Here is some additional information on the Canada Hibernia Holding Corporation, for those who want to dig a little deeper into this.
The Hibernia Management and Development Corporation website gives some general information on overall ownership of the Hibernia field.
Background information is harder to come by online, although there is plenty in old newspaper files from the early 1990s.
In developing the Hibernia field neither the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador nor the Government of Canada initially took a direct interest. The federal National Energy Program (NEP) and provincial legislation from the early 1980s anticipated that government would legislate a share of any offshore development. The Peckford administration passed legislation in 1980 to create a provincial petroleum corporation that was supposed to provide the provincial government with a means of accessing considerable revenues from offshore development.
The federal Mulroney administration repealed the NEP although it retained Petro-Canada, the federal Crown corporation for a number of years.
While the Real Atlantic Accord does refer to Crown shares, this clause refers to potential shares of the type envisaged under the NEP. In the event, the dismantling of the NEP rendered this clause irrelevant and the federal interest in Hibernia does not fall under the provisions of the Real Atlantic Accord.
In 1992 the federal government acquired an 8.5% interest in Hibernia following the withdrawal of Gulf Canada Resources, one of the original partners. Since no other private sector partners could be found to take up the shares, the project would have collapsed without the federal investment.
CHHC is a small federal Crown corporation which administers the federal shares. It is located in Calgary
As an aside, if you read the NOIA website, apparently only the intervention of NOIA members (one a former advisor to Brian Peckford) and federal Tory ministers like John Crosbie saved the day in 1992. Apparently, the provincial minister of energy at the time, Rex Gibbons, later a chairman of NOIA (!!!!), had nothing at all to do with it. Perhaps NOIA's partisan leanings go back much further than events of the past few months. The link is to an overview prepared for the association's 25th anniversary, less than three years after Gibbons' term as chairman.
