August 2000
by Barry Stagg
The latest fishing fiasco in Newfoundland is a direct result of Jean Chretien's fisheries minister, Vancouver MP Herb Dhaliwal deciding that Grand Banks' shrimp should be allocated to Prince Edward Island business interests so they can sell it off to foreign processors. This is all such a typical example of federal Liberal appropriation of Newfoundland property. When Liberals are involved, so, inevitably, are the parasitic life form known as "biznizmen' in more sedate places like Moscow and Vladivostok.
This nonsense, inviting the predictable and proper Newfoundland reaction , is the same foolishness that has spawned the destructive give-away of Grand Banks' codfish to foreigners, the off-shore oil blockade of Pierre Trudeau's day and the now antiquarian decision of Lester Pearson to prevent Newfoundland from freewheeling its electricity across Quebec land. These are all part of a piece that involves confiscation of Newfoundland property rights and economic potential by the federal government. The administration of Newfoundland's resources for the greater Canadian good proceeds as usual.
All of this is integral to a standard Liberal process that has enabled politicians, the likes of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Clyde Wells and Brian Tobin to be elected and re-elected. Buying people's votes with handouts, promises of welfare and supposedly free goods is standard fare. Even though it is destructive and corrosive of social and economic structures, it proceeds apace. In fact, the Liberals were strutting around Halifax in late June, trying to hide George Baker's frowns, while announcing that another piece of flim-flammery was being put in place to distribute cash around the region in a run up to the next federal election.
Since high technology development is the latest fashionable craze of the Liberals, this fund is being put forward in the name of developing these types of industries in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. This untidy bit of vote buying is akin to the Liberals deciding to dump Toronto garbage over some Saskatchewan wheat field in the hope that it will fertilize an orange grove. Pure, unadulterated political opportunism is the only way to describe this. Even the Liberals themselves acknowledge that this is a barefaced attempt to buy people with their own money.
However, for the Liberals, Brian Tobin included, there is no escaping the Newfoundland reality that the federal Liberals, in the come- from -away embodiment of Fisheries Minister Dhaliwal, have once again appropriated Newfoundland fishing property and sent it elsewhere. This will be a very hard matter to deal with on the campaign trail whether you are Liberal MP George Baker or any of the other sycophantic bunch who hope that the Prime Minister's coat tails help them rather than swing them perilously close to the hot, burning coals of the political incinerator. Oh, to be a fish-fly on the wall in the office of turncoat MP Bill Matthews, lately of the Conservative Party but now sitting uneasily as a careerist Liberal MP representing the Newfoundland riding that guards the Grand Banks.
The Liberal philosophy, if such vacuous and self-defining ideas can be called philosophy, is to maintain Newfoundland as a dependent region, administered by Ottawa and bribed by sufficient federal monies to keep the retail cash registers humming and the government employed elite, (civil servants, teachers, etc.), happy enough that they totter along toward RRSP and government pension nirvana.
To see Newfoundland come to this is to weep. Perhaps W. B. Yeats was on to something in his seminal poem 'The Second Coming'. My barbarized Canadian version would have the Liberal's rough beast
'shrimping toward Ottawa to be born'.
I extend my apologies to the great Irishman.