October 2002
by Barry Stagg
One key issue that may receive less than full attention is one that would be provocative if fully examined. That is the matter of how Newfoundland and Labrador, the province, has fallen prey to a social disease common to all the other provinces and territories in this federation we embrace as Canada. The pathology of management level statism is the greatest source of restraint and decay in Newfoundland, as it is in, particularly, the so-called have not provinces. An indifferent federal government, lazy and uninterested in championing local industry falls back on subsidy and patronage programs that cultivate a class of local management elites. These privileged few, divorced from market commerce owe collective prosperity and endurance to the federal government's dedication to statist re-election spending and economically incestuous coddling. The white-collar public servant class of Newfoundland and their fellow travellers in the various federal mascot industries of the province form both a bloc of voters and, most significantly, groups of upper income loyalists who exchange fealty to statist superiors for career continuity. Funding becomes destiny.
The situation found in Newfoundland, featuring the presence of a significant bureaucratic or state dependent elite, is the same in all other parts of Canada. It is just that in the poorer provinces these statists are a more potent political and economic influence than they are in Ontario or Alberta. In any Newfoundland Royal Commission on this subject, care must be taken that conclusions made do not ignore the presence of such a significant non-market element nor should this diverse group's collective dedication to maintaining their dominance be airbrushed out of existence. To do so is to accept that confederation's policies of subsidies substituted for trade and resource protection are and will continue to be the accepted status quo.
The plainest and most painful example of how the statist status quo works is found in the fishery. The fishery is a resource destroyed by Canadian indifference and more than a suggestion of outright political malevolence. The Grand Banks were abandoned to bandit fishing practices, foreign and domestic, with a complete and sanctimonious refusal to exert national military control over this precious and world-significant treasure. In turn, a government elite of landlubbers has grown up, like weeds in a wasteland, whose members work, variously, in management of the dying fishery, dispensing other subsidies and at other conventional government jobs: teaching, hospitals, etc.
No jurisdiction can long endure as an independent and self-contained constituency if its resource base is undefended. Newfoundland has off-shore resources that demand national protection: oil and fish. Unless the national government militarily controls this ocean territory then the primary reason for confederation vanishes.
One clarion call should go out to this group of baby boomers who triumph career-wise in the face of so much economic devastation:. The civil servants of Newfoundland and their compatriots in the state dependent industries of the province must accept that their prosperity, their very careers are, at least partially, a function of the mismanagement of the natural resources of Newfoundland and Labrador and the displacement of government effort from proper, militant resource control into the social welfare management of certain and permanent poverty.
Newfoundland, the nation exists as Newfoundland and Labrador, the Canadian province as a commitment, a pact, made by Canada to protect its borders and Newfoundland's natural but wasting bounty. The privileged salary earners of the province must accept that an elitism based on poverty management is a fool's doomed existence. They must undertake to bridle their private self-interest in maintaining and expanding management salaried fiefdoms and instead commit to a conservative effort to build up Newfoundland, the nation, in or out of Confederation, as the case may be. Ask not for selflessness in this pursuit, rather demand an honest patriotism toward the lyrically idyllic Newfoundland that, in recent times, is enjoyed only by the self-same class who have the economic luxury of leisure time packaged as the summer holidays and vacations of the securely employed.