DON'T EXPECT NEW OVERSIGHT MEMBERS TO BE WALLFLOWERS

The Ball Administration recently made four new appointments to the Muskrat Falls Oversight Committee. Two — professional engineer Jason Muise and Memorial Economics Professor Dr. Jim Feehan — are longstanding anti-Muskrateers, “naysayers” in the idiom of the Wiliams/Dunderdale era.

Now the Committee has three who tried their best to warn successive Tory administrations of Muskrat folly, including Bern Coffey — the Clerk of the Executive Council, who is the Chair.

While those appointments seem a step in the right direction, for the present I am inclined to counsel caution that they actually represent a shift in the way oversight is performed.

Two others — an accountant and a former bureaucrat — were appointed along with Muise and Feehan.

The four joined the Deputy Ministers who have inhabited the Committee from the very beginning. Of course, the latter should only be ex-officio, available solely to give support to the independent members of the Committee.

MUSKRAT TAX IDEA: WHAT WAS JIM FEEHAN THINKING?

I sat in the audience at St. John's Rotary Club, last week, as Memorial Economics Professor, Dr. Jim Feehan, explained how successive years of excessive spending and a precipitous decline in revenues, much of it anticipated, had given rise to the province’s current fiscal mess.  He took time to explain the limited options available to the government, quantified the savings associated with service and program cuts, and suggested possible new revenues, all in pursuit of self-rescue.

Lunch was already over before he launched into the proposal for a new “Muskrat Falls Financing Tax”.  Luckily, the normally thoughtful Professor was empathetic enough not to have subverted decent gastronomy before exposing the audience to the most recent innovation of the ‘dismal science’.

A “Muskrat Falls Financing Tax”, an economic concept? Not really; not in the way of Piketty or the Nobel winning Klugman. It was just an idea; perhaps, like hundreds of others. Except, this one had more implications, an unusual rationale; it was presumptuous, to say the least, even for an economist.