Premier says N.B. will have better energy sovereignty dealing with Quebec than unstable Middle East, Venezuala

A1

by brent mazerolle
times & transcript staff

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

25 Comment(s)

Premier Shawn Graham has had a few people ask this week how he thinks historians will one day judge his proposal to sell NB Power to Hydro-Québec.

Enlarge Photo

RON WARD/TIMES & TRANSCRIPT

Premier Shawn Graham

The difference at a conference in Dieppe yesterday was that it was a room full of historians from across the nation asking the question.

The annual conference of the Association for Canadian Studies drew about 80 academics to the Ramada Inn yesterday, and Premier Graham came from Fredericton to address them. After his prepared remarks he invited questions from the audience and was immediately asked about the power deal.

He immediately cited the late Louis J. Robichaud, whose introductions of the Official Languages Act and the Equal Opportunities program had been the subject of some of his prepared remarks.

"I know if those issues had been brought before the public at that time for a referendum, they would never have passed," Graham said. "Great leaders have to have the courage of their convictions to move forward with transformational change knowing there is going to be a negative impact in the short term but a positive impact in the long term."

Recalling how he as a boy had the chance to know Robichaud because his father had served in Robichaud's government, the premier noted "the negative impact is often on one's personal life and on one's ability to take on the differences of opinion which are so important when change occurs."

Besides the arguments already made this week about erasing 40 per cent of the provincial debt, lowering power rates and cutting carbon emissions, he also said "we're reducing future risk for our province," whether it's the cost of decommissioning Point Lepreau 30 years from now or refurbishing the Mactaquac dam.

Predicting there will one day be a federal tax on carbon, the amount of fossil fuels in current New Brunswick energy production would mean higher rates if the status quo was maintained.

But there was a bigger issue with fossil fuels that the premier turned back at critics who say selling NB Power to Quebec equated to giving up some of our sovereignty.

"Today New Brunswickers are saying to themselves, 'why should we have to buy our energy from Quebec?' The fact is in New Brunswick we buy our oil from the Middle East to fuel our power plants," he said. "We buy our coal from Venezuala to run our coal-fired plants. I think it's a wise decision today that we're tying ourselves to a stable partner in a secure country who's a neighbour."

Noting that most of his speech to the historians a few moments earlier had been with how New Brunswickers from what were once two solitudes had spent the past 40 years not merely learning "to live together, but to build together," the premier said he believed the deal with Quebec would be another example of neighbours building together.