He can't be serious

If I were a federal Conservative, reeling after a week of negative coverage on the whole Bernier affair, there are very few things that would make me want to get up in the morning, let alone get up in the morning and read a newspaper.

This would be one of them.

Probing

Federal regulators in the United States have launched a probe into U.S. oil markets. It's actually been underway for nearly six months.

Isn't this another classic example of a failure of communication between the executive branch and the bureaucracy? I mean, if they want to know if there's price-fixing in the industry, surely they could just pick up the phone and call Dick Cheney...

Bob Cole for Supreme Court

Stephen Harper claims that his government will have a more open, populist approach to naming the next Supreme Court Judge.

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador is publicly insisting that the vacant seat on the Court must be filled by a Newfoundlander.

Playoff hockey fans are once again musing about the broadcast booth at Hockey Night in Canada. Speculation is rampant that CBC wants Bob Cole to move on.

Surely we can all find a reasonable accommodation here. Cole can at least claim to have an Honorary Doctorate of Laws, which must give him some qualification. And with the required three Judges from Quebec, there'll always be someone around to remind him of the names of anyone who doesn't play for the Maple Leafs.

Everybody wins.

It's a dandy!

Oily

A thoughtful blog post on oil prices, the articles linked from it are worth a look, too.

On relationships...

"We stand really at a crossroads in terms of our relationship with Canada,"

- Our Dear Justice Minister, in the Globe and Mail

Actually, Jerome, we are Canada. Or part of it. Much as that continually irks you and your fellow travelers.

How do you have a relationship with yourself? Or with a part of yourself?

Don't answer that.

What a difference two days make...

Two days after "misspeaking", Kathy Dunderdale now preaches the virtue of "undertaking significant analysis". Indeed.

Great Crusade gets a raincheck

We're suing the feds! We're suing Quebec! We're seeking redress! We're going to court!

Ummm... no we're not! We're doing no such thing! We misspoke!

As Wally notes, this is taking contradicting your cabinet colleagues to a whole 'nother level.

Prison transfers. Or prisoners on transfers. or Black and Right. Or some bad pun.

From his temporary residence, Conrad Black writes:

"And to the limited extent that regional economic inequalities should be addressed other than by market forces, it should be from the general revenues of the federal government. Some provinces should not have to pay Danegeld to others, with Ottawa, collecting, redistributing and taking perennial credit for national self-preservation."

Far be it for me to suggest prison reading material, but I would start here. You see, Equalization comes from the general revenues of the federal government. It always has.

h/t to Adam

UPDATE: He'll never get to read this. --sob--

Weekend update

Oh... and I have an LL.B. now.

Quick! We need a distraction!

This will surely be entertaining.

More from CP. Let the games begin.

Mining for answers

If your IP address is: stjhnf0112w-142162160212.pppoe-dynamic.nl.aliant.net

And you just Googled the terms "federal royalties Voisey Bay", I can save you some work.

Not sure what your question is, but the answer is definitely ZERO.

If you need more, I suggest you start here. Or maybe a Grade 10 text book.

Irony

"The premier is responsible for the hiring of many of these political staff. Their sustained public attacks on the character of elected members of the House of Assembly, while in his employ at taxpayer's expense, is a clear reflection of the premier's style of leadership."

- Excerpt from a 2003 Letter to the Editor of former Premier Tom Rideout chastising then Premier Roger Grimes for doing to future Premier Danny Williams what current Premier Danny Williams is now doing to him.

Understatement of the day

This one's hilarious:

"If there's going to be conditions . . . laid out publicly on a radio show, well then that's just not the way I operate."

- Premier Danny Williams, berating Innu Chief Peter Penashue in today's papers.

That's right - laying out conditions on the airwaves is the stuff of pikers. A real negotiator would buy off the radio host, hit the open lines, run full page ads across the country and then rip down the flags.

That's how you "operate".

As per usual, Wally has more...

Irony

"Who needs an opposition or a House of Assembly when we’ve got Glen Carter, David Cochrane and Ivan Morgan on the trail?" writes Ryan Cleary in this week's Independent.

A more fitting question might be "who needs government communications staff when you have the Independent?"

A message to the faithful

Comrades, the time has come to ban Hansard. Get rid of it all together. Public records of the legislature must no longer be taken. Old records must be destroyed. How else can we stop those mischievous enemies of the state from using Google to make the Premier and his ministers look like such morons, day in and day out?

Proud. Strong. Desperate.

Every day, I tell myself, "...hey, it can't get much worse."

Then, every day, without fail, it does...

The government that claimed it couldn't react to warnings about faulty cancer testing because it was impossible for the Premier or his staff to sift through all of the volumes of correspondence he receives in the run of a day now has the Justice Department turning itself inside out to dig up any possible hint of a historical precedent in which anyone in government may have said anything about an inquiry in the past.

Desperate.

Danimal Farm

Further to my earlier post...

"they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere..."

(Animal Farm, Chapter 7)

Premier Williams noted at some point this week that he really doesn't care what gets said about him and his government on the radio.

But someone sure does.

As Wally notes, VOCM (a.k.a. state broadcaster of Dannystan) took its site down today, and when it reappeared, all recent stories related to the Premier's comments about the Cameron inquiry had , er... vanished.

Heck, Wally even raced me to the Orwell analogies, citing a great passage from 1984.

That's ok, I'm more of an Animal Farm fan anyway.

"Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

(Animal Farm, Chapter 5)

Birds of a feather

Danny Williams, February 13, 2007:

"I'll tell anybody out there, if they're going to take down the reputations of people that are in public life, then they'll have to basically answer for it, and they'll have to answer for it in court."

I guess he wasn't kidding.

As noted before, he's just like his buddy, "Steve".

Endorsement

Ok - I doubt anyone from Saint John still reads this neglected piece of internet real estate. But if they do...

From the Telegraph Journal's municipal election endorsements:

Ward 3 (lower west, uptown, south and old east)

Kurt Peacock is our unanimous first choice. He brings intellect to the table, which could make for interesting analysis of the work done by senior managers. His knowledge of issues such as poverty and economic development, housing, community planning and environmental concerns would be a valuable addition to council's decision-making process...

Those of us who know Kurt couldn't agree more.

Voter info is here.

"We phoned the judge..."

Further to my last post (see below), it's gone from bad to worse.

I'm not sure if you can get the video here, but I swear... and I'm not making this up... that at the end of last night's NTV report on the Premier's latest blatherings about the Cameron inquiry, Anchor Fred Hutton, with a straight face, looks into the camera and tells viewers, "We phoned Justice Cameron's office for an interview but she declined comment..."*

What did you expect she would do?

That's what passes for journalism in Newfoundland. Calling a judge to comment on her own inquiry while it's still ongoing.

But it gets better. The same report features a telephone interview with the Justice Minister, who after rattling on at length about the fact that there's "no intimidation" of the inquiry on the part of government, closes with a line suggesting that if the inquiry goes too far, or goes on for too long, it will have serious consequences to the health system.

Nope, no intimidation whatsoever.

Sometimes, the only thing better than going home for a few days is leaving.

My home province has become a Banana Republic.

Welcome to Dannystan

The Western Star quotes Premier Danny Williams, referring to the ongoing inquiry into botched cancer testing:

“That process has to take its course and Madam Justice Cameron conducts that in a way that she sees fit,”

Ah yes, the independence of the judiciary.

Of course, that quote only appears after the Premier

• describes "candidly" that it appears to be "more of a prosecution than an inquiry"
• notes that its methods are "inquisitorial"
• laments its "distressful...tone and nature"
• suggests it has become a "witch hunt"
• declares that he would "...like to see the inquiry move expeditiously, be wrapped up as soon as possible"

This would be the same Premier who, in response to a decision that wasn't to his liking, told The Telegram two years ago that the ruling was "over the top", and made a memorable reference to the judge "...this guy got up on the wrong side of the bed". Of course, when suggestions of a complaint to the Law Society started kicking around, it was duly noted that the Premier was no longer a registered member of the Newfoundland and Labrador Bar.

Just three weeks ago, after publicly pronouncing that the pending class action litigation related to the cancer screening would be lost by the Health Authority, the same Premier had a completely different excuse. His explanation for those flippant comments, dutifully reported by the local CBC, were that they weren't made in his capacity as Premier, but rather, as a lawyer.

Tonight's CBC coverage was no better. Instead of asking a very simple question - i.e. Why is the Premier of the Province telling an independent judge running a public inquiry how to do run the damned thing??? they ran a lip-service piece repeating the Premier's comments and criticism of the inquiry's progress practically verbatim... as news.

Incidentally, the same Premier also spent the better part of a week explaining, after his first question period in over 8 months, why discussing the inquiry at all would be inappropriate in the legislature.


Surely somebody in the Press Gallery in St. John's studied civics or some reasonable equivalent since grade eight... anyone?

UPDATE: We now have a national audience. And comments, too!

Exit polls

This is as good a reason as any to be happy that Canadian elections don't prominently feature exit polling. It's devolved into nothing more than a glorification of racial profiling.

The separation of church and chicken

My God, this is funny. Mary Brown's Fried Chicken, long a vital component of Newfoundland democracy, has run a-fowl of the local Catholic Diocese with it's latest ad campaign, "Hail Mary".

"There underneath these very important words in our faith is a huge chicken burger."

- The Bishop, Diocese of Corner Brook and Labrador

Better make it a combo... the Telegram weighs in...

Sssh. Don't tell.

If you were a leader of a national political party, and you were announcing an election campaign promise with a price tag of nearly half a billion dollars*, wouldn't you put it on your website?

Of course you would, unless you:
(a) had no intention of keeping the commitment;
(b) knew you'd never be elected to fulfill it; or
(c) didn't want voters in the rest of the country to know about it.

*That was the approximate value of 8.5% of the Hibernia project about 8 years ago. I assume its value is somewhere in the same ballpark today. Depleted reserves would have lowered that value over time, but higher oil prices would have raised the value of remaining reserves. If any reader has a revised or more recent valuation, please send me a note, or post a comment below.

Uncanny

Damn you, WJM!!!

I swear I wrote the exact same thing earlier today and put in the can for tomorrow. Anyway, it saves me the trouble.

Here it is, a pretty good rebuttal to another pile of weekly separatist crap from the usual sources.

On Air apologies from CTV

I missed this.

My, what a difference a year makes...

My first day in Toronto and according to the papers the sky is falling.

Ontario is becoming a "have-not" province. There's a plight, which gives rise to a crusade, and even the possibly of jokes just around the corner.

More stupid quotes are sure to follow. In the meantime, here's a quote that isn't stupid, coming from an unlikely source, from exactly one year ago today:

But let’s face the facts here folks. Does anyone in this room honestly believe that Newfoundland and Labrador is fiscally better off than Ontario?

You guessed it. That was one of the few lucid passages from Premier Williams' speech to the Economic Club of Toronto from May 3, 2007.

More on this to follow...

Relativity

I never thought I'd say this, but Ken Boosenkool writes a piece on Equalization in today's Globe which is actually really, really good. A must read, actually. At least the diagnosis part.