It makes sense that the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, given the reasons it cited at its recent convention, would not want to retain our province’s current coat of arms.
It does not make sense, given the reasons it cited, for it to want our province to have any coat of arms at all, except that some air of nobility still clings to the idea of a coat of arms, and the Liberals, like all our modern politicians, are sorely in need of anything that could allow them any sort of association with anything at all noble.
The pitcher-plant “business brand” with which Danny Williams often replaced the coat of arms in government advertising ought to be quite good enough for a political party which after all perpetuated Williams’s most prized project: Muskrat Falls.
The chief value to our politicians of our being “muttly-cultural,” which currently, in Newfoundland at least, the politicians are trying far more to bring about than simply to respect, is that then we would not speak with one same voice against bad government.
Not that our MHAs are themselves highly multicultural; rather they seem steeped in the monochromatic culture of commerce which has as its purpose the piling up of pecuniary profit and is, indeed, at odds with the Biblical injunction to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness, since what is righteous would be everyone’s actually deserving what he needs, by reason of his having himself produced with his own direct activity something that someone needs. (That what persons deserve are the effects of what they do, is a primary principle of justice.) A motto which would suit these politicians far better, in their view, would be “Seek ye first a job from your much-moneyed betters.”
Colin Burke
Port au Port