EYE ON LABRADOR

What do you do when you your political party is lagging in the polls and you're becoming increasingly irrelevant on the national stage?

Resume talking about the one issue guaranteed to engage voters: separation from Canada.

Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe did just that during a stop at Memorial University last week. Newfoundland is the first stop on Duceppe's nationwide tour, which is apparently aimed at finding out how Canadians would feel if Quebec decided to split off and become its own country (maybe it's a rhetorical tour).

During his St. John's stop, Duceppe insightfully pointed out that Newfoundland was once its own nation, "even had a national anthem" and that if Quebec did indeed separate, a good business relationship with Newfoundland and Labrador could be fostered.

"We have more proximity with Newfoundland and Labrador, especially Labrador, than we do have with B.C.," Duceppe told reporters.

"We have trade, we have some business disputes at certain times - that's part of life also - but I think that we could work as a sovereign state, and Labrador and Newfoundland the way they want."

Pardon my French, but what has this man been smoking?

He is apparently blissfully ignorant that the Upper Churchill deal goes way beyond a "business dispute" in the eyes of every Newfoundlander and Labradorian I've ever met. It's a painful part of the province's contemporary culture; a festering wound that won't be healed until 2041.

And as for Quebec's proximity to Labrador, well, gee, Gilles, no kidding? Labrador - that same place whose southern border your government disputes? Is that the Labrador you're talking about?

Duceppe's tour, which he is marketing as a kind of "fact finding" mission, is really aimed at gathering enough anti-Quebec sentiment from the rest of the country so he can return to his home province and restoke the separatist fires, which have been burning low in recent years. It seems he chose to start in St. John's not because of its geographical position, but because he knew he'd get a sympathetic ear from a province that often muses aloud about splitting off from the rest of the country.

Duceppe knows he won't find the real fuel for his anti-Quebec fire until he hits Ontario and the western provinces. There he will no doubt find loads of people encouraging Quebec to stop talking and finally separate. They will tell Duceppe that Quebec is a province full of whiners who get a free pass and loads of gifts from the feds but still complain about not being treated fairly.

And that's exactly what he wants to hear.

Andrew Waugh