"If Winter Comes..."

FTLComm - Tisdale - September 25, 2000

The day began with only a few wisps of cloud in the sky but just before 0800 this morning a heavy bank of cumulus rolled in from the North absorbing Tisdale's Dehydration smoke only a few hundred above the ground. Its that time of the year, a time of transition and reevaluation as we assess what we are doing and plot a course for the coming months. High above us in yesterdays late afternoon sky a harbinger of things to come as a set of cirrus cloud was sprayed miles above us and there in the centre of the picture on the right was the coming winter's first sun dogs.

Sun dogs are a curious phenomena they are ice crystals caught high in the atmosphere that refract the sun's light producing a halo around the sun and like a rainbow they are visible from below and from above. Over flying thin cloud in the winter you can look down and see the sun's point of light and around it the glistening circle of brilliant light of the refracted light.

After nine years as Premier and three decades of public service in Saskatchewan our premier will announce today what he wants to do now. It was remarkable how listeners to CBC this morning called in with such positive feelings towards Roy Romanow. Roy Romanow the man who brought us both a children's dental program that was later cancelled and the worst roads since the thirties. The man who would help to create a new constitution for Canada and at the same time close fifty-four hospitals in this province to balance a budget and work his province out of debt while seeing his province under his leadership sink to the highest crime rate in Canada and his government reach a point where it only has support in the two major cities as its policies destroyed the economy and life style of the rural province of the country. But there is a balance in everything, the dreams of grandeur set out by Grant Devine had to be balanced by the financial reality of Roy Romanow. But soon the ditch below will be covered in snow, the leaves gone and the intense colour replaced with the subtle tones of white, gray and blue. So shall the political ditch change, the federal election will come and go, a new premier will be selected and we will settle into another winter hockey season and bitch about the roads, the grain prices and the cost of gasoline. "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" (Robert Browning)