Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (29 page)

Certainly, Hurricane Katrina was, and is, a disaster—nature at her most violent and devious. The scale of devastation and misery entailed is not something, let us thank our stars, we on this side of the world are much familiar with.

The great devastation the hurricane wrought is truly a horrific and heartbreaking visitation on our good neighbours the Americans. They deserve every good wish and support we Canadians have to offer, because they are undergoing a real disaster—an event out of proportion to all human efforts, even in the puissant West of the twenty-first century, to forestall.

I think a portion of the meaning of this terrible word, disaster, has left the consciousness of North Americans. It may be a terrible sentence to write, but we don’t expect cataclysms, real disasters, to happen in
our
part of the world—they are not “natural” here. We have become inured to a heartless exceptionalism: that whenever a typhoon, hurricane, tidal wave, famine or earthquake occurs, when the
dead number in the thousands or tens of thousands, it is only “natural” if it occurs somewhere else.

But when a natural disaster of the scale of Katrina does hit our side of the world, its devastation carries a psychological magnification. We have all but given up the belief that such events can happen to us.

But they can, they do and they will. And there is nothing that wealth, technology or government can do to stop a disaster—however much all three can do to circumscribe everything but its central impact. It is in this area, in the area of deploying the abundant resources of a powerful state to check and reduce the human tragedy incident upon every disaster, that the furious debate over Katrina now rages.

There was no stopping the hurricane itself, and most likely no staying of the terrible flooding that followed. Floods are as old as Noah; the whirlwind spoke to Job.

But there were deficiencies of planning and response, from the mayor’s office to the White House, and the incidents of sheer recklessness and criminality during a time of crisis are sufficient to fill an anthology of incompetence and willfulness.

The failures of planning and response may, in part, be set down to that sense of immunity to disaster, our sense of favoured exceptionalism, that has seeded itself in the West. The recklessness and criminality on display from some in New Orleans perhaps belongs to some territory beyond explanation. Both factors have made a horror more horrible.

However, there is one aspect of the debate that is a very troubling signal of the state of American politics now. The ferocity of unstoppable partisan frenzy, which began with the first news of Katrina’s landfall, is, I fear, almost too much for the American political system to contain. For the antagonists of George W. Bush, there is nothing too grotesque or outrageous by way of insinuation or allegation to lay on his doorstep. Of which the charge that racism “explains” whatever shortcomings the U.S. federal response may have displayed is both the most vivid and toxic.

A great natural calamity is just another stick to wield in the partisan wars. American politics is, day by day, more a continuous fever of accusation, irrational hostility and destructiveness. Partisan combat knows no limits. A democratic system cannot be sustained under such a pitch of opportunism and cynicism.

The dead have not been numbered, grief has not been given its time—and, yet, partisanship rages on. This may be Katrina’s second drear gift: the eclipse of American politics.

Newfoundlanders are as exuberant as everyone else about Canada Day, but, in my province, it has been an abiding irony since we joined the Confederation that the national birthday coincides with the bleakest day on the entire calendar of Newfoundland history.

That’s a large claim to make. Newfoundland history is streaked with calamity and loss of life. Those who have any familiarity with the long, sad course of the contentious seal hunt are aware that its pursuit has been scarred all too frequently with appalling catastrophes. Indeed, it was on the very eve of the First World War that seventy-eight sealers from the SS
Newfoundland
were caught away from their ship in a savage storm on the northeast coast and died a gruesome death.

Outport existence and fishing on the wild waters of the North Atlantic were always a wedding with danger and peril. How many, over the generations, went out in the morning not to return at end of day is probably impossible to tell. It is enough merely to note that Newfoundlanders are not unacquainted with grief.

Modern times are no different. The boon of offshore oil had a terrible inauguration with the
Ocean Ranger
disaster. On February 15, 1982, under the assault of 100-mile-an-hour winds and massive waves, the
Ocean Ranger
went down, and all her eighty-four-member crew with her. I remember that day. Newfoundland is a small place. It blackened the entire province, as everyone seemed to have some connection—family, neighbour, friend—with one of the lost.

Grief strikes hard in a concentrated space; it echoes longer in the common memory. For every rollicking ballad of the likes of “We’ll Rant and We’ll Roar Like True Newfoundlanders,” a song intoxicated with the delight Newfoundlanders take in the rough, wild place we call home, there is another pitched in a minor key.

There is an undernote of keening in all Newfound-land history. That keening was never sharper than after the morning, ninety years ago today, when the 801 members of the Newfoundland Regiment left their trenches and went “over the top” toward the German lines at Beaumont Hamel. So many, and so young, they went to death or maiming. Of those 801, only sixty-eight were present for roll call the next day. For the Newfoundland
Regiment, for Newfoundlanders back home, it was, to summon up a biblical name, Aceldama, the field of blood.

If Newfoundland, in terms of population, is a small place now, it was an even smaller place then. The young men of Beaumont Hamel (we would surely call many of them boys today) had come from every corner of the country (as then it was). Not an outport nor a town but sent someone, not a family hardly but was to bear the terrible cross of a favourite they were never to see again.

They had gone with that mix of motives with which young men have always gone to war. Adventure beckoned some, escape from the too-familiar others; honest fealty to “King and Country,” which probably seems a little
outré
today, likely spoke in some measure to all.

But it surely ripped the heart of all of Newfoundland that, in the very first minutes of the great Battle of the Somme (in less than half an hour, they knew doom was upon them), on a perfect summer day, so many of her sons in that battalion, nearly all, were dead or mangled. The Newfoundland Regiment fell under a brutal hammer stroke of concentrated machine-gun fire, mortar and sniping. They were, for that time, alone on the field. The Essex Regiment, which was to have simultaneously advanced, in the confusions of that morning, had not.

It was the most brutal day in Newfoundland history.

The regiment received the honorific of “Royal” from King George himself, the only such designation that was awarded during the entire war. But for me, the most affecting
memorial comes not from the ceremonial designation—the Royal Newfoundland Regiment—or even from the carefully tended battlefield, which today will host the first return of the regiment as a unit since that awful day ninety years ago, but from the words frequently cited of some of the wounded survivors of that terrible morning: “Is the Colonel pleased? Is the Colonel satisfied?”

There is a ferocious loyalty in those words. And a ferocious innocence as well. They are empty of every cynicism.

Winston Churchill once set up a meeting for Joey Smallwood with the legendary Rothschilds. Mr. Smallwood had been trying to put together in the early 1950s a consortium to finance his dream of harnessing the great falls of the Hamilton River (renamed Churchill to honour the statesman, in part for this intercession). The aging Mr. Churchill was impressed by Joey, who had a volubility only second to that of the great lion himself, and arranged a luncheon. The upshot was the Rothschilds became one of the key financial mediators in the development of this huge engineering miracle. Mr. Churchill, like Mr. Smallwood, was taken with the scale of the enterprise. He called it (Mr. Smallwood never tired of quoting these words) “a grand imperial concept.”

It says how long ago all this was that at the time of this celebrated utterance, “imperial” was not a pejorative. It’s another index of those long ago days that the main draw
of the development, at least for Mr. Smallwood, was that it would immediately create jobs, thousands of jobs.

I have often thought that Mr. Smallwood’s economic understanding was unduly influenced by the example of the pharaohs (John Crosbie might argue the influence extended to Joey’s style of government). If a project was massive, grand, monumental, it had intrinsic appeal. And jobs. These twin allures may explain, in part, why the deal wasn’t closely examined as to benefits after the project went on stream. Or at least as closely as any project should, that once it was up and running was under a ninety-nine-year contract.

No one dreamed then of OPEC, or escalating oil prices. “Energy crisis” hadn’t entered the lexicon. No one, at least on the Newfoundland front, glanced a few decades down the road to insert a clause in the power contract that might allow for some flexibility in the selling price of Labrador power, should the world demand for energy alter over the near century of its term.

The rest is history, and from the Newfoundland side of the equation, miserable history at that. Mr. Smallwood got to cut ribbons, hobnob with the wealthy and powerful, and see himself as a true titan of Newfoundland’s economic development. He got, as well, the lengthy and frequent pleasure of retelling his story of the meetings with Sir Winston and the Rothschilds. Mr. Smallwood was his own Homer.

Churchill Falls was the first big project. There would be others, and a truly mixed record they have. Remember Come-by-Chance: By the time offshore oil loomed on the economic
and political horizon, it occurred to Newfoundlanders that this was probably the last one. Mines, paper mills, petrochemical complexes—they had all in succession been shrouded in the promise that this one would be the one development that would unshackle Newfoundland from its economic chains. The dependence on the fishery, and mainly the fishery, which was always a mixed and frequently tragic mainstay, would finally be broken.

Well, all the world knows the Churchill Falls deal now as a very poor trade. A lot of labourers went to Labrador when the project was in construction, but the gold of Churchill Falls has been a shower into the Quebec treasury ever since, and will be for decades more. And all the other big-ticket items were either a mess from the start (Come-by-Chance) or never really delivered on their promise.

It is grandly ironic that, at least from Mr. Smallwood’s day, the search for economic development was always conceived as something to supplement or counterpoise the historic Newfoundland fishery. Never to replace it. That was unthinkable. The fishery would always be there but it would never on its own be enough to draw Newfoundland into its full potential, keep young Newfoundlanders home, and offer anything like real economic parity with the mainland.

But fate, or careless management, which in Newfound-land’s case is fate’s twin, intervened, and the fishery died. This was an arrow to the heart. The province has been reeling ever since. Its faith in its own future, in the best of
times a tenuous, anxious emotion, has been very nearly exploded altogether.

No wonder, then, that on the question of the offshore, on the disposition of its revenues, and on the issues of equalization and “clawback formulas,” the citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador are exercised as they rarely have been. It’s very much The Last Chance syndrome. The offshore is seen, almost by one and all, as our last chance to secure an economic viability—the last great project that might rescue Newfoundland from five hundred years of just hanging on.

In the long shadow of the collapse of the fishery, this is not just another routine Ottawa-versus-St.-John’s conflict. For my crowd, it’s the moment of truth.