By Barry Stagg
July 1998
Economic Refugees
Industry Canada has released a report by University of Ottawa professor Serge Coulombe. The report in predictable Ottawa fashion calls for the depopulating of Newfoundland as a way of improving the economy. Apparently Ottawa is not aware that its efforts at depopulating the Atlantic provinces have been working effectively for years. Maybe the well-fed bureaucrats at Industry Canada wish to change the steady flow of economic migrants out of Newfoundland into a real stampede of refugees.
The idea of inducing a stampede of economic refugees out of Newfoundland is not original thought. Dr. Parzival Copes achieved notoriety and something approaching infamy in the 1960's when his similar theories were widely denounced in Newfoundland. The conventional wisdom was that Copes' ideas served as the theoretical basis for the odious resettlement program which eliminated many small self-reliant fishing villages in Newfoundland and transported its residents to larger communities that became little more than economic refugee camps.
From my vantage point overlooking Pape Avenue in Toronto I get a little testy with central Canadian pundits who wish to lecture and hector Newfoundlanders about how they should be grateful for the welfare payments coming their way from prosperous Central Canada. These self-righteous people with a typical missionary's zeal forget that the prosperity of Central Canada is directly founded upon the lack of prosperity of the nether regions of this country.
I read recently that many Canadians outside Ontario and Quebec consider national industrial policy for Canada has been effectively a regional development plan for Ontario and Quebec. The Auto Pact comes to mind as the most obvious form of a regional development treaty that Canada has to offer. While car plants prosper in the part of Canada that protrudes most southerly into the United States, the rest of the country has to go on buying cars produced in Ontario and produced there because of favourable tariff concessions negotiated with the United States. The existence of the Auto Pact provides a wonderful economic engine for Ontario. However the lack of similar trade arrangements for the rest of the country points out that, indeed, Canadian economic policy is preoccupied with the centre of the country. Perhaps that is the real essence of Confederation. The rest of the country exists as a repository of customers for the businesses that prosper in Ontario.
The Auto Pact was negotiated and completed in 1965. Think of what a similar treaty with the United States involving the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland would have meant for Newfoundland's hydroelectric industry in 1965. If free trade in electricity had been negotiated then Newfoundland would have been able to build Churchill Falls on its own and sell that electricity to very anxious American customers. Of course the idea of that treaty is a total pipe dream. It makes sense economically and Newfoundland would have been a prosperous province within a few years of the signing of such a treaty. Instead Churchill Falls is effectively owned by the province of Quebec and its nominee, Hydro Quebec.
The political rationale for the de fact expropriation of Churchill Falls by Quebec is well known. Still it behooves us to consider what could be if economic policy for Newfoundland was treated with the same priority as national economic policy for Ontario and Quebec. If the Newfoundland region of Canada had fair treatment in that regard then economic refugees looking desperately for work outside the province would be a figment of some pessimist's imagination instead of cold, stark reality in 1998.
It is unfair and unconscionable that Newfoundland, as an ostensibly equal partner in Confederation, is held hostage to Quebec in terms of hydroelectrical development. Contrast this to the free trade in automobiles that has existed for the benefit of Ontario and Quebec since 1965.
It is fair to say that the economic refugees that are contemplated by Industry Canada are creations of Ottawa whether by indifference, outright recklessness or a deliberate policy to emasculate the Newfoundland economy for the benefit of the larger partners in Confederation.
If Newfoundlanders are to be lectured by the righteous of Toronto about their economic dependency then it is fair to point out the policies that guarantee the province's subjugation. Confederation's economic migrants are the creations of government policy made in Ottawa.