her failure to meet the deadline set by law even once amounts to little more than excuses.

They just don't wash.

Not content with her self-serving rationale,  Manning went a step further. She quit the job a week or so before she was appointed to cabinet.  Then she complained about the amount paid to the review commissioners.  She was going to quit at some point anyway because she wasn't making enough money.

So much for public service.

So much for the law.

You can see the pattern of behaviour, too.  It's like Manning's  distressing habit of speaking in a way she believes lawyers and cabinet ministers should speak.  She uses bigger words than are necessary and she uses complicated ways of saying things.

Take the bit about the pay she got as a review commissioner as a good example:

But I did resign certainly in the view of making myself available should that position arise. And also I was a private practice sole practitioner, and I don't apologize for one moment in saying that I had a profit-seeking motive at that time. …Often times that work is not undertaken by lawyers, and in the overall consideration of where my practice was going I didn't feel that it would be in my best interests from a profit-seeking perspective to continue on that front in any event."

The result is that manning does not sound like someone important and knowledgeable. Instead, Manning sounds like someone who is trying to sound important or knowledgeable. People will inevitably compare this story with her earlier claims of nobility for taking on a job of public service  - as a cabinet minister - for less than she'd make as an "unmarried lady" lawyer of her "vintage", as she described herself earlier in October.   In the case where she had a tough job to do on behalf of people in a genuinely tough spot,  Manning found that from a "profit-seeking perspective" this was not something she'd be doing for long anyway.

Not only does her tortured way of speaking sound like she is putting on airs, Manning's shifting perspectives make her sound as though she is not being sincere or candid.

Asked if she would have finished the work had she not gone into cabinet,  Manning told the CBC's Rob Antle that she would "not usurp her professional obligations."  Usurp means to take a position illegally or improperly. Manning used it wrongly here.  But notice that it sounds pretty impressive. Well, sounds impressive unless you speak English fairly well.

Self-serving rationalizations delivered in ponderous language, coupled with a persistent disregard for established rules and the law, especially ones that cause Manning personal inconvenience. These  are hardly the qualities people look for in a cabinet minister, let alone the justice minister and attorney general.  As NTV's latest poll has shown, people aren't looking for Manning in the  job.  About 60% of them don't approve of her appointment to cabinet or the fact that she is unelected. They also likely won;t be impressed by Paul Davis who, as Simon Lono noted on Wednesday,  picked Manning because he liked her work ethic.

The soundness of Davis' judgement is obviously open to question.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-35696561632497727372014-10-29T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-29T06:00:00.482-02:30The October 2014 NTV/MQO Poll Numbers #nlpoli
NTV commissioned NTV to poll opinion about the provincial Conservatives a month after Paul Davis took over as Premier.

The party choice numbers are simple enough:  Liberals at 37,  Conservatives at 16,  the NDP at just six percent, and undecided at 40.

Leadership numbers Put Dwight Ball of the Liberals slightly ahead of Paul Davis (31 to 27) with Lorraine at 10 and undecided at 33.

The Conservatives who have been clinging to the belief that "satisfaction" with government is the great hope will be dashed to find the most recent "sat" number is 48%, down from 60% just a short while ago for MQO.

So what does it mean?

Well, the party choice numbers are pretty much in the same neighbourhood as they were one year ago.  The MQO/NTV poll in October 2013 had the Liberals at 35, the Conservatives at 20, and the NDP at 12.  And in March 2014, the numbers were almost exactly what they are in the most recent poll:  37, 19, seven.

No matter what they have done, including pound through a year-long leadership circus, the Conservatives have not moved the party choice number one teensy bit.  Now some people will get excited by the variation from poll to poll.  They shouldn't.  Whether it is MQO or Corporate Research Associates, these polls have such a big margin of error that you can have a variation of up to 210 or 12 points from an earlier poll and it would still be within the range of possibilities and not a significant sign of change.

You don't need to bother with that because the lack of change in these party choice numbers tells you something else.  There is no connection between the party choice numbers and either leader or satisfaction.  They all move on their own.

We already knew that satisfaction wasn't influencing party choice or vice versa.  Well, now we can safely say that there is no apparent connection  between party choice and leader choice. That flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that holds that leaders are everything in Newfoundland politics.  But there's no denying the numbers.

So what's driving party choice?

Well, that's the $64,000 question.  The sort of polling the media uses can;t possibly tell us that.  We'd need to design some specific questions to explore that question.

One thing we know is that the major parties should be polling to find out why the party positions are where they are in the horse race.  The only way you can secure your lead or move from second into first is by exploring what's driving opinion. So far the parties seem to be relying on pure conjecture.  A little bit of hard information, and the will to use it, could make a dramatic change in local politics.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-1958126096944080962014-10-28T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-28T06:00:00.638-02:30Things that raise alarm bells #nlpoli
As it becomes more clear that the two recent murders of Canadian soldiers had less to do with terrorism and more to do with people who are otherwise screwed up, the RCMP commissioner issues a media statement claiming the police have a video that links one murder to "ideological and political motives."

But they can't release the video and may never release it.

Right.

We have proof you are wrong, but we can't show it to you.

That's always credible.  Let's everybody keep a close eye on that story.

And in other news, the Canadian media love to congratulate each other for a job supposedly well done.  The latest entry in the public masturbation contest is the Telegram.  The Monday editorial included this gem:

Canadian reporters were generally solid and professional in their on-the-spot coverage of the events in Ottawa last week.

That would be true if you ignored the endless hours of speculation unsupported by anything but whatever popped into an anchor's head,  underpinned by the implicit assumption throughout the televised coverage that – yup – this was terrorism.

One national broadcast seemed to repeat anything said to any reporter by any passer-by.  The result was that there was shooter on the roof of a building on Metcalfe and a dead body at the Rideau Centre. All reported but none of it true. The only rumour not circulated was the one about a strange flying machine on spindly legs rising up from a lightning strike in the Byward and shooting death rays into the fleeing crowds.

Meanwhile, the actual story – a lone shooter intercepted and killed quickly – seemed to be the one thing no one wanted to discuss, even though there was lots of solid information including eye witness reports that pointed in that direction.  There's that implicit assumption thing.

Instead, one reporter asked how someone could wander around Ottawa with something concealed and yet no police detected it.  Hint, genius:  it was concealed.  Another main anchor kept talking about JTF-2 special forces roaming over the hill, even though the people in green uniforms he was talking about clearly had the RCMP crest on their shoulders.  A tiny point to some, but all too indicate of the kind of wild commentary from uninformed people stuck on air to fill dead air.

Media coverage of last Wednesday's events fuelled public anxiety by relying heavily on speculation and, in some instances, outright flatulence, in place of hard information.  To be fair, not every outlet or every reporter engaged in the sort of crap speculation that marred some of the coverage from the big outlets.

The bad reporting got a big boost from the complete failure by police authorities to provide timely and accurate information in the interest of public safety and security.  That was a huge part of the story last week.  But wait,  there was another story that seemed to slip the notice of the "solid and professional" reporting even as the crisis that actually ended before noon turned into an endless "lock-down" that seemed to have no direction or purpose.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-74463215377424604082014-10-27T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-27T06:00:02.544-02:30"We are an island economy" and other nonsense #nlpoli
CBC's  On Point  this weekend delivered up some all-too-familiar conversation on the budget and a political panel talking about Judy Manning but sometimes you have to look closely at things to appreciate the value in public comments by politicians and reporters.

In an interview with David Cochrane, finance minister Ross Wiseman confirmed that he cannot even think about trimming government spending because the economy is heavily dependent on it.  Wiseman put the figure at about 30%.

Regular readers of these e-scribbles have know this for years.  What's news in this is that we have a finance minister admitting it publicly.

Then there is the stuff Wiseman said about the importance of waiting for the OPEC meeting in November to see if the cartel can hook a deal to drive oil back up.  Wiseman also said there's lots of oil out there to be developed.  The provincial government strategy is to hold things together until prices go up and big oil production cranks up again.  In the meantime, Wiseman and his colleagues will just keep spending more than the people of the province can actually afford.

Again, this is stuff regular readers have heard before. The difference is that they heard it from Wade Locke,  last week.  Wiseman was just repeating Locke's talking points.  But that's no surprise since Locke's been the current administration's go-to guy for financial advice.

Keep spending until the oil gets here.

It sounds so familiar.

Those old enough will remember the dark days of the 1980s.  The oil companies found four fields.  Oil provinces shot through the roof.  Lots of people expected fantastic things to happen.

And then the price of oil fell through the floor.

Meanwhile the provincial government kept going with its program of funding work projects in areas of the province so people could qualify for unemployment insurance.  10 weeks of work would get another 42 weeks of UI benefits.  The scheme was known popularly as Lotto 10/42.

A national news magazine program did a profile of things in Newfoundland at the time.  They reported on Lotto 10/42.  They even interviewed a guy named Glenn Tobin who was minister of social services.  Lotto 10/42 didn't exist, Tobin told the reporter in so many words.  But if it did, such a scheme wouldn't matter, because in a few years the oil would be here and everything would be fine.

The difference between Glenn and Ross is that Glenn could look forward to oil money.  Ross and his mates have actually had upwards of $20 billion.  That's the kind of money that would have made Glenn and his mates break down in tears with joy.  Ross and his fellows just spent all the cash and never put a cent aside for anything.

Well, except the Muskrat Falls insanity,  as New Democrat Lana Payne reminded us on the political panel after the Wiseman interview was done.  She didn't call it insanity, of course.  You see, Payne was a huge supporter of Muskrat Falls.  She loved it because it was important for her political allies in Nova Scotia.  And she really loved it up because it was important for her political friends in Newfoundland and Labrador , the Conservatives.

These days Lana doesn't say much about Muskrat Falls, but she did bring it up as a sort of reminder of Conservative thinking.  Lana seemed to be doing a bit more than that though.  She almost seemed to be giving us a  defence of the Conservative project.  "We are an island economy" she offered.

We are an island and this will end our isolation.  It's a vintage Danny-ism and it is, to be absolutely clear the sort of utter foolishness that comprises the myriad rationalisations Muskrat supporters have offered up for the mess.

We are not an island, of course, not if "we" includes the people of Labrador and the huge part of the province they inhabit.  What Payne has done is give us a very good example of the world view of some people in Newfoundland and Labrador. They were very strong supporters of the Conservatives back when Danny Williams was leading them.

These people often talk about going across the province when they mean they go across the island. The island is the dominant bit and Labrador of not just secondary but tertiary importance. Labrador is a resource warehouse to be exploited. They'll all take great offense when you point out that their world-view is out of step with current thinking, but the fact is, that's what they are.

That's also a defining characteristic of the Conservatives, by the way.  From 2003 onward, they spent most of their time working on problems from the 1970s. That would be building the Lower Churchill,  fighting with Quebec, or the original plan to renegotiate the 1985 Atlantic Accord. What wasn't a rerun of That 70s Show was about much older ideas like Muskrat Falls, as justified by the Bay d'Espoir project.  using 1970s or 1960s era thinking to attack modern problems.

The Conservatives used to talk a lot about how they were spending their time learning things.  They used words like "we", as if the rest of us needed to learn the same basic things the Conservatives and their legion of supporters like Payne didn't seem to understand was that time had passed. The rest of us had learned from the mistakes of the past. If only the Conservatives and their allies had paid attention, perhaps they wouldn't be in the political mess they are in and, without doubt, the rest of us wouldn't be in the financial mess a decade of persistent Conservative mismanagement has brought.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-44545862573004304042014-10-24T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-24T06:00:01.537-02:30A Greek Tragedy #nlpoli
While you are busily mulling over the possible implications the drop in oil prices might have on the provincial government's budgets,  distract yourself by pondering some of the other implications of low oil prices on the provincial economy.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency thinks that about 25% of Canadian energy projects would be in jeopardy if oil goes below US$80 a barrel and stays there for any length of time.  As the Financial Post noted in its report last week on the IEA opinion,  that would put a number of newer more expensive projects in Alberta and maybe in Saskatchewan in doubt.  Norway's Statoil has already shelved an oil sands project.

Globally,  the low prices would also make about three percent of all energy projects dodgy propositions.  Some of those are deep water projects like those in the Orphan Basin offshore Newfoundland. The Orphan isn't turning up in any of these global forecasts because people don't know enough about the prospects there to determine if they are even commercially viable.

Not surprisingly, if oil prices stay where they are now or go even lower,  odds are that more expensive local offshore projects will take longer to bring into production.

But what some people may not have noticed yet is that a slowdown in western Canada would also have an impact locally.  As SRBP has been noting since 2006,  migrant labour is a significant part of the economy in many parts of the province.  A chunk of the labour force in the province currently working out west will likely have to come home where they will be looking for work.

They might find it, but frankly, they might not.  A downturn in prices for things like iron ore  has already put some question marks over developments in western Labrador.  Other projects in the province, including Muskrat Falls, are already well underway so they may not be needing lots of labourers.

Once those projects are done, that will be pretty much it and there's not much behind it.  The economy lately has been driven largely by government over-spending. Between the massive debt the Conservatives have created over the past decade with their strategic idiocy and lower royalties from energy,  future governments won't be able to follow the Wade Locke model and substitute unsustainable government spending for actual economic development and diversification.

That's the essence of what the Conservatives have been doing, including in their ludicrously named Prosperity Plan, all enthusiastically endorsed by Locke.  Last week, Locke confidently predicted this down turn won't last because, as the Telegram paraphrased it, "a lot of oil production relies on a higher price. Fracking and Canada's oil sands, especially, need oil around $100 per barrel to make a profit."

Problem.  According to the Financial Post's story, only about three percent of the global supply needs prices that high to survive.  And as for that oil produced by fracking?  Well, that accounts for about four percent of the American supply.  The technical term for Locke's comments is "wrong" in other words.

If prices go back up in the near future it won't be because so much of the global supply is more expensive than the current prices.  In fact,  most of the projects in the world are very profitable over the long-haul at prices at or below where they are now. We could be at the early stages of a market correction that brings oil prices back down after a relatively long period of uncertainty that itself produced the high prices.  We've seen these kinds of corrections before.

If you read on through the Financial Post piece, you'll see that even some of the deep water sites in places like Brazil remain profitable at these recent prices.  Deep water isn't what makes the Orphan potentially unprofitable.  Cost discipline is the phrase you'll see there as the reason places like Brazil remain profitable.

Well,  price discipline isn't necessarily what you get around these part.  Look at the massive cost escalation on Hebron caused to a sizeable degree by the provincial government's own massively expensive and entirely unnecessary Muskrat Falls project.

Some of you have undoubtedly been counting up the number of strategic blunders in recent government policy that the prospect of low oil prices highlight neatly. That last one - needlessly driving up your own costs – is especially obvious.

Obvious now.

Maybe even a bit more obvious when the oil companies finally launched the Hebron project firmly underway over the past couple of years.  The price went up about 70% in just 18 months.

Cast your mind back to the time in 2006 when the provincial government walked away from Hebron over a disagreement over what amounted to about $500 million. Not many people raised concern over what the Conservatives were up to. They just cheered on the rather vague need for "equity."

All of this remains speculative.  We won't know for sure what will happen, but we can see the fundamental strategic idiocy of the past decade. If the government hadn't embarked on its orgy of spending, the government ministers and officials wouldn't be excreting bricks in worry.  They'd have cash on hand and lots of economic activity going on.

And had they devoted their time to serious business like creating a stable, cost-competitive offshore industry,  we'd be looking at a future that could survive the ups and downs of the oil industry.  After all, it's not like we hadn't seen those ups and downs already in Newfoundland and Labrador and knew what to do in response.  The only people who didn't seem to know that were the Conservatives. They seem to have come to office with poverty of knowledge, an abundance of arrogance, and, as it seems, a propensity to go bald-headed at things.

The result has been a mess that the people of the province will be paying for over the coming decades.  That financial reckoning is something that will come regardless of what the price of oil is five and 10 years from now.

Hubris has its price.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-45624157377645020212014-10-23T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-23T06:00:02.828-02:30At the going down of the sun, and in the morning… #nlpoli

We will remember them.

Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent

  Corporal Nathan Cirillo

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9925311.post-58948306008593754742014-10-22T06:00:00.000-02:302014-10-22T06:00:01.643-02:30Get the police out of politics and politics out of the police #nlpoli
They just don't look like recruiting ads.

That's the most striking thing about a series of television ads airing in Newfoundland and Labrador.

There's no sense of an invitation to come and join the group.  At least, there's nothing of that in the images themselves.

Consider the number of shots that have the police facing the camera.  The effect puts the viewer in an adversarial position, especially when faced with the tactical team or the riot team in these shots, above and right.

The only place you see the invitation is in the last image, a graphic that looks like this:

Now you get why these ads aren't really about recruiting.

See it?

Right there at the bottom is a little statement that tells you these ads are "brought to you by the RNCA".

That's the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary Association.

It's not the police force.

The ads are from the union representing police officers.

That little tidbit of information surfaced Tuesday in a Telegram story that was seemingly pushed out by the police association to counteract the intense criticism the ads have generated on social media. "New video showcases lesser known duties: RNC" the title on the story reads, even though the story makes it plain that the ads didn't come from the force itself, at all.

The Telegram story puts the recruiting aspect as an unmistakeably secondary aspect of the whole thing.  While there's no attribution to the comment, the Telly story very clearly states that recruitment "is another reason for the video, since the RNC has an active recruitment drive."  Not the reason, but another reason.  The main one, as the headline on the story says, is to showcase supposedly lesser known aspects of the Constabulary's capabilities.

Which is all wonderful, except the ads don't really give any useful information on those supposedly lesser known capabilities of the local police.  There are lots of those aggressive, confrontational shots.  Lots of darkness and agitation and plenty of shots of cops and only cops.

Running through the heart of the university campus.

Running up a stream with a pair of dogs.

Speeding around outside the narrows and in the harbour.

On the radio.

In an office looking up something on a computer.

Getting ready to kick in a door.

Sitting in a  car, talking on the radio.

Looming out of the smoke with helmets, batons and riot shields.

Galloping along Water Street.

But no civilians.

No members of the public the police are supposed to be there to serve and protect.

A showcase of lesser known capabilities?

Pull the other one, guys.  It's got a screaming siren on it.

A better way to show the public what the police force is all about would have been to allow reporters like Tara Bradbury do profiles of the officers involved in the activities and have a look at the work involved.

But while that sort of thing is what you would expect the police force to be doing as part of its public obligation for accountability,  the force hasn't done that.  Instead, they've allowed the union to do its own campaign aimed at its own purposes with a recruiting campaign scabbed on for show.

This new twist on the story raises serious questions about the entire project. We've got to wonder why the police leadership decided to give the union authority to run its own campaign using the force's identity.  If it was a matter of money, then that's something the government needs to address. If it's a matter that the police leadership saw no need to run a proper public information program using public money, then we have to question the thinking behind that decision both at Fort Townshend and in the public safety ministry.

Ultimately, the union and the force don't share the same interest and that's actually clear in the ads. The union exists to advance its members' interest, particularly in contract negotiations for pay and benefits. The police force is a public institution responsible for the impartial enforcement of the law.

Knocking down the distinction between the police force itself and the police officers' union carries with it some serious implications in that question of interests. We need to keep a sharp distinction between the police force and the actions of its individual members outside the workplace.  That includes what their union does.

The union has developed a regrettable tendency over the past decade to ally itself with political parties through political donations. They've been heavily backing the Conservatives for the past decade, pretty much to the exclusion of anyone else.  If the union shifts its cash support to the Liberals now that they are on the rise, then things don't get better.  The union will merely be carrying on what is – in itself – a very bad practice.

In Ontario, they've got a more advanced stage of the politicised police  disorder. In the largest province in the country, there are three police unions and all are involved to one degree or another in political activity. One union ran ads in the last provincial election campaign attacking one of the political parties.   Politics and badges don't mix well

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary needs to pull this campaign and scrap the recruiting website.  Start over, this time without getting the police union to pay for it.

As for the political contributions by the police union, well, best to fix that problem by changes to the laws governing political donations.  We'd be better off in the long run banning donations by companies and unions and putting caps on individual donations. The Conservatives promised it but never delivered.  There really is no greater fraud, Danny Williams. The Conservatives could set the tone by refunding the RNCA donations. If the Liberals or New Democrats have any cheques from the RNCA, they should politely return the cash.  Whatever party forms the next government, campaign finance reform should be at the top of its agenda.

We don't need to politicise the police force or leave the possible impression that the line between policing and partisanship is blurry, let alone resurrect the climate in which people  - including at least one police officer – could claim that there was open political interference in policing and prosecutions.  We've been through that already and it was an awful mess.

Just ask Bill Rowe.

-srbp-
 Ed Holletthttps://firstname.lastname@example.com