Just run with it

Craig Jackson reports in today's Telegram:

A portion of Labrador territory remains "non-definitive" on Quebec maps. Despite the ruling, the boundary line still hasn’t been officially surveyed, an issue this province is examining.

Even so, Williams says he isn’t concerned about it.

"It only gives people in Quebec an issue to run with, that perhaps there’s some dispute over the boundary," he said.

Newfoundland politicians have a much greater propensity to "run with" the Labrador boundary issue than any recent Quebec ones. Indeed, playing the jingoistic Quebec "bogeyman" game has been in the playbook of every Newfoundland politician from Cashin and Crosbie, through Moores, Peckford, and Tobin, and even, to some extent, Grimes.

The only exception would seem, at least to this corner's recollection, to be Wells.

Danny might just as easily, and much more truthfully said, "It only gives people in Newfoundland an issue to run with, that perhaps's Quebec has some real claim over the boundary."

It's also extraordinary that the Premier didn't know the boundary was, for the most part, unsurveyed. Surely a lawyer of his calibre, and one who has obviously spent so much time studying the Smallwood playbook, would know that. If he investigated, he might learn that Canada, before Confederation, had offered to jointly survey the then-international boundary... and that Newfoundland declined the suggestion.

Then again, this is also the Premier, a Rhodes scholar, who, on his first visit to the Northern Peninsula, had to ask what those lights off in the distance, across the Strait of Belle Isle were — having confused Labrador, then still an "integral" part of the province, and not the "minute" one it would become on swearing-in day, with Quebec, or ships at sea, or the Northern Peninsula curving back on itself in Einsteinian space, or something.

Labrador geography? Not his strong suit.