Premier Danny Williams is a little smarter than I had given him credit for.
After doing enough work over the past seven years to knock down a small elephant, he is retiring from politics. As a final lash at Quebec, and like an animal who turns and snarls with a gesture of defiance in retreat, he has put together a loosely defined framework for an agreement on part of the Lower Churchill called a term sheet.
No matter: if it matures he will get credit. If it does not, someone else will have screwed it up.
There is little doubt Williams caught an economic wave, a wave started by premiers past, to our great benefit. And while making the occasional financial and strategic gaffe, he worked hard and did a decent job. The columnists and critics have been, on the whole, kind — even the most curmudgeonly of them.
But when one of them, Randy Simms(Nov. 27, “Life after Danny”) gives him credit for our “pride,” I draw the line. Simms suggests we were not at the “great Canadian banquet” but were “relegated to the children’s table.”
I suggest we came out of near-starvation with the fish merchants’ knives at our colonial throats.
It took hard work on our part, the help of 30 million fellow Canadians, and a few barrels of oil to get our economic pride back. Is this the pride Simms is talking about? In any case, is this a “restored pride” or our first experience with the notion? It’s hard to tell from Simms’ comments.
I will try to be a little clearer on the matter.
Williams might have instilled some sense of pride, however defined, in Randy Simms and others, but no dear leader did that for me. I had it before Williams, during Williams, and I’ll have it after Williams. I have never suffered from any sense of inferiority or poor second cousinism to other Canadians.
True pride cannot be grafted onto a people in Kim Jong-Il style. It is not fostered by belligerence. It is not waving a flag (nor lowering it, for that matter) and it is not the jingle in your pocket. Rather it is a feeling in your guts — deep in your guts — and I’d like to think we have always had it. That’s a gift Premier Williams could not give me. What we did not have was wealth, and I suspect Simms has conflated these issues.
With my gratitude for the effort, I wish the premier a jingle in his pocket and good health in the future.
Robert Rowe
St. John's
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Indeed, poor Robert must be naturally immune to the kool-aid. Everyone else can plainly see the emperor's new cloths....