FACE TO FACE
Should Newfoundland have joined Confederation? Wayne Johnston says
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hose Newfoundlanders who voted for Confederation in the 1948 referendums did so for pragmatic, unsentimental reasons. The country, especially that part of it beyond the Avalon Peninsula, was indigent, isolated, poverty-stricken, dependent on the whims of a fickle fishing industry. Most of these people had never been to Canada, had never met anyone who had been there and did not know anything about it. They could not feel patriotism for a country of which they knew nothing. They voted, understandably, for Canada because to do so, as Joey Smallwood explained to them, might mean some extra money in their pockets from Canada’s social “welfare” programs, including the baby bonus, a stipend from the country awarded on a per-child basis.
NEWFOUNDLAND HAS BECOME THE POOREST PROVINCE IN THE FEDERATION. Most of those who, in the same referendums, voted for a return to independence, did so for patriotic reasons. You can feel patriotic about a country that you know from having lived in it all your life. You can love such a country without glossing over its geographically determined shortcomings. You can be justified in thinking of it as your country. If you happened
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to live in the most prosperous part of that country, as was the case with most of those who voted for independence, your material sacrifice was far less than your isolated countrymen. Small wonder, then, that the vast majority of people from St. John’s voted for a return to independence. Many other factors were involved in the referendums, far too many to enumerate here. But I’ll say that the question boiled down to patriotism versus pragmatism—and pragmatism won, if just barely. However, the question “Would Newfoundland be better off if it had never joined Canada?” can only be answered “Yes.” Since joining Canada, Newfoundland has become the poorest province in the federation, chronically so except for a brief boom when oil was selling at more than $100 a barrel. Combining the unemployed, those who no longer look for work, and those on welfare, Newfoundland’s true unemployment rate approaches near-Third World levels. Its hydroelectricity, most of it from Labrador, enriches the province of Quebec and fills the federal coffers while Newfoundland gets next to nothing—in the case of the Churchill Falls and Muskrat Falls hydroelectric projects, and even in that of oil, Newfoundland has had to negotiate with its hands tied by dint of it being part of Canada. In a place as traditionally poor as Newfoundland, there is, or so it seems, only one way to develop a megaproject: give the
natural resource (hydro, oil) away to some foreign country or corporation that can afford to exploit the resource in exchange for short-term jobs building infrastructure. How has this worked out for Newfoundland? The province has a debt of more than $12 billion, an annual deficit of nearly $2 billion and a crippling annual interest payment that will balloon the debt to more than $20 billion within five years— an unsustainable number. Without a resurgence in oil prices, yet another bankruptcy is a near certainty. In an independent Newfoundland, the cod fishery, a sustainable, nonpolluting resource, would have been managed by Newfoundlanders, not by federal politicians, scientists and civil servants who allowed foreign freezer trawlers to vacuum our ocean floor for years at a time, destroying the northern cod stocks. An independent Newfoundland would have a fishery that was viable on every coast of the island and Labrador. It would not be rich, perhaps not as well off as mainland provinces are now—but then, much worse is true of the confederate Newfoundland of today. An independent Newfoundland would not be a dependent Newfoundland, forever going cap in hand for handouts from the feds and foreign corporations. And independent Newfoundlanders would not have to put up with the mockery, scorn, condescension and bigotry that is inherent in the term Newfie. L
JULY/AUGUST 2017 > legionmagazine.com
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2017-05-25 4:00 PM
