BOB WAKEHAM: Are we our own worst enemies with the Churchill Falls deal?

As if the numerous efforts to scrap and re-negotiate the most atrocious, inequitable, one-sided deal in this province’s history hadn’t gotten messy and confusing enough, now we have the Parti Québécois entering the already blurred picture with its aggressive Quebec-first philosophy that you just know will further muddy the waters of the Churchill River and its massive hydro power.

Predictably, Premier Tony Wakeham has been doing his Pollyanna routine in interviews and in a government-funded piece of video puffery to try and convince all of his understandably pessimistic constituents that the new separatist premier in Quebec, Paul St. Pierre Plamondon, will dance a jig of acceptance for the latest configuration of the original Memorandum of Understanding because it’s just so damn enticing for both provinces.

Well, Tony the Tiger had better hold off before shoveling another spoonful of Churchill Falls Frosted Flakes down his gob and shouting in near ecstasy, “THEY’RE GR-R-REAT!”

Because you can take it to the bank that Premier St. Pierre will make sure he places his own indelible mark on the agreement signed several weeks back between his predecessor Christine Frechette (now relegated to asterisk status in Quebec history) and Wakeham, with Prime Minister Mark Carney contributing bags full of federal cash to the deal.

Plamondon will, indeed, be functioning with the drawback of a minority government once he’s sworn in, but the new premier will be hell-bent, I would suggest, on impressing his fellow Quebecois with a sales job that will ensure the proposed agreement is altered, seemingly for the umpteenth time, to ensure Quebec’s benefits will be enhanced at the expense of Newfoundland — the province his predecessors have, after all, mistreated with an unabashed lack of scruples since the original Upper Churchill deal was signed in 1969.

But you never know: Maybe the new premier is a pragmatist, and will recognize, as did François Legault, the premier who signed the MOU in 2024 with then Premier Andrew Furey, that the ‘69 deal will expire in 2041, a mere spit in time, when Newfoundland will be in charge of the Churchill Falls brothel and can nail Quebec with a reciprocal screwing.

Maybe he’ll be a sensible type, who will realize that Quebec will require the level of Churchill power long into the future — power only available in the present agreement — and that he’d be acting like a politician minus a few shingles if he were to play counter-productive hardball in any future negotiations or was inclined to rip the contract to pieces (as he said while in Opposition he would do) and allow the scraps to float uselessly down the Churchill River.

Here in Newfoundland, billions of desperately needed dollars which seemed agonizingly close to being hauled off the table and stuffed into our coffers — a spectacular input that would give this place the kind of financial comfort it has never had, either as a province or as a country — might disappear in the fog if, in fact, the Parti Québécois balk big time at the Wakeham-Frechette arrangement or set conditions that would make any revised agreement unpalatable.

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can’t be helped if they’re more than slightly jaded about this entire Churchill Falls matter, given the innumerable, contradictory assessments delivered by different administrations.

There were confounding evaluations from one government-appointed committee after another.

A group of nine self-proclaimed experts told us the whole thing stinks to the high heavens, with a crowd of similarly-ordained experts declared we’d be cracked not to embrace the deal.

Former premiers tore it to shreds as still other politicians sang its praises.

Pundits, profs and other public commentators disagreed on its merits.

And so forth and so on. Who were/are we to believe?

All the while, those billions of bucks I referred to were being eyed eagerly by people who can’t afford a decent load of groceries, or have to scrape to pay shockingly high heat bills, or don’t have a family doctor, or sit tortured in an emergency room for 10 and 12 hours and longer to see a physician — these are the ordinary souls, not the politicians and the experts.

I don’t even know what to say anymore about this whole mesmerizing affair; and I’m surely not alone.

Like many, I applauded the actions of the Furey government in not having the province wait until 2041 to turn the tables on Quebec, of not adhering to that proverb of revenge being best served cold, and of acting now to try and repeal the ‘69 agreement. (Although Furey can’t get out of this mess unscathed, having inexplicably and suddenly flown the Confederation Building coup to return to fixing bones and not staying around long enough to see what he helped birth reach fruition, to see it through to the end.)

But if all these machinations I alluded to — many prompted by know-it-all egotists or caused by shameless examples of political one-upmanship — result in that immoral Upper Churchill agreement remaining unchanged, and desperately needed money stuck in limbo, then we’ll have to conclude once more that we’re our own worst enemies, that we put in place politicians who don’t know their arses from holes in the ground.

I’ll finish up with this: It’s always exceedingly satisfying to hear so often about what a unique, magical place we live in, as we did last week when actor Josh Hartnett, the star of the locally shot Netflix series Below, extolled the unprecedented virtues he found in Newfoundland.

For sure, our culture is rich, and we’re a proud lot.

But we’re still an impoverished place of habitation for too many of our residents.

Perhaps, though, just perhaps, this whole back-and-forth Churchill Falls story can still have a lucrative ending.

We can only hope such will be the case.