September 1996
by Barry Stagg
THE MORALITY OF 1949
March 31, 1999 will mark fifty years of Newfoundland in Confederation. It looks very much like Newfoundland will go into its golden anniversary having to tread cap in hand and right carefully too. Special and servile deference must be made to the generous Ottawa Brahmins who heap these convenient transfer payments like Christmas hampers. Is this old game just an odious repeat of what the British shoved down our gullets in the hundred years of Responsible Government leading to the Commission of Government collapse in 1933.
Have a look at these pieces of recent Newfoundland history:
1. Newfoundland's share of the Canadian Shield, that is to say Labrador, has not brought Newfoundland the riches that the rocks of the Shield have yielded for Ontario and Quebec.
2. Churchill Falls exists as a Quebec industry because the federal government in the 1950's refused the repeated requests of the Smallwood government to legislate a federal power corridor across Quebec.
3. At the same time the Liberal government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was running roughshod over the rights of the prairie provinces by legislating a national gas pipeline from Alberta flowing eastward to Ontario and Quebec. Naturally enough the federal regime had no difficulty ordering that the pipeline be built over Western land sending the petroleum wealth of Alberta and Saskatchewan eastward. The "National Interest" was the political commandment invoked to do this controversial deed.
4. Sarnia became the oil refinery capital of Canada because of the national pipeline legislation.
5. Quebec Hydro exists as a monster power utility because Canada would not legislate a national power corridor to carry Newfoundland electricity from Churchill Falls to the appliance obsessed masses of New York and New England.
6. Full control of Churchill Falls would have given the Newfoundland government the means to attract the notoriously fickle heavy industries to the home of the cheap and plentiful juice from the Big River.
7. Secondary production from Newfoundland mining deposits is virtually nil. A case in point is the complete export of the Wabush/Labrador City iron ore through the Quebec sea port of Sept Isles.
8. Even if there was no tax take from Churchill Falls, the clout that control over the power capacity gave Newfoundland would have made it a major industrial province.
9. Churchill Falls was anything but revenue neutral and was a great source of wealth for Quebec Hydro and the friendly separatists hanging around the Plains of Abraham.
10. Newfoundlanders and the provincial economy were deprived of the industrial clout and the tax revenue of Churchill Falls.
11. All of these activities took place after Newfoundland entered Confederation.
12. When the Hibernia oil field appeared ready to generate " Texas tea" type wealth and business for Newfoundland in the eighties, the federal government stepped in and obtained the equivalent of a legal injunction preventing Newfoundland from dealing independently with this property. That federal action was under the discredited auspices of the "National Energy Plan" and the Allan MacEachen budget. These federal fiascos ended the off-shore "oil play" as a profitable private matter.
13. The strangling of the oil boom by the last Trudeau government(1980-1984) represented an eternally lost opportunity for Newfoundland to profit mightily from the frontier oil frenzy.
14. The Canadian government in two significant situations: Churchill Falls and Hibernia has stepped in and usurped Newfoundland control over its own property.
Where is the morality in a federation that agonizes over the hurt feelings of an increasingly over-indulged Quebecois mass while trampling on the economic hopes of a province that has never had the blessed chance to be over-indulged or wealthy?
Where is the justice and the sense of national purpose in expropriating opportunities from Newfoundlanders while making it convenient and inevitable for Quebecers to take advantage of these same things?
There is certainty where justice and morality are absent: The federal government is about to defer to Canada's spoiled brat province in Quebec once again. We are apparently supposed to cower and shudder while Chretien and his agents go about the serious business of saving us once again from the scorn of the Quebecois.
Newfoundland should not be coming cap in hand begging for a stronger and more authoritative federal government to take care of the chronically feeble. Rather Newfoundlanders should be attacking the moral authority of a Canadian government that has handed over Newfoundland resources to Quebec, to foreigners and to itself. This same crew of hypocrites leads a choir singing hymns about sharing and goodness and understanding while the secular priests of politics go about their sordid business of making sure that the Newfoundland resource treasury is rarely used for the primary benefit of the citizens of the province.
Make your plans early for that golden midnight hour in 1999, just a split second away from April Fool's.