The jig is up

For tired political delusions

What you are looking at is someone’s idea of an exciting election statement. It comes either from the Brain Trust in Andrew Furey’s office or their marketing posse behind the most completely curated Image ever to sit in the Big Chair on the Eighth Floor.

There’s a campaign slogan: This is our time!

It is a perfect local political slogan because it has literally no meaning. It is beige and can be made to mean anything. It means the time is the Liberal’s time to win a big majority at last so Furey can frig off but you are supposed to be foolish enough to think it is your time, too. Your time for what is cleverly left out, though, in a too cute by half way. It is your time to be made a fool of. Again.

The key to making a fool out of you is in the other part of the slogan - Our resources. Our jobs. Our electricity. - as if there is some Great Deal about to come that will give you something besides an ache in the stomach and an emptier bank account.

But the whole thing is Trumpian in its delusions.

This slogan will only work if you can forget your 30 months wait for an MRI or the fact you have no family doctor and the crowd spouting that slogan have no plan to get you one and that Andrew Furey promised your electricity rates will not double but they will and more. You must forget what you need and give the Liberals what they want.

This slogan will only work if you are as ignorant of reality as the person who wrote it and the person who approved it and anyone who endorses it by sharing it thinks you are. The politicians and the marketers and the others who push this line think you are stupid. Gullible. Ignorant.

Make.

No.

Mistake.

There is a huge demand for electricity in New England. Has been for decades. The problem remains now as it has always been, which is getting it from here to there and making money at it.

That’s where the whole scheme falls apart. Always does. In the 1960s, BRINCO - the company that built Churchill Falls - could not get electricity to New York at a price the New England market would pay. There have been times in the last 15 years when we have shipped electricity for free to New England from Churchill Falls and lost money at it.

Nothing has changed. If anything it is worse. Gull Island remains further from New York than Churchill Falls and hence more costly when you want to move electricity from one to the other.

When everything was sailing along back in the crazy days of our own Proto-Trump, Danny Hisself could not sell electricity from Gull Island *anywhere* outside Newfoundland and Labrador and make money at it. That’s why he made *you* pay for Muskrat Falls and gave the electricity to Nova Scotia free of charge.

We have been down this path so many times before it is laughable anyone would try it again.

But here we are.

What’s even more shocking is that the numbers in this Joey-like Message from the Premier are made up.

Literally.

Made.

Up.

They are the Ohio Cat-Eating Aliens story of Newfoundland.

Forget the demand. It is whatever it is.

Look at the supply.

Newfoundland and Labrador produces more than 40 terawatt hours of electricity today. All of it is spoken for, except for a scrap, and even after 2041, the bulk of it - the 35 Twh or so at Churchill Falls - will not be up for sale to New England. It will be used here and it will be used in Quebec.

There is not another 40 Twh up for development. Gull Island and the proposed Churchill expansion will not produce another 40 Twh. But if they magically did, that too is slated for Quebec and this province, according to the hype from here and Quebec since Francois Legault came and made Andrew Furey swoon.

If you believe the other foolishness of some of the hydrogen crowd, just one of them will produce 10,000 megawatts - 10 terawatt hours - in wind *and* solar electricity on the windy but fog-enshrouded Burin Peninsula but that is like the Sprung Greenhouse that in order to meet its production promises of cucumbers the length of Brian’s ambition and tomatoes as big as the moon needed more sunshine in Mount Pearl in February than they get in Cairo in June.

But where will all this electricity go?

Nowhere, even if by some magical thinking it could all exist.

The line across the Gulf cannot handle it, nor can the lines through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and then down into New England through three Canadian provinces and five U.S. states as Jim Thistle used to say, holding up bunches of fingers to emphasise how ludicrously far and insanely costly it all would be.

Nor could all this go through Quebec without building new electricity lines that would cost - like the nuttiness proposed for the Burin - something in the tens of billions of dollars. Or million millions as Joey said.

All of these lines are the ones the liars behind Muskrat Falls used to fool you before and yet here we are with the pain of that lash still stinging fresh across the wallets in our arse pockets and someone is back with a bigger belt.

This is our time, alright.

Our time to send packing anyone who thinks we are stupid enough, gullible enough, naive enough, that they can sell us this idiocy for now the eighth or 10th time and get away with it.

The time has come, as the Pea Sea slogan put it in the 1970s, the time has come for this horseshit to stop.

We have been ready for a better tomorrow, as Brian Tobin’s slogan had it almost 30 years ago, ready for decades for the better tomorrow of no such lies again and again.

This is our time, alright, the ordinary people’s time to be rid of the charlatans, the con artists, and their stooges who come up with this stuff.

For them, the jig is up or at least it should be.

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