Poor Johnathon

Transcontinental newspapers published a commentary yesterday I thought you might appreciate. Hopefully some of its points will not be lost on all the anon posters on this site and on other ill informed Canadians.

Enjoy.

Poor Jonathan
By Andy Barker
The Advertiser

Newfoundlanders need hides like elephants in order to thwart off the seemingly endless insulting jokes and disparaging comments.

A few years ago, a Toronto columnist Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail) described Newfoundland as a vast and scenic welfare ghetto. She was not the first upalong to cast snide remarks our way, and sadly she is not the last. Margaret now has the company of a fellow Toronto columnist, Jonathan Kay.

Jonathan is no greenhorn journalist, but an award-winning columnist and editor at the National Post. The native Montrealer is no slouch with metallurgy degrees in engineering from McGill, and a law degree from Yale. He has worked overseas as well as freelanced articles for major U.S. newspapers and magazines.

Jonathan's swipe was an editorial "Maitres chez Newf" in the April 26, National Post. Kay poked fun at the throne speech in which the Williams government expressed its intention that Newfoundland and Labrador be the master of its own house. Kay said that as Canada's poorest province we only survive due to transfers - handouts from Ottawa. Williams he sees as "The surly teenager haranguing his parents over the size of his allowance."

Kay ended with "Either they're rugged individualist proud of their identity and self-reliance. Or they're professional welfare cases, endlessly harassing the rest of us for more handouts."

Poor Jonathan. He has the degrees, awards, and the big job at
the National Post, but he still knows diddly-squat about the Newfoundland economy, people and history.

Jonathan's blatant use welfare, handouts, and allowances all reinforce that jaded image of us as die-hard lazy lushes, out of work, and on the bum as usual. Welfare, handouts, and allowances paint a totally false picture of the Newfoundland economy.

If poor Jonathan had done a little googling, he could have easily learned that our unemployment rate, which can spike upwards due to the seasonal fisheries, is now at 14 per cent. But a minimum of 80 per cent of our work force works year round, year in, year out. Our weekly earnings are nearly in fourth place, and our hot economy (oil driven) is one of the national leaders with an 8.5 per cent growth rate. As well, in 1997-98 we depended upon Ottawa for nearly 44 per cent of our budget. But in the 2007-8 budget estimates we are indeed becoming masters of our house with Ottawa's share now down to less than 29 per cent.

Last year we poor Newfoundlanders managed to spend $6 billion
on retail products that were either manufactured or distributed from Ontario and Quebec. That retail spending will no doubt increase this year due to the tax cuts, and our oil, mining, fishing, and forestry industries will continue to buy all sorts of equipment and parts from the mainland. We keep a goodly chunk of the crowd upalong in a job - and that's surely good- as well as fatten the profits at corporate head offices in Toronto and Montreal.

As a foreign exchange earner Newfoundland has always been one of the tops since 1949. Yankee money poured in here via their four military bases, plus we exported minerals, newsprint, and fish to them and to overseas markets to earn even more foreign currency.

Many of those same exports are now augmented by offshore oil - in its infancy stage - which is sold into the U.S. market. Nickel exports from Labrador with the likelihood of more mines in Labrador and on the island bode well for future exports.

And Labrador's lower Churchill (the upper Churchill is a huge profit maker for Jonathan's native Quebec) has the juice that Ontario Hydro would love to have. Even the fisheries with all its woes still earns a good buck for the national economy. And not to be forgotten are the millions earned each year by Navcan as hundreds of daily flights, to and from Europe, as they crisscross our sky.

On top of the wealth that is generated here, Newfoundlanders upalong are doing fine. Imagine the state of the Alberta and Ontario economies if migrant Newfoundlanders put down their tools be it the wrench, shovel, stethoscope, or laptop and came home? Image the chaos in the armed forces if General Rick Hillier and the thousands of his fellow Newfoundlanders suddenly retired? And how dull would the Canadian airwaves be without the likes of Rex Murphy, Rick Mercer, Bob Cole, and Mary Walsh?

Maitre chez nous - masters of our own house - was Quebec's quiet revolution rallying cry. But unlike Newfoundland, Quebec was never a nation. Perhaps poor Jonathan is unaware that we had our own prime ministers, army, currency, stamps, customs office, Rhodes scholar designation, and our own war memorial in France. Even Canada's Vimy memorial was designed by Walter Allward the son of Newfoundlanders who moved to Toronto many years ago.

If the well educated, like poor Jonathan, can't get their facts straight and do a good critical analysis, then the common folk uplong must believe that what is said about us, must be true.

Perhaps, that ingrained, prolonged, disparaging attitude towards us, steeped into the mainland conscious, nurtured by erroneous writers, will force us to opt for nationhood once again.

But this time, along with our pride, we have the wealth in so many ways be it the environment, education facilities, the arts community, and an ever-growing robust economy to go it, alone. And, dear poor Jonathan, Canada would be the biggest looser - not us!