Living with the fallout

Of all the tortured logic that has cropped up in public discourse during the Danny Williams era, today's masthead editorial in the Western Star outdoes, and will forever outdo, all other challengers to the tortured-logic championship.

It's worth reading in its entirety, but here are the money clips:

It’s the duty of the opposition to challenge the government on legislation it brings before the house, and make sure these kinds of potentially expensive hiccups don’t make it into law.

They were asleep at the switch in this matter — there’s now way around it.

They dozed in their seats, didn’t ask enough questions ... and let the bad legislation become the law of the land.

It should be a lesson for all concerned.

Our system works best when the tough questions are asked ... not when government gets a free pass.

The last sentence in particular ought to be translated into the best classical Latin and made the official provincial motto; Quaerite prime regnum dei, your day is done.

For the record, in the highly unlikely case someone at the Star is actually capable of embarassment and decides to bit-bucket it, is the paper's masthead editorial of December 18, 2008, which was written within hours of Our Dear Expropriation:

Expropriation was the proper action
The Western Star

AbitibiBowater suddenly has a renewed interest in this province — now that the provincial government has expropriated the company’s water and timber rights.

The international forest company — and its former corporate setup — has closed two newsprint mills in this province in a couple of years, throwing hundreds of their own employees out of work and impacting thousands of other Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

The legislation to take back the water and timber rights passed the House of Assembly in a matter of minutes Tuesday and apparently caught the company off guard.

What exactly did these people expect would happen?

Did they seriously think the people of this province — much less the government — would allow them to pull up stakes after making millions of dollars in profits over the years, and keep collecting money from our power and forests just like nothing happened?

AbitibiBowater will have no connection with this province after March 2009 and will contribute nothing to our economy.

The provincial government — and the full legislature — did the right thing by taking back the rights. AbitibiBowater is grumbling about the action and threatening to sue to retain its rights — a threat that holds no merit.

The legislature has every right to take action to expropriate and no court in the land would overturn it.

AbitibiBowater made a business decision to shut the mill and they will have to live with the fallout.