"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. " Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Purists will rightly point out that Marx and Engels are talking about the impact of bourgeois economies in producing the conditions necessary for the political awakening of the proletariat.
However, the notion can be applied in another context, namely that constantly disrupting established relationships - whether of people to work, or ideas to the material world - produces the effect of unsettling the foundations on which human society functions.
Political dialogue is no exception.
Modern political discussion, especially as we have seen locally in recent months, often relies on pure emotion divorced from history and any other meaningful context.
Newfoundland nationalists and many others can be easily roused by the symbol of the Upper Churchill without most of them ever appreciating the long history and the particular context in which the Upper Churchill hydroelectric project was developed. Similarly, the Real Atlantic Accord can be assailed on the basis of myth and misrepresentation and even those who authored the agreement can simply discard established fact in the face of current expediency. On this point see anything written or said by John Crosbie in the past five years.
There is more to this than the abuse of history. It removes events from a human context which can be appreciated and assessed and in the process serve as a guide to deeper understanding of current problems or issues. As some wit once remarked, history is not so much what occurred as what we remember. In Newfoundland and Labrador, our memories are exceedingly dim. In a place where so much of our history remains unexplored, the record of what occurred transmogrifies into mythology and in some instances it is deliberately transmogrified by those wishing to influence wider public opinion in favour of or against one cause or another.
Ours is largely an oral culture, as it has been for centuries. There is a well-known communications exercise of whispering a message to one person who whispers it to the next in a long series. The humour comes in hearing first what was said at the beginning and then what emerges at the end after the message has passed through umpteen "listening and repeating" iterations. Such is oral history and oral culture.
Recall how easily Brian Tobin evoked the Upper Churchill in his sham-fight with INCO, or how readily Danny Williams whispered the same words during his recent offsets campaign against the federal government.
All this may overload a simple news release with too much political theorizing but I will take the risk.
Consider the second news release in two days from Liberal Opposition leader Roger Grimes on the federal shares in Hibernia. Grimes states:
"I call upon government to update the people of the province as to what actions have been taken to ensure this important asset is secured. Lobbying efforts should also continue to have the headquarters of the Canadian Hibernia Holdings Corporation (CHHC), the crown corporation that operates this 8.5 per cent share, moved to this province from Calgary. It is an insult that a federally run corporation that makes their profits from our resource is based in Alberta, not Newfoundland and Labrador. This is not acceptable and government should fight to have this office, and the jobs that go with it, transferred to the province."
Grimes is continuing his pseudo-nationalist posturing from his days as Premier. It was Grimes, after all, who funded the expensive and largely vacuous Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada. The Royal Commission's final report is, in many respects, merely a summary of the standard nationalist complaints about what former Tory cabinet minister Bill Marshall called "the rack of Confederation". Little effort was expended to provide a deeper understanding of this province in its current context or to offer a richer understanding of events like the Upper Churchill contract negotiations. The Accord offset section of the final report is a particularly odious example of fact being twisted and distorted for a purpose other than the furtherance of understanding.
That said, Grimes' releases on the federal Hibernia shares pander to the misunderstanding of a simple subject. Grimes transmogrifies the location of an office, of all things, into an insult, into yet another wound on the scarred psyche of Newfoundlanders (but not necessarily Labradorians) The reality of the Canada Hibernia Holding Corporation (CHHC) office becomes air for Grimes' purposes.
CHHC staff comprise a handful of people, four of whom are traders who, to the best of my knowledge, are engaged in the business of selling oil to generate the revenue from the federal shares of Hibernia production. They work on the Calgary exchange, again as far as I know, but even if that were not true, they are simply located in a city which is the centre of the country's oil and gas industry. Pretentions by Halifax and St. John's are obviously to the contrary.
So what value, beyond the purely symbolic, comes from relocating this tiny office? The answer, in short, is none. The office may bring a handful of new salaries to an already prosperous city and the office itself may generate some modest rental revenue. It would bring no great economic benefit and may well disrupt the simple - and cost-effective - functioning of the office where it is.
As a rule, government salaries produce no substantive economic benefit, as the Tobin experiment of dispersing provincial government offices around the province showed. Relocation was a symbol, but merely of the government's inability to foster economic development outside the metropolitan St. John's region. The expansion of government - as advocated in the revamped Independent - merely serves to increase the taxation burden on the whole society and, more often than not, stifles the imperative to deliver needed services effectively. After all, if the mere presence of the salary is the valuable commodity, then that is all the government need produce. What incentive exists to do something actually?
As for Grimes other issue, acquisition of the federal shares themselves, the overall context needs greater examination to determine if the idea is even feasible. The corporate partners may not be willing to see the simple transfer take place. They might insist that it be transferred but at fair market value. This is something which the provincial government simply cannot afford - without using the new offset money and given that the Hibernia project is halfway through its productive life the chance of recovering the purchase cost plus produce a real profit is slim. Were we somehow to engineer the transfer for a token sum, one can only imagine the national repulsion at such a generous gift on top of what is widely perceived as an already overly generous gift in the January deal.
What we might find, in a detailed analysis, is that acquisition of the shares would produce no substantive financial benefit. In the last scenario mentioned above, it might come at a more significant political price in the long term. Such is the history of this place: long on symbols, short on the practical.
Then we wonder why we are not more prosperous than we are, either economically, or politically.
The simple answer is that we reduce everything to air.
Air is free.
