By Barry Stagg
September 1998
THE SILENCE OF THE WOLVES
Upper Canadian pundits have been publicly lambasting Newfoundland premier Tobin in recent days about his truculent stand against Inco over the Voisey Bay mine. Tobin's determination not to have Voisey Bay be another Churchill Falls is laudable and support for it can and does transcend party politics. Memories of the extorted Churchill Falls contracts are an excellent antidote to the financial cheerleading for Inco that comes out of the Toronto business community.
Churchill Falls was to be the path to Newfoundland's New Jerusalem. Its development as a Newfoundland owned and controlled industry was enough to make Newfoundland the eastern Alberta. Forget about oil for a moment, put cod fish aside: electricity and the mad thirst of American toasters for that vivacious voltage would overflow the Newfoundland revenue till. After all it was money that made Alberta wealthy. Oil and gas were the fiscal incidents to moneymaking. Churchill Falls was to be Newfoundland's moneymaker. The haymaker that T.K.O.'d the Newfoundland moneymaker was sucker punched by Quebec with the Ottawa referee making sure that the political fix was in.
The Canadian prime minister of the day in 1965 was that great peacemaker, Lester Pearson. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in settling the Suez Crisis of 1956. Of course this same man stood by in stoic silence as Quebec extorted Churchill Falls from Newfoundland. At Churchill Falls the Great Referee stood by. While the gas flowed from Alberta eastward to Sarnia and Montreal under a federal regulatory shield, the electricity from Newfoundland stopped dead on its pylons at the Labrador border. There the electricity went through a magical transformation. It became Quebec electricity. Then it was released to surge magnificently to the American border. The New York toasters and the Ottawa pacifists were happy.
The economic and social results of the Churchill Falls extortion are predictable: thirty years of misery and poverty. Two generations of Newfoundlanders have joined the Newfoundland diaspora in places like Brampton and Fort McMurray. Skills, spirit, energy, brains and ambition have been exported to bloom outside the province. The legacy of the great Canadian rigged game is here now in the face of the people tired of being poor, tired of fighting a vicious tide of unfairness.
Churchill Falls is an economic product of Canadian confederate hypocrisy. Lester Pearson, in the style of many a central Canadian do-gooder, gladly exported his diplomacy and charity while prescribing puritanical poverty for the eastern homefolk. It seems that in Canada we are all classified as sinners. Only the rich sinners in Ontario and Quebec get to wait until the afterlife to pay for their sins. The poor sinners in provinces like Newfoundland have to pay now.
The federal government's rightful role in Canadian geo-politics is to be the honest arbiter between competing provinces. Provincial attempts at extortion are met by Ottawa regulation. Example: the National Energy Board controls and mandates cross- border transport of oil and gas, i.e. from Leduc to Laval. The N.E.B. regulations fill Sarnia and Montreal oil refineries with western crude. The N.E.B. was Ottawa's surrogate referee. Some say that the fix was in, even in that deal. Albertans still recoil at the thought of Marc Lalonde and the National Energy Program of the eighties. However, at least, the product stayed in provincial control.
When Newfoundland is criticized for facing down Inco at Voisey Bay, the fact of world geo-politics is mentioned. That means that Inco is supposedly governed by world market prices. Canada, though, has its own sordid geo-political mess as well. Apparently geography is no impediment to resource exploitation as long as the exploiters are central Canadian and the resource is in the far east or the far west. Otherwise geography and extortion reign supreme.
Long, dramatic political silences are characteristic of the federal government where Newfoundland economic interest conflicts with central Canadian financial imperatives. Then the silence of the Canadian wolf is deafening. Brian Tobin's statist politics are immeasurably preferable to the self-serving social Darwinism that the federal government has practiced.