Cutting off our nose to spite Quebec

Pam Frampton: I remember a speech Kathy Dunderdale gave to the St. John’s Board of Trade about Muskrat Falls when she was premier that was breathtaking in its ferocity towards the province of Quebec.

“He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.”

— John Milton

I remember a speech Kathy Dunderdale gave to the St. John’s Board of Trade about Muskrat Falls when she was premier that was breathtaking in its ferocity towards the province of Quebec.

It was a fall afternoon, Oct. 3, 2012, and Dunderdale was in full flight with jingoistic rhetoric so extreme, so charged, it’s a wonder the St. John’s Convention Centre could contain it.

As The Telegram’s James Mcleod reported, it was a noticeable shift in sales pitch for Dunderdale, who up until then had been pushing the massive hydroelectric project on its positive benefits — not as a mechanism for revenge.

“There has always been an undercurrent of anti-quebec sentiment in the case for Muskrat Falls,” Mcleod wrote, “but up until now, the government’s message has focused primarily on stable, low-cost electricity rates for Newfoundlanders, and the benefits of being able to sell excess power to mainland customers, or use it to power mining developments in Labrador.”

Yet all of a sudden, here was Dunderdale railing on about Quebec with an evangelical fervour, describing that province as a predator intent on keeping Newfoundland and Labrador down.

In a column the next day, I wrote: “Quebec is an open wound, even after 30 years, the premier declared, and then rooted around in that wound with her pointiest stick. Quebec would try to ‘keep us down.’ It is a geographic yoke around our necks. Muskrat Falls will ‘break Quebec’s hold’ over us. They are suffocating us. We will not be held hostage. We need to be in the driver’s seat. We will be the authors of our own destiny. And on and on it went, to the point where I began to believe Danny Williams had taken up ghost-writing.”

Now, you don’t have to be in this province very long, let alone have been born here, as I was, to realize how profoundly the spirit of Newfoundland and Labrador has been damaged by the disastrously lopsided 1969 deal favouring Quebec that developed the hydroelectric potential of the Upper Churchill River. It is a thread of bitterness among the many rich and vibrant strands that bind us together.

You can understand it, to a degree. I mean, Quebec rakes in more than a billion dollars a year from Upper Churchill power while this province sees less than $100 million.

It was a raw deal we’ve been suffering under for almost half a century.

And for some, the resentment festers, particularly among those of the generation who remembers the deal being done.

I’d hate to think Muskrat Falls was predicated primarily on a desire to give Quebec the finger; in other words, on passion and not rationality. But it’s a question worth considering. We’ve all seen how the other anticipated assumptions driving the project — a surge in demand for electricity, a mining boom, rising oil prices, the need for rate stability — have not been borne out.

In an interview with Atlantic Business Magazine in 2011, after vacating the premiership, Danny Williams waxed philosophical about what Muskrat Falls represented for the province.

“This is a day of great historic significance to Newfoundland and Labrador as we move forward with development of the Lower Churchill project, on our own terms and free of the geographic stranglehold of Québec which has for too long determined the fate of the most attractive clean energy project in North America,” Williams said, foreshadowing the message his successor would soon be driving home with a vengeance.

“It’s a huge milestone,” Williams continued. “It’s the day, hopefully ... when Newfoundlanders can finally let go of the Upper Churchill and say, ‘Done. It’s over.’”

But is it over, when that milestone has become such a crushing millstone? Or could it be, that in trying — at least in part — to stick it to the province of Quebec, we find ourselves shafted far worse by the decisions of our own people than Quebec ever could?

I’d hate to think Muskrat Falls was predicated primarily on a desire to give Quebec the finger; in other words, on passion and not rationality.