It's the Final Countdown...

School is out this year on June 21st, not long away now, and it's been a heck of a year.

God knows it's been a hard one both for students, teachers, and parents.

For some it is also a day of reckoning for,when the end of the year comes, there won't be anything left to hold back some oil company employees who traded houses in places like Calgary,Alberta to start a new life amidst the prospects of founding another major oil field off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

For when the school year ends, so will the prospects of those same families staying in Newfoundland. The arguement has been made that, maybe the Premier was playing a little too hard when it came to negotiations for royalties and other benefits from our resources and that's what has caused all the problems. The Hebron-Ben Nevis deal will die a slow and inglamorous death at the hands of a few who pushed just too hard.

What I hear is that the provincial government drove hard to have royalties paid out on the oil type there at $40 a barrel US while the oil companies agreed to $50 bucks a barrel, a $10 a barrel difference. That's what might have caused the province to lose a $4 billion dollar offshore platform that was just a little smaller than the Hibernia platform itself.

That's not all...

My sources in Texas also tell me that there was to be a second platform constructed immediately after the first was completed...

How much did we lose?....Really...

While an Irish billionaire explores the Placentia Bay area for a suitable site for a refinery and the world thirsts for our resource, did we let loose the dogs to play in someone elses yard?

Did we let the "kids out from school" without learning from them ourselves that, we could have had so much more in the way of benefits like keeping our kids here to work. Did we founder away our human resource to keep our natural resources in the ground?

Has the chance for a major step into the petroleum development field been thwarted by $10 bucks a barrel that couldn't have been negotiated to rise if the price of oil again rose along with it?

We've forgotten about escalator clauses my friends, and a St.John's lawyer was the first one to forget.

We've got until June 21/06 to get negotiations up and going again or it's going to be hard times on the Rock in another year or so. Get the adults in government and Chevron back to the table now before the kids get out of school because if not, we'll lose a lot more than royalties on $10 bucks a barrel.

As of today, we've got 7 days left to save it ...