Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013

CHAPTER 1

2003

FEBRUARY 2003

Editor’s note: A provincial election was held in Newfoundland on Oct. 21, 2003. Ray wrote this column, his first for The Northeast Avalon Times, eight months before Danny Williams was elected premier.

Looking Danny square in the eye

Be brave, dear people. Be brave.

We’ve got another long and dirty month of March coming soon, but the time has also come when we must grab Danny Williams by the tail and look the situation squarely in the face.

March will come and go, but there’s no getting over, under or around Danny.

Danny it is and Danny it shall be. Beggars can’t be choosers and neither can the Newfoundland voter. For the next eight or ten years, your God-fearing Newfoundlander will hear Our Father which art in Heaven in the morning and Premier Danny Williams said today on the evening news.

Many of us won’t make it. Many a poor soul will snap under the strain of another March blizzard and Danny. They’ll run stark naked down the road howling, Take me now, Lord! Take me now!

Alas, we have made our own bed and now we must lie in it.

There’s no longer a choice for politics in Newfoundland and no need for one. We’re in the hole for $9 billion, which heaves us straight on Ottawa’s mercy. And the Grits crumble under their own rot, leaving the Tories to tumble into the vacancy … and so on forever and ever.

Grimes never stood a chance. Brian Tobin left poor Roger covered with a fatal slime. Danny Williams saw it was only a matter of waiting.

How sad, though, that the great Newfoundland voter still thinks there’s any choice in the matter or that it matters a rat’s fundament which party sits in Confederation Building.

We’re in a hard place where provincial politicians do us no good except to provide a little entertainment for the masses. Roger Grimes was no more than adequate. He cursed like a back-slid Pentecostalist, told scummy jokes abroad on public business, played early morning hockey with the boys and dyed his hair varying shades of orange each month.

While he had that moustache, he bore an amusing resemblance to that old bloke in the Brit comedy series, On The Buses.

Of course, as a premier, Grimes didn’t know if he was coming or going … but since when has pig-ignorance ever disqualified a Newfoundland politician.

Poor Roger was not much good even as entertainment. Danny is useless. Squeezing a laugh out of Danno would be as hopeless as suppressing a fart in church.

Which is why, I say, we must be brave. There’ll be no joy from Premier Williams, not even the inadvertent kind. I tried but I failed. There wasn’t much to go on. He’s got a big, blocky, square head with his hair parted down the middle.

Apart from little tiny eyes darting east to west and back again, there’s no expression on his face at all. If he forced a smile, the results would be hideous and frighten hornets from the nest.

I learned that Danny’s only charm was a skyrocket temper refined in downtown back alleys. I set out to test this. I made sport of his daughter’s wedding … an overblown, grandiose, rather pompous affair that only the newly rich can manage.

Sure enough, it did the trick. Danny started phoning the house at all hours of the day. But I wanted him wound up to the top notch of his mainspring to see if he could really give us some sport as premier.

So I put our younger daughter to work answering the phone. Sorry, Mr. Guy is presently in Rome collecting his long-overdue Papal Knighthood. Or off helping Dr. Henry Kissinger ghostwrite his memoirs. Or currently in Cape Town assisting Mrs. Nelson (Winnie) Mandela launch her new line of wrinkle-fighting cosmetics.

I don’t know if the kid kept to the script or not. But by the end of the week, she reported that Mr. Williams was making low growling noises rather like Wile E. Coyote bashed once too often by the Roadrunner.

After that, the calls stopped. At the last I was too chicken to answer.

Supposing I did and Danny Boy went into cardiac arrest. I wouldn’t look very nice on Bas Jamieson then, would I? Anyway, sending him over the edge will be your decision before long.

Think twice … his replacement might be Brian Tobin.

MARCH 2003

‘Poor politicians’ deserve no pity

In this racket, there’s one question you’re asked a lot.

Why are you always so down on the poor politicians?

To me, the question seems so silly that I never have a civil answer ready.

Poor politicians? Good Lord, have you checked their pension plans lately?

But for more than 40 years, I get the same question in one form or another.

My best friend, as I thought, at the old Evening Telegram turned on me suddenly: Who the hell do you think you are to criticize Joey Smallwood?

Once in a supermarket as I was checking a dozen eggs for cracks a thundering big woman came up behind me and gave me an elbow in the kidneys.

She said she was the premier’s aunt.

You never got a single good word in your cheek for Brian Peckford, have you?

Then there was the time somebody reported to me that at a party at Brian Tobin’s house, poor little Mrs. Tobin commenced to snivel, Why does Ray Guy keep saying these terrible things about Brian? Brian is a good man.

Sure. And Adolf Hitler was quite fond of dogs and small children.

I suppose a proper answer is to tell people to look in the Public Accounts under Office of the Premier.

By now, the amount per year must be nigh on $20 million. Your money. To be spent on assistants and assistants to the assistants; press secretaries; public relation officers and campaigns; researchers; private secretaries; and God knows what.

All of this money is pointed in the same direction: to tell the world what a fine chappie the premier of Newfoundland is.

Even this wasn’t enough for Joey. He took some more of your money and printed his own newspaper, the Newfoundland Bulletin, 100,000 copies a month free to every household.

One issue contained 18 photos of the great man himself, showing what a fine fellow he was. No blushing violet was he.

There was a time when CJON was popularly known as CJRS … for Smallwood. A couple of his cabinet ministers were on its board of directors. Plus the Brothers Jamieson and G. Stirling.

At the time of the approaching $500-million Come By Chance bankruptcy, the Daily News was taken over by two of Smallwood’s pimps who kept assuring us that everything in the garden was rosy.

On top of all that, there’s the great overload of cabinet ministers we’ve always had. Each of these is a smaller model of the Office of the Premier — hot and cold running flacks, hacks and propagandists.

And that’s not the half of it. It adds up to one thundering great brass band, paid for by you, and playing the one tune: What a friend we have in … the premier.

So what is my own little tin whistle alongside of all that?

I’m only ashamed I wasn’t able to crack it to the buggers hotter and heavier — and for that I beg the pardon of God and you.

APRIL 2003

Leave the war, go gardening

All big green bangs all the time … I came down with a nasty case of Baghdaditis. It helped take me away from the atrocities of the weather.

A few facts linger from that TV spectacular, the best thing CNN has done since the O.J. Simpson circus:

(a) The U.S.A. has six per cent of the world’s population and 85 per cent of its wealth;

(b) The U.S.A. has 14 times as much military power (nuclear bombs and all) as all the rest of the world put together; and

(c) Bush, Ashcroft and Cheney and others are the same kind of religious nutbars as Osama bin Laden, some fundamentalist Jews and some of those frothing Muslim ayatollahs.

Surprise, surprise. We thought we were getting somewhere, only to find we’re back in the 1400s — where the lord and lady lived in a castle, everybody else in hovels; the fellow on one side had bare feet and a sharp stick, while the fellow on the other side had a war horse, sword and full armour; and religious wars were as common as Wal-Marts.

Zealotry in religion is always a dangerous thing.

I find it easier to live next to someone who, for example, considers himself a half-decent Pentecostalist than to someone who believes himself to be a good, solid Presbyterian.

The half-decent have doubts; the good, solids have none. These latter consider they’re absolutely right and that you are absolutely wrong. This, taken to its end, leads to slaughter.

So we have today one side calling the other The Great Satan and the president of the United States talking of an Axis of Evil and declaring that whoever is not for us is against us.

Unfortunate, too, Bush’s early use of the Middle Ages term crusade.

Bush and company should scare us a lot more than Saddam and national gangsters like him, because the White House today is a place where the capering, blaring, cynical and lunatic televangelist would feel more at home than would a Thomas Jefferson or an Abraham Lincoln.

This isn’t new. Was there ever a country in history more convinced that God was on its side than the U.S.A.?

It becomes an easier thing to believe than ever when you have 85 per cent of the world’s wealth and 14 times as many big bangs as the rest of the globe. Pray for the Yanks, it’s all gone to their heads. Pray for the rest of us when the American rampage starts in earnest.

Jean Chretien asked a fine question while he was at a meeting in Mexico when the U.S. decided to invade without the UN: Oo will be nex’?

So there went Young George blasting the limbs and guts of grannies and children all over the rocks of Iraq while referring to God every three sentences, as if God were a combo of Stormin’ Norman, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman on his March to the Sea.

Religion? Christianity? Sounds more like Ducks Unlimited to me.

Now that the Americans (some of them are your real cousins, some of them are mine) realize they can do anything to anyone anywhere in the world — if they have God’s permission — who are you going to vote for in the next provincial election?

That sort of puts it in perspective.

Premier Grimes. Will your administration look askance at the U.S. decision to pre-emptively nuke North Korea or will you stick to the one about the old maid trapped in the shithouse?

Mr. Williams. Would your government make every effort to mount a Royal Commission on the prospects of the U.S. taking over its former military bases in Newfoundland, or will you get out your lovely sealskin coat and sashay around St. Anthony again?

Aw, shag it. I think my bad case of Baghdaditis is wearing off. Also my slight dose of Globalitis. All I have to watch out for now is SARS and talking on the telephone without a mask to folks in Toronto.

Let us go out now and see how the winter has served our dear gardens.

MAY 2003

Province demands freedom, but it could be nasty

Once every 10 years the cry goes up: Free Newfoundland! Separation! A Nation Once Again!

It began as soon as it started, 54 years ago, with half the population saying no way to Confederation and the other half saying yes way.

Each decade since then, the heartfelt commotion arises anew — largely from bar stools at two o’clock in the morning, but also from politicians trying to hang on by the fingernails.

If this world was ever invaded by Martians, folks of all nationalities, creeds, races and shoe sizes would come together in a single body to fight the common enemy.

It’s a bit like that every 10 years or so in Newfoundland. In our case, the little green men with death rays are from Planet Ottawa. If a billy goat could be taught to bleat that anti-Ottawa sentiment, Billy would become provincial minister of finance after the next election. At least.

The more intellectual among us (that is to say, those not still sitting on bar stools at 2 a.m.) don’t just bleat. They put up serious reasons. Solid examples. Eloquent theories.

During one such uproar it was The Scandinavian Example.

Later it was The Icelandic Example. Recently it has been The Irish Example. If these regions can do it, why not the Happy Province?

In Joey Smallwood’s day, before we all got our wonderful education, it was $8 million. Joey was going to lead us all back out of Canada because PM John George Diefenbaker wouldn’t raise the sort of bonus we signed up for in the Terms of Union. Scholars from the university carried the coffin of a dead Confederation through the streets.

This time it’s fish. Or, rather, no fish. Or, maybe, not being able to fish for fish that aren’t there.

Roger Grimes of the prematuely orange hair wasn’t slow kicking a dead horse … or fish.

Grimes wants part control of the fishery. Was it only yesterday he wanted to give away lakes like Gisborne?*

Or go kissy-facey with the premier of Quebec on Labrador hydro when both of them were in danger of job-loss and both were prepared to stir up almost any kind of excitement for the sake of re-election?

As has been said, Look at the two characters we’re faced with in the next provincial election: one of them could probably buy Confederation Building and the other fellow might possibly sell it.

For fun and profit, I’ve had more than 40 years watching these shenanigans.

When these 10-year cries went up, sometimes I agreed; sometimes I didn’t. It depended on whether my new medication was doing me any good or whether my drawers wouldn’t come out whiter than white as advertised.

I saw a nasty danger, sometimes, in Newfoundland becoming a Country again … although I always referred to this place as this Country with a capital c.

There were the hideous examples of those movies about isolated western U.S. towns where the mine-owner’s brother-in-law was the mayor, the sheriff was well and truly bought off and the rest of the townsfolk were a’runnin’ scared.

Clearly a job for the Lone Ranger.

Newfoundland, independent and in that situation, was nasty to contemplate … especially since our recent past with the merchant princes of Water Street in full control was so very like the town of Dead Varmint, U.S.A., before the good guy rode in.

We did it to ourselves once, we could do it again.

Think not? Have a good look around at town councils in isolated places like Bung Hole Tickle, G.D. Bay. Little Hitlers out of control. And no, I did not, sir, mention Monday nights at St. John’s city council.

On the other hand, I could see the case for smacking our bums at the rest of Canada. Ralphie Klein, when he was mayor of Calgary, said, Newfies are welcome here as long as they bring their own picks and shovels. Watch your back, Roger.

Bill Davis, the pipe-smoking, corn-fed premier of Ontario, once said, Newfies are welcome in this province as long as they leave their rowdy ways behind and learn how to really work.

It was at times like this that I saw myself (yeah, in my dreams!) standing in front of the Canadian army trusting that the one-third who were Newfoundlanders would point their guns another way, or that one-third of the Canadian navy would be sunk at the docks or the Canadian air force would never get off the ground.

Newfoundland is not geography — Newfoundland is people, and a multitude of our brethren are scattered.

As to the latest, Grimes and the fishy fuss, I put that in baby talk for my own edification, years and years ago.

Ontario makes plastic doodads. Canada wants to sell these doodads to other countries.

Other countries won’t buy Ontario’s doodads if Canada makes a squawk about things like foreign overfishing.

Fish are soon sucked up, Newfoundlanders are soon out of jobs. So, what’s the problem? Let Newfoundlanders come to Ontario and get jobs making plastic doodads. Case closed.

And what cod we were allowed to catch went to the States in frozen 50-pound blocks, 300 per cent value-increased processing to be done only in the good old U.S. of A.

Confederation, ain’t it grand? Free trade, ain’t it lovely?

JUNE 2003

Editor’s note: Brian Tobin, a Liberal MP and federal cabinet minister, returned to Newfoundland to enter provincial politics in 1996. Tobin led the Liberals to victory in the 1996 and 1999 elections, and was premier of the province from 1996 to 2000.

Tips to enjoy your summer

How to forget our nasty pickle and enjoy a good summer — some easy steps:

• Concentrate really hard on forgetting that you ever heard the name Brian Tobin.

Just when we thought we were getting somewhere, here comes the sleazy little blackguard to pitch us all into the doldrums.

After 50 years or more, we figured we had made a mile or two’s political progress, that we were smart enough not to get sucked in by self-regarding, self-serving, self-important oily creatures.

Then along came Tobin. Everyone went for him, and he used us to his own advantage — not once, but twice.

As my late Ma might have put it, the great Newfoundland voter gobbled him down, boots and all, honey-sweet.

Instead of a mile-or-so’s progress in 50 years since Joey Smallwood, we hadn’t even got as far as the garden gate. It was as much of a letdown as Clyde Wells’ discovery that it would take Newfoundland another 415 years to catch up economically with the Canadian average.

So, to enjoy summer, blank out the Tobin experience. He never happened. Instead, listen to the birdies in the trees, listen to the mockingbird.

• Fish. Don’t let the fishy headache bother your summer holidays. Take the John Efford approach. Blame it all on the seals.

Like Effort, wake up and see seals crawling up your bedroom wallpaper, going up brooks to devour little bunny rabbits, attacking infants in their cradles in Twillingate, tearing up cabbage gardens and knocking the crutches out from under pensioners from Forteau to Cape Race. Seal attack!

Efford has gone from Confederation Building to Parliament Hill using seals as the Great Satan. A simple mind brings contentment, a Johnny-One-Note is always in harmony. Slaughter seals by the million, says Efford, and even the rate of gingivitis in the province will go way down.

Whenever fish comes up, press the seal button and go back to sleep in your hammock.

• Roger or Danny? Is this a problem to ruin your summer’s gravel pit camping? Where’s the confusion?

One of them has got a bad back and the other one has become a real pain in the arse. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.

Yes, it’s true, they’re all the same and there’s not a thing we can do about it except keep them moving like fleas on a hot stove.

Greg Power, a Smallwood intime, betimes and cabinet minister, once said of politicians, After seven years, they commence to steal.

Power should know. He used to boast publicly of rushing out of cabinet meetings to adjust his own investments according to the inside information that had come up.

These days, seven years is much too generous. Two weeks is more like it. Some would say politicians commence to steal the day they’re elected — in the sense that the one thing above all else is hanging on long enough to collect those outrageous pensions they’ve voted themselves.

So keep them hopping. Don’t leave one crowd in long enough to get themselves buried head and shoulders into the public treasury like ticks on a sheep. There you go … one more summer worry gone.

• Like the sun dial, count only the sunny hours. Avoid anything that might make you draw a sharp instrument across your throat. Leave alone the after-dark radio phone-in shows unless fortified with the heaviest kind of medication.

Stun, with a large rock, anyone who says the weather has gone awful queer. Threaten your offspring who have moved abroad with defamation of character if they don’t send you regular payments on a wheelchair and/ or coffin.

In general, have a carefree summer. It is all somebody else’s fault.

JULY 2003

Editor’s note: In 2002, premier Roger Grimes appointed the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada. The commissioners — Sister Elizabeth Davis, Judge James Igloliorte and fishing company executive Vic Young — submitted their $3-million report to the government in June 2003.

Premier must have monkeys as advisers

You be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they’ll be nice to you.

This is the refrain of an old country hurtin’ song about a mother installing her daughter in a whorehouse.

And this is the guts of Premier Roger Grimes’ royal commission report on our place in Canada.

Oh, you can say it in more delicate language. Indeed, the commissioners — a judge, a nun and a businessman — do.

They talk about catching more flies with sugar than with vinegar. Or going for cooperation instead of confrontation, or going along to get along.

What better advice for a novice in a whorehouse?

At any rate, Grimes is one dim bulb. We all know what royal commissions are for. If you’ve got something to cover up or something you don’t want to tackle, or if you need a pacifying sugar tit for a squalling public … appoint a royal commission.

By the time the commission’s report comes out, all hands will have forgotten why it was set up. There are enough copies of royal commission reports moldering away in government basements to restock a considerable forest. A royal commission report is subsidized housing for rats.

Yet along comes Roger and twists the whole concept by 180 degrees. Grimes claims he wants the matter discussed over hill, over dale and all around the circle. What, by throwing the cotton batting of a royal commission over it!

Vic Young, as good a businessman as you’ll find anywhere, knows that you’ve sometimes got to be a whore to get along in business, to keep a s***-eating grin on your face while dealing with those whose guts you despise, that, in short, the dollar is the bottom line. Get it, any which way you can.

That’s good business. It fits in with the buccaneering capitalism now devouring God’s green Earth and the people thereof. But it is not good politics.

Even a cement-head like Roger should realize that. Who are his public relations advisers these days … three trained rhesus monkeys?

Does it make any sense to advise Newfoundlanders to act like whores when the suggestion from Upalong that we already are makes our eyeballs squirt blood?

It’s the dread that we really might be kept people that makes us rail against the Mainland. And there’s always a Mainlander with time on his hands to pick at that subconscious scab. Come on down here and we’ll show you our quaint … eck!

You be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they’ll be nice to you.

And federal money will flow and great deals will be made and commerce will boom and tourists will flock and the St. John’s Board of Trade will ejaculate into its collective pants.

I suppose Newfoundlanders make as good whores as anyone else, although I have some doubts. Some other provinces are quite proud of their tartishness and have made up traditional heritage folksongs about it, such as the rollicking and delightful Halifax Whores. Tourists enjoy the ditty.

Hate the sin but love the sinner is an old saw I could never see the sense of. Separating sin from sinner is the proper business of God. And so we go from a sinful report to the sinners who wrote it.

Vic Young, businessman. When his trawlers had sucked the oceans bare of codfish around Newfoundland, Vic sent his trawlers to the west coast of Africa, where the desperate inhabitants trod on each other’s heads for the chance to ruin any long-term fishing future.

Sister Elizabeth, Bride of Christ and micromanager of health care. I think it’s fair to say that with her hierarchical background in Mother Church, the blessed sister would tend to do a low kowtow to those set in authority over her. Ottawa, for instance. After all, when she was going to school the laity was the very bottom rung of the ladder.

Native Person, whose name I can’t instantly recall. Good man, I’m sure, and a clever one, too. It must not have been easy to get a judgeship. I know, because one of my cousins, Willy Adams, was the first native person to become a Canadian senator … but that’s another story. The judge was clever, but I dare say Roger Grimes thought he was more so. The commission needed someone to represent all creeds, colours and conditions of those peevish Labradorians, and the judge, on the surface of it, was your man.

So, I say, the three persons who made up the commission tells us as much as their big thick report.

A report which nobody will ever read … except me, who has to make an honest buck somehow.

AUGUST 2003

MP John Efford breaks with Pope, endorses use of birth control by seals

Hurrah for our own native son, John Efford!

In case you didn’t notice, Mr. Efford beat both the Holy Father and the Archbishop of Canterbury by a long shot in the matter of what we can only call novelty nooky.

Long before the word came from the Vatican or Canterbury, our John spoke his piece loud and clear on the topic of same-sex marriage. The word went forth from Mr. Effort’s office that he’s agin it. Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub, OK, says John. But no more than one in the same bunk.

How was it that our Honourable Member for seal-bashing was so lively off the mark on shirt-lifting matrimony? Is it a big concern in his district?

Was he informed that life as we know it in Newfoundland had come to a complete halt until he gave the world his thoughts on two chaps picking out their china pattern?

We may never know. What we do know is that he beat the Pope to it by a good six weeks. Quick as a bunny was our John.

Was it because Efford felt he had lost ground to others with the SARS, the Mad Cows and the West Nile Virus?

Few if any mad cows reported from Port de Grave. As to same-sex marriages, you’ll have to ask Mr. Efford.

I have my own theory. Was John Efford in a rush to get in line with the Pope re novelty nooky because he, Efford, had gone directly against the Holy See on the topic of birth control? His Holiness has always been against that, too — but this spring, Johnny came out in favour.

Birth control for seals. John E. thinks its a good start. John P. has never declared on an exception for seals.

(Look. This is Newfoundland. I don’t have to make any of this up, it’s all there in your daily rag.)

The Pope is against birth control. Other world leaders like John Efford favour it for seals. Both His Holiness and His Fishyness are dead set against same-sex marriage.

Is there no common ground here? No meeting of the minds? Any chance of the Holy Father and the Honourable Member getting into the same bed, so to speak?

Of course there is … and I think that’s where we’re headed.

A joint release from the Vatican and from Mr. Efford’s office calling on the Government of Jean Chretien to ban anything but same-sex unions between all seals within this country’s jurisdiction. Otherwise, the Pope will threaten to send Chretien to hell and John Efford will threaten to send him a clear message. That should do it.

Which brings us, logically, to the topic of what, in more genteel parlors, is called self-abuse.

(Let us not leave ourselves open here in Conception Bay North to the awful sin of Niceness and Pride. One of the present Pope’s first declarations of his pontificate was a thundering denunciation of the above-mentioned practice. The Congress of the United States of America considered forcing then-president Bill Clinton to show the spots on his constitution which Monica Lewinsky claimed she saw. And Honourable Member Efford has certainly shown that he’s no fuddyduddy when it comes to novelty nooky.)

Very well, then. A few weeks ago, there were news reports from all directions —