He's got lots of them actually. Not much that comes out of the premier's mouth is spontaneous. Most of what he says (you will have heard, surely, about his five-point plan and that perfidious federal unfairness) is thoroughly scripted and endlessly repeated.
But the new slogan is this: "We're gonna be okay."
That's what he tells most audiences these days. That was the single most important thing, he told reporters this week, that he wanted citizens alarmed at the seismic economic upheavals rocking their world and workplaces to know.
"If there's a message that I want to convey to Ontarians, it's that we're gonna be okay."
It's by no means an original line. A musician named Jenny Youngman apparently has a song titled "We're Going to Be Okay." Bob Marley used a variation on the theme – "everything's gonna be all right" – to pleasing effect in his hit "No Woman, No Cry."
But where the expression seems most commonly to pop up, if a recent troll of the Internet is any indication, is in the fields of sports and religion – two of the more paternalistic realms, not coincidentally, of human endeavour and arenas where promise almost always surpasses performance.
The instances are endless – from the pros to colleges to high schools – of coaches predicting before big games that if the players can find a way to hit, or skate, or rebound, or rush the passer, or play within themselves, why, "we're gonna be okay."
A classic of this genre came from the coach of a women's softball team from Nantucket, Mass., who announced the happy news that "pitching-wise, we're going to be okay, and defensive-wise we're going to be okay, too."
Down at his Episcopal church in Bethesda, Md., a preacher was apparently onto this cheery bromide years ago in a sermon titled "Bob the Turtle."
The central theme being that, for all life's vicissitudes, the wars, the famine and disease, prison "or worse," yep, you guessed it, "you're going to be okay."
Out in California, a member of a church badly damaged in last year's catastrophic fires told reporters, while surveying the loss, that "we can worship in this building here, we're going to be okay."
If there's just a hint of condescension in the premier's tone, a sense that he's talking down to folks with lots tougher roads ahead of them than his, it's precisely because this is the very language we are advised to use in talking to children under stress.
In a web posting titled "How to talk to your preschooler about disaster," a counsellor says the important words for kids to hear during difficult days are: "We're all okay, and we're going to be okay."
The support group GriefWorks agrees that children wracked by trauma and fear should be told, "we're going to be okay, even though we are sad."
The inherent paternalism in the expression shows up, as well, in Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road.
"We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
"Yes. We are.
"And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
"That's right."
There it is again in the first chapter of Lisa Unger's detective novel published earlier this year when the protagonist leans toward an injured man.
"`It's okay. We're going to be okay,' I tell him, even though I don't have any reasons to believe this is true."
The book, for what it's worth, is called Beautiful Lies.
Jim Coyle's provincial affairs column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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