Racism in Newfoundland and Labrador #nlpoli

Some people in Newfoundland and Labrador are talking about racism.

This is good.

Unfortunately, they are talking about racism somewhere else.

This is bad.

And, they aren’t really talking about racism with the intent to do something about.  They are talking about something completely superficial and meaningless.

That’s worse because nothing will change in Newfoundland and Labrador, where racism is so commonplace that most people don’t even realize it.

You can see how disconnected the racism conversation in Newfoundland and Labrador is from the local reality by the talk of tearing down a statue to an obscure Portuguese explorer who may or may not have taken 57 slaves from somewhere in North America to Portugal.

If you are looking at that and scratching your head a bit, well, you should.

We know very little about Gaspar Corte Real.  On his one voyage early in the 16^th century, Corte Real led a small fleet of three ships, only two of which made it back to Portugal after stopping *somewhere* along the coast of northeastern North America. The one with Corte Real on board disappeared.

And everything about him disappeared into the ocean, or would have had the Portuguese government not resurrected him and embellished his story as part of a campaign in the 1960s to win some support for Portugal at time when its dictatorial government was involved in human rights abuses and a bloody colonial war in Africa.

As part of the campaign, the Portuguese government gave the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador a statue, which has stood in plain sight but entirely invisible since 1965. 

Flip ahead to 2017, when, in the midst of a national flurry of stories about statues somewhere else, a reporter for the Telegram looked around to see if there were any dubious statues that could be hauled down here.  It was the ultimate local angle approach to a national and international story since pretty much everything in the story is unsourced. 

The claim about 57 slaves in the story comes with no attribution or source and the source cited in the Wikipedia entry on Corte Real gives the Telegram story as the source.  The number is absurdly precisely, given the fact there is very little known about the guy.  But in all likelihood, Corte Real did what pretty well every European explorer did at the time.  He landed, captured some locals, and brought them back to his country.  

Doesn’t make it right by any measure but that really isn’t the point. The story about capturing slaves and that he was a slave trader is an invention of very recent writers.  We do not know very much of anything with any certainty about him beyond that he existed,  was from Portugal, and may have reached some part of North America around the time that John Cabot sailed from England to what is now Newfoundland.

Three years after *that* story from the Telly, the statue has come back into view as a result of a local demonstration inspired by events in the United States.  Even after the Telegram story, an astonishing number of people – including many who supported the local demonstration – did not have a clue who Gaspar Corte Real was.

They just wanted to haul down the statue.

But what does that have to do with racism in Newfoundland and Labrador?  

Well, nothing at all.  The statue isn’t there to praise slavery and racism.  That’s what the controversial American statues are all about. Edward Colson, whose statue wound up in Bristol harbour last week, made his fortune in the European slave trade.  He was English.  Bristol was his home port, and well, you can see a direct line.

But Corte Real?

There isn’t a line.

There isn’t anything.

The people fired up about Gaspar Corte Real are not really interested in doing anything about racism in Newfoundland and Labrador.  They are just sending a message about themselves.  The statue isn’t about history, it is about today and about consciously avoiding any concrete action to acknowledge racism in Newfoundland and Labrador.

An empty gesture is easy.  It requires no effort.

But the thing is, many of the folks ready to pull the statue down, were alive in 2007.  That’s the year that they and their neighbours elected a government with one of the largest majorities in the province’s history.  A part of the platform was a policy to give women $1,000 for every baby they bore, along with another hundred bucks a month for the first year of the baby’s life.

This was an answer – supposedly – to the province’s declining population.  It looked an awful lot like the sort of pro-natal policies in nationalist and ultranationalist countries around the globe.  And just so no one could misunderstand what it was about, the Premier even made that plain at the news conference when he made the campaign commitment.

“We cannot be a dying race.”

Not a single reporter asked what race the Premier meant.

Not a columnist nor editorialist asked the question.

A couple of reporters dismissed your humble e-scribbler’s efforts to ask the question with the admonition that “we all know what he meant” or words to that effect.

Truth is, people *did* know what he meant and they were just fine with that move as part of a larger effort to create a closed society defined along what one throne speech referred to as a nation made up of many nations.

Sounds wonderful but when you live in a province in which 96% of the population is made up of locally born descendants of Europeans from the British Isles, the dying race in the 2007 policy wasn’t anyone with dark skin. The reference to nations looks suspiciously like someone substituted the word nation for what people used to call race.

Even then, though, there as something that was about dividing people according to their ethnicity. Sectarian education, and the associated division of government spoils, and electoral districts, along religious lines also paralleled a division between ethnicities:  English and Irish chiefly.  So, the attention paid to European ethnicity after 2003 – the celebration of “Irishness” is part of that - harkens back to the old days.

Separating people into groups and discriminating among them on that basis is an essential feature of political culture in Newfoundland and Labrador because it is an essential feature of the society and culture in the province.  The signs of it may be less formal, less obvious today than it was 20 years ago but the signs are there is you understand what you are looking at.

The whole thing is built around definitions of us and them, of defining who is the same and who is other.  We do that effortlessly internally in the same way we do it externally as well.  After 2003, we had a litany of stories about foreigners who were supposedly trying to rip us off.  Federal Liberals in Ottawa, mainland companies like Abitibi or ExxonMobil, and - at the zenith in 2009 – the vast and nefarious “Quebec” conspiracy to shag us at every turn.  “Their” agents were everywhere.

This tendency lives with us today.  The ban on travel during the pandemic reeks of xenophobia.  Those who are not from here come off as filthy (disease-carriers) who cannot be trusted to follow the rules. The government announced the policy after lurid tales of tourists surfaced from Bonavista.

“I met a couple from Nova Scotia,” the mayor of Bonavista told CBC.  “I also met a couple from Quebec. I've seen some of the American licence plates — I have yet to speak to any of them in person but we do see them around and we see them going to the drive-thru that's still operational, we see them going to the coffee shops, as well as some of the local grocery stores.”

“If you come from away, stay away,” the province’s health minister said.

If that filthy, untrustworthy outsider tone wasn’t clear when the government first announced it, then the exemption policy on 05 May certainly rang the gong.  People who could get in were some version of locals. It was a call to tell what Danny Williams once called homing pigeons that they could come back.  But the others were barred, even if they owned property here and even if there was a constitutional guarantee that as Canadians, they had a right to move about the country

These are all old subjects for regular readers of these e-scribbles. Other people's bigotry and prejudice and racism turn up frequently in 15 years of posts. Very little has changed.  So commonplace are racial slurs that a young man from the west coast recently noted on Twitter that he had used an ethnic slur to describe himself, without realizing it was a slur.  A young woman on Twitter, self-identified as Indigenous, did not bat an eyelid as she attributed attitudes and beliefs to someone else based solely on her perception of the other person’s race. Or consider the dispute between the Innu and the NunatuKavut people, that includes arguments that are based on race and racial purity.  

Racism is so common an element in local culture that the recent stories about anti-black racism are hardly astonishing.   What is remarkable, though, is the intensity with which some people carry on about an irrelevant statue.  

The reason is simple to understand, of course.  It is like the plastic bag ban. The largest source of plastics pollution in the province is from plastic fishing gear.  No one would lift a finger to deal with it, though, because to do so would challenge a large and influential part of the economy and society. It would take work. So folks settled for a meaningless display, satisfied their consciences, and went on to other things.

Getting rid of a statue no one knew anything about and cared even less for allows the people who want to trash it to signal their virtue as they do nothing to address the problem of racism in the province.  It is an expression of power and privilege.  In its own way, the statue crowd are as plain a reminder of who has power in the province and who doesn’t and that is what will make ridding Newfoundland and Labrador of racism such a long and difficult struggle.

-srbp-

Budgeting Control and Resources #nlpoli

Shortly after the 2003 general election, the newly elected Conservative politicians accepted a proposal to cut down the number of health boards and education boards across the province.

Save money, they said.

Save money, the politicians repeated.

And so it happened.

As it turned out, the consolidation didn’t save any money.  It certainly didn’t reduce the public service payroll, a goal the Conservatives set out in their election platform.

Bennett’s telephone call “gendered violence” according to PACSW prez #nlpoli

Most of you likely missed it, but a sharp exchange in Twitter on Monday showed the way politics in this province rolls these days.

Dara Squires writes a blog called ReadilyAParent, She’s also syndicated in the Western Star and some of the TransCon weeklies.  Dara’s post on Sunday took up some recent local political events.  “False Feminists in Politics” is about feminism and women in politics. 

Here’s a taste of the broader argument:

And yet, in general, we swallow it hook, line and sinker when a woman rises to a position of power and declares herself a feminist. It's taken as both proof of the validity of the feminist promise and a victory of sorts when they do. But herein lies one of the largest dangers of false feminism, especially with regards to politics. For if some white, upper middle class women make their way into politics, or the heads of boardrooms, or CEOs of major companies, than we find ourselves facing the argument that the fight for equality is over. Wente is one of the white, upper-middle class elites who would have us believe this

Squires drew the whole thing down closer to home with a pretty sharp critique of Kathy Dunderdale. She made some particularly strong comments about the way government House leader Jerome Kennedy tied Jim Bennett’s telephone call and threat with violence against women:

Yeah, you read that right. Not only does he minimise the true extent of such violence by using it in comparison to a single, slightly threatening phonecall [call], he also shows an utter lack of awareness behind the real reasons for delayed reporting or not reporting sexual and domestic violence.
…
I can't believe that Dunderdale, who has been a member of women's status groups and worked as a social worker, would've not seen the significance of Kennedy's statements. The moment I read the transcript it was like a punch in the gut. But Dunderdale, leader of the party, Premier of the province, and supposed women's rights supporter, did nothing to halt Kennedy's ongoing attack against victims of violence.

Squires got some attention on Monday from some of the most powerful people in the province.  It’s hard to tell exactly how the Twitter discussion started and who got whom involved but before too long it involved not only Lana Payne – head of the federation of labour – but Glenda Power, the Premier’s communications director. 

You should go read the exchange;  just scroll back a couple of days or so and you can find the three contributions to the discussion.  It’s civilised, although tightly constrained by the 140 character limit. And you can expect that the Power didn’t accept for a moment that her boss might be anything but right.

What’s most interesting is that after Squires invited more substantive comment on her blog, she got it but not from Payne or Power but from Linda Ross.  The head of the Provincial Advisory Council on the Status of Women left not one but two comments with a title “Criticism without Merit.”  They are right at the bottom of the post linked above.

Now some of you will recognize that this is not the first time that Ross – a cabinet appointee – has entered a provincial political fray on behalf of her patron Kathy Dunderdale.  Last April she launched a pretty savage attack on then-opposition leader Yvonne Jones over what was entirely a fabrication on Ross’ part.

This time Ross has some much more interesting things to say.

For starters, there is nothing half-hearted in Ross’ support for the Premier:

“The record of Premier Dunderdale and her government in Newfoundland and Labrador on advancing the status of women and preventing violence against women and other vulnerable populations has been outstanding.”

Ross then lists a series of what Ross suggests are Dunderdale’s personal accomplishments.  In the classic fashion, they involve how much money government spends. Ross attributes things to Dunderdale that she didn’t do.  Well, certainly not as Premier, anyways, if she did them personally at all:

In addition to the above noted investments, under Premier's Dunderdale's leadership, we now have a 10% participation of women in trades in this Province, up from 3%. Such achievements are critical in advancing women's economic and social equality. Likewise, since 2003 approximately 50 percent of all new recruits to the RNC are now women and more women are appointed to Provincial boards, agencies and commissions.

The construction Ross employs isn’t accidental.  What Ross is employing is the traditional patron-centred politics that has come to epitomize the Williams and now Dunderdale Conservatives in power.  The patron gets personal credit from his or her clients for government policies and programs, as if they would not have occurred without the patron.

The overall discussion about Squires - even on Twitter - and the emphasis in the exchange on common successes runs directly contrary to Squires’ argument without actually refuting it.  But it does express the norm of provincial politics these days:  partisan differences are, in truth, superficial ones.  For the elites themselves, the connections among them are more important than ideological or partisan differences or ones based on different values. 

What the elites have in common is also more important – to them – than anything else.  You can see this is the similarity among the elections platforms last October.  But you can also see this in the way Ross unequivocally endorses the partisan attack on Jim Bennett:

“in reality this event was indeed a very real act of gendered violence.”
…
All acts of violence and abuse can be equally as damaging regardless of the type of violence and abuse and can have very serious long-term impacts on a woman’s life. Violence is violence, regardless of what form it takes. Minimizing a woman’s experience of violence because it does not fit into the old-school traditional definition of violence could, by many, be identified as a form of violence in and of itself. We as women and as feminists must never minimize or judge another woman’s lived reality. 

Violence and abuse are best understood as a pattern of behaviour intended to establish power and maintain control over colleagues, intimate partners, or groups. The roots of all forms of violence and abuse are founded in the many types of inequality which continue to exist and grow in our society.

Yes, friends, in Ross' world, Jim Bennett’s lone asinine phone call exists as part of a continuum of violence that is directed by men against women solely on the basis of the chromosomal structure of the two people involved. Bennett is scarcely better than a serial killer or rapists. serial killers and rapists. 

Of course, Ross’ argument is as patently absurd as it seems, on the face of it.  Ross has made equally absurd arguments before when both parties were female.  What is important to notice here is that Ross seldom makes public statements on anything.  When she does make them – as in Jones or Bennett - she is as prepared as any Tory backbencher to make a ridiculous argument in support of her patron.

Kennedy’s remarks are – according to Ross -  “totally within the Provincial Policy on this matter.”
But just so that you appreciate the extent to which Ross’ arguments  are not motivated by a general concern about violence in our society consistent with “Provincial Policy”  take note of her comments that criticise any of her patron’s associates that were as bad or worse than Bennett’s or Jones’ at any time since 2003.

Don’t waste your time.  You won’t find any.

Take a minute and let all that soak in.  There’s some pretty heavy ideas in there.

As for what this incident says about issues like equality and political power in the province, we’ll have to save that discussion for another day.

- srbp -

Abuse and power

Last fall when the provincial government debated a resolution to appoint the current child advocate, the minister then responsible for the department of child, youth and family services - Joan Burke  - reminded everyone that the advocate’s position came from a recommendation by some very thoughtful members of the House of Assembly.

They comprised a Select Committee on Children’s Interests created by the House of Assembly in 1994.  Their report, issued in 1996 after two years of study and consultation recommended a number of actions designed to change fundamentally the way the provincial government approached children's’ issues

Those thoughtful members, interestingly enough, specifically rejected the very idea Burke embodied as minister, namely the creation of a separate department to deal with children, youth and family issues within government. They were concerned that such an approach was unnecessarily costly, may serve to marginalize family issues with government and would not encourage the fundamental change in attitudes to children and family issues they felt families and children in the province needed:

It seems contrary to Committee members, therefore, to isolate the needs of children and youth into a single ministry. It is the fear of the Committee that issues affecting children and youth would be "marginalized" into a junior ministry. The goal of government, however, should be to educate and involve all departments and levels of government in designing and implementing appropriate social programs and policy.

The purpose of the child advocate was to speak for the interests of specific children and children generally.  The select committee recommended and Roger Grimes’ administration established the position as an officer of the House of Assembly, separate from the government. In that way, the advocate’s office was supposed to speak for children and families to those with power.

This is a crucial point.  It’s hard to imagine anyone in our society with less power than children. Families are often not much better off, especially when dealing with government.  Just as children are the least powerful of our society, it is equally hard to imagine anyone more powerful than the provincial government armed with all the legal means to accomplish whatever purposes it wants.  The advocate was supposed to provide some balance, largely by making much louder the weakened voice of the child.

All that background is what makes the child advocate’s intervention in most recent story of child protection in the province troubling in the extreme.

Carol Chafe is responding, in largest part, to a complaint brought by a minister of the Crown against the news media and the parents of two children taken into custody by officials of the minister’s department. The parents complained to the news media and the news media dutifully reported the story.

The minister, for her own reasons, decided to try and use the child advocate’s office to a purpose for which it was clearly never intended:  namely as an agent acting on behalf of the most powerful authority in the province. 

Note that Chafe did not make any public comment – as she should have – when the story first broke.  Neither she nor any of her officials appear to have made any efforts to intervene in the case, to deal with the media or the family.

Not until now, that is. 

After Charlene Johnson lodged her complaint.

In a very poorly written statement, Chafe acknowledges that people have a right to know certain things and that the media ought to report.  Then comes the “but” and it is a big one:

However, when children are the central part of the story their right to confidentiality, privacy and safety must trump all other interests.

Asked by CBC’s Ted Blades in an interview on Tuesday to balance the need to discuss a significant issue with the trump card, Chafe couldn’t do it. That isn’t really surprising.  This story carried on for a week.  if Chafe genuinely understood her role and was convinced that the children’s interests “trumped all other interests” she’d have been on this before Charlene Johnson called her in.

Chafe didn’t need anyone’s approval to get in on the case. She has a wide scope of action under the act that governs her office.

Well, the correct phrase is actually had a wide range of powers.

Under changes made to the child advocate’s act in 2008, an entirely new clause (15.2) inserted in 2008 gives a cabinet minister the right to order the advocate to cease an investigation based on the very vague claim that an investigation is not in the public interest. There is no requirement for proof nor does the advocate have any right to appeal the decision to a third party. One letter from the minister and the investigation stops.

Period.

On the face of it, what the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are seeing here is yet another example of how the current administration has steadily reduced, muzzled or eliminated any means by which someone may question its decisions.  The process, as Carol Chafe likes to talk about, has been one of erosion. 

Piece by piece.

Slowly.

Almost imperceptibly.

But once they emerge into the light, as with Carol Chafe’s intervention a handful of months into her new job, there can be no mistake about the result.

Power, once appropriately constrained, has its hands free.

- srbp -