deal or no deal?

Whenever a major, contentious issues comes up in politics, it doesn't take long for people to start providing a very common refrain: "Who are you to criticise something if you offer no positive vision or alternative yourself?"

This proposition has always bothered me on a number of levels.

First and foremost, we should always ruthlessly critique any political or economic proposition presented to us by a sitting government that involves our money (which is everything!). And this goes doubly when something doesn't bode well about it - the current fiasco around Muskrat Falls testifies to the necessity of this fact, given that the government's entire defense of the project amounts to 'don't look this clean-energy gift horse in the mouth!'

More than this, though, is the wishy-washy position this implies; there is a special place in hell reserved for people who aggressively sit on fenceposts. While obviously reserving judgement or outright picking sides isn't an outright evil (and it is indeed always warranted!), it is certainly no virtue either. In this case, the starting point of any positive vision or alternative to the Muskrat Falls project must begin with criticising what exactly is wrong with the current proposal - and there is much to say, and it has been said by others, elsewhere, with greater depth than I.

To just shrug and say "maybe it's not a great deal, but how can you criticise if you can't come up with a better one?" is an awful approach to the politics of mega-projects, given the history of this province. I mean, if it has done nothing else, the 40 years of wailing and gnashing of teeth since the Upper Churchill was signed should indicate that, as a worst-case scenario, no deal (for the time being!) might - just maybe! - be better than a raw one.

everything remains as it never was

Old habits die hard, but here I am attempting to break the old habit of "never writing anything, ever".

Anyways, it's basically summer. My coursework for my graduate degree are all currently finished (although I am hoping to sit in on some courses the fall, but that's neither here nor there), so I'm left with a little over a year to churn out a thesis. I have a general idea for a topic but I should probably nail something down - originally I wanted to go with something to do with the rights of transgendered people in Canada, but now it's drifting more towards something like multiculturalism (a topic I'm feeling surprisingly comfortable approaching)... both of which increasingly seem to hinge on more abstract questions, like the nature of the political subject, and the political implications of adopting different stances towards conceptualising the human subject. Really exciting, I know, and sure to thrill people who were vaguely interested in my honours thesis on Newfoundland politics.

But I am interested in pursuing obtuse theoretical debates! I just don't want to detach myself completely from real life. I'm hoping that with the upcoming provincial election in 2011 I will be able to immerse myself in some actual concrete matters (I guess this could have applied during the recent federal election, but I honestly don't care that much about federal politics aside from a purely analytical perspective... as a Newfoundlander I have accepted that federal politics is generally more something that happens to me than something I effect, haha). Danny Williams has since retired from provincial politics so our hilariously inept government no longer seems invincible - it's nice. The Muskrat Falls thing seems like a fiasco in the making, so it might be worth keeping on top of. At any rate, I feel like the provincial scene is lacking a good 'critical' voice - not just in the sense of opposition to the sitting government, but to the systemic totality of it all. Haha, I'm such a douchebag.

Meanwhile, though, it is all about the intellectual labour (and finding a paying job so I can eat in the meantime). I've got a small selection of books I want to work my way through in the next month or so - specifically, Alain Badiou's Ethics - An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. I feel reading these two books together will be a good exercise, because Young seems to set the stage for contemporary debates in political theory around questions of justice related to subjectivity from a post-modern/critical perspective, while Badiou apparently sets out to obliterate both Young's (not explicitly, of course) position and the Anglo-American liberal mainstream she sets herself up against. Naturally, I'm much more interested in Badiou, but reading both should give me enough material to form a really wicked research question that might get me into a good PhD program. This would probably also be easier if my supervisor wasn't in Ontario for the summer, but it's all good.

But other than thesis work, I don't have much planned for the summer. Taking in a couple concerts/festivals (Supertramp in June, Salmon Fest and Osheaga in July) should be deadly, doing some writing with Sondi, helping out the provincial Liberals (I am, after all, a committed Smallwoodist), and generally trying to improve my cooking skills/get outside more. I'm literally anticipating the highlight of my summer being a visit to the Maoist bookstore in Montreal. Yes, I will be paying for everything in cash, thanks.

Sprung Falls

I'll keep it brief - the Muskrat Falls project will not be subjected to scrutiny by the PUB, which normally can assess an electricity project and determine whether it is the cheapest option for providing power to the consumers.

Personally, I'm not aware of any instance where the provincial government has invested vast sums of money in a project not subjected to outside scrutiny in order to generate miraculous benefits vis-a-vis job growth and economic development that has ever gone wrong, ever, in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador.

..Suddenly, I've got an overwhelming craving for cucumbers.

some thoughts on newfoundland nationalism

"...[N]ational heritage [is] a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism." - Slavoj Zizek

There is definitely some weight to this idea. If I recall correctly most of the literature on the genesis of nationalism as an ideological phenomenon indicates it tends to form as economic development in a given society progresses from a primarily "feudal"/heavily agricultural/subsistence economic arrangement into modernity, and it almost always originates among the educated (read: well-off) classes. This is why I would suspect we didn't see the meaningful appearance of [political] nationalist sentiment in Newfoundland until the late 1960s/early 1970s; it was only then that the province had enough people well-off enough to give a shit about 'standing up for Newfoundland' (I don't think the Anti-Confederate campaign in the late 1940s was ever fundamentally motivated by nationalism [although it was obviously present, ideologically] - it was primarily a question of economic and political power for the business/political class in St. John's and the pulp-and-paper corporate fiefdoms of Grand Falls and Corner Brook. Confederation meant a loss of control by local [commercial, political, clerical] elites over taxation, economic regulation, etc etc etc.)

More importantly I think this particular idea - nationalism as ideology being a retroactive construction in order to mask a present social antagonism - is a good way to begin an analysis of the way nationalism has played a role in provincial politics since the beginning of the Williams administration. Presumably anyone reading this would be familiar with the way the provincial government has been shutting down political opposition (not just the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly, but wider media scrutiny and citizen dissent) by appealing to the Nation - recall the Premier answering Yvonne Jones' questions about the Abitibi expropriation (or the legal dealings with Quebec, or [political issue of the day]...) by implying she was a traitor!

The real question in this situation is to try and determine what social antagonisms nationalist ideology in its present manifestation is blurring. While I'm sure there are many, a few in particular grab my immediate attention - the 'conflict' between 'rural' and 'urban' Newfoundland ('rural' being primarily working-class, "traditional" economy of fishing, agriculture, manual labour, etc. with 'urban' being primarily the oil/gas industry, finance and commerce, etc.), and, as always, the broader class antagonism in this province that is beyond being pinned down to a matter of geographical location; I'm sure any of the unions who've run afoul of the provincial government could testify to this point.

Here I don't think it's hard to see why nationalism works so well as an ideology in the 'Zizekian' sense - what better way to override the actual antagonism between 'have' and 'have not' (to use the popular terminology) than to have us live within a conceptual framework where we are all 'Newfoundlanders and Labradorians', all of us united as a 'nation' with an illustrious historical narrative united against the Other[s] (the federal government, Big Oil/Pulp and Paper/Greenpeace, Quebec, etc). The provincial government here especially likes to make a full identification with nationalist ideology; the House of Assembly is where we are politically represented, and the governing party has an extraordinarily strong mandate (they control roughly 90% of the seats) with an extraordinarily strong executive branch - which leaves us with the bizarre political configuration where the Premier [on his own or through his cabinet] can effectively (if the opinion polls are to be believed) declare that "Le Nation, c'est l'Etat.. et l'Etat, c'est moi."

Obviously this is a very rough sketch of an ideological critique of the present political climate in this province. I think it's a good foundation at least, and if nothing else, some food for thought. But I definitely would consider it as something worth a bit of concerted research.

Mr. Smallwood Goes to St. John's

[The following is an excerpt from my honours thesis dealing with Confederation in 1949. As the paper is an investigation of the relationship between class, ideology and state intervention in Newfoundland and Labrador's economic development in the twentieth century, it is less concerned with the specific political wranglings of Confederation and moreso with its overarching significance with regards to the class relations that existed in Newfoundland's politics at the time. Normally I wouldn't have posted this but considering the significance of these two days in our province's history I wanted to share my understanding of the matter with an appreciative audience. Hopefully my account of the Confederation referendum - though brief! - will be stimulating. Footnotes were omitted from this blog posting simply because it would be a pain in the ass to reformat them. - D.]
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The political wranglings that led to Confederation with Canada were won almost solely through the efforts of Joseph Smallwood - efforts which played off the silent class tensions that bubbled just beneath the surface of Newfoundland society since the days of William Coaker.

When the National Convention opened in 1946, almost two thirds of the delegates were solidly anti-Confederate, including the entire bloc from St. John's. After his motion to send a delegation to Ottawa to discuss terms of union with Canada was defeated in late 1946, Smallwood came to the conclusion that if the crusade for Confederation was to be won, it would have to be taken out of the Colonial Building in St. John's and directly to the people themselves.

His opportunity to do so came when the Commission of Government decided to record the Convention's proceedings, and then have them played over the radio every evening. Smallwood, a former radio personality, took full advantage of this development and turned the Convention into a spectacle. Solidifying the position of the pro-Confederation movement among the populace, Smallwood responded to anti-Confederate attempts to remove the microphones by stating that “to despise these microphones is to despise the people of Newfoundland.” [Peter Cashin would later label Smallwood "a communist."] Smallwood's motion to send a delegation to Ottawa eventually passed at the Convention on March 1 1947, and it was the negotiations that occurred at that time which formed the basic terms of union to be voted on as the Confederation option.

With preliminary negotiations in Ottawa on the Confederation question completed, it was now left to the National Convention to decide on Newfoundland's fate. A few days before the final vote, Smallwood made another populist plea to the microphones in the Colonial Building:

...this is not 1869. This time the people are going to know the truth. They are not going to be smothered with the lies and propaganda of 1869. It was easy enough in 1869 to bluff the people [...] but this time the anticonfederates are not going to get away with it, not even if every millionaire, half-millionaire and quarter-millionaire in the country rallies to the side of the anticonfederates. The day is gone when their money-bags will tell our people how to vote. That day is gone, and we live in a different age. Our people are no longer in the mood to bow down and worship a man just because he has somehow or other to make a great fortune for himself. They no longer measure a man's patriotism or his loyal heart by the money he has in the bank. When we say we have a stake in the country we no longer mean how much money a man has, but how many children he has, what is the size of his family, what is his love for the country. When we talk of “men of substance” today, we mean something more than money. Our people are on the march in the tens of thousands. They have formed great trade unions and co-operative societies, and cannot so easily be bluffed anymore. They have learned alot over the past few years, and they ask questions, questions they never dared ask in the bad old days. They ask questions about our vicious system of taxation. They ask questions about the cruel and oppressive cost of living. They ask questions about a system of taxation and of government that has held them down and made it impossible for a working man to live decently and rear a family by his honest earnings. Yes, our people are in the mood to ask many questions today that they never asked before. They are not so easy to bluff as our forefathers were in 1869, and our anticonfederates are going to find that out in 1948 when the referendum takes place.

But Smallwood's efforts were largely wasted on the delegates at the National Convention. The Confederation question was defeated on the floor by a vote of 29-16 the last day the Convention sat, and on January 29 1948 it was promptly dissolved. Undaunted, two days later Confederate magnate Gordon Bradley took to the airwaves with a speech written by Smallwood that damned the Convention politicians who had “thwarted the peoples' right to decide [on Confederation] for themselves,” and urged people in the outports to make their will known via a mass petition. When the petition (containing almost 50,000 names) was collected and sent to London, the British government announced on March 10 that “it would not be right to deprive the people of the opportunity of considering the matter,” and a popular referendum on Confederation was scheduled for June 3, 1948. [For their own part, the British were extremely eager to do whatever it took to get Newfoundland off its hands.]

The referendum campaigns of 1948 saw the class tensions in Newfoundland come to a head as the Confederation question was polarised between two blocs - Smallwood and the Confederates, who campaigned tirelessly across the island and appealed directly to the fishermen and other workers in the outports in a radically (by Newfoundland's standards) grassroots fashion; and the anti-Confederates, who consisted of “almost the entire business and professional class of St. John's,” as well as the Island's two pulp-and-paper companies in Grand Falls and Corner Brook (who feared an end to corporate tax exemptions should Confederation pass). Echoing Newfoundland's oldest home-grown revolutionary Sir William Coaker, Smallwood declared prior to the first referendum that “we don't expect the support of the merchant class, but we can do without them.” The Confederation debate was in many ways an open class conflict.

Unfortunately for both sides, the June 3 referendum failed to produce any clear decision, and the vote breakdown revealed just how polarising the Confederation question was:

• Responsible Government - 69,400

• Confederation - 64,006

• Commission of Government - 22,311

Following the stalemate, Commission of Government was dropped from the ballot, and a second referendum was slated for July 22, 1948. For another seven weeks the campaigns raged on (now with Newfoundland's perennial sectarian conflict between [anti-Confederate] Catholics and [Confederate] Protestants mixed into the fray), but with a turnout of 84.89%, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians at the end of July delivered the final results:

• Confederation - 78,323 [57.24%]

• Responsible Government - 71,334 [47.76%]

Confederation had barely squeaked by, but the referendum results were officially accepted by both the Canadian and British governments. Much to the dismay of the Newfoundland merchant class and Catholic nationalists in St. John's, the independent state of Newfoundland vanished forever and on April Fools' Day, 1949, Newfoundland formally became Canada's tenth province. It was one of the few instances in the island's history that the popular classes had beaten the merchants at their own political game.

As for Joey Smallwood, the man behind Confederation's curtain, biographer Richard Gwyn frames his position in the immediate aftermath of the July referendum:

Virtually single-handed, [Smallwood] had dragged Newfoundland into the twentieth century. The crazy radical had become, as Ewart Young had predicted, “the hero of the hour and of Newfoundland history.” He had also become the most powerful man on the island. Those who had once laughed at Smallwood as a “crazy radical” would have to turn to him now for patronage, position, and prestige.

This “crazy radical” would remain Newfoundland's Premier for 23 years. By the time he would leave office in 1972, so many boats had been burned under his watch that Newfoundland was unrecognisable.

The Parable of the Failed State

The thing that has been - it is what will be again, and that which has been done is that which will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it may be said, See, this is new? It has already been, in the vast ages of time which were before us. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

At this time [the year 1908 – D.], Canadian financial interests joined forces with the Reid Newfoundland Company in an effort to manipulate Newfoundland into confederation. Their instrument was E.P. Morris, Bond’s minister of justice, who left the Liberals and formed his own party in 1907. The new People’s party was drawn from a growing middle class of small businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and newly prosperous outport merchants, not all of whom were aware of Morris’ secret corporate backing. The party was marked by a reversion to the late nineteenth-century policy of adventurism. Morris capitalised on recent industrial development and prospering fisheries to announce a programme of extensive national development encompassing agriculture, mining, local manufacturing, and the fisheries; its keystone the construction of several costly branch railways. Succumbing to Morris’ promises of “something for everyone,” Newfoundlanders ignored the lessons of 1894 [a bank crash/depression that devastated the country – D.], becoming caught up in a euphoria that the revenue was ultimately incapable of supporting. They ousted the cautious Bond from power.

In the process, political life underwent a substantial change. During the Whiteway era, parties had been organised on the basis of rival views of Newfoundland’s destiny. After 1900, only Bond’s party maintained a coherent vision of the future, but his Liberalism was as much identified with his hostility to the Reid interests as it was with his nationalistic fisheries policy. Morris’ party was no more than a fraud, a vehicle to be used by its leaders to buy their way into office and further their ambitions. It represented cooperation with the Reids, and for the rank-and-file it became an efficient channel for patronage and profit. Confederation was shelved. Uninspired by a national vision, politicians contented themselves with extracting a living from the system, and reduced politics to the supervision of an unwieldy and inadequate administrative structure. Parties evaded fundamental economic and social issues and as a result became the expression not of ideas, but of violent personality conflicts. [Emphasis added – D.]

_{From Ian D.H. McDonald’s “To Each His Own”: William Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union in Newfoundland Politics, 1908-1925, pg. 3}

"Have" status is an illusion

[an op-ed I recently submitted to Memorial University's student paper, reprinted here because, hell, why not inject it into the blogosphere too?]

Friends, Newfoundland Labradorians, countrymen; lend me your ears.

I come with the Honourable Premier Williams today to bury the old, impoverished, “have-not” Newfoundland, not to appeal to it nostalgically and wring my hands in the air screaming “we have prosperity, but at what cost?” as you might expect to hear from our troglodytes and cultural reactionaries. No longer is Newfoundland and Labrador the poor cousin of Confederation; as Brian Peckford opportunistically prophesised so long ago, the sun now shines over Newfoundland and Labrador. Have-not is no more.

Nevermind that the Aboriginal peoples of Northern Labrador are so impoverished by centuries of political and social repression, and that even in the face of “generous” food subsidies the price of a box of Kraft Dinner is still so high that many people are now resorting to scavenging in landfills for scraps of food in order to avoid starvation in the year 2008; Danny Williams says we have achieved prosperity, and Danny Williams is an Honourable man.

Pay no attention to the dying gasps of rural Newfoundland and its rotting wharves, to the towns full of homes adorned with satellite dish gargoyles connected to one another by dilapidated roads, to the crowded midday taverns surrounded by Ford trucks freshly purchased with Albertan blood money for a funeral procession to mark the death of community. Danny Williams tell us things are different now, and Danny Williams is an Honourable man.

Ignore the devastated health care sector, so crippled by blatant mismanagement that nurses and doctors are leaving in droves while patients are left to linger and die within a bloated and Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy. Ignore the Diaspora of young Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who take their skills, passions and talents on a reluctant exodus to the mainland in order to pay off the crushing debt they incurred at an institution originally established to freely educate the people of this province. Ignore the government’s refusal to negotiate with unions representing the chronically underfunded workers in this province, a refusal that springs from the same miserly instincts that coursed through the veins of the Water Street merchants who rode roughshod on the backs of the outports a century ago.

Ignore every last social grievance that permeates the lives of you and everyone you care about: Danny Williams stood before a crowded 500-dollar-a-plate gala, held a glass of champagne aloft and proclaimed that we can hold our heads high, because we are a have province.

And who will disagree with the optimism brought on by our new prosperity? Danny Williams is an Honourable man, and it is the work of this Honourable man that has brought us to where we are today:
A have province, full of have-nots.