Throne Speech 2015 was the kind of document you’d expect from a group of politicians who are out of new ideas. People are making a big deal out of the review of the provincial curriculum for K-12 schools. That’s what the folks in the education department do for a living.
Continue readingTag: unsound fiscal management
The Sir Robert Bond Papers: “We are an island economy” and other nonsense #nlpoli
CBC’s On Point this weekend delivered up some all-too-familiar conversation on the budget and a political panel talking about Judy Manning but sometimes you have to look closely at things to appreciate the value in public comments by politicians and reporters. In an interview with David Cochrane, finance minister Ross
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The Whizzo Quality Assortment #nlpoli
On the outside, the spring budget for 2014 looks like a delicious assortment of goodies for everyone. You can tell it is delectable because everyone is shouting for joy and drooling over their good fortune. There is not a single group who have had their hands out for government money
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: How do they run things? Budget Lead-Up #nlpoli
Finance minister Charlene Johnson will read the new provincial budget speech on Thursday. In keeping with the provincial Conservative tradition, though, they’ve been announcing bits and pieces of the budget already. On Monday, for example, justice minister Darin King announced that the new budget would contain money for 20 new
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The Politics of Oil and Budgets #nlpoli
When any country or province depends heavily on the money that comes from resource extraction, it affects politics there. Political scientist Michael Ross is probably the most recent author on the subject. Terry Karl has also written extensively on the resource curse. She wrote of the best known books on
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Marshall’s release doesn’t match DBRS public statements #nlpoli
Simply put, Tom Marshall’s most recent news release about the report by Dominion Bond Rating Service doesn’t match what the bond rating agency said in a news release about the provincial government’s finances. You can see that pretty clearly if you read the whole release from DBRS. The release indicates
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Another call for an oil investment fund #nlpoli
In a column in the weekend Ottawa Citizen, Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute made a convincing argument for investing provincial government oil revenue in an investment fund: Natural resource revenues, by contrast, gyrate wildly. The temptation, when prices are high, is to pretend those revenues will always exist,
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The Bow-Wow Parliament lacks bark and bite #nlpoli
In the wake of the latest revelations of financial mismanagement in the provincial government, SRBP has been looking at some of the possible contributing developments over the past decade or more. Last week, SRBP noted that it appears the provincial government broke up the treasury board secretariat around 2007. They
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The Root of the Problem #nlpoli
Mr. Speaker, if the members opposite think that the level of scrutiny that we do over a $3 billion expenditure in health care is to take every single health authority and work down line by line by line through every piece of that, I do not know what they are
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