Raise a Glass to Danny Williams

The most popular premier in Canada is resigning. He'll be missed by Newfoundlanders, but not so much by the rest of the country.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s beloved Danny Williams announced today he will be stepping down on Dec. 3, after seven years of presiding over an economic boom that has seen his province go from "have-not" to "have."

The ever-ebullient Williams “embodied the kind of confidence Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, and Atlantic Canadians generally, see as an essential precondition for the region’s development,” writes the Globe and Mail editorial board. But the Globe also notes that swagger made some waves in the rest of Canada, most famously when he pulled Canadian flags from government buildings over a spat with Paul Martin about equalization payments. His “petulance” was good for Newfoundland, but not great for national unity.

The staunch federalists on the National Post editorial board are still smarting from some of Williams’s regionalist stunts, and deliver this parting shot: “[Williams’s popularity] arguably says as much about his province as it does about him. More than six decades after entering Confederation, Newfoundlanders still apparently feel so hard done by that they’ll embrace a leader who plays the regional victim card more aggressively than any modern Canadian politician outside of Quebec.” Somewhat paradoxically, the Post admits Williams’s policies could ultimately prove to have lifted Newfoundland out of the economic marginalization that breeds such regionalism.

Williams may be charismatic and confident, writes Macleans.ca blogger John Geddes, but “it would be silly to miss the fact that the most important factor reshaping Newfoundland over the past decade wasn’t politics, it was petroleum.” Geddes notes that Williams came to power six years after the Hibernia oil field began pumping liquid gold into the province’s economy, and the resulting period of prosperity made Williams as much as he made it.

The Globe’s John Ibbitson delivers the most flattering eulogy to Williams’s career. He agrees that the premier can’t take all the credit for his province’s ascendency, “but perception matters in politics and [Williams] instilled pride into the hearts of Newfoundlanders, gave them the sense, for the first time, that their fate was in their own hands, rather than in some boardroom far away.”