Oil Patch Insider

Danny is The Man to people of Newfoundland, Labrador

Whatever Big Oil may think of Danny Williams there’s no doubt where he stands among the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The pit-bull premier led his Conservative government in a re-election romp Oct. 9, collecting almost 70 percent of the vote and filling 43 of 48 seats in the provincial legislature.

And he is already bristling for a fight with Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper, using his mandate to lock horns with both the oil and gas industry and the federal government.

“There is a message here, Steve: If you want to take me and my team on, you’ve got to take on the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.”

(No one calls the prime minister “Steve,” other than U.S. President George W. Bush in one of his back-slapping moments.)

Despite nominally coming from the same political party as Harper, Williams has vowed to do whatever he can to ensure Conservatives lose every one of Newfoundland’s seven federal seats in the next national election.

There seems little doubt that Williams soared to seldom-scaled political heights by going to the mat with a consortium of leading oil partners in the Hebron-Ben Nevis project as part of his campaign to make Newfoundland a “master in its own house” by ensuring there were “no more giveaways” of natural resources.

Just prior to the election campaign he locked-up an agreement in principle to give his government a 4.9 percent equity stake in Hebron and released a new energy strategy targeting a 10 percent stake in future projects.

Williams is already in hot water with ExxonMobil — the target for much of his scorn — and Murphy Oil — who plan to sue the Canadian government, alleging it violated the North American Free Trade Agreement by allowing Newfoundland to adopt a new guideline that requires them to spend millions of dollars on research in the province.

Williams said that if the companies don’t want to contribute to R&D in Newfoundland “we’ll certainly fight them all the way in court.”

The two companies estimate the new regulation will cost them a combined C$50 million, regardless of the commercial need for such investment, or of the resources in place to sustain that spending.

—Gary Park