Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  “National unity and the state of federalism,” added Reform founder Preston Manning, “is in better shape today than it was before this election began.”

  But no one really expected it to last long; it never does in Canada. Another election could just as easily throw power back to the Liberals. And, increasingly, Alberta was coming to resent how much of its oil money was being lost to such matters as equalization. There was also the continuing matter of senate reform, which Harper had promised to address. And then there was the growing issue of the environment, which Harper would need to deal with. The panic attacks might have subsided somewhat, but the nervous twitches, whether talking about the threat of Quebec separation or Western alienation, were a constant.

  The West was in, all right, but as one newly elected Western politician put it, this might delight and calm the West but would most assuredly cause “the Central Canadian Sphincter Index to shoot to the top.”

  One inescapable observation about the Harper victory was that the Conservative seats were almost exclusively away from the big cities, Edmonton and Calgary being obvious exceptions. And within the West itself there were signs of the urban–rural split, with Edmonton, Calgary, and booming Fort McMurray—now being called the “Shanghai of Canada”—drawing thousands of rural Westerners to high-paying jobs in and around the old industry.

  It didn’t help Saskatchewan that Alberta, with high-paying jobs and the lure of two mighty cities, was right next door. Young workers and young families were quick to follow opportunity. When my Globe and Mail colleague John Stackhouse was researching his Timbit Nation in 1999 he passed through Yorkton, picked up the local This Week, and found the following reference to the fact that twenty-six thousand people had bailed from the province that year: “Once again, Saskatchewan plays the farm team, educating people for the twenty-first-century economy, at the expense of the Saskatchewan taxpayer, and sending them off to build other provinces.” It all seemed to underline what Sharon Butala had written in an essay nearly twenty years earlier: “Saskatchewan was only the holding area where one waited impatiently until one was old enough to leave in order to enter the excitement of the real world.”

  Yet those who come from Saskatchewan, much like those who come from Newfoundland, have a sort of worship for the place—even if the place left behind has vanished, as in the case of Tate down the road from Raymore.

  Wallace Stegner, the celebrated American writer, lived with his family on a homestead near Eastend, Saskatchewan, between 1914 and 1920. He called it “Whitemud” in Wolf Willow, the novel he wrote of the Canadian prairies, and said that “prairie and town did the shaping, and sometimes I have wondered if they did not cut us to a pattern no longer viable.”

  Stegner returned to little Eastend after some three decades living and prospering in the southern United States. Places like Eastend, he believed, were not unlike a coral reef in that they were formed by substance built up through the “slow accrual of time, life, birth, death.… The sense of place so rock solid it, at least, never vanishes.” He walked about the town that had so formed him, and concluded, rather evasively: “Has Whitemud anything by now that would recommend it as a human habitat?”

  By not answering, he answered.

  When the Royal Bank of Canada did a study on what has been called “the internal brain drain,” it found there were two big losers among the ten provinces: Saskatchewan and Newfoundland.

  No one was surprised in the slightest.

  Thirteen

  The Colony of Dreams

  IT WAS IN BONAVISTA, three hundred kilometres up the wild and rocky eastern coast of Newfoundland from St. John’s that, legend has it, Giovanni Caboto first set his feet on firm ground on June 24, 1497. Giovanni was a Venetian but also an entrepreneur, so as “John Cabot” he claimed the land for King Henry VII of England and, for his troubles, collected a ten-pound bonus.

  Newfoundlanders consider this their first selling out by outsiders, and certainly not the last.

  John Cabot was supposed to be searching for the fabled western passage to Asia, but instead he found this massive rocky island at the far reaches of the Atlantic. He sailed along the western coast until he found the deep shelter of Bonavista Bay, where the cod were so plentiful his men had only to lower weighted baskets into the water then quickly haul them back up teeming with glistening fish. He called it “New-Founde-Land” in the language of his new patron, and the name stuck.

  There’s a statue of John Cabot on the outcropping of rock that stands between the sheltered harbour and the open sea. For years the fishermen of Bonavista would pass under his gaze as they headed out, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers had done for centuries. But no more—not since the federal government closed down the cod fishery in these parts and obliterated the only reason Bonavista stands here in the first place.

  Yet few here, if any, believe the federal fisheries scientists. They’ve been wrong before—who, after all, foresaw the collapse of the East Coast fishery?—and they say they’re wrong again. The fish haven’t gone; they’re just … not here. When Newfoundland’s Wayne Johnston was seeking a title for the novel he wrote about his home, he didn’t need to think long. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams could just as easily stand as the provincial motto.

  Not long after the most recent fisheries closures, I called in on Bonavista and found Larry Tremblett cleaning up his fishing boat that hadn’t left its moorings in weeks. The vessel, appropriately, is called High Hopes—and Tremblett certainly had them. He was convinced that Newfoundland remained a land of such untapped potential—the return of the fisheries, the offshore oil and gas—that it could equal Saudi Arabia if only it were managed correctly. “We’d have people coming down here to do our work for us,” he told me, pushing back a frayed and faded baseball cap over curling hair.

  It’s an old refrain and eerily similar to the “New Jerusalem” dreams of Saskatchewan. A half century earlier Newfoundland’s first premier, Joey Smallwood, predicted that his stubborn little province would one day emerge as the “new Alaska.” It’s always something. The New Norway. The New Iceland. The New Singapore …

  Tremblett pointed to the gulls floating on the calm harbour water. He said that the gulls of Bonavista, once so well fed from the constant dumping of cod guts from the plant, wouldn’t even acknowledge the boats coming in and out of the harbour. Now they sit and wait for the odd flush of crab waste. “Watch this,” he said.

  He walked over to his boat and returned with a handful of herring bait. He threw a couple down into the water and then stood, holding the bait high in a Statue of Liberty pose. The gulls swarmed him instantly, an image that was less a gentle East Coast postcard than something from a Hitchcock film.

  But Larry Tremblett doesn’t need a horror movie to frighten him. There are payments on his boat. And his two boys, who were supposed to join him on the boat, have left the province in search of work. He has no idea if they’ll ever be back. “This,” he said, spreading his hands over the scene, “is turning us into a senior-citizen town. The young people get out of school and pack up and go—they’ve got no other choice.”

  The mayor of Bonavista, Betty Fitzgerald, worries about her town losing its young, worries about distraught fishermen turning to drink, to violence, to suicide, worries about what the rest of the country—which she says she loves—thinks of her and her fellow Newfoundlanders. “You won’t find any harder working people in the country,” she said, her long, strawberry-blond hair flying in the wind that snaps the flags outside the town hall offices. “We’re caring, kind, hard-working people—so why put us down? Because we’re such laid-back people who don’t speak out? Why? … This really bothers me, that people would blame us. I don’t think of myself as lazy. Tell me that to my face and they’ll be sorry.”

  Fitzgerald puts in eighteen-hour days at a job that pays nothing in an attempt to salvage some future for the little town. The John Cabot statue attracts the
occasional tourist, but hardly enough. If the fishery takes too long to recover, or never does at all, towns like Bonavista are as surely doomed as the Tates and the Smuts three and a half time zones west.

  The decline of the Newfoundland fishery has spawned as many theories as gulls drifting over the quiet Bonavista Harbour. The only thing everyone agrees on is that bad management played a part—but whether it was Ottawa’s or the province’s remains open to question.

  “In 1975,” Michael Harris writes in his powerful 1998 book Lament for an Ocean, “there were 13,736 registered inshore fishermen in Newfoundland; by 1980, that number had ballooned to 33,640. There wasn’t a politician in the land who was prepared to accept the consequences of restricting entry to the fishery.” The federal government brought in the unemployment insurance that made seasonal work more attractive while the provincial government offered incentives and grants. Licences and quotas were easy to get, and so fish plants went up in unlikely places. And the discrepancies between reported and actual catch were never properly addressed. It was clear from the mid-1980s, Harris argues, “that the fishing industry could not support the number of people who depended on it for a living.” Harris was simply ahead of the times on this story.

  In the fall of 2006 the journal Science reported on a massive international study that predicted the collapse of the entire world’s fishery by the middle of this century. In the words of lead researcher Boris Worm, a Canadian, “I think we’re smart to realize where we’re heading, and avoid it.”

  All the same, it was not hopeful news for those Newfoundlanders who believe that if the cod isn’t already back it’s on its way soon. The study also found that 29 percent of the fish and seafood species are currently being caught at less than 10 percent of their historical high catches. Canada, Worm said, is already starting to scrape “the bottom of the barrel” in opening a fishery for sea cucumbers and hagfish in Cape Breton.

  “After that, it is jellyfish—and then no more.”

  IN THE LATE WINTER of 2005 I drove from downtown St. John’s out to Conception Bay and a small community called St. Philip’s. I’d come to visit a man called Gus Etchegary. In his home, high on the bluffs overlooking the spectacular bay, the eighty-year-old retired fish plant manager pulled out huge multicoloured bristol-board graphs to demonstrate his own theories of the fishery’s demise.

  “Honest to God,” he said while assembling his massive charts, “I hate all the whining and griping. I hate it. But there’d be no need for any of it if our resources had been managed properly.”

  Joining Confederation back in 1949, he said, was nothing short of a shotgun marriage forced on islanders by Great Britain. The worst part of it, he continued, was the transfer of control over the fishery to Ottawa, not to St. John’s. His charts showed massive catches each year from 1875 on: decades of consistent 200,000- to 300,000-tonne takes, with another 75,000 tonnes or so going to foreign fleets. And still, year after year, the fishery recovered.

  After 1949, however, everything began to change. Cod stopped being salted and was instead frozen. European war fleets were turned into fishing vessels, with trawlers and then freezer trawlers moving in to take what used to be caught by jigging with line and hook. By 1968, Etchegary said—thick finger hammering at a spike in the chart—the foreign catch had soared to 810,000 tonnes. “And that wasn’t even accurate. They were underreporting.”

  The spawning stock shrank, the catches fell year after year, and eventually the fishery collapsed. “The fish,” Etchegary said, “never had a chance to recover. Just think of it. A totally renewable resource worth more than $3 billion a year—lost to mismanagement. We should be making a significant contribution to the national economy, not always being criticized for having a handout.

  “And here we are, for Christ’s sake—we’re destitute.”

  MAINLANDERS TEND TO SEE Newfoundland as forever on the receiving end of equalization payments—and, indeed, roughly one of every three dollars Newfoundland spends today does come from those federal payments. But for Betty Fitzgerald, too many Canadians likely agreed with Stephen Harper when he spoke of a “culture of defeatism” in the East.

  Newfoundland, in truth, often led the country in growth in the early part of this century, its percentage increase in gross domestic product rising more quickly than other provinces’ in part because it had been so much lower to begin with. That growth, however, is another story in the urban–rural split. St. John’s and its suburbs were booming, with housing prices going up, SUVs in the driveways, a thriving university, and myriad new developments in oil and high tech that had nothing to do with the vanishing fisheries.

  Those not living on the more prosperous Avalon Peninsula, on the other hand, could feel things slipping away. And yet they were determined to find some catch that would allow them to remain. At one point close to tears herself, Fitzgerald shook with anger: “People call us crybabies— well, I’ve got news for them. We’re not crybabies. We’re fighters. And now we’re going to have to prove that we’re fighters.”

  Newfoundlanders are tough. You have to be tough to survive here. The history of Newfoundland is filled with shipwrecks and seal hunt disasters and lost fishing vessels. Its early governors used to bail at the first sign of snow until in 1817 orders came from London that the current governor, Admiral Francis Pickmore, must stay over and thereby demonstrate to the locals that their betters were truly better. In the spring Pickmore headed back to London—in a coffin.

  “A person might live to the end of his days,” Newfoundland humorist Ray Guy once wrote of the resilience of Newfoundlanders, “and never cease to marvel and wonder, one way or another.” The wonder today is whether the province is up to battling what may prove the toughest element of all: economic reality. With collapsing fisheries and few jobs, the small places are shrinking, the people leaving for better opportunities either in St. John’s or, more often, on the mainland.

  This “emptying out,” of course, is also occurring in Saskatchewan, northern and northwestern Ontario, northern Quebec, the rural parts of Atlantic Canada, and isolated pockets right across the country. But only in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador is it necessary for those running for premier to talk about stopping the flow and even bringing the young people back. And only in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador—whose half-million people live on a land mass the size of Japan, with the lowest population density of all Canadian provinces—has out-migration become part of a larger story of discontent.

  So serious did this become that in 2002 a Royal Commission began conducting hearings on “Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada”—a provincial venting that produced eerie echoes of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future a decade earlier. Canadian civil wars, it might be said, are fought sitting down or, in their most physically active form, standing patiently in line for microphone no. 3.

  Vic Young, the erudite St. John’s businessman who chaired the Newfoundland commission, was fully aware of the growing discontent. “We brought enormous riches into Canada,” he announced at the opening session of this $3 million navel-gazing exercise. “Our fishery, our forests, our hydro power, oil and gas reserves, our people, our strategic location. But we find ourselves at the bottom of the ladder. How can there be such a disconnect between what we brought into Canada and where we are today?”

  That disconnect had outraged an increasing number of provincial personalities, including James McGrath, former federal fisheries minister in the brief 1979 Joe Clark government (“I wasn’t there long enough to do any damage”) and former lieutenant-governor of the province. “Why is it,” the man with the thick glasses and wild head of white hair asked when I visited him at his “town” home in St. John’s, “that we’re one of the wealthiest pieces of real estate on the globe and yet we’re perceived as the basket case of Canada?”

  Newfoundlanders, McGrath said, were fed up with playing the hapless buffoon to the rest of the country, the punchline to so many jokes and, in
the fall of 2006, the subject of ridicule in a car commercial for the manner in which they speak. Thanks to education and the sophistication of modern communications, the new Newfoundland, he believed, had finally grown out of its “incredible inferiority complex.” “We are,” he said, “no longer ashamed of our culture and our accents.”

  McGrath had come to believe that for Newfoundlanders Confederation was a raw deal that verged on “cultural genocide.” Ottawa destroyed the fishery. Ottawa wants its share of oil royalties. Ontario takes the iron ore away for processing. Quebec takes hundreds of millions of dollars a year away in electricity. Those who’d been against Confederation in 1949—and the McGrath family numbered among the St. John’s “townies” who opposed it—are back in full voice, joined by a frustrated youth whose province keeps leading the country in economic growth yet cannot offer them work.

  “In 1949 we had a $40 million surplus,” McGrath argues. “We had no debt. We had the world’s biggest fishery. We had untapped mineral resources in Labrador. We didn’t even know about the oil and gas off our shores or about the hydroelectricity from Churchill Falls. That’s the ‘basket case’ we were when we came into Canada. And now there’s this perception in Canada that Canada would be better off without this basket case?”

  The growing frustration even led to a province-wide demand for a proper balance sheet that would prove Newfoundland has more than held its own in Confederation. One local newspaper, The Independent,concluded that since 1949 Canada has benefited by $53.5 billion, with a provincial return of only $8.9 billion. The federal government, on the other hand, cited other statistics to argue that billions more have flowed into the province than out.

  In typical Canadian style, province and federal government were heading in opposite directions.

  In early 2005 the new and nervy premier, Danny Williams, ordered the Canadian flag be removed from all provincial buildings. The revolutionary pink, white, and green flag of the original colony went up poles all over the island. Williams also rather brilliantly turned desperate federal campaign promises into a new deal on oil royalties and protection under the absurdly complicated equalization program. There were political and financial victories, but still the out-migration continued—in particular to Alberta and its high-paying jobs in the oil industry.