Shaun Newman Podcast - #1134 - Ches Crosbie Pt. 2

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Ches Crosbie returns for part 2. He is a Newfoundland and Labrador lawyer and former politician. A Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford and Dalhousie, he founded a class-action law firm in 1991 and later led the Progressive Conservative Party from 2018 to 2021 while serving as Leader of the Opposition. He won a Windsor Lake byelection in 2018, grew the party’s seats in 2019, then lost his own seat and resigned as leader after the 2021 election. He later served as chairman of the National Citizens Inquiry, which examined Canada’s COVID-19 response.Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Nor’East Apothecary - USE promo code SNP for 15% off your orderhttps://thepowerofplants.ca/Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Brett Weinstein. This is Tom Lomago. This is Bruce Party. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is Dr. Pierre Corey. Hi, this is Frank Peretti. This is Daniel Smith.

This is James Lindsay. This is Vance Crow and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. On the podcast, folks, happy Thursday. How's everybody doing today? All right. Lord Willing, we get off Newfoundland today. All right? So there you go.

As I sit here recording this, the sun is shining. It feels so. It feels so good. It has been rainy, cloudy, miserable. You know, we've made the best of it, but the sun is actually shining. It's actually warm. And I tell you what, it feels pretty darn good. So wherever you're at on a Thursday, I hope your week is cruising along.

Okay, we've had the Allison Inquiry for four days of recap. Once again, I know everyone's like, you went four, one, two, three. It was a mix-up on our end, so that is why it goes four, one, two, three. It's a long story. but me and Jack just got some wires crossed. That's why that came up. If you're wondering where the mashup from last week is, it couldn't happen.

It's a long story, one that I hope to share very soon. But regardless, we couldn't get mashup on last Friday, so if you're wondering where that is, it wasn't there, and tomorrow the mashup will return, albeit a little twist to it. Tews is going to be there. I won't. You'll see when you hop on for tomorrow's mashup

that he's got some new co-hosts for a Friday that aren't going to be me. But regardless, the mashup will return tomorrow. Now, if you've been paying attention to the world and all the craziness, maybe you're looking for something that makes a little bit of sense. I turn to precious metals. They seem to make sense to me. And the company I recommend is, you know, got their start at a Rocky Mountain House in Alberta.

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If you're in that area, looking for somebody you can trust. Shane Stafford and his group 7808423433. 3-3. They'll get you squared away and they'll get you going wherever you need to go. All right. Now, if you haven't subscribed on Substack, you really should. We have the Tanner & A Masterclass. Now, all 10 episodes are out. That's something you can pay attention. We got the week in review on there as well. And of course, we have the episodes coming out and a few bonus questions hiding on Substack. For the Allison Inquiry, obviously you all probably paid attention there. There was no bonus questions for those days.

but we're getting back to them. So look forward to, you know, getting some new episodes out for you here in the coming weeks. And some bonus questions are definitely going to be landed on substack. So pay attention again for that. Once again, we have CHESS today, so there will be no bonus questions. But that's okay. We got part two with CHESS today. So looking forward to your guys' thoughts on our newest conversation.

And then when I was in PEI, okay, when I was going through PEI, I ran into this lady named Dr. Laura Braden and her brother Thomas for that matter. And we started talking about some of the things they were doing. We talked about in our episode, the Nor East Apothecary. They craft small batch tinctures, teas, and saves. I look at shampoo and conditioner. That's just me. Hey, you probably got a few things you're looking for.

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but we're in Newfoundland. I decided to make the best of it. I ran into chess again. And I did another one as well on the rock. So there's some new episodes. coming next week. We're going to be full steam ahead as we get back on the road into Nova Scotia and look forward to you guys hearing some of the story of what's been going on since we've landed in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and been on the rock. It's been a story for the ages. I tell you

what, it's been something and look forward to sharing more of that in the days, maybe weeks ahead. regardless, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is a lawyer and former politician in Newfoundland. I'm talking about Chess Crosby. So buckle up. Here we go. Well, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Chess, I'm back.

Well, I'm glad to have you back, but you may not be glad to be back yourself. You know what? It, I think this morning we went and we took the kids out for a hike at Chance Cove. And it was a beautiful. and I was sitting there and I'm like, it's like a lemony snicket series of unfortunate events. I mean, you can look at it, the cup half full, half empty, gives me the opportunity to come back and do a follow-up with you, you know, a week after the fact. Plus you got a chance to see Salavage and visit a cousin. Yes, yeah, like it's, and I've got to really interact with some wonderful people here that have gone above and beyond what normal people.

what normal people would normally do for you. Yeah, and you may have gotten tired of hearing advice about how to fix a blown engine. Well, so for the audience, they probably don't know this, but, you know, it started a week ago Monday. So what are we at? We're like 10 days ago now. We blew the transmission, and that sucked. But then Brian Southgate was here from Alberta, and under 24 hours I'm working on it.

Pretty incredible when you think about it, from Alberta flying in on a red eye and coming and rebuilding an entire transmission. Shows devotion. However, he was probably afraid you'd do a podcast on it. Well, the thing is, I think nothing he'd done could have prepared us for, you know, what happened after. Then we blow the engine.

And, you know, I'm sure people are, you know, do people want to know that or not? Well, I know my podcast audience. They want to know what the heck's going on. Yeah. And it's nothing they could have possibly foreseen. You know, like there's a whole series of events that lead to a whole bunch of unfortunate events that have happened, which keeps me on the rock, keeps us on the rock for another day. And, you know, allows me to explore some conversations and do that.

So, you know, Brian or Brian or Zane are listening. I think they're wonderful. And I think what they did for me was wonderful. It just didn't work out, right? like at the end of the day, the suburban has met its match finally and we'll be staying on the rock. Yeah, sort of metaphysical, nothing you could do about it. You're on the rock, but not on the rocks. That's right.

Now, when I talked to Garrett, one of the things that he brought up was potential, right? And he was talking a lot about Canada, and then we zeroed in on new. Newfoundland Labrador's potential and how a lot of it's been squandered. And when I pushed some different things, he's like, honestly, I don't know the ins and outs. And I remember thinking, maybe I haven't said it in the middle of the covers. Hey, you get chess back in here. Well, I'm back. One of the ones that is obviously in the spotlight currently is this deal.

And I've tried reading as much, but not coming from Newfoundland. I'm like, I kind of get it. I kind of don't. Maybe we could just start with what we're talking about in Churchill. And then there's gull. and, you know, there's different pieces moving. You being from here, from here, can probably explain it a heck of a lot better than I can ever come close to.

Well, Sean, it's like anything. You can make it complex or you can make it simple. And most people like simple, so I'll try and stick with that. First of all, the scope and importance of Churchill Falls in particular and the entire Churchill River, It ranks, I think, number 16th in the world for production reliable, insight, constant production of electricity, electricity generation, number 16 in the world. So I think most people would grant that that sounds world class. And it is.

It kicks out, it will be kicking out over six thousand, six. 6,000 megawatts or 6 gigawatts once the upgrades which are visualized under this agreement are executed So nowadays There's such a voracious demand for electricity Particularly in the United States and Canada That they don't talk about megawatts anymore. They talk about gigawatts. So that would be six gigawatts 6,000 equals 6 gigawatts, 6,000 megawatts. And that's big, but in the United States they're actually building multi-center generations,

generation situations, some of the big hyperscalers for AI, in the range of 10 gigawatts, 10 gigawatts. And I just mentioned the Upper Churchill being worth over six. With its full development, the Churchill River is probably 10 or 12 gigawatts, so on a pair with anything that's being done in the United States. And with proper development of wind, it could be worth even more than that. So it's big. It's big. And if it's big in a world sense, world-class sense, then for a tiny province like Newfoundland Labrador, which has a population of what, five, five, five, 540,000 people, that's not big and by world standards.

For the population of this province, proper development and being the primary beneficiary of that resource would be utterly huge. It's way bigger than the riches in the offshore, the oil and gas, riches in the offshore, way bigger than that, and would represent, you know, it's built, it was, had finished back in 1969, I think it was, and started generating then.

It was built on budget or even under budget and faster than they projected. You don't hear those kinds of accomplishments. No, those don't go in today as well. But the mortgage is paid off, as it were, the bonds and all the rest of it. It's paid off and it's got substantial monies on hand to do things with, which are actually going to be used for. the for upgrading the generators and I think possibly putting an extra generator in which is going to they're saying will provide another 1,270 megawatts so another

gigawatt and a quarter that's power they're going to squeeze out of the existing facility for an expenditure of I think around well it's modest compared to the power benefit And that alone could power the projected needs of Labrador West. There are four major mining enterprises that are looking, have been asking and seeking more power out there. That's enough to look after their needs for the foreseeable future. So we didn't have to do this deal with Quebec because of the power needs,

of the Labrador trough, critical minerals, iron ore and all the rest of it. We could have answered those needs simply by augmenting the power output at the established plant on the Upper Churchill, which has been set up and running for decades and decades now with hardly a hitch. So this deal didn't need to be done for that reason to power mining in Western Labrador. All you had to do was tune up the generators and improve the output at the existing site on the Upper Churchill, which they will be doing. But this entire deal didn't need to be done because of that. That could have been done by the owners of the existing plant,

the paid for plant, no debt, money on hand in the bank, as it were, without doing anything else. So it wasn't required in order to satisfy other industrial needs that exist right now in Labrador. So then walk me through why? because like I listen to, oh, I read what you sent me of the accountant breaking down the different points. Then I listened to some news coverage of it, right? They're billing it as, you know, the biggest deal in, not Quebec history, sorry, Newfoundland history,

and billions of dollars, and they're trying to remain really, really positive about it. But like, if I'm looking at it very simply, you guys own the plant. It's on Newfoundland Labrador territory. Right. We're the owner, but we lacked an owner's strategy in approaching the negotiation. Sure. So they just wanted to have a deal done so they could guarantee money coming in? Sure.

Why wouldn't they? You know, they're not arguing for us. They're arguing for their own interests. I mean, here's a contrast in how we approach this, we being Newfoundland Labradoros. Yes, yeah. Quebec has an enormous amount, perhaps more than anyone else on the continent, amount of ingrained expertise and resources and skill and knowledge of power generation and power transmission and markets around North America.

Quebec is par excellence in that area. They have the resources and they're permanent and they're constantly upgraded. So in 2023, Quebec Hydro, and the politicians generally listened to Quebec Hydro in Quebec, because they know who has the expertise, and it's got a lot of respect in the population there. They came out with a plan and made it public in 2023. It's called Action Plan 2035. So within 10 or 12 years from that point, 10 years from now, or thereabouts, they have planned to spend an extra $200 billion on upgrading their transmission in Quebec

and exports as well, and to double their output of energy, to double it. They already had a huge master plan in place. The Quebec Premier for a Chet right now, who knows, you may continue on as Premier, said publicly that they didn't just have Plan A for this negotiation with us and Labrador, about Labrador. They had Plan B and they had Plan C. Compared to that, what we had was a hastily thrown together strategy. backed up by expertise, pulled together for the needs at a moment. Because you can't really contrast Newfoundland, Labrador, Hydro with Hydro Quebec.

They don't have the same permanent resources. Our local hydro is more concerned with getting power to consumers in the middle of winter than it is with long-range forecasting about major development. of hydro resources and has to cobble that expertise together when it's needed. We don't have a permanent institutionalized capacity there. Nor in fact we have a plan that in any way resembles the plan that the Quebecers had with this master plan going to 2035, the action plan, as I said. Nor had we worked out, you know, all these scenarios whereby what we would do if

If X happened, if X happened, Y, we'll do Y. If something else happens with, they had all that figured out. As the Premier said, they had A, B, and C plans. For all I know, they had more than that and all the variations in between. So unfortunately, we found ourselves dealing both in the Fury negotiation, which ended up with an MOU with Quebec and Quebec Hydro. in December, 24. And in this one, under Premier Wakeham, we'll call it the 2026 MOU.

We approach that as a bunch of amateurs, frankly. And it doesn't matter how much talent you pick up, like Barry Perry. You'll hear people say, oh, Barry Perry has all this experience and so on. Well, Barry Perry could be a genius at negotiation and various aspects of the power industry. But you can't just pick up an immensely complex file, no matter how experienced and skilled you are, and be the master of that set off against a bunch of people who've lived it for their careers. That doesn't happen. You can't plunk someone in the middle of a complex negotiation with all of these scenarios involved in it

and all the complex workup that the other side has done and expect them to do well. doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. And that's what we did. Current deal with Quebec goes till 2041, right? Yes. Right. If they sign a new, right, we talk about this being the second, basically the second MOU in a very short time, the 2024, we're going to call the one right now in MOU as well, 2026. 26. You still have to wait until the original deal to expire, correct? Or are Are they talking about... No, no, this would replace the contract that was executed in 69, yeah, and which runs for 65 years.

That's only another 14 years now that it would run. And people say, oh, we need the whatever now, the money that would be generated, the jobs, all that sort of thing. No, no doubt we need it now, but that doesn't mean we can't afford to wait a bit longer. And I've always said, and many others have said, it doesn't mean you're waiting 14 years, because Quebec needs that power more or less now, or it has to replace it. It's about, I think, 15% of their total power generation

that they use at home and then sell on into the United States or wherever. So they can't afford to take chances with 15% of their total enormous power volume, they have to know where they're going to get it if they're not going to get it from Churchill Falls. So they can't wait 14 years. They can't wait 14 years. With the lead time involved in building major hydroelectric generation, you're looking at at least 10 years, 12 years, maybe even 14 years to replace that power. Once you say, go, let's do it. It takes that long. So it's not a matter of waiting 14 years. They have to act on that well before the 14 years, way before the 14 years expires. It might be closer to 14 months than 14 years. So that was our advantage. We had the advantage

of time. And at some point there'd be a sweet spot where their urgency for the power and being up against deadlines would have caused them to make their, you know, their best offer to us when it became clear that we had resolution around this, and we weren't going to take just any old thing for the sake of short-term benefit. But we didn't project that kind of resolution, and for whatever reasons, the present government wasn't prepared to wait.

They wanted to rush into it and get it done. And I'm afraid that generations into the future we'll be paying the price for that. Why do you need Quebec on this deal? back on this deal? Now, you're putting your finger on a good question. They are the natural customer. Back in the day under Premier Joey Smallwood, and for a long time after that, there was really

no way to get the power to market except through Quebec, the province of Quebec. Smallwood made an issue out of getting wheeling rights through Quebec because Quebec was refusing it. And Quebec governments of whatever stripe have been pretty consistent about this all the way through. And at the time, Prime Minister Pearson wasn't willing to force the issue, even though the federal government had the constitutional power to create that corridor or force that corridor to be recognized by Quebec. He wasn't prepared to do that. He wasn't prepared to do it. Smallwood had a letter in his pocket when he went to Montreal at one point, but the federal government talked them out of actually sending it. And so we ended up with

the deal that we ended up with for 65 years and no inflation escalator. In fact, the price went down over time. But my point is we're no longer, you know, like prisoners in the dungeon strapped to the wall, chained to the wall, by Quebec. We have other options as to what we can do with the power, and one very big one would be to develop an electrically based AI industry and other users of power right in Labrador. Right now in the United States, the appetite for electricity is voracious and increasing every year, and it's putting their own grid under strain. There's a lot of political pushback against hyperscalers who want to put AI facilities. facilities in areas that are anywhere close, you know, to establish settlement, urban areas, all that. There's a big nimbie pushback. People don't want it in my backyard.

But guess what? Labrador is comparatively speaking empty. There might be a hyperscaler who wants to do a joint development of Gull Island, which is part of this deal, which is, I don't know, it's two or three thousand megawatts. at Gull Island. But we don't know because we didn't ask. We didn't go out and look for people or expressions of interest from Microsoft or Apple or whoever it might be. We didn't do that. My argument is always being that what you do is you should take the raw material, which is the electricity, and use it to manufacture a finished product. And that would be the data. And guess what? Data cables and

under Quebec jurisdiction. So what we could be doing is having a homegrown AI industry in Labrador and exporting the end product of that, the data, over fiber optic cable all around the world. As a matter of fact, there's a cable coming ashore from Norway this year, later this year, called the Leaf Erickson Cable, which is just to illustrate that those connections exist. If they don't exist, they can be created as needed, they're much less expensive to do than a high-tension electrical power line. And we could have a homegrown industry based on turning electricity into that finished product called data. But we're not going in that direction. And I think we're going to see Quebec doing it instead.

I always come back to hockey. And it's like you got a how many year deal? What are we saying? 60 some years you've been you've been under this deal? it's a roughly a 70 year deal or 70 plus year deal. Yeah. You know, you think about that and you go, it's a bad contract. You know, especially when you don't have an inflation, anything to do with that. No inflation escalator. And you go, if you understand anything, it's like, well, that should be written in there

so that, you know, you're not paying one cent back in 69 to one cent. And that isn't the actual number. But you could argue to excuse that back in the day. day because before the early 70s and the you know the energy the oil crisis OPEC all that sort of thing sure electrical power rates have been stable for a very very long time so people were just taking recent experience and assuming it would continue forever which of course is a tricky assumption but maybe it was understandable but now we know differently and we can't make that kind of

assumption that's that prices will remain stable and fact quite the opposite when you have such a burgeoning demand for electrical power from AI. They look to be anything but stable. Yeah, I would say I can give a lot of grace not knowing the people, the men, the women that were a part of the deal, but I would still use the word naive, that you're going to sign that for that long and nothing's going to change? For 10 years? Yeah. Okay. We're talking 69 to 2041. Well, I don't need to win an argument about what they should have done back in 1969. But I would make an argument in what they should be doing right now today as we sit here in 2026.

And they should have had off-ramps periodically, which is standard practice now in long-term power contracts. You can see it, for example, Site C in British Columbia. They've renamed it recently. Big project that exports electricity into the northwestern. the United States. And every five years now, they take another look at the pricing and make adjustments based on what market demand is and the price for the electricity is. So something like that, every five, every ten years anyway, should be in there. But it's not. Off-ramps is one word for it.

For sure. Just so I'm clear, the Churchill, the dam there, Newfoundland Labrador, owns it? Yes, well, it's our resource, our river, and our territory. The actual territory it's in has never been in dispute with Quebec. There was a dispute over borders but didn't include where the Upper Churchill generating plant is. So by every measure it's ours, yeah. And the whole principle that Mr. Wakeham should have been negotiating on and which in fact he said he was negotiating. was negotiating on was the idea that we who own the resource should be Newfoundlanders and

Labradorians the principal beneficiary of that resource. That was a principle that Premier Brian Peckford established back in the day when Prime Minister Mulroney was the Prime Minister of the country back in the 80s. He fought that battle and he won it because it was enshrined in the Atlantic Accord and received legislative approval in the Parliament of Canada and in the legislature of Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, principal beneficiary of the resource. That's established vis-a-vis the offshore oil and gas resources. Mr. Wakeham took the advice of a panel he himself appointed and said, that's what's going to govern my negotiations for this MOU deal that we're talking about here now. But I don't think you could find anybody, even them in the government, who negotiated this,

who would claim that this 2026 MOU makes us the principal beneficiary of the resources of the Churchill River. I don't think you could find anyone who dared to try and say that's what happened here. Again, Quebec has ended up to principal beneficiary. And they did that because they had a plan and we didn't. And we didn't have enough political resolve. I was listening to a commentator out of Quebec. And he was talking, you know, his understanding of the last election in Newfoundland was that there was going to be a referendum specifically on the Churchill.

and that when he got in, Wakeham just went ahead because, you know, there's election coming in Quebec. And my understanding of the commentators, this is me commentating on the commentator's thoughts. But I found it interesting is he's like, well, the reason he rushed through a deal and didn't do the referendum, which he promised, was that with a change of government in Quebec possibly coming, he wanted to make sure they got a deal. I'm like, but as I'm listening to that, I keep going. There's 14 years left on the deal. Even if it's a bad deal, you've been in it for as long, you know, on and on. Nothing that Tony Wakeham said about his reason for reneging on his promise,

which was clear and unambiguous. Nothing that he said makes any sense. I think that in the background, I'm speculating, I suppose. But if you look for an explanation, I think the Prime Minister Kearney told him not to. And part of that thinking on Kearney's part was. was he's dealing with Alberta, which might yet have a referendum on separation. He's dealing with Quebec, which loves to have referenda on separation. Particularly, it looked like it was going to be a PQ government.

Maybe it still will be. I don't know. And he didn't want the idea of referenda getting street legs and looking like a good idea. That's speculation on my part. There may have been other reasons. But always in the background, Kearney's chief public servant, Michael Sabia, like a year ago, he was the chairman of Quebec Hydro. He knows this file backwards and forwards as much as any person alive, and he wasn't in there rooting for Newfoundland and Arbador. He's a Quebecer.

So those were some of the resources arrayed against us. And what we should have done is taken time out, slowed down, put together a comprehensive strategy, which is what Mr. Wakeham's own appointed body that reviewed the first MOU said we should do, get the balance right between industrial use and export and government revenue and all the rest of that. That would have taken time. I don't know how much time, maybe it would take a year, who knows. But we didn't do that. That was the advice that Premier Wake himself commissioned and received,

but he didn't act on it. And I think that's the reason why we've gotten up, we've ended up being snookered. We weren't prepared. It feels like when you come back to where I started this with Garrett and us talking about the potential of Canada, it seems like we're getting snuckered every which way, right? Like, I mean, you drive through the country, which I have done, and the potential for every province.

I haven't been to a province yet where I don't see potential. And then you talk about, you sit here in Newfoundland, Labrador, and you talk about owning the resource, having 14 years left on a deal. I mean, like, you still got the deal in place. It's a poor deal, but it's still there. You know, to fast track it, to get out of that deal, to lock back into another long-term. deal that, you know, if you're going to be the principal owner of it, you might as make the best deal possible for your citizens. Yeah, but they, I think they set themselves a low bar.

In other words, the objective of the Newfoundland Laborator government seemed to have been simply to be in a position to say that they did better than the previous liberal government had done, that they got a better deal than the liberals got. That's a low bar. It should have been what Mr. Wakeham actually said, which was to make us the principal beneficiary of the resource. I don't think anyone can defend that that's what actually came out of this. There are those who would argue that Wakeham and company didn't even improve on the liberal deal.

One example would be the, the, liberals did have a form of off-ramp where you could take stock of what prevailing electrical prices were after 2041, which is when the old contract would expire, and a system of increases up until that. So we have the system of increases up until 2041, but after that, it's a formula based on consumer price index for escalation. Now, that might be just fine in a pension plan for an individual. But is that going to reflect the market price of electrical energy in the United States and Canada going forward for 40 years? Chances are not. It's not the right formula if that's what you're trying to do.

So while the liberals for the years after 2041 had a system of revising things based on, on current information, the current market pricing. This deal doesn't have that. So you could say, well, that's one respect in which this is worse. So all I'm saying is whether they achieved their low bar goal, which was to do better than the Liberals had in the negotiation with Quebec, is disputable. You go back to Carney, and I know you're just drawing conclusions without all the information. But I mean, what I've been trying to figure out is, okay, so what on earth would he have said in order to get him to put, because like everything he ran on, obviously they knew this was a bad deal.

The MOU was a bad one in 2024 and they wanted to do it. The fact that they had talked about a referendum, I assume a ton of Newfoundlanders, you know, I've run into a lot, have talked about this. So everybody kind of understands that there's something going on here. what could Karnie do to make politicians go oh okay we'll just tell the line because I get it from a Canada standpoint where Karnie said

and he's trying to show unity and bring everybody together while the United States is doing things and he's trying to do things and he's trying to pull everybody together but what would he do to Newfoundland I mean it's not like I don't know

at this point when you drive through Newfoundland it's not like you see the Rolls Royce is just going everywhere and everybody's booming you know in the in the in the things I've read on it a lot of talk has been around how many jobs had come in but then there's also a caveat yeah but that isn't the next 50 years of jobs that's a short-term job thing and that's what authors keep trying to point out to the audience that are reading it and so you look at what would carney do to a uh a premier or say to them that would get them to change and just ram something through last minute? Well, they may have been distracted by an offer of federal money. That's the famous

$10 billion, billion dollars that Kearney is supposedly committing to this. But the actual distribution of who gets the $10 billion is $6.5 billion of that goes to Quebec. And it's the rest to us. So even on who gets the federal money, we're not the principal beneficiary. Right. So this is what I mean. When you start looking at the numbers, once again, to any Newfoundlander listening, I'm not a Newfoundlander. I'm just the outsider looking at it and going, you know, I'm reading all the percentages. None of it would even suggest that Newfoundland owns this thing. It's almost looks like Newfoundland's out building it, and we're getting a little cut. That's way it looks. And so that's why I bring up, why do you even need Quebec? Not to throw a slight at Quebec. Well, to the extent that you can have, a homegrown industry, in terms of big users of electricity, who would be willing to co-locate near the source of generation, you don't need them. But we haven't explored that. Yeah, but it doesn't sound like the government, it sounds like they started to, and then they stopped,

and they rammed it through, and are trying to pull out the positives of it. It just seems like a very bad negotiation. style, which you've highlighted multiple times. When I go, you own the plant, or the dam, sorry. The deal expires in 14 years. That gives you 14 years to not only start upgrading it, but explore all the things that would for sure happen way faster in 14 years. It's like the one marshmallow versus two marshmallow.

I don't know if people get that reference, but they put a marshmallow in front of a kid and say, if you, you know, if you wait, I'll give you two. And yet they always, well, not always, but majority take the one marshmallow because they want what they want right now. And you look at it and you go, yeah, but wait, wait, we're 14 years away from getting out from a bad deal where Quebec has us by the nuts. But 14 years from now, you have everything.

Well, I said it's probably more like 14 months that we would have to wait, not 14 years. Yeah, but I mean, the deal is set. Which would be well within the existing term of this present government under Mr. Wakeham, 14 months. Like, they have three years yet to run. They can afford to wait, temporize for a while, you know, see what better deal they can do, build up the resources, because, you know, I think I used the word, our approach was amateurish. Well, yeah, compared to Quebec's, it was.

They had a strategy in depth, and we had something we cobbled together in jig time. Who's going to win in that scenario? Yeah, well, Quebec's a formidable opponent, I mean, in a dealing. And anyone who has their stuff together, certainly when they've got Plan A, B, C, and you know about, sorry, their action plan at 2035, they're thinking out into the future. I mean, what I'm trying to figure out for not just Newfoundlanders, because I'm harping on this Newfoundland thing right now, but all Canadians, right? Yeah.

We've got to start looking into the future. And, you know, I keep watching things with the United States in particular. Man, I put out a tweet the other day. And basically it was on responsibility. And Donald Trump, good or bad, isn't the reason Canada's in the situation is. Man, it was like I set off a time bomb because it just exploded. And I was like, oh, okay, everybody's upset. But that's an emotional response.

Yeah. You look at Canadians and it's like, we're so happy to get just this little crumb. And yet you can have way more. One of our root problems is the economy hasn't grown in 11 years. And whose rulership did that coincide with? The federal liberals, first under Trudeau, now it's Kearney. A country that doesn't grow has got trouble, major trouble. Eventually that's going to cause fissures which may not be healable.

You mentioned going across Canada and all the potential we have. yeah, a lot of it's in the natural resource area as well, but the liberals, you could argue, have done their best to erode and tie up and regulate out of existence our ability to develop our natural resources. Is that going away? I think that, you know, the proof of that still has to be seen. Yeah, I would agree.

one other thing you said the first time I talked to you and I never really followed up on it near enough you said Alberta and Newfoundland are very similar I'm not using your exact quote but that we should be working together and I've always politically I've heard a lot more about Alberta and Quebec and that Albertans should use some of the things that Quebec has done for itself to better itself I've never heard the Newfoundland Alberta connection and I'm curious, you know, we can talk more about Churchill, other than how frustrating it must be to be a Newfoundlander and not see a coherent strategy, I would say.

But when you bring up Alberta-Newfoundland, what were you meaning by that? Well, first of all, a lot of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians go out to Alberta to work. They know Alberta, they've lived in Alberta. They might go back and forth, some have settled. Everyone has family members who've been out there or have moved to be out there. And we have ties of affinity and blood ties to people in Alberta,

our own people who've moved out there. We also have a common interest in being able to develop our natural resources of oil and gas and minerals. in particular as against the regulatory overreach of the central government of the country, which is governed by an axis of people who think they have the natural right to govern the rest of the country. Some people call them the Laurentians or the Laurentian access, simply because the Laurentian Mountains are there dividing or running through, Ontario and Quebec. So it's basically Ontario and Quebec runs the country. And, you know,

I follow affairs in Alberta to some extent, some extent. And to me, it constantly looks like central Canadian interests are being elevated above those of areas of the country, particularly Alberta and Saskatchewan, which have a resource base and want to get on with the job of creating prosperity and freedom. That's a fundamental cleavage in the country. I think that we share the same interests in ending that federal overreach. We in Newfoundland and Labrador share the same interest in ending that federal overreach as you do in Alberta.

And so that's why I think we should team up. Everybody in a political struggle, and that's what it is, needs friends and allies. And we and Alberta, to my mind, are a natural allies. Yeah, when you put it that way, that makes a lot of sense. You're talking about natural resources. Did you see Trump's tweet about potash and Belarus? No. I'm sure it was good though

well he's talking about opening up supply chains with Belarus and you know one of the things that Canada is you know we're proud we got the potash we got the oil we got everything and things that people have been pointing out is well they took out Venezuela

and Venezuela's got oil and now he's talking about Belarus and I chuckle about it because I'm like Canadians are so easily manipulated so easily do they just run to the emotion train and yell and scream but it's to me

whether you like Donald Trump or not he's got a plan in place and Canadians all of us are being governed by emotions and emotions aren't a plan yeah no they're not

and while you're busy being emotional you're not being rational and other people can take advantage to that and that's what's going on in Canada how do you I kind of knew what I was doing with my tweet.

And I followed up with another one after everybody lost their absolute and uncontrollable crap. How do you get a population to think a different way? Is that possible? I don't know if that's possible. I mean, I'm sure it takes time. Yeah. Well, if you roll it back, this all, this hysteria came about, hysteria about America and Trump.

when Trump made what I think was a joke about the 51st state. Correct. And then when he saw what the reaction was in Canada, everyone got all worked up over it. Trump being Trump kept it up and made more jokes. I think we would have been much better advised to play it cool. In other words, chill. That's Trump being Trump.

He's making jokes. You know, keep our powder dry. Let's not lose our heads here. But instead, we did the opposite. We lost our heads. We went hysterical. And Kearney, who looked originally like a probable loser in a contest with the Conservatives in Pierre Paulyev,

ended up taking advantage of all that, of the hysteria, which has now become anti-Americanism, not just anti-Trumpism. And there he is in power, and he has a majority of government after buying a few extra seats off. When will people come out of that bout of hysteria? It's a good question. It's been said that people lose their minds in crowds

and come back to their senses one by one. So it'll happen, but how soon, I don't know. Well, after we had talked, You'd mention that. And I was sitting around with a group of Newfoundlanders. And a lot of this came up. And I don't know if it was in the process of just being frustrated at the life of a series

of unfortunate events. But I got into it a couple times because I was just like, you know, like everything that's going on right now. It's self-imposed. Like we're literally biting. on anything he says. And yet our government itself isn't doing anything to help us here and get us out of the problems

we're in. And every time he pokes, we lose our collective minds. Kearney was masterful, absolutely masterful, riding that wave. And maybe even creating a bigger wave out of that. I mean, the Mike Myers commercial, I felt Canadian pride out of that. I mean, I knew it was completely hogwash. But I watched it. I'm like, that's brilliant.

Like I had to, you know, as much as I can, when I get emotional and I'm angry, I mean, in hockey, in a game, you're in playoffs. An agitator is sent to do what? Agitate and try and get you to retaliate because they want to win the game. And so, listen, folks, I'm playing hockey, anyone who played with me, I was in a motor, emotional roller coaster. So what did the agitator do? He came to me and poked me. That's what happened in hockey. And I watch this.

And I'm like, the opposite is true where you can build up Canadian pride, right? Or not the opposite. Just a similar way of doing it. And the Mike Myers thing really instilled this elbows up. We're going to stand on Canadian values and go that way. And Mark Carney and the liberals,

whether they generated it, whether Trump was in cahoots, who frig knows, joke, not a joke. Him doing that caused a bit of a ripple. They got turned into a wave. And they just kept feeding it. And it continues to be fed because I keep running people in Newfoundland. They're like, I'm going over here and oh, where are you going there?

I'm not going to support the United States. I'm like, oh. And I've met Americans who've come here that want to get out of the craziness that Trump's cut. And you Canadians are so nice and everything, you know, and I'm like, oh, this has been masterfully done. Because it has seated into so many people. And I didn't think that going across the majority of Canada. I hadn't run into a ton of. But now that I've been staying here for a while,

I've run into more and more conversations around it. And I haven't blown a gasket on it. Here in Newfoundland as well. Yes. Because we historically we had, we loved having the Americans here during the Second World War. Sure. And there were bases during the Cold War.

There was an affinity. And many Newfoundland women, married American servicemen, including my own father's sister. So I would have thought that the amount of, you know, to be frank about it, anti-Trumpism slash anti-Americanism here in this province would be less, but maybe not, and probably less than Alberta. I think where people were more heavily victimized by the hysteria was in Ontario. And the reason I say that is I think Ontarians have an identity problem.

Less so out here, less so in Alberta. They're the part of the country who can't figure out who they are. And so they get easily offended if, you know, Trump makes a joke. We would have been much better off to keep our cool and stay rational, but instead he got us where he wants us. And what started as anti-Trumpism is now beginning to be seen, if you listen to Victor Davis-Henson, for example,

in the United States by Americans as anti-Americanism. And that's a different thing. Yeah, it's a really different thing. It's, well, I'm beginning to see it because I keep running into it. I've ran into it a bunch now in the last seven days, well, seven, eight days since I've, I talked to you the first time.

Yeah, this is not healthy at all. It's not going to do us any good. And if Americans in general start to perceive that, it's going to make for a world of woe for Canada. Yeah. Before I let you out of here, any final thoughts? I don't plan on seeing you again, at least at your house. I do appreciate you doing this again, but if you have final thoughts.

I hope that your plan comes true. Yes, me too. And you get home safe and sound with the kids. kids, it's a great trip that's your own, Sean, and with your wife too, of course. But yeah, you know, I'd leave it with this suggestion, because the subject was this deal that we've done with Quebec, is that Mr. Wakeham, the present Premier, arguably doesn't have a mandate to enter this MOU, which is a political issue, not a legal one, of course. But the reason I say that is we've had a history of referenda here and it's how we got

into Confederation in the first place. We joined in 1949. We're the newest province, provincial entrant into confederation. But we did that by way of a referendum in 1948 in which the other alternative was economic union with the United States and it came very close. But we took the decision we took and people live with it and we've been happily members of a member province of Canada more or less ever since. So referenda have a history here, but what this Churchill River Deal represents to my mind and many others is an issue of our entire sovereignty within Confederation, our sovereignty as a province within the promise of Confederation, because of the If we're to have Newfoundland and Labrador a chance of being politically independent and economically

independent, not dependent on the central government in any way, shape, or form, stand on our own two feet, economically, be prosperous, realize our provincial sovereignty within what is permitted by Confederation, then we need to be the principal beneficiary of this river. And right now we are not. Mr. Wakeham promised a referendum on this. He reneged on that promise. He abstained in the vote on the original Fury deal, the first MOU. The party, the PC party abstained. He downplayed the whole issue of the Churchill River and the status of the deal. And the whole issue during the election campaign a year ago, he downplayed. it, didn't want to talk about it.

He used the referenda idea as a way of not talking about it, because that means it would be a decision made later. Then he reneged on it after the election. And all we've had is a staged House debate in which the people who are responsible for advising and negotiating were trotted into the legislature to give their side of the story. It's not the place for testing whether this deal is good or not good. not good. And for the most part, the vote went on party lines. So here we're facing the most

consequential decision for our future and the possibility of our sovereignty. And the government has never actually run on it and gotten a mandate to do it. So that's my point about not having a mandate. They don't have a mandate to execute this deal. That's my opinion. It's a political opinion, but that's what it is. Man, if I was sitting there, well, I am. I sit here and I go, I know you're talking about sovereignty,

being able to stand on your own two feet and tyrannical governments, that is the last thing they want. That's my own two cents on it, because I look at it and I go, you know, in my world, I want independent, sovereign, be able to take care of your own thing, right?

And you go out and do the work, you reap what you sow. Yeah. So if you want to sit around and do nothing, that's on you. And that isn't the case of what we're living under, right? Everything wants to centralize, we'll do well out a little bit, make you dependent on what we can give. Yeah, yeah. And you're talking about an entirely different thing on this deal.

We're the victims of creeping socialism in Canada. You know, we have much more we should be admiring about the Americans. Their devotion to the idea of individual liberty and, for that matter, state sovereignty. Their vindication, which we're still keeping at arm's length, of the idea of medical sovereignty or the right to make your own medical decisions, which we saw trampled on during the late COVID thing. They're moving in directions exposing the manipulation and psychological operation that went on behind COVID that we haven't even touched on yet. At least no government has touched on it. And as long as you want to have collective amnesia about that, you're at high risk for repeating the same thing again.

Yeah. Well, Chess, appreciate you sitting down with me for a second time. Let me back in your house for a third time. and appreciate everything you've done while I've been here and just, it's been very nice to meet you and get to follow up on a conversation. That doesn't usually happen, but we make the best of the circumstances we're in. And it's been enjoyable to be on the rock for a few extra days. I don't mean to make it seem like it's been bad or anything.

It's not been the case. But the sun shining on my back right now, that is a joyous sight. It's been missed while being out here. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a famous statement campaign slogan made by former Premier Peckford. He's the man I mentioned in the context of principal beneficiary in the Atlantic Accord. He said, one day the sun will shine and have not will be no more. Let's hope.

Let's hope. Thanks, Jess.