No deadline pressure
Premier Paul Davis says a direction to wrap up a deal with Statoil by the end of the year will be tempered with the need to sign the best deal for the province.
Premier Paul Davis says that when he told his natural resources minister to wrap up a major offshore oil deal by the end of the year, he didn’t really mean exactly that.
In a mandate letter from Davis to Natural Resources Minister Derrick Dalley, Davis said a deal to develop the Statoil find in the Flemish Pass should be concluded by the end of 2015.
All week, the Opposition Liberals have been asking about that, saying that placing a firm deadline on negotiations could prevent the government from holding out for maximum benefits from the oilfield.
Moreover, Liberal Leader Dwight Ball has pointed out Statoil is in the middle of a drilling program to fully understand how much oil is out there, and the work won’t be done until sometime in the middle of 2016.
Davis said the government won’t sign anything but the best deal for the people of the province.
“Earlier rather than later is always good, but we’re certainly not going to enter into an agreement or be subjected to anything less than what’s ideal and beneficial to the people of the province,” he said.
As for the year-end deadline, he said it’s not important to focus too much on the details of exactly what was written.
“I suppose we could pick a lot of that out of mandate letters, why I would have said any particular piece or sentence or used phraseology,” Davis said. “But, you know, it’s important that we move forward with these agreements.”