Rex gets it wrong
Rex Murphy gets his point right, but his facts wrong:
The point Mr. Baker is choosing not to see is that a real, and sometimes quite personal, quarrel between two political leaders, is emphatically not a quarrel about the merits of Confederation. Mr. Harper is not Canada. Mr. Williams is not Newfoundland. The other partners of Confederation are not denying Newfoundland's rights. The contest is not a failure of Confederation but a contest between two hard-tempered leaders, one given to outrage, the other to payback. We should not translate it into anything higher.Rex is right: Danny Williams' megalomania notwithstanding, he is not the province, and the province is not he.
But Rex is also wrong. It's not that one is given to outrage, the other to payback.
They both are.
posted by WJM @ 6:15 PM
1 Comments:
You're right, but that's not all Rex got wrong:
"What we have is a disagreement between Newfoundland and the current federal government. There is also a very real feud between Mr. Williams and Mr. Harper. These two overlap, but they're not the same thing."
For someone so famously careful with words, Rex is awfully careless with them here.
First of all, why is it a disagreement between Newfoundland, i.e., the island, and the current federal government? Leaving aside the omission of Labrador, why isn't it a disagreement between a provincial government and the federal government? The disconnect in nouns is odd.
Second, Rex is making a false distinction between the personal feud and the battle over funding. As even DW himself has publicly acknowledged, it was the personal feud that led to ABC that, in turn, led to the now-infamous shaft. One cannot separate the personal from the political in the chain of events.
Further down the column, Rex goes off the rails again:
"I think the disagreement could be resolved if the feud were set aside. The point Mr. Baker is choosing not to see is that a real, and sometimes quite personal, quarrel between two political leaders, is emphatically not a quarrel about the merits of Confederation."
Well, Curious George may have a poor understanding of the underlying constitutional issues, but he has a clear understanding of what DW has been saying.
Here is DW on the now cancelled Confedation party, as quoted in the same Globe and Mail on 7 February: "It should have been a legitimate celebration of coming out of the 'have not' status and being a net contributor to Canada. We're looking at that to be a very positive thing — and then Canada just struck us over the head." Canada -- not Ottawa, not Harper. Rex must have missed the whole pulling down the Canadian flag thing.
Rex seems not to understand that in this instance, the "feud" and the "disagreement" are one and the same thing. And this feud is not "sometimes quite personal." It's always personal.
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