Shipbuilding contract: the good, the better but not the best
The good news is we won. The better news is that we won fair and square. The best news would be for the process by which Halifax’s Irving shipyard last week won a $25-billion federal shipbuilding contract-for-a-generation become the new norm.
But that last, of course, is least likely.
That’s because the shipbuilding contract was that rare special case in which the always tempting opportunity to claim credit smacked up against the even more critical need to deflect blame.
Usually, when politicians dole out big-ticket largesse, they either try to spread the wealth around so every no-name MP of the right political persuasion from every unlikely constituency—“Calgary sure is a fine place to build a destroyer”—gets their own say-cheese moment... Or they simply plunk all the cash where they think it will win them the most votes.
Sometimes, such cynical schemes backfire. Spectacularly.
In 1986, for example, Brian Mulroney’s government awarded a maintenance contract for its CF-18 fighter jet fleet to a Quebec firm instead of rewarding a clearly better bid from Winnipeg. Western anger over that slight helped spawn the Reform party... and we know where that led.
The current Reform... er, Conservative government certainly didn’t want this contract to go CF-18 on them, especially given competing bids from both coasts and Quebec.
But the Tories—to their credit— also wanted to use this once-in-a-generation contract to create more-than-a-generation centres of shipbuilding excellence in Canada.
So Harper shut out the lobbyists and muzzled the partisans. It’s no surprise he benched Nova Scotia’s “Patronage Pete” MacKay, and no surprise either that MacKay lashed out at the provincial NDP for claiming the (equally undeserved) credit he wanted all for himself.
Instead, Harper turned the process over to senior civil servants and a private sector “fairness monitor.”
By all accounts, the process worked—so well Canadians are asking why not use the same process for other big contracts, like Harper’s recent sketchy $9-billion, no-tender fighter jet deal?
And why not extend this fairness idea to provincial, even municipal contracts?...
Uh, right... This is Canada. Pity.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Let the (Convention Centre) Summer Games begin
Metro reporter Alex Boutilier’s scoop last week that costs for the new convention centre have increased sent local, provincial and federal politicians scurrying about like ants on a hot summer day, but to less positive result.
No one was able—or, more to the point, willing—to confirm what Alex’s source had told him. And no one, therefore, was prepared to tag a new, final price on the controversial convention centre project.
That costs have gone up should come as no surprise.
The developer, Joe Ramia, set his original $159 million figure for the public contribution to the downtown centre when he made his pitch to government way back when. Halifax and the provincial government were each to ante up $56 million, with the federal government chipping in $47 million.
Ramia guaranteed his price until Jan. 15, 2011.
When that date came and went with Ottawa still dithering over whether it wanted to play the convention centre funding game, Ramia extended his guarantee until Apr. 15.
Which also passed with no yea or nay from the federal government.
On April 19, Ramia told Metro his prix fixe menu was no longer fixed. “We’ve got contractors and stuff like that that are working on it,” he explained. “They have to come back and say, ‘Look, here’s the price we gave you and ... here’s the price today.’”
When Alex caught up with him last week, Ramia “declined to comment.”
One would guess that, if those costs had held firm, Ramia would have been happy to say so.
The provincial government, which is believed to have the new numbers in its back pocket, wasn’t talking. “We don’t have public discussions on ongoing negotiations,” sniffed Shawn Fuller, the premier’s director of communications.
Both Ottawa and the city claimed they know nothing… about any new cost figures.
There are rumours Ottawa will announce its funding decision next week.
That there are rumours likely means the feds are saying yes. But to what? If there has been a price increase, any deal will still have to go back to the province and city council for re-approval.
Let the Convention Centre Summer Games begin.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
When in Yarmouth… Politicians and the Hypocritic Oath
Progressive Conservative leader Jamie Baillie was in high dudgeon last week when he took his summer road show to Yarmouth to warn business leaders there about the terrible costs to our grandchildren’s grand kids because of our socialist-horde government’s “stubbornly… swimming-against-the-tide” tax policies.
A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but it’s summer. And Baillie himself was attempting to generate maximum barbecue-season publicity for his third-place party from the fallow news-bite possibilities of last week’s eastern Canadian premiers’ and New England governors’ gathering.
“We sit around the table with the neighbouring jurisdictions, but when it comes to spending and taxes, we are uniquely going in the wrong direction,” Baillie harrumphed, parroting the currently popular, populist, less-government-is-better, no-government-is-best mantra. “We are surrounded by jurisdictions that are reducing taxes and containing the cost of government to create jobs and strengthen their economies. In Nova Scotia taxes are up, government spending is up and jobs are disappearing.”
Baillie’s Republican-loving, Tea-Party-aping, Harper-hoping-to-be cut-cut-cut speech might have sounded more sincere if not for the last phrase in the last, please-don’t-notice paragraph of the Tory press release previewing Baillie’s talk.
Baillie, it said, would “highlight the importance of our province’s longstanding relationship with New England and the economic isolation caused by the NDP’s decision to cut the ferry service.”
The Yarmouth-Portland ferry service? The one that a former Conservative government subsidized to the dance-that-jig tune of $18.9 million between 2007 and 2009, the one the NDP refused to give $6-million more of taxpayers’ dollars to in 2010, the one that the operators—not the NDP—cut after the company couldn’t get what it considered its fairest share of our tax dollars.
Yup, that ferry service.
All opposition politicians, of course, must take the Hypocritic Oath. It comes with the territory.
And there are, without doubt, sound economic reasons for subsidizing ferry service, which brought thousands of tourists and created hundreds of jobs in economically fragile southwestern Nova Scotia.
But to follow the logic of the currently ascendant no-government-is-good-government movement—see Jamie Baillie above, plus Rob Ford, Jim Flaherty, Michelle Bachmann et al—using taxpayers’ cash to prop up private businesses should be a bad thing…
No?
Unless, of course, you’re in Yarmouth at the time.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Immigration: Can we get it right this time?
It began in 2003 with the Hamm government’s rightful recognition of our ticking demographic time bomb. In order to defuse it, Nova Scotia desperately needed to attract more immigrants who would root themselves, their businesses and their families here.
But the fast-track solution spawned by those best of self-interested intentions quickly got tangled in our politics as all-too-usual. Untendered, closed-door contracts. The greed of too many in the business community who saw the newcomers as cash cows to be milked instead of potential colleagues to be welcomed and mentored. And then, of course, the government itself refused to be transparent or accountable about what it was really up to until the mess of its own making was beyond fixing.
Only about 300 of the program’s 800 newcomers stayed, and many have nothing good to say about their $130,000-welcome-to-Nova-Scotia experience.
Friday’s tentative settlement of a class action lawsuit by the last 336 unsatisfied economic-stream immigrants puts a final, welcome coffin nail in a botched program the province shuttered in 2006.
But it doesn’t change our desperate need for more immigrants. Thanks to Nova Scotia’s declining birth rate, aging population, out-goers and lack of in-comers, our current half-million-strong labour force is expected, according to one study, to shrivel by 150,000 able bodies—30 per cent—in the next 25 years. By 2015, Nova Scotia will have reached the point at which “the availability of labour hits zero.”
Immigration alone can’t solve that elephant-in-the-room problem. But it will play an important role in any solution.
Which is why the current government’s "Welcome Home to Nova Scotia" immigration strategy is welcome. Aiming to double our number of new immigrants to 7,200 each year by 2020, it focuses—finally—on identifying and targeting compatible newcomers instead of counting the quick bucks we can take from anyone with bucks to spare, then matching their skills with our community needs.
Nova Scotia’s average farmer, for example, is 58 years old. Can we attract immigrant farmer-entrepreneurs to take over and expand the province's agricultural sector? What about temporary workers and international students who’ve already experienced Nova Scotia’s charms? Can we make it easier for them to stay? How about more easily confirming the credentials of those trained abroad? And welcoming family members of those already here?
Let’s hope we’ve got our priorities straight this time. We probably won’t get another chance to make a good first impression.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Hypocrisy, patronage and the cleansing power of transparency
Michel Samson is right on both counts. The Liberal MLA is right to acknowledge that last week’s collection of NDP appointees to various provincial agencies, boards and commissions is clearly a well qualified lot.
But he is right too to point out the unbecoming hypocrisy of a government that—while in opposition—railed so righteously against patronage picks.
Last week’s 16 rubber-stamped, Grade-A choices include a former federal NDP MP, a former provincial NDP MLA, a former provincial NDP candidate, the father of a current NDP cabinet minister and a party donor. The government, Samson noted, had already appointed another former NDP MLA and the son of a former provincial and national leader to significant positions too.
But interestingly, neither Samson nor Chris D’Entremont—a Tory member of the Human Resources Committee, who also tut-tutted the NDP’s hypocrisy—appear to want the process changed.
Someday, they said without saying, it may be their turn to reward friends and punish enemies, and they don’t want their own plum-proffering proscribed. (Perhaps the real reason the NDP opposed the system in opposition was that, at the time, they couldn’t imagine becoming the government…)
Our appointments process is far better than it used to be—how could it not?—but it can still be improved.
These days, if you apply for any of dozens of now-publicly-advertised positions—from the Agricultural Marshlands Conservation Commission to the Crane Operators Appeal Board—your application is first vetted by a non-partisan committee of civil servants and lay appointees.
The names of those chosen to do the choosing are published on the government’s website.
Transparent.
Once the vetters come up with their list of qualified candidates, it is passed on to the minister responsible who gets to make the final choice.
Accountable.
But we never get to decide for ourselves if the minister has chosen the best qualified candidate because the other names on the short list aren’t made public.
Which is neither transparent nor accountable.
It would be a small change but making those names public would give us the information we need to make up our own minds about whether the best qualified candidate got the position.
Transparent. And accountable.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Do boots on the ground equal votes in the hand?
Time flies when you’re having fun. Ask Darrell Dexter. Next month, he will celebrate his second anniversary as the province’s first ever NDP premier. In two years—probably less—he will try to become Nova Scotia’s NDP premier to win a second majority government… or, perhaps, settle for a minority… or, failing one of the above—and politics being politics—not be Ignatieffed in his own riding.
His fate then may well depend on what happens in Ottawa today.
Today, Dexter leads a high-level, high-profile delegation of business and government leaders to Toryland. Their goal: to browbeat, sweet-talk, cajole Stephen Harper’s newly re-elected, no-reason-to-like-Nova-Scotia majority government into spreading some largesse our way.
The stakes are billions of dollars high.
Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding, for example, wants a sweet piece of the navy’s upcoming $35-billion shipbuilding program. At a “Ships Start Here” kick-off pep rally Friday, Dexter touted consultants’ reports claiming the project could generate 11,500 spin-off jobs and inject $800 million a year into the provincial economy.
“Winning this bid,” Dexter declared, “would equate to hosting the Olympics each year for 30 years.”
And then, of course, there’s the Lower Churchill, a $6.2-billion Newfoundland-Nova Scotia power generating and transmission project Dexter has grandly called “our Canadian Pacific Railway.” Dexter is fond of metaphor and simile.
If Lower Churchill happens—and Stephen Harper promised to make it happen during the federal campaign—Nova Scotia workers would be in line for a chunk of its 45,000 person-years worth of work. And the Lower Churchill itself would become a stable source of forever energy for Nova Scotians—and for future industrial development.
While Dexter will remind Ottawa of the prime minister’s Lower Churchill pledge, he’ll stickhandle more delicately past Harper’s seeming reluctance to cough up $47 million finance Halifax’s infamous downtown convention centre. Please!
And, among those many other supplications, Dexter will also pitch yet another provincial capital project: a new stadium.
If Dexter can convince Ottawa to fund any or all of the above, it will mean construction boots on the ground in time for the next provincial election.
Which could make Dexter’s hopes for re-election more likely.
Which, of course, is the idea.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.