Mickles and muckles

We are supposedly supposed to be grateful to Danny Williams, and whoever else, for finally ponying up cash amounting to maybe 50% of the project costs of a high school auditorium project which would be funded 100% by the provincial government anywhere else in the province.

But Labrador, being 50% a federal territory anyway, if Danny's recent behaviour is any indication, must always depend on federal government "commitments" in order to "leverage" any of the provincial tax money it sends to St. John's to come back to the region. Heaven forbid the provincial government actually pay the full freight — even 50% plus a dollar — of anything under provincial jurisdiction in Labrador, that ever-so integral part of the province.

Anyone remember Danny pulling that stunt when he delayed the opening of that very definition of garishness, The Rooms?

The percentage of federal money on the table for the new auditorium is exactly the same as it was three years ago. And time is money. By putting off the project, and holding out for more federal money to pay for something that the provincial government, by rights, ought to have provided to Labrador in any event, with or without a dime of federal funding, Danny Williams, the great financial manager, has gained nothing, and succeeded in doing nothing more than adding a good $1.5-million to the total bill, including the portion of the bill that the province deigns to take responsibility for. Thanks largely to steel prices, the project cost has balooned faster than the general rate of inflation.

As great-grandfather would say, "many a mickle makes a muckle." Danny's ostensible concern about saving mickles has cost both levels of government muckles, and eastern Labrador two years of enjoying the performance space it should never have had a hiatus in enjoying.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

Such is the cost of Danny's determination to turn Labrador into a federal territory (at least expenditure-wise; the province, of course, collects the revenues and wants to double-dip them to boot) and also of his not-so-subtle strategy to drive wedges between Labradorians and the sentiment, historically well-founded, that they do better by the federal government than by the government of the province they are supposedly an integral part of.

Maximize revenues, minimize expenditures, and shift your costs. This is the Danny Williams approach to governing like you would run a business — perhaps soon to even include a few ACOA applications. Nowhere does it show more than north of the Strait of Belle Isle. Maybe ACOA would also pay for the operating costs of the performance space; a little line item that is already getting the buck-pass from the cost-shifters in St. John's.

It might be good for the public accounts, but it's a darned funny way to make 72% of the provincial landmass, and a disproportionately large portion of the provincial economy, to feel "integral".