From a CBC story in which, among other things, Danny Williams brushes off the NAFTA issue in the Abitibi repo job:
The Newfoundland and Labrador's expropriation does not include the mill itself, although the government will take over a hydroelectric power plant at Star Lake, which sells power to the provincial grid. The government has said it will compensate AbitibiBowater for the Star Lake plant.
People should read more.
The expropriation bill seized all hydro assets AbitibiBowater held in central Newfoundland but they went beyond that.
They seized hydro assets - way more than Star Lake - belonging to other companies and those companies are named in the expropriation bill:
- Fortis (Exploits River Hydro Partnership involves Central Newfoundland Energy, a subsidiary of Fortis Generation)
- Clarica Life Insurance (now owned by Sun Life)
- Enel North America
All have likely lawyered up pretty tight. An e-mail inquiry by your humble e-scribbler to Sun Life netted a nil response. The company’s public affairs department wouldn’t even confirm what involvement the company had in the hydro project in the first place. As dumb as that kind of response is, that’s how you can tell the lawyers are on the job and bums are really tight: a company won’t even confirm information that is currently in the public domain.
There was no hope they’d offer any remarks on the substance of the dispute.
But seriously, people should read more and maybe pursue a bit more of these stories.
Like how does Beth Marshall’s husband Stan, Stan the Fortis Man feel about Danny frigging over his investments? Stan’s been known to have a blunt opinion or two.
Like is Enel – or any other company partnered with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro – reconsidering its investment based on the expropriation?
Or has anything been expropriated beyond the Abitibi bits, which would be contrary to the law, and which would have the effect of strengthening Abitibi’s case that the expropriation was discriminatory?
Or have they really all lawyered up, which is a sign of a much bigger dispute and much bigger problem than you’d think if you got all your news from, say voice of the cabinet minister.
Maybe if Lorraine Michael and others hadn’t been so flattered that Danny had deigned to let them in on such historic action – “socialist” action, as Lorraine proudly declared it in the legislature – that they turned off their brains, they might have noticed the sweeping nature of the expropriation bits of the bill.
Nope. If people paid attention to some of the details other stories might emerge, one’s that have more to do with the current issue than the pap being spewed from all manner of organs and orifices.
Like for instance, they might have found the inadvertent humour in this comment from the Premier:
"You know I'm a lawyer of over 30 years, so blowhard, five-page letters that get sent to everybody in the country mean nothing to me. I know the law."
Sometimes the five page blows only get sent to one party, but the point is still the same. Knowing the law is something else though.
And that’s where people might want to separate the bluster from the evidence. You see, for all the praise he gives himself, Danny Williams record in court - with decisions rendered by judges - isn’t that good. Well, not if the two prominent cases that have been adjudicated in the past five years are to be considered.
In Henley v. Cable Atlantic, the Premier lost badly in a case he didn’t have to even fight. He elected to dispute a contract with a guy hired to help with the sale of his old cable company to Rogers. The guy eventually got paid in full but not until Danny Williams shelled out for expensive lawyers to fight the case - in a losing cause – through two Ontario courts. The bill at the end must have been double what it would have been if Williams hadn’t been so bloody minded at the start. SO if the guy is will to waste his own cash on a loser, imagine what he’d do when he was playing with other peoples’ money.
Enter Ruelokke v. Newfoundland and Labrador, in which the provincial government – in a brief that surely was approved by the province’s top legal beagle if not written by him – argued that a clause that said the final decision by an appeal tribunal was binding on the parties actually meant that none of it could be reviewed by a court.
That got laughed out of court just on the English comprehension alone. The rest of the evidence was an unflattering portrait of an administration that was all over the map when it came to the whole business of finding a boss to run the offshore regulatory board.
Then there’s the 2005 offshore deal in which the government started out looking for a federal transfer that doubled offshore revenues forever.
They settled for $2.0 billion in cash.
Then there’s the Hebron deal. it could be worth $10, $20 or $28 billion depending on which hyper-inflated estimate you wanted to take at the announcement. (Yes, they settled for two billion in cash on the other one) Guaranteed flat 1% royalties up front for the companies, a higher royalty rate tied to the price of oil (above an amount it flows; below – nothing), a give away of historic proportions on the construction side, a deal in which the companies - alone - have a decade to decide whether or not to build the project.
You get the point.
-srbp-