Erratic Chaos
Sovereignty, history, and going in circles
The circus is coming! The circus is coming!
The Supreme Court of Canada is on the road, touring the country in this the 150th anniversary year of its creation. They started in Victoria in early February. Moncton is next on March 10 and 11. Then it’s off to Yellowknife, Sherbrooke, and Thunder Bay. There’s also an essay competition, a reunion of former law clerks of the Court, a public forum, and all the other fun times you’d expect from the berobed nine.
There’s really nothing in this at all but it seemed like the appropriate dull start to a mid-week column where the only thing going on is Andrew Furey still talking about how the guy who hires temps at the White House frightened him with his talk that Donald Trump means what he says and says what he means. So, by implication, the annexation thing is real. Furey never explains because no one can explain why he is frightened if we are supposed to take the American President at his word, as Trump’s junior staffers put it, yet at the same time Furey says Donald Trump is chaotic, erratic, and constantly changes positions.
Those two things cannot live in the same space but then again if it were not for contradictions, Andrew Furey would have little to say. But Andrew Furey’s latest gibber-jabber is interesting because it shows yet again how little he knows of history and therefore how little he understands what is going on around him today.
We’ve already had the offhand remark from Furey last year about fishermen here fighting merchants for 500 years, which doesn’t even count as exaggeration for effect it is so profoundly out-to-lunch. Then there’s his Churchill Falls Give-away, which shows how little he knows of what happen over the past 15 years let alone 55 years ago. The latest weird words from history is about Confederation in 1949 and how Newfoundland and Labrador gave up “sovereignty” because of economic forces.
People watching these events unfold may be worried about annexation and military action forcing Canada to relinquish its independence, but "that's actually not usually how it happens," said Furey. "Since the turn of the century, there's usually economic conditions that force dilution of sovereignty or relinquishing sovereignty."
Furey said the issue of sovereignty isn't abstract in N.L., as 75 years ago the dominion voted to become a Canadian province.
"There was no tanks on Duckworth Street. There was no aircraft carriers in Placentia Bay. It was because of economic forces that we gave up our sovereignty and joined Canada."
The turn of the century was roughly 25 years ago. That’s probably not what Furey meant. Maybe he read something written in the last century and meant the turn of the 20th century, which would be 125 years ago. Either way and especially if you take the whole of the 20th century, it is incredibly rare to find any country that absorbed into another without violence or threats. In other words, Furey’s just flat-out wrong in what he said.
The rest is no better. Saying that “economic forces” drove Confederation is like “dilution of sovereignty,” another phrase Furey dropped in that CBC clip. The words are meaningless. They sound like the speaker has a clue but they are actually nonsense at best or harmfully misleading at worst. Look at it this way. The European Union, for example, requires that the member states weaken - another word for dilute - some aspects of the individual sovereignty, like having a unique currency, in order to gain greater economic rewards while not giving up their separate international status as independent countries. The free trade agreement between Canada and the United States is the same thing. Countries dilute their sovereignty for the greater economic reward of moving goods and services back and forth across the borders easily.
That’s what we are talking about in the racket with the United States, actually. There’s no threat of invasion. No threats at all really. The Americans are actually asserting their economic sovereignty and undermining the free trade agreement. Yet, Andrew Furey is arguing against American sovereignty by insisting they keep their trade barriers down so Canadian goods and services can get into the States freely. At the same time, Andrew Furey is also asserting provincial sovereignty by keeping his trade barriers up between provinces.
That’s the thing about words like sovereignty. If you don't know what they mean, you can make a lot of easy mistakes. Sovereignty is something we usually think of when talking about countries and generally that’s the best example. Sovereignty means that unless another country can out muscle you, there’s no reason why the country has to do *anything* unless it wants to. International law exists but only to the extent that countries agree to follow it.
Sovereignty exists even in Canada for provinces. The Canadian constitution is based on the idea that there is a division of powers between the national and the provincial level. And inside either of those divisions, each is sovereign. The federal government or the individual province gets to decide. That’s why Andrew Furey can talk out of both sides of his face at the same time about trade and barriers to free trade. No one can force the Newfoundland and Labrador government to lower trade barriers with other provinces. But Andrew Furey can talk about lowering American barriers to trade all he wants.
Germans didn't surrender their sovereignty when East and West merged in the 1990s. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians didn’t surrender their sovereignty in 1949 either. They merged their country with another one in a truly remarkable and optimistic way. The decision, as Raymond Blake and Melvin Baker have explained, had an economic element to it, but there was more than just economics.
“Newfoundlanders were not tricked into political union with Canada in 1948,” Baker and Blake wrote. “They knew what they were doing.” They added : “Like other citizens elsewhere around the world, they confronted their leaders and were motivated by their own plight. In the 1940s, they were part of an emerging voice throughout the developed world that wanted a more activist government.” People wanted a government that not offered only greater economic security but also a better standard of living for ordinary men and women and one that was itself more progressive than the Newfoundland government before 1934.
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians wanted to look after themselves after 1949. They saw the best way of doing all of that was inside Canada, where they could retain their own unique identity and at the same time share in the benefits of a much larger and diverse country. The fights with Ottawa between 1949 and 2003 were about ensuring the provincial government was able to do its job fully.
Being a “have” province meant having an economy in Newfoundland and Labrador that gave the provincial government enough money each year to deliver services to its people without federal hand-outs. It meant modern jobs and prosperity for individual Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. It meant Newfoundlanders and Labradorians deciding for themselves how they would live and work in their own province inside their own country.
Now think about the years since 2003, especially since 2015. It’s been all about getting hand-outs from Ottawa and surrendering our sovereignty when we didn’t need to. Surrendering sovereignty has been Andrew Furey’s defining policy choice. The give-away to Legault surrenders control of Labrador’s huge hydroelectricity projects to Quebec for the better part of the century *without* any compensation beyond the deceitful 50 year extension. The offshore wind deal gave away provincial control over offshore lands to Ottawa, again without compensation or even need.
There was supposed to be a different kind of circus in Newfoundland and Labrador every fall or spring since the end of 2023. Called an election. It just keeps getting pushed back again and again. We were supposed to be in the carnival of an election already *this* year and now it looks like we might be at the voting circus this fall. All we have in the meantime is the truly erratic chaos of the crowd running this place, led by Andrew Furey.