Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  But when a natural disaster of the scale of Katrina does hit our side of the world, its devastation carries a psychological magnification. We have all but given up the belief that such events can happen to us.

  But they can, they do and they will. And there is nothing that wealth, technology or government can do to stop a disaster—however much all three can do to circumscribe everything but its central impact. It is in this area, in the area of deploying the abundant resources of a powerful state to check and reduce the human tragedy incident upon every disaster, that the furious debate over Katrina now rages.

  There was no stopping the hurricane itself, and most likely no staying of the terrible flooding that followed. Floods are as old as Noah; the whirlwind spoke to Job.

  But there were deficiencies of planning and response, from the mayor’s office to the White House, and the incidents of sheer recklessness and criminality during a time of crisis are sufficient to fill an anthology of incompetence and willfulness.

  The failures of planning and response may, in part, be set down to that sense of immunity to disaster, our sense of favoured exceptionalism, that has seeded itself in the West. The recklessness and criminality on display from some in New Orleans perhaps belongs to some territory beyond explanation. Both factors have made a horror more horrible.

  However, there is one aspect of the debate that is a very troubling signal of the state of American politics now. The ferocity of unstoppable partisan frenzy, which began with the first news of Katrina’s landfall, is, I fear, almost too much for the American political system to contain. For the antagonists of George W. Bush, there is nothing too grotesque or outrageous by way of insinuation or allegation to lay on his doorstep. Of which the charge that racism “explains” whatever shortcomings the U.S. federal response may have displayed is both the most vivid and toxic.

  A great natural calamity is just another stick to wield in the partisan wars. American politics is, day by day, more a continuous fever of accusation, irrational hostility and destructiveness. Partisan combat knows no limits. A democratic system cannot be sustained under such a pitch of opportunism and cynicism.

  The dead have not been numbered, grief has not been given its time—and, yet, partisanship rages on. This may be Katrina’s second drear gift: the eclipse of American politics.

  I wrote here about partisanship as “toxic.” If there is anything that will finally dismantle the modern democracies of the West, it will be found in the ever more total, fervid, blind and angry reduction of politics to the hyper camps of left and right. Nothing is off-limits to real partisans. Foreign policy, natural disasters, personal life—these were once the territories where decency feared to tread. Politics has become total; any weapon will do; decency of argument is a museum relic. The American system is supersaturated in hyper-partisanship; ours, being smaller, has not reached the white-hot and hateful depths of our burdened neighbours. But it has its moments and spaces of rival ugliness. Left and right are the new fanaticisms for some.

  THE BLEAKEST DAY | July 1, 2006

  Newfoundlanders are as exuberant as everyone else about Canada Day, but, in my province, it has been an abiding irony since we joined the Confederation that the national birthday coincides with the bleakest day on the entire calendar of Newfoundland history.

  That’s a large claim to make. Newfoundland history is streaked with calamity and loss of life. Those who have any familiarity with the long, sad course of the contentious seal hunt are aware that its pursuit has been scarred all too frequently with appalling catastrophes. Indeed, it was on the very eve of the First World War that seventy-eight sealers from the SS Newfoundland were caught away from their ship in a savage storm on the northeast coast and died a gruesome death.

  Outport existence and fishing on the wild waters of the North Atlantic were always a wedding with danger and peril. How many, over the generations, went out in the morning not to return at end of day is probably impossible to tell. It is enough merely to note that Newfoundlanders are not unacquainted with grief.

  Modern times are no different. The boon of offshore oil had a terrible inauguration with the Ocean Ranger disaster. On February 15, 1982, under the assault of 100-mile-an-hour winds and massive waves, the Ocean Ranger went down, and all her eighty-four-member crew with her. I remember that day. Newfoundland is a small place. It blackened the entire province, as everyone seemed to have some connection—family, neighbour, friend—with one of the lost.

  Grief strikes hard in a concentrated space; it echoes longer in the common memory. For every rollicking ballad of the likes of “We’ll Rant and We’ll Roar Like True Newfoundlanders,” a song intoxicated with the delight Newfoundlanders take in the rough, wild place we call home, there is another pitched in a minor key.

  There is an undernote of keening in all Newfound-land history. That keening was never sharper than after the morning, ninety years ago today, when the 801 members of the Newfoundland Regiment left their trenches and went “over the top” toward the German lines at Beaumont Hamel. So many, and so young, they went to death or maiming. Of those 801, only sixty-eight were present for roll call the next day. For the Newfoundland Regiment, for Newfoundlanders back home, it was, to summon up a biblical name, Aceldama, the field of blood.

  If Newfoundland, in terms of population, is a small place now, it was an even smaller place then. The young men of Beaumont Hamel (we would surely call many of them boys today) had come from every corner of the country (as then it was). Not an outport nor a town but sent someone, not a family hardly but was to bear the terrible cross of a favourite they were never to see again.

  They had gone with that mix of motives with which young men have always gone to war. Adventure beckoned some, escape from the too-familiar others; honest fealty to “King and Country,” which probably seems a little outré today, likely spoke in some measure to all.

  But it surely ripped the heart of all of Newfoundland that, in the very first minutes of the great Battle of the Somme (in less than half an hour, they knew doom was upon them), on a perfect summer day, so many of her sons in that battalion, nearly all, were dead or mangled. The Newfoundland Regiment fell under a brutal hammer stroke of concentrated machine-gun fire, mortar and sniping. They were, for that time, alone on the field. The Essex Regiment, which was to have simultaneously advanced, in the confusions of that morning, had not.

  It was the most brutal day in Newfoundland history.

  The regiment received the honorific of “Royal” from King George himself, the only such designation that was awarded during the entire war. But for me, the most affecting memorial comes not from the ceremonial designation—the Royal Newfoundland Regiment—or even from the carefully tended battlefield, which today will host the first return of the regiment as a unit since that awful day ninety years ago, but from the words frequently cited of some of the wounded survivors of that terrible morning: “Is the Colonel pleased? Is the Colonel satisfied?”

  There is a ferocious loyalty in those words. And a ferocious innocence as well. They are empty of every cynicism.

  NEWFOUNDLAND

  LAST DICE GAME

  Winston Churchill once set up a meeting for Joey Smallwood with the legendary Rothschilds. Mr. Smallwood had been trying to put together in the early 1950s a consortium to finance his dream of harnessing the great falls of the Hamilton River (renamed Churchill to honour the statesman, in part for this intercession). The aging Mr. Churchill was impressed by Joey, who had a volubility only second to that of the great lion himself, and arranged a luncheon. The upshot was the Rothschilds became one of the key financial mediators in the development of this huge engineering miracle. Mr. Churchill, like Mr. Smallwood, was taken with the scale of the enterprise. He called it (Mr. Smallwood never tired of quoting these words) “a grand imperial concept.”

  It says how long ago all this was that at the time of this celebrated utterance, “imperial” was not a pejorative. It’s another index of those long ago days that the
main draw of the development, at least for Mr. Smallwood, was that it would immediately create jobs, thousands of jobs.

  I have often thought that Mr. Smallwood’s economic understanding was unduly influenced by the example of the pharaohs (John Crosbie might argue the influence extended to Joey’s style of government). If a project was massive, grand, monumental, it had intrinsic appeal. And jobs. These twin allures may explain, in part, why the deal wasn’t closely examined as to benefits after the project went on stream. Or at least as closely as any project should, that once it was up and running was under a ninety-nine-year contract.

  No one dreamed then of OPEC, or escalating oil prices. “Energy crisis” hadn’t entered the lexicon. No one, at least on the Newfoundland front, glanced a few decades down the road to insert a clause in the power contract that might allow for some flexibility in the selling price of Labrador power, should the world demand for energy alter over the near century of its term.

  The rest is history, and from the Newfoundland side of the equation, miserable history at that. Mr. Smallwood got to cut ribbons, hobnob with the wealthy and powerful, and see himself as a true titan of Newfoundland’s economic development. He got, as well, the lengthy and frequent pleasure of retelling his story of the meetings with Sir Winston and the Rothschilds. Mr. Smallwood was his own Homer.

  Churchill Falls was the first big project. There would be others, and a truly mixed record they have. Remember Come-by-Chance: By the time offshore oil loomed on the economic and political horizon, it occurred to Newfoundlanders that this was probably the last one. Mines, paper mills, petrochemical complexes—they had all in succession been shrouded in the promise that this one would be the one development that would unshackle Newfoundland from its economic chains. The dependence on the fishery, and mainly the fishery, which was always a mixed and frequently tragic mainstay, would finally be broken.

  Well, all the world knows the Churchill Falls deal now as a very poor trade. A lot of labourers went to Labrador when the project was in construction, but the gold of Churchill Falls has been a shower into the Quebec treasury ever since, and will be for decades more. And all the other big-ticket items were either a mess from the start (Come-by-Chance) or never really delivered on their promise.

  It is grandly ironic that, at least from Mr. Smallwood’s day, the search for economic development was always conceived as something to supplement or counterpoise the historic Newfoundland fishery. Never to replace it. That was unthinkable. The fishery would always be there but it would never on its own be enough to draw Newfoundland into its full potential, keep young Newfoundlanders home, and offer anything like real economic parity with the mainland.

  But fate, or careless management, which in Newfound-land’s case is fate’s twin, intervened, and the fishery died. This was an arrow to the heart. The province has been reeling ever since. Its faith in its own future, in the best of times a tenuous, anxious emotion, has been very nearly exploded altogether.

  No wonder, then, that on the question of the offshore, on the disposition of its revenues, and on the issues of equalization and “clawback formulas,” the citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador are exercised as they rarely have been. It’s very much The Last Chance syndrome. The offshore is seen, almost by one and all, as our last chance to secure an economic viability—the last great project that might rescue Newfoundland from five hundred years of just hanging on.

  In the long shadow of the collapse of the fishery, this is not just another routine Ottawa-versus-St.-John’s conflict. For my crowd, it’s the moment of truth.

  It was a puzzle to me on the day it was officially announced that the Newfoundland cod fishery was to be closed that there was so little public outcry, and it has been even more of a puzzle since. I do not mean to say there was no notice of it, that it wasn’t huge news, or that it wasn’t the talk of just about everyone in Newfoundland at the time. There were a couple of “noisy moments” during the actual announcement, by then-fisheries minister John Crosbie. But there was nothing like any full manifestation of outrage, no giant demonstrations, nothing—to my mind anyway—that measured up to the scale and significance, to the meaning, of that announcement.

  It was, in effect, the suspension of the defining social and economic activity of all of Newfoundland since there has been a Newfoundland: that day marked the first moment, since there was a Newfoundland, that Newfoundlanders were stopped, by law, from drawing on the resource that brought it in to being, sustained it, and stamped its whole historical and unique culture.

  The thought has teased my mind ever since that Newfoundlanders, perhaps defensively, perhaps for reasons too subtle or profound to offer easy articulation, were attempting to defer a total acknowledgement of the significance of this despairing milestone.

  They—we—knew what it meant, but it was too large and deep a blow for an immediate commensurate response.

  VICTIMS OF STEREOTYPING | January 15, 2005

  “I like Newfoundlanders. I really do.”

  My esteemed colleague Margaret Wente wrote that in a recent column on Newfoundland. Twice. Well, let me say at the top of this one: “I like Margaret Wente. I really do.” But I fear her repeated assurance—and I wish I wasn’t writing this—leaves me unconvinced.

  After all, if you write a column describing Newfoundlanders as “picking the pockets of Chinese dry cleaners and Korean variety-store owners who work ninety hours a week,” describe them as “surly” ingrates, “gobbling” cod tongues while they luxuriate in a great “scenic welfare ghetto,” and, in general, put down everyone in Newfoundland as part of a set of lazy, self-indulging, whining spongers, rote-chanting “I like Newfoundlanders” doesn’t salvage the piece from being one sour, willful, collective putdown.

  It’s a nasty cast of mind that traffics so generously in stereotypes. The Chinese are dry cleaners; Koreans know only convenience stores; Newfoundlanders are shiftless pickpockets. It’s a spurious contrast she sets up, and she knows it.

  If the point Margaret was hoping to insinuate—that it is only “hard-working” new immigrants who actually “pay” into the revenues that provide equalization; that it is only the most industrious being extorted to pay for the least industrious—then she has so bizarre a conception of the Canadian tax system, and the principle of equalization, that it is beyond my ability and, more to the present point, my desire, to rescue her from it.

  She makes other scattershot observations that are insult trying to dress as candour. Newfoundlanders have a “sense of victimhood that is unmatched.” Dear Lord, the global industry of professional victimhood has landed on many shores, and infested whole multitudes of causes and groups like a plague, but if one were seriously to look for a few places where the posture and cant of “the victim” is considered unseemly and unworthy, Newfoundland would be one such place.

  For all the social clichés and easy characterizations of “pogey” and “handouts” that seem to teem in Margaret’s “I like Newfoundlanders” brain, any real acquaintance with Newfoundland would have introduced her to a strain in my province’s character that is the radical opposite of her wildly gratuitous calumny.

  I’ve known people so hostile to every notion of something for nothing, they wouldn’t trouble a neighbour to borrow a cup of milk. I’ve known legions of men and women who put in a lifetime’s work of a kind that those of us who spray words for a living should be embarrassed to stand next to.

  Try going to Long Harbour, or Burgeo, or Lamaline, or St. Anthony or Port de Grave and meet with some of the men and women who have worked, really worked, for a living, Margaret, and try telling them to their faces they’re the spoiled delinquents of your furious imagination. Try telling the same to those who, after a life of work, have nothing, and have abandoned their homes and history to find work elsewhere.

  We have our louts and layabouts—point me to any region of any country that doesn’t. But where you come up with the notion that Newfoundlanders—of all people—are the artists of vic
timhood is a trawl too confused for me to fathom.

  Then there’s this business where Margaret writes of Newfoundlanders blaming “us” for the collapse of the fishery.

  Who’s this “us”? The citizens of Canada didn’t collapse the fishery, and no one in Newfoundland even dreams they did.

  The only point on which any blame is being assigned is over the stewardship of the resource since Confederation. That was federal. No one argues otherwise. And it is surely fair, and not victimhood, that if the government that had control failed in its stewardship, then it should bear some responsibility for so failing.

  As for the money being poured into Newfoundland while we guzzle cod tongues and stare out the scenic bay, keep in mind the billion dollars a year going “outward” from the Churchill Falls hydro project that alone nullifies the equalization “debt.”

  Her last shot was as carelessly aimed as all the rest. You can keep all the gas and oil revenue, she says, but pay us (there’s that enigmatic “us” again) back what we’ve sent down. Well, say I, not so fast.

  Restock (and return) the Continental Shelf, turn back Churchill Falls and, one last thing, rescind the contemptible practice—which obviously has appeal to very limited natures—of dealing in caricature and stereotype and maligning an entire province on the basis of little more than ill-acquaintance and condescension.

  Shut down the Newfie joke industry, of which, it mildly saddens me to say, Margaret Wente’s column is an extended and singularly hostile example.

  That said, I like Margaret Wente. I really do.

  THE PEACE OF TWILLINGATE | August 12, 2006

  Less than a week ago, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days, under perfect skies, driving through some of the resolutely beautiful communities of Newfoundland’s northeast coast.