By Barry Stagg
August 1997
Newfoundland's Economic Vivisection
John Maynard Keynes has been dead for fifty years. A twisted version of the great economist's seminal theories lives on in Newfoundland. Regional economic development engenders from the interventionist economics of Lord Keynes. Where there is unemployment and a weak economy government will spend tax dollars to create jobs. That is Keynesian economics as practiced or butchered in Canada's Newfoundland.
State intervention means state control. It also may be state misuse, abuse or dalliance depending completely on the whim of the statist bureaucrats. In Newfoundland's case the statism of Ottawa civil servants meant mostly neglect and harmful intervention. There is a most obvious example. The state controlled fishery is now a virtual icon representing the maximum abuse and destruction that distant civil servants can wreak on a natural resource.
The abuse and destruction of Newfoundland through reckless Keynesian policies is even more profound than the desecration of the holy fishery. That is something very difficult to master given the abject state of the state administered industry. However, Ottawa governments are resourceful and imaginative in finding new ways to caustically dissolve the Newfoundland economy.
Over at the Treasury and Finance bunkers they outdid even the Fisheries Department They hauled apart the very entrails of the provincial economy and stuffed the vacuum with foul "make work" straw. A summation of the efforts of Ottawa's fiscal dilettantes would produce a distinct spinning motion if placed strategically over the final resting place of the great Lord Keynes.
Then again the task that fell to these worthies was not just scripted by conventional economics. They had the one hundred years run of the Indian Act as a puerile model to emulate. Would Professor Keynes now review his ideas if he were alive in 1997 to see how the concept of state intervention through reckless statute predated even his Depression-stimulated theoretical masterpiece of the 1930's? In 1930 the Indian Act was a hidden colonial shame that no proper English scholar would consider in the realm of economic theory.
With the passage of sixty years the paths of Keynesian statism and Indian Act paternalism converge. The convergence is at a crossroads where incidental sadists practice economic vivisection on aborigine and Newfoundlander alike.
Vivisection: a concept more conventionally associated with the anti-sealers and animal rights groups who oppose it passionately. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as 'surgical experimentation on living animals for scientific research'. Economic vivisection is the practice of foolish and careless substitution of government handouts for real wages and jobs . That is the story of both "Reservation Economics " and "John Cabot Economics".
Ottawa and its drones there and here have had nearly fifty years to work their casual havoc on the Newfoundland economy. Contrast that to the one hundred years they have devoted to the cause of emasculating the aboriginal economy. They are much further along the perverted road to success with our native brethren.
The Ottawa version of regional economic success is to strip the local economy of all private vigour and ability to act independently. When all depend on government money or regulation then the plan is finally a winner. That is the legacy of TAGS and ACOA and DREE and all these other acronyms that spell disaster. They force out the struggling natural capitalists and encourage and foster the inter-generational handout specialist who knows from his father and mother that a decent living comes anonymously and regularly and shamelessly from the cheques in the Newfoundland mailbox.
Newfoundland is being gutted by banal policies and procedures that rival acts of real genocide in their sinister audacity. Handouts kill initiative in people just as sure as they do the same for the wretched Canada Geese that panhandle on the Toronto waterfront. Where once dwelled magnificent independent splendour now lives squalid dependency. In Toronto the authorities talk of rounding up the guano-producers and sending them to a charitable slaughterhouse. In Newfoundland we hear the echoes of Parzival Copes preaching massive re-settlement to the mainland.
Without the powerful economic tools of Churchill Falls, Hibernia and a prosperous fishery then Newfoundland is a vulnerable victim waiting for the rusty economic scalpel of some Rideau Canal dandy working on a promotion and a pension. The natural resources of Newfoundland are powerful economic cudgels that Ottawa has usurped. In place of these Newfoundland tools are the narcotic weapons of chequebook economics. Of course the narcosis of the cheque is inflicted upon the recipient rather like upon the opium smoker of the days of Empire passed.
The last days of Empire have passed into history for Hong Kong. Newfoundland is well advised to follow that example. Retrieval of the Newfoundland economy from statist careerists on the Rideau Canal is an absolute necessity. Newfoundland is no place to put a Canadian colony.