With changes in leadership in NL and Quebec and Wakeham's opposition to the MOU, the Churchill Falls deal may be done before it begins

There’s an admittedly crude saying (at the top of any scale of vulgarity) often utilized during decidedly low brow exchanges between philistine patrons in dingy “bucket of blood” taverns in St. John’s — places I confess to have frequented during my days of shameless debauchery — that fits to a tee the way in which politicians are in danger of muddling what could have been a relatively straight forward and immediate answer to Newfoundland’s seemingly endless existence in a financial septic tank.

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The infamously tasteless phrase — I am banking on Ms. Editor’s agreement that a euphemistic clean-up would destroy its unmistakable meaning — was often the ultimate shot aimed at a verbal combatant’s penchant for convolution, for complicating any issue under the sun.

“Aw, for gawd’s sake,” the floundering debater would be told in so many words: “You’d shag up a wet dream.”

For sure, my use of barroom metaphoric language is not everybody’s method of observance on this matter of the Upper Churchill.

But I’d bet dollars to Tim’s doughnuts that much of Newfoundland and Labrador is wondering aloud, in his or her own way, how it has come to pass that an agreement in principle that could have destroyed the hideous ‘69 Upper Churchill contract with Quebec 15 years before........

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