By Barry Stagg
April 1997
RICH MAN'S SPIRITUAL
Gordon Lightfoot wrote the tune Rich Man's Spiritual in 1964. For some time the tune has been one that I like both because of its evocative imagery and because I can play it on my guitar. Both the title and the lyrics symbolize a lot about what has gone on in the past thirty years with the charity/welfare state that has brought cyclical prosperity to Central Canada and a virtually permanent sense of dependence for Newfoundland and the rest of Atlantic Canada.
I know this is a bit of stretch to take Lightfoot and project him into what can be a very dry and possibly boring diatribe about that usual demon, the chronic Canadian welfare state. However give it a try anyway.
"Going to buy me a poor man's trouble": there is nothing quite so self-righteous and smug as the post-charitable state of some well- off philanthropist who has just told himself that the alms and pennies that he has contributed to the unwashed are going toward his eventual sainthood. Its essence is condescension. It is also the fundament upon which federal government policy toward Newfoundland has been based since Confederation. The plan is for the federal government to 'alm and penny' those transfer payments to Newfoundland in exchange for which Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders will express servile gratitude and compliance. The federal government has purchased our poverty and in the style of the great Victorian patrons it also demands our dependence and our allegiance.
Two rules apply when the rich man buys the poor man's troubles. First there must be gratitude from the poor wretch who receives the alms and pennies. Secondly the poor wretch must accept that the rich man is extracting the right to buy your baubles and trinkets as well as your troubles. A group of Indians on Manhattan Island learned about that concept in a famous $23.00 sale of that well known place to a certain Dutch explorer in the 17th century.
Two examples of this process in Newfoundland are Churchill Falls and Hibernia. In Churchill Falls the federal government called in its markers from Smallwood's Newfoundland thus usurping the baubles and trinkets of Churchill Falls through its Quebec nominee. Newfoundlanders found out that the alms and pennies extended from 1949 to 1966 had a price. The economics and the politics of the Churchill Falls deal are complex, hazy and to a large extent impenetrable. The facts though are more straight forward than the backroom dealings that we call politics in these matters. Newfoundland was persuaded to surrender its property as a goodwill gesture.
Hibernia is a different sort of story but the end result is the same. In 1979 it was confirmed that huge reserves of oil and gas were on the Grand Banks and that the big international oil companies were madly scrambling to get a piece of this deal. Before the question of ownership could be resolved the short lived Clark Conservative government in Ottawa was booted out and the return of Pierre Trudeau began in 1980. With the National Energy Program and the able assistance of energy minister Marc Lalonde, Trudeau blocked Newfoundland's claim to provincial ownership of the seabed. This effectively ended the development phase until the Trudeau regime was routed by Brian Mulroney in 1984.
Timing was everything. During the four years that the National Energy Program crippled Hibernia, the time to develop at a pace that would have made Newfoundland awash in oil royalties had come and gone. Hibernia went ahead as essentially a wonderful construction project not unlike the Churchill Falls construction project of the sixties. It is still a magnificent development but the chance to make Newfoundland a "have province" in the 20th century has come and gone. The time frame for significant oil wealth in the province is now more in keeping with the remaining life span of the Churchill Falls contract.
Some agree that the federal government should be the Newfoundland patron and that Newfoundlanders should be grateful for the attention and the tax dollars. Not surprisingly many who make a good living out of managing that flow of transfer payments are overwhelmingly in favour of the system continuing. However those who chafe under the yoke of dependence and subservience feel otherwise.
Let us not be too complicated in our analysis of the situation. The wealthy patron extracts your resources as some sort of moral payment for his charity. That is wrong and is called colonialism. Colonialism can exist inside a single nation. We need not get so sentimental about the Francophone and Anglophone hearts beating inside the Canadian bosom that we ignore the economic arteriosclerosis that has affected the eastern extreme of this country because of the demands of these two rapacious hearts. The endless tune of Quebec separatism becomes tiresome. The melody of the Rich Man's Spiritual begins to sound like a funeral dirge.