Yappily Disgruntled

"Pessimism and crap" are not attributes that Newfoundland's premier, Danny Williams admires. All the less so when he perceives anyone raining on his parade. And he celebrates quite the parade. The Rock is no longer a disadvantaged province of Canada. No longer requiring the handouts it has traditionally received through transfer payments from the federal government representing funding acquired through taxation of other, traditionally wealthier provinces.

Yet despite the province's good fortune with the development of the Hibernia oilfields and the riches that have come its way through oil, Danny Williams took great umbrage at the nerve of the federal government pointing out that as a wealthy province it no longer qualified for those great tax breaks, let alone the transfer payments it had so long accustomed itself to enjoying. And he did his very best to scupper the electoral fortunes of the Conservative-led government, as a result.

Now his dander has been raised by some provocative questions raised by a open-line host on a provincial radio station. Having been apprised by a proud premier that a deal is proceeding to developing the Hibernia South oilfield, the host had the temerity to raise the issue of the province's sad state of its traditional fishery. The radio show host, one Randy Simms, merely posed a question that had to be asked.

Newfoundlanders who made their living in forestry and fishing are invested and interested in the futures of those resources. So the host invited listeners to call in with their take on the situation.

And then fielded a number of responses from call-in respondents, all of whom have a very deep and vested interest in the furtherance of oil revenues, along with the collapsed state of the province's traditional natural resources industries. And then, an hour into his show, who but the premier called to express his indignation over the host's supposed attitude toward the province's good fortune.

"I can't understand for the life of me why when we've now negotiated another deal here this morning that is going to put twice as much money and royalties in the province's hands as we collected in 12 years on all three projects and you got to find something wrong with it", fulminated that perennially irritable scold. But, countered the host, what about the fishery, the logging industry.

"We don't need that kind of pessimism and crap coming out of your mouth in the mornings, I can tell you right now" said the premier, over-riding the perfectly logical enquiry. "You're the reason that I keep going in this job because it's the skeptics and the negative people in this province that have kept us, those lobsters clawed back in the pot year after year after year, but I refuse to listen to pessimists like you - and we're going to move forward and we're going to do it despite you".

So there. The old crab had his say, and that's that. His to dispose, theirs never to oppose. As for the traditional way of life on the Rock, that's past and gone evidently, as far as he's concerned. Of course fossil fuel extraction also has a finite life.