A ballot question

Control of offshore resources is vital to our future

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

There are just 15 sitting days of the House of Assembly between now and Christmas.

That ought to be a riotous concern to everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador since it means the government is doing very little beyond spending way more than we can afford and what it *is* doing is not properly accounted for to their elected representatives and to the people who have to pay the bills.

The mob currently running the place are the least transparent, least accountable bunch to hold office since 2003, which is saying something since we are in the Age of Accountability, the Age of Dannyism.

Arguably, then, this is the least transparent, least accountable bunch since 1949. We’d have to go back a century or more to find another lot like this one.

But that’s not the story for today.

Bill 90 on the order paper for the current sitting is titled Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Newfoundland and Labrador Act. It will change the Atlantic Accord (1985). It will mirror changes already made by the federal parliament in Bill 49.

The people behind these changes will talk about offshore wind.

In announcing an agreement signed last December, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador made it sound like they’d gained control of the seabed inside 17 identified bays across the province and set up a definition that would let GNL control other bays along the coastline for windfarms.

The agreement will “enable Newfoundland and Labrador to take the regulatory lead on offshore wind projects within its inland bays to enable the development of offshore wind projects in Newfoundland and Labrador that will power the province’s economy forward.”

The agreement would set up a “clear process for Newfoundland and Labrador to administer land tenure and life-cycle regulation for offshore wind.”

With the predictable and efficient approach presented by the MOU, our governments are sending a direct signal to investors, workers and communities that Newfoundland and Labrador and Canada are collaborating to unlock offshore renewable energy development within provincial bays while affirming our shared commitment to joint management under the Atlantic Accord Acts as part of a thriving and sustainable offshore energy sector in the province.

Both Premier Andrew Furey and then-minister Seamus O’Regan made a big deal of Newfoundland and Labrador being the “principal beneficiary” of our resources. There is a quote in the announcement frome ach of them using those two magic words.

There are two problems. The easy one first:

The process set up is not clear, predictable, or efficient.

Along some parts of the coastline a developer would deal with the provincial government. In others, they’d deal with a completely different set of rules set up by the offshore energy board. And all along the coast of Labrador and on at least half the island’s coast, any company that wanted to develop wind farms on land *and* offshore would have to deal with the provincial government for the landward development and the offshore board for the ones on the seabed close to shore.

That leads us to the big problem, which is that in cutting this deal, Andrew Furey and the provincial government signed away control of everything out to 12 miles to the offshore board along most of the coast. In the Great Fight of the 1970s and 1980s, the federal and provincial government’s each made court references to ask which of them owned what. Everyone remembers the 1984 Supreme Court of Canada decision but they only remember the part in which the Court said everything on the continental shelf 12 miles and more from shore belonged to the federal government.

They forget the mention in the first part of the SCC decision about the *other* reference, the one by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador to the Court of Appeal in St. John’s. That one determined that while the federal government owned everything from a point 12 miles out to sea to the edge of the continental shelf, all the seabed from the beach out to 12 miles from shore belonged to Newfoundland and Labrador.

The federal government never appealed the decision, so it stands as the law. The 1984 Supreme Court decision specifically avoided dealing with the 1983 Court of Appeal decision because it expected an appeal to come. The 1985 Atlantic Accord only dealt with oil and gas resources. Newfoundland and Labrador never surrendered control of the seabed inside the 12 mile limit. But politicians and bureaucrats apparently forgot.

So when Andrew Furey got all fired up about ensuring Newfoundland and Labrador was the principal beneficiary of offshore wind development, he seems not to hsvr known he already had it. GNL already controlled the seabed inside 12 miles without any need to ask permission from the federal government about anything. And for everything beyond 12 miles, in the area where people were most likely to develop any wind energy in the near future, the provincial government already had what it needed in the original offshore agreement that created the offshore energy board.

As it was, the talks that led to December took way longer than necessary. There were really only two options:

1. Work with the dividing line at 12 miles and figure out how to handle where the two governments’ jurisdictions overlapped, or

2. As with oil and gas, let the offshore board run offshore wind from the beach out to sea as well as oil and gas and do it for the same reason the provincial government put its jurisdiction together with the federal one in the 1985 deal: that way the provincial government got to treat the resource of the whole continental shelf as if it were inside the province’s jurisdiction without really giving anything up.

This third option - the one that apparently involved lots of fighting to get Ottawa to let Newfoundland and Labrador say it was principal beneficiary of lands it already owned - was as crazy as building Muskrat Falls and giving all the benefit to Nova Scotia. Newfoundland and Labrador got *nothing* in return for the give-aways in Bill C-49 and whatever is in Bill 90.

This should be an issue in the coming federal and provincial elections. No party comes out looking good in it since federally, the Conservatives - with two exceptions - and New Democrats supported the government’s bill.

But someone can look better. Provincially, the Liberals will support the give-away. The New Democrats will likely do so as well since it is supposedly about green energy. It remains a question what the Pea Seas will do.

Bill Marshall was the provincial energy minister at the time of the Atlantic Accord deal and he had been an important cabinet minister before he took over the energy portfolio. On the 20th anniversary of the Accord in 2005, Marshall said that the current crop of politicians didn’t understand the importance of the Accord. He was right, as this latest escapade shows.

There are two reasons for this to be an election issue.

First, there is the give-away itself. Second, there is the secrecy of the whole business. There was no public discussion of anything before the announcement and - unless the Pea Seas fight Bill 90 - this will be law before any of us have digested lunch on the day it shows up in the House. If the current give this away for nothing, they can give it all away orvtrap a future government.

That give-away and secrecy is not unusual for the current mob but in this bill the rest of us should find a reason to say we’ve had enough. After all if the politicians and bureaucrats do not recognize the value of the hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of seabed the province controls for the very economic development the December 2023 release talks about, then they need to learn the lesson with resistance from the parties in the House and other leaders in the community. Since we cannot count on the Bored of Trade or the other weak voice at Energy NL, some other crowd or improvised gaggle will have to speak up, too.

Control of our resources is crucial to the future of Newfoundland and Labrador just as it was in the 1982 election, if not more so. There is enormous potential in Newfoundland and Labrador but we have squandered it over the past 20 years. It’s time to stop. If the future of the province isn’t a ballot question in the next election, we shall have no future worth speaking of.

Make the choice to be informed. Become a Bond Papers subscriber