Yeah, I read that yesterday at the office. The tone of it got my blood boiling, but I couldn't help but agree with some of the points she was making.
Dependancy is not a pretty thing.
It's not just Newfoundland. If Wente has the clarity to bitchslap Newfs for dependancy, well... I can hardly wait to see her opinions on **Quebec. Judged by similar standards, how would Quebec fare under her whip, do you think? The words "total humiliation" come to my mind ... but it's not just Quebec.
The problem with Wente's observation is that it stops at NFLD's borders. She's describing a larger, systemic problem that reaches Prince Rupert.
Look at Canada as a whole: Think of how stunningly rich the land is in people, education and resources... Then look at gross mismanagement by it's social system pandering to the gimme gimme crowd. Eight out of ten provinces plus three territories on the take.
**(But that's a problem: Any apparent criticism of Quebec is automatically dismissed as "hate". I can't bash a Newf for following suit... I encourage it. The more idiots crying wolf and disingenuously whining, the better to call out PQ's fakery, and the better to deal with substantive issues.)
Ran is correct, it's not just Newfoundland.
The problem is Confederation and an elitist system that robs from one region to feed the greed of another.
Newfoundland would be a rich territory if it was an American protected area. It is poor because Canada is corrupted.
I forgot to add that we live in a country where equality is a charter right except when it comes to being unemployed. If you live in Kingston Ontario, you may have 4 months EI but if you are fortunate enough to live in Atlantic Canada, you may have 9 or more. Odd for a Federal program but part of the corrupted mental state of the nation.
I hope Newfoundland moves beyond the flag issue and begins the process to remove itself from the clutches of corrupted Canada.
Wente makes a few good points, but overall she misses the mark. Newfoundland has been around for centuries, but only part of Canada for fifty years. The long history of "The Rock" proves that its people are very self-sufficient and enterprising. It is the federal systeme that has attempted to infantilise them and to create artificial dependancies.
Newfoundland is being mercilessly exploited. Its cod fishery has all but disappeared, its hydro contracts with Québec are a sham, and now Ottawa wants to grab all the oil revenues.
As for the fishing industry, it should be remembered that it was only after Brian Tobin ( a Newfie) began firing cannons across the bows of Spanish trawlers that Ottawa finally got some balls.
Premier Williams is doing the right thing. I hope he sticks to his guns. Those revenues belong to Newfoundland....morally and legally!
Quebec and Newfoundland also have the highest income tax rates in the country. If I had my same job and income just across the Ontario border, I'd save thousands each year in tax. No wonder all the provinces with lower provincial tax are much better off economically; people can actually keep more of the money they earn.
There was a statistic a little while ago that 25% of unattached people in Quebec were collecting welfare. I understand that there are some people who genuinely need this safety net, but come on, this has gotten way out of control.
If there's such a thing as a Canadian culture or a Canadian set of values, it needs to be enlarged to include such ideas as personal responsiblity, work ethic and industriousness. We need to get away from this mindset that the government "owes" us or that the government should take care of us for sitting on our asses and sponging off the system.
Crosby is wrong to consider criticism against Newfoundlanders racism, if that is what he called it, but perhaps the point he is trying to make (or the point he should have been making) is that what a university friend of mine from St. John's once said:
Criticism of Newfoundlanders seems to be the only accepted form of bigotry left.
Now, we all know that the plight of the Newfoundlander is nowhere near that of other groups (i.e. Jews, African-Americans, etc) but write Wente's condescension about Jews, African-Americans, gays or any group with a history of bigotry directed towards them and no self-respecting publication would even consider publishing it.
So, this Black Newfie Rabbi goes into a bar....
Posted at 2005-01-07 17:22:05 [PermaLink]Oops, make that; Black handicapped lesbian Newfie Rabbi (I'm pretty sure that makes her Reform but I could be wrong)....
Posted at 2005-01-07 23:29:12 [PermaLink]Damien's comments are almost exactly my own views. Wente's comments are both insulting and true at the same time.
I've seen great positive change in Newfoundland in the last decade. An entrepreneurial spirit can be felt everywhere in the city of St. John's. The achilles heel of economic thinking in the province is the exageration of the importance of the natural resources. The oil will not outlive the babies born this year. It may not even outlive today's university students. The future depends on the ability of Newfoundlanders to take on the world in a knowledge based economy. There are significant signs of this happening around the province, though mainly in the city. The fish , oil and ore are merely part of the grub-stake needed to find the real wealth. Even with all the possible oil royalties, the future is dark unless the province wakes up to the real opportunities and takes some hard decisions. It must stop wasting effort on doomed dreams of saving a 19th century isolated rural economy as the 21st century turns the whole world into knowledge competitors and close neighbours.
Good post, Ponder; now all you need to do is get Danny on board.
Posted at 2005-01-08 16:14:30 [PermaLink]Belated response to the ponderous comments about
"doomed dreams of saving a 19th century isolated rural economy":
Fishing is a 21st century industry just as it will be in the 22nd century, barring a 'Soylent Green' solution from Ottawa.
The entrepreneurial spirit of the capital city is a continuing function of its own hegemonic relationship to the rest of the province. Other examples of this phenomenom exist openly in Canada. Charlottetown or Ottawa for that matter have similar underpinnings for their mercantilist commerce.
It will not do for the market economy of Newfoundland to distill down to electronic office work for which neither the province nor St. John's itself possess any significant competitive advantage. Wishing away the difficulties of revitalizing the fishing business by touting a Jane Jacobs styled Supertown approach is a retrograde turn back to the kind of economic rationalization that made Parzival Copes such a reviled economist in Newfoundland 35 years ago when I was a first year MUN student(as if you needed to know that).
By the way Boswarlos, on the Port au Port Peninsula is my own personal choice for the new information age megalopolis when orders come down from the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Barry Stagg, what in the name of God is a "Jane Jacobs styled Supertown"?
Have you ever actually read any Jane Jacobs' writings on economics? Her ideas about the role of markets and the nature of growth should be a blueprint for market-oriented economic and political change in Newfoundland and Labrador.
I've seen you bitch about Jane Jacobs in print before. What the f*ck is your beef, anyway?
Damian, Good points. I'm a BC'er (who grew up in Snowy-Peg, as it happens), but I hear you loud & clear. The patterns are much the same.
You reading Hazlitt? IIRC - it's been years since I read him, too - his arguments come down to the tyranny of the visual, i.e that we must use our rationale to see the logical economic good, rather than being distracted by a visible govt program that we can (literally) see. For ex, look at the contrast between a visible program such as a bridge to PEI, vs. a not-as-visible alternative, such as the myriad economic activity that follows a tax cut, that we never will see. Hazlitt notes that the latter is vastly superior, right? I would agree.
Next on your readin' list: Capitalism: the unknown ideal, by Ayn Rand. It's worth a look, if only for the essay by a young Alan Greenspan, lauding gold as a defence against predatory govts and their dilution tax (i.e. inflation). As Mr G. notes (I paraphrase from memory), we can't trust those inhenerently dishonest central bankers. Well, something like that...
Your takes on NF's getting screwed on their power deals were news to me, but then, you may or may not be surprised by the kinda info that filters thru to the rest of the country. That filtering process, and countering it, is what blogs are all about. Good luck.
Jane Jacobs, whatever the merits of her 1960's attack on the conventions of urban development, has become the patron saint of megacities in Canada. Her fans embrace her ideas as a way to encourage the expansion of industry-free cities, full of white-collar office workers paid for out of the public purse.
From my perch in the Annex, the essential Jacobian neighbourhood, it is clear enough that dilettante city folk see wider sidewalks and banning cars from downtown as issues paramount to other little items such as the choking cost of taxation required to keep up the salaries and benefits of her neighbours.
Better that the Annex aristocracy spent some of their idle intellectual power on things like smaller government and the elimination of provincial trade barriers. Then again, the magical aura of Toronto might be seen as less magic and more the product of the politics of tariff barriers if more light were shone where now only deterministic nonsense about the inevitability of urban superiority plays like a nursery rhyme
Stagg, it's obvious that neither the wide-sidewalk NIMBYists, nor you, have ever read, or at least not understood, any of Jacob's writings.
And as for the choking costs of taxation: read what she says about the subject. (BTW, it's suburbs, not central cities, that are the oversubsidized tax hogs.)