Criticism from away . . . Or calling it like it is

VOCM has already framed this story through their headline National Paper Aims at Premier and their lede that a mainland paper has "taken another swipe at Danny Williams." But numbers like employment rate are hard, cold and indisputable although their interpretation might be called into question.

Still, not all numbers are politics; some are just numbers whether you like them or not.

Judge for yourself.

And if you want to see the raw numbers on which this article is based, check StatsCan here and scroll down to the tables.

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Danny Chavez makes life harder on the Rock
Derek DeCloet
Globe and Mail, June 9, 2007

Nothing can stop Canada's sizzling job market, and it's not just an Alberta story any more. In every province but two, unemployment is lower today than in 2000, and in absolute terms, no province has enjoyed a bigger decline in the jobless rate than Newfoundland and Labrador.

Yes, this week's employment data prove it: As Premier of the Rock, Danny Williams is an economic disaster. No, really. He is. The drop in Newfoundland's unemployment rate to 12.9 per cent sounds good - it was nearly 17 per cent at the start of the decade - but the statistic hides as much as it tells. It flatters Mr. Williams.

A more meaningful figure is the employment rate, which tells you what percentage of the labour pool is actually working (as opposed to the number who are looking for work but can't find it). The hard facts are these: barely half - 51.5 per cent - of working-age Newfoundlanders have a job, trailing everywhere else by a country mile. Forget Alberta. If only Newfoundland had the same employment rate as tiny Prince Edward Island (61 per cent), it would have 40,000 more inhabitants drawing a paycheque.

How can this be, in a province blessed with abundant oil reserves, during the greatest energy boom in a generation? I doubt that Newfoundlanders are that much lazier than other Canadians. It's about opportunity, or lack of it. Newfoundland's jobs boom is a mirage: Roughly the same number of jobs exist there today as in October, 2003, when Mr. Williams was elected. It's the size of the labour force that has shrunk, because residents are moving to Fort McMurray and other points west.

"If [companies] want to deal with South American dictators, they can go to South America," says Charles Cirtwill, acting president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax. He's referring, of course, to Mr. Williams' latest gambit - to demand a 5-per-cent stake in all future oil and gas projects, at no cost to the province. A similar demand has put the brakes on Hebron, a massive offshore oil development led by Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

If that smells vaguely like expropriation, or perhaps extortion, we assure you that it's merely Mr. Williams trying to get a "fair share," to use the phrase that often accompanies Newfoundlanders' grievances. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, though. Wade Locke, an economist at Memorial University, found that government's take of offshore oil projects is 51 to 55 per cent of pretax cash flow - "similar to the shares found in Alaska, Alberta and Australia." The province gets a larger piece than Ottawa.

So lush are the royalties from energy that they could turn Newfoundland into a "have" province by about 2012, ending decades of equalization payments from the feds, Mr. Locke writes. Inconveniently, that would also bring an end to Mr. Williams' popular stunts to protest that multibillion-dollar gifts of equalization are not enough. Politically, that's magic. Mr. Williams' Conservatives enjoy more than 70 per cent approval in recent polls.

But if extreme confrontation works for squeezing more dough out of Ottawa, it doesn't work for business. When it comes to the Premier's tiresome Danny Chavez routine, oil companies don't know where the demands will stop. In Hebron, the government first demanded a 4.9-per-cent stake. Mr. Williams' Natural Resources Minister is already warning that it will ask for more, once negotiations resume. "If you're an investor, you're not interested in finding a resource that may be nationalized four or five years from now," says Mr. Cirtwill of AIMS.

Don't laugh. That's essentially what happened to Fishery Products International. The province didn't reclaim ownership of FPI, but successive Liberal and Tory governments neutered the company. Twice since 2001, the province amended the FPI Act, obstructing a merger attempt and meddling in restructuring plans. John Risley, who was part of the investor group that took control of the company in 2001, remembers getting a phone call from FPI's lead banker. "He said, 'You guys don't run this business any more. The government does.' "

FPI is being sold now in pieces - only after the province imposed conditions that will force the buyers to prop up rural towns in Newfoundland. Mr. Risley says breaking up the company was the only way to get it out from under the government's thumb. The quickest way to fix the poisoned business environment would be for voters to kick Mr. Williams out this fall, but Mr. Cirtwill just laughs at the idea. "The only real question is, is he going to win every seat?"

Ministers victims to media reports - Can't read

I've worked for ministers over the years and I've seen the kind of briefing notes, files, books, binders, and boxes they have to plough through. Before any decision is made or any action taken, ministers are briefed with more information than you can imagine.

In my experience, there is rarely a problem with insufficient information. In fact, the reverse is true. Most times there is so much information coming at ministers on all kinds of issues, large and small, that they are overwhelmed.

Sometimes, it gets so bad that it's hard to distinguish what is an important issue from what is trivial.

Finance ministers, by virtue of the job they hold, get vast volumes of information, possibly more than any other portfolio. The get more kinds of numbers, scenarios, analysis and projections than you can shake a stick at.

Federal minsters who are also the regional ministers for their province, are flooded with information for their own portfolio and also the information for every other portfolio as it pertains to their province.

Under this system, in this province, you can be sure that Tom Marshall, Finance minister, and Loyola Hearn, federal regional minster, would be kept up to date on the most important fiscal issue and political hot potato in this province today - equalisation.

So why are these two politicians acting like they don't have a clue what the numbers are? Are they reduced to picking information out of the newspapers like the rest of us? Do they ever review their briefing materials or are they sailing along by the seat of their pants?

Early this week, local economist Dr. Wade Locke said that the federal offer, over the next 20 years, represented $6.5billion more while the provincial position represents an additional $4.5billion.

Keep in mind he was clear at the time that these were preliminary figures based on a provisional interpretation of the legislation and a whole lot of numerical assumptions. Locke's hope, he said, was that both sides would be forthcoming with numbers of their own so that clarity could come over this issue.

No such luck.

Instead both Hearn and Marshall seized the results and dashed to the news media claiming how Locke's research vindicated them. Hearn crowed about an additional $6.5billion and Marshall whined about a lost $4.5billion.

Then Dr. Locke has revised his numbers fairly dramatically. Now the federal offer apparretly represents $1billion LESS than the status quo, a shift down of $7.5billion from his earlier interpretations.

You would think the Hearn would release numbers of his own to defend the federal position. He does not. Instead he's reduced to a weak claim that no province will be harmed.

But does he actually have any real idea whether the province will be harmed? Apparently not.

As for Marshall, he's definitely on the warpath now. And you can expect the Premier to be leading the barbarians at the federal gate as soon as he gets home.

But didn't Marshall already know that Locke's numbers were off in the first place?

Both of these senior ministers have to have projections of their own. Are they keeping them to themselves for some high strategic reason? Are they getting around to reading them at all?

What happens next week if Locke or another analyst announces that the provincial and provincial offers are both exactly the same at, say, $16billion over the status quo. How will Hearn and Marshall respond then?

Will they know any different? And if they do, will they let us in on the secret?

Danny Williams: Losing his balance

There's a delicate balancing act that every NL politician must master in putting their position forward, especially, but not exclusively, to a national audience.

On one hand they need to be strong, clear, articulate. They also need to go farther than, say the Premier of Ontario, in order to overcome the obvious political disadvantages of coming from a relatively small province on the geographic margins of the country.

You need other qualities to compensate.

John Crosbie is probably the best example of a NL politician being successful on the national stage. No one doubted his smarts, skills and integrity.

But that wasn't enough to push his agenda forward. He also had to be witty, colourful and grab public attention in the way few politicians ever do.

Still, he never fell into the trap of becoming a caricature of the grasping, pork-barreling local pol-made-good even when he launched his internal war, on behalf of his province, within the Mulroney administration for federal investment in Hibernia.

People called him wrong and misguided but there was always underlying respect for him. In that delicate balance, few ever matched Crosbie's political gymnastic skill.

Then there is the current national public reaction to Premier Williams latest crusade. Here is a small sample of today's editorial coverage.

From the Globe and Mail

With his glib tongue and fast temper, Danny Williams has never been known for his diplomacy. But the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier has run amok over the past two weeks with his inflammatory complaints about how much his province will receive in transfer payments in the recent federal budget. Newfoundland has been "shafted," he declared.
. . .
Mr. Williams has long been anxious to obtain the best deal for his province in everything. But now he has become careless, because Canadians in other provinces are figuring out just how much he is pocketing. They should stand with Mr. Harper in his fight.

From the Windsor Star:

Governments at all levels and of all stripes already use tax dollars to fund advertising for policies that are nothing more than thinly disguised partisan ads. Spending even more tax dollars on advertising in a dispute that could better be waged with press releases and opinion articles in newspapers represents an extravagance governments in these lean times can ill afford.

If Williams and Harper can't start acting like adults, voters should think about cutting off their allowance.

From the Edmonton Journal

Of course, none of the substance of this is remarkable. Williams is indeed playing fast and loose with the facts on equalization, and the Conservatives' recent advertising assaults on the Liberals are no different from salvos fired in the other direction during past elections.

From the National Post

If Danny Williams, the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier, were trailing in the polls, his latest hysterical attacks on Prime Minister Stephen Harper could be explained away as mere electioneering. But his provincial Conservatives are so popular -- polls measure his support as being as high as 70% -- that their re-election is all but assured in this fall's elections. So there must be some other reason for his demagogic rantings and threats to deliver Mr. Harper "a big goose egg" of seats in Newfoundland in the next federal campaign. We suspect his theatrical fury is cover for his own recent disastrous mismanagement of his province's energy industry.
. . .
At his best, Mr. Williams is a charmer and a visionary. He seems genuinely committed to getting his province off the federal dole -- eventually. But at his worst -- such as when he is storming out of premiers' conferences and flying home to take down the Canadian flag from Newfoundland's House of Assembly --Mr. Williams' is a juvenile showman whose antics serve to cast his province as Canada's pouting brat. Newfoundland and Labrador deserves better.

It looks like Premier Williams' very public campaign against Canada's New Government has generated little sympathy for this province nationally. In fact, in many corners it's a wash at best.

Even worse, Premier Williams has squandered his national political capital and respect in a Quixotic attempt to take down a national government on an issue for which there is little natural sympathy for his position.

Premier Williams may not want to link his prior decisions on expenditures or policy, on potential offshore projects for example, but others do want to and they do. And he has no answer for that other than dissembling that he's making progress and he hopes for better in the future.

The problem with those who lose their balance is they are often in denial about it until they hit the ground. It's not falling that's hard, it's the stopping. There's an old saw about the guy who fell off the ten-story building. As he fell, people near the windows heard him say as he plummeted by, "So far so good."

Premier Williams is not the best judge of how this national campaign is going - the national audience is. At best the national audience is clearly hearing, "So far so good" and at worse he's already hit the ground.

The local audience is mixed but still overwhelmingly in the Premier's favour. But a lot of that support has been based on pure emotional response to the resonant message of "we are being shafted." Ultimately that message needs solid information and evidence as the foundation of the campaign otherwise that energy just dissipates.

Both the province and the federal government have avoided being pinned down on the equalization numbers preferring qualitative descriptions like "shafted" and "blessed".

But now thanks to Wade Locke of MUN, we have a much clearer idea of what the fight is over - the difference between $24.1 billion or $28.6 billion on a program which is already an improvement of $6 billion over what we were receiving before.

We'll see next week if, on this issue, the people of the province judge the program as a shaft or a blessing; the national audience have already rendered their decision.