Autonomy!

A curious little revelation in a Barb Sweet piece in the Telegram on Friday regarding the fate of the Colonial Building:

The fate of the Colonial Building — site of Newfoundland's first legislature building — remains up in the air.

Shane O'Dea, a member of a provincially appointed committee of heritage experts looking at the conservation and interpretation of the building, said the committee made its submission to the province in the spring.

He believes the decision is hung up on the province waiting for cost-shared funding from the federal government.

And he attributes the delay in that funding to the feud between the province and Ottawa.

"The relations, you might describe as 'frosty,'" he said of the provincial government's relationship with the federal government.

Why, in the name of all that is decent, is the province "waiting for cost-shared funding from the federal government"?

Better questions: Has the province even applied for such funding? If so, under which program or programs?

Someone ought to remind the provincial government of the Terms of Union, Term 35 of which provides:

35. Newfoundland public works and property not transferred to Canada by or under these Terms will remain the property of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Colonial Building was not one of the public works transferred to federal ownership or jurisdiction by the Terms of Union. If the province wants to do something, anything, with the building, it should do so without expectation of federal funding, "cost-shared" or otherwise, just as the federal government would maintain its properties in the province without provincial cost-shared contributions or expectation thereof.

Not that he cares, but there are a few things Danny Williams could do, if he's looking to blow lots of cash on Big Ideas, that could get him back in this corner's good graces.

One of them would be to move the seat of the legislature out of the glorified high school on the hill, and back into the historic Colonial Building.

But for that, or any other intended use of Colonial Building, federal funding should neither be required, expected, or requested.

After all, it is just a tad unusual that the province which, step by step, is becoming master of its own house, blah blah blah, is looking to the federal government to underwrite the restoration of the most visible and famous symbol of the past- and would-be-independence that is a favourite leitmotif of the autonomist movement and its leader.