Danny and dog-whistles (again)

Bill Rowe got the ultrasound message too!

Newfoundland's former Ambassador to Canada wrote his latest column (so sadly not available online) for the St. John's Telegram under the headline "A few dire consequences?"

Ominous, wot?

He sets the scene:

Back in June of 2006, no one in Canada took Premier Danny Williams seriously when he warned that, if the Canadian government accepted the equalization changes recently recommended by a panel of "experts," and clawed back this province's hard-won Atlantic Accord money, there would be "dire consequences."

Then a bunch of other stuff happens, leading up to:

Quebec quietly settled enough of her citizens in Labrador to win a majority in a referendum to have Labrador join that province. The Parti Quebecois government, wildly popular from the future billions of extra equalization dollars, and for righting a historic wrong by regaining Labrador and its riches as a lawful part of Quebec, expected no difficulty in obtaining a big majority in their own upcoming referendum to achieve Quebec independence.

Newfoundland, reigned over by Prime Minister Danny Williams, got its own seat at the UN, and became a tight little island nation facing the challenges, like Iceland, of sink-or-swim independence alone in the middle of the north Atlantic Ocean.

Fantasy is such a wonderful genre, but it's a bit of a stretch to ask the reader to suspend disbelief to the point where a parallel universe exists in which a province is prompted to leave Canada because they get so much money from the federal government, or because they don't get enough.