There are a
couple of points in his 1,000 page report where commissioner Richard
LeBlanc refers to politicians and other officials of the Government of
Newfoundland and Labrador as being naive in their dealings with Nalcor
officials about Muskrat Falls. He says Ed Martin took advantage of the politicians
and bureaucrats.
It is
arguably one place and perhaps the only place where LeBlanc is wrong in his
description of Muskrat Falls and how it came to be.
Muskrat
Falls was, from the outset a political project, initiated and then relentlessly
pursued by a group of politicians for their own reasons. Their leader,
Danny Williams, selected Ed Martin to work with him on the Nalcor project,
chiefly to build something on the Lower Churchill as Williams’ legacy.
Martin told
LeBlanc that he had one job – to build the project – and that was all of it. But
Martin did the job for Williams. Along
the way Williams recruited to his circle senior bureaucrats who also actively
collaborated in the project for their own reasons. It was this circle that met in April 2010 at
The Rooms and decided to plunge ahead with the redefined project now known as
Muskrat Falls.
They were
not naïve. They were not duped. They did not care. They had one goal. They worked together to
achieve it from the time Williams launched the venture in 2006 until thd last of them resigned in 2016.
Muskrat
Falls was the bastard child of ego and ambition, nothing more. All the other ideas associated with it, such
as retribution for the 1969 power contract, were never anything more than lies –
rationalisations to gain support for the project. The cabal from The Rooms deceived the
public and they deceived themselves.
They wanted
it built and nothing would stop them.
Regular
readers of these e-scribbles over the past 15 years are familiar with the
notion. There is something like 250,000 words about the Lower Churchill
project in these electronic pages. Now those regular readers and many more have
the benefit of a $15 million investigation that included scores of witnesses
and tens of thousands of pages of documents. Those loyal readers know
that every single thing said about the project by the Known Critics was
true. We were right.
And where we
did not have direct knowledge, we correctly deduced through a variety of
indicators what was going on. One of the most startling for your humble
e-scribbler was a point during Kathy Dunderdale's testimony where she talked about
the tense negotiations in September 2012 that could have scuttled the
project.
By that time,
provincial government finances had deteriorated to the point where it had to
borrow the entire cost of the project. Nalcor would borrow some and the
government would borrow more and give it to Nalcor as "equity".
A Kremlinology post at the time noted the changed language Dunderdale
used to describe the loan guarantee. No longer nice to have but
"important" as if to say essential.
"So it
is," your humble e-scribbler wrote at the time, "that a
provincial government once dependent on the federal government for half its
annual revenue is now entirely dependent on the federal government once again
for a project that was supposed to be done with the people of Newfoundland and
Labrador in undisputed control.
"A
provincial government that supposedly had the fiscal capacity to build the
Lower Churchill on its own cannot go anywhere without Ottawa’s money."
By the time
Dunderdale was locked in those tense negotiations with the federal government,
common sense would have told any government genuinely interested in protecting
the public to stop and rethink what they were doing. But Dunderdale was in on it from the
beginning. Nothing would stop her.
And now here
we are almost a decade after that and we must go cap-in-hand to Ottawa again to
get help paying for the project in its entirety.
Such is the
magnitude of the mistakes made by Danny Williams, his associates, and his
successors, Dwight Ball included, not just with Muskrat Falls but with the
fundamental direction of the province.
With LeBlanc’s
report in hand and with the knowledge of how much of this was in public at the
time people wildly cheered on Williams and his successors, the question now is what, if anything, will
come of the knowledge.
-srbp-
