The Power of Deception
Uncommunication and the NewOld NALCOR
Top logo is Newfoundland *and* Labrador Hydro, the original company, although this one dates from 2006 after the switch to NALCOR had started.
Middle logo is NALCOR.
Bottom is the logo for NALCOR’s current operating name, which not only keeps the NALCOR graphic image and font but keeps the post-2003 habit of getting rid of the “and” in the name of the province.
It took someone about a half hour to get out of bed, watch a part of Wednesday’s video, and then send an email that said one thing: as of New Year’s Day, the proper name for the provincial energy company is Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.
That’s it.
Pedantic? Yes.
Did the writer not think I was aware of this and hence did not need a reminder? Obviously not even though I’ve been using both, sometimes reverting to NALCOR out of habit.
Experience suggests that this person may not work for NALCOR but has ties to the company, this deal, or to the provincial Liberals. He’s got skin in the game. *Those* are the only sorts of people who ignore everything else and focus on something that is really just part of the packaging.
Or in this case part of the grift.
It’s a distraction. A bit of trivia. There’s no sign this company under a new name is any different from the one that brought you the catastrophe on the Lower Churchill. In fact, it is so much the same company that - as Wednesday’s opening made plain - Muskrat Falls was very much present in all the talk about this supposedly new 1969 deal that was allegedly not like the old one but was - in fact and despite all the NALCOR claims - the same as Muskrat Falls and worse than 1969.
Hence the anxiety induced in someone to tell me that the same old company had a shiny new name. Heck one of the old NALCOR people told me off years ago for writing it all in caps, as if it were an acronym when it supposedly wasn’t. Bet you a nice chunk of change the name came from Newfoundland and Labrador Corporation much like DEWCor is Danny’s initials with the “cor” from corporation tacked on or - to go way back to the 1950s - the original One Big Company to Develop Everything in Newfoundland and Labrador was called NALCO. If you focus on trivia, you want to distract me from something else.
Bond Papers: The Power of Explanation
Except in this case, it’s the need for some people to focus on trivia that is the something else to notice. Deception was a huge part of the NALCOR operation and it still is. Changing the name of the company - and taking two years to do so - is part of the pattern. Same for the “debate” in the House of Assembly that was not a debate but a four day sales job in which all the government people read from a script to give the NALCOR folks softball excuses to recite their prepared marketing lines. If the truth got out, it was by mistake.
If the crowd currently running the place were genuinely committed as a matter of values and principle to openness, honesty, independent oversight, or anything else like that, then they would not have staged a rigged show in the House of Assembly, controlled every aspect of it, right down to timing, and rushed it so that no one had any time to see what they were doing.
A relatively minor but telling part of the grift, the con, the deception was something now so commonplace most people likely missed it. It’s also a sign of how fundamentally anti-democratic the local political culture has become. News media got the NALCOR marketing pitch - called a technical briefing - before the opposition politicians did. Weeks before, actually. The politicians got theirs later. Weeks later, a couple of days before the staged performance in the House of Assembly last week.
None of the politicians commented on it even though they were clearly taking part in a rigged game and - under our constitution - *they* and the House are the independent oversight of government. Nor did they or anyone in the media comment on the strangeness of giving them detailed information before the politicians.
Nor did anyone comment on the red-highlighted words on the very first slide of NALCOR’s technical briefing. Confidential and Commercially Sensitive. It was a lie. Deliberate falsehood. Not true. A knowing statement of false information since the people who typed the words out on the slide knew the information in it was intended for public release - hence the briefing to news media, d’uh - and therefore was neither confidential nor commercially sensitive. That stuff is not given to reporters. But this was, hence the lie in the very first slide.
But that big warning makes the people reading it think they are special. They are on the inside even though they are - 100% - on the outside. They feel privileged even if they aren’t. It makes them careful about what they say because they have information they think is secret. On some level, it also makes them look at the people feeding them as being trustworthy because they are letting the rest in on the Big Story. The psychology is simple but powerful and always effective. And it’s just like the way the old NALCOR crowd like Gil Bennett were always so accessible and friendly and therefore, seemingly truthful but in reality always telling us less than the truth we had a right to know.
The charade was so convincing that during the peak of the Muskrat con, one reporter reacted with complete disbelief to my point that - obviously - NALCOR had never looked at alternatives to Muskrat Falls to see if it was really lowest cost alternative. Why would they lie? he asked. Truth is, I explained they never released any evidence to show they had, even if they needed to redact some genuinely commercially sensitive information. They just didn’t have them but releasing them would have been the easiest way to shut down criticism. It was the same reaction - basically - as another reporter who took an all-expenses paid junket to the construction and produced a piece on how NALCOR had cracked the water management code, months after someone else pointed out they hadn’t. Officials always tell the truth. The rest of you lie. Well, at least that’s the default setting in many skulls in newsrooms and elsewhere even when the officials lie to their faces, obviously, as in that slide.
NALCOR never did produce its own studies on alternatives to Muskrat. All the supporting expert evidence in 2012 came from companies paid by provincial government to tell them the answers they wanted. Why would they lie? this reporter had asked. Richard LeBlanc spent 18 months showing not just why they lied but how extensively NALCOR and the people behind it (along with the politicians) organized not just lying but hit squads to attack critics. Now we have more experts telling us that this latest greatest deal ever is a great deal right after telling us they weren’t asked to do that job and couldn’t possibly comment, backed up by the inadvertent disclosure - in some other tidbits - that they were not actually part of the negotiating team in the room opposite the Hydro-Quebec hotshots.
NewLab Hydro, NL Hydro, NALCOR renamed - take your pick - is so much like its old-name company that it even has invented a cutesy phrase to explain away a crucial part of this deal and a key part of the old arrangement, which is that NALCOR buys electricity from Churchill Falls at exactly the same price as Hydro-Quebec does. It’s in their corporate interest to go along with HQ because they derive the same corporate benefit that in NALCOR’s case let’s them pad the bottom line at public expense with no tangible benefit to the public.
“Unfortunate Benefit.” That’s what Walter Parsons, one of the NALCOR negotiators called it. Jennifer Williams mentioned the phrase when the pair appeared on CBC Radio before Christmas to talk about their new baby. They never explained how it was unfortunate or who benefited.
It isn’t unfortunate - except for the ordinary people of Newfoundland and Labrador - and it could be a benefit to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, had Walter and Jennifer pushed for more cash on the export price. The only benefit in this case is for NALCOR and it wasn’t an accident. NALCOR did it deliberately.
Thing is, they could have pushed for more cash *and* benefitted taxpayers and ratepayers. NALCOR would get a 65% rebate on their payments, thanks to their shares when Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation declares a dividend. A cost of six cents a kilowatt hour for Newfoundland and Labrador would become - in effect - only two cents while charging six cents to Hydro-Quebec would earn Newfoundland and Labrador roughly four cents of HQ’s payments. That means Churchill Falls electricity for Newfoundland and Labrador would be basically free and there’d be huge gobs of cash besides from the huge share of the output Hydro-Quebec takes but isn’t compensated for. This deal of Andrew’s and Jennifer’s and Walter’s is a massive giveaway. Breath-taking. And inexplicable.
The same thing works at the stupidly low price under the New 1969 Deal but all the cash that Newfoundland and Labrador gives up at the idiotically low price isn’t paid back with any other guaranteed benefits under the deal. There’s no guarantee of Gull Island, for example and Quebec gets to expand its control of electricity on the Churchill River until almost the 22nd century. Quebec benefits hugely from the low price under the 1969 Repeat deal since it can use the super low deal they got from Andrew Furey to keep *their* electricity rates down as they bring new and more expensive sources of electricity online. Meanwhile, NALCOR will be driving your rates on the island up every year like clockwork, since they do not have a way to pay for the ever-escalating payments on Muskrat Falls except through your rates after 2030. There’s not enough cash in this give-away to pay for the catastrophe.
The impact of the NALCOR grift that encircles the provincial government is really obvious in a CBC story this week about the gigantic mining explosion in mining in the province that could come out of this deal. The story is the result of the lack of basic information in local newsrooms these days, a matching lack of inquisitiveness generally (much like the why would they lie? guy), and NALCOR’s lack of commitment to openness, transparency, and just explaining stuff in plain English.
“Labrador needs more power to unleash the full potential of the region's mining industry, say Hydro execs” heralded the sub-head on the story. “Top officials with N.L. Hydro believe a proposed new deal for energy sales to Hydro-Quebec, and the development of additional hydroelectric capacity on the Churchill River, will power a fresh surge in mining activity in Labrador, generate significant jobs and revenue for the province, and help meet the growing global demand for so-called ‘green’ steel.” went the lede.
It's being financed by mining companies, has reached an advanced stage in terms of front-end engineering and design, and proposes the construction of a new transmission line at a cost of more than $1 billion to "supply their decarbonization needs," said [NewLab Hydro’s Walter] Parsons.
The story makes it sound like the problem for the miners is that NALCOR doesn’t have enough electricity to meet their needs, not without this splendid deal Parsons was involved with. The one really obvious thing missing is how much electricity the miners need. And apparently, CBC didn’t think to ask or NALCOR didn’t feel it obliged to say. But it’s crucial.
That reference to the power line is actually a clue to the real issue, which the NALCOR folks fibbed about. The current lines are maxed out and the new line will let more electricity flow. It’s just passed off in the story as something about green energy when really it is just upgrading the inadequate supply due to NALCOR’s lack of sound planning.
And NALLCOR has plenty of electricity to meet likely demands in the near future and could easily build wind energy, something explicitly blocked by the Great Risley Fishing Trip Scheme/Scam for no good reason. The story actually has some details that don’t fit the marketing spin of the whole piece but tell you the truth, inadvertently.
As the CBC piece explains using NALCOR info, Labrador West now consumes 312 MW (forget the metric here makes no sense) out of the 525 MW NALCOR gets from Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation (here’s an extra tidbit) for the same price HQ pays. “The remainder of that power is sold to Hydro-Quebec at just 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour under a lopsided agreement that's been in place since 1969, and is not set to expire until 2041” according to CBC.
Well, no, unless something really stupid has happened. NALCOR has been selling that surplus of 200 and a bit megawatts into the US since 2009 and for the decade before that it went to HQ for five cents a kilowatt hour, not two tenths of a cent. NALCOR also sells surplus Muskrat Falls electricity into the United States.
And that idea of letting NALCOR take the NL HYdro recapture block for cost makes no sense because since the renewal clause cut in on the 1969 contract, CF(L)Co has a tidy little deal to sell *more* than the surplus of the NALCOR 525 MW block to Hydro-Quebec largely because HQ doesn’t get as much electricity under the renewal as it got before. Besides, given the previous sales arrangements, NALCOR would be just stupid to sell HQ electricity for the same price NALCOR paid for it when there is a more lucrative export market in the States. It also seems this story makes the common mistake of thinking NALCOR and CF(L)Co are the same thing. They aren’t.
But here’s where the story really falls to pieces and it involves that extra line. Lab West needs 312 MW to power itself right now. Not just the mines but the towns. There’s 213 MW left from the 525 MW block that’s surplus and there’s more than enough unclaimed at Muskrat Falls to double Lab West’s existing power need and bring it up to 624 MW, total. Frankly, there’d like still be power left over from Muskrat Falls.
Think of it this way. The problem in Lab West is not a shortage of potatoes (electricity(even though the CBC story makes it seem that way. There’s just no truck (transmission line space) to get the potatoes from NALCOR’s fields to Lab West. NALCOR is making the miners buy a truck. The New Churchill Falls deal has precisely nothing to do with what’s happening or what will happen in Labrador West. The 1465 extra megawatts of power coming from this rebooted 1969 give-away doesn’t actually have a likely home so that’s why all or most of it will go to HQ for a foolishly low price under the 1969 contract reborn.
So yeah, as of the first of the month, the provincial government’s electricity company is calling itself Newfoundland (and) Labrador Hydro again. But uncommunciation, deception, misinformation, and all the hallmarks of NALCOR are as much part of the corporate culture as the NALCOR graphic image is still in the company logo. So, too, is the misinformation in the local conventional media.
