Assistance is so appropriate

The provincial crown-corporation energy company decides to build a hydro plant in the remote northern wilderness. In order to get that power to market, they plan to build a long transmission line from the plant to their preferred tie-in point.

The proposed line takes as straight a course as the topography will allow as it leaves the plant, and as straight a course as possible as it approaches the tie-in. But in the middle, there’s a bit of a problem.

There’s this funny piece of territory that the provincial government in question doesn’t actually have jurisdiction over. It is the lawful jurisdiction of another government altogether. In fact, the land in question has been out of the province’s jurisdiction for a long time, and since well before it drew up its latest plan to connect a remote hydro plant to an urban energy market.

The province in question has plenty of its own crown land on which it can build the transmission line, but avoiding the jurisdictional line and a sort of “trespass” onto the other government’s land means taking a detour. So the proposed power line has to do a dog-leg, and skirt the boundaries of that bit of off-limits real estate without actually crossing it.

According to the Williams Principle of 2009, this means that the provincial government building the transmission line is entitled to compensation from the government that has the gall, the audacity, the nerve to maintain, for complex historical reasons, jurisdiction over the land in question. Or, as the Rhodes Scholar and Great Lawyer put it, more eloquently than this corner ever could:

We are going to go around it. We are not going through it, and on that basis we think it’d be appropriate for the federal government to provide some assistance.

Oh, wait – you still think this is another post about the Gros Morne/Lower Churchill issue?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s actually a post about the La Romaine project, where the transmission line from the La Romaine 3 and La Romaine 4 stations would tie into the Montagnais post on the existing transmission line coming out of Churchill Falls.


As this map [source .pdf] shows, the bee-line route is rudely interrupted by that little niggly bit of interior Labrador that has the geopolitical temerity to be inside the Atlantic watershed, but south of the 52nd parallel (green circle.) And so, notwithstanding the myth that Quebec doesn’t recognize the Labrador boundary, Hydro-Quebec has had to plan its power line around a jurisidictional line on a map.

In other words, Hydro-Quebec is going to go around Labrador. They are not going through it, and on that basis it’d be appropriate for the Danny Williams-Government to provide some assistance. Right?

Dave Denine, you can expect that phone call soon from Thierry Vandal.

Of course, this is a ludicrous suggestion. The two situations are nothing alike.

After all, the dogleg involved in the La Romaine case, unlike the Gros Morne problem, actually makes Hydro-Quebec’s power line longer than it otherwise might be, whereas Danny Williams wants compensation for the stupid federal stupid national stupid park that makes his power line shorter.