For those who have been paying attention to the former federal emissary to Newfoundland and Labrador, John Crosbie's interventions on the Atlantic Accord dispute have been curious.
For example, here is his column from Atlantic Business Magazine. Take this paragraph as typical:
"The difference between the June 5th agreement and the proposal outlined by Minister Goodale is in the range of $4 billion. Total provincial un-clawed back revenues during the projected 21-year-life of the Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose Fields, based on an estimated future price of oil of $35 per barrel, would be $6.5 billion. If the present regime continues, NL will receive $2.1 billion over the 21 years when all presently known oil resources would be completely used up. If the federal suggestion of the "Ontario cap" is carried out, Newfoundland would receive another $400 million over the 21 year period. The overall division of the revenues from the offshore would then be 38 per cent for NL and 62 per cent for Canada. Clearly such an act of federal treachery and promise breaking would remove from NL its one opportunity ever to become a "have" province, as would be the case for Nova Scotia."
To be fair, at the outset, this comment from Mr. Crosbie is based solely on the October offer and Mr. Crosbie likely had to meet a printing deadline well before the December offer was made. That's one of the hazards of trying to comment on today's issue in a medium that doesn't allow some flexibility to meet for changes tomorrow or the day after.
That said, Mr. Crosbie did know certain things when he wrote the paragraph excerpted above that make his comments dubious. For example, he knows full-well that the deal he helped to craft in 1985 gave absolutely no commitment that federal and provincial revenues would be divided into any set of proportions. What he calls "federal treachery" is not something that happened since 1993 when the Liberal Party took power in Ottawa. The "treachery" to which Mr. Crosbie refers is his contained in his own deal operating as intended.
As a further example, Mr. Crosbie has known from the start that his new interpretation of "principle beneficiary" is decidedly not what was intended by the signatories to the Accord.
Yet further, Mr. Crosbie knows full-well that he makes an utterly false contention when he states that over the course of 21 years the provincial government will receive only $2.1 billion of the %6.5 billion of projected provincial revenues. As Mr. Crosbie himself described this contention in 1990, it is "absolutely, utter nonsense".
Leap ahead in time to Crosbie's assault on the Globe and Mail, this time mounted from the pages of the Sun chain. For purposes here, I'll excerpt some of Mr. Crosbie's historical and other facts and comment on them one by one:
-Extract begins-
Other historical facts that our Ontario-centric Toronto intellectual elite don't remember, if they ever knew them, are:
- Canada first took an interest in claiming our offshore resources on the east coast in 1961; [This assumes that as a matter of law, the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador owned them in the first place. What occurred was a dispute, like all disputes, in which resources were claimed by two parties, both of whom had a claim. Neither the Newfoundland Court of Appeal nor the Supreme Court of Canada accepted the proposition that the offshore resources ever belonged to Newfoundland and Labrador.]
- The Trudeau government made a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada, which decided in March 1984, that the undersea and undersoil resources off east-coast Newfoundland were owned by Canada and not Newfoundland, just as Canada had earlier owned the resources under Alberta, et. al. [For his own partisan reasons, Mr. Crosbie neglects to mention the reference by the Government of Newfoundland to the Supreme Court of Newfoundland Court of Appeal. Mr. Crosbie is also fully aware, or ought to be aware, that the legal status of the resources beneath the ground in Alberta and Saskatchewan was and is fundamentally different from the situation offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. Both courts found in favour of the federal government having legal jurisdiction, which is different from ownership.]
- It took from 1961 (mostly under Liberal governments) until the Mulroney government resolved these disputes via the Atlantic Accord signed on Feb. 11, 1985; [Mr. Crosbie neglects to mention the numerous efforts to resolve the ownership dispute and develop the fields by mutual agreement between the federal and provincial governments. Among other issues, it was the provincial government's insistence on pursuing the ownership argument that held up a deal during the Peckford administration. Such was not the case in Nova Scotia.]
- The Accord recognizes "the right of Newfoundland to be the principal beneficiary of the oil and gas resources off its shores." [Indeed it does, Mr. Crosbie, but the term is undefined in the Accord. That said, the definition Mr. Crosbie offers of the term is radically different from the benefits provided to Newfoundland and Labrador by a landmark agreement. His new interpretation does not match the public statements made by Prime Minister Mulroney and Premier Peckford when this historic agreement was signed.]
-Extract ends-
Note that nowhere in his Sun spewing does Mr. Crosbie go back and point out his revenue clawback argument from ABM and elsewhere continues to exist under the January deal he praises.
Mr. Crosbie concludes his tirade against what he calls "central Canadian control-freaks" by encouraging them to "cease to promote incorrect, unintelligent, insensitive, ill-informed and biased views that ignore the history of the problems."
Would that Mr. Crosbie took his own advice, we might be spared his ahistorical, partisan ad hominem rantings. His own presentations are no less incorrect or ill-informed and the result of his interventions have been no less insulting to the intelligence of his readers across Canada than the opinions of others he presumes to criticize.
