Tobin’s legacy

Ostensibly weary of politics after 24 years, Industry Minister and former Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin has announced he will leave public life to spend more time with his family.

Whenever a politician resigns with that phrase on his lips, political junkies among the press corps instantly seek the story behind the story. The dailies are filled with speculation that Tobin may have given up on the race to succeed Jean Chrtien as leader of the national Liberal party, which in recent years has carried with it, ex officio, the premiership of the country; or that he may have asked for the Foreign Affairs seat in the newly shuffled cabinet and been spurned; or that he is biding his time until Paul Martin, minister of finance, and the punters’ favourite to replace Chrtien, retires, leaving the field open.

We won’t bother with that. Tobin was always politically ambitious, and to imagine the leopard’s spots vanishing may be too much for anyone who has watched Canadian politics in the past two decades, but history turns on little things, and one of them may have changed Tobin’s plans for himself.

Still, it is instructive to look at Tobin’s career, from his election as a viciously partisan member of the House of Commons in 1980, through his appointments as a cabinet minister and as premier of Newfoundland. And he has displayed one virtue, if few others: he was always consistent in his economic illiteracy. He championed economically destructive — but electorally profitable — pork-barrel politics in Atlantic Canada in the 2000 election campaign, was among those who goaded the government into a massively stupid and duplicitous trade war with Brazil, and most recently floated a plan to spend $1 billion on high-speed Internet connections in rural Canada. Not for Mr. Tobin the good grey way of fiscal rectitude when money could be splashed around, especially when it meant Liberal seats; and not for him the good sense of the market when government dirigisme could be put to good political use as a very visible hand in the economy.

The crowning example for this industry was Tobin’s obduracy over the development of the Voisey’s Bay nickel deposit after succeeding Clyde Wells as premier of Newfoundland. The project’s operator, Inco, had unveiled plans for a mine and mill at Voisey’s, on the Labrador coast, with a smelter and refinery in Argentia, on the island’s Avalon Peninsula — qualifying all its plans with the caveat that any development would have to meet Inco’s internal requirements for rate of return.

Every company does this: projects must meet economic criteria to advance. It is a central rule of doing business, basic to management’s duty to the shareholders. Inco, while it may have been foolishly effusive about Voisey’s Bay’s potential, did not hide the condition.

But in Tobin’s mind, the plans became promises; and when Inco, faced with deteriorating nickel markets after the Asian recession of 1997, demurred about a smelter, he committed his government to making sure Inco would not develop Voisey’s Bay without also building a smelter and refinery in Argentia. And he was, indeed, consistent: the Voisey’s Bay mineralization still sits in the ground, and the government of Newfoundland continues Tobin’s war of words. It has lasted almost four years now, while Inco has drilled off the rough equivalent of a Voisey’s Bay reserve in Thompson and Sudbury, and announced plans to develop the Goro nickel-laterite deposit in New Caledonia (welcomed, with open arms, by the French and departmental governments).

And those words at war have never been much governed by the facts. In the face of reserve estimates that never got above 31 million tonnes grading 2.88% nickel, 1.69% copper and 0.14% cobalt, Tobin called Voisey’s “the most exciting nickel, copper and cobalt deposit anywhere on the planet Earth.” The government’s media spin on the development deadlock has been to portray Voisey’s as a vast and rich and easy project. Even in good times, it is not vast, and in bad ones it is not easy.

What is often forgotten in the Voisey’s Bay processing issue is that Inco also suggested plans for a nickel oxide plant for Argentia. It would have meant 550 jobs and the long-term offtake of half of Voisey’s nickel concentrates. On the original three-year construction schedule, if Voisey’s Bay had been approved with a nickel oxide plant, that plant would probably have come into production this year and the mine would have been operating now.

But half a loaf was not nearly as good as none, when the empty breadbasket comes with a politically attractive grievance. Those jobs weren’t Brian Tobin’s job.

Companies in the nickel business compete with each other; everyone knows that. But inside the nickel companies, projects compete with each other, which fewer people appreciate. So it was that the Voisey’s Bay nickel project lost out to other projects in Inco’s portfolio, and is now well down the company’s things-to-do list.

Brian Tobin may kiss cod in press photo-ops. But he has been no friend to Newfoundland.