Business
Bitter legacy hangs over today’s energy discussions between Quebec and N.L. premiers
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.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
Ever since March 16, when presidential candidate Donald Trump created a controversy by predicting President Joe Biden’s efforts to force Americans to convert their lives to electric-vehicle (EV) lifestyles would end in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry, the industry’s own disastrous results have consistently proven him accurate.
The latest example came this week when Ford Motor Company reported that it had somehow managed to lose $132,000 per unit sold during Q1 2024 in its Model e EV division. The disastrous first quarter results follow the equally disastrous results for 2023, when the company said it lost $4.7 billion in Model e for the full 12-month period.
While the company has remained profitable overall thanks to strong demand for its legacy internal combustion SUV, pickup, and heavy vehicle models, the string of major losses in its EV line led the company to announce a shift in strategic vision in early April. Ford CEO Jim Farley said then that the company would delay the introduction of additional planned all-electric models and scale back production of current models like the F-150 Lightning pickup while refocusing efforts on introducing new hybrid models across its business line.
General Motors reported it had good overall Q1 results, but they were based on strong sales of its gas-powered SUV and truck models, not its EVs. GM is so gun-shy about reporting EV-specific results that it doesn’t break them out in its quarterly reports, so there is no way of knowing what the real bottom line amounts to from that part of the business. This is possibly a practice Ford should consider adopting.
After reporting its own disappointing Q1 results in which adjusted earnings collapsed by 48% and deliveries dropped by 20% from the previous quarter, Tesla announced it is laying off 10 percent of its global workforce, including 2,688 employees at its Austin plant, where its vaunted Cybertruck is manufactured. Since its introduction in November, the Cybertruck has been beset by buyer complaints ranging from breakdowns within minutes after taking delivery, to its $3,000 camping tent feature failing to deploy, to an incident in which one buyer complained his vehicle shut down for 5 hours after he failed to put the truck in “carwash mode” before running it through a local car wash.
Meanwhile, international auto rental company Hertz is now fire selling its own fleet of Teslas and other EV models in its efforts to salvage a little final value from what is turning out to be a disastrous EV gamble. In a giant fit of green virtue-signaling, the company invested whole hog into the Biden subsidy program in 2021 with a mass purchase of as many as 100,000 Teslas and 50,000 Polestar models, only to find that customer demand for renting electric cars was as tepid as demand to buy them outright. For its troubles, Hertz reported it had lost $392 million during Q1, attributing $195 million of the loss to its EV struggles. Hertz’s share price plummeted by about 20% on April 25, and was down by 55% for the year.
If all this financial carnage does not yet constitute a “bloodbath” for the U.S. EV sector, it is difficult to imagine what would. But wait: It really isn’t all that hard to imagine at all, is it? When he used that term back in March, Trump was referring not just to the ruinous Biden subsidy program, but also to plans by China to establish an EV-manufacturing beachhead in Mexico, from which it would be able to flood the U.S. market with its cheap but high-quality electric models. That would definitely cause an already disastrous domestic EV market to get even worse, wouldn’t it?
The bottom line here is that it is becoming obvious even to ardent EV fans that US consumer demand for EVs has reached a peak long before the industry and government expected it would.
It’s a bit of a perfect storm, one that rent-seeking company executives and obliging policymakers brought upon themselves. Given that this outcome was highly predictable, with so many warning that it was in fact inevitable, a reckoning from investors and corporate boards and voters will soon come due. It could become a bloodbath of its own, and perhaps it should.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Fraser Institute
By Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill
If Honda, Volkswagen and Stellantis are unwilling to build their EV battery plants in Ontario without corporate welfare, that sends a strong signal that those projects make little economic sense.
On Thursday, the Trudeau and Ford governments announced they will dole out an estimated $5 billion in corporate welfare to Honda so the auto giant can build an electric vehicle (EV) battery plant and manufacture EVs in Ontario. This is the third such deal in Ontario, following similar corporate welfare handouts to Volkswagen ($13.2 billion) and Stellantis ($15.0 billion). Like the previous two deals, the Honda deal comes at a significant cost to taxpayers and will almost certainly fail to create widespread economic benefits for Ontarians.
The Trudeau and Ford governments finalized the Honda deal after more than a year of negotiations, with both governments promising direct incentives and tax credits. Of course, this isn’t free money. Taxpayers in Ontario and the rest of Canada will pay for this corporate welfare through their taxes.
Unfortunately, corporate welfare is nothing new. Governments in Canada have a long history of picking their favoured firms or industries and using a wide range of subsidies and other incentives to benefit those firms or industries selected for preferential treatment.
According to a recent study, the federal government spent $84.6 billion (adjusted for inflation) on business subsidies from 2007 to 2019 (the last pre-COVID year). Over the same period, provincial and local governments spent another $302.9 billion on business subsidies for their favoured firms and industries. (Notably, the study excludes other forms of government support such as loan guarantees, direct investments and regulatory privileges, so the total cost of corporate welfare during this period is actually much higher.)
Of course, when announcing the Honda deal, the Trudeau and Ford governments attempted to sell this latest example of corporate welfare as a way to create jobs. In reality, however, there’s little to no empirical evidence that corporate welfare creates jobs (on net) or produces widespread economic benefits.
Instead, these governments are simply picking winners and losers, shifting jobs and investment away from other firms and industries and circumventing the preferences of consumers and investors. If Honda, Volkswagen and Stellantis are unwilling to build their EV battery plants in Ontario without corporate welfare, that sends a strong signal that those projects make little economic sense.
Unfortunately, the Trudeau and Ford governments believe they know better than investors and entrepreneurs, so they’re using taxpayer money to allocate scarce resources—including labour—to their favoured projects and industries. Again, corporate welfare actually hinders economic growth, which Ontario and Canada desperately need, and often fails to produce jobs that would not otherwise have been created, while also requiring financial support from taxpayers.
It’s only a matter of time before other automakers ask for similar handouts from Ontario and the federal government. Indeed, after Volkswagen secured billions in federal subsidies, Stellantis stopped construction of an EV battery plant in Windsor until it received similar subsidies from the Trudeau government. Call it copycat corporate welfare.
Government handouts to corporations do not pave the path to economic success in Canada. To help foster widespread prosperity, governments should help create an environment where all businesses can succeed, rather than picking winners and losers on the backs of taxpayers.
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