If you weren’t at the Confederation panel discussion on Wednesday night you’re bound to have no idea what actually happened.
But if you were there you wound up as part of a great two hour discussion of a current issue that thankfully avoided turning into another edition of Radio Free Spindy.
The political science department at Memorial University organized a panel discussion on Confederation titled Terms of (Dis)union: Confederation 60 years on.
The panel comprised Terry Bishop-Stirling and Jeff Webb from the history department, political scientist Christopher Dunn, Jim Feehan from the economics department and Russell Wangersky from The Telegram. Moderator for the evening was Doug Letto. After some opening remarks and a series of questions put to the panel by Letto, the moderator opened the floor for what proved to be where the real meat for the evening appeared.
The telegram coverage gives only a tiny portion of it, incidentally, and it isn’t online. It also gets the vote count wrong. The majority of hands opted for Confederation but the difference wasn’t overwhelming. That’s what prompted panellist Terry Bishop-Stirling to comment that the result was pretty much what happened 60 years ago.
When asked about what was needed to change things from this point onward, there was an apparent consensus on the panel about the need for greater awareness of provincial issues among people across the country. That thread wound through the night on one way or another.
On the surface that seems like a good idea and certainly the obsession in some quarters with what is written about the province in the Globe and Mail reflects that view.
But is there really a need for people in Saskatchewan or even Nova Scotia to be familiar with Newfoundland and Labrador history and issues on most of the things that dominate provincial politics here? While it’s a wonderful Katimavik/national unity kind of idea, typically most of us do not bother with issues that are of a local and private nature somewhere else.
All the issues of economic development are the ones that get people agitated the most but they are also entirely under provincial jurisdiction. While people not from here ask the sorts of questions some of the panellists mentioned - and we've all had them – their inquisitiveness might be taken less as a sign of their ignorance and more as a normal curiosity at why that crowd down there are on our TVs again ranting about something.
In other words, it's not just a matter of why they don't know as much as a question of should they know or do they need to know in the first place.
Economist Jim Feehan repeated several times the idea that the history of Newfoundland and Labrador is a struggle for control of natural resources. That’s certainly one view but provincial political control, which is what he seemed to be talking about, was sorted out in 1949 and reinforced in 1985. At that point of realization, it gets a bit hard to figure out what value there would be in educating people in the lower mainland of British Columbia about Churchill Falls.
Heck, most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians aren’t up to speed on that except as myth. That goes to perhaps the most incisive point made during the night by one of the audience members.
What may be needed came out of another part of the discussion, namely the need for a wide, local and public debate about local political priorities. That’s something which has been absent for the past five or six years. if that sort of thing were to take place maybe we could realise we are already masters of our own house.
We just have to start acting like it.
-srbp-