16 October 2006

Danny Williams: The Star Trek response

Danny Williams told us all over the weekend that he had signed a bad deal.

Of course, that isn't literally what Danny Williams said in his attack on Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

But implicitly, the Premier's latest tantrum is based on his own admission that his 2005 agreement with the Government of Canada did not provide the Equalization offset he claimed.

There's no other way to explain his apparent concern that federal handouts related to oil revenues to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador would drop under an Equalization scheme the Prime Minister is supposedly going to implement.

The January 2005 deal was supposed to hide offshore oil revenues from Equalization. Otherwise, as oil revenues increased, the provincial government transfer from Ottawa - Equalization would drop.

Williams knew full well the range of possible changes to Equalization so his deal should have been bullet proof. Williams knew Stephen Harper's plan plus he knew the positions being taken by various provinces. Even if he couldn't tell exactly what would come out of the Equalization review, he certainly knew the best case and worst case positions.

And hey, this isn't something he can fob off to naivety. Danny was in this up to his arm pits from the start and kept total control of the negotiations right up until he ordered Loyola Sullivan to sign the deal.

Williams' concern this week that the province would lose money in changes to Equalization are proof that his 2005 deal was bad. It was bad because it didn't protect the offsets from known and anticipated changes to the Equalization formula.

It's that simple.

To make matters worse, though, Danny Williams now seems to be trying to get Stephen Harper to endorse Equalization changes Danny Williams himself didn't even support in his now-famous letter to the federal party leaders.

Danny Williams proposed that Equalization be calculated using all provinces and including all provincial revenues. He didn't want to hide anything from Equalization.

That's right.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Danny Williams is so keen to fight anyone that Danny Williams in October 2006 is willing to fight Danny Williams from January 2006.

And by extension, since - by his own admission - Danny is willing to fight anyone who has acted against the best interests of the province, he should he lambasting himself and the deal he signed in January 2005.

After all, by his own admission this weekend, Danny Williams signed a bad deal with the federal government.

Egad.

Suddenly I feel like Captain Kirk dealing with errant computers like Nomad and M-5.