EDITORIAL PAGE — Constitutional wrangling

The constitutional referendum is past but not forgotten. In the days following the vote, the economy seems destined to become the favored topic, but mark our words, the constitutional debate may be taking only a temporary reprieve.

A writer to a Toronto daily perhaps summed it up best in the following rhyme:

Politically a referendum

Oft continues ad infinitum.

From the yea-sayers of Newfoundland to the nay-sayers of British Columbia, Canadians had their say. And for whatever reasons, the majority said “no.” And the country did not disintegrate as forecast by the doomsayers. Miners in the Hemlo gold camp of Northern Ontario continue to ply their trade and extract the area’s precious mineral.

Let’s face facts — it was a lousy sell job by the “yes” side. The prime minister’s assertion that Canadians must vote “yes” because only a “yes” vote would save the country begged the question of why Canadians were being asked to choose one side or the other in the first place.

What did the stock market think of the referendum? The day of the vote, the TSE 300 composite index closed ahead by more than 29 points and was up by more than 10 points at the close of business the day after. The following week, the volatile interest rates began to decline.

Possibly, the markets had discounted all of the doom and gloom in the days leading up to the vote and were ready for a big cheer. A “no” vote did not mean disunity.

Near Logan Lake in British Columbia, the large Highland Valley Copper project continues to produce its useful copper-molybdenum payload.

The old British North America Act of 1867 established a federal state in which powers were distributed between the federal and provincial governments. The Charlottetown accord was an attempt to re-work or modernize that system of distribution to better reflect changing times.

Interestingly, resources, which belonged to the provinces from the beginning, would have been returned to them on an “exclusive” basis, which has been interpreted to mean that if a province wished to go it alone on a certain program, it would have negotiated with Ottawa for the required funding. The resulting agreement would have guaranteed the amount and type of funding for a period of up to five years. Any incentive program involving government, for example in the area of taxation writeoffs, for mineral exploration might have taken on a specific provincial flavor. But that remains a topic for future negotiations.

In northwestern Quebec, the Selbaie mining operation continues to supply global markets with its copper-zinc-silver-gold mineralization. Meanwhile, another government in another part of the world also seems to have misread the public mood. The Tory party in Great Britain announced the closing of two-thirds of that country’s coal-mining industry and then, in the face of a storm of public protest and a threatened mutiny by party backbenchers, beat a hasty retreat.

Tens of thousands of miners were reported to have marched on Westminster in London in protest against the planned closing of 31 of the United Kingdom’s 50 pits and the loss of about 30,000 jobs. The government itself narrowly avoided defeat on the issue in the House of Commons by promising to review all of the threatened closings and to have an independent assessment made of its energy policy, which would see natural gas and nuclear power replace coal. The decision to drastically reduce the size of Britain’s coal-mining industry may have made excellent economic sense but at the grassroots level, it simply didn’t wash.