October 2001
by Barry Stagg
Oil from Garden Hill on the Port au Port Peninsula threatens the very symbol that all Newfoundlanders embrace, be they heathen, colonialist, warmongering, stuckup townies or the righteous rest of the crowd from west of the treacherous concrete beast of the Avalon. Such is the state of peril for this fierce and loathed being , this Donovan's Overpass. As is so often the case, treachery and skulduggery can only be defeated by greater malfeasance. Lo and behold, St John's has spawned the very folks who own and vigorously promote the oil patch that nuzzles so closely to Cape St George. Heresy trials are imminent in the courts set aside for this in the George Street stockade. The capital city will have its revenge on the nasty traitors.
These fellows who search for oil along the west coast are in the same category as those who roved the back roads of Wild Rose Country when Alberta was more cattle than oil, more wheat than sweet crude, more like Newfoundland is now. In 1947, Leduc, Alberta was just another unknown small town, oblivious to its fate as the site of Alberta's first big commercial oil field.
Think a little about drilling for oil in Alberta in February. It was February 1947 that Imperial Oil struck its Leduc gusher. The job of oil exploration, 'wildcatting, ' on the bill of Cape St. George in February 2001 is just as daunting as drilling the now legendary Leduc hole that Imperial Oil turned into black gold that winter, some 54 years ago.
There may be gushers and there may be nasty dry holes on the rocky peninsula jutting into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. That is the adult reality of being in the oil business. 133 dry holes before Leduc is the historical record of Imperial Oil's western play. Garden Hill and the other drilling projects going on in Port au Port and elsewhere along the coast are not orphans. They are brethren to the many failures and the few vital, rip-roaring victories that make Alberta our Texas and might just turn Ralph Klein into our northern version of George W. Bush. My apologies are extended in advance to the Al Gore fans still getting over that dangling chad business.
With this columnist's unerring instinct for meandering on and off topic ( what topic?), the little matter of the filthy, nasty highway exchange on the Avalon must be addressed again. The key to the economics of oil is that it creates its own huge fiscal gravity. In plain terms it pulls in money and business. This will be marvellous for the nascent secondary industrial base of the Port au Port Peninsula, where only fables and legends of the Aguathuna Quarry remain to dance with the gravel piles of Lower Cove and the gas flares of Garden Hill. For our sinister friend, the overpass from Hades, this will mean welcome relief from the dirty washes in filthy salt and slush that those big tractor trailers deliver on their way into town. Fortunately, with all that kinetic economic energy on the west coast, those big trucks will have to spend so much time navigating the roads to Port au Port that they will have a lot less time to drench Donovan's Overpass. The environmentalists of St. John's can thank big oil for that bit of ecological relief.
All foolishness aside, this is a happy story as the land based oil industry of Newfoundland grows in promising fashion along the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Newfoundlanders are getting closer to the day when private business can take over the economy, wrestling it away by the brute force of petro-dollars and leaving the crypto-socialist dregs of the old Ottawa command economy to wither like Brian Tobin's fading memories of his last French lesson.