No matter which of the two parties running in the Baie Verte - Green Bay by-election wins the seat next Monday, the Pea Seas will take it.
But we may miss out on an important opportunity.
The winning part is because the Pea Seas are running a candidate who is a Pea Sea if not also a Conservative while the Liberal candidate is a card-carrying member of Pierre Poilievre’s bunch up in Ottawa. The Dippers are running a NOB, that is, a name-on-ballot.
The by-election has gone largely unnoticed among the normal people across Newfoundland and Labrador because it is far away from Sin Jawns - where all the reporters live - and because it has become an accepted fact that the Pea Seas will sweep the place as they did in Fogo Island - Cape Freels to everyone’s shock.
That’s changed.
Last week, Pea Sea candidate Lin Paddock offered the opinion at an all candidates forum that the government could find more doctors for rural Newfoundland and Labrador if they went looking in places where people “adore” the outdoors - like Germany, he f’rinstanced - instead of places like India and Pakistan and so on because they frig off to the mainland. CBC selectively quoted Paddock’s remarks to make story sound better but still there are issues with his ideas.
The Lib’rals jumped on this and on Paddock. Immigration minister Gerry Byrne scolded the Pea Seas. “Not only are [the comments] not true in evidence,” Byrne told CBC, “but they have overtones which cannot be condoned. It is my duty and my responsibility to call out these comments and to demand an explanation but more importantly a retraction and an apology."
The honourable member for High Dudgeon was in fine form. What Byrne said was true in one respect. There is no evidence that doctors from one country are more likely to stay in this province than those from another. There is a ton of research done on what it takes to recruit doctors and keep them here. Their adoration for the outdoors was not a factor nor was there any relationship between a love of the outdoors and being from India, Pakistan, Libya, Britain, Ireland, the United States, South Africa or any of the other places where doctors come from including Newfoundland and Labrador and other parts of Canada.
Doctors come and go. Not so long ago 40% of doctors in the province got their medical training from somewhere other than Canada. We are below 30% these days but the numbers are still hefty. Many left over the years and those that left wanted more money, a different type of practice, a promotion, to live in a major centre, to hook up with more people from their own original community and on and on go the reasons. All normal, understandable stuff no different from the reasons people born here and who are not doctors frig off to Tranna.
About half of those internationally trained doctors stayed until they got their Canadian credentials and then buggered off to the mainland. As national licensing rules changed and the local medical board offered no advantages and plenty of idiotic obstacles to practicing here compared to other places, many of the doctors who used to come here to Canadianize their experience and qualifications simply don’t come here in the first place. We don’t even get a chance to lure them here with our charms.
While half the international medical graduates high-tailed it elsewhere, the other half stayed. They come in all shapes, sizes, and skin colours, the latter point Gerry Byrne kept referring to as being from a “racialized” country. We cannot hold Byrne’s love of popular jargon against his intent, which was to call out the Pea Sea for being dumb or for dog-whistling about people who do not look like “us”. “Racialized” in that sense Byrne used is a synonym for “coloured,” which means that as much as Byrne’s goal was loftier than just trying to win a by-election, his aim was off. Racism lurks everywhere and some of the most racist people are ones who Byrne learned the word racialized from. It’s a term he should banish from his vocabulary.
Mentioning Byrne is not to resort to “what-about-ism”, which means to distract from one bad act with another. The point here is to make a clear distinction between what Byrne did inadvertently and what we cannot be so sure Paddock did.
Even allowing for Byrne’s enthusiastic use of the wrong buzzword, the Lib’rals had a believable case until Premier My Dime My Time wanted in on the publicity and demanded Pea Sea leader Tony Wakeham act like a leader and fire Paddock. Let he who is without sin, Wakeham could have said but Wakeham looked very much like a leader as he calmly repudiated My Dime’s melodramatics. No different from your example, Wakeham said in so many words, which had he said just those words few would have blamed him and many would have cheered.
Furey is playing the race card cynically and every one now knows it. He so Furey-ously wants a Furey - Liberal in the seat he doesn't give a toss who it actually is. Muskrat Falls insider. Poilievre backer. Anyone can be a star Furey candidate. In this case Furey will grasp at anything to win. His desperation shows. All of that speaks more than anything else to the political flaws of his own leadership and that is ultimately another way the Pea Seas cannot lose this by-election. They may wind up winning it twice, if such a thing is possible.
The wider problem here, the bigger opportunity lost is that we have the comments, which are too convenient in the distinctions Byrne played on to be mere slips of the tongue. Paddock could have said something along the same lines without singling out countries. After all, there’d be no reason to do so since for 60 years or more our hospitals and clinics have been staffed up with all sorts of doctors from all sorts of places, including from local bays and coves and wilderness.
If there was a particular issue on Paddock’s bit of the shore with transient doctors, it would not be because they are from places where people don’t want to set a few slips in the fall, wet a line now and again through the summer, and go off for the moose or out on a snow machine in the fall and winter. If the issue was transients then that would have been the obvious point to make. Instead, Paddock did something else, which tells us at the very least he was winging it and had no clue or that he was using a code-word for some of his voters.
If that is what Paddock was doing - talking of protecting our culchuh and hairtage in the words of that sheet-wearing crowd in O Brother, where art thou? or suggesting we hire people like “us” - we have another issue going on. If so, it might not change the outcome of this by-election, but it might be something that shifts the complexion of the political race between the Lib’rals and Pea Seas later on in a general election.
The thing is, we have always had a streak of isolationism, racism, and bigotry just below the surface of our provincial culture. Sometimes it is open in the way Danny Williams and his followers used to talk about Quebec. There was always the contrast within Newfoundland and Labrador between the story of Lanier Philips on the one hand or efforts to limit the number of African-American soldiers and sailors here during the Second World War on the other. There are twin realities of happy and welcoming people while others talk of the evil outsiders who come only to exploit. All too often we dismiss the casual racism inherent in phrases like “we cannot be a dying race” and in some parts of the province there very much is the sort of racism that exists everywhere in the world. We are not immune from stupidity.
The opportunity missed here is for both Furey and Wakeham to lead an adult conversation on identity, one that is not merely a cheap political grab for a seat. The Premier could disband his racist Indigenous ghetto committee, for example and show us actions that count instead of words that don't. There'd be a sign of real leadership. Equally Wakeham could get in front of this gaffe by promising to do more than Furey on identity issues if he becomes Prenier. Give examples. Show us how you’d be different, Tony. Put Furey on the back foot so that he trips over the low ethical bar he set.
The bar doesn’t have to stay low, though. That’s the point. We shouldn’t play games with race. We can get rid of the hateful ideas and create a genuinely inclusive society of our own.
All we need is a leader to help build the consensus. That neither of the two party leaders thought of *that* option when dealing with this little mess tells us how far we are from the ideal world we imagine.
While I agree with your assessment… I don’t think there was any realistic opportunity for either Wakeham or Furey to advance any deep conversation. Byrne’s indignation smacked of a “political gotcha” and Wakeham was only concerned with getting the issue off of the news cycle as quickly as possible.
While the comment from the Tory candidate is tone deaf and rooted in some anecdotal nonsense the opportunity to advance this conversation was lost unfortunately. The real concern is someone clamouring on about things that are not backed up with facts. Happens all the time.
Google can be a wonderful thing and if Mr. Paddock used his mouse he would have learned that German doctors are leaving because of poor remuneration and working conditions and heading off to places that provide better conditions…not moose or Brook trout. What’s really at play is the want of some to have our rural doctors to fit in unnoticed behind the wheel of their Dodge Ram as they head out Berry picking. Rural NL has a long inclusive education journey.
Good piece, Ed