A place full of Canadian history
Strictly speaking, Canada 150 is a misnomer here, as Newfoundland only joined the Confederation in 1949. Yet Newfoundland is so fittingly Canadian, it is hard to imagine it otherwise: the sea, the coast, the north, the indigenous people and the first European explorers — the Vikings arrived centuries before Columbus sailed — the closeness to Europe and the opening to a new continent. And the moose.
Without Canada, what would Newfoundland be? Well, Newfoundland. It is fully Canadian, but the visitor senses that it would be fully what it is regardless. That it has its own time zone reminds everyone that it is both part of the whole and still set apart.
The last big celebration of the 1867 British North America Act, Canada’s 125th in 1992, didn’t go so well here in Newfoundland. In what might have been the oddest Canada Day celebration in either of the former dominions, Newfoundland’s own John Crosbie — the federal fisheries minister — returned home to protesters and shouting matches about the impending closure of the cod fishery.
“I didn’t take the fish from the g-damn water!” the fiery Crosbie countered about overfishing. The next day he announced a moratorium on the cod fishery. It was proposed to last until 1994. This year marks its 25th anniversary.
The closure of the cod fishery meant some 30,000 people were laid off, or more than 10 per cent of the entire labour provincial labour force. It was the largest layoff in Canadian history. It was a devastating blow to rural Newfoundland in particular, which had survived on the cod fishery since not long after John Cabot’s ships were impeded in their progress through Newfoundland waters, so teeming were they with cod.
The Newfoundland cod fishery was something of a metaphor for Canada’s pioneers. It was not an easy way of life, but it offered a modest prosperity. It attracted those seeking a better life from afar. That meant waves of Irish from the next island over, who found Newfoundland’s geography familiar and shaped a familiar culture there too, as well as Portuguese and Spanish fishermen who came over seasonally.
Canada Day 1992 marked the end of the cod fishery, and while Newfoundland would go down hard, it would not stay down. Again a metaphor for Canada’s economic development, the province would shift from the fish in the water to the oil found underneath i t. Offshore oil development would, along with Newfoundlanders working in the Alberta oil sands, bring an entirely new level of prosperity to Newfoundland, just as Canada was billing itself an energy superpower. The prosperity was real, but the life was different.
It was at Bay Bulls that Crosbie was besieged on Canada Day 1992. Twenty- five years later at Bull Arm, the gigantic Hebron oil platform was just towed out to sea this month.
It is, by any measure, a marvel of scientific ingenuity and commercial boldness. Six years in construction at a cost of $ 14 billion, the behemoth is 278 metres high, weighs 750,000 tonnes and has living quarters for 220 people. It was towed out to the Grand Banks, some 350 km southeast of St. John’s, and should be producing oil by the end of the year.
The Hebron platform, which would have at one time been feted from coast to coast as a sign of national achievement, now meets a mixed reaction. Where once Canada was proud of the resourcefulness called forth by a resource economy, the impressive inventiveness it takes to bring oil out of the sea is now overlooked, replaced by disapproval for the carbon emissions it puts in the air.
Cod, seals, oil — Canada’s easternmost point is the first to feel the waves of new trends crash down upon it. To live in Newfoundland is to wrest from the environment a tough living. Sometimes it must seem that the environment is wresting that living back.
It is not rare to hear that Canada now aspires to be a Pacific nation; that the future of trade is around the Pacific Rim. Perhaps so. Newfoundland is a reminder that this continental nation has Atlantic roots. When Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter here in 1941, it was still common for bright students to study overseas in Ireland — which was rather easier to get to than Toronto.
At Cape Spear, Canada begins, as it were, thanks to 1949. Across the ocean lies the Old World; here begins the new. On Signal Hill early on July 1, Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations will begin. And in Newfoundland, part of Confederation for not even half that time — only 68 years — the Canadian story is told in summary form.
THE CLOSURE OF THE COD FISHERY MEANT SOME 30,000 PEOPLE WERE LAID OFF. — DE SOUZA