The Black Armband Brigade

Ever-so-predictably, Greg Locke joins the Black Armband Brigade, wringing his hands over Confederation, moping over what might have been:

How would politics, business and social structure be different than it is. Would we be like Iceland, Ireland …or even Malta!

Aha! A new one for the crypto-separatists. Malta. Greg, Chairman Dan, Sue Kelland-Dyer, Averill Baker, Lisa Moore, and the rest who are entranced by the entirely phony comparisons to Iceland and Ireland can perhaps explain: what are the Icelandic, Irish, and now Maltese equivalents of Labrador?

When is the CBC going to start underwriting those documentaries comparing Labrador to Yukon or the NWT, anyway?

He continues:

Sadly, I’ve been to Canada. Spent half of my life there and guess what? They don’t want us. Never did. What they wanted was to complete their country, from “sea to shining sea” …not to mention the natural resources. Like all colonialists, for Canada, it was always about what they could take out, not put back in. They didn’t think that once they took over everything they would have to actually feed and house the dirty little buggers.

Greg Locke, whose technically-proficient but otherwise intellectually dubious book "Newfoundland: Journeys Into a Lost Nation" pays just enough attention to Labrador to whinge about Churchill Falls, has some gall complaining, with no basis in fact, about Canada's supposed resource colonialism.

Perhaps Greg Locke can explain, what natural resources did Canada want? Which ones did they get?

And in his description of "colonialists", he captures perfectly, mutatis mutandis, the attitude of Newfoundland colonialist-nationalists towards Labrador. Why is the almost entirely fictitious Canadian "colonialism" towards Newfoundland worthy of denunciation, at annual and more frequent intervals, while Newfoundland's very real colonialist past — and present — in Labrador goes utterly unaddressed by the St. John's literati and glitterati?

The dead Beothucks get more sympathy from Newfoundland nationalists and the cultural élites in Town, than living Labradorians, of whatever ethnicity, do.

Indeed, those who dare raise Newfoundland's own little domestic colonialist streak are condemned by those same literati and gliterati as, at best, "whiners", at worst, four-letter epithets.

Locke continues:

What use are those MPs when they are 1/ beholding to the party over the people who voted or them and 2/ Newfoundland has no voting power in Canada.

Setting aside the overcorrection ("beholding")... the "Newfoundland has no voting power in Canada" is utterly bizarre. Newfoundland, with six MPs, obviously has a voting power greater than zero. And perhaps this point is too subtle for a Townie nationalist, but can't the same argument be made, mutatis mutandis, for Labrador's position within the province of which it is supposedly a part? After all, with only four seats in the provincial legislature, compared to Newfoundland's six in the House of Commons or Senate, wouldn't that make Labrador's provincial voting power 2/3 of zero?

When Newfoundland nationalists start being honest with the facts, and when they finally come to terms with the hypocrisy of how Newfoundland does onto its own little colony pretty well everything that Newfoundlanders claim, rightly or wrongly — and it's almost always wrongly — Canada does to them, then, and only then, will they find any sympathy in this corner.

And even then, not very much.