June 2003
by Barry Stagg
Russell Kirk , great American writer, historian and conservative thinker ended his Conservative Reader anthology by including this pithy comment on modern folly: "The totalists say that the old order is a corpse, and that man and society must be fashioned afresh, in grim fashion, upon a grim plan."
Kirk could have been writing about the woeful philosophy of Joe Smallwood:"Burn your boats". That creed informed the established attitudes of fifty years of Confederation. A simplistic, irrational tribute to modernist hubris and silly dreaming translated into a lifetime of contemptuous treatment of fishing folk and fishing industry. Nothing was too whimsical to be tried in lieu of hard policy by the Rideau Canal Fishing Admirals. If there was a way to diminish the stature and power of Newfoundland fishing, it was found and implemented by Ottawa.
Life as a fishing province- a country subsumed in the confederation of Canada- became a series of contrivances. Fishing and the great bounty of the Grand Banks were treated with the disdain that detached career bureaucrats muster for the odd habits of the local peasantry. Smallwood came through for the federal Svengalis in the way he was always intended to perform. The province's first premier was an advocate and a true believer of the vain modernism that imagined that sufficient exchanges of salaried cash between shirt, skirt and tie earners would replace the basics of economics: resources-production-supply-demand. The fishery- a true natural bounty- was chopped into statist chunks until it resembled nothing less than a disastrous work camp straight out of Moscow, circa 1955.
Newfoundland in 2003 has a grimly prosperous white collar sector that is essentially an economic virtual reality. In the devastated fishing towns, the teachers, doctors, nurses and the petty regulators make up a government class divorced from the misery and emptiness of the fishing folk. The cursed folly of managerialism has brought forth an economic caste system where the homogeneity of bureaucracy- the same white shirts and skirts from St. John's to Ottawa, from Clarenville to Kingston-fosters an economy based on management of misery, on regulating decay, decline and dependency.
Any talk of constitutional reform for Newfoundland is now in the category of tardy barn door closing. It can be argued that the demise of the fishery and the co-opting of its people into statist dependency is a successful government project which began one second before midnight on March 31, 1949. Let there be no other projects. Resource recovery is a long term exercise in having faith in the resilience of Newfoundland's natural bounty- I refuse to call it an 'eco-system'. Constitutional manipulation is no substitute for Canada's military policing of the fishing grounds. Absent that commitment, ruinously resisted in days past, the burning of boats will be denied for want of timber and the descent into Soviet-styled economic decadence will be complete.