Interlinear A

Some interlinear notes and queries, in an attempt to decipher the Premier's interview with The Labradorian this week:

DW: We went up there last year and we had a cabinet meeting.

A meeting of a cabinet which did not then, and still does not, have a Labrador MHA sitting in it.

DW: I’ve got to tell you quite bluntly, and frankly that I was very surprised at the negative reaction we got to the initiatives that we’d taken. We came back reeling… But I’ve got to tell you that I was taken aback by the fact that we got such a negative reaction.

That could be related to the fact that the executive council office is doing an excellent job at keeping the Premier in a bubble.

DW: […] it seemed that we got more criticism for things we weren’t doing, like the new auditorium for example. And that’s something of course that we are always considering. Minister Shelley, the Minister for Labrador Affairs, is looking at that.

Why wasn’t he “looking at that” when the arts-and-culture budget was announced back in March?

DW: People were saying, ‘Well, these are monies that have been announced before’ and everything else but they were monies that…were in fact being firmly committed by our government. So I thought we were making genuine attempts to really do things in Labrador.

As “people” said, and as Rob Antle reported in the Western Star and the Telegram, on March 10, 2005:

Most of the $56 million portrayed as new money for Labrador by the Williams administration this week was previously announced. And the vast majority of the money comes from federal, not provincial, sources.

[...]

What Williams didn't say is that $31 million of that $56-million total was announced six months earlier. In September 2004, the province said it would spend $35 million to kick start Phase 3 of the Trans Labrador Highway. ... [O]n Tuesday, Williams announced $40 million in spending on Phase 3... with, he acknowledged, some "carry-overs" from the previous year. But those "carry-overs" amounted to $31 million (of the $35 million announced six months ago) or 78 per cent of the $40-million total.... new, unannounced, work will account for only $9 million of the money spent in 2005-06.

[...]

Every dime of the $40 million announced for Labrador highway work is from Ottawa.

If you don’t want to be criticized for recycling money announcements and taking provincial credit for federal funding sources, the easiest way to stave off that criticism is to allocate genuinely new, genuinely provincial-sourced funding to government initiatives in Labrador.

It doesn’t get much more genuine than that.

DW: In the very first speech that I gave when I accepted the leadership of the party I said one of my major priorities was Labrador because I felt that Labradorians had the same argument with the island that the province has with Canada — the fact that we have a lot of resources and they’re being taken away from us and we’re not getting anything fair in return. I’m particularly sensitive to the needs of Labrador

This entire interview is a mighty funny way of showing that sensitivity…

DW: but I find…and maybe a lot of it is generated by the opposition up there, a lot of negativity has come out of some members up there. And I don’t mean Mr [Randy] Collins, but specifically Ms [Yvonne] Jones, who has taken a very negative reaction to any initiative we’ve undertaken… When we get down to the next election and Yvonne wants to win her seat and fire a bullet at everybody in government that’s her prerogative.

If Yvonne has made it onto The Enemies List, that’s probably prima facie evidence that she’s doing something right.