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| Left to Right: Bill Doody, Brian Peckford, John Crosbie, Jane Crosbie, and Beth Crosbie at the 1983 federal PC leadership convention |
The outpouring of praise in memory of John Crosbie,
who died on Thursday, has been such a flood of cliché and, in some cases,
fiction that it does a disservice to the memory of one of the most significant
political figures from Newfoundland and Labrador in the 20th
century.
Remarks by Edward
Roberts, Joe Clark,
and Brian Mulroney were closer to the truth of the man than most. Roberts once
noted that Crosbie wanted to be leader of anything he was ever involved with,
starting with the Boy Scouts. Certainly,
that is a testament to Crosbie’s ambition and determination, but in his
interview last week, Roberts spoke plainly of Crosbie’s considerable intellectual
talents that went with his ambition and determination.
Likewise, Clark spoke of the respect that
public servants and cabinet colleagues in Ottawa had for Crosbie both for his
ability and for the professional way he dealt with them. The politicians understood that Crosbie would
be tough to deal with when he wanted to get his way, but they understood that
Crosbie never failed to deploy the same fierceness in defence of the team when
attacked from outside. The bureaucrats appreciated someone who understood their
briefs, especially in portfolios like finance.
By contrast, Rex
Murphy, so long removed from Newfoundland and Labrador
physically and mentally that his writings on the province are a unique brand of
safari journalism, gave the National Post his trademark overwrought
prose. He appears, as well, to have used
an equally overwrought imagination to cover over the considerable gaps in his
memory of what actually happened now almost a half century ago.
The one thing Murphy got unmistakably right is to
credit Jane Crosbie for her role in John’s political career. Not to eulogise her before her time but Jane
is as much the political force, and understood as such, as John ever was.
People in Newfoundland and Labrador today who claim they want to get more women
involved in politics – many of them people who know nothing of politics in the
province and care even less about it – would do well to spend some time talking
to Jane Crosbie and others like her. To say that “Jane was every bit his equal” may
well sell Jane short, although the crucial part is that “the only difference [between
the two] being she chose the off-stage role.”
Crosbie
and the Offshore
Too many commentators make Crosbie out as the
architect of the 1985 Atlantic Accord.
The truth – revealed in the scant mention of it in Crosbie’s own 1997
collection of anecdotes about his life – is that Crosbie had little to do with
it. Brian Mulroney proposed the idea
that offshore resources ought to be treated like those on land. He delivered on his promise once he became
Prime Minister.
Brian Peckford and Pat Carney, both of whom were
deeply involved in the negotiations of the astounding agreement know and have
said publicly that Crosbie was nowhere to be seen.
Carney,
the federal energy minister at the time, told the Chronicle Herald in
2007 that, “despite
claims to the contrary, John Crosbie was never involved in the offshore
negotiations with either province in the l980s. That task was assigned by prime
minister Brian Mulroney to me, on the grounds that a Western MP and minister
with an energy background would bring more balance to an issue which involved
intense regional as well as national implications.”
Mr. Mulroney was still leader of the Opposition when he signed the original principles of the Atlantic accord with then premier Brian Peckford on June 14, 1984, three months before the Conservatives won the federal election. The completion of negotiations, led by me, was a priority of his government.John Crosbie’s most important contribution to the province’s oil and gas industry came in 1992. With oil at the equivalent of $12.88 cents a barrel today, Gulf Canada pulled out of the Hibernia project at a crucial time. Crosbie brought the federal government to the financial rescue of the project, over the considerable political resistance from western Canada and elsewhere. Hibernia was the lead project of the province’s offshore oil industry and, as it turned out, the source of the wealth that made Newfoundland and Labrador one of the wealthiest governments in Canada.
This may be
what the Accord praisers meant but it is more important to credit Crosbie for
precisely what he did and why that is important than to simply make stuff up
about him.
Crosbie
and Muskrat Falls
Oddly
missing from the recollections of Crosbie’s political accomplishments is his
role in what is - after oil and gas – arguably the biggest political story in
post Confederation Newfoundland and Labrador.
As provincial energy minister in Frank Moores’ administration, Crosbie
led the de facto nationalisation of BRINCO’s interest in Labrador
hydro-electric development and the creation of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.
Crosbie believed that Newfoundland and Labrador
should have taken the action in the 1960s when Quebec nationalised its own
electricity industry and created Hydro-Quebec.
The effect
of the move was to create a political fight between two provinces that is now
more a matter of fiction than fact in almost every aspect of its popular telling.
In 1976, Crosbie initiated the first of many unsuccessful legal efforts to undo
the 1969 power contract between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation and
Hydro-Quebec. Crosbie initiated the
recall demand for 800 megawatts of power to be delivered in 1983 even though
the province did not need the electricity and, as Crosbie noted in his 1997
book, had no way of getting it to the island where it was supposedly needed.
Crosbie was
not alone in this effort nor could anyone has foreseen where those events in
the 1970s would lead. The objective of the exercise, simply put, was to find a
way to overcome the financial problems faced by the government and spur the
economic development of the province.
The ones behind the effort may have wound up fighting with Hydro-Quebec
but they were, in no small measure, inspired by the example of Quebec in the
1960s and financial windfalls that could come – they believed – from having
just such an organisation in Newfoundland and Labrador.
There were
other views within government at the time.
Frank Moores, for example, regretted the acquisition of the BRINCO
interest since it increased the public debt by 25% at the time. Bill Marshall, another key figure in the
provincial cabinets through the 1970s and 1980s, believed it would have been
enough to buy back the water rights.
Yet at the
time both Moores and Marshall were persuaded of the view of Crosbie and his
allies. As much as those initial
intentions were good, it is a matter of fact that the feud with Hydro-Quebec,
initiated in the mid-1970s, drove decades of relentless and fruitless legal
manoeuvring. And ultimately, the myth of
Hydro-Quebec’s untrustworthiness and the fairy tales about the 1969 contract
played a central role in the rationalisation for the Muskrat Falls project. And Crosbie – his own understanding of the
issues still locked in 1976 – endorsed Muskrat Falls as a risky but worthwhile gambit to
break Quebec’s (after 1997 imaginary) stranglehold on development of Labrador’s
hydroelectric potential.
The Class
of ‘66
John Crosbie
entered provincial politics in 1966. Joe
Smallwood appointed him to cabinet alongside Alex Hickman and Clyde Wells. Three of them bright, two of them, shiny and
young and every bit the symbols of the generation born before Confederation but
the first to come of age after it. At
university in the 1950s and early 1960s and then into cabinet in August 1966
right before Smallwood called the election in September.
It is no
small testament to Crosbie’s achievements that, in a statement released
Saturday, Clyde Wells said Crosbie had done as much for the province as
Smallwood. The handful of words by Wells needs a context, though, to give it
proper impact. The Class of 1966 stands
out for the number of members who shaped the province and its politics for
decades after. Crosbie as provincial
cabinet minister and federal cabinet minister in a career spanning just shy of
30 years. Clyde Wells, later Premier at a
crucial time in the province’s history and afterwards Chief Justice of
Newfoundland and Labrador. Alex Hickman,
a cabinet minister under two different Premiers, later a supreme court justice
and the commissioner who investigated both the Ocean Ranger tragedy and Donald
Marshall’s wrongful conviction. Edward
Roberts, Smallwood’s executive assistant, then into cabinet, later leader of
the opposition in the 1970s and back into cabinet in the 1990s, finishing, like
Crosbie as Lieutenant Governor. If Wells
put Crosbie on a par with Smallwood, then it is high praise indeed.
As tempting
as it is to tell an entertaining story, Rex Murphy is wrong – fundamentally wrong
– to characterise the political defeat of Smallwood as a struggle between Smallwood
and Crosbie. It was due to a shift in
the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, especially those who came of age in
the years after Confederation. Not
surprisingly, Crosbie and Wells played a
hand in the beginning of the movement to oust Smallwood.
In his
memoir, Crosbie accurately describes
the rupture with Smallwood over financing for the Come by Chance refinery. Smallwood
agreed to give the job of negotiating with John Shaheen to a cabinet committee
that included the Wells, Crosbie, and Hickman.
Crosbie and Wells decided to make a stand as Smallwood intervened in the
talks to give Shaheen an even better deal than the one Smallwood had already
worked out. Crosbie and Wells had
concerns about the financial risks to the province and, as it worked out, left cabinet over the whole business. Smallwood had their desks bolted to the floor
on the opposition side of the House. It took
four years, however, including the PC
win in the 1968 federal election, and then the 1969 Liberal provincial
leadership fight for the movement
against Smallwood to gather momentum.
Smallwood
did not go easily or willingly. He announced
his resignation - hence the 1969
leadership fight – and then decided to seek to replace himself when it appeared
Crosbie would win the job. Crosbie was still an independent Liberal in 1971
when he and Wells led a cross-examination of Shaheen in the spectacle that
accompanied debate of the refinery in the House and Shaheen being called to the
bar of the House to answer questions.
But Crosbie
and Frank Moores – by then returned to Newfoundland and Labrador from Ottawa to
become PC leader – had been talking for a while about Crosbie’s move to the PCs
in the 19761 election. They cut a deal,
the details of which are only hinted at in Crosbie’s memoir, that saw Crosbie
join the Tories. The 1971 election was a
tie and it took another six months afterwards, a change of government and
another general election in 1972 before Smallwood was consigned to the
opposition benches for the rest of his parliamentary career.
The Great
and the Small
Like all
great public figures, Crosbie’s record is neither simple nor clean. Crosbie was the federal minister representing
the province at a time when half the provincial government’s income came from
federal transfers. This gave Crosbie
power over the province that rivalled that of Smallwood at his peak. And like Smallwood, Crosbie did not relish
being challenged.
In his 1997 memoir,
Crosbie personally attacked both Clyde Wells and Brian Peckford for doing
nothing more than representing their provinces and taking positions with which
Crosbie did not agree. To Crosbie, they
were selfish and ungrateful. Crosbie was no different in office. In September 1990, the provincial government
raised the possibility that the 1985 Atlantic Accord’s Equalization offsets
might not work as intended. Crosbie
publicly dismissed the suggestion as the government “biting the hand that feeds
it” and of “wanting to have one’s cake and vomiting it up too.” No
other minister in any other administration would have spoken of a provincial
government that way nor gotten away with it.
To his last breath,
Crosbie repeated the lie that Clyde Wells had destroyed the Meech Lake
Accord. In his comments on Crosbie’s
role in Hibernia, Mulroney did the same thing in reference to
Crosbie’s championing of a federal investment in Hibernia. The truth is that Mulroney’s Accord died as a
result of political opposition across Canada and his own administration’s
miscalculations about wells and about Elijah Harper in Manitoba.
As for the
Hibernia project, it delivered such financial and strategic benefits to the
country that it would have been childish and stupid for federal politicians to
let the project die. The 58 federal Progressive
Conservative MPs to whom Mulroney referred as bearing a grudge over Meech Lake
would have been biting off their own noses to spite their own faces had they
rejected the federal investment in the offshore.
This should
not diminish Crosbie’s pivotal role in pushing for the federal investment. Both Rex Gibbons - energy minister at the
time – and Peter Kennedy, a public servant whose career began when Crosbie was
a provincial cabinet minister, rightly identify Crosbie as indispensable in
securing the federal investment and financial guarantees and with it the
offshore industry that transformed Newfoundland and Labrador. Others could be
more generous and fair than Crosbie.
Crosbie’s
view of provincial ingratitude varied with his position at the time. Pat Carney’s letter to the editor of the Chronicle
Herald, for example, came after Crosbie’s savaging of the 1985 Accord’s Equalization
offsets. She finished the letter by
observing that the “actions of Mr. Crosbie in attacking the Atlantic Accord
provisions in the Harper budget show Mr. Mulroney's concerns were valid.”
This was not
the only time that Carney and Crosbie slagged each other in public. Crosbie refers to her as “cantankerous” and a
“bad-tempered Irishwoman” in his 1997 memoir.
She returned the favour in her memoir three years later. Nor was it the
only time Crosbie shifted positions on a subject and attacked people he had
previously supported.
As much as he endorsed Danny Williams in 2004-2005,
a couple of years later, Crosbie penned a column for Atlantic Business
Magazine in which he labelled Williams the biggest current threat to
Confederation. Later, Crosbie criticised
Williams over the provincial party leadership. For his part, Williams returned
the favour by expressing amazement at Crosbie’s ingratitude for the elevator
the provincial government had installed at Government House during Crosbie’s
tenure as Lieutenant Governor since Crosbie had difficulty negotiating stairs.
A Great
Story, Much Left of it to Be Told
John Crosbie
is one of the most significant figures in Newfoundland and Labrador history in
the second half of the 20th century.
His significant role in Canadian politics, particularly in championing
development of the east coast offshore and in advocating free trade, is largely
unexplored. Of all his considerable achievements, Crosbie’s role in the
development of the province’s hydro-electric industry has been – like the
industry itself- ignored by scholars and the public alike while he was alive
and in the tributes to him since he passed away last Thursday.
Clyde Wells
said of Crosbie that he had a more extensive impact on the province than anyone
except Joe Smallwood. This may be an
uncharacteristic exaggeration by Wells.
But when the full, and accurate, account is made of Crosbie’s 30 years
in provincial and federal politics, Wells will likely not be very far off the
mark.
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