NL after the oil boom and hydro bust #nlpoli

Newfoundland and Labrador Historical Society

George Story Lecture and Annual General Meeting

Marine Institute - Hampton Hall

The Return of History?

Newfoundland and Labrador 

after the Oil Boom and the Hydro Bust

Dr. Jerry Bannister

April 30, 2020

Building on the themes established in A river runs through it (2012), Dr. Bannister will explore the changing roles of history since the province’s economic downturn. 

He will trace patterns in political culture and collective memory from the Williams era to the present day, as the province experienced the end of triumphalism and the return to a politics of loss. 

In discussing the causes and consequences of the Muskrat Falls crisis, he will examines the ebb and flow of Newfoundland nationalism over the past 20 years. Is this province breaking with its past or returning to its 20th century narrative?

A graduate of Memorial University and the University of Toronto, Dr. Jerry Bannister is an associate professor of History and Acting Director of the Marine Affairs Program at Dalhousie University.   

Born and raised in Newfoundland and Labrador, he is a past member of the Executive of the Newfoundland and Labrador Historical Society.

Recent books:

• Elizabeth Mancke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim, and Scott See, eds., Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North America, 1749-1876. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.
• Melvin Baker, Jerry Bannister, and Christopher Curran, eds., Essays on the Legal History of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s: Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2019.
• Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012
• William R. Keylor and Jerry Bannister, The Twentieth-Century World: An International History. First Canadian Edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

-srbp-

On the need for politics #nlpoli

Politics [is] the art of pursuing common interests through... active listening, advocacy, public persuasion, compromise and negotiation.

Bob Rae

William Ford Coaker,
the father of the Commission

The people from Newfoundland and Labrador quoted in the Globe and Mail on Friday described the problem facing the province today.

We are not talking about chronic overspending, an aging population that will need more health care, or the impact of Muskrat Falls.

The problem is the shared attitude among the province’s opinion leaders  - the ones quoted by the Globe and many more besides - that *any* solutions to the province's financial problems are bleak and politically unacceptable.

Here are the bits from the Globe and Mail piece, ironically by some guy named Greg Mercer, a name he shares with the current Premier’s chief of staff:

• Political science professor Amanda Bittner: “You’re going to be making some tough choices that nobody is going to be happy with, and it’s probably going to be miserable.”
• Lawyer and cable television show host Melissa Royle Critch described the problems as “daunting” and said the debt problem was “insurmountable.”
• Progressive Conservative leader Ches Crosbie: “We are in a death spiral.”
• Outgoing Premier Dwight Ball said that borrowing to cover continued deficits will be the major challenge facing his successor.
• Economics professor Scott Lynch said,” [Dealing with the financial problem is] going to be a nasty situation. These cuts will be extremely painful.”

We can add to that finance minister Tom Osborne who recently dismissed out of hand a proposal to put the government’s liquor corporation in the private sector, like Alberta did more than 20 years ago.  The result would create jobs,  preserve provincial tax revenues, and bring in a couple of billion dollars in the sale.

But Osborne, like all the others leading the province will brook no change in anything.

They simply want someone else to pay the bills.

First Wells ministry, 05 May 1989 #nlpoli

May 5, 1989 was a Friday. 

It only took the couple of weeks between the election on April 20 that year and May 5 for the government to change hands between political parties for only the second time since Confederation.  The House met before the end of the month was out and before that first session ended,  the province had a new budget.

Clyde Wells was the fifth Premier after Confederation.  He was preceded by Joe Smallwood,  Frank Moores, Brian Peckford, and Tom Rideout.  

In the first 40 years after confederation,  we had five Premiers.  Since 1999 - that is, in less than 20 years - we have had eight Premiers.  Dwight Ball is number 13 in the line, the majority of whom since 1999 have served for four years or less.  We might have a fourteenth, depending on how events turn out.

The habit after 2003 has been for a majority party elected in the fall to wait upwards of six months before opening the legislature.  The initial excuse was that there was a work to do in getting ready for the House.  In 2007 and 2011,  the government was re-elected and did the same thing.  

This is the official portrait of the cabinet sworn in May 1989 by Lieutenant Governor Jim McGrath.  The photo is courtesy of Rex Gibbons, who you can see standing on the extreme left. The photographer was Don Lane.

It was a relatively small cabinet at 15. The cabinets immediately before it had had upwards of 23 members. It was also a fairly well-educated cabinet: three of the people around the table had doctoral degrees (two in education and one in geology). There were a couple of lawyers, some teachers, business owners, and folks like Walter Carter who had spent all of his working life in elected public service.

Most of them carried on in cabinet for a while after or in the House and later still went back to their old careers or took on new adventures. Five of the members of that cabinet have passed away since.

The ministry consisted of:

Standing (left to right)

• Rex Gibbons, Mines and Energy
• Eric Gullage,  Municipal and Provincial Affairs
• Walter Carter, Fisheries 
• Chuck Furey, Development  (after 1992 - Industry, Trade, and Technology)
• Dave Gilbert,  Works, Services, and Transportation
• Jim Kelland,  Environment 
• Paul Dicks,  Justice,  Attorney General
• Chris Decker,  Health
• Herb Kitchen,  Finance

Seated (left to right)

• Graham Flight,  Forestry and Agriculture
• Patt Cowan,  Employment and Labour Relations
• Clyde Wells,  Premier,  Intergovernmental Affairs
• His Honour, James McGrath,  Lieutenant Governor
• Winston Baker,  President of the Executive Council,  President of Treasury Board
• John Efford,  Social Services
• Phil Warren,  Education

-srbp-

Corrected name of Furey's portfolio, 09 May 2018)

Dependence and Independence #nlpoli

For those who might be interested,  Tuesday's post on Churchill Falls and Wednesday's post on the road to Muskrat Falls are a summary of a draft on hydro-electricity development that's been in the works for a couple of years now. It was supposed to be the chapter of a book but it got out of control and might be worth turning into a book.

Sometimes you get caught up in the details of things so it's useful to take a step back and look at the broader themes that emerge from your writing.  One that hadn't appeared before now was the consistency that ran from Joe Smallwood in 1949 through Moores and Peckford in the 1970s and 1980s,  Wells and Tobin in the 1990s and finally Roger Grimes.  

Each of their administrations had as its goal the development of the provincial economy to the point that the provincial government would no longer be what Smallwood called a poorhouse. His vision was a "growing prosperous province of independent families."  That's not surprising if you know anything of Smallwood's experience in Newfoundland from the 1920s onward.  He had disagreements with the federal government, the most famous being the 1959 row over Term 29 payments.

Gandhi, Mandela, and a guy in a chicken suit #nlpoli

If the provincial New Democrats had sent a garden gnome around the province, odds are that the photos he'd have brought back would be more interesting than the stuff Earle McCurdy is posting from his wanderings around the province this summer.

This is a picture Earle tweeted on Monday from a coffee shop in Gander.  Admittedly, it has been a few years since your humble e-scribbler has visited Suburbia-in-the-Woods, but recent news reports suggest that there is a sizeable population of folks still there.

Well, enough at least that a fellow of the political stature of Chainsaw Earle might possibly manage to draw enough of an audience on his own account as to populate a decent size photo.  And certainly enough if the local squad of New Democratic Party zealots got all together in one spot, they might be able to pass themselves off as  something resembling a handful, if not a bunch.

But one person?

That's just embarrassing.

The possible shift #nlpoli

If the polls are right, we could be looking at an unprecedented shift in politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.

We could be looking at lots of things but it’s a useful exercise to put a bunch of ideas on the table.  That’s about the only way you can tease out rends that others won’t see.

What can we say about these polls?

The Great War and Newfoundland Political Memory #nlpoli

“It is sobering to think,”  historian Sean Cadigan wrote in the Telegram on Tuesday, “that the memory of the casualties of war has been used partially for later political purposes for almost a century.”

Cadigan was recounting the history of the ceremony on July 1 that started in 1917 to mark the anniversary of the battle in which hundreds of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians died in a few short minutes.

It is possible that, in the process of "remembering," we may be in danger of forgetting the real aspirations of the men of 1916 when we gather on Memorial Day tomorrow.

Sobering though it may have been,  Cadigan had no trouble using the corpses at Beaumont Hamel for his own purpose and that is where we begin. 

Identity Crisis #nlpoli

Newfoundland is changing, Michael Crummey writes in the Newfoundland nationalists’ newspaper, the Globe and Mail.  House prices are climbing in St. John’s.  There are plenty of expensive restaurants around and people to eat the food and drink the wine sold there.

“But,”  says Crummey,  “while oil execs tuck into their gourmet fish, much of rural Newfoundland is falling deeper into a crisis that began with the cod moratorium in 1992.”

The whole province – Newfoundland and Labrador – is changing.  There is a difference between the changes around the provincial capital and the rest of the province.  Crummey says that a “generation from now,  what it means to be a Newfoundlander will be something altogether different” from what he calls the traditional Newfoundland of “isolated, tightly knit communities that relied on the fishery and each other for survival.”

All true stuff.  The place and its people are changing.  The problem with Crummey’s commentary is that he gets his timescales wrong and misidentifies the root of the change and its implications.

Remembering… or not #nlpoli

The news release that announced a provincial commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the First World War includes right at the start a picture of two couples, one older, and a small child.

The photograph is curious.

Look closely at it.

Some Thoughts on Politics, Myth, and Identity #nlpoli

Your humble e-scribbler saw a couple of comments last week that said the NDP town hall on Muskrat Falls was a good argument against having a referendum on the megaproject.  Some people were quite badly misinformed, so the commentary went, not just about Muskrat Falls itself but about the province’s electricity supply and demand.

Those observations are surprising.  They are surprising because we’ve had two whole years of relentless marketing by Nalcor about their project.  They are surprising because the provincial government has been trying to develop the Lower Churchill continuously since 1998.  There isn’t a single year since then when the provincial government, Nalcor and before that Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro have not been trying to find some way to get this thing done.

That’s almost 15 years of relentless public discussion.  And still people don’t know basic information.

Absolutely gobsmacking, that is.  Unless you think about public discussions over the past decade or so.

Beaumont Hamel and the Newfoundland nation #nlpoli

Mark Humphries is an historian at Memorial University.  He spoke with CBC’s Chris O’Neill-Yates on July 1 about the impact of Beaumont Hamel on Newfoundland and Labrador.

Humphries does an interesting job of putting the 700 dead and wounded on that day into a larger context.  He likened it to 161,000 Canadian males between 19 and 45 years of age dying in 20 minutes today.


Then in response to a question from Chris, Humphries turned it into a unifying event for the country.

A river runs through it #nlpoli

Jerry Bannister’s paper “A river runs through it:  Churchill Falls and the end of Newfoundland history” is now available in the latest issue of Acadiensis.