Two pieces last week from AllNL, otherwise known as allnewfoundlandlabrador.com that are worth whatever you wind up paying for this perfectly niched and always useful news service.
First, a very long - for them - piece by editor Alex Bill on what it would take to make a good deal between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro on Churchill Falls, Gull Island, and the rest. It appeared on February 15.
If you don’t have a subscription, get one. The only way you can read the link is with a subscription. And yes, I am quoted in the piece but that’s not why I recommend you get a subscription. Regular readers will know I think this is the best little newsroom in Trepassey or where ever you are in the world but have an interest in business and politics in Atlantic Canada. While other, old newsrooms are being turned into daycares - literally, in one case - this one is scrappy and informative.
Anyway, one of the things I said to Alex Bill was that the biggest obstacle to any discussion of electricity policy in the province is the lack of knowledge generally about the issue. People think they know lots, but even the simplest, most obvious things are lots in the rumour, myth, and sheer bullshit.
The cause of this is a combination of:
the political lies and misunderstandings that are spread about the 1969 Churchill Falls contract, compounded by
a general ignorance of what happened *since* 1969, which is actually way more important to understanding what is likely to happen these days, and on top of it all,
the silence about what is happening today, which just compounds the ignorance.
Paragraph Two of the 1900 odd word article by Alex.
Alex explains that he spoke to more than 20 people knowledgeable of the subject. Most spoke on condition of anonymity. He only quotes five of us - Des Sullivan, Bern Coffey, me, Mark Dobbin, and Innu Grand Chief Simon Pokue - which means that roughly one in four of his interview subjects would agree to be quoted by name. More than 75% were desperately afraid of putting their name with an opinion in public.
Now you might ask what those controversial opinions might be. Good question.
Well, it was radical stuff like the notion that:
Indigenous groups should be involved, especially if the project is on land the Indigenous groups claim,
we could get best value by putting the power up for auction,
the government should negotiate Gull and Churchill separately, or
the province should make sure Quebec agrees to let us ship surplus electricity.
Nothing really off the wall.
The auction has been in public already. Bern Coffey has said it and I included the idea in a piece I wrote before the current talks started.
The Indigenous involvement is just a big d’uh. And in fact, it’s actually mostly settled since the Innu Nation - the Indigenous group with the widely recognized land claim in the area involved - already has an agreement that covers development of Gull Island and compensation for Churchill Falls. Getting them *more* involved is a policy chocie and there are good reasons to do it. But none of that is so controversial you need to hide your face or risk being strung up in the street for saying it.
[Continues below link]
Ditto handling things as two separate talks. That’s basically a variation on something posted here last year. All sensible, on the face of it and yet three out of four people were shitting their pants at the prospect of saying those words out loud and having their name linked with it.
Seriously.
Community leaders afraid to speak.
And then people wonder why the province is so far up Shit Creek economically and, for the guv’mint, financially, that we are now paddling in the headwaters at the newly renamed Lake Danny.
But look at that last one.
The one about exporting electricity through Quebec.
Apparently, all the knowledgeable people who spoke from under a cloak of secrecy did *not* know arguably the most obvious, basic, and important thing about Labrador electricity that happened within the last 40 years.
You see, NALCOR has been able to export electricity through Quebec since the early 1990s thanks to American trade laws that affect Hydro-Quebec’s and other companies’ legal ability to do business in the United States. So access available for close to 30 years and that point slipped right by people knowledgeable about electricity policy. You can find some background in this column from the old version of Bond, in the second part of a series on hydro development in Labrador. The title is “Jerusalem, Eldorado, and Perdition.”
So, there’s no need for any guarantee from Quebec to do something Quebec cannot block in the first place without giving up their lucrative export market.
And to make matters more embarrassing for the Silent Ones, NALCOR has been exporting electricity to the United States since 2009. That’s 15 years now and these folks missed something that was widely reported.
Now admittedly, they might have the same amnesia that led newsrooms at the time to report that Danny Williams “broke the stranglehold” Quebec supposedly had not once but twice, but the story *did* get reported. This is “The Persistence of False Information.”
Be interesting to know how many were Muskrateers, like Mark Dobbin. Dobbin by the way still thinks Muskrat Falls was a great idea, just badly managed. A common excuse among the Muskrateers that ignores the fact that the people who managed it badly - like Danny Williams, Ed Martin, Gil Bennett, and the rest - are the same ones who cooked up the original Great Idea. By the way, Mark offers rationalizations to calm his cognitive dissonance, not actual reasons.
But I digress.
You can see the confirmation of my point about widespread general ignorance, even among the unignorant, as well as the consequences of the lack of public discussion, right there in the threads of Alex’s fine weave.
Boom.
Could not have asked for more.
Second piece.
Friday, a story on housing starts and how in January things were up an amazing 25%, or 100% or 1,100% depending on what you were looking at. All rosy and wonderful.
Numeracy is not just the ability to do addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. It’s logic of the “if this, then this” variety. Numeracy goes alongside literacy to form the bedrock of life and it is actually the one in which Newfoundlanders and Labradorians chronically performance worse than other Canadians. We are rubbish at literacy as well but we worse again when it comes to numbers and logic. Two thirds of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians cannot do math at a level needed to function successfully in modern society according to some estimates. The same estimates hold that about one in every two people cannot read well enough. Two in three cannot figure.
That story isn’t a problem with math, as such. It’s really a case of ginning up a story but you’ll see where this is going in a second.
The story was about Canada Mortgage and Housing reports that in January there were 70 housing starts in Newfoundland and Labrador, which were two and a half times more than the number of starts in January 2023. The other numbers related to how many of them were single family versus multi-family.
If we held that rate of 70 a month for the whole year, then we’d have fewer than 500 starts. There were 733 new starts in all of 2022 and 488 in all of 2023. So that estimate of 70 a month for the year is a reasonable forecast, considering too that in December, housing starts were 70 and that was *down* a lot from December 2022. You can get information from the provincial government on this, by the way, freely available online.
But you can see the trend is down or if not down then not very high. Really not high at all when you realize Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation thinks the province needs 60,000 new homes by 2030 to deal with population growth and other things. That would be roughly 10,000 a year.
We are building just point zero five percent of that target in other words. At that rate, we’d have 3,000 houses built by 2030 when we needed 20 times that many.
If you cannot get a picture in your head, imagine you had one buck and you needed 20.
Now you get it except it’s 60,000 housing units, which could be single homes or individual apartments.
Bit of perspective.
There are almost 50,000 households in St. John’s. That CMHC forecast would mean enough houses for a population the size of St. John’s. Take it with a grain of salt. CMHC did its work from a national level and from that perspective Newfoundland and Labrador is a rounding error.
But here’s something closer to home and likely a little more realistic. A 2023 report for the City of St. John’s on housing needs in the city.
Using the mid-level population projections, there is an estimated housing shortage of 1,110 units as of 2023. This shortage is estimated to increase to 3,080 units by 2028 and 4,315 by 2033.
Based on mid-level demand projections, the total number of required units (including the 2023 shortage) by 2028 is estimated to be 4,335 and 6,825 by 2033. Unit distribution is estimated at 29% studio/1-bedroom units (1,260 by 2028; 1,980 by 2033), 40% 2-bedroom units (1,745 by 2028; 2,750 by 2033), 18% 3-bedroom units (790 by 2028; 1,245 by 2033), and 13% 4+ bedroom units (545 by 2028; 860 by 2033). Note that all figures reported are cumulative for respective years.
Using the mid-level population projection - not the high case or low case but the middle one - the City would need almost 7,000 new housing units by 2033, or roughly a decade from now.
We are building 70 a month.
Roughly 500 a year.
We need to build 700 a year for 10 years according to the City’s experts so we are still a wee bit short. Not nearly as bad as the CMHA figure but still short. That's the story.
And if you look at the estimate of the current shortfall, we built only half the housing units we needed last year in St. John’s. The same would be true for this year at the glorious rate from the AllNL story.
At that rate, we’d still be short 7,000 houses a decade from now.
And that’s just in St. John’s.
What I said about Labrador electricity policy is true for just about everything in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Lots of people, including those directly involved, don’t know lots of basic things or make basic mistakes.
We don’t talk about things, either, to sort out mistakes, if for no other reason.
Things are bad.
Not talking makes things worse.