Welcome to the Monkey Cage
EQ hits court, Polling numbers, and what's in a name?
Politics is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Some circus.
Some monkeys.
The provincial government’s high-priced lawyers went to court last Friday - June 21 - to file the statement of claim in the Equalization lawsuit.
It became a public document at that moment. Anyone can have a copy. It’s no longer a secret.
Monday was a provincial government day off.
Tuesday came and went.
Tuesday night, allnewfoundlandlabrador.com produced a tidy summary of the claim for its Wednesday edition.
Your humble e-scribbler and a few others emailed the government’s lawyers Wednesday morning looking for a courtesy copy by email rather than traipse to the Supreme Court and hope to Jesus the registry might possibly be able to produce one in a timely way.
The official news release from the government crowd appeared at 3:40 Wednesday afternoon.
The lawyers replied to the email at about five past four - that is, roughly a half hour after the government got around to releasing the document - to say they could not distribute the thing without direction from the client.
And then in a second email - while I was typing the reply asking who was actually the one who could make the decision - sent the link to the official news release. Maybe the lawyers get paid by the each for emails when the bill goes to the client, like the American lawyer who sent the client a bill for the Christmas card he’d sent.
Anyway, given that everyone involved on the government side - lawyers included - knew the thing was coming, when it was coming, and that people would naturally be interested in it and would want a copy of what was a document freely available to the public once given to the court, the sluggishness and pedantry about putting a public document in public was clumsy and inept.
We’ll deal with the statement itself on Wednesday.
There’s a new Angus Reid poll that shows Andrew Furey near the top of its quarterly survey of public satisfaction with their leaders.
A whopping 55% of respondents in Newfoundland and Labrador said they were mostly or completely satisfied with job Andrew Furey is doing. The crowd in The Bunker must be putting away their pistols and cyanide pills at this glimmer of hope after a couple of heavy by-election losses. Well, they can perk up a bit but the rest of us might be a bit more sane and sensible.
First, the results are for an unweighted sample of only 173. That means the sample does not line up with age, sex, geographic distribution, and other similar things in the population as a whole. A weighted sample out of the 173 would likely drive the margin of error all to hell… and…
Second, as it is, the margin of error is seven points. That’s the highest of any province in this poll.
Third, Furey’s jump in the quarter is almost identical to the margin of error. That’s a red flag right there on top of the two we’ve already found. Seven points is a big jump
Fourth, people were highly satisfied with Roger Grimes and his crowd before voters pitched them to the curb. Go back to 2015 and you’ll see the same thing for the Pea Seas. They like the direction of the province… but…
Fifth, as the recent Narrative poll showed, satisfaction with the government or the Premier does not mean voters will favour them the same way. The Narrative’s satisfaction question gave roughly the same results as Angus Reid, give or take, with a similarly high margin of error, but when asked who they’d vote for, the largest number of people wouldn’t chose and those who did pick a party, split almost dead even between the Furey-ous Team and the Pea Seas.
NALCOR is still NALCOR, legally and in every other way. There is a board of directors and corporate officers, as shown in this page from what is labelled NL Hydro’s 2023 annual report.
Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro-electric Corporation exists. it is also called Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, according to the law that governs the corporation.
It has a board of directors as well as corporate officers. The board is not 100% interchangeable with the NALCOR Board.
The relationship between NALCOR and NL Hydro is also clear and there’s a nice diagram in the 2023 annual report that shows how NALCOR relates a string of other companies.
But if you read the 2003 annual report, you run across a bunch of I’m-my-own-Grandpa explainer sentences that tell you how the people running NALCOR refer to the whole she-bang now that the provincial government just doesn’t want to call NALCOR NALCOR any more. It’s complex. Needlessly complex. Deliberately complex.
“This Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) should be read in conjunction with the annual audited consolidated financial statements (financial statements) of Nalcor Energy (Nalcor) for the year ended December 31, 2023.”
Title on the cover of the report is NL Hydro, but here we are in the first sentence of the management analysis saying the report is all about NALCOR.
Next heading is “Our Company” and the first sentence says “The Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro group of companies (the Company or Hydro) is comprised of corporations established in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador (the Province).” [Italics added]
Hang on. Suddenly there’s something called the Nl Hydro “group of companies” and that it is sometimes referred to as Hydro or the Company even though it refers to a group of companies and not just the one NALCOR subsidiary called NL Hydro. The group of companies actually means NALCOR, legally. The next paragraph explains what all those different companies owned by NALCOR do while still being called Hydro - when they are actually owned by NALCOR - and Hydro has historically been the really short, casual way of referring to the hydro-electric corporation alone.
Then we get this: “Throughout this MD&A, ‘Company’ and ‘Hydro’ refer to the Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro group of companies (formerly Nalcor), references to ‘Nalcor’ refer to the Nalcor legal entity and references to ‘NL Hydro’ refer to the Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro legal entity.” [Italics added]
Legally, there’s NALCOR and NL Hydro. Period. NALCOR is the legal entity called NALCOR but in this annual report there’s an attempt to make up something called the Hydro group of companies to take the place of NALCOR even though legally and in every other meaningful way, the thing called Hydro referring to the “group” doesn’t exist at all. It’s a fiction. But there is a Hydro, which is NL Hydro, which is a subsidiary of NALCOR
Then it gets worse.
Having already said that the word “Hydro” is another word for the group of companies, we see something called “Hydro Regulated activities”, which means sales to customers within the province governed by the Public Utilities Board and belonging entirely to the thing legally called Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, meaning the hydro-electric corporation. Not all NLH sales, of course, since the PUB regulates the island and some parts of Labrador. Some.
Other stuff in Labrador owned by the hydro-electric corporation is *not* regulated by the Public Utilities Board. And that gets lumped in with stuff belonging to other companies owned by NALCOR - but not the hydro-electric corporation - under “Other Electric.” That would be not-hydro-electric corporation stuff like electricity sales to Nova Scotia, payments to Emera for the Maritime Link, and paying for Muskrat Falls and the LIL ( called by another misleading phrase “rate mitigation”) even though the companies involved in that are listed separately and there’s a whole other thing called “Energy Trading” that apparently includes both electricity transfers and sales within NALCOR, which is also known as The Company also known as Hydro also known as the Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro group of companies.
To be truthful, we really should include the second oil company - called Oilco - in all of this. OilCo is basically a bunch of NALCOR people on some sort of bureaucratic witness protection scam and who get paid a lot of money to manage oil equity stakes still legally owned by NALCOR Oil and Gas, even though NALCOR could do that same job cheaper itself.
Confused? That’s the idea. This sort of mucking about with words isn’t designed to make it easy for anyone to know what’s really going on. It’s designed to confuse the heck out of those of us outside NALCOR, people in the provincial government who are supposed to know what is going on with NALCOR, and guaranteed it would even confuse people inside NALCOR, too.
It also lets people inside NALCOR claim they make a profit even when there’s no logic to how that’s possible. As former Clerk of the Executive Council Dave Vardy, himself a graduate in economics from Princeton, no less, pointed out this week to Saltwire readers, the NALCOR annual reports shows record profits of $619 million with Muskrat Falls that isn’t paid for accounting for 62% of the record profit. As Dave points out, Muskrat Falls profit is more than ten times the profits from Churchill Falls and almost double NALCOR revenues from oil and gas, which, by the way are supposedly paying for Muskrat Falls thanks to the farce called “rate mitigation.”
Overall, Vardy notes that energy sales were down in 2023 compared to 2022 and somehow both Muskrat Falls plant and the transmission link to the island produced a surplus of $386 million while at the same time needing $740 million - with hefty chunks of that from ratepayers - in order to pay for Muskrat falls and the LIL.
None of it adds up. But then again pretty well everything about NALCOR has never involved the truth. Frankly if someone said Nalcor was really a coded anagram of Enron, we should believe it.
Editorial Note: There’ll be no new column Monday. We’ll be back to regular programming on Wednesday.