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Bitter legacy hangs over today’s energy discussions between Quebec and N.L. premiers

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2 years ago

6 minute read

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey and Quebec Premier François Legault pose in the office of the premier at the Confederation Building, in St. John’s, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Daly

By Sarah Smellie in St. John’s

As Quebec Premier François Legault seeks a new energy deal with Newfoundland and Labrador, he faces a public in the Atlantic province scarred by the legacy of a pair of hydroelectric projects mired in missteps.

Legault travelled to St. John’s this week for discussions with Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey about the 1969 Churchill Falls hydroelectric energy deal — and what will come after it ends in 2041. The lopsided deal heavily favours Quebec, and has left a lasting bitterness in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The two leaders are scheduled to speak with reporters later on Friday after the meeting.

Jeff Webb, a historian at Memorial University, says some residents of Newfoundland and Labrador think the province wouldn’t have endured the “humiliation” of needing equalization payments from the federal government if the Churchill Falls agreement had more evenly served both provinces.

“It does speak to people’s sense that this is something that’s always been rightly ours, and it’s been stolen,” Webb said in a recent interview.

Decades later, that hostility drove people in Newfoundland and Labrador to embrace the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project, which is long delayed and draining the provincial purse, Webb said.

The 1969 Churchill Falls deal allows Quebec’s provincially owned hydroelectric utility, Hydro-Québec, to purchase 85 per cent of the electricity generated by the dam in Labrador, and therefore reap most of the profits. As of 2019, the deal had yielded close to $28 billion in profits to Quebec, and about $2 billion for Newfoundland and Labrador.

Under the agreement, Hydro-Québec pays a fixed price of 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour for Churchill Falls power. By comparison, the utility said in a news release this week it made an average of 8.2 cents per kilowatt hour on power it sold outside the province in 2022. Hydro-Québec made a record-breaking income of $4.6 billion last year, the release said.

The Innu of Uashat mak Mani-utenam in Quebec filed a $2.2-billion lawsuit against Hydro-Québec earlier this year, claiming the Churchill Falls hydroelectric station has destroyed a significant part of their traditional territory. In 2020, the Innu Nation in Labrador launched a $4-billion lawsuit against Hydro-Québec and Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp., a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, for the ecological and cultural damage caused by the damming of the upper Churchill River in the early 1970s.

Pam Frampton, who retired in 2021 as the managing editor of The Telegram newspaper in St. John’s, said she grew up under the shadow of Churchill Falls.

“There was always these associated feelings of shame and bitterness, and the feeling that we had been duped,” Frampton said in an interview.

Frampton said she believes the province would be in a completely different economic position now if the Churchill Falls arrangement had not been so skewed.

“Wanting to give Quebec the middle finger, if you will, was a part of the impetus behind Muskrat Falls,” Frampton said. “I think if we had a fair day’s deal with (Churchill Falls), we wouldn’t have been so hell-bent on getting (Muskrat Falls) developed at any cost.”

Like the Churchill Falls project, the Muskrat Falls development harnesses the power of the Churchill River, in Labrador, and it also sits on traditional Innu territory. It was green-lit in December of 2012 after much trumpeting and fanfare by the Progressive Conservative government at the time, particularly by premier Danny Williams, who quit politics in late 2010.

Muskrat Falls has been disastrous for the province’s finances and morale. Its price tag now sits at more than $13 billion, a figure Andrew Furey described in 2021 as “an anchor around the collective souls of Newfoundland and Labradorians.”

Legault has said he wants a “win-win” deal for Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador — and has even suggested paying the province more for electricity before the current deal ends in 2041.

Frampton said the Quebec premier needs to know that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are hardened and still smarting from both projects.

“I think he needs to know that, going in, we are gun shy, and for good reason,” she said. “He should expect us to ask the hard questions. And I certainly hope to God our government does, on our behalf.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 24, 2023.

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‘Context Of Chemsex’: Biden-Harris Admin Dumps Millions Into Developing Drug-Fueled Gay Sex App

Published on November 22, 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Owen Klinsky

The Biden-Harris administration is spending millions funding a project to advise homosexual men on how to more safely engage in drug-fueled intercourse.

The University of Connecticut (UCONN) in July announced a five-year, $3.4 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) for Assistant Professor Roman Shrestha to develop his app JomCare — “a smartphone-based just-in-time adaptive intervention aimed at improving access to HIV- and substance use-related harm reduction services for Malaysian GBMSM [gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men] engaged in chemsex,” university news website UCONN Today reported. “Chemsex,” according to Northern Irish LGBTQ+ nonprofit the Rainbow Project, is the involvement of drug use in one’s sex life, and typically involves Methamphetamine (crystal meth), Mephedrone (meth), and GHB and GBL (G).

Examples of the app’s use-cases include providing a user who has reported injecting drugs with prompts about ordering an at-home HIV test kit and employing safe drug injection practices, UCONN Today reported. The app is also slated to provide same-day delivery of HIV prevention drug PrEP, HIV self-testing kits and even a mood tracker.

“In Malaysia, our research has indicated that harm reduction needs of GBMSM [gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men] engaged in chemsex are not being adequately met,” Shrestha told UCONN Today. “Utilizing smartphone apps and other mHealth tools presents a promising and cost-effective approach to expand access to these services.”

Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia and is punishable by imprisonment, according to digital LGBTQ+ rights publication Equaldex. Drug use, including of cannabis, is illegal in Malaysia, and drug trafficking can be a capital offense.

The NIH disbursed $773,845 to Shrestha in July to conduct a 90-day trial testing the efficacy of JomCare among 482 chemsex-involved Malaysian gays. It also provided Shrestha with $191,417 in 2022 to “facilitate access to gender-affirming health care” for transgender women in the country.

“Gender-affirming care” is a euphemism used to describe a wide range of procedures, including sometimes irreversible hormone treatments that can lead to infertility as well as irreversible surgeries like mastectomies, phalloplasties and vaginoplasties.

Shrestha has a track record of researching mobile health (mHealth) initiatives for foreign homosexuals, co-authoring a 2024 study entitled, “Preferences for mHealth Intervention to Address Mental Health Challenges Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in Nepal.”

The proliferation of LGBT rights has been a “foreign policy priority” under the Biden-Harris administration, a State Department spokesperson previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation, with President Joe Biden instructing federal government department heads to “to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.”

“Around the globe, including here at home, brave lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) activists are fighting for equal protection under the law, freedom from violence, and recognition of their fundamental human rights,” a 2021 White House memorandum states. “The United States belongs at the forefront of this struggle — speaking out and standing strong for our most dearly held values.”

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Nov. 12 that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would collaborate to establish a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with Musk claiming the agency would feature a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.” Some DOGE cuts could come from LGBTQ+ programs, such as a grant from the United States Agency for International Development to perform sex changes in Guatemala and State Department funding for the showing of a play in North Macedonia entitled, “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”

“The woke mind virus consists of creating very, very divisive identity politics…[that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite,” Musk said at an event in Italy in December 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal. “It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves.”

Shrestha and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment. When reached for comment, a UCONN spokeswoman told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, “specific questions about the grant and the decision to award it to our faculty member should be directed to the NIH, since that’s the funding agency.”

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Broken ‘equalization’ program bad for all provinces

Published on November 21, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Alex Whalen  and Tegan Hill

Back in the summer at a meeting in Halifax, several provincial premiers discussed a lawsuit meant to force the federal government to make changes to Canada’s equalization program. The suit—filed by Newfoundland and Labrador and backed by British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta—effectively argues that the current formula isn’t fair. But while the question of “fairness” can be subjective, its clear the equalization program is broken.

In theory, the program equalizes the ability of provinces to deliver reasonably comparable services at a reasonably comparable level of taxation. Any province’s ability to pay is based on its “fiscal capacity”—that is, its ability to raise revenue.

This year, equalization payments will total a projected $25.3 billion with all provinces except B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan to receive some money. Whether due to higher incomes, higher employment or other factors, these three provinces have a greater ability to collect government revenue so they will not receive equalization.

However, contrary to the intent of the program, as recently as 2021, equalization program costs increased despite a decline in the fiscal capacity of oil-producing provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, the fiscal capacity gap among provinces was shrinking, yet recipient provinces still received a larger equalization payment.

Why? Because a “fixed-growth rule,” introduced by the Harper government in 2009, ensures that payments grow roughly in line with the economy—even if the gap between richer and poorer provinces shrinks. The result? Total equalization payments (before adjusting for inflation) increased by 19 per cent between 2015/16 and 2020/21 despite the gap in fiscal capacities between provinces shrinking during this time.

Moreover, the structure of the equalization program is also causing problems, even for recipient provinces, because it generates strong disincentives to natural resource development and the resulting economic growth because the program “claws back” equalization dollars when provinces raise revenue from natural resource development. Despite some changes to reduce this problem, one study estimated that a recipient province wishing to increase its natural resource revenues by a modest 10 per cent could face up to a 97 per cent claw back in equalization payments.

Put simply, provinces that generally do not receive equalization such as Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan have been punished for developing their resources, whereas recipient provinces such as Quebec and in the Maritimes have been rewarded for not developing theirs.

Finally, the current program design also encourages recipient provinces to maintain high personal and business income tax rates. While higher tax rates can reduce the incentive to work, invest and be productive, they also raise the national standard average tax rate, which is used in the equalization allocation formula. Therefore, provinces are incentivized to maintain high and economically damaging tax rates to maximize equalization payments.

Unless premiers push for reforms that will improve economic incentives and contain program costs, all provinces—recipient and non-recipient—will suffer the consequences.

Authors:

Alex Whalen  and Tegan Hill
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