Labrador’s industrial opportunity has never been more promising, or more tenuous. It could explode with resource-based prosperity. Or just as quickly implode from unreconciled Indigenous relations.

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You could hear a pin drop as Hydro-Québec CEO Michael Sabia and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro president Jennifer Williams took the stage together at the Goose Bay Legion this past June for Expo Labrador.

The air conditioning hummed in the background, but otherwise the room was still with all eyes and ears hanging on their words. In just 10 days, Sabia would leave the utility world behind to become Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the Prime Minister’s most trusted advisors. It was a sign that Labrador’s energy future had reached the highest level of national attention.

“It could never be a bad thing for (the Gull Island/Churchill Falls expansion), or even for the province as a whole, when one of the architects of this deal is now in charge of the civil service of the federal government,” said Seamus O’Regan, a former cabinet minister who’s now a senior business advisor with law firm Stewart McKelvey. “To have somebody there who fully understands the depth and the breadth and the scale of this project is so important.”

Inside the Legion hall, dartboards were draped in black curtains and the room swelled past capacity with business and political leaders packed shoulder to shoulder.

Organizers said they could’ve sold the room out four times.

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