Head-scratching and nose-pulling over latest twist in Matthews appointment debacle

A few of the people steadfastly supporting the provincial government’s pork-barrel attempt to get Elizabeth Matthews on the offshore regulatory board were left scratching their heads Tuesday evening. [changed verb tense]

Some are so perplexed trying to reconcile their stories with the facts that they are even calling for a public inquiry

The reason is simple.  Yet another aspect of the story they have been spreading is blowing away in the face of facts. 

The specific bit now boiling off faster than a Japanese reactors’ cooling water is the claim that Elizabeth Matthews didn’t know about her board appointment or that her appointment included a seat on the board, depending on how you interpret the comments. 

On Friday, Matthews responded to a Liberal opposition news release that noted she was appointed to the offshore board on December 21 with effect from January 1, 2011. CBC provincial affairs reporter David Cochrane tweeted a series of comments on this, including comments about Matthews:

(March 11)  “Where are you getting this from?  Feds tell me her appt isn’t finalized at all…I spoke to Matthews directly.  She says she is not on the board….EM says she has never been told of any appointment.  Do Libs have draft letter never sent?…Skinner says they nominated EM in January…”.

Cochrane put Matthews’ comments to Shawn Skinner in a scrum on Monday.  Skinner agreed that Matthews hadn’t been notified and that’s the story CBC ran with on Tuesday.  Skinner also mentioned that the appointment needed an order in council but insisted that Matthews didn’t know about the appointment.

Well, the order in council clinches it:

If you look on the left-hand side of the document, you will see the list of people to whom officials of the cabinet secretariat distributed the order.  “P” is the Premier.  The Natural Resources and Public Service Secretariat deputy ministers got copies, as did the Attorney General, the Deputy Clerk of the Executive Council and the file.

And so did someone named E. Matthews.

Just so that everyone understands just how crucial this document is, understand that the order in council is one of the basic legal instruments of our system of government.  You can find a handy definition of what an order in council is over at the Privy Council Office website along with a searchable database of these public documents.

To paraphrase, an order in council is a legal instrument made by the cabinet, called the Lieutenant Governor in Council, by powers given by a law or, less frequently, the royal prerogative.  In most provinces, orders in council are made on the recommendation of the responsible minister and take legal effect only when signed by the Lieutenant Governor.

They don’t get back-dated.  And they damn well don’t get left sitting idly around somewhere unattended.  The people who handle these things are nothing if not diligent to the point of anal retentivism about making sure everything is done just so. That’s not a knock on them; to the contrary, the people in the Executive Council office are among the most trustworthy and responsible people anywhere on the planet.

They don’t shag up, as a rule.

And in this case, they’d have extra incentive not to make a mistake.  As Shawn Skinner pointed out on Monday, these appointments belong entirely to the Premier.  Kathy Dunderdale gets to make them just like her predecessor Danny Williams did. That isn’t what happened before 2003, by the way.

If Kathy picked Liz, then there’d be hell to pay if Liz did not know that she could start earning cash come the New Year.

Nor is it really plausible that Kathy Dunderdale, Shawn Skinner or any of their senior staff might have buggered up and not mentioned to Liz she had a seat on the board.

Nor is it likely that they thought one didn’t happen without the other.  Shawn Skinner’s been pretty clear since Monday that they considered it a two-stage process, but stage one happened in December. 

The order in council makes the appointment to the board first.  Then it puts Matthews forward as a vice-chair, subject to federal approval.  That’s what Skinner told reporters on Monday.  As it turned out, the feds made a counter-offer to accept Matthews contingent on the province accepting a second vice-chair by federal appointment.

Nor is it likely David Cochrane either misunderstood what Matthews told him or made a fairly consistent mistake in conveying it via Twitter or anywhere else. Matthews relayed what he got and consistently put the comments to Skinner.

Now Liz may have misunderstood what was going on, but that’s a different – and entirely possible – thing. 

For something like this, Matthews would have been entitled to attend any board meetings after January 1, 2011 and participate like any other member.  The only thing that hadn’t been settled up to the time she bailed on the whole thing was the second part of the order.  That is, the federal government had not agreed to her appointment to the vice-chair’s job.

But her board appointment on behalf of the province?

Full legal effect on December 21.

With Matthews’ decision to bail on the appointment, the whole vice-chair position at the board is up in the air.  The idea of two vice-chairs appears to have been nothing more than an effort to have a federal appointee to offset Matthews. 

With her appointment now dead, there’s an opportunity for both St. John’s and Ottawa to agree on an open competition to be followed by an appointment based on qualifications and merit.

If nothing else, it’s got to beat the hell out of yet another complete disaster  - remember Andy Wells? - that its proponents have been forced to defend with what amount to claims of their own bungling and incompetence.

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Where is the Hebron development application?

Last January, the Hebron partners said they’d be submitting their development plan for Hebron to the offshore board by the end of the year.

That would have been December 2010.

Now it’s March 2011 and there’s still no sign of it.

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No more give-aways indeed: Big Oil’s L’il Buddy considering cash breaks for major oil companies

According to the cover story in the latest issue of Natural Resources magazine, the provincial government and representatives of the major oil companies are reviewing ways to increase exploration offshore.

Operators are presenting the government with a “suite” of proposals, according to [industry representative Paul] Barnes — many of them involving fiscal incentives, such as tax credits or royalty relief, that could spur increased exploration. 

Barnes is quoted as saying that the talks are “high-level” likely meaning they involve the Premier and other senior cabinet ministers. The 2007 energy plan included a recommendation to establish a working group involving industry and the provincial government to develop “regulatory and fiscal measures” to promote exploration as well as what the document refers to as “other industry needs.”

One idea reportedly under consideration is a royalty break for dry exploration wells.

For example, companies already producing in the area may favour some type of incentive that’s royalty based. If they drill a well and come up dry, they could get royalty relief on current production. “If there’s some risk offset, that may encourage some additional exploration activity,” Barnes noted. He said there are similar royalty-relief holidays for deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, to help mitigate the cost of unsuccessful wells.

That’s a significant switch from earlier Conservative positions but it is consistent with what the Conservatives have done since they took office.

For example, before 2003, when oil prices were below US$30 a barrel, Danny Williams attacked any suggestion that the Hebron partners might need a flat one percent oil royalty in the early years of any Hebron project.  Once in office, when oil prices tripled, he agreed to just just a windfall for the oil companies. The provincial government will lose hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, if oil prices remain above US$35 a barrel. 

Other issues for the industry include continued uncertainty about the province’s oil royalty regime.  The 2007 energy plan committed to scrap the existing one and replace it with a new approach.  Four years later there’s no sign of work being done, let alone any progress.

In natural gas, the provincial government still doesn’t have a royalty regime.  That’s despite the fact work on the rules started in 1997 and the 2007 energy plan outlined a draft royalty policy.

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Matthews bails on board position

Elizabeth Matthews is bailing out of her controversial nomination to serve as vice-chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore petroleum Board.

It isn’t clear if she is also leaving her appointment to the board itself.

As CBC reports, Matthews is blaming the Opposition Liberals for politicising the entire matter.  Matthews served as a communications director for the Liberal administration of Roger Grimes before she left quickly to work for Danny Williams in the Opposition office where he was infamous for slinging wild, political accusations.  In another ironic twist, Matthews former boss said he got into politics because he was sick of all the patronage and corruption.

The big twist in the story appears to have come on Friday when the Liberals revealed a December 21 letter from natural resources minister Shawn Skinner to his federal counterpart appointing Matthews to the offshore with effect from 01 January 2011.

And then things went horribly wronger Update:

The Telegram has the full text of Matthews’ statement.  For starters, try and find the clear statement where she says she is quitting her appointment. Then check and see if she has actually launched any defamation action given her references to defamation.  This sounds suspiciously like John Hickey suing Roger Grimes for stuff Danny Williams said:  a huge pile of smoke to cover the catastrophe everyone else sees.

If that wasn’t enough, note, among other things, the change in her title in the Premier’s Office from the bio sketch in the letter on the appointment – “Senior Policy Advisor”  - to “a senior advisor”.  There’s a huge difference in the two.  That’s just the tip of that iceberg.

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Matthews appointment to offshore board kept under wraps until leak

Flip back to the provincial government news release archive for last December and there’s one thing you won’t see:  an announcement appointing Elizabeth Matthews to occupy a provincial seat on the offshore regulatory board.

That’s because they didn’t issue an announcement despite sending the federal government a letter advising the feds of the provincial appointment. You can find the letter online at the Official Opposition’s website.  They got it from the provincial natural resources department.

In the second paragraph of the letter, natural resources minister Shawn Skinner  also nominates Matthews as vice-chair of the offshore regulatory board. That’s something the federal government would have to agree to.  Apparently they did but only on the condition that the province accept a federal second vice-chair.

One huge difference between the two vice-chairs, incidentally is that the federal one actually was a senior policy advisor in a previous life.  The biographical sketch of Elizabeth Matthews was evidently written by someone in the latter stages of advanced pinochiosis.  For example, the bio sketch talks about a re-negotiation of the Atlantic Accord.  That never happened so it would be pretty hard for Matthews to have been involved in it at all, let alone at the level the writer claimed.

There’s a story in Saturday’s Telegram on this but sadly it isn’t online. The story includes some quotes from a bizarro news release Skinner issued on Friday, supposedly to correct information in the Liberal release that went out along with Skinner’s letter to the feds.

The bizarro thing is that he didn’t actually correct anything. Instead, Skinner confirmed what the Liberals said.  he also did a bit of a nose-puller when he claimed that the provincial government had to appoint Matthews to the board in order to nominate her as vice chair.

Think of that as being a chicken-and-egg version. Before now, the federal and provincial governments could successfully agree on an appointment as vice-chair before making an announcement.  The board seat was secondary.  In this case, the provincial government apparently tried to push Matthews forward with a seat on the board and then tried to cut the deal on the vice-chair’s job.

Surprise.  Surprise.

The feds didn’t play along and put forward their own nominee for a second spot in a “I’ll take yours but only if you take mine too” kinda deal.

Both bits of that – the provincial ploy and the federal counter - likely have a lot to do with the fact that Matthews is basically a patronage appointee with no relevant qualifications to take on the vice-chair’s job. She can’t really hold a candle to either the current or former chair and she’s outclassed experientially speaking by the guy she was supposedly replacing.  Had the provincial government opted for a meritorious appointment perhaps with an open competition they might have found one of several qualified women from the province to take the job.

Word of Matthews’ appointment leaked out about three or four weeks ago in the province’s oil community.  It caused a great deal of consternation.  A few weeks after word started to spread, CBC’s David Cochrane reported it.  He only gave the bare bones of the basic story though. Apparently CBC isn’t reporting the rest of these details as they’ve come to light.  It will be interesting to see if anyone adds new details to the story this week or if this is really the end of the story.

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Toronto Sun needs oil fact checker

Here’s the quote:

So you’ve got the only oil refinery processing Newfoundland crude owned by the South Korean government, while the other oil refineries in Eastern Canada process oil pumped from wells located halfway around the world.

That comes after a lengthy discussion about the Come by Chance oil refinery and where crude from the Newfoundland offshore goes.

Slight problem.

Come by Chance refines oil from Iraq, Venezuela and Russia.  It doesn’t refine anything from the local offshore.

Certainly the company that owns the refinery could get oil from the local offshore if it wanted to use it.  Some people like to spread a fable that the 1985 Atlantic Accord prevents it, along with prohibiting the construction of a new refinery in the province. But truth be told it merely puts some restrictions on refining Newfoundland offshore oil in Canada.

The oil companies ship their product to the United States because it is more profitable for them to do that.  They take the oil they pump out of the ground and ship it to their refineries and sell the refined products in their gas stations across the Untied States.

D’uh!

Makes good economic sense.

Meanwhile, the crowd at Come by Chance buy cheaper heavy sour crude from places like Venezuela and Iraq and ship that into the United States.  The stuff offshore Newfoundland is light, sweet crude, incidentally.  Higher wholesale price but also easier to refine into more products.  That means it is much more profitable in the longer run.

Someone at the Sun really needs to do some checking of those pesky facts.

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Good Tory? End of story

Telegram editor Russell Wangersky maps out the new normal in federal and provincial politics in a devastating column titled “Lies, the new truths.”

Russell’s right on the solution to the problem:  people have stop accepting what they are told at face value especially when it comes directly from people involved and who, in certain instances, have a vested interest in the story.

Do that and, among other things, you might avoid the gigantic embarrassment of tweeting “I just heard from her. This is a patently false rumour” only to have to suck the whole thing back minutes later when the thing turned out to be patently true. 

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Traffic with no secret appointments (Mar 7–Mar 11)

1. Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll
2. MOU PIFO 2
3. The importance of education:  education and the economy
4. Tories at 44.5%;  UND at 39%:  government pollster
5. Patronage, pure and simple
6. The secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador
7. Personal bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador
8. AbitibiBowater, Democracy and the public interest
9. Drilling in Gulf is dangerous and unmanageable
10. Labrador Hydro:  That 70s Show

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Getting more women involved in elected politics

Take a gander at this clip from a recent edition of CTV’s Power Play with Don Martin. It features an interview with Nancy Peckford, executive director of Equal Voice.

Nancy covers some of the issues involved at the federal level in getting more women in elected politics.

 

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AbitibiBowater, Democracy and the Public Interest

There’s a new commentary from an Ottawa-based think tank on the AbitibiBowater expropriation.  The commentary is basically Brian Lee Crowley’s presentation to the Commons standing committee on international trade.

You can read the full text here. and below are four highlighted points:

“1.  The Chapter 11 provisions of NAFTA provide no bar whatsoever to Canadian
governments acting in the public interest through law and regulation, but they
properly require that the government pay the legitimate costs associated with
their decisions, including compensating parties whose property is confiscated or
nationalized.

2.  Paying compensation for expropriation is a matter of basic fairness and is a
fundamental principle in Canadian law, not just NAFTA.

3.  As a country with huge investments in other jurisdictions, we benefit enormously from such investor protections in other countries, and failure to apply
such protections domestically would damage our credibility and harm Canadian
investors

4.  The AbitibiBowater case points up a damaging inconsistency in Canada’s constitutional and legal framework whereby Canada has the treaty-making power
and, therefore, is responsible to ensure that we meet our treaty obligations; but
provinces are not bound to respect the NAFTA provisions. A mechanism can and
should be found to oblige provinces to take responsibility for their decisions and
prevent them from passing the costs of provincial decisions on to the federal taxpayer.”

There’s also a version of the presentation in a Troymedia piece called “Provinces behaving badly and what can be done about it”:

Governments in Canada have the right to take your house, farm, or factory, but the requirements of fairness and the Canadian democratic tradition normally subject that power to limits. Governments must compensate you if they take your property. Moreover they don’t get to set the price unilaterally; it must be done by an arm’s length agency and be subject to judicial review.

It was Newfoundland and Labrador’s decision to ignore these rules of decent behaviour that created the damage that federal taxpayers must now clean up.

If there is any kind of a democratic deficit in the AbitibiBowater decision, surely it is here: in a genuine democracy, voters should have to face the true costs of their decisions so that they can make a balanced assessment of the pros and cons. The current arrangements force innocent federal taxpayers, who have no hand in choosing provincial governments in other provinces, to nonetheless pay the tab for those governments’ bad behaviour. And that is practically the textbook definition of a perverse incentive.

 

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Labrador hydro: That 70s Show reruns

Listening to Leo Abbass on CBC radio Wednesday afternoon, you could almost imagine you were back in the 1970s. 

Harry Hibbs. 

Banana seat bicycles. 

Joan Morrissey. 

All around the circle.

John Crosbie with muttonchops. 

The whole shooting match.

Radio Noon had Abbass, the mayor of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, as the guest for its hour-long call-in show. He was talking up Muskrat Falls, the economic disaster doing business as Danny Williams’ memorial to Hisself. 

Some guy called in to point out that after construction ended, there’d only be a handful of jobs left keeping an eye on the gauges as all the power streamed off somewhere other than Labrador.  Abbass disagreed.  After all, he reasoned, there’d be all that cheap power available to lure some industry or other and hundreds of jobs to boot.

Flick your mind back 40 years - if it goes back that far -  and you probably remember another bunch of politicians who said exactly the same thing. That was the big idea for Churchill Falls back to the 1950s when Joe Smallwood supposedly first dreamed his first dream of immortality: cheap power for aluminum plants and lumber mills. 

Ditto Baie d’Espoir on the island.  That one was supposed to support not one, not two, not even three or four major new industries.  By the time Joe Smallwood and his crew got around to that one, their cheap power was supposed to sustain seven new industries.

Seven.

With one blow.

Paper mill.

Refinery.

Petrochemical plant. 

Hockey stick factory.  Betcha never heard that one before.

Phosphorus plant.

A bunch of new industries.

Hundreds of new jobs.

All with cheap power.

2 mills, even less than at Churchill Falls.

Not even the pretext of trying to make the thing break even.

Just like the aluminum smelter in Labrador.  That old chestnut is still good for all sorts of mileage even from the most highly educated members of our population.

What do the hydroqueen, at least one recent premier, the odd economist, and now maybe a mayor have in common? 

Your first two guesses don’t count but if you get it right, you could win the chance to cut the ribbon at the Grand Opening of the latest Great Unnamed Industry to Save Newfoundland (and Labrador). 

The gigantic load of horse manure is that much a part of our culture that when they get done with the 60th anniversary of the Fisheries Broadcast, CBC should celebrate 60 years of aluminum smelter rumours in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Oh dear.  Was that sarcasm? 

There’ll probably be a Telegram column now defending the honour of this beloved fairy tale.  If two university professors get a quote in the paper noting its turd-like aroma, you can bet there’ll be at least two columns, one of which will point out that the two learneds are – whispers – you know.

That way.

What way?

You know:

Different.

You mean mainlanders?

YES!  For Gawd’s sake.

And as such, they are unfit to comment at all on our revered customs and venerated observances.

Like Screech-ins and gravel-pit camping, both of which have been practiced in the province (and maybe even Labrador) since John Cabot’s time at least. 

Surely, that long.

And they are definitely not – respectively – a cheesy 1970s marketing gimmick by the liquor corporation and a relic of the post-war era when the government actually had enough money to build roads for people to drive cars on.

And it isn’t just this Labrador hydro power stuff.

Take a look at municipal politics.  Some poor sod who went into a coma around the time of the Canada Summer Games in 1977 and who sprang back to life this week would look at the TV and wonder what the frig was going on.  Some woman from city council with a hat on then talking about being verbally beaten up by her fellow councillors when his lights went out. Now that the lights are back on,  he sees some woman from city council with a hat on…

You get the idea.

Then there’s the fishery.

Only difference is that this cartoon today would have the one guy with four hands covering ears and eyes and with both feet in his mouth.

Since 2003, it’s like the province – and Labrador - is one giant trip back to the 70s.

 

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Personal Bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador

The following chart shows personal bankruptcies in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1991 to 2009.

Data is from Statistics Canada, compiled by the Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency.

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The secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador

The secret of life and comedy is timing.

In this case, the secret of life in Newfoundland and Labrador would be the curious coincidence in timing of a conference to discuss ways of getting more women involved in the oil and gas industry with the leak that the provincial government passed over qualified female candidates in the industry for a job at the offshore regulatory board in favour of pure patronage.

As much as this sort of old-fashion pork may be the nature of life under the provincial Conservatives, it isn’t very funny.

What it does make clear, though, is that anyone hoping to increase the number of women involved in the province’s offshore industry is going to have a long way to go.

First you’ve got to get rid of these very old, very backward ideas about patronage and entitlements and get government to make appointments based on merit first.

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A trading nation: 2011 update

Newfoundland and Labrador exports more to the United States than any other foreign location.  This is a point made in a 2005 post but more recent numbers tell just exactly how important a role the United States plays.

In 2008, total exports peaked at more than $10 billion.  Two years later, exports to the United States have only recovered to slightly more than it was in 2005;  that’s about $6.4 billion.

In 2010, the next largest export destination was Germany at $734 million, then China at $704 million.  It’s a big slide to the fourth largest export destination – the Netherlands – and $120 million in exports in 2010.  When you look at those figures, consider how foolhardy it was to ignore free trade negotiations with the European Union.

On the flip side, the largest import source for Newfoundland and Labrador remains Iraq at $1.8 billion.  Next is Russia at $595 million followed by the United States at $324 million.  The fourth largest import source is Venezuela.

If you are trying to figure out those import sources, think about the largest export destination.  Think of oil and you are in the right neighbourhood.  Iraq is the chief source of heavy sour crude for Come by Chance and on the flip side, all that refined product is destined for the Untied States.

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Drilling in Gulf is dangerous and unmanageable

Marilyn Clark, a Magdalen Islander studying at Memorial University, argues that oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is unmanageable and dangerous in the current regulatory context.

She writes in the Montreal Gazette:

What will governance look like with four offshore regulators in less than 500 kilometres of water? If we believe that Quebec and Newfoundland will cooperate to prioritize citizens, we are kidding ourselves. They have already sliced moving water down the middle to conduct their environmental assessments.

The lack of a harmonized approach for a single body of water will permit pollution without political accountability; the citizens of one province will have no way of holding the governments of other provinces responsible.

Why is the government gambling with the assets of my region, while the renewable resources of southwest Nova Scotia and British Columbia are protected? The Gulf only fully flushes itself out once a year. If drill cuttings, waste water and chronic spills are the new ingredients of our Gulf, we will be importing our lobster from the Caribbean and our crab from Asia. How can I be expected to invest in my region when I know that the offshore regulatory framework is so flawed that oil companies monitor themselves?

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The importance of education: education and the economy

The National Post’s Kelly McParland offered a colourful chart last November comparing a number of things, including federal transfers to provinces (on a per person basis), provincial gross domestic product and the amount spent per person on education.

There are also some bullet points. 

One stood out:

Newfoundland has strong investment, high GDP, generous transfers, yet still has the country’s highest unemployment and spends very little on education. Might those last two be related?

They might well be related. 

But then again, it is hard to know for sure given that the figures for per capita education spending, for example,  are from 2006 and unemployment is from 2010. There’s no indication why the figures are from different years but they are;  it’s not like the information is secret or otherwise unavailable. 

As for employment rates, in October 2010 it was around 13%  - according to the Post chart - and in October 2006, it was 14%. The participation rate is up slightly in 2010 compared to 2006 (61% versus 58-59%).

Still, it’s hard to escape the idea that there is a connection between education and economic performance.

Consider this some food for thought.

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Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll: government pollster (revised numbers) #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Corporate Research Associates issued a correction to its latest polling numbers for Newfoundland and Labrador on Monday and the result is truly startling.

The Conservatives under Kathy Dunderdale have the support of 56% of voters compared to 51% for the Tories under Danny Williams in November 2010.

Sure her personal popularity may be less than Danny’s but she’s managed to pull the Tories out of their downward slide in Danny’s last three months that took them from 61% in August to 51% in November.  Dunderdale’s started the Tories back on the path to the stars and without doing very much of anything for the past three months except fend off a weak challenge to her leadership by Brad Cabana.

Not surprisingly, the Conventional media are following along with CRA’s news release and their own conventional wisdom to make the poll numbers fit what they think the numbers should say.  They are saying that Dunderdale is not as strong as Danny but she is still pretty big.

But as absurd as it may seem, the CRA numbers really put Kathy ahead of her old patron.

According to CRA’s revised numbers, undecideds dropped from 31% to 23% in the three months or so Danny’s been gone.  The unfiltered, undistorted CRA numbers show Tory support went from 51% in November with Danny as leader to 56% with Kathy Dunderdale.

Both the change in party support for the Tories and the change in undecideds is outside the margin of error (4..9 percentage points)

“How could this be?” you are likely asking.

Call it the mother of all typos.

The original news release included this sentence:

Those with no stated preference included those who were undecided (18%), do not plan to vote (3%), or refuse to state a preference (18%).

That adds up to 39%.

The table at the end of the news release gave the figure as 23%.  Apparently that second 18% was only supposed to be two percent.

Not 18.

2.

Big difference.

It’s a bit of a head scratcher as to how someone could mistakenly type “18” instead of “2” and how the release could get out the door with such a glaring error.

Your humble e-scribbler took the figures in the text of the release in largest part since they were consistent, across the board with a similar poll done by NTV/Telelink in February.  Those are the figures used in an earlier post. 

Now what we are left with is a poll that mirrors Telelink in every way except in Conservative support and the level of undecided/no answer and will not votes.  The differences are hardly inconsequential. 

What this cock-up really should be is a reminder that CRA’s poll reporting does contain some rather glaring problems.  For instance, CRA routinely distorts the results of its polls by presenting only the results for decided voters. You can see the effect of that misrepresentation by charting the results as a share of all responses, not just the “decideds”. This chart is taken from post last December on CRA’s fourth quarter poll.

According to CRA’s version, the Conservative party’s support remains in the mid 70s. What doesn’t get noticed is that the “undecided” category has gone from the teens to 31% in November 2010.  Now it’s dropped again to 23% in the most recent poll.

You’ll also see in the middle of that chart another clue that something is seriously wrong with CRA’s polls.  That flat line in the middle would be a period of three consecutive quarterly polls where the difference in Tory support was apparently less than one percent. Those interested in a more detailed discussion can find it in an older post:  There’s a fairly lengthy post that discusses most of the major problems with CRA polling:  “How the Tories get 28% more votes thanks to CRA”..

For the first time in a long while, CBC has added a few questions to CRA’s quarterly polling.  Ostensibly they give new information, but essentially, CBC just gives a variation on the basic horse race questions. One of the CBC questions even repeats the same flawed question format of “mostly” and “completely” and equally extreme negative choices.  On other occasions, incidentally, CRA has asked a typical five point Likert scale (strong and moderate positives and negatives with a neutral) and reported the results as “completely” or “mostly” as appropriate. 

What is the difference, after all, between completely and mostly, compared to completely and somewhat?  think about it for a second and you’ll get the point.

What’s missing in all the questions is the sort of stuff that would give any indication of what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are concerned about.  What pollsters typically do is ask what issues are of concern to their respondents.  Then they might ask voters to rate party performance on each question.  Sometimes they might leave out the party support questions so as not to unduly influence the responses, but with or without it, one can get a much better sense of what potential voters are thinking.

Instead of some insight, one gets absurd responses.  For example, when asked whether Williams departure will influence party choice (the question itself is oddly worded, by the way), 34% said they were less likely to vote Conservative while 30% said they are more likely. 

Huh?

Exactly.

And don’t forget the Conservatives supposedly enjoy 73% voter support  - using CRA’s own method of reporting - with only 18% actually undecided in their party choice.

And as a last point, let’s just remember this basic point.  CRA polls eligible voters.  They don’t screen for usual voters or regular voters.  They just survey all eligible voters. That means you need to compare their poll results, including UND/DK/NA with the actual poll results for any given election.

In their Fall 2007 quarterly survey, CRA put the combined no answer/will not vote/undecided at a mere 18%. The actual result on polling day was 38%.  CRA’s quarterly polls typically show that the “will not vote” category is less than five percent.

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White Rose field may get GBS

According to the Telegram, the White Rose partners are looking at using a concrete gravity base structure or GBS.

The concrete well-head unit would support a drilling rig.  Oil from the wellhead would be pumped to the existing SeaRose floating production, storage and offloading vessel and from there to tankers to take it to market.

“We’re looking at a whole range of different concepts,” said Paul McCloskey, Husky’s East Coast vice-president

“One of the opportunities that we are considering is the installation of a very skinny GBS.

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Tories at 44.5%, UND at 39%: government pollster #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Double-down Update:

• CRA's issued a correction that its UND category was 23% as shown in the table not 39% shown in the text.  That's one mother of a typo and therefore that's worth a whole new post, coming later.
• CBC apparently piggybacked on this one and has some specific questions of its own coming later on Monday evening.  That would warrant a separate post on its own.
• New post:  “Dunderdale boosts Tory support from last Williams poll”

Original Post begins...

Support for the ruling provincial Conservatives under Kathy Dunderdale is at 44.5% compared to 61% last August under Danny Williams according to a Corporate Research Associates quarterly poll released on Monday.  The results match almost exactly with a recent NTV/Telelink poll that put support for the province’s Tories at 44.3%.

Undecided, including those who refused to answer and those who do not plan to vote is at 39%, up eight percentage points from CRA’s November 2010 poll.  NTV/Telelink reported 37.9% of its respondents didn’t know how they might vote, wouldn’t state a preference or indicated they would not vote.

And that’s where the real story is for these polling numbers.  According to CRA’s polls, support for the provincial Conservatives started to slide during the last three months of Danny Williams’ leadership.  His abrupt departure didn’t stop the slide.

What’s worse, the margin of error for this poll is 4.9%.  That means there is a possible variation in those numbers of almost 10 percentage points.  Given that the Tory and UND number is less than 10% is it possible that more people are undecided or won’t state a preference than are actually indicating they will vote for the provincial Conservatives.

There are problems with the way CRA presents its figures.  For example, they show party choice for decided voters.  This is highly misleading as can be seen in the party vote numbers. The obvious decline in Tory support vanishes completely because of the way CRA reports its figures.

Still, if you look at the numbers, understand what you are seeing, and can check them against a second set of figures like NTV/Telelink, the results can be dramatically different than what you will see reported by conventional media.

These poll results from two different firms don’t  mean the Tories will lose the next general election.  What they do show is an electorate which is sufficiently uncomfortable that they will not state a clear support for the ruling party.  The fall general election could be up for grabs, depending on what the Conservatives and the opposition parties do over the next three to seven months.

- srbp -

MOU PIFO 2

For those who haven’t watched it yet, the raw video of fisheries minister Clyde Jackman’s news conference on the fisheries restructuring report  is worth watching in its entirety. 

Jackman and his staff apparently tried to rush the reporters and overwhelm them.  Instead of the usual background briefing on the report and a lengthy introductory statement, Jackman simply sat down, blathered out some perfunctory thanks and quickly asked for the first question.

What happens next is both beautiful and horrifying.  The beauty is in the elegance of reporters’ questions, especially CBC’s David Cochrane:  simple, focused and sharp despite working with the considerable handicap of not having read the lengthy report ahead of time.  They fillet Jackman’s credibility in living colour and lay out for anyone who cares to see it both the solution to the fisheries crisis and the only serious obstacle to it, namely the provincial government itself.

The horrifying bit is Jackman, his finger sometimes point here and there while he desperately tried to say something that did not sound asinine.  What Jackman fell back on repeatedly were a bunch of stock phrases about the need to treat the industry like an industry or the “ask” for a whole lot of money.  The result – the horrifying bit – comes with the realization that either the cabinet is completely fractured over fisheries reform and cannot figure out what to do or that they are agreed that the fishery must simply be allowed to collapse of its own accord.

There simply isn’t another alternative for Jackman’s performance.  After all, you don’t have to watch too much of his squirming to get the feeling that Jackman was busily clicking his heels under the table and muttering “There’s no place like home, Toto” under his breath.

In all likelihood, the current cabinet, like previous cabinets simply can’t get a position they can all agree on.   That would explain why Jackman never could define what he actually wanted instead of the report in front of him.  That’s why he relied on stock phrases that themselves meant nothing.  And as a result, one gets the idea pretty clearly that the provincial government simply doesn’t know what it wants, except to know that they did not want to accept the report in front of him and all its implications.

What Jackman did mention one too many times for comfort was the idea that some people think time will take care of the whole thing.  In other words, in an industry dominated by people rapidly approaching retirement, most of the people who would be “restructured” will simply leave the industry on their own if nothing else happens. He also talked about signs that prices might be climbing again soon, perhaps another clue as to what some in the provincial government might be hoping for.

Cochrane asked if the entire MOU process was now a waste of time.  Four and a half years of work at building a consensus in the industry seems to have come to naught. Not at all, said Jackman since now everyone has a study that describes exactly how bad things really are; now people can talk about solutions.

People have been talking about solutions for years.  This report was supposed to be the first step to action, not to further talk.  For anyone willing to pay attention, comments this past week made it pretty clear that both processors and fish harvesters are done with talking.  They want some action.

That leaves the provincial government in a terrible spot:  there is an election in October. The fishery is a gigantic political problem affecting many districts on the island and in Labrador. The governing party not only has no idea what to do about the fishery, they cannot even develop a strategy to effectively manage the controversy.

And what’s more, they have no distractions, no foreign demons, no bits of absurd political theatre to use to distract people.

What a terrible place to be in.

- srbp -