Oui, monsieur le Président

Minister of Something Charlene Johnson jumps to the defence of Dear Leader today during Question Period:

MS JOHNSON: Mr. Speaker, we had no control over what happened in Quebec, but as the Premier clearly, eloquently stated yesterday, we have to fight back, Mr. Speaker, and one of those things is considering going to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Some of the more eloquent eloquence that emanated from the Premier yesterday, as recorded by Mr. Hansard, included the following:

So if we have to fight them in the courts or fight them at the Régie, or if I personally got to get down and go toe to toe or roll around on the ground with them to fight them, we will do it.

I think that, as a Province, we have to keep fighting Quebec because if we don’t they will take away everything we have.

As I said to the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, and I say to the Member for Signal Hill-Quidi Vidi, we will fight them wherever we have to fight them in order to prove our point. If that is in the Quebec courts - we know what the attitude is in Quebec courts, we know what the bias is in the Quebec courts, but there are higher courts than that and we are not going to give up.

So we will carry on as we (inaudible).

… instead of our mantra of no more giveaways, we took it away. We took it away from a company that had abused this Province, had not fulfilled its mandate to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, were given land assets and timber assets and hydro assets to run a pulp and paper mill and they did not. They tried to walk away from it, so we nailed them.

The problem with the hon. member is it is never enough, but money does not grow on trees; that is the problem. That is the problem.

But wait! There’s more! Not only is He eloquent in English, He has secretly been working on His eloquence in Canada’s other official language. Federal leadership ambitions, perhaps?

PREMIER WILLIAMS: What we probably could have predicted but we would have thought hopefully would not have happened is that Quebec and the Quebec judges and the Quebec courts would have shafted us once again and that is exactly what is happening, every single decision that we have had out of that Province in the last month. That Régie decision as I said in the House was absolutely shameful. Quebec lovers, if we could only keep the Quebec lovers quiet, Mr. Speaker, it would be nice.

MR. SPEAKER: Order, please!

PREMIER WILLIAMS: Excusez- moi. I am going to go back there.

[…]

PREMIER WILLIAMS: Mr. Speaker, we are in the process and we are in the process of course of estimating exactly what those liabilities are. As I indicated in a previous question, from Mademoiselle , the Leader of the Opposition, 75 per cent to 80 per cent of this cost will actually be related to non-expropriated assets, those assets would actually be Buchans which is the lion’s share of all environmental liabilities, Botwood and also the Stephenville mill which is long past but of course obviously which we are going to end up with at the end of the day because they have moved those assets over to a shell company in order to avoid liability