The argument goes that paying for every two-bit bay town to have a school, paved roads, power lines, a health clinic, and water and sewer services — the gall; real baymen should be happy with a well and an outhouse — has busted the budget. If they would just move en masse to Mount Pearl, the government could save enough money to perhaps reopen a library or two.
Speaking of closing rural libraries, what else is it but a policy arising from this very attitude — that the outports get too many unaffordable services and siphon funds from the public treasury faster than Nalcor.
Put bluntly, the sophisticated residents of 21st-century metropolis St. John’s can no longer subsidize the backward way of life in the outports. Rather than demanding services equal to the townie crowd, the baymen will just have to move to where the schools and pavement are, because those things will no longer be coming to them (except, of course, during election years).
If this condescending, preposterous argument sounds familiar, it should. Similar reasoning and exhortations are occasionally made by people and/or pundits in Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver or any number of other well-off Canadian locales that are not in Newfoundland (or Labrador).
Most of us have heard, “Newfoundlanders should move to where the jobs are.”
Granted, that one hasn’t been said as much since the oil boom came and went, but it still lurks in the Canadian psyche, guaranteed.
Now that the province has returned to its traditional have-not status, the arguing over equalization payments will recommence. And someone, somewhere, will once again derisively suggest that, “Newfoundland should be towed out to sea and sunk.”
The blame that some Canadians cast upon Newfoundlanders is no different than the blame now being put upon people who live in small communities. If townies are correct in their logic about shutting outports, then Torontonians are also correct about shuttering Newfoundland.
How small is too small? How poor is too poor? And who gets to decide? If people in St. John’s are eager to tell baymen to get out of their outports, they better be willing to listen to people in Ottawa or Toronto who tell them, in turn, to get out of St. John’s and not stop until they are clear of Newfoundland.
The blowhards’ hypocrisy is hurricane-strength. At the same time Premier Cathy Bennett and her government close rural libraries and send the message that small-town residents shouldn’t expect equal treatment or services, millions of dollars are spent on advertising campaigns to entice tourists with images of, you guessed it, coastal scenes and outport life. That laundry blowing in the sea breeze isn’t on George Street.
The government uses colourful outports as a sales pitch, while at the same time subscribing to the notion that too many outports are costing too much money.
Newly appointed Minister of Luncheon Speeches Dwight Ball should remind his boss Bennett that outports were here long before the Golden Arches. Their government’s treatment of people in rural areas exhibits contempt for the province’s long history.
The oil boom and high-tech 21st century notwithstanding, those tiny towns were established for a good reason, and it is entirely understandable that people still want to live in them. If you’re going to cut services to people who are too stubborn to move to bigger towns, you should also stop boasting about the province’s unique and wonderful culture. It didn’t arise from a government program, after all.
Brian Jones is a copy editor at The Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected].
