Some thought it funny he said show me the money.
But Furey told Legault, you had me at hello.
Last week someone asked me what a good deal with Quebec on Churchill Falls might look like.
I replied: how long is a piece of string?
Like any deal, what each side thinks will make a good deal depends on what the side wants to get out of it. In the talks on Churchill Falls with Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador started talks with Quebec on Quebec’s terms and without having figured out what the province needed from electricity development in Labrador let alone what it wanted.
Francois Legault framed the talks in terms of the old Newfoundland nationalist myth about the 1969 deal and Andrew Furey and every commentator and reporter and politician was only too happy to play along with the foolishness. Furey’s Genius Committee gave him some sort of advice, which he likely ignored, which is what Andrew Furey has done with every one of his dream team committees since he took office.
Furey himself started negotiations and never told the people of the province he was negotiating, let alone what generally the government wanted. Literally everything reported by any media in Newfoundland and Labrador about the talks has come from Quebec first with some little comment coming later from Newfoundland and Labrador.
Everything.
So Quebec has set the agenda from the start.
In that context, it is very hard for Newfoundland and Labrador to get anything other than what Quebec is prepared to offer. And frankly, all Quebec has to do is make it look like they have given something to atone for the imaginary 1969 contract to let Andrew Furey claim victory, call the election, and get on to whatever he really wants to do with himself.
To meet that test, Legault merely has to offer some amount for electricity above two tenths of a cent a kilowatt hour. For his own side, he would want to keep things below three cents. There’s a lot of room in there for a deal. But while the number would be larger, the 1969 agreement would otherwise be intact.
The 1969 contract as it developed after 1975 is basically a deal by which the two shareholders split the electricity between the two and pay the bare minimum for it. They both resell it to their own consumers at inflated prices. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Muskrat Falls reflects precisely this philosophy and NALCOR and Andrew Furey have locked it in place.
All the talk of enlarging Churchill Falls is great. There’s a huge amount of water available and adding more generation has been a goal for decades. Add Gull Island to the mix. Wonderful stuff.
But if all you do is split the power between the shareholders and pay the least possible for it, then you have nothing but 1969 all over again. This is exactly what Newfoundland and Labrador is doing. There is no sign it is doing anything else.
This is crucial because even if Newfoundland and Labrador takes much more electricity based on whatever utterly nonsensical estimates of demand NALCOR has cooked up - as it has always done - and more besides, there is no way to get that electricity anywhere. NALCOR cannot meet existing demands in Labrador. Its link to the island does not work properly. And it does not have the transmission lines to get the electricity through Quebec to other markets, if it could even consider doing that.
Plus the government crowd are talking about hydrogen projects, confusing them with wind generation, have no idea at all what the domestic need is and will be, and are also purposely ignoring wind potential in Labrador, none of which enters into any of the limited public talk about Labrador hydro-electricity.
That limited public talk is the bit we should be worried about. Andrew Furey’s chronic refusal to be accountable to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador is among the most worrisome traits he has. The opposition parties are also useless. Pea Sea leader Tony Wakeham only wants the deal debated after it is done and unchangeable. This is Dwight Ball, circa 2012, who called for a debate only because he wanted the chance to show his enthusiastic support for Danny’s fiasco. There have been no comments from local experts of any kind, save for people like Bern Coffey or me earlier this year. The others stayed silent or were co-opted with seats on this that or another of Furey’s committees of sham advisors.
Whatever comes out of the secret talks between Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, people like Andrew Furey will call it great, historic, transformative or whatever other words they need to use so that it fits *their* needs to get what *they* want, which is precisely what happened with Muskrat Falls. The result with serve the corporate interests of NALCOR and any other businesses involved. It will meet the political needs of whoever is in power. Others will support the deal because, as with Muskrat Falls, they can profit from it and then blame it on others.
And while AllNL has done a great job of reporting last week on Andrew Furey’s latest comments about the deal he is cooking up entirely in secret, remember that Francois Legault told everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador about it first.
Getting to a good deal where both parties can secure considerable benefits by exporting hydroelectric power is challenging when every province and state hopes to be self-sufficient in electricity generation. The general options for self-sufficiency are wind power, small nuclear reactors, and solar power. I expect that technological change will rapidly develop and disrupt the older technology of hydroelectric generation and its transmission to markets.