Dance to the cartographic time-warp

It’s a bloody shame that too many Newfoundlanders exhibit too much of a francophobic tendency. If the province’s population had great competence in the French language, they might do some reading and finally get over the paranoid delusion that Quebec, even if it is “out to get Labrador”, doesn’t have a shadow of a case, let alone one that is re-inforced by creative cartography. If so, then what are the implications for Saint-Pierre & Miquelon, which have, apparently, been claimed by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador (and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon?)

In the late 1960s, the Quebec government of the day appointed the Dorion Commission, la Commission d’enquête sur l’intégrité du territoire du Québec. It studied all the land and maritime boundaries of the province, but it was really little more than a colourable attempt to re-open the Labrador boundary dispute.

Dorion and his colleagues were very clear: Quebec lost in 1927. Its loss was confirmed in 1949. Quebec has no legal claim to Labrador, and does not gain one by pretending that 1927 never happened. Indeed, by its cute pretence that the watershed boundary applies in southern Labrador, Quebec is in fact giving credence to the general legal argument that led to the height of land being established as the boundary line along most of its length.

There is no Labrador boundary dispute, Tom Kierans’ vivid flashbacks to the 1960s notwithstanding. It’s baffling that the media would still, in 2005, give any credence to the supposed “dispute”, when even Jacques Parizeau, the purest and durest of les purs et les durs, has thrown in the towel.

No, the cutesy Quebec map thingy is not the product of some conspiracy to undo what the Privy Council did in 1927. It is the result of a Quebec government cartography policy, which leads to maps like this.

Would that the province which Labrador is actually in would adopt such a policy. Then we might see the last of maps like this.

After all, if those Quebec maps which claim Labrador strengthen Quebec’s claim, then there must also be legal implications of those Newfoundland and Whatchamacallit maps which ignore Labrador or treat it as something other than the integral part of the province that Danny Williams says we are. They must, if you accept the Kierans theory, weaken Labrador as a legally integral part of Newfoundland and Labrador.

And would that Newfoundland nationalists would broaden their narrow minds long enough to get at least as torn up about their own government’s and society’s attitudes towards Labrador, as they are about Quebec’s. If they want to start changing those attitudes, they should start at home.

Oh, and Brian Peckford: you’re not a lawyer. It shows. Your government talked to Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s, when their maps were often even more extreme. If you don’t like implications, then shut up.