Newfoundland calls to amend Constitution
May 8, 2003
The last time there was a real Wrestlemania match between Newfoundland and Ottawa was way back when, as they say, giants walked the earth. Joey Smallwood and John Diefenbaker had a wonderful go at each other over one of the terms of Newfoundland's union with Canada. There were more sparks that flew out of that match than Churchill Falls has been able to generate ever since.
Today, another Newfoundland premier – one that, as he would be willing to admit, doesn't have quite the voltage of Joey Smallwood – threw down the gloves at Ottawa, and the current Liberal government, over Ottawa's handling of the Newfoundland fishery.
Roger Grimes went quite a distance. He wants no less than a renegotiation of the terms of union. At issue is the continued closing of the Newfoundland fishery. But contained in Mr. Grimes' announcement is a good deal more than just the fishery.
The Premier very clearly states that there exists a broad and deep feeling that Ottawa doesn't understand the consequence of its policies for Newfoundland, that there is a growing resentment over what he has called Ottawa's high-handedness when it makes decisions affecting Newfoundland that go so much deeper that the bare economics of those decision.
Ten years ago, the historic Newfoundland fishery was halted. Since then communities have been gutted of young people and the middle aged. Some outports have dwindled into shells of their former vitality. Each year of the so-called moratorium – and there have been ten of these years – has seen the gradual, slow atrophy of the cardinal signature of Newfoundland's way of being.
Closing the fishery was not the same as closing a chain of drugstores, or a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets.
So there is a background sentiment for what Roger Grimes announced today. And it is taking on some extra power from what is going on simultaneously in the New Brunswick crab fishery. That sentiment may be stated as follows: a growing sense of distance from Ottawa, the feeling that the whole East Coast, not just Newfoundland, is a item in the bureaucratic administration of Canada, rather than a living component of Confederation.
It's my feeling that it isn't the decisions in themselves or the facts behind them to close down the Gulf cod fishery or limit the crab fishery that have so angered fishermen in both provinces, but that they are issued from the federal Fisheries Department and a federal government from some high distance, unburdened by a real feeling for what these decisions will mean for those who have to live by them.
Roger Grimes is heading for an election soon. Without a doubt, he is taking the dramatic step he has taken impelled by the advantages he sees for him politically in taking it. Politics never sleeps in Newfoundland. That much is unchanged since Joey Smallwood's day.
His political advantage aside, he is also mining a very real perception: that the oppositionless government in Ottawa is no longer as careful as it should be with the texture of people's lives in what we call so easily "the outlying regions of this country."
And that the feeling of being left out constitutes one of the soft fractures of this Confederation, as alive in Newfoundland and the East Coast as it is, depending on the time of day, say in Alberta.
I don't know if what Mr. Grimes launched today will have a real benefit for Newfoundland fishermen. But he has done one real service already: he has broken the spell of complacency that just because the government in Ottawa doesn't face any real opposition, that there's not real opposition to the government in Ottawa.
For The National, I'm Rex Murphy. |
