Sorry, Canada, we have other fish to fry

The Rock isn’t into this party, says Dawn Rae Downton.

My parents left their home in St. John’s in 1948 to come to Halifax, my father to Dalhousie’s dental school and my mother to the brand new Victoria General hospital, to work as an RN. Because they were entering a foreign country, they carried their chest X-rays rolled up under their arms as evidence they were free of tuberculosis.

That was the tradition then. But new traditions came to Newfoundland along with Canada, and, after the initial enticements to join up, they often weren’t welcome.

Except for Nunavut, which “joined” in 1999 but had already been part of the country as a territory, Newfoundland (today Newfoundland and Labrador) was by far the last to join Confederation — and half-heartedly at best.

In late-1948, the vote to join was barely 52 per cent in favour. The opposition came from St. John’s and the rest of the Avalon Peninsula. Like Brexit today, and like the last U.S. election, it was the city folks against the outports, with the outports winning the day — but losing themselves in the process under premier Joey Smallwood’s “resettlement” policy.

Joey fought hard to convince his people to go Canadian, just as hard — and cannily — as Joey fought for everything. He flew from outport to outport in a seaplane, campaigning. “I’ve come to you from out of the clouds,” he’d say grandly when his plane landed on outport ice or some far-flung government wharf. In his pocket was the promise of a “baby bonus” from Ottawa for every Newfoundland child.

That and a few other financial incentives won the day, barely, and the Dominion of Newfoundland, now just Newfoundland, joined on March 31 the following year. It was a dark, blustery spring day, and those Newfoundlanders still around to remember it will tell you that the weather suited the occasion, and has ever since.

Newfoundlanders think of themselves as Newfoundlanders first, and then, they suppose, Canadians. They don’t usually celebrate July 1 along with the rest of Canada. Instead, the date is elegiac, as ceremonies remember the Dominion’s dreadful losses in the First World War. For Newfoundlanders, July 1, 2017 marks the 101st anniversary of the “July Drive,” when most of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was mowed down going over the top in Beaumont Hamel, France, expended like so much chaff in one of Field Marshall Douglas Haig’s many tactical blunders on behalf of Britain and her allies.

My mother, born in an outport on the island’s northeast coast, remembers July 1 as a day off school when a bunch of kids got together and rode bikes with coloured streamers in the wheels, rang their bells and ate ice cream bars, just glad to be free.

But you won’t find separatists in the bars of George Street. Canada doesn’t matter much to many Newfoundlanders. Canada is there like God might be there, sensed only when it brings harm.

Ottawa, via the short-sightedness of its Department of Fisheries and Oceans, famously ruined Newfoundland’s offshore cod fishery; with the cod went the economy. Later, the salmon on the Grand Banks went down too. These were gorgeous fish from cold, deep waters, so much better than the salmon we eat out east today — even I remember that. My mother never got over the loss. She ate farmed salmon eventually, and always regretfully.

The Ocean Ranger, with regulators — Ottawa, the province, the U.S. Coast Guard — bickering over territory rather than monitoring safety, went down with all hands on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Fifty-six Newfoundlanders were lost, and 28 come-from-aways. The Sikorsky that dumped 18 men into the unforgiving Atlantic between St. John’s and the Hibernia oilfield in March 2009 was only flying because the federal government allowed it to. Elsewhere, Sikorskys had failed testing and were sometimes grounded for design problems. Then we have the Churchill Falls hydro project, where Quebec won hugely with the help of Ottawa, and Newfoundland lost again.

I could go on, and my mom would go on. Canada 150 or not, were she still with us this July 1, she wouldn’t be celebrating. Dawn Rae Downton, born in St. John’s, is a writer who now lives in Halifax.

Newfoundlanders think of themselves as Newfoundlanders first.