SpankyMcFarland

Yes, due compensation. Nobody that I know would disagree with a reasonable revenue sharing program. After all, Quebec will shoulder a lot of the future building costs on the river. I think the MOU offers that but I seem to be in the minority here at the moment. The outgoing government slipped up by not having a credible, arm’s length independent assessment of the deal. However, if we miss out on it we will have a tragedy on our hands. I think the federal government should have developed basic guidelines for how provinces should co-operate in resource development.

Nobody is asking for that in NL. Reasonable accommodation is all we want. The problem between NL and Quebec reflects our basic architecture as a country.

Imagine the Ten Commandments carrying a notwithstanding clause in the small print at the bottom: but if the Canaanites do any of the above, have at ‘er b’y, sin at will.

Canada is not the moon. It is a federation where reasonable co-operation should be expected.

He is attacking us. Please, face reality. Of course, I’m not blaming Trump for every problem we have, merely for what he is doing to us which he is choosing to do out of a mixture of stupidity and malice.

I’m happy with how my municipality works. They do a good job. I can see where my taxes are going.

Our country is being attacked by him constantly. It’s hard to ignore.

A tariff on Canadian lumber is a tax on young American homebuyers. Trump wants to tax these people so he can give tax breaks to others who certainly don’t need them. MAGA voters are in for some hard lessons.

Where are people discussing the new duties on lumber on this very strange, allegedly Canadian, forum?

Trump is the problem there. He clearly wants to destroy our auto industry and doesn’t care how much that hurts his own country. BTW where is the BC lumber thread? Surely a pressing national issue. Is this going to be the last forum in the world without a search function? Is there a prize for that or something?

The current deal lasts until 2041. I’d like to be alive to see a better one. If Quebec or Canada had signed such an exploitative, long-term agreement with a developing country they would have been shamed into tearing it up decades ago or the other side would have gone to war to get rid of it. For NL the situation is like the oil crisis of 1973 (a very long time ago and yet four years after our infamous contract was inked) or the current tension between Ethiopia and Egypt. Talk to Newfoundlanders about the matter and they’ll have a hard time stopping green slime shooting out of their heads. We can’t wait even another five years for a reasonable deal that shares profits in a more equitable manner. Without a major cash injection we are an ever diminishing old folks home unable to pay our bills. So there’s no question we are more desperate for a new deal than Quebec is. Obviously, Hydro Quebec see the need to nail down their future power supply as well but we’re just one part of that picture for them - 15% at the moment but it could be more if the new projects on the river go through. Perhaps I am imagining this but I got the feeling from Legault and his officials that they were aware of the history and wanted to share the resource more fairly. I very much doubt the sister party of Mr. Blanchet, whom I cannot stand watching for more than a few seconds at a time, will be concerned about such matters.

Wakeham being more pugnacious here, going after the “pundints” as he calls them as well as perhaps the sceptics in his own party, and talking more about Churchill Falls than he did recently. He sounds rather like Joey Smallwood on the subject and we all know how that turned out for the province - expletives deleted. Let’s hope his independent review of the deal backs it and we get through our next referendum experience without a Brexit-style nightmare for the government. Looking at his campaign promises, ‘better health care’ and ‘lower taxes’ will be difficult to bring about together unless we all fly to Dubai on one-way tickets and hope they don’t notice the run on fries. As for ‘safer communities’, I think Mr. Wakeham needs to take a little walk on the wild side, ie, the mainland. We have a critical shortage of young people already. Crime is the least of our problems.

B’y, FYI on a Canadian forum that’s trolling - pure, simple and stupid. Do you expect me to make remarks about your family now or something?

Virtue signalling? I don’t treat it as background noise. My portfolio agrees with me. Can Pakistan fill the void China leaves? Even if it could would China allow it to?

Nice concession speech by Premier Hogan, no rancour at all in it and the crowd behaved themselves too. He put in a plug for the Churchill Falls MOU which is right and proper in my view.

It’s official. Majority government for the PCs.

By contemporary standards it was a good-tempered contest, if anything a little on the low energy side. Truth be told, there was more snark within the parties than between them. The PCs had a ceiling of 21 seats and hit it. They had a great ground game. However, I hope I don’t shock you when I reveal that neither party took the opportunity during the campaign to discuss the massive spending cuts that will be needed for our province to survive. Now come the headaches for Tony Wakeham. What a grim task: bills, bills everywhere and not a quid in sight.

We are toast if we don’t get a deal. I honestly can’t tell you if the MOU is a good one - I’m told it is good enough by people who know more than I do. Former PC Premier Danny Williams hates it but he is bitter about a lot of things including the universal drubbing he received for the Muskrat Falls fiasco which went many billions over budget. Somehow I felt Legault was out to make amends a little for what Quebec did to us which makes me very frightened of dealing with the PQ instead, if they win. They are hardcore and hostile. NL has a new PC government, not known if majority govt yet.

PC 21, LIB 15, IND 2, NDP 2. 21 is majority govt. Hard to see the Liberals climbing that mountain. The margins are small in some seats but the odds are firmly for a PC win. Rural NL went for the Tories more or less as it did in the general election. People wanted change after ten years of Liberal rule which is understandable. The Hydro deal wasn’t a big factor. Popular vote share was even overall but there were lop-sided results for the Liberals in ‘town’ (St. John’s) and many close wins for the Tories elsewhere (except in Northern Labrador where the PC guy got nearly all the votes going for some reason - don’t know why!).

The PCs simply say they want to renegotiate the deal and put it to a referendum but they didn’t make a big issue of it in the campaign which looks to have been a winning strategy. I am hoping that means some minor tweaks to the existing deal and not tearing it up completely because the fear is that Legault will lose before a new deal can be signed and the next Quebec govt may decide to play hardball. After all, it has worked very well for them so far. They could wait ten years until NL can’t pay its bills at all and get any deal they want. One thing in NL we should know at this stage - no federal government will intervene to get us a just deal with Quebec. We are on our own on this one and with provincial debt approaching 20 billion (with liabilities double that, really) we may be speeding into a hard debt wall soon.

Rough night so far. At the moment it’s PC 19, LIB 17, IND 2, NDP 2 in the 40 seats. If this hydro deal is blocked by a PC govt the province is in for a very uncertain future, esp. with a possible change of govt in Quebec.

The resource is owned by the country and the province it’s in. Getting it out should be a secondary matter not subject to extortion. We have been way too lenient in these cases and it has hurt Canada.

Facebook and Google are as international as any companies in the world. They have destroyed our local media, systematically violated our privacy, enabled scams on a mass scale and affected our kids’ behaviour in all sorts of ways. In no way are they friends of our country. They’re the globalists I’m most concerned about.

So far, we only know of one place where we can live in the universe. Shouldn’t we be zealous about caring for it, watching out for potential threats to the biosphere?

You wouldn’t believe anything I presented so why should I waste my time? Here is a typical website that contains some of this evidence: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/