Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (31 page)

It was bad meteorology; that was indisputable. But it was stupid politics incarnate. Weather is the currency of every Newfoundland conversation, and it may be a misery,
but it’s our own misery. Outsource the weather—why, that’s Newfoundland blasphemy!

This saga has an interesting end. On Wednesday, the day after introducing the Accountability Act in the Commons, Stephen Harper visited Newfoundland—his first trip there as PM. He gave a speech in St. John’s, but he announced the reopening of the weather office in Gander. The Harper boys are already looking toward the next campaign, is what this tells me.

The Liberals had better tidy up that leadership business real quick. It’s no time to be dallying when Mr. Harper, only two months in, is scoring points on “fixing” the weather in Newfoundland.

Michael Ignatieff, quick: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks.

It’s a Danny Williams year back home in Newfoundland. The Hebron oil field is on again.

Mr. Williams has played a hard game with the big boys and he’s won. That is the near-universal verdict, and in politics there is nothing quite as attractive as winning. It’s a victory that has a bigger charge or echo in Newfoundland than it would have in perhaps any other province. That’s because, almost since Confederation became a reality, the
Newfoundland record on setting the terms for the exploitation or management of its resources has been such a dismal one.

It all goes back, as does almost all modern Newfoundland politics, to Joey Smallwood’s reign—and that term is chosen advisedly. Smallwood had many attractive qualities, but among them we may not include either prudence or prescience. In the presence of big-name promoters or industrialists, hard man Joe purred with obsequiousness, starstruck and infatuated from mere proximity to the rich or the great.

His economic development policy can easily be seen in retrospect for what it was: a series of manias. Starting small, it went from hockey stick factories to a chocolate bar company, a rubber boot plant to a strange and darkly comic essay in cattle ranching. Alas, Newfoundland never did catch on as Wyoming north. From there, it ricocheted to greater and grander schemes, many of them midwifed by dubious promoters or downright fraudsters.

Smallwood’s formula was a basic one: huge government subsidies in exchange for jobs up front. Combined with what can only be understood as an absolutely positive thirst for snake oil and a worshipful gratitude for those who relayed it, by the tanker truckload, to his eager throat: this was not a solid business plan.

The greatest scheme was the Churchill Falls development. It married Smallwood’s mania for job creation with his ego-besotted lust to be associated with a “great” enterprise.

Seeking to get that project off the ground brought “the little fellow from Gambo” into the chambers of the fabled Rothschilds, and even to an audience with the very hero of the twentieth century himself, Winston Churchill.

To say such encounters placed Smallwood’s judgment on sabbatical implies that, on the matter of Newfoundland’s economic development, he had judgment to begin with. But, alas, that was not so. Having met with the great, he began to believe he was one with them, floating above mere mortals on the hurricane currents of his own deeply aggravated self-regard. By this point, Smallwood was so popular politically, without challenge either in the House of Assembly or within his own cabinet, that he was less a premier than the Pharaoh of the North Atlantic.

This was the psychological context in which the deal to develop Churchill Falls was brewed. Its most irresistible characteristic was an immense upfront payoff: thousands of construction jobs for Newfoundlanders. And in Newfoundland politics, jobs, then as now, are better than gold—they are platinum. Where was the cold eye to look over the contract for the long term, to weigh immediate benefit against long-term and catastrophic inequity? In the climate of the time, in the near-delirium of this “great imperial project,” disinterested scrutiny was a phrase in a dictionary no one owned.

And so, as Newfoundlanders, to our woe, have long recognized, we signed on to one more megaproject—the greatest of them all—only, over the long years since, to see the
substance of its benefit, the billions of profits teeming from the Upper Churchill till 2045, flow to another jurisdiction.

This is the backdrop against which Premier Danny Williams’s obstinacy (as it is perceived out of province) on so many matters plays. Most particularly, it is the background on which his hardball with the offshore oil companies is perceived. No wonder the deal has elevated his already stratospheric political stock, and no wonder, either, that, as he approaches a provincial election, he is a one-man juggernaut. He’s right to have been so strenuously resolved that an economic mischief of heroic proportions for Newfoundland not be repeated.

His very success, however, is building a worrying symmetry. In Newfoundland right now, Mr. Williams is unopposed and unopposable. In the authority he has over Newfoundland politics, and in the scale of his current eminence, he is stronger and of more sway than even his historic predecessor, Joey Smallwood.

He is neither as fitful nor as naive as Smallwood, which is a mercy beyond all thankfulness. But he is so powerful at a time when the future of Newfoundland (the offshore success notwithstanding) is so precarious, that there is only one voice in Newfoundland that really counts.

There’s the symmetry. And that is a peril, both for us and for him.

There have been many books on Newfoundland politics, but none that captures all, or even a flare, of the grim, manic, impulsive, compulsive, erratic, exultant and heartbreaking flavour of the sport.

Newfoundland politics is emphatically not one-dimensional. True, like the politics of other provinces and places, it does, on a democratically periodic basis, concern itself with a collective assessment of the villains and scalawags in office and allows for a contest to refresh the mix. You know these events as elections.

But the real flavour of Newfoundland politics can’t be picked up from some post-election scoresheet. It’s in the tone and byplay of the campaigns, the anecdotes from elections past, legendary nomination battles—all the great tidal wave of political minutiae that has never made it to the headlines outside the province, and not that often within.

One famous election, Joey Smallwood’s last as premier, ended up in a near tie: Liberals 20, Conservatives 21, New Labrador Party 1. To add to the tangle, several individual districts were won by extremely narrow margins—the narrowest by one vote. In that district, there was a polling station in a village roughly halfway between Cow Head and Baker’s Brook by the name of Sally’s Cove.

By the morning following this closest of elections, it was learned that all 106 Sally’s Cove ballots had been burned. (Legend has it the ballots were used to start a fire.
They surely did.) The fate of a whole government hung on incinerated ballots, atoms of ash swirling in the fog-choked winds over the wild coastal shoreline of the Great Northern Peninsula. Democracy cremated.

The burning of the Sally’s Cove ballots—an incident by turns as ludicrous as a Monty Python sketch and as sinister as a John Le Carré fable—left all Newfoundland in suspense as to which party—Joey Smallwood’s or the young Frank Moores’s—was to rule, while a perplexity of judges and a conundrum of constitutional experts wearied their brains and souls in an attempt to sort out the mess.

All this played to a counterpoint of relentless skulduggery being practised on a number of backbenchers, through bribes, booze and bombast on a scale unknown since the days of Tammany Hall. Picture, if you will, a garage sale of backbenchers, a flea market of the fickle. Some were bought, then rebought. One was bought so often it was impossible, on any given day, to determine who owned him.

One loose cannon was put “in storage” in a St. John’s hotel room with enough booze to secure him for a few months and keep him away from the lures and guiles of the other side. And one of Frank Moores’s successful candidates promptly quit the Conservatives because Mr. Moores wouldn’t publicly offer him a cabinet post even before he, Mr. Moores, knew, or could know, he would be premier.

I cannot remember a wilder farce, and nothing I’ve seen on the mainland—and I’ve been to British Columbia—compares with it. I remember another close election in
which a Liberal candidate won a tight race on the strength of a story about “losing the family rosary beads.” That was, alas, ever so long ago, and it is questionable now whether there are many candidates with rosaries to lose, and certainly none with the wit to make a story of the loss.

Of the most recent campaign, that of this week, in which Danny Williams won record approval—an almost frightening popular endorsement—it was so intensely focused that it was almost “dry” of those splendid moments and adventures that diversified the many that preceded it.

Mr. Williams has acquired, in a very short time, superlative campaign skills, and those, in combination with his superbly vocal “standing up for Newfoundland” in various contests with prime ministers and oil companies, have turned him into something of an instant local hero. But it was not just the theme of standing up for the province or his theatrical repertoire that got him the landslide.

There is an undercurrent of deep apprehension about the fate of Newfoundland, over the survival of the main currents of the singular culture produced by a long and unique history. That apprehension emerges, even amidst the current so-called oil boom, from the gradual emptying out of Newfoundland’s outports, the spectacular social erosion brought on by the collapse of the historic fishery.

Mr. Williams was seen as the only figure large enough to at least address this apprehension, and it was to the tender hope he could stave off so grim an outcome to Newfoundland history that he owes so much of the endorsement that he
received. Newfoundlanders are far from sure that he, or anyone, can really meet this challenge, but they are quietly praying it may be so.

Maybe, in its way, this is yet another story about rosary beads after all.

It’s too bad Loyola Hearn, who was the Newfoundland minister in the Harper government, is not running again. After a long career in politics, he has decided to leave the game.

Mr. Hearn is a very decent man, a product of the great coastal stretch outside St. John’s we call the Southern Shore. He is an “outport” man, just as Danny Williams is a “townie.” The health of Newfoundland has always, by some peculiar chemistry, depended on a dynamic equilibrium of its outport and townie components.

Today, after the collapse of the cod fishery and with the near-coincidental explosion of offshore oil, the out-port dimension of Newfoundland is almost in ruins, while St. John’s and its suburbs are rich and active as never before. There are two Newfoundlands. The capital city and environs are in a fever of development, while vast stretches of coastal communities are inert and underpopulated, mere phantoms of what once they were.

Mr. Hearn’s retirement deprives Newfoundland politics of a necessary voice, one suited by temperament and background to speak on the overwhelming subject of the accelerating extinction of Newfoundland’s quintessential outport heritage. It deprives the province of an authentic counter-voice to the extremely present Premier Williams.

This is not the only unhealthy imbalance in the province. There are forty-eight seats in the House of Assembly, and Mr. Williams owns forty-four of them. The Liberals, with three, are the rump of a rump, and the NDP, with one, is a vapour. The numbers tell it: Mr. Williams is King of the Rock, the most powerful politician since Joey Smallwood. The scope of Newfoundland politics has shrunk to oil and Danny Williams.

There are only two ways of doing politics now: Mr. Williams’s way, or no way at all. Those who cross him, in what he sees as “Newfoundland’s interests,” are given short shrift and none too subtly derided as working against Newfoundland. This was a Smallwood turn, and the least attractive aspect of his quite mixed political qualities. In Mr. Smallwood’s last and bitter days, he turned Newfoundland politics into a one-man show incarnate.

That’s why it was so very unfortunate that, when Mr. Hearn—who, while he may not be as good a politician as Mr. Williams, is at least as honourable a Newfoundlander—said he was retiring, Mr. Williams issued this statement: “The one thing that my cabinet ministers have done throughout is stood up for their constituents, for the electorate and
the people they were elected to represent and they have done that. And it’s unfortunate in the last few years that Loyola hasn’t done the same thing.”

Oh, cut it out. This “standing up for Newfoundland” palaver is best administered in small doses, if at all. And it never fits the mouth of the person doing the “standing up.” Furthermore, a difference of opinion, a clash of party interests, should never be categorized as a clash of patriotism. There is a jingoism of small places as well as of large, and Newfoundland is more susceptible to it than most. Newfoundlanders are ferociously fond of Newfoundland, but that very affection can play havoc with our judgment and our politics.

The idea that Mr. Hearn, because he disagreed with Mr. Williams, acted with less than honourable intent toward Newfoundland is ludicrous. Mr. Williams, in fact, is a much better man than his own statement would have you believe.

And now that the federal election is on, Mr. Williams has thrown himself with gale force into the campaign. He sent an email to his entire caucus to determine whether they were onside in his campaign against “Steve.” And out of the forty-four, there was only one spine. It belongs to Elizabeth Marshall, who earlier—this is the distilled version—quit her cabinet job because she wasn’t going to put up with the premier running her ministry for her. Ms. Marshall alone didn’t respond with the ovine bleat, “Yes, sir, yes sir, three bags full.” All the others signed on.