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. 

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.

Our plastic history, utter contempt version #nlpoli

On Friday, the Telegram’s Brian Jones takes issue with fisheries minister Darin King:

Fisheries Minister Darin King’s tantrum this week against the Fish, Food and Allied Workers’ (FFAW) union is the latest example of this government’s extremely bad behaviour.

Jones warns of the dangers of contradicting the current administration:

These days, suggesting differently will entail not only a public lashing by the minister in charge, but a pulling of government funding.

What’s particularly fascinating is that Jones’ column treats King’s comments and the implications of them as if they had not been the way the Conservatives have ruled the province since 2003.

All that has happened is that Williams’ pigheadedness (and that isn’t entirely a criticism) and short temper has been replaced with an utter and thorough contempt.

Yes, Brian, Danny never continually displayed utter and thorough contempt for anyone  who disagreed with him, for the provincial legislature, for free speech, openness, transparency and accountability, other people’s accomplishments, the facts…you get the idea.

Darin is punitive, vindictive, callously petty, or authoritarian according to Jones.

Danny was just pigheaded.

Potato, potato..

- srbp -

Our plastic history revisited

One of the earliest posts among these e-scribbles dealt with a proposal – in 2005 – to rework the Colonial Building. 

The plan was to fix the place up, set up some displays to “interpret” some parts of the province’s political history for visitors and turn the rest of the building into offices.

The plan is striking for its ability to reduce the significance of our historic seat of government to yet another mouldering artifact of the past. The language of this discussion paper is sterile: "The Colonial Building is one of the most significant heritage properties in Newfoundland and Labrador." It is said to have heritage character-defining elements.

The plan is also striking since a committee of government-appointed experts from government and the local arts, cultural and heritage associations has determined the fate of the building, now vacant with the absorption of the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador into the bland collective known simply as The Rooms.

The Colonial Building is to be restored in some fashion and turned into offices for arts, cultural and heritage organizations in the province. There will be the obligatory charade of "stakeholder consultations", but the Colonial Building will continue to be what it has been since 1959 - home to yet another group of technocrats.

In 2005, the whole thing was supposed to cost a little over $3.0 million, with the bulk of that going to restoring the building.

The original post raised a few hackles on someone involved in the whole plan.  He fired off some odd e-mails.

And then the whole plan vanished off the face of the Earth.

Like so many plans, strategies and other Great Initiatives of the current crowd what is running this place, people just stopped talking about it.

Stopped talking about it, that is, until the last day of announcements in the Summer of Love 2011 Great Orgy of Spending Announcements by the provincial Conservatives. These announcements have absolutely nothing to do with the pending election or the fact that the provincial government’s pollster is in the field this month.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale and federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue pulled off a mega-announcement in St. John’s of federal and provincial cash totalling more than $60 million for three projects. 

The two governments will get together with the City of St. John’s to drop $45 million into expanding the St. John’s Convention centre.

Another chunk of cash will go to turning an old industrial site in Paradise into a municipal park paradise sort of thing.

And the balance will go to the Colonial Building project.

There’s no dollar value on the Colonial Building project in the official news release, but odds are it is considerably more than the $3.0 million the whole thing was supposed to cost six years ago.*

Our plastic history, inordinate delays and massive cost overruns.

Plus ca change.

- srbp -

Holy Frack Update:  According to the Telegram:

Premier Kathy Dunderdale also announced $8.6 million from the province (to be matched by the federal government) to complete the restoration and modernization of the historic Colonial Building, which used to house the provincial legislature and archives. That funding will be added to $4.4 million previously committed by the province and $625,000 from the federal government.

Clicking and clacking the old calculator gives us $22.225 million.

That would be seven and a half times the projected cost for the whole she-bang in 2005.

A tourist in her own land

Lisa Moore writes fiction for a living.

For some inexplicable reason, someone thinks this qualifies her to write some special appreciations of  the world as it actually is, offered up as anything but fiction.

Like her 2005 documentary that compared Iceland and Newfoundland in Hard Rock and Water.  She based the piece on the simple – and simply preposterous – construction “Iceland = independent = prosperous/Newfoundland = not independent = not prosperous”. 

The whole idea was ludicrous well before events within three years of her documentary proved Moore’s thesis spectacularly wrong.  But that did not stop her from scaring up a few bucks to make the thing. Nor did it stop the Duckworth Street cognoscenti from flocking to see it and talk about its deep insights at the pubs and coffee shops they usually habituate.

Lest we forget: forgotten edition

So innovation minister Shawn Skinner will be attending Remembrance Day ceremonies at the “St. John’s National War Memorial” on Thursday.

There are at least two problems with this particular news release:

First, the National War Memorial is in St. John’s but it is not the St. John’s memorial, as this release suggests.  It’s the one erected in the Dominion of Newfoundland in the 1920s as its national war memorial, hence the name.

Second, Skinner isn’t just participating, he is representing the provincial government – officially – in the one ceremony that represents the entire province. Nice if the Premier could have made it, but evidently he had something else on.

Incidentally, it was good to see the Premier on Tuesday tossing around a few softballs with former journalist Peter Walsh over at Dannyvision.  All that free television across the province is especially important in polling month.

Those two huge gaffes  - what Skinner will be doing and where the event takes place - are enough to make a mockery of the sentiment expressed in the release that people ought to attend a Remembrance ceremony.

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Le declin de l’empire

Eyes firmly fixed on the past, as if obsessed,  instead of looking toward the future.

Tell-tale sign on top of all the other tell-tale signs - Churchill hydro etc - of unhealthy obsession with the past.

In eight years time, they may find that many of the changes they hoped for like massive new industries will still be little more than the fodder for someone else’s rhetoric.

Finishing other people’s ideas, if you can finish them at all, is not like having ideas – and real accomplishments  - of your own.

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Credit where credit is due

You either get credit because you deserve it or you don’t.

Absolutely.

When it comes to the Atlantic Accord, it is unfortunate that the landmark agreement in the province’s history is suffering the fate of so many aspects of local history.  That’s right:  the Accord is becoming the stuff of myth on the one hand and general ignorance – for the most part – on the other.  Having its name appropriated for another, far less significant document is but one symptom of the problem.

Well, just to clear up any question about credit for negotiating the Accord, the best evidence is a photograph taken of the people directly responsible for that task.  That would be the provincial and federal negotiating teams along with the first ministers and energy ministers at the federal and provincial levels.

The woman seated in the front on the right is Pat Carney, then federal energy  minister and now a senator.

Now that you’ve noticed Pat, notice who isn’t in the picture.

What is it about Tories and eating their own?

Meanwhile, notice that this issue isn’t new by any means.  It cropped up in 2007 as well, as a result of public chatter about other, related issues.

Update:  Here’s the print story on which CBC radio is basing it’s news piece on Friday. The print story gives much more detail.  you really need the two to get a balanced account. The story is by Barbara Yaffee who some will remember from her days – back then – reporting from this end of the country. 

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Fantasy Island; Flags of Our Fathers version

A cabinet minister whose doesn’t know his historical arse from his current events elbow.

And now a bunch of guys who put up a flag to remind us, supposedly, of where we came from, of our past. That’s how one of the guys behind a giant pink, white and green flag described the project for CBC Radio’s Chris O’Neill-Yates.

Seems some yahoo unscrewed the flag base and demolished the thing a month or so after the boys put it back. Apparently it’s been vandalised every year since it was stuck up there a few years ago.

Ah yes, a glorious reminder of our past.

Our past as the pre-Confederation Newfoundland, it would seem:

As mentioned in my last post, we’re putting up the Republic of Newfoundland flag on the South Side hills, and everyone is invited to join in on the hike.

Those familiar with what actually happened will no doubt be scratching their heads and rightly so. Just stop before you cut through the skin.

The Republic of Newfoundland is fiction.

Never existed.

Never happened.

The “republic” is entirely the invention of a local guy looking to make a buck on a few tee-shirts. And he’s made it too what with the popularity of the shirts among the latter-day corner boys.

The flag – in all its pink, white and green gloriousness – belonged to a St. John’s crowd but over its whole history it never gained widespread popularity through what became the Dominion of Newfoundland.

It was certainly never adopted as the official flag of the country.

In other words, at the very best, the flag is a townie artefact but as the flag of a republic? You can’t be the flag of something that never existed anyways.

The crowd who demolished the flag are very likely not a bunch of historians on a rampage.

They are most likely just another bunch of locals who like to destroy what others have made, even if – in this case – what the flag represents is entirely a figment of someone’s imagination masquerading as reality.

Oh well.

If the boys with the flag are raising some money to fly their flag again, maybe they can get in touch with Paul Oram.

He seems like the poster child for their project.

Update November 21, 2009: New title to deconflict with another post. Both were originally titled "Fantasy Island"

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