Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  Twillingate is a spectacular setting at any time. But under a summer sun, with smog-free air, this outport on the very edge of North America will easily lead even non-Newfoundlanders to believe that the world’s great vacation spots—the Caribbean islands, gaudy Maui of the Pacific, famous others—are greatly overrated as ecological marvels.

  And this is not even to make mention of Musgrave Harbour. Not perhaps as celebrated as Twillingate among the cognoscenti of the mainland, Musgrave Harbour is the very jewel of the northeast coastline. The people are friendly, solicitous to be hospitable but tactful in its dispensation. Musgrave Harbour’s stretch of sea and beach would send pangs of bitter envy through the most devoted fan of Tofino, way over on the other side of the country.

  The northeast coast is quite a place. It has produced a sturdy, hardy, generous band of people. Perhaps never more so than a few generations back, when the towns and villages of this part of the island brought forth the “iron men” who set their teeth to the howling gales and tempests of brutal North Atlantic winters and sent forth such local heroes as Abraham Kean, the greatest sealing captain of all time, to the exigencies and unimaginable deprivations of the Labrador ice in midwinter.

  It was also the nursery of quite possibly even more formidable heroes, their epic wives and mothers, who gave birth, raised families, took sorrow and hardship as it came, and endured absences laden with continual and surely heartbreaking anxiety each year the hunt was on.

  These towns and outports are, naturally, less riven now by the strict and unforgiving imperatives of the pre-Confederation era. And since Confederation, the commanding spirits that would once have assumed prominence in the limited channels of the fishery, politics, the church or local commerce have turned their energies to the wider world of Canada or beyond.

  The outports remain, but now, especially since the collapse of the cod stocks, they are less busy, and the harbours, inlets and coves are more slenderly trafficked. Some fishing remains, the glory of their setting remains, some trickle of tourism is solicited and received (Newtown, Bonavista Bay, is a wonderful stop—try the jam!), but, at least to my imagination, there is a glow of melancholy nostalgia over them even on the most luminous summer’s day.

  Still, they are peaceful and tranquil—certainly so to the visitor. I mean to be neither condescending nor fulsome when I say they radiate a sense of remove and shelter from the gathering whirlwind of our too modern world.

  All of which is the context for when, on leaving this slice of rock, ocean and charm, I caught up on the news of the remaining part of the world.

  Another (alleged) plot by mad jihadis, this time to murder thousands high in the sky on intercontinental flights leaving London; talk of “liquid bombs” and “disposable camera flashes” as detonators. We are getting very close to an absolute definition of “sinister” here. If the allegations prove true, this is a bitter plate some very evil men were about to serve on the innocent and unsuspecting.

  How fragile we’ve become, how fragile the modern world, when, in its great capitals, you must not take toothpaste or hair gel as you make the transit from the terminal to the airplane. How much more anxious would millions of people be today, if the diligence of British and Pakistani agents had not revoked the planned slaughter, if a dozen great jets and all within them had been destroyed by murderous fanatics.

  Sixty or seventy years ago on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, people worried about storms, shifting ice, the perils of direct encounter with an imperious Nature as they pursued a livelihood. Now, people may be going to a convenience store in London, or walking to a beach chair in Bali, or working in a great office tower, or just taking a subway home, and a percolating menace surrounds us and all we do.

  I am not sure, in one sense, which was the more challenging life.

  I agree with those who say we are in combat with desperate, determined and artful forces, and that—in our typically overprivileged, casual, Western way—we do not take what threatens us with the mortal gravity it deserves.

  One thing is certain: the quiet and peace of Twillingate and Musgrave Harbour, the sense of sanctuary I tasted in those places for a few sunlit days, seem to have departed the world forever.

  METEOROLOGICAL MADNESS | April 15, 2006

  Weather is the starting-motor of almost every conversation, the oil of every new acquaintance, the life preserver of all our awkward moments. A few of the great humorists were weather connoisseurs. Twain said some fine things about weather. I rather like his telling of how cold it once was: “Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death!” And Twain generally gets the credit for “Everybody talks about the weather; nobody does anything about it.”

  Weather is always more than just weather. That’s a rule of life. Shakespeare knew this. He sketched it in The Tempest, but saved his finest stuff for King Lear. Lear comes to terms with himself only after coming to terms with the weather—storm therapy. Lear on the heath, caught “unaccommodated” under the furious elements, is Shakespeare at his best: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout …”

  William knew his weather.

  My crowd in Newfoundland are certainly the very scholiographers of weather, Nature’s own and very finest band of weather-readers. Lear would have had more than a few buddies in Newfoundland. Weather, back home, is talked about with greater frequency, with mixed and strained affection or savage, raging hostility, than I have ever noted anywhere else in this country. In Newfoundland, “weather” means “bad weather.” And that, alas, is mainly true. Bad weather we usually get, and always expect. If someone says “there’s a bit of weather coming on,” they inevitably mean a lot of weather’s coming on. All of it bad.

  The main problem with Newfoundland weather, however, is not how bad it is, but when it’s going to happen and what form it will take. Newfoundland weather veers and oscillates, shoots up one bay and down another, crashes from snow to rain to fog, drizzle and sleet, and back again through every conceivable and mortifying combination, with dazzling unpredictability and precocious variety.

  Whoever coined the term “weather system” never visited Newfoundland. There is no “system.” I’ve been in houses on the South Coast, down around Marystown, where there was a warm front on the porch and a blizzard in the kitchen. (Wasn’t going upstairs. God knows what waited up there.) Lear wouldn’t have lasted the night on the South Coast.

  System? Randomized torment, maybe. But system? Ha! The Liberals, a few years back, in the high noon of their genius, decided in the face of the sheer, God-defying impredictability of Newfoundland weather, that taking all forecasting off the island and out of the province was a good idea. They shut down the weather office in Gander, and decided it somehow made more sense to guess, from a weather station in Halifax, at next morning’s blizzard in Joe Batts Arm on Fogo Island.

  No more forecasting from Newfoundland itself was the principle. They could just as easily have chosen Winnipeg or Hawaii, for the logic involved. In any case, there wasn’t a man, woman, boy or girl in any bay or harbour, city or town of all Newfoundland and Labrador that had the slightest idea why the bunch in Ottawa thought Halifax, the capital of another province, should be asked to utter prophecies on “the weekend weather” in Newfoundland.

  Gander, after all, was at least “in” the weather it was taking a stab at projecting. Do people phone Calgary when they are going camping in Kelowna?

  It defied sense. It defied reason. And it produced a massive protest, culminating in what was, I’m told, the largest petition ever signed in the province—more than 125,000 names, to haul the weather centre back from Halifax and moor it again on the drenched, blizzard-ridden, fog-tormented soil of the home province.

  It was bad meteorology; that was indisputable. But it was stupid politics incarnate. Weather is the currency of every Newfoundland conversation, and it may be a misery, but it’s our own misery. Outsource the weather—why, that’s
Newfoundland blasphemy!

  This saga has an interesting end. On Wednesday, the day after introducing the Accountability Act in the Commons, Stephen Harper visited Newfoundland—his first trip there as PM. He gave a speech in St. John’s, but he announced the reopening of the weather office in Gander. The Harper boys are already looking toward the next campaign, is what this tells me.

  The Liberals had better tidy up that leadership business real quick. It’s no time to be dallying when Mr. Harper, only two months in, is scoring points on “fixing” the weather in Newfoundland.

  Michael Ignatieff, quick: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks.

  ONE VOICE THAT COUNTS | August 25, 2007

  It’s a Danny Williams year back home in Newfoundland. The Hebron oil field is on again.

  Mr. Williams has played a hard game with the big boys and he’s won. That is the near-universal verdict, and in politics there is nothing quite as attractive as winning. It’s a victory that has a bigger charge or echo in Newfoundland than it would have in perhaps any other province. That’s because, almost since Confederation became a reality, the Newfoundland record on setting the terms for the exploitation or management of its resources has been such a dismal one.

  It all goes back, as does almost all modern Newfoundland politics, to Joey Smallwood’s reign—and that term is chosen advisedly. Smallwood had many attractive qualities, but among them we may not include either prudence or prescience. In the presence of big-name promoters or industrialists, hard man Joe purred with obsequiousness, starstruck and infatuated from mere proximity to the rich or the great.

  His economic development policy can easily be seen in retrospect for what it was: a series of manias. Starting small, it went from hockey stick factories to a chocolate bar company, a rubber boot plant to a strange and darkly comic essay in cattle ranching. Alas, Newfoundland never did catch on as Wyoming north. From there, it ricocheted to greater and grander schemes, many of them midwifed by dubious promoters or downright fraudsters.

  Smallwood’s formula was a basic one: huge government subsidies in exchange for jobs up front. Combined with what can only be understood as an absolutely positive thirst for snake oil and a worshipful gratitude for those who relayed it, by the tanker truckload, to his eager throat: this was not a solid business plan.

  The greatest scheme was the Churchill Falls development. It married Smallwood’s mania for job creation with his ego-besotted lust to be associated with a “great” enterprise.

  Seeking to get that project off the ground brought “the little fellow from Gambo” into the chambers of the fabled Rothschilds, and even to an audience with the very hero of the twentieth century himself, Winston Churchill.

  To say such encounters placed Smallwood’s judgment on sabbatical implies that, on the matter of Newfoundland’s economic development, he had judgment to begin with. But, alas, that was not so. Having met with the great, he began to believe he was one with them, floating above mere mortals on the hurricane currents of his own deeply aggravated self-regard. By this point, Smallwood was so popular politically, without challenge either in the House of Assembly or within his own cabinet, that he was less a premier than the Pharaoh of the North Atlantic.

  This was the psychological context in which the deal to develop Churchill Falls was brewed. Its most irresistible characteristic was an immense upfront payoff: thousands of construction jobs for Newfoundlanders. And in Newfoundland politics, jobs, then as now, are better than gold—they are platinum. Where was the cold eye to look over the contract for the long term, to weigh immediate benefit against long-term and catastrophic inequity? In the climate of the time, in the near-delirium of this “great imperial project,” disinterested scrutiny was a phrase in a dictionary no one owned.

  And so, as Newfoundlanders, to our woe, have long recognized, we signed on to one more megaproject—the greatest of them all—only, over the long years since, to see the substance of its benefit, the billions of profits teeming from the Upper Churchill till 2045, flow to another jurisdiction.

  This is the backdrop against which Premier Danny Williams’s obstinacy (as it is perceived out of province) on so many matters plays. Most particularly, it is the background on which his hardball with the offshore oil companies is perceived. No wonder the deal has elevated his already stratospheric political stock, and no wonder, either, that, as he approaches a provincial election, he is a one-man juggernaut. He’s right to have been so strenuously resolved that an economic mischief of heroic proportions for Newfoundland not be repeated.

  His very success, however, is building a worrying symmetry. In Newfoundland right now, Mr. Williams is unopposed and unopposable. In the authority he has over Newfoundland politics, and in the scale of his current eminence, he is stronger and of more sway than even his historic predecessor, Joey Smallwood.

  He is neither as fitful nor as naive as Smallwood, which is a mercy beyond all thankfulness. But he is so powerful at a time when the future of Newfoundland (the offshore success notwithstanding) is so precarious, that there is only one voice in Newfoundland that really counts.

  There’s the symmetry. And that is a peril, both for us and for him.

  THE ELUSIVE FLAVOUR OF OUR POLITICS | October 13, 2007

  There have been many books on Newfoundland politics, but none that captures all, or even a flare, of the grim, manic, impulsive, compulsive, erratic, exultant and heartbreaking flavour of the sport.

  Newfoundland politics is emphatically not one-dimensional. True, like the politics of other provinces and places, it does, on a democratically periodic basis, concern itself with a collective assessment of the villains and scalawags in office and allows for a contest to refresh the mix. You know these events as elections.

  But the real flavour of Newfoundland politics can’t be picked up from some post-election scoresheet. It’s in the tone and byplay of the campaigns, the anecdotes from elections past, legendary nomination battles—all the great tidal wave of political minutiae that has never made it to the headlines outside the province, and not that often within.

  One famous election, Joey Smallwood’s last as premier, ended up in a near tie: Liberals 20, Conservatives 21, New Labrador Party 1. To add to the tangle, several individual districts were won by extremely narrow margins—the narrowest by one vote. In that district, there was a polling station in a village roughly halfway between Cow Head and Baker’s Brook by the name of Sally’s Cove.

  By the morning following this closest of elections, it was learned that all 106 Sally’s Cove ballots had been burned. (Legend has it the ballots were used to start a fire. They surely did.) The fate of a whole government hung on incinerated ballots, atoms of ash swirling in the fog-choked winds over the wild coastal shoreline of the Great Northern Peninsula. Democracy cremated.

  The burning of the Sally’s Cove ballots—an incident by turns as ludicrous as a Monty Python sketch and as sinister as a John Le Carré fable—left all Newfoundland in suspense as to which party—Joey Smallwood’s or the young Frank Moores’s—was to rule, while a perplexity of judges and a conundrum of constitutional experts wearied their brains and souls in an attempt to sort out the mess.

  All this played to a counterpoint of relentless skulduggery being practised on a number of backbenchers, through bribes, booze and bombast on a scale unknown since the days of Tammany Hall. Picture, if you will, a garage sale of backbenchers, a flea market of the fickle. Some were bought, then rebought. One was bought so often it was impossible, on any given day, to determine who owned him.

  One loose cannon was put “in storage” in a St. John’s hotel room with enough booze to secure him for a few months and keep him away from the lures and guiles of the other side. And one of Frank Moores’s successful candidates promptly quit the Conservatives because Mr. Moores wouldn’t publicly offer him a cabinet post even before he, Mr. Moores, knew, or could know, he would be premier.

  I cannot remember a wilder farce, and nothing I’ve seen on the mainland—and I�
�ve been to British Columbia—compares with it. I remember another close election in which a Liberal candidate won a tight race on the strength of a story about “losing the family rosary beads.” That was, alas, ever so long ago, and it is questionable now whether there are many candidates with rosaries to lose, and certainly none with the wit to make a story of the loss.

  Of the most recent campaign, that of this week, in which Danny Williams won record approval—an almost frightening popular endorsement—it was so intensely focused that it was almost “dry” of those splendid moments and adventures that diversified the many that preceded it.

  Mr. Williams has acquired, in a very short time, superlative campaign skills, and those, in combination with his superbly vocal “standing up for Newfoundland” in various contests with prime ministers and oil companies, have turned him into something of an instant local hero. But it was not just the theme of standing up for the province or his theatrical repertoire that got him the landslide.

  There is an undercurrent of deep apprehension about the fate of Newfoundland, over the survival of the main currents of the singular culture produced by a long and unique history. That apprehension emerges, even amidst the current so-called oil boom, from the gradual emptying out of Newfoundland’s outports, the spectacular social erosion brought on by the collapse of the historic fishery.

  Mr. Williams was seen as the only figure large enough to at least address this apprehension, and it was to the tender hope he could stave off so grim an outcome to Newfoundland history that he owes so much of the endorsement that he received. Newfoundlanders are far from sure that he, or anyone, can really meet this challenge, but they are quietly praying it may be so.

  Maybe, in its way, this is yet another story about rosary beads after all.

  DANNY WILLIAMS HAS GONE TOO FAR | September 13, 2008