Copying
The Reading List for 17 Mar 2023
Copying made the news this week.
Twice.
You had people in the coves northeast of St. John’s climbing on the ice piled up by strong northeast winds against the beaches.
It’s dangerous stuff. The water moves. You can fall between the blocks of ice and be crushed or drop into the ocean with little chance of anyone getting you out.
It shows how much locals are becoming tourists in their own land. One time you’d only see visitors doing stuff like this. Usually it’s going down to the cliff edge in a storm or when heavy seas are breaking only to fall over the edge or swept away by a wave.
The locals used to know better. They were smarter about their own place. Make no mistake, they’d take risks. Copying was a local pass-time to jump from pan to pan on the sea ice in a calm harbour. The name comes from the way one boy - it was almost always boys - would head out and then the others would follow him, copying his route from sheet to sheet as they moved underneath.
There was a practical value in that sort of copying. The boys would one day likely go to the ice during the annual spring seal hunt. Hundreds of miles out to sea, they’d climb down the side of a ship, move from pan to pan in search of seals, which they would kill then to drag the skins and carcasses back over the same ice pans to the ship.
Dangerous work. The chance of good pay, depending on the season. And always the risk of going down in the frigid water or worse, like in 1914, getting caught on the ice during a storm. Caught in a blizzard in March that year, 78 men out of a group of 132 from the steamship Newfoundland froze to death. Eight of the bodies were never recovered. The others were brought back to St. John’s, lashed to the deck and covered with tarpaulins, frozen as they’d died, some embracing. Authorities set up a make-shift morgue in the basement of the King George V Institute on Water Street where the bodies thawed enough for proper burial.
There was another kind of copying this week. Political copying. Absurd copying. Andrew Furey decided to dress exactly like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a joint appearance in Clarenville. There isn’t a political leader in Canada who would do anything except stand apart and be recognizable as a leader in his own right.
Except in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Except Andrew Furey.
It’s part of the absurd shrine to himself that Furey has made out of the walls, shelves and table-tops of The Premier’s Office. Both are displays of profound insecurity. Uncertainty.
In another sense, Furey is merely the ultimate expression of the political strategy the provincial Liberals have been employing since 2015. They have snuggled so close to their federal cousins that riding on federal party’s coat-tails falls far short as a metaphor.
Sycophants and the party-boys and -girls will point to the polls as proof the strategy works. A self-marketing poll by Angus Reid showed Furey had climb 14 points in popularity since December. There’s no reason to explain the jump. None. Any more than there is a reason to explain the climb from the 40s where Furey was a year ago. If anything the numbers are counter-intuitive. Furey’s been facing more controversy than ever. More complaints about his behaviour. More anger from the public over health care and no real solutions from Furey and the Liberals.
That’s what makes the party-boy line so hollow. If the same poll is valid now, then it was valid before when Furey was tanking. It’s also the same logic as the copying behaviour. It works, so the argument goes, because the Liberals won three elections using it. This skips over correlation - two things appear connected - to confuse coincidence with causation. It’s a fallacy like the old Danny-boy tautology that the twitchy-shouldered wonder was right because he was popular and popular because he was right.
Truth is, the modern political copying and the rationalizations that go with it are like the difference between the crowd of tourists playing on the ocean ice and the old hands who learned how to do a job despite knowing the deadly risk they were taking. One of them only thinks what they are doing works.
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