Read Some Day the Sun Will Shine and Have Not Will Be No More Online
Authors: Brian Peckford
However, after the ministers held a number of meetings, it was time for the
negotiating teams to begin sitting down and put into writing a draft agreement
based upon the principles the ministers discussed. This process had no sooner
started when Cyril Abery, the chair of our negotiating committee, reported to
Bill Marshall that the talks were going nowhere. Marshall wrote Chrétien on
January 24, 1983:
I write you concerning the present offshore talks. You and I have had five
meetings before any matters were referred to our negotiating teams. Our
meetings were meant to establish the principles and agree on parameters that
would lead to fruitful, successful, detailed talks between our negotiating
teams. From the start you insisted that it would be beneficial if you and I
did not exchange written positions on different items, although detailed
notes were taken by both sides. I agreed with you for the sake of getting
the talks going. During these meetings I thought we had made meaningful
progress, and I think you did too. The fact that both sides agreed to refer
some of the matters to our negotiating teams proves this.
However, since the two negotiating teams have been meeting, things have
changed dramatically. I find positions being taken by your team widely
diverge from the positions you took during our talks. That was the reason
for my first meeting with you after the teams started meeting, which I
thought would
resolve the differences between you and your
team. The further meetings between our two teams showed that you were not
successful in having your position adopted by them.
Therefore, I requested a second meeting with you, which we had Friday past.
You still maintained that your team's position is really not your position
or that of the Government of Canada. However, your team's position is the
only written position we have. All your positions have been verbal although
noted.
Mr. Marshall went on to express his puzzlement and to request in writing from
the minister his “understandings” on the seventeen items critical to the talks,
from management issues of a joint board, revenue issues, national
self-sufficiency, to sliding scale royalties, etc. This letter came as a result
of private meetings between the two negotiating teams being held in the Meridien
Hotel in Montreal, considered a good place away from the glare that would more
likely be present in Ottawa or St. John's. The two ministers met and then the
teams sat down to map out a framework agreement based upon instructions from the
ministers. However, the federal team had the same position that it had displayed
during the previous talks with former Energy minister Lalonde. Here is
Marshall's interesting and revealing commentary:
I called Jean Chrétien. He said he would contact his negotiating team and
set the matter straight. When the meeting reconvened, it was the same story.
It was obvious I was not amused when I called him the second time. He was
apologetic and full of assurances there had been some slip-up and he would
set things right. The teams reassembled once more, incredibly with the same
result. It was so eerie and weird that this could be happening in talks of
such import to both governments.
The best description of my feelings over being toyed with a
third time is expressed in the adage: “fool me once, fool me twice, me poor
fool if you fool me thrice.”
I had remained in Montreal. Jean Chrétien had gone back to Ottawa after we
had agreed the officials could begin putting together a draft on the basis
of the principles agreed by us. I was furious. I called him in Ottawa and
asked him to come down to Montreal immediately. He said he was tied up and
could not come right away, but he would come that evening.
In the interval, I sat down and prepared a letter to him listing the
seventeen principles of the framework of the agreement that he and I had
agreed would be fleshed out in an initial draft by our respective officials.
After the letter was typed, I put it in my pocket and waited in my hotel
room for my visitor's arrival.
He arrived alone and we sat down to discuss the situation. I began by
getting right to the point in expressing deep concern over Paul Tellier's
(the prime minister's chief of staff) refusals to discuss the framework we
had mapped out. I then frankly told Jean Chrétien, while he may have
believed he could conclude an agreement along the lines of our agreed
framework, it was becoming apparent that the Trudeau policy had not changed
and he could not deliver on his assurances. I suggested that Mark Lalonde
was still pulling the strings. He was then told in unmistakable terms that
negotiations could not continue on that basis.
Chrétien responded in the same refrain; namely, there had been confusion
and he would straighten it up. After he went on in this vein for a while, I
put
my hand in my pocket and pulled out the envelope
containing the letter. As I was doing so, I suggested the best way to clear
up the confusion for once and for all was to provide a written outline of
the framework of our agreement for the negotiating teams. They would then
have our joint instructions and would be able to get on with preparing a
draft of the agreement for submission to us. Then I advised him that I had
prepared that outline and suggested he read it with a view to giving it to
the teams.
When I took the envelope out of my pocket with the seventeen principles
intended to serve as joint drafting instructions to respective teams of
officials, Mr. Chrétien's eyes became fixed on it. I remember him rising
from his chair whilst exclaiming, “But Bill we agreed there would be no
writing.” I recall responding that the federal negotiators were not
accepting what we had agreed, so we had to reduce it to writing.
I, too, then got up out of my chair, holding out the envelope to him.
Facing me, he started walking backwards towards the door with his hands up
in front of his body as if to ward off some deadly blow, whilst incanting
“no letter” to which I replied “just a little one, Jean.” Then I heard him
mutter “no writing,” while continuing to back-pedal with his eyes
transfixed on the envelope I was holding out to him. I recall responding
with something like “just these few words, Jean” as he reached the door,
whereupon he exited, slammed the door right in front of my extended hand
holding the proffered letter, and beat a hasty retreat lickety-split down
the hotel corridor. He was gone, never to return.
A response to Marshall's letter was never received.
We had no choice but to sever any more talks on the issue. It
was obvious Chrétien's words were his own and he could not get them to become
federal policy. He continually misled Mr. Marshall and failed to deliver what he
had promised. Either he thought, once back in negotiations, it would be
difficult for us to leave and, therefore, he could convince us to sign a Nova
Scotia deal, doing something that his rival Marc Lalonde was unable to do and
making himself look good in the eyes of the prime minister, or naively believing
he could convince the PM and Lalonde to accept the Newfoundland position. The
former is the more plausible to me. But this did not stop Mr. Chrétien from
telling a local newspaper that “the people he was dealing with were not dealing
in good faith.”
Here was a man who refused to put his position in writing, was undermined by
his negotiating team, obviously being controlled by others in the federal
government, and then had the gall to describe the other side as bad-faith
negotiators when we had put our position in writing and where our minister and
the negotiating team were saying the same things.
Even the mayor of St. John's, John Murphy, a known Liberal, got in the act.
Having contacted Chrétien, he wrote me a letter indicating that what the federal
government was offering was a good deal. I responded to the mayor by pointing
out the facts were not as had been painted by Mr. Chrétien and that we thought
it only fair that positions be put in writing, concluding with “however, in the
matter of the offshore, I regrettably have to note that your comments, based as
they are upon one-sided and incomplete information, hardly serve the interests
of all the people of the province.”
The period from January, 1983, onward, after we severed talks, was the most
difficult period of all. As Marshall says:
The period between the break off of the Chrétien round in January
of 1983 and June of 1983 saw the bleakest of days. There was nothing to
negotiate and no one with whom to negotiate. The pressures exerted on us
locally to sign and get on with
development, fueled by local
federal acolytes and the Board of Trade, spiralled. Jean Chrétien kept the
heat on with statements of his willingness to resume negotiations. But there
was nothing to negotiate and no one with whom to negotiate in good
faith.
Then the shocking news came in February. Our court ruled that the offshore was
federalâwe had no ownership rights whatsoever. The Nova Scotia deal, our own
rejection of further talks, and now the unfavourable court decision, tested our
resolveâespecially in light of a budget that year that saw us having to increase
our sales tax to 12%, the highest in the land, increase our corporate and
personal taxes, impose a new capital tax on banks and trust companies, increase
tobacco and liquor taxes, and raise fees on many other government
services.
In April we played our last card: no more offshore negotiations until there was
a change of government in Ottawa. And then the slightest glimmer of hope! Brian
Mulroney won the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. There
was renewed vigour in the party and a growing sense that it could win the next
general election. Extensive talks with the party concerning offshore had been
ongoing for some time, such that it was only days after Mulroney's ascension to
the leadership that I was able to announce that the new leader and party had
communicated to us in writing that the party was prepared, when it became
government, to finalize with us an offshore accord that met the province's
management and revenue positions. My response at the time, June 14, 1983:
The Mulroney letter is a significant breakthrough in Newfoundland's long
and often discouraging struggle to receive fair and equitable treatment on
this resource which we were proud to have brought into Confederation.
This agreement provides both the provincial and federal governments with a
positive constructive role in the management process. It provides for our
province being treated equally and equitably with other oil
and gas producing provinces on the matter of revenue sharing.
I am firmly of the view that the offshore will be an important building
block for Canada in the years to come.
It is often forgotten that this commitment came from Mulroney after our own
Newfoundland Court of Appeal had ruled against us and before the Supreme Court
of Canada had ruled. It would have been a credible position for Mulroney to
announce that he would make a final decision after a Supreme Court of Canada
ruling. But true to the commitment of an earlier leader, Joe Clark, Mulroney
never flinchedâhe delivered.
Mulroney wasted little time, only two months, in getting himself a seat in
Parliament by taking the seat of Central Nova in Nova Scotia in a by-election as
a result of the resignation of the sitting Member Elmer McKay (Peter McKay's
father), which allowed Mulroney to run there.
The Conservatives began improving in the polls and the Liberals were slipping.
Trudeau seemed vulnerable and a Conservative victory now seemed at least
possible, if not probable.
In February, 1984, Trudeau, seeing the writing on the wall, announced his
intention to step down. We were delighted!
Dampening that optimism of Trudeau leaving, and the possible electoral success
of the Progressive Conservative Party, was our defeat at the hands of the
Supreme Court of Canada on March 8, 1984. No sooner was Trudeau to leaveâour
obstinate opponent to a fair deal for the provinceâthan this stunning rebuke of
our claims by the highest court:
In summary, we conclude:
Continental shelf rights are, in pith and substance, an
extraterritorial manifestation of external sovereignty.
Canada has the right to explore and exploit in the
continental shelf off Newfoundland because:
Any continental shelf rights available at international law
in 1949 would have been acquired by the Crown in right of the United
Kingdom, not the Crown in right of Newfoundland;
Even if Newfoundland could have held continental shelf rights prior to
Union, they would have passed to Canada by virtue of the Terms of
Union.
In any event, international law did not recognize continental shelf
rights by 1949; such rights were not indisputably recognized before the
Geneva Convention of 1958. [p. 129]
Canada has legislative jurisdiction in relation to the right to explore
and exploit in the continental shelf off Newfoundland by virtue of the
peace, order, and good government power in its residual capacity.
In short, in our opinion both parts of the question should be answered in
favour of Canada.
Just when we were gaining some hope, this decision put a dagger to the heart.
You are no sooner off the mat than you are knocked down again.