Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (30 page)

“I like Newfoundlanders. I really do.”

My esteemed colleague Margaret Wente wrote that in a recent column on Newfoundland. Twice. Well, let me say at the top of this one: “I like Margaret Wente. I really do.” But I fear her repeated assurance—and I wish I wasn’t writing this—leaves me unconvinced.

After all, if you write a column describing Newfoundlanders as “picking the pockets of Chinese dry cleaners and Korean variety-store owners who work ninety hours a week,” describe them as “surly” ingrates, “gobbling” cod tongues while they luxuriate in a great “scenic welfare ghetto,” and, in general, put down everyone in Newfoundland as part of a set of lazy, self-indulging, whining spongers, rote-chanting “I like Newfoundlanders” doesn’t salvage the piece from being one sour, willful, collective putdown.

It’s a nasty cast of mind that traffics so generously in stereotypes. The Chinese are dry cleaners; Koreans know only convenience stores; Newfoundlanders are shiftless pickpockets. It’s a spurious contrast she sets up, and she knows it.

If the point Margaret was hoping to insinuate—that it is only “hard-working” new immigrants who actually “pay” into the revenues that provide equalization; that it is only the most industrious being extorted to pay for the least industrious—then she has so bizarre a conception of the Canadian tax system, and the principle of equalization, that it is beyond my ability and, more to the present point, my desire, to rescue her from it.

She makes other scattershot observations that are insult trying to dress as candour. Newfoundlanders have a “sense of victimhood that is unmatched.” Dear Lord, the global industry of professional victimhood has landed on many shores, and infested whole multitudes of causes and groups like a plague, but if one were seriously to look for a few places where the posture and cant of “the victim” is
considered unseemly and unworthy, Newfoundland would be one such place.

For all the social clichés and easy characterizations of “pogey” and “handouts” that seem to teem in Margaret’s “I like Newfoundlanders” brain, any real acquaintance with Newfoundland would have introduced her to a strain in my province’s character that is the radical opposite of her wildly gratuitous calumny.

I’ve known people so hostile to every notion of something for nothing, they wouldn’t trouble a neighbour to borrow a cup of milk. I’ve known legions of men and women who put in a lifetime’s work of a kind that those of us who spray words for a living should be embarrassed to stand next to.

Try going to Long Harbour, or Burgeo, or Lamaline, or St. Anthony or Port de Grave and meet with some of the men and women who have worked, really worked, for a living, Margaret, and try telling them to their faces they’re the spoiled delinquents of your furious imagination. Try telling the same to those who, after a life of work, have nothing, and have abandoned their homes and history to find work elsewhere.

We have our louts and layabouts—point me to any region of any country that doesn’t. But where you come up with the notion that Newfoundlanders—of all people—are the artists of victimhood is a trawl too confused for me to fathom.

Then there’s this business where Margaret writes of Newfoundlanders blaming “us” for the collapse of the fishery.

Who’s this “us”? The citizens of Canada didn’t collapse the fishery, and no one in Newfoundland even dreams they did.

The only point on which any blame is being assigned is over the stewardship of the resource since Confederation. That was federal. No one argues otherwise. And it is surely fair, and not victimhood, that if the government that had control failed in its stewardship, then it should bear some responsibility for so failing.

As for the money being poured into Newfoundland while we guzzle cod tongues and stare out the scenic bay, keep in mind the billion dollars a year going “outward” from the Churchill Falls hydro project that alone nullifies the equalization “debt.”

Her last shot was as carelessly aimed as all the rest. You can keep all the gas and oil revenue, she says, but pay us (there’s that enigmatic “us” again) back what we’ve sent down. Well, say I, not so fast.

Restock (and return) the Continental Shelf, turn back Churchill Falls and, one last thing, rescind the contemptible practice—which obviously has appeal to very limited natures—of dealing in caricature and stereotype and maligning an entire province on the basis of little more than ill-acquaintance and condescension.

Shut down the Newfie joke industry, of which, it mildly saddens me to say, Margaret Wente’s column is an extended and singularly hostile example.

That said, I like Margaret Wente. I really do.

Less than a week ago, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days, under perfect skies, driving through some of the resolutely beautiful communities of Newfoundland’s northeast coast.

Twillingate is a spectacular setting at any time. But under a summer sun, with smog-free air, this outport on the very edge of North America will easily lead even non-Newfoundlanders to believe that the world’s great vacation spots—the Caribbean islands, gaudy Maui of the Pacific, famous others—are greatly overrated as ecological marvels.

And this is not even to make mention of Musgrave Harbour. Not perhaps as celebrated as Twillingate among the cognoscenti of the mainland, Musgrave Harbour is the very jewel of the northeast coastline. The people are friendly, solicitous to be hospitable but tactful in its dispensation. Musgrave Harbour’s stretch of sea and beach would send pangs of bitter envy through the most devoted fan of Tofino, way over on the other side of the country.

The northeast coast is quite a place. It has produced a sturdy, hardy, generous band of people. Perhaps never more so than a few generations back, when the towns and villages of this part of the island brought forth the “iron men” who set their teeth to the howling gales and tempests of brutal North Atlantic winters and sent forth such
local heroes as Abraham Kean, the greatest sealing captain of all time, to the exigencies and unimaginable deprivations of the Labrador ice in midwinter.

It was also the nursery of quite possibly even more formidable heroes, their epic wives and mothers, who gave birth, raised families, took sorrow and hardship as it came, and endured absences laden with continual and surely heartbreaking anxiety each year the hunt was on.

These towns and outports are, naturally, less riven now by the strict and unforgiving imperatives of the pre-Confederation era. And since Confederation, the commanding spirits that would once have assumed prominence in the limited channels of the fishery, politics, the church or local commerce have turned their energies to the wider world of Canada or beyond.

The outports remain, but now, especially since the collapse of the cod stocks, they are less busy, and the harbours, inlets and coves are more slenderly trafficked. Some fishing remains, the glory of their setting remains, some trickle of tourism is solicited and received (Newtown, Bonavista Bay, is a wonderful stop—try the jam!), but, at least to my imagination, there is a glow of melancholy nostalgia over them even on the most luminous summer’s day.

Still, they are peaceful and tranquil—certainly so to the visitor. I mean to be neither condescending nor fulsome when I say they radiate a sense of remove and shelter from the gathering whirlwind of our too modern world.

All of which is the context for when, on leaving this
slice of rock, ocean and charm, I caught up on the news of the remaining part of the world.

Another (alleged) plot by mad jihadis, this time to murder thousands high in the sky on intercontinental flights leaving London; talk of “liquid bombs” and “disposable camera flashes” as detonators. We are getting very close to an absolute definition of “sinister” here. If the allegations prove true, this is a bitter plate some very evil men were about to serve on the innocent and unsuspecting.

How fragile we’ve become, how fragile the modern world, when, in its great capitals, you must not take toothpaste or hair gel as you make the transit from the terminal to the airplane. How much more anxious would millions of people be today, if the diligence of British and Pakistani agents had not revoked the planned slaughter, if a dozen great jets and all within them had been destroyed by murderous fanatics.

Sixty or seventy years ago on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, people worried about storms, shifting ice, the perils of direct encounter with an imperious Nature as they pursued a livelihood. Now, people may be going to a convenience store in London, or walking to a beach chair in Bali, or working in a great office tower, or just taking a subway home, and a percolating menace surrounds us and all we do.

I am not sure, in one sense, which was the more challenging life.

I agree with those who say we are in combat with desperate, determined and artful forces, and that—in our typically
overprivileged, casual, Western way—we do not take what threatens us with the mortal gravity it deserves.

One thing is certain: the quiet and peace of Twillingate and Musgrave Harbour, the sense of sanctuary I tasted in those places for a few sunlit days, seem to have departed the world forever.

Weather is the starting-motor of almost every conversation, the oil of every new acquaintance, the life preserver of all our awkward moments. A few of the great humorists were weather connoisseurs. Twain said some fine things about weather. I rather like his telling of how cold it once was: “Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death!” And Twain generally gets the credit for “Everybody talks about the weather; nobody does anything about it.”

Weather is always more than just weather. That’s a rule of life. Shakespeare knew this. He sketched it in
The Tempest
, but saved his finest stuff for
King Lear
. Lear comes to terms with himself only after coming to terms with the weather—storm therapy. Lear on the heath, caught “unaccommodated” under the furious elements, is Shakespeare at his best: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout …”

William knew his weather.

My crowd in Newfoundland are certainly the very scholiographers of weather, Nature’s own and very finest band of weather-readers. Lear would have had more than a few buddies in Newfoundland. Weather, back home, is talked about with greater frequency, with mixed and strained affection or savage, raging hostility, than I have ever noted anywhere else in this country. In Newfoundland, “weather” means “bad weather.” And that, alas, is mainly true. Bad weather we usually get, and always expect. If someone says “there’s a bit of weather coming on,” they inevitably mean a lot of weather’s coming on. All of it bad.

The main problem with Newfoundland weather, however, is not how bad it is, but when it’s going to happen and what form it will take. Newfoundland weather veers and oscillates, shoots up one bay and down another, crashes from snow to rain to fog, drizzle and sleet, and back again through every conceivable and mortifying combination, with dazzling unpredictability and precocious variety.

Whoever coined the term “weather system” never visited Newfoundland. There is no “system.” I’ve been in houses on the South Coast, down around Marystown, where there was a warm front on the porch and a blizzard in the kitchen. (Wasn’t going upstairs. God knows what waited up there.) Lear wouldn’t have lasted the night on the South Coast.

System? Randomized torment, maybe. But system? Ha!
The Liberals, a few years back, in the high noon of their genius, decided in the face of the sheer, God-defying impredictability of Newfoundland weather, that taking all forecasting off the island and out of the province was a good idea. They shut down the weather office in Gander, and decided it somehow made more sense to guess, from a weather station in Halifax, at next morning’s blizzard in Joe Batts Arm on Fogo Island.

No more forecasting from Newfoundland itself was the principle. They could just as easily have chosen Winnipeg or Hawaii, for the logic involved. In any case, there wasn’t a man, woman, boy or girl in any bay or harbour, city or town of all Newfoundland and Labrador that had the slightest idea why the bunch in Ottawa thought Halifax, the capital of another province, should be asked to utter prophecies on “the weekend weather” in Newfoundland.

Gander, after all, was at least “in” the weather it was taking a stab at projecting. Do people phone Calgary when they are going camping in Kelowna?

It defied sense. It defied reason. And it produced a massive protest, culminating in what was, I’m told, the largest petition ever signed in the province—more than 125,000 names, to haul the weather centre back from Halifax and moor it again on the drenched, blizzard-ridden, fog-tormented soil of the home province.