Ye brave Newfoundlanders who plough the salt sea,
With hearts like the eagle so bold and so free,
The time is at hand when we’ll have to say
If Confederation will carry the day.
Men, hurrah for our own native Isle, Newfoundland,
Not a stranger shall hold one inch of its strand;
Her face turns to Britain, her back to the Gulf,
Come near at your peril, Canadian Wolf!
Cheap tea and molasses they say they will give,
All taxes taken off that the poor man may live;
Cheap nails and cheap lumber, our coffins to make,
And homespun to mend our old clothes when they break.
If they take off all taxes, how then will they meet
The heavy expenses on army and fleet?
Just give them the chance to get into the scrap,
They’ll show you the trick with pen, ink and red tape.
Would you barter the right that your fathers have won?
Your freedom transmitted from father to son?
For a few thousand dollars Canadian gold
Don’t let it be said that our birthright was sold.
Newfoundland Anti-Confederation folk song (1869)
Faithful readers of this blog know that my sainted mother was from Newfoundland. My mother and my father after my birth in Paris, Illinois, due to my 21 year old Mom being deeply homesick, lived in Newfoundland from 1957-1961. My brother was born there in 1958. Newfoundland never being an easy place to make a living, for all its stark beauty, my family returned to Paris, Illinois in 1961 so that my father could obtain employment, and that is where my parents lived for the remainder of their lives, and where my brother and I were raised.
Newfoundland was granted dominion status in 1907. During World War I, Newfoundland had a proud war record, its regiment in France being granted the signal honor of being designated the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Alas war debts, the Great Depression and corrupt politicians bankrupted the nation and Newfoundland, with its legislature suspended, and a governor appointed by Great Britain, became a colony, in all but name, again in 1934.
In 1948 a referendum was held to determine the future of Newfoundland, with three options: restoration of dominion status, confederation with Canada, and a continuation of being a colony of Great Britain. The Brits made it quite clear that they could no longer afford to subsidize Newfoundland. There was some sentiment among Newfoundlanders to ask the US Congress for statehood, but supporters of that idea were unable to get it on the ballot. In the first referendum held, a narrow plurality of voters chose dominion status, with confederation with Canada coming in a close second. In the second referendum the option for continued colonial status was dropped. Confederation supporters, some of them, prior to the second referendum, appealed to religious bigotry by arguing that Catholic bishops were telling Catholics to support dominion status, which an overwhelming number of Catholics did support. In the second referendum 52% of the votes were cast for confederation, so Newfoundland joined what prior generations of Newfoundlanders had often referred to as the Canadian wolf! It was still a topic of some controversy in the Sixties among my Mom’s relatives!
If Greenland eventually becomes a US Territory, do not be surprised if Newfoundland and Labrador eventually apply for statehood.
Canada’s political class has been bound and determined to injure Canada’s people by replacing them with Arabs, Chinese, and East Indians. The annual issuance of settler’s visas is currently running at 13x what is prudent while fertility rates are depressed. The stock of temporary residents permitted is, likewise, in excess of 13x what is prudent. Standards for naturalization are weak.
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Prior to this rancid project, they implemented a policy of exaggerated deference to Quebec in lieu of doing something sensible like negotiating a velvet divorce.
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And, of course, you’ve had the usual occidental anarcho-tyranny. Bloated public budgets, bloated public employment, understaffed police services munching on doughnuts or distracted by vicious nonsense.
One of the candidates for the next Canadian PM (Chandra Arya) is an Indian man who does not speak French and is proud of it (his English is also questionable.) He insists that the “Quebecers” don’t really care about whether anyone speaks French or not which is a claim that not even the Canadian media can take seriously. Note too when I say “Indian” I don’t just mean “Indian in terms of racial background” I mean “born in Indian and lived there until he was 43 years old.” As a parliament member he’s also fought against having checks on foreign influence of politicians.
Just one of the many ways that life in Canada is indistinguishable from parody.
Although I am sure many inhabitants of these areas are good and decent people, I fear they are in the minority and that we would only be sure to add democrat Senators from these areas, in perpetuity. No thanks.
The Newfoundland government has been a perpetual battle between the Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservatives. If Newfoundland were to secede from Canada by popular referendum, which would be how it would be done under Canadian law, and then request statehood, I would not bet a large sum of money on which American political party would then dominate the oldest English controlled area in North America on the Federal level, especially if Greenland becoming American touched off an influx of Americans into that new State. There are only 545k Newfies at present.
[…] News, Punditry, and Analysis:The State of Newfoundland & Labrador? – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American CatholicNew Western Civ Defender Posts – […]
I’m wishing Trump weren’t generating this distraction.
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I’m also hoping that a Poilievre ministry will (a) actually come to pass and (b) implement a 180 degree policy change in numerous areas.
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That would include a reduction in the number of settler’s visas issued each year to about 35,000, a reduction in the target number of temporary residents permitted in the country at any one time to about 200,000; an end to temporary residency permissions to any parties other than accredited employees of foreign governments, authentic refugees, students, teachers, and dependents of the foregoing; a moratorium on the issuance of educational visas until the temporary resident population falls to 160,000 or so; summary deportation of any refugee applicant who skipped over other countries before arriving in Canada (ditto their dependents); the placement of all refugee applicants (and their dependents) in detention or at least in ankle monitors until their case is decided; a requirement that one have spent the majority of one’s natural life as a lawful and palpable resident of Canada ‘ere one might be eligible for naturalization; limiting certain public offices, occupational licenses, and security clearances to native citizens and to naturalized citizens who have spent the majority of their natural life in the country as lawful and palpable residents. (This shmuck Arya should have had to wait until 2049 to apply for citizenship).
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That would also include a program of repealing legislation which restricts freedom of speech and publication above and beyond conventional exceptions. (Those being such things as disorderly conduct, incitement to riot, stalking and harassment, criminal solicitation, fraud, perjury, contempt of court, trafficking in pornography, civil defamation, classroom disruptions, and disclosure of properly confidential information). Appended to that would be vigorous and impartial enforcement of laws against blocking traffic on public thoroughfares.
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That would also include a requirement that recruitment and promotion in public employment and in private natural monopolies be regulated by impersonally-administered examinations, that collective bargaining agreements be debarred from including race patronage schemes and the like, that government agencies and corporations have a custom defined by statute, that natural monopolies have a custom defined by statute, that medical service providers have a custom defined by statute, and that vendors providing services specifically to travelers have a custom defined by statute. Otherwise, freedom of contract and association prevails in federal law.
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That would include sale, dissolution, or liquidation of a scrum of federal agencies and federal government corporations. The postal service should be put on the auction bloc along with the plant-and-equipment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
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That would include building prison and jail cells for federal use and to rent out to provincial governments and to vigorously expand manpower to consequential tasks, such as hunting down and deporting illegal aliens.
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That would include limiting federal grants to corporate bodies to (a) disaster relief granted miscellaneous parties, (b) financing inter-governmental agencies (like the World Bank), (c) bits of aid to foreign governments (the modal form of aid being not cash but services, equipment, and credit to buy equipment), (d) an unrestricted grant to provincial and territorial government distributed according to formulae, (e) payment of property taxes to local government on equal terms with private property holders,
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That would include limiting the federal welfare state to (a) overseas development and relief, (b) domestic disaster relief, (c) veterans’ benefits; (d) a scatter of direct or contracted services to niche clientele (e.g. certain Canadians living abroad, military families, itinerant households, long-term temporary residents, people in remote areas, aboriginals, people facing actions in federal courts); (e) income transfers (old age, retirement, disability, survivors, interstitial unemployment, and tax rebates), and (f) insurance binders (for medical care and l/t care).
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That would include paying federal employees a stated compensation and financing employee fringes by assessments on that stated compensations (recorded as withholdings on pay stubs). An aspect of that would be staged replacement of defined-benefit programs with defined-contribution programs.
Speaking of Greenland, the present arrangement of Denmark, US Bases and native peoples can not continue as is. In the post WW II world, this arrangement worked well but times change, not least of which are the designs of Russia and China on the Arctic. Trump threw out a proposal, good or bad, and now is the time to bring the interested parties to the table and work out the details.
I’m not seeing what’s wrong with the status quo in Greenland.
Should Saskatchewan and Alberta want to join the US, by all mean, go for it. Maybe the maritimes (New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia). That’s it.
Vancouver is to the left of Seattle and that is not easy. Ontario can be its own country. Quebec can vote to rejoin France. I admit to being disheartened about Quebec. It used to be very Catholic, but after Pierre Trudeau, they threw away worship of God for worship of the French language.
South Florida (really, Miami-Dade) is majority Latino. Spanish is everywhere there and without draconian language police issuing citations against business signs in English.
The Catholic Church in Quebec began to implode some years before Trudeau was a prominent national politician.
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Quebec has sufficient population and personal income flow to prosper as a sovereign country. Regrets that a velvet divorce was not negotiated 60 years ago.
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In Anglophone Canada (and, to a lesser degree, in Quebec), the acute problem is wildly excessive immigration conjoined to a horrid reception matrix of ill-considered welfare benefits and the abuses of anti-discrimination law.
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What’s also puzzling is that the racial neuroses in our own country are replicated in one occidental country after another, even though none of them had anything resembling our unfortunate history with chattel slavery.