Check out the Conservative television spot aimed at what they label as "Atlantic".
Then listen to the fake presenter talking about Stephen Harper's connections to the "Martimes", as if the two were the same thing. Then there's a switch by Harper to talking about Atlantic Canadians. Mixing the two is a habit for Canadians not familiar with the places east of Cornwall, Ontario. Maritimes is a term that predates Confederation in 1949.
Then the guy who talked about a culture of dependence in Atlantic spouts a new message: a positive one about wanting to help Atlantic Canadians.
or was it Maritimers?
To put this in perspective for people not from Atlantic Canada, lumping Newfoundlanders and Labradorians in with people from Nova Scotia is like saying that everything from the Ontario border to British Columbia is "the West": a big, homogeneous mass without specific issues and different cultures within each province.
It's like listening to people not from Atlantic Canada talking about driving through all four provinces in a day.
Take a map of Atlantic Canada.
Place the easternmost tip, at St. John's, on the Ontario-Manitoba border.
Where does the western tip (Edmundston, New Brunswick) wind up?
Vancouver.
If you get the geography or the names wrong, odds are good you don't fundamentally appreciate very much else, either.
Update:
A sharp-reader took issue with my distance experiement.
Fair enough.
The experiment described above was one used some time ago to impress upon people the size of Atlantic Canada. It's a long-standing local joke the number of people who think they can drive around easily, as I said. Sort of like a European friend of mine who, on coming to Canada, figured we could pop down on the weekend to California. By car. When you have never lived more that 150 miles from the ocean, big is a concept that is a little hard to fathom.
So, I hauled out the atlas and worked it out. East-West the distance goes from the Man/On border to just about Calgary, give or take a bit. It's the north-south distance from the northern tip of Labrador to Cape Sable that stretched on a map far enough to hit Vancouver, give a take a few miles.
The point of the exercise?
Atlantic Canada is a physically large place and within that there are differences of culture, geography and everything else as well as four distinct provinces. It's just as diverse as anywhere else in Canada.
If you go back to the Harper spot, let's take a look at the messages. Harper is asked about his deep roots in "the Maritimes". He talks about how his father had to leave to find opportunity elsewhere, like so many from his generation.
Then he bridges out to a statement that he believes the region should have control of its own resources and that "made in Ottawa solutions are not the answer".
To put it bluntly, this little spot is designed to do two things. First of all, the Conservatives are trying to get past the culture of defeat comment that has dogged Harper since he first made it. He wanted to leave the impression he was fully aware of the region through his father's family. Second of all, the spot is designed to deal with what is perceived to be a common regional attitude.
Unfortunately, what we have here is a caricature - a perception of Atlantic Canada or the Maritimes being the same. And the solution he talks about is an equally simplistic caricature. The "region", actually each of the four provinces, controls its own resources already. There are no "made-in Ottawa" solutions.
At no point, does Harper mention anything specific that a Conservative government might do to deal with this "problem".
Immediately above the "Atlantic" spot on the CPC website is one targeted specifically at British Columbia. That's a telling part of the Conservative approach in this spot - four provinces get lumped together as being somehow as homogeneous in attitudes and opinions as British Columbia. Atlantic Canadian or Maritimer is the identity for local people in the same way that people from the other coast would call themselves British Columbians.
But here's the thing: the sense of identity implicit in the spot is wrong. It comes from people who are not from here. It's a convenient way to describe people in the same wrong-headed way as we sometimes see all people west of described as "westerners" or, indeed of describing all people in the centre of the country as Ontarians.
However, those convenient labels miss so much that is important.
Like I said, get the name wrong and you are likely to get a lot more wrong as well.
