Ron Penney, a former deputy minister of justice and critic of the previous MOU signed in 2024, said Ottawa’s involvement is a big change because provinces don’t have to find that money.<\/p>\n
“But there’s a downside to loan guarantees, as we found out with Muskrat Falls, because sometimes you go ahead with a project based on a federal loan guarantee that you otherwise would not be able to do,” Penney told CBC Radio’s The St. John’s Morning Show.<\/p>\n
The possibility for a wind energy project in Labrador, which was not in the 2024 MOU, is also something that makes sense to Penney.<\/p>\n
“The problem, of course, with wind is everybody knows it’s intermittent,” said Penney. “So you need to have backup power. So to have a wind farm associated with Churchill Falls makes a lot of sense.”<\/p>\n
![\"Quebec](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/cbc.ca\/96c0574326f117dfec9f7d831d367430.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
The deal won’t be finalized until after the Quebec election, to be called in the coming weeks, with a different political party, the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois, currently favoured to form government.<\/p>\n
Penney doubts the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois will sign on to the agreement as it currently is written.<\/p>\n
“I think we’re going, as I say, to a third chapter,” he said.<\/p>\n
Kelly Blidook, an associate professor in Memorial University’s political science department, also anticipates Quebec will have a different party in power by the deadline to have the deal finalized \u2014 which is the end of 2026.<\/p>\n
“Until we have that finalization, I would say that this isn’t really big news, but I can appreciate the politics around wanting to do the announcement now,” Blidook said.<\/p>\n
While having Ottawa involved in the deal is important, he added, if the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois forms government and doesn’t like the deal, “it will not happen.”<\/p>\n
“We should always be talking about this as a tentative agreement, not as a done agreement. And those are very different things,” he said.<\/p>\n
Shifting politics<\/p>\n
During last year’s provincial election Wakeham promised to put any agreement to a public referendum. On Monday, he backtracked and instead, said he’d open the House of Assembly on Sept. 14 for a special debate.<\/p>\n
Penney said he’s disappointed and he had wanted a debate, adding it could impact Wakeham’s future credibility.<\/p>\n
Blidook said while in opposition, Wakeham also said an MOU needed to go through an independent review and go before the House of Assembly.<\/p>\n
“I’m assuming that he still believes these things. I’m guessing we won’t necessarily get these things,” said Blidook.<\/p>\n
“Until we really have these things, it’s very difficult to assess whether this ultimately is a good deal. But obviously he’s going to argue that it is because now he’s in charge.”<\/p>\n
The political circumstances have changed since former premiers Andrew Furey and former premier Fran\u00e7ois Legault signed a previous MOU in December 2024, said Blidook. At the time, there wasn’t the possibility of a Quebec separatist party forming government and down south, Joe Biden was still U.S. president, he said.<\/p>\n
“This change in terms of the importance of economic security, the change of having Mark Carney as prime minister and this push to do all these things, I think Premier Wakeham actually did find himself in a position to sort of get a better agreement.”<\/p>\n
Download our\u00a0<\/a>free CBC News app<\/a>\u00a0to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our\u00a0<\/a>daily headlines newsletter here<\/a>. Click\u00a0<\/a>here to visit our landing page.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having Ottawa step up in the new Churchill Falls agreement between N.L. and Quebec “makes a tremendous difference,”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[54678,55424,16366,55422,61,38828,241,55423,24777,55425,55421],"class_list":["post-173952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-churchill-falls","tag-kelly-blidook","tag-mou","tag-muskrat-falls","tag-ottawa","tag-parti-quebecois","tag-quebec","tag-ron-penney","tag-tentative-agreement","tag-transmission-lines","tag-wind-energy-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}