SIGNS OF THE TIMES

October 1997

NUCLEAR ERROR

There is an old song called "London Calling" by British traditional balladeers, The Clash. Bridgewater musicologist Tom Feindel introduced me to the smooth textures of the group's recordings in 1979. The seminal tune "London Calling" has the group coining the phrase "nuclear error" to describe an exquisitely banal onset of atomic Armageddon.

The tune is no more than a stepping off point for an excursion along the radiant shores of Lake Ontario, down the St. Lawrence and up the Labrador coast to Lake Melville. There lies the mouth of the mighty Churchill River and an open invitation to re-visit the murky shoals of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. There are dark passages along treacherous political and economic rifts to be travelled by the Prince of Cataracts and others who would dare enter once more the maelstrom of national hydro-electric production for this young and fracturing country.

There has been a colossal and horribly expensive nuclear error in the colossus we know as Ontario Hydro. The nuclear nirvana of Pickering, Darlington and Bruce power plants has mutated into a fiscal mushroom cloud that changes the features of the energy map in all of Canada. Simply put, the province of Ontario is running rapidly out of safe, cheap electricity. This makes all the thunder and foam and potency of the Lower Churchill River into an investment that can make mighty Voisey Bay look like an Indonesian stock market tryst. Never before has the need for clean, dependable hydro- electricity been higher. More significantly this resource belongs to Newfoundland at a time when its government and its premier are cleverly perched to maximize this opportunity in the power corridors of Ottawa. This is a clarion call to Premier Tobin to seize the day and ensure that the potential for darkened office towers along the shores of Lake Ontario translates into kinetic wealth and industry on the banks of the Churchill River.

Let us see how the idea of a national power corridor through Quebec to Ontario plays with the mighty Ontario Liberal caucus. When heating and lighting the homes of their constituents in Toronto and Brampton and Orillia is at stake, those hundred Liberal MPS will be frothily anxious to pass the legislation that so tragically eluded Premier Smallwood and his Brinco buddies in 1966. I personally would camp out on the manicured shoreline of the Rideau Canal to witness this monumental Canadian event. The term "watershed " does not even begin to do justice to the significance of such a happening. Perhaps the word "justice" comes closer to the heart of the matter. The Summer of Love, thirty years and a season or two late, might set the emotional ambience for a most poignant scene in the tale of Newfoundland's torturous path to prosperity.

The imposition of the morality of capitalist supply and demand upon the Churchill Falls dilemma is one deliciously ironic solution to an omnipresent disgrace. The most vivid irony is in the fact that Ontario's demands of 1997 will get for Newfoundland the prosperity that Ontario's demands for the Auto-Pact in 1965 denied our fair and suffering home province. In 1965 the federal government was fiscally pre-occupied with making Ontario and Quebec functionally a part of the U.S.A. as far as automobile tariffs were concerned.This left no room to broker a power corridor from Labrador to the American border.

Ontario exercised its immense political gravity in concert with Quebec in these times. Now the Jupiter and Saturn of Canadian realpolitik are no longer in agreement on much of anything and certainly not on the need for Ontarians to avoid freezing in the dark.

Freezing in the dark: that term sounds hauntingly familiar. A sinister Canadian ghost story out of Alberta in the eighties comes to mind. The title of the pathetic little saga sounded something like 'The National Energy Plan'. The authors were apparently anonymous according to the literary critics in the Prime Minister's Office.

These are the times when Newfoundland can and must extract its full economic rent from the power potential of all that water surging down the canyons of the Churchill River. In the reality of our Canadian confederation the chance to move electricity from Labrador to the microwave ovens of our expatriate brethren in Brampton is now. Right now radioactivity is barely held in check in the aging nuclear power plants that loom as environmental albatrosses for the adopted home of so many Newfoundlanders. Clean and secure electricity is in great supply up on the Labrador. All it takes to get it to market is the will to legislate a national right of way for power lines over northern Quebec. With the reality of Quebec's inevitable partition if separation comes about, it would be comforting to know that such a right of way exists over territory virtually certain to remain in Canada in light of the aboriginal majority in these regions.

Let us not be shy about chatting up our Ontario neighbours about this bit of friendly commerce. In the not so mellow words of The Clash, we can tell them:"we live by the river".


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