Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it has been almost six decades since Canada decided to join with the people of Newfoundland and Labrador in a bold experiment.Negotiations were long and difficult but ultimately the feisty Canadians realised it was better to give in to what The Fates had long since ordained.
The dream of Newfoundland visionaries - their own manifest destiny that one day Canada would come out of the self-imposed isolation and be embraced by Newfoundlanders and Labradorians with welcoming familial arms - was at last realized.
Sure there are those in Newfoundland and Labrador who can only imagine Newfoundland as a puny, subsidiarist enclave, but there are others who dream bigger dreams, who think bolder thoughts.
Today, there will be those who wear black armbands, who pop Secret Nation into the VCR and watch the bootleg edition of what they still insist is a documentary.
Well it is sort of.
Its author lives in Ottawa these days doing something other than meeting with federal ministers and officials like he gets paid to do. His boss has just about put him out of a job, it would seem.
I digress.
But there are others, numbering now in the millions across Canada, who will have a tot of rum or down a cold Black Horse and smile.
Grin a marvelous grin as we consider how much a great nation has become even greater.
And it all started, one a chilly March night 58 years ago.
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