The First Sign (II)

The First Sign is the vagueness, the lack of details.

In The Telegram of February 3, 2001, citizen Danny Williams told Tracy Barron (whatever became of her?) “We always seem to be traded off — whether it happens to be fish, hydro or oil and gas. There’s always a national or international picture.”

In his speech to The Party faithful on April 7, 2001, the night he became Leader of The Party, he said “Our fishery is bartered to foreign countries in the interest of international relations.” Interesting use of the present tense there.

A few months later, as guest speaker at John Hamm’s party convention over in Nova Scotia, he said:

Our fellow Canadians must wonder why Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are always angry, always complaining about the inequity of the Upper Churchill… not to mention the gross mismanagement of our cod fishery by the federal government, resulting in its destruction; the bartering of our fishery rights for favoured access to international markets.

(Are you always angry?)

In a January 7, 2005, op-ed in the Globe and Mail — this was a couple of years before Danny complained that the same paper would never let him get a printed word in edgewise — he writes:

Canada permitted foreign overfishing off our coast to continue, to our detriment, in order to secure trade agreements that benefited other regions of our country.

Two days later, he told Craig Oliver of CTV News:

We had to get the Canadians’ attention about the history, the deep history of Newfoundland and Labrador. How we’ve been wronged and slighted by the federal government, how they’ve mismanaged our fishery basically to oblivion, and have allowed foreign trawlers to take everything off our banks in the interests of external trade.

The next month, in a speech to the Empire Club, he claims:

We lost the power to manage our fisheries when we entered Confederation, and Ottawa used our fishery to trade quotas to foreigners for favours benefitting other Canadians.

And on May 18 of that year, he tells Will Hilliard of The Telegram:

I reiterated our position on custodial management and I can tell you it was something that made the EU officials very uncomfortable. I also pointed out to them that I felt that Canada had, at times, traded off our interests in the interest of the bigger trade issues.

On January 23 of this year, as reported by Craig Jackson in The Telegram, Premier Williams told a University of Saskatchewan audience of about 200 that “Ottawa, in turn, used its control of our fishery to trade quotas to foreigners in exchange for other favours.”

And, in his speech to the Economic Club of Toronto in May, he said:

In entering confederation, we also lost the power to manage our fisheries, and Ottawa in turn used its control of our fishery to trade quotas to other countries in so doing, it mismanaged some species of our domestic fishery to the point of commercial extinction.

The first sign is the vagueness, the lack of details. None of the trade-deal proponents, not even someone, like Premier Williams, with access to the files, a legal mind who can prove a case, and a flair for communicating his argument, can answer any of The Big Questions:

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

Danny is long on vague, un-detailed accusations.

He, like the rest of them, is short on the details:

WHO traded fish quotas to foreign countries?

To WHICH foreign countries?

WHAT fish?

In exchange for WHAT trade or foreign policy considerations or concessions?

WHEN did these deals occur?

WHAT was their duration?

WHERE were they signed or otherwise approved, and by WHOM?

WHY did this happen?

HOW, that is, under authority of what domestic or international legal regime, was this fish-for-X practice carried on?

Why, in any of the many instances over the past six years in which Danny Williams has raised the “trade deals” spectre, has he not been able to give any of the details of those supposed trade deals?

The lack of details can only be explained by one of two things:

The trade deals, and their details, exist, but Danny is deliberately holding back the information.

Or they don’t, and Danny is, inadvertantly or deliberately, misleading the public by claiming that they do.

Which is it?