Uniting Newfoundland, Dividing the Country

If there are two things to be learned from Premier Danny Williams's legacy, it's that he did great things for Newfoundland and that giving Ottawa the finger makes people like you.

There is probably no better columnist to comment on Danny Williams’s legacy than the National Post’s Rex Murphy. Partly because Murphy is a Newfoundlander himself, and partly because no other writer uses phrases like “he could speechify with the best of our best.” In a long and flattering column Murphy describes the many ways that Williams embodied and understood the Newfoundland psyche, and says prime evidence of this is that he’s leaving office just after signing a hydroelectric deal for the Lower Churchill River. “There is no political scar that cuts deeper into the consciousness of Newfoundlanders,” Murphy writes, “than the horrible Upper Churchill deal” signed by Newfoundland’s first premier Joe Smallwood, which continues to allow Québec to siphon billions of dollars out of Labrador. Murphy says that Williams will be remembered as both the anti-Smallwood and the second coming of Smallwood, the former because he undid the Upper Churchill fiasco and the latter because he will take his rightful place alongside history’s great premiers.

His achievements for Newfoundland aside, the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert says that Williams’s legacy is a troubling trend for Canada. “Williams demonstrated that Quebec’s take-no-prisoner approach to federal-provincial relations could successfully be exported,” she writes. Politicians in other provinces are learning that taking on Ottawa is a great way to win votes: in Saskatchewan, Premier Brad Wall’s popularity is soaring in the wake of his successful bid to block the Potash Corp. takeover, and the Wildrose Alliance is gaining ground with its Alberta-first agenda. Hébert doesn’t mention it (the Vancouver Sun and Rex Murphy do), but federalist premier Jean Charest is now Canada’s most unpopular provincial leader and Gordon Campbell, always cooperative with Ottawa, was run out of B.C. on a rail. This contrasts starkly with Williams’s 90 per cent approval rating. Observers often characterize Canada’s political landscape as divided between liberal and conservative, but Hébert says “the real polarization is inter-regional, not ideological, and the current federal leadership is more an impotent casualty of the phenomenon than its instigator.”