A country of residents and exiles
Jim Candow's Convocation Address
Originally from Suburbia in the Woods, Jim Candow spent 34 years with Parks Canada as a historian. His detailed, diligent, and thorough research helped visitors to national historic sites and national parks throughout Newfoundland and Labrador understand the people and the place. His 2019 book The Invisibles is not so much a history oif the Royal Newfoundland Companies as the subtitle describes it but a n insight into Newfoundland society and politics at the time of self-government and in the stormy and sometimes violent years afterward.
Memorial University awarded Jim an honorary doctor of letters degree at this spring’s Grenfell convocation. This is a recognition richly deserved and Jim’s thoughts delivered to the Convocation in Corner Brook show us why.
In my younger days, I was a big Jack Kerouac fan. One thing that stuck with me over the years was a comment he made on the nature of existence. He said: “I dare you to meet me in a million years and tell me this wasn’t all a dream.” Well, folks, I won’t need a million years, because I have been in something of a dream since receiving word of this honour.
And a beautiful dream it has been.
Actually, I have something in common with Kerouac, as do all expatriate Newfoundlanders and their descendants. His parents were part of a wave of nearly a million people who left depressed rural Quebec for industrial New England between 1840 and 1930. Population movements of this kind are called diasporas, and diaspora is central to the Newfoundland experience. Over the next few minutes, I am going to trace the course of our diaspora, followed by some thoughts on its impact and current significance.
The diaspora’s roots are demographic and economic. From a mere 20,000 people in 1800, Newfoundland’s population grew nearly tenfold by 1884. The economy was then almost completely dependent on the cod fishery, which employed 60,000 people. This was, in fact, its historic peak. But because so many people were chasing finite numbers of fish, average catches had been falling for years, dragging down incomes in the process. In earlier times, lower catches were often offset by higher prices, but now prices themselves were falling because of competition from better quality fish from Norway and Iceland. This created a perfect storm that not only swelled government relief rolls, but also led to massive emigration to Canada and the so-called “Boston States.”
Governments tried various strategies to broaden the economic base, starting with financing a trans-island railway to unlock the mineral and agricultural resources of the interior. These, however, largely proved to be imaginary. Governments then turned to resource development, resulting in newsprint mills in Grand Falls and Corner Brook, and mines in Bell Island, Buchans, and St. Lawrence. While these certainly helped, the fishery remained by far the leading employer. And except for a boom period in the First World War, it continued to be plagued by low prices, depressed incomes, and poor quality.
Newfoundland touched bottom in the 1930s, when salt fish prices collapsed and a quarter of the population was thrown onto government relief. People therefore continued to leave. In 1933, the Newfoundland Royal Commission estimated that there were 200,000 Newfoundlanders in Canada and the United States. Newfoundland, it seemed, was two different countries: one comprised of residents, the other of exiles.
The Second World War brought another short-lived boom, but people began leaving as soon as it ended, among them an estimated 20,000 women who married American servicemen. After Confederation, fishery incomes remained low except in the tiny offshore sector. Meanwhile, the mechanization of woods work eliminated thousands of jobs in the second most important industry. The 1960s, therefore, witnessed an exodus to Ontario.
Population growth stagnated in the seventies and eighties, and then came the collapse of the northern cod stock in the early nineties, after which people left on a scale that dwarfed all that went before it. Despite a couple of recent growth spurts, the population today is roughly what it was in the mid-1970s.
The diaspora’s impact on families has been enormous. Claire Mowat, who lived in Burgeo in the early 1960s, wrote of an elderly couple who had some sixty direct descendants in the United States, none of whom they had ever met. The family dimension is perfectly captured in the Ron Hynes classic, “Sonny’s Dream,” in which Sonny dreams of moving away, while his aging mother begs him to stay. “Sonny’s Dream” is, in fact, the theme song of the diaspora.
There has also been a loss of capable people. Captain Bob Bartlett, E.J. Pratt, Gordon Pinsent, and David Blackwood all spent their adult lives elsewhere, as has Wayne Johnston, the province’s greatest living novelist. On a positive note, though, Blackwood said that living away helped him to view his work more clearly, and it is hard to dispute the results, which are iconic representations of outport Newfoundland. Indeed, while Blackwood and his fellow exiles may have left the island, it clearly never left them.
But while talented people leave, talented people also remain. In fact, you could argue that it is the best and the brightest who stay. Because Newfoundland and Labrador is like New York City in this respect: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
It is also, I think, easy to exaggerate the diaspora’s uniqueness. We live, after all, in an age of diasporas, and in that respect, one of the most striking recent developments in Newfoundland and Labrador has been unprecedented international immigration.
Of course, Memorial University has long been a cosmopolitan island within an island. When I arrived on the St. John’s campus in 1971, my first history professor, Ranee Panjabi, was a recent immigrant from India. She opened my eyes to other cultures, and encouraged me to pursue a career in history. I wouldn’t be standing here today if it weren’t for her, and I hope that the present diversity will enrich other people’s lives as well.
There may well be some friction between natives and newcomers, as there were in the nineteenth century, by the way. But I trust that, as on September 11, 2001, when some 7,000 strangers landed in my hometown of Gander, our better natures will prevail. Because after more than a century of being a source of diaspora, Newfoundland and Labrador is now on the receiving end.
In closing, I would like to thank Memorial University for this great honour. I wish you grads beautiful dreams. And I thank all of you for listening to another expat whom the island has never left.