Front Burner - Two Newfoundlanders on the province's confounding election

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

With an election this week, two Newfoundlanders, CBC reporter David Cochrane and radio host Tom Power dig into the many issues facing the province, and how voter apathy has spread during the campaign.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. As I talk about it, I can feel and smell everything that I did back then. And he looks down at me, I'm looking up at him, and he says, that's my little girl. It's a 30-year-old homicide where we don't have anybody charged and convicted.

Felt like a murderer had gotten away with something. Tell me now, did you have anything to do with the murder? Someone Knows Something with David Ridgen, Season 5. Now available. Go to cbc.ca slash sks. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Hi, I'm Tom Power. And if that didn't give it away, I have Tom Power here with me today, host of Q on CBC Radio. Hi, Jamie. How's it going?

So you all may know this. Tom is from Newfoundland. Newfoundland. Newfoundland. Listen, Jamie has been working very hard. I want to give her some credit. I've been giving her tips on how to pronounce... So the election is for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I should be clear about that. And the name of the island is? Newfoundland. Newfoundland. Jamie, you're killing it.

Newfoundland. There we go. You're doing a great job. Yeah. Anyhow, about a week ago, I get this text from Tom. Tell me what this text said. So I was sitting at my desk. I was reading about the Newfoundland election, following the great coverage of my colleagues back at CBC Newfoundland, but finding that a lot of my friends on social media were not necessarily talking about the Newfoundland election too much, including my friends up here. So I said, Jamie, I want to talk about the Newfoundland election.

And I have this theory that no one wants to win it. So Tom has some questions about the Newfoundland election. So we're going to call up our colleague. David Cogger is now based in Ottawa, but he's also from Newfoundland. And for years he was covering the province. I mean, to me, he's sort of my OG. Like he's the guy who when Danny Williams was premier and there was this great love for Danny Williams, he and a number of reporters, but he

was pushing back against Danny Williams. And I just felt like me and my friends at least hung on every single word he had about the analysis of the problems of the province. So today we're going to talk about the Newfoundland election. We're going to ask the question, does anyone want to win? That's coming up on Frontburner. Okay, so we're going to get David Cochran on the line. David, are you there? I'm here. Hi, guys. Hello. What are you at, Dave?

Hey, Tommy. How's it going? Good, good. So Tom's been giving me a very hard time about how I pronounce Newfoundland and Labrador. It's a tongue twister. I mean, a lot of people get screwed up on Newfoundland. They call it Newfoundland or Newfoundland. But, you know, Labrador even trips up Dwight Ball, the current premier, because he drops one of the R's and calls it Labrador. You know, I remember 86. It was a great day for Newfoundland and Labrador. Newfoundland and Labradorians. Newfoundland and Labrador. That's

the way he says it. He says it really fast, so you kind of miss it. But if you listen to it, it's not done right. Okay. Okay, so let's get going here. So David, Tom suggested to me the other day that nobody wants to run Newfoundland. Now, I was being a little hyperbolic. I just want to point that out. But was he? That was something I felt. Like, I felt when I was watching the election,

I was like, does anyone even want to win this thing? Yeah. Like, so that's why I texted Jamie. The way forward is a multi-year plan to advance our province. I speak to you tonight as a new leader seeking your confidence in a difficult time. I cannot watch the disservice being done by the old-time parties to the people and the

place that I love. You know what I mean, Dave? Yeah, no, I get what you're saying. I mean, look, there's no shortage of people back home who want to run the government. There's always someone who's interested in being premier. It's kind of a cool job. Yes. But what's lacking, I think, is do they really want to deal with the fundamental issues that need to be dealt with? Because Newfoundland is at a very interesting point in its history right now where it's an existential moment for Newfoundland and Labrador where the population is aging rapidly. And there's no young people and there's no children. And the economic challenges are severe and the geographic and demographic challenges are severe and the serious conversation about those serious issues,

it's just not happening. Okay, so let's run through some of these big issues and let's start with demographics. So, I mean, you know, Newfoundland is becoming the oldest province in Canada. Why? Well, it has to do with a lot of things. And it goes back to when I was just in university and the federal government shut down the cod fishery. Laid-off workers will get $225 a week. The payments will begin in 14 days and last for 10 weeks.

Six generations down the line passed out, and he's done nothing but S-H-I-T to us. And with that, fishermen stormed the doors of John Crosby's news conference. They were enraged over a compensation package they say is unacceptable. Over the next decade, the population of the province dropped from about 620,000 to about 520,000. And in 1996, Newfoundland and Labrador was the youngest province in the country, median age of 34. Now it's the oldest with a median age of 46. So that's a trend line that screams death for your resident population. You have more deaths each year than you have births each year. The school, the K-12 school system, the student population, over the last 20 years has been cut in half.

When I graduated high school, there was about 130,000 kids in school. Now there's 65,000 kids in the entire school system across the province. So you take those numbers, Jamie, spread out over the 14th largest island in the world and the vastness of Labrador, and they've got a settlement pattern that is based on a pre-industrial fishery that no longer exists. And there's just not enough money to support that many communities with that few people over that much space. I don't think there's any winning. I think we're looking at a population decline that we've never seen before. We used to have a lot of stuff one time, but we don't have so much now because not any people here, right? In the future, we'll be here as a town, but it'll be, you know, they often call this the forgotten coast.

So I want to get to the money and the natural resources in a second, but would it be fair to say that one of the reasons why the province is becoming so old is also because people are leaving the province? I mean, you've got young people like Tom and then old people like me, and we've all left in the past decade, right? Yeah. And this is the challenge. The fishery closure was the great accelerator because so many people, particularly in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, could work in the fishery

because of the seasonal nature of it and then, you know, employment insurance and allowed people to stay. And when that went down, the economic impact on Newfoundland and Labrador of closing the fishery would be the equivalent of closing the auto industry in Ontario. Tom, you've moved away, although I think for you it's, you know, probably because you got this job. Yeah, I mean, I had an interesting situation where I moved away to do my radio show, but that doesn't stop the fact that everywhere I go across Canada, whether I'm touring with my band, I mean, it's always been this way.

But I'm running into Newfoundlanders everywhere I go. But it feels like more and more of my graduating class than even maybe five years ago are living in Ontario or living in Alberta or living in B.C. right now. Friends of mine who said they'd always stay, friends of mine who are starting to raise families have chosen to leave around the time that they're starting to raise families because they want to make sure that their children have the right resources as well. It makes me, you know, incredibly sad. And I still go home and I'm still friends with a lot of people back home. I want to make sure I point that out. You know, a lot of people are staying. But yeah, there's no shortage of people like me who've left. And David, earlier you mentioned natural resources, too. So let's talk about oil for a second. So I know oil prices have impacted the Newfoundland

economy. And what has the global downturn in oil done to the province? Well, it's two things. There's been a drop in production because a lot of the operating oil fields are sort of past what you call peak production. So they're just producing fewer barrels of oil than they did. And the price has dropped. And a lot of people use that to complain. But it's a little bit misleading. Newfoundland and Labrador doesn't have the same problems with its oil sector that Western Canada does. It's on tidewater. It's offshore. You don't need a pipeline. You load it onto a tanker, and then it goes to the global market, so you get the top price.

You get the same price for oil there that you get in Norway. So you don't have that problem. And Newfoundland and Labrador doesn't really have a revenue problem. There's enough oil production there for there to be enough money to provide for the place. There's a spending problem. The old progressive conservative governments ran deficits in Newfoundland and Labrador. They were projecting oil barrel prices of $125 a barrel. So that is nearly double what it is today, and the former governments still couldn't balance the books because they gave massive raises to the public service,

then they went on a hiring spree, and then they did a significant expansion of social programs and infrastructure programs, all based on one-time windfall money from oil. It's like relying on bingo winnings to pay your mortgage. It's not sustainable. Got it, got it. Dave, you know I tried that for a couple of years. I can't believe you bring that up right now.

That's why you moved to Toronto. That's ultimately why I had to move to Toronto. Don't we all just try to scratch lottery tickets? Where the downturn is really hurting is the rural Newfoundland economy in particular because a lot of people who live in rural Newfoundland on the island, more specifically, would go to work in Alberta and would go to work in Saskatchewan and they'd bring the money back. That money is not there to be made anymore, at least not at the rates as it once was. So there's been a real hit to the economic health of rural Newfoundland and Labrador, which was being sustained by sort of fly-in, fly-out workers and remittance incomes

coming back to the island. For instance, again, in my graduating class, it was common. Like, you know, essentially everyone in my school went to Alberta, you know. And as a musician, it was a great market, you know. As a traditional Newfoundland musician, oftentimes we do gigs in Alberta. We do gigs in Grand Prairie. We do gigs in Fort McMurray because there was a ton of Newfoundlanders. But even just arts-wise, those gigs have largely gone away.

There were direct flights from Deer Lake, which is a small town on the west coast of the island, to Fort McMurray. Let's move on to another big issue that we have to talk about, which is debt. How bad is the province's debt? Are we the Greece of Canada, David? Is that what's going on?

Without the weather and the great food, you're not far off. Look, Newfoundland and Labrador has by far the worst balance sheet of all of the provinces. You've got a net debt that hovers around $15 billion. That is by far the highest in the country. And you stack on top of that a hydro project that everybody's going to have to pay for, and the debt burden just gets a whole lot worse. Okay, so you mentioned, I'm going to guess that some of this debt is because of sort of the overspending and then the drop in oil prices, as we just talked about. I know another thing to understand the full picture of the debt in this province,

we have to talk about Muskrat Falls. And Tom's just going to sit this one out. I got a family conflict because of Muskrat Falls. So I'm going to walk out the door. He's just going to tap out for a second. I'll go for a smoke or something like that. Don't worry about me. I have a family conflict on Muskrat Falls, too, because my family back home is going to have to pay for it.

Okay. So tell me about Muskrat Falls and why your family back home is going to have to pay for it. Okay, so tell me about Muskrat Falls and why your family back home is going to have to pay for it. Okay, so Muskrat Falls is a large-scale hydro project in central Labrador that was sold as a way of solving the future energy demands of the island of Newfoundland. Through an unprecedented link to the North American electricity grid, the Muskrat Falls project will unlock the potential of Newfoundland and Labrador's energy warehouse and help drive our economy for the next 100 years. It's a hydro project that is controversial

because it's on Indigenous territory. It's being dammed. So the Prime Minister didn't seem too interested in meeting with Indigenous folks who are affected by the Muskrat Falls dam. dammed. And power lines are being run underwater to the island and then from the island to Cape Breton to bring surplus power to Nova Scotia. It was sold to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador as a clean, permanent, renewable energy source because a lot of the energy on the island right now is generated by burning bunker sea oil. And in the era of climate change and carbon pricing, that is not a sustainable option long

term. The problem is, is it was sold to people as a $6 billion project. It's now at least a $13 billion project. Nalcor's new chair, Stan Marshall, says the project never should have been started, but it's too late to scrap it. In my opinion, the Muskrat Falls project was not the right choice for the power needs of this province. Okay, so when you say that your family's going to have to pay for this, you're saying that this $13 billion cost overrun, that cost is going to be put onto them? Yeah, it's going to show up in their power rates. So here's what it would mean. Typically, the power rates on the island are about $0.12 a kilowatt hour. Under Muskrat Falls, they're going to go up to about $0.23 a kilowatt hour.

Right. So I had a three-bedroom house in St. John's, a little over 2,000 square feet. My energy costs per year, it's all one bill, was about $3,000. Under Muskrat Falls, I'd be paying $6,000. Under Muskrat Falls, I'd be paying $6,000. Now, you go back to what we talked about with demographics and age, pensioners, fixed income, low economic opportunity. How is that sustainable in the long term? So the solutions that are being discussed in this election for Muskrat Falls is to subsidize the power rates. You did a tremendous amount of work in fixing the problem.

Well, I agree you have. We finally copied my rate mitigation plan. We changed the oversight committee. Our rate mitigation is in place, sir. Yours is not. To take money out of the general revenues of the government and pour it into the project, which is technically owned by the government, to keep rates low by subsidizing it. Hard thing to do, though, with less and less people. Hard thing to do with less and less people and with not a lot of money.

And also it's the sort of thing that would take $500 to $700 million a year to keep the rates only going up by about 50% instead of 100%. So, Jamie, you could get to a situation that when the budget comes out every year from the provincial government, the rate subsidy line item for Muskrat Falls could be the fourth largest thing in the budget behind health care, post-secondary and secondary education combined, the interest on your debt, and then a giant subsidy to keep power rates at a marginally affordable level. Wow, that's extraordinary. It's an enormous challenge. Tom is back from his smoke break. I'm back. Yeah, I'm properly fumigated. I'm feeling pretty good. So I've got a better sense now of a province with a lot of intractable issues, an agey population, fewer economic opportunities, a very big debt load, a load that will balloon even more with muskrat falls, as you mentioned.

And I can see how this is like such a daunting thing to take on. And let's talk now about how all these issues are playing into the election. Well, there are four parties running, but really only two are in play to form government because only two of them are running full slates of candidates. And that's the incumbent liberals and the opposition conservatives. Dwight Ball is the sitting Premier. He is the leader of the Liberal Party. I have covered and interviewed every Premier in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador with the exception of Joey Smallwood, who was

dead before I became a journalist. And Ball, while a well-meaning fella, is one of the least charismatic and engaging politicians to ever run the place. It's a place that tends to produce oversized personalities. Ball is not one of them. I encourage you to ask questions to the candidates that come to your door.

Ask them about the plan. Ask them about their future. We've got a clear plan, a clear platform, leading this province to a brighter future. He's a Pentecostal pharmacist from Deer Lake and a rural businessman, a very low-key kind of guy. And he's also extremely unpopular right now. He is polling below his party, and that is an interesting dynamic in the election. His main rival is a guy named Chess Crosby, who's the leader of the Progressive Conservatives.

If the Crosby name sounds familiar, it should because his father is John Crosby, who's a former federal cabinet minister who once sought the federal PC leadership and was a senior minister in the Mulroney and Clark governments. Ladies and gentlemen, madame et monsieur, the Crosby shuttle was going to take us right to 24 Sussex Drive.

Chess Crosby's not his dad. He's not sort of the charismatic, larger-than-life figure his father was. He's a lawyer, a class action and personal injury lawyer. You just filed your taxes. Are you better off today than you were four years ago? You just filled your gas tank. Are you better off? You just paid your insurance premium. Are you better off? You just paid your insurance premium. Are you better off?

PCs I speak with back home say if they had a more conventional and charismatic leader, they'd be walking into government on Thursday. But because of the Chess Crosby-Dwight Ball dynamic, the unpopular premier and the unusual opposition leader, they kind of balance each other out in a way. Interesting. And Tom, I know you've been watching these debates. How would you describe them? premier and the unusual opposition leader, they kind of balance each other out in a way. Interesting. And Tom, I know you've been watching these debates. How would you describe them? What was interesting to me watching the debates was that it didn't seem to be a debate of ideas.

There wasn't as much, here's what I'm going to do for the province. Here's how I'm going to fix Muskrat Falls. Here's how I'm going to fix the debt. Here's how I'm going to fix the aging population. It was simply this other candidate is not going to do a good job at it. Now, what are you going to do? I don't know. But this other, yeah, more negative. Chess Crosby is not going to do a great job with this. Chess Crosby saying Dwight Ball is not going to do a good job with this without hearing a concrete set of ideas.

The NDP at this point has no platform. And the PCs, well, theirs is riddled with errors and fallacies. If you're happy with the last four years of Dwight Paul, you know how to vote. The Liberals are only working for their rich friends and themselves. They too have failed to put the people of this province first. Which I think leads to why there are so many

undecided voters right now. I mean, I saw CBC say something along the lines of is it 39 percent? Yeah, a couple weeks ago it was up to 40 percent of undecided voters. That's a massive number. Well, I'll ask you guys as journalists, is that a biggest number you've come across for undecided voters?

David? Yeah, it's big. I think part of it is there's a frustration and an apathy and an anxiety back home. And in talking to the parties as they try to predict and prepare for voting day on Thursday, that apathy, that anger, that volatility, that undecidedness, nobody would put money on a particular outcome. Tom's right about the debate. There was no grand solution. There was no grand vision. I sort of described it as watching two bowls of vanilla ice cream melt in the sun.

There was no energy. There was not a lot of color. It was a lot of finger pointing and blame. Mr. Ball set a record for broken promises. Mr. Crosby has shown there's one rule for him and a different rule for everyone else. But speaking of things I've never seen before, I know that NDP leader Alison Coffin, she suggested, and I want to be clear here, she suggested that potentially voters who don't have an NDP candidate in their district should spoil their ballots, should vote for neither a liberal or a PC. They can vote with their hearts. They can spoil their ballot. They can write to the government and say this was a mockery of democracy and let them know that they are very upset with the way that this election was handled. Dave, I can't think of a time I've ever heard of that before.

No, and that's most of them, right? I mean, because the NDP are only running 14 seats in the 40 districts that are available. We call them districts in Newfoundland and Labrador, by the way, not ridings. They're only running in 14, and they sort of blame the fact that this election was supposed to be in the fall, but it's happening in the spring, and now they're in a situation where they may not win either one of their seats. They just don't do the work between elections to build district associations. So this idea of spoiling the ballots, oh boy, I don't like that idea at all. It just seems, it's dumb. It sounds like this is really a two-party race and that quite possible that this election is fought on inches. There have been a few scandals in the headlines.

I'm just curious to get your take briefly on whether or not you think they're going to move the needle at all. For the Liberals, there was this Skategate scandal. Like, yeah, former MHA Dale Kirby is calling for an investigation into the Liberals who got tickets to Caitlin Osmond's figure skating show in Marystown last year. So there's a great figure skater, Canadian figure skater to Caitlin Osmond's figure skating show in Marystown last year. So there's a great figure skater, Canadian figure skater named Caitlin Osmond, who spent most of her life in Alberta.

She's an Olympic medalist and a world champion. Caitlin Osmond has earned for the free program 152 points. But her family comes from Marystown on the Burren Peninsula, which is right next door to where my mom's family is from, actually. And after her great victories in the Olympics, they wanted to have her come home and put on an exhibition in the Marystown rink. Everybody wanted to be part of this. The tickets were in demand. Caitlin Awesome was coming home. It was a hero's welcome. A guy named Mark Brown, who's a member of the House of Assembly and a parliamentary secretary formerly to the Premier, young fella in his mid-20s. He was put in charge of trying to get tickets for the premier and everybody to go.

He got 34 tickets. But a paper trail emerged of his assistant brokering a $1,500 grant from the government to the skating rink in return for the tickets. This is a Bev Oda expensive glass of orange juice scandal. Oh, yes. It's something people can understand. And get outraged about. Okay. This is a Bev Oda expensive glass of orange juice scandal. Oh, yes. It's something people can understand. And get outraged about. Exactly.

You are using your office to get a figure skating ticket and normal people don't get those seats because of your influence. That is not going to, that does not sit well. Okay.

So this is a real problem for Mark Brown whose seat is now on the line. Liberal leader Dwight Ball brushed off the allegations. There's nothing there. I paid my way. I paid for my tickets. I paid for my accommodations. I paid for my way back. on the line. Liberal leader Dwight Ball brushed off the allegations. There's nothing there. I paid my way.

I paid for my tickets. I paid for my accommodations, paid for my way back. There's nothing there. We all know what this is about. OK, so we've got this is a Liberal scandal. And then recently for the Progressive Conservatives, like this last minute scandal erupted over candidate named Michael Normore. And I should point out this scandal took over social media in Newfoundland.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram completely consumed by the scandal when it came out. Yeah, Michael Normore is a conservative candidate in Cartwright-Lance-Eclair, which is what we call the south coast of Labrador. He essentially has some things on his social media that were anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, and anti-immigration. I'm conservative, and I'm not in favor of same-sex marriage. You know, that's the way I was brought up, and I'm not in favor of same-sex marriage. That's the way I would run it. That's my belief. And so that became an issue for Chess Crosby, who initially defended the candidate.

The fact that he has conservative views on those issues, he recognizes are a matter of personal opinion. The story went out, the outcry was large, and then predictably, they dropped the candidate. And he understands the situation and the anxiety he's provoked. But if elected, he would not be in the PC caucus. It is a classic failure of issues management where you stand by an obvious scandal only to take the hit and then end up doing the obvious thing after a day or two of really bad headlines. So that was six days before voting day that that happened. The Tories need to gain in Metro St. John's, where more progressive voters live than in some areas,

but they also need to gain in central Newfoundland. And Jamie, that's where a lot of religious Pentecostal voters live. So Chess Crosby was in a tough spot of alienating his metro base, but potentially upsetting some of his more socially conservative potential voters in central Newfoundland. It's interesting, Jamie, because this whole time I'm trying to come up with a closer that gives us some kind of hope for the future, you know. And when I was living in Newfoundland, which was around the same time Dave was reporting on Danny Williams,

as I mentioned before he got on, it was a time of great, you know, hope. Our popularity is based not so much on me, it's based on the fact that I think I represent, in my own heart and soul, the hearts and souls of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, how we've been heard done by in some respects over the years, but how we now have a renewed optimism.

We were going to take back our province, and we were going to separate, and we were going to separate and we were going to, and every bar I went to in Ontario that had a Newfoundlanders in ownership had a picture of Danny Williams up behind the bar. It was a different time. So this anger that Dave mentions, in addition to the apathy, is something that's really consuming Newfoundland right now and a lot of Newfoundlanders. I like to believe that we're resilient people. We've survived an awful lot. We've survived commission of government. We survived joining Confederation. We survived paying down our war debt. This is the first time I've seen this kind of anger,

this kind of apathy from Newfoundlanders, at least in my social media feed. But Tom, that hope was a false hope. It was the dot-com bubble of Newfoundland and Labrador optimism. It was built on an oil boom. It was a boom that was wasted in a lot of ways. Okay. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. David, thank you. I'm going to keep Tom around. We're going to talk about the Raptors.

But David, thank you so much. Thank you, guys. David, do you think we'll be able to go home again? Someone's getting married this summer, so we'll be back before that. Okay, good. I'm going back for the 24th of May. We'll see how that works out. All right.

Have a good time. Say hi to everyone. I will, I will. See you. Okay, so complete 180 from Newfoundland. Tom, are you still recovering from Sunday night's

Raptors game? I am. I tell you, I play a gig every Sunday night in the east end of Toronto. I play Irish music. So every now and then I'd sneak away from my gig and I'd look at the score and I'd stream it on my phone a little bit. And so I drive home, I get through the door, and I'm going to catch the last of the fourth quarter. I'd be able to watch it live.

I got home and I was like, oh man, only 20 seconds left. Little did I know that would be the greatest 20 seconds of the fourth quarter. I'm going to be able to watch it live. I got home and I was like, oh, man, only 20 seconds left. Little did I know that would be the greatest 20 seconds of my adult life. Is this the tagger? Goal! The reason why we're talking about this is I just want to note that we did this very fun episode a few weeks back about how this one scrappy underdog team, the Raptors, got to where they are today. We talked to beloved Raptors play-by-play announcer Jack Armstrong. And you can find it in our feed.

And the Raptors play the Milwaukee Bucks on Wednesday. And if the National Basketball Association is not your thing, I want to point out the St. John's Edge Canadian basketball team doing incredibly well right now. Also setting attendance records. So things aren't all bad in Newfoundland and Labrador. Now you can go back. Thank you. Okay, I'm Jamie Poisson. I'm Tom Bauer.

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