Don’t get fooled again

Anyone in attendance at that Husky Oil/provincial government love-in the other day may have heard a familiar musical theme in the air:

“Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed Poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.”

If the cheerleading crowd listened carefully, though, some of the words may have changed somewhat (rhyming is optional):

“Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Dwight.

Poorly polled Newf, barely kept his province fed.

Then one day, he was huntin’ for some votes

And up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude.”

Now the mannequin man, our always impeccably dressed and faultlessly coiffed premier, would never feel comfortable wearing Jed Clampett’s wornout, sweat-stained cowboy hat, or keeping his pants up with a tattered piece of rope, à la Jed’s nephew, Jethro Bodine (as tantalizing an image as that might conjure up).

Still, I couldn’t help but think of Jed, the patriarch of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” as I watched the premier the other night, a broad smile plastered on his puss, more oil in the backyard, recognizing — as many, if not all of his predecessors have recognized — that an oil bonanza announcement invariably brings about a spike, if ever so briefly, in the popularity polls.

(Continuing for a moment with the local version of the “Hillbillies” cast: I envision Siobhan Coady, the minister of Natural Resources, who shared the spotlight last week with the premier, in the role of Elly May Clampett, famous mostly for her tight, rope-belted jeans. And, since the senior citizen, Granny — sitting in her rocking chair in the back of that beat-up pickup — seemed to be the voice of reason within the “Hillbillies’” intellectually challenged clan, how about Lorraine Michael in that role? As for the before-mentioned Jethro, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, an everything’s relative sort of metaphor, I’ll grant you, (Jethro thought of the swimming pool in their newly acquired opulent home as the “cement pond,” you might recall, and had a talent for talking a great deal, but saying very little), I nominate Steve Kent. And perhaps the snobbish bank manager, Mr. Drysdale, could be played by Finance Minister Cathy Bennett).

OK, enough of our “Beverly Hillbillies” remake, Newfoundland legislative style.

The fact remains that we’ve seen earlier versions of last week’s production.

I can recall during one of the mid-term days of the Frank Moores administration, when Leo Barry, then a newly minted Mines and Energy minister (now a white-haired septuagenarian in jurist robes), passed around a container of oil for the horde of journalists gathered in the cabinet room to smell; the governing Tories were hoping, obviously, that the reporters would pass on the message, a politically self-serving message, that we were now destined to be smothered gloriously in billions of dollar bills, that we were heading into Jed Clampett territory, the nouveau riche of Canada.

(Moores obviously allowed Barry at that long-ago press conference to bask in the oil glory, the then premier, after all, more interested in the price of good scotch than the price of oil, more concerned with the look of a mini-skirt than the shape of a drilling rig).

In any case, as history has informed us: from Brian Peckford right through to Danny Williams and now Dwight Ball, the spectacle of the joyous holding of hands in the air has made a regular appearance at Confederation Building — the province and the oil companies trying to convince the residents of this perpetually have-not place that, at the very least, economic stability was just around the corner.

But other than a couple of shining years when Williams and company were able to parlay incredibly high oil prices into a spending spree, with little thought for the future, a time when Newfoundland could enjoy so-called “have” status and thumb its nose at our poor mainland cousins, where, pray tell, have these announcements, of the type we heard this past week, with their bells and whistles, really gotten us? Other than hundreds of jobs for thousands of Newfoundlanders, as one past pundit, whose identity now escapes me, once noted.

We’re told we’re in an economic tailspin. The price of gas is through the roof. We’re taxed to the hilt. Our libraries have been closed, for gawd’s sakes. There’s even a tax on books.

So, believe, if you so will, that Ball and Husky will alter your life in dramatic fashion.

Get sucked in by last week’s public relations exercise. Yes, Jed Clampett did OK. But that was fantasy land; make-believe land.

This is Newfoundland.

So, believe, if you so will, that Ball and Husky will alter your life in dramatic fashion.