Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2019Note: These towers were built by the British, not the French. Sorry!
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Sir Charles Ross was really a jerk sometimes. Not the sort of guy you would want to go into business with.
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Here are the Wikipedia pages on Sir Charles Ross, Bart. and Martello towers.
Colby Cosh discusses the moral squalor, cowardice, avarice, and reflex appeasement gesturing of the NBA and finds a Canadian angle to the whole mess:
The National Basketball Association has spent the week trying to control the effects of a tweet by Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, who jeopardized his job on Friday when he told readers “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” The tweet winked out of existence quickly, but it had prodded a sore spot. Morey faced immediate criticism from the Rockets’ owner and from the Chinese consul in Houston. Steps were taken within China to declare the Rockets personae non gratae and to cancel some NBA broadcasts.
[…]
Which leads to us to the true Canadian angle, copyright Colby J. Cosh 2019 (all rights reserved). Daryl Morey’s tweet was the 21st century’s “Vive le Quebec libre.”
All right, Morey isn’t a statesman, as de Gaulle was — but the NBA itself wants us to believe that it is a force for international harmony, and Morey is a prominent figure in the NBA. There is an amusing subplot here in that Morey has traditionally been regarded as an outsider in the league, a computer nerd who barged his way in by using technical analytics to improve team performance both on the court and at the gate. The natural assumption of a person who went to university in the 1990s is that he would be perfectly free as a matter of course to blurt out a political opinion — one that is in no way remotely controversial in the free world — on Twitter. Well, we are all learning to revise such assumptions.
When General de Gaulle uttered the 1967 version of an ill-advised, impulsive tweet, it created a small spasm of anger in English Canada, as Morey’s endorsement of an increasingly separatist protest movement in Hong Kong has. (Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong is supposed to be as much an accepted fact as Canadian sovereignty in Quebec, and from the Party point of view, the Hong Kong protests are internal civil disorder. The same, of course, would go for China’s re-education camps full of Uyghurs, who represent the fate that pro-democracy Hong Kongers are trying to avert.)
But it was the Canadian political establishment that de Gaulle really provoked to rage with his sly, ambivalent remark. It was seen as an offence against hospitality. Canada’s mandarins — pardon the inadvertent pun — knew that de Gaulle’s resounding “liiibre” would give, above all, moral impetus to the enemies of Confederation. This proved to be the case, as far as history can tell. Et donc — vive Hong Kong! Vive Hong Kong libre!
Andrew Coyne on the disgraceful habit of the federal government (and nine provincial governments) to look the other way when Quebec decides that some of the guarantees in the Charter don’t apply in La Belle Province:
For many observant persons, particularly Muslims, Sikhs and orthodox Jews, this amounts to a religious hiring bar: the wearing of the hijab, the turban and the kippa are key requirements of their faith, and as such core elements of their identity. To demand that they work uncovered is, in effect, to post a sign saying Muslims, Sikhs and Jews need not apply.
We should be clear on this. It’s not just a dress code, or an infringement of religious freedom, or religious discrimination, or those other abstract phrases you hear tossed about. We are talking about a law barring employment in much of the public sector — not just police and judges, but government lawyers and teachers — to certain religious minorities.
Existing workers may have been grandfathered, but only so long as they remain in their current jobs. Should they ever move, or seek a promotion, they will face the same restrictions. The signal to the province’s religious and, let’s say it, racial minorities, vulnerable as they will be feeling already after the mounting public vitriol to which they have been exposed in the name of the endless “reasonable accommodation” debate, is unmistakable: you are not wanted here. Not surprisingly, many are getting out — out of the public service, out of Quebec.
That this is actually happening, in 2019, in a province of Canada — members of religious minorities being driven from their jobs, and for no reason other than their religion — is sickening, and shameful. That shame is not reserved to Premier Francois Legault or his CAQ government, the people responsible for designing and implementing this disgraceful exercise in segregation, this manifestly cruel attempt to cleanse the province’s schools and courts of religious minorities. It is no less shaming to the rest of us, everywhere across Canada, so long as we permit it to continue.
That is, so far as we are capable of feeling it. But experience has taught us to look the other way when it comes to Quebec, to tell ourselves that it is none of our affair, that we must not raise a fuss when the province explicitly elevates the interests of its ethnic and linguistic majority over those of its minorities, or threatens the country’s life for long years at a time — the beloved “knife at the throat” strategy — to back its escalating fiscal and constitutional demands. We dare not. We cannot. For then Quebec would leave.
Canadian elections have their own quirks — historical, geographical, linguistic — that cannot be accurately captured in national opinion polls:
Conservative support is heavily concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tens of thousands of its votes are therefore likely to be wasted racking up massive majorities in a relatively small number of seats.
The Liberal vote, by contrast, is more efficiently distributed, notably in Quebec, with its tight three- and four-way races, where a winning candidate might slip through with 30 per cent of the vote or less. So even though the Liberals are projected to win fewer votes than the Conservatives, they are also projected to win a solid plurality of the seats — perhaps even a majority.
Then again, the polls are misleading in another way. A poll can project, with some uncertainty, the level of support for the various parties among the voting-age population. It is a more difficult matter to predict what proportion of each party’s supporters will actually turn out to vote. The Liberals benefited in 2015 from a surge in turnout, especially among younger voters, on the strength of Justin Trudeau’s sunny idealism. No such enthusiasm, or idealism, is detectable this time around.
It all makes for a close, unpredictable race. The Liberal challenge is the usual one: to round up the vote on the left without giving too much ground on the centre, appealing to those tempted to vote NDP or Green not to split the progressive vote lest the Tories get in.
The Conservatives, for their part, will also be fighting a two-front war, with the emergence of the People’s Party to their right imposing some constraint on their ability to reach across the centre. To date the PPC has not posed much of a threat — its support has stalled at around 3.0 per cent — but it is not impossible that it could break out of that range now that voters are paying more attention.
Of course, Maxime Bernier being actively excluded from the debates, and the pollsters often not including a choice for the PPC will also limit the PPC’s visibility to ordinary Canadian voters. Oddly, this may benefit the Milk Dud and his “Conservatives”, as the media tries to ignore Bernier’s party but gives disproportional coverage to the Green and NDP campaigns, which potentially weakens support for Trudeau and the Liberals.
Update, 16 September: I guess the media finally noticed that excluding Maxime Bernier from the debates was a sub-optimal idea for their preferred winner (Justin Dressup).
The Leaders' Debates Commission (@debats_can) has invited @MaximeBernier to the Commission’s debates on October 7 and 10 #cdnpoli https://t.co/1ZGAZRO7KU
— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) September 16, 2019
Even back in the day Western or Alberta separatism could never pass the Tebbit cricket test: Albertans have always kept cheering for Canadians at the Olympics or the hockey worlds, even at times when we were convinced intellectually that Confederation was a swindle. Much less would Westerners ever consider rooting against Canada, or hoping for its humiliation, or sabotaging it in a context of warfare or geopolitical struggle. Reform intellectuals like Hill have always wanted to create a sort of Western Canadian nationalism; that the necessary basis for nationalism is a nation, or something even slightly like one, has always escaped them. This is the super-secret advantage that Quebec has when using the blackmail tactics Hill and others are trying to imitate. Quebeckers have a genuine alternative loyalty to their extended Quebecois family, and Westerners have no equivalent. If we did, we wouldn’t have to advertise for secessionist generalissimos in the papers.
Colby Cosh, “Advice on Western separatism: don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself”, National Post, 2019-07-26.
In Trains, Bill Stephens outlines some of the strikes against VIA Rail Canada’s hopes for a dedicated passenger-train-only route between Toronto and Quebec City:
Last month VIA’s $4 billion plan got a $71 million boost that will fund additional feasibility studies. It shouldn’t take $71 million to figure out the plan is fatally flawed. Why? Because it won’t accomplish its chief aim: Eliminating the mind-boggling delays related to sharing tracks with Canadian National freight trains.
To be successful, passenger service needs to be fast, frequent, and dependable. VIA’s current service is faster than driving between Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal. It’s fairly frequent, too, with seven weekday departures between Toronto and Montreal. But it’s not dependable. On-time performance is in the low 70% range for the entire Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor. VIA blames the late trains on interference from CN freights, primarily on the double-track route linking Toronto and Montreal.
So you can understand why VIA would lobby the Canadian government for a dedicated passenger route. Last year VIA’s Eastern Corridor, the Canadian equivalent of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, carried three-quarters of VIA’s entire ridership. It stands to reason that you can fill more seats with service that’s faster, more frequent, and more reliable.
[…]
Keeping passenger and freight trains on time takes a combination of operational discipline, the right track capacity, and a willingness to make it work. CN takes pride in its operational discipline, and executives say the Eastern portion of the railroad, between Chicago and Halifax, is underutilized. What’s missing, it seems, is a willingness to expedite VIA trains.
VIA needs a cooperative host railroad more than it needs a new route that would bypass intermediate population centers, face opposition from the not-in-my-backyard crowd, take years to build, and in the end would still have to rely on shared trackage in key areas.
Also a monumental problem without an apparent solution: Squeezing extra trains into Toronto Union Station and Central Station in Montreal on new approaches that would only complicate operations and increase conflicts with freight and commuter traffic.
Colby Cosh reports on a recent academic paper that sticks the boots into the little potato and his, um, problematical French language issues:
Thursday’s hot-off-the-press Post contained a short summary (by CP’s Giuseppe Valiante) of a recent academic paper about how Justin Trudeau’s handling of spoken French is regarded in Quebec. In case you didn’t read Valiante’s summary, I’ll give you a four-word abstract: it drives people nuts. Obviously it’s hard to know how many Quebeckers are really annoyed or nauseated by the prime minister’s French, but if you judge by the newspapers, as Binghamton University French-language scholar Yulia Bosworth did in her article for the American Review of Canadian Studies, it seems Trudeau is the equivalent of fingernails scraping a chalkboard forever.
Hungry with curiosity, I got hold of Bosworth’s paper, entitled “The ‘Bad’ French of Justin Trudeau: When Language, Ideology, and Politics Collide.” As writing it suffers from the typical defects of published scholarship in the humanities: as the title suggests, it is one of those things in which every mental construct of any kind becomes an “ideology.” As scholarship it is pretty good: it contains a useful potted history of Quebecois linguistic self-hatred, and how “Quebec French” went from being a perennial object of shame to a rigid conscious standard, enforced with the same pride and viciousness as Parisian French within France.
But as disguised comedy, the article can’t be beat. When Bosworth wants to give the flavour of her sample corpus of Quebec newspaper abuse of Trudeau, she has to clear her throat professorially first. “Titles, arguably, play an important role in constructing public images; they constitute visible and frequently consumed newspaper content and help construct a linguistic landscape.” Zzzz. But then you get to the good stuff, the distilled liquor:
In Justin Trudeau’s case, headline readers encountered ‘a beautiful empty shell,’ ‘the little boy,’ ‘a privileged target,’ ‘a thinker of nothingness,’ ‘a deserter,’ a ‘mythical hero,’ ‘window dressing for radical individualism,’ ‘a young dilettante,’ and ‘Justin-the-Red.’ Among the many examples of negative descriptors pinned on Trudeau are: ‘smokescreen,’ ‘the call of the void,’ ‘hypocrisy,’ ‘lack of courage,’ and ‘Pee-Wee’s revenge.’ In terms of adjectives, Trudeau was called ‘slimy,’ ‘tricked,’ ‘attacked,’ ‘targeted,’ ‘troubled,’ and ‘criticized.’
Obviously there is a lot of that sort of talk around, and certainly JT gets a rough ride in the Post and the Alberta broadsheet papers from time to time, but I think only in Quebec do you find this language in headlines, rather than in the comment threads or your uncle’s Facebook feed. (“Radical individualism”? Really?)
Chris Selley explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:
… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, “criminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. … When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.”
No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it’s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company “too big to fail,” whether it’s because of political donations or connections, or because its pension plan is heavily invested, or because it has acquired a creepy semi-sacred status among otherwise normal people — or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs — all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That’s what we’ve been witnessing.
But there’s an even bigger breakdown going on that’s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin’s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller Stéphane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi — Moammar’s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son — and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.
Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn’t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown’s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the “culture of complacency” and the “culture of delays” the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right “to be tried within a reasonable time.”
It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada’s comprehensively screwed-up justice system never rises to the level of political crisis. In the first year after the Jordan decision alone, some 200 cases were thrown out on grounds of excessive delays. Some of the accused make the Friends of Moammar look like saints. They include alleged murderers, child molesters and drunk drivers.
The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we’re still fighting over whether to pursue them — and not, it must be said, in a way that makes us look like a terribly serious country. How nauseatingly fitting it would be if a court threw the case out before the feds even got a chance to decide what to do with it.
Colby Cosh asks who is the one with memory issues — former Trudeau puppet-master Gerald Butts who resigned unexpectedly (but not at all for reasons related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, we’re told) or the minister who was relegated to the least important portfolio (in the view of the Trudeau government) in a totally unrelated cabinet shuffle after failing to fold under pressure?
On Wednesday, in testifying about the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. Until the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin are heard in a trial and resolved, or until they are abandoned, the thing will remain news, and Liberals will suffer.
The government’s line is that it was inappropriate for former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to make a final commitment to leaving her Director of Public Prosecutions alone and to living with the decision not to enter a plea-bargaining process with SNC-Lavalin. Her successor in the office, David Lametti, will not make such a commitment now. We will never get the reassurance of hearing that the matter is closed. The professed view of cabinet, what’s left of it, is that it would be wrong to close it.
The government has tried to explain its belabouring of Wilson-Raybould as being perfectly appropriate. She was supposed to verrrry carefully consider the fate of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs and a head office in Quebec, and then consider it again, and then consider it again. Butts tells us that they weren’t looking for a particular politically convenient answer, mind you.
They just stayed after her to keep reconsidering the answer she kept giving, explicitly or implicitly. They reassured her at every turn that the decision was hers. And then they got rid of her and made it someone else’s.
[…]
In theory, if you wanted to get rid of a truculent justice minister who won’t put a thumb on the scales of justice, offering her a job you know she will never, ever take seems like a good way to set about doing that. But this is just an unhappy coincidence, and we are not to draw inferences from it. I would conclude that “The Liberal government undoubtedly meant well,” but saying this sarcastically has, I am afraid, already become a Canadian cliché.
If you happen to have misplaced your Libranos scorecard, Daniel Bordman has a quick summary to bring you up to date:
So here is how the accusation stands: The PMO put pressure on the AG to the benefit of SNC-Lavalin, she refused and was shuffled out of the AG position.
This led to a massive public outcry from the Conservatives, NDP and the 10 or so Journalists left in the mainstream media. The original plan was for the new AG, David Lametti, to explain to the public why this story is overblown and there was no need to look any further into the allegations.
His plan: he went on TV and explained to the public that he had spoken to Justin Trudeau and he had denied the allegations, so no investigation was needed. Brilliant! If only Bruce MacArthur and Alexander Bissonnette had known of this expert legal strategy of denying what you were caught doing, they could have escaped justice.
It is also important to note that the Prime Minister admits to having “rigorous conversations” with Jody Wilson Raybould over the SNC-Lavalian case.
After the Shaggy “it wasn’t me” defence failed to convince anyone outside of the CBC editorial board of Justin Trudeau’s innocence, a new plan was formed.
Plan B seemed to be, have everyone smear Jody Wilson-Raybould and act like it was her scandal not the PMO’s.
While she was remaining silent due to attorney-client privilege (which is a debatable position), Trudeau continued to speak for her. Again, it should be pointed out that Trudeau could have waived this at anytime to let her tell her side of the story, he didn’t.
This all came to a head when Trudeau claimed that “her presence in the cabinet speaks for itself”. The next day she resigned.
Off to Plan C, which seems to have been concocted by new Liberal strategist, Kim Jong Un.
A committee will be constructed to investigate these accusations, which of course will have a majority of Liberals and be headed by Liberal MP, Anthony Housefather, who has already added his flare to the investigation suggesting the reason that Jody Wilson Raybould was shuffled out of the AG position was because she didn’t speak French.
Remember, he is the impartial leader of Liberals investigating an allegation of Liberal corruption. It is also important to point out that both of the ministers in charge of immigration matters, Ahmed Hussain and Bill Blair, can’t speak a word of French between them.
We, Conservatives, were a coalition from the very beginning, in Canada. We were, of course, the Liberal-Conservative Party under Sir John A, reflecting the alliances formed between Ontario and Atlantic Canadian Tories and Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine’s moderate Parti bleu in Quebec. This was in contrast to the Liberals who were formed by the Clear Grits from Upper Canada and the Papineau’s radical Parti rouge in Quebec.
(So Quebec has always been central to both Conservative and Liberal political success in Canada and it was Quebec that gave us our modern Conservative blue and Liberal red icons ~ which are opposite to the Democratic blue and Republican red in the USA.)
Ted Campbell, “Our Conservative Roots”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-03-05.
Ted Campbell remembers Canada’s Second World War Prime Minister:
Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.
I was born in 1942, William Lyon Mackenzie King was the prime minister; my mother often said that, in the 1940s, it seemed that he would never cease to be prime minister, and she thoroughly detested him; it wasn’t all of his policies she hated, it was, mainly, how he approached the war, and a few other things ~ she was, later, fond of the Canadian poet F.R. Scott’s rather bitter epitaph:
He seemed to be in the centre because we had no centre,
No vision to pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.Truly he will be remembered wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.Let us raise up a temple to the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.Now, Canada fought a good war, we made four absolutely vital contributions:
- We were the true “breadbasket of the empire,” our farmers fed our large Army and much of Britain’s, too;
- We were a major part of the “arsenal of democracy,” our factories and shipyards turned out all of the things, from tanks and trucks and bombers and corvettes to Bren guns and grenades that were needed to help defeat the Axis powers;
- We managed the all important British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that was a key element in the allies’ eventual success; and
- We played a huge and a significant leadership role in the Battle of the Atlantic ~ the only battle Churchill said that he really feared losing.
But under King we did each with apparent reluctance, seemingly trying to never serve any vital interest if there was even a remote chance that any political constituency might be offended ~ something that reminds me of Justin Trudeau in 2018. Our large and entirely commendable war efforts were, in the main, directed, sometimes despite King, by the indefatigable C.D. Howe, and the national unity concerns were assuaged by recruiting the universally respected Louis St Laurent.
The King era was characterized by extraordinarily tepid leadership at the top but brilliant work by strong ministers in a small cabinet. It also began Phase 1 of a national political civil war. I think that in the First World War many Canadians had either understood or had been, largely, indifferent to Quebec’s objections to conscription. But in the 1940s we had better mass communications and many Canadians were less understanding of Quebec’s reluctance to participate in that war, especially as Canadian casualties mounted after Hong Kong and then in Italy and then in France, Belgium and Holland. Louis St Laurent did not try to explain French Quebec’s misgivings to English Canada, his job was to maintain, by force of his own stellar reputation and personality, just enough support in Quebec and, as he easily did, to “outclass” the vocal, crypto-fascist, French Canadian opponents to the war. But there was another division fomenting inside the Liberal Party of Canada: both Howe and St Laurent had a new vision for Canada in the post war world; both saw Canada as an important actor on the world stage; both were frustrated by King’s timid leadership; it is very probable that had St Laurent, the foreign minister, rather than King, [been] the prime minister, led Canada’s delegation to the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco in June of 1945 that Canada, not France, would have been the fifth member of the Security Council (or that it would have had only four members. as originally planned). St Laurent, especially, was known, liked and respected in both London and Washington; both he and Howe were highly regarded as leaders and as statesmen … King was not; Churchill distrusted him because he has actively supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and it seems to me that both Churchill and Roosevelt saw him as little more than an errand boy.
To follow Quebec politics, to read a French-language Quebec newspaper, is to regularly come across trumped-up or bewildering linguistic angst. A new study or census will show French is in pretty good shape, and the language hawks will immediately start slicing and dicing the data to paint the most dire possible picture. The Habs will appoint a captain who doesn’t speak French. A newspaper columnist will hear a friendly “bonjour-hi” one too many times shopping in downtown Montreal and blow his stack. While First World parents around the world strive to have their children learn as many languages as possible, you still encounter the odd Quebec voice wondering if francophone children learning English represents an existential threat to their society.
Chris Selley, “Oh no… It really looks like Justin Trudeau truly, deeply believes all those silly Liberal myths”, National Post, 2017-01-19.
William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:
There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.
The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?
Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.
Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.
I use the term “pesky” in the headline to avoid being slagged by one or possibly even both of my Newfoundland and Labrador readers … to curry favour with them, I’d need to escalate from somewhere between “ethically doubtful” and “outrageous”, and even that might not capture the essence of anger and resentment at Quebec’s amazingly great deal long-term on cheap hydro-electric power from the Churchill Falls facility. It is, as Wikipedia says, “the second largest hydroelectric plant in North America, with an installed capacity of 5,428 MW”, and thanks to Quebec financing and astute negotiations, most of that output is sold to Quebec at a very small proportion of today’s open market price. Colby Cosh arches an eyebrow over a Supreme Court justice’s lone vote of dissent on the case:
Churchill Falls generating station, Labrador.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It is my solemn duty to perform one of the important functions of a newspaper columnist: raising one questioning eyebrow. On Friday the Supreme Court issued a judgment in the long battle between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp., a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and Hydro-Québec. CFLco is the legal owner of the notorious Churchill Falls Generating Station in the deep interior of Labrador, close to the border with Quebec.
The station was built between 1966 and 1971. Hydro-Québec provided backing when the financing proved difficult for the original owner, an energy exploration consortium called Brinco. This led to the signing of Canada’s most famous lopsided contract: a 1969 deal for Hydro-Québec to receive most of the plant’s output for the next 40 years at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt-hour, followed by 25 more years at one-fifth of a cent. The bargain ends in 2041, at which time CFLco will get full use and disposal of the station’s electricity back.
This has been a heck of a deal for Quebec. It took on the risk of financing and building the station in exchange for receiving the electricity at a low fixed price — one that both sides in the court case agree was reasonable at the time. But it meant that Newfoundland saw no benefit from decades of oil price shocks, from the end of nuke-plant construction in the U.S., or from the increasing market advantage hydroelectricity enjoys while dirtier forms of power generation attract eco-taxation.
It has been maddening for Newfoundland to remain poor while Hydro-Québec grows fat on the profits from a Newfoundland river. Quebec, for its part, has never been completely convinced of the legitimacy of its border with Labrador, and it sees its good fortune as a sort of angelic reward for having to be part of Confederation. The Churchill Falls deal is (quite reasonably) regarded as proof that Quebec’s homegrown industrialists were able to beat resource-exploiting Anglo financiers at their own game. There are thus reasons beyond the bottom line that Quebec has never wanted to renegotiate the Churchill Falls contract. But the bottom line is enough.
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