By Barry Stagg
May 1999
SLIEVEENS AT THE HELM: 50 YEARS OF CONFEDERATION
Comments on current events are always a month behind in the mechanical life of a monthly magazine. As I write this, the 50th anniversary of Newfoundland's Conferation has just passed. Living and writing as I do in Toronto, the centre of the Newfoundland diaspora, I have to rely on news and comments coming from Newfoundland and fellow Newfoundlanders. The National Post did a decent job of reporting on the shallow virtue of Brian Tobin's various manipulative events purportedly celebrating Newfoundland but more accurately celebrating Brian Tobin. In the same vein, Newfoundland writer Marjorie Doyle, writing in the April 5th Globe and Mail, took the measure of Tobin and characterized his machinations as those of a "crass politician". However, it was the two part article in the Globe's Focus section written by Gwynne Dyer on successive Saturdays, March 27 and April 3, and John Gray's report "Tobin Pins Hope on Knowledge Jobs" in the Globe of April 3 that most caught my attention.
Renowned historian Dyer earned the ire and dismissive contempt of many in the Newfoundland establishment by suggesting that the vote for Confederation was achieved by fraud. However, his suggestions are hardly new and perhaps a more practical interpretation of the Confederation vote is that it was achieved not by overt fraud but rather by coercive and manipulative politicking marshalled by that legendary British and Canadian toy politician, Joey Smallwood. If Smallwood represented anything more than himself and the collective interests of the British and Canadian hierarchy during the Confederation debate, the next fifty years failed to disclose it.
Rex Murphy's ode to the inevitability and now moot nature of Confederation failed to convince me that Newfoundlanders, the collective, should take responsibility for the demise of that essential Newfoundland industry, the cod fishery. Mr. Murphy in his March 31 article in the Globe left me with the impression that he was rationalizing the continuing gulf between the mostly public-funded gentry of Newfoundland and the rest of the province.
Perhaps Mr. Rupert Short of Beaumont, Notre Dame Bay spoke the supposedly unspeakable truth when he confronted the Canada Conference, of which Mr. Murphy was an integral part, with the sobering revelation that only 4 of 41 adults in Beaumont had jobs, of which two were teachers, one the postman and one the Salvation Army Officer. The snorts of derision from grizzled Newfoundland politicians, Ed Roberts and John Crosbie failed to diminish the poignancy and newsworthiness of Mr. Short's comments. The wordiness of Rex Murphy was upstaged a little.
Finally, there is the John Gray report in the Globe on the Premier's newfound fascination with the "knowledge industries". In the April 3 Globe, Gray reported on Tobin's fixation on a supposed generational shift in Newfoundland. This seems no more, no less than the convenient political wish of the present Premier. Is he wishing away the hard battles that go with winning the war over Newfoundland's control of natural resources? If telemarketing can substitute for quintals of fresh fish, then the Premier seems all for it. There, he is on all fours with the illogic of the first Premier and his now infamous chocolate and rubber boot factories. These two were supposed to make the inshore fishery a quaint and obsolete oddity. "Burn your boats" said Smallwood. Welcome to Brian Tobin's chocolate factory.
The Newfoundland establishment seem intent on asserting that Confederation and its economic pitfalls were somehow inevitable, or in any event the collective responsibility of all Newfoundlanders. I beg to differ. The post-Confederation destruction of the cod fishery and the third world-style contracts for Churchill Falls are the products of low road malfeasance by specific individuals. There should no more be collective Newfoundland responsibility for these travesties than there should be collective Ontario responsibility for the depravities of Paul Bernardo.