Danny Williams is now learning Labrador politics - they no longer want to be a colony of Newfoundland. They will not allow the development of the Lower Churchill unless they are the "primary" beneficiaries. Thanks to them - another townie government will not repeat the Upper Churchill fiasco.
Now it's time for "read - REID - read" to succeed.
It is not possible that column after column - news story after news story - industry publication after industry publication - can be wrong when they state that aluminum chases cost competitive - reliable - renewable - and now my own word "kyotoble" power everywhere in the world but Labrador.
The continued ignorance of our collective elected reps is not acceptable anymore.
Here's another such story out of West Virginia - as Jackson County celebrates the 50th anniversary of its aluminum smelter. READ the Charleston Daily News STORY HERE
Here are a few of the interesting statements and comments in the article:
The Ravenswood plant has 660 employees. The average salary is $50,700. The plant has a $34 million annual payroll.
High energy costs have decimated the smelter industry in the United States, Hale said. In 1974, there were 34 smelters in the United States and they accounted for 34 percent of global aluminum production. Today there are only 13 smelters in the United States and they represent just 7 percent of global production, he said.
Hale said alumina accounts for 37 percent of the plant's costs, while electricity accounts for 26 percent, labor accounts for 16 percent, carbon accounts for 8 percent and other raw materials account for 12 percent.
Because aluminum is a worldwide commodity, Century can't control the price it receives for its product, Hale said. Therefore, the company focuses on costs in order to keep the plant competitive.
Century, like others in the aluminum smelter business, is expanding in locations where power costs are low. Century owns a giant smelter in Iceland powered with electricity generated using hydro and geothermal power. Century plans to have another in plant in operation in Iceland by 2013.
Most of the aluminum produced at Ravenswood is used next door at Alcan Rolled Products' rolling mill. The businesses were established as one unit in 1957, but split into two in 1999. Hale said Century just signed a new contract to supply Alcan through 2009.
Just so that we can feel more assured about this fellow Hale who is quoted throughout the story:
Wayne Hale, Century's executive vice president and chief operating officer and Hale worked here from 1986 to 1989. "It's a place where I learned about people," he said. Hale most recently worked in Moscow, where he oversaw operations at 11 aluminum plants in Russia and Ukraine for Sual-Holding.
If you export the power they will not come - once they understand that to use the superior power of the Lower Churchill they have to set up operations in Labrador - they will come. And as you can see above - the smelter is one piece - then there is the value added secondary production.
There is no argument to export that power - there is only the desire and the determination to use it for industry.
The Leader of the Opposition must do something other than follow Williams on this one - or repeat the mistakes of the Wells - Gibbons energy policy. You see if Williams can demand things of the oil companies and mining companies - he can certainly demand them for Labrador power.
So read Reid read to succeed.
10 comments:
Indeed Sue, if Premier Williams can make demands on Big Oil and win, he can turn that Lower Churchill Hydro energy project into a 'pot of gold' for Labrador, which will be good for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Go for it Premier, it should be done no other way.
I agree that if Williams chose, he could make the same demands of industry that uses Hydro as he does of big oil. Yes, he could. It is exceedingly sad that he does not. Even sadder, the Reason why not. Williams, like Smallwood and Smallwoods successors, obviously see Labrador, not as he said 'an integral part of the province' but as a warehouse of goods to be taken and used, at will, for the sole benefit of the Island. His supposed care and concern, though spoken, is clearly questionable.
To be able to say, in view of conditions in Labrador and rural Nfld, that 'St.John's has been neglected' clearly shows his 'centricity' of thought.
Lloyd
lp - I agree with you but I believe most of Labrador's resources were exported to provinces like Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. These are the provinces that have thrived and still are thriving on Labrador's resources. No different than the FISH spawned on the Grand Banks OF Newfoundland, which grow in that prolific fish nursery but gets caught by fishers from all over the world to keep far away places economies percolating, because Ottawa doles out the fish quotas to them. Or the Oil which is produced off the coast of Newfoundland which gets refined in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, because a contract that does not allow us to refine one barrel of that sweet crude oil or any other type of crude oil has a clause which gives provinces like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the sole right to refine the oil.
If the resources had remained in the province, just think what the profits of those resources could have done for Labrador and Newfoundland?
Ottawa has an economic structure in place which favors the heartland of Canada, and of course it has a Kyoto target which it has to meet. And the rest of Canadian provinces covetously guard that Kyoto target for their areas. (Alberta didn't want the province of Newfoundland and Labrador to enter into the Oil producing realm solely because it would be using part of the Kyoto target that Alberta had complete control over with regard to the production of Oil. Everyone, I am sure can remember Ian Doig and what he had to say. If one had listened to Doig, you would have sworn there was not one barrel of oil in Newfoundland and Labrador coastal waters.)
The other provinces wish that Newfoundland and Labrador would stay out of the Kyoto equation and keep on exporting its resources out to keep the other parts of Canada vibrant, and then those other provinces do not have to share the Kyoto pie with Newfoundland and Labrador.
That lp is what has kept the province of Newfoundland and Labrador 'have not" for ever. How can we put in infrastructure and maintain infrastructure when there is no money to do so?
Big money is made for governments and their areas through the development of an area's resources and then converting those resources into industry right in and around the place where the resources are developed. That is the only way that we will get ahead in this province. We, the people, have to put down our feet and exercise our voices by letting our politicians know that enough is enough. And that is what we are doing through this blog.
Sue, this thinking makes such good sense that it is hard to imagine why it is not enthusiastically embraced by those in a position to put it into action, or why there would be objections except, of course, from our Canadian gainsayers. The problem is not blindness, and it certainly is no stupidity, so what is it then? Perhaps the case of Loyola Hearne is a good analogy. Loyola is not so dumb as not to know that the bloody NAFO nonsense he is getting on with is detrimental to Newfoundland and his defiance nothing more than so much gobblegook intended to befuddle those who remind him of his betrayal and of his failure as a Fisheries Minister to reverse the ongoing mismanagement of this vital resource. It is nothing but pig-headedness that prevents him from admitting to failure , so that he would rather let the ship run aground and be damned rather than heed the warnings , much less hand over the wheel into some more competent hands.
Similarly, Danny is not stupid but he is certainly equally pigheaded. However, unlike Loyola, he is not, at least not at this point, obsessed with foolishly trying to rationalize failure but rather with his hobby of collecting dollars: a hobby in which he has been so successful that he has captivated the admiration and following of the vast majority of the Newfoundland electorate. While this is Danny's legitimate boast it is our Achilles' heel, for it is this tendency of ours to idolize the slick players that has been our downfall.
But getting back to Danny, he is so single focused , so hell-bent on doing it his way that any that any suggestion that is not in accord with his own opinion bounces off him like darts thrown at a stone wall. We have all heard stories, and some of us know examples, of individuals who while literally starving themselves to death, hoarded huge sums of money hidden underneath mattresses and in jars and crocks an cubbyholes all about them.
Such a miser would not hesitate to sell the contents of his house without any thought of how he would subsequently live if it meant having a few more dollars to stash away. While an over-simplification, isn't this exactly the mentality being expressed by Danny as he stubbornly insists on trading resources for dollars without any consideration of how it will be possible for future generations to continue to live here.
Danny may be a lot more sophisticated than the pauper who starves to death with his pockets stuffed with thousand dollar bills, but if he follows through with his pigheaded notion that it is better to trade off Lower Churchill hydro power than to use it for the development of industry at home; particularly in Labrador, isn't the mentality one and the same?
Lloyd C. Rees .
Yes Lloyd I see it as one and the same.
If Premier Danny Williams does it the way he is indicating, I will say that the Premier is no different than any other Premier, but I can say this, he is much more informed than any other Premier while developing one of our resources, who might have had something pulled over their eyes in the past, while most likely having smoke screens thrown up all over the place to make things non-transparent.
Premier Danny Williams is a much more informed Premeir than any other Premier in the history of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people of the province should not tolerate having the Lower Churchill Project developed for any other reason than to have the grids running North and South, East and West in Labrador to provide energy for Labrador's domestic use and with the excess energy creating industry to fuel an all around economy for Labrador and thus provide for the much needed infrastructe of a road network that connects of all Labrador and which is sorely lacking.
Premier Williams would you please just opine for a few minutes before you utter your desires ever again concerning the Lower Churchill Hydroelectric Energy project: this coveted hydroelectric energy must be developed with Labrador front and foremost in your mind and ours. No other way is acceptable.
For anonymous #1:
I guess I just have to say once again: Ottawa, nor the central provinces, can just come here and take stuff away without the assistance and especially the consent of the Government of NFld and Labrador. Please try and put the blame in the right place - they have always just given it away for the pure and simple reason of royalty dollars in the provincial treasury - thereby shortchanging both Labrador and the Provincial coffers. Williams himself once said...'you can't claw back a job...', and while royalties, or equity or whatever else is important - ultimately earned wages is the only thing that really builds communities, and earned wages is ultimately the only dollars the average person can ever hope to have any control over. Governments decided the rest.
I partially agree with you on the fish, but there are lots people to blame for that one, mainly Ottawa but also the Province. Mostly just greed on everyone's part.
Lp - What you don't seem to grasp fully is that the Ottawa government has a template for the economic development of Canada. And the structure of that template is designed to benefit Central Canada. It didn't matter what the politicians and people of Newfoundland and Labrador wanted, it was what Ottawa and the Central provinces wanted that won the day. But I think we have become stronger here and we are not going to allow the 'status quo' to rule the day any longer. We will have our say.
That economic structure dictates where mine smelters, oil refineries, and 'FISH QUOTAS' are to be allotted to get the biggest bang for Ottawa; and that, of course, involves having resources move to Canada's heartland in order to keep the heartland strong in the manufacturing sector. No doubt the desire is present in Ottawa at the moment is to have the coveted and clean Lower Churchill Hydroelectric energy project developed and piped to Central Canada to maintain and augment further industry there. Ottawa's desire is probably no different than their desire was back 40 plus years ago when Ottawa would not intervene on this province's behalf to have the Hydroelectric Energy of the Upper Churchill project conducted through a Quebec corridor, so that the province of Newfoundland and Labrador would have been the primary beneficiary of the Upper Churchill Hydroelectric Energy, instead of Quebec Hydro.
Lp while the province of Newfoundland and Labrador gets royalties for its exported resources, the royalties received only represent a small percentage of the profits that those resources could have yielded if they had been used instead for industrial development here in Newfoundland and Labrador. Another factor that has to be taken into account when resources are utilized to create industry is the resulting indirect spin-offs that occur as a result of industry being present.
Lp - I wonder if the Newfoundland and Labrador politicians played hardball at the time when each of our resources came up for development to have pressured Ottawa to have them remain in the province to create industry here, would Ottawa had allowed it to happen? Our politicians would have had a big argument on their hands I am sure.
But as far as I am concerned our politicians should not have allowed our resources to have gone anywhere. Our resources should have remained in this province to create industry here. If the politicians couldn't get things to work out the way they wanted them to get the biggest bang for our province, then no resouces should have been developed in the first place. Ottawa would have gotten the message after a while, since, no doubt it would not have wanted to have funded a welfare state which held many resources. Can you imagine the grumbling from the provinces waiting with baited breath though, if the province of Newfoundland and Labrador refused to have exported its resources?
I still remember the articles written in the Globe and Mail by lobbyists on behalf of Ottawa and Big Industry, which wanted the Voisey's Bay Nickel Ore to be shipped to Sudbury, Ontario and Thompson, Manitoba. It still makes me sick when I think of that resource and the pressure that was placed on it by Ottawa and Big Industry for it to be sent off to Ontario and Manitoba to keep their economies percolating.
Ottawa has been paid hundreds of times over for anything it has done for this province in the form of having our resources appointed to the places where it wanted them to go.
I heard Premier Danny Williams say on the Debate tonight that Ottawa has earned Four times the amount it put into Hibernia for the 8 per cent equity, and the Hibernia Project still has 50 per cent of its life left. That means Ottawa is up 400 per cent with half the project still left to go forward. What a deal?
You can say what you like about whether or not I, or anyone else, grasps the (your) whole idea. Except for fisheries (management and control), all other resources are directly, unmistakeably, constitutionaly under Provincial control. That is why I say someone (in this case successive Provincial government) had to sign it away. I didn't say there was no pressure, I didn't say it was right, or wrong. I say it was within their control. Take the responsibility or nothing changes.
As far as the current Provincial energy plan goes; tell me, why should it matter to Labradorians where Labrador's hydro potential goes? If it is gone and of no benefit, short term, long term and to each and every one of us, Why should we care where it goes? It's just gone. Along with it all the other possibilities we (Labrador) would have had from the untouched, pristine river. For us a loss/loss.
"partially agree with you on the fish, but there are lots people to blame for that one, mainly Ottawa but also the Province. Mostly just greed on" - if labradorians say that we dont understand them .I would like to point out that,that shoe is a perfect fit for both parts of the province.It seems those from Labrador dont have a clue when it comes to the history of the fishery.Blaming the province for the collaspe of a fishery that we had for 500 hundred years.Thats like saying Smallwood got a good price for ChurchHill power .Get a grip .
Anything to continue the blame game agasint St Johns.You guys are clearly grabbing at starws to keep the blame game going.Dont like the province guys ,then leave.
Do you have a clue to how many displaced people there are from Newfoundland and Labrador around the world.Can you put into your mind how many people there are that would love to be in your shoes right now.
Keep dividing the house guys.Ottawa is looking for more resources and the way i see into the box,you guys right now are the weekiest link in confederation.Guess who thier looking at.
Oh? Newfoundlanders were fishing the cod for 500 years? I know Europeans were and Aboriginals no doubt used some but I really don't think there was anyone known as Newfoundlanders that far back. Maybe you can show me?
I still say that if land based resources leave this province it was with the full knowledge and consent of the province.
And who is coming looking for resources? Here in Labrador we lose these at the hands of 'the Province' and no one else. The so called 'Energy Plan' is the latest and the worst of examples.
Enough from me on this subject, we are taking up this bloggers space for nothing useful. Bye.
Lloyd
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