The people who organized the launch of the Uber taxi service in St. John’s last week obviously didn’t know that über is the German word for over.
As in overdone or overblown - übertrieben - which was the event itself.
Excess: Überschuss
There are lots of übers.
Übermensch.
Super-man.
Not the comic book super hero but the superior human as opposed to the untermenschen or inferior people. Sub-humans. The Unfit.
Or the first words of the old German national anthem: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.
The St. John’s Board of Trade - these days pretending to be concerned about the whole province - said the arrival of a new mainland taxi company in St. John’s was “a great day for the Newfoundland and Labrador business community” although no one explained how something as trivial as new jingle buses in town improved the business community in Nain or Corner Brook or Wabush or Clarenville.
Even if people in those places eventually sign up to be a hack-driver for Uber, they are still just taxi drivers even if the name people like to give it is “ride sharing.” Ride sharing is things like carpooling. Money might change hands between the people involved for gas but it isn’t a commercial transaction for profit as part of a company. That’s being a taxi, which in Newfoundland and Labrador some municipalities are allowed to regulate. Unless someone wants to call it something else that is - on paper anyway - this is now regulated by the provincial government under new rules introduced last fall while other taxis are municipal. There’s no reason why these two things that are the same get treated differently but then again, lots of things in Newfoundland and Labrador these days either don’t make sense or come with no official explanation. Certainly Uber won’t be cheaper than a properly regulated taxi service, as CBC proved a few days after The Big Show.
This idea that what’s good for some townies is good for everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a new idea at all. It’s actually just a variation on the idea Newfoundland is the whole place , like when people talk about going across the province, from St. John’s to Port aux Basques, or when at a St. John’s Board of Trade shindig with Barack Obama, the celebrity the Board put up to “interview” him said “we are an island people in Newfoundland and Labrador”. Oddly enough, no one who thinks that way understands why Labradorians get so upset about it and yet those same people get incensed when someone talks about going across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax.
At times that St. John’s ist Neufundlund und Neufundlund St. John’s ist attitude played a major role in determining the fate of the country. Ninety years ago, in February 1934, Newfoundland - as the country was called at the time - gave up elected self-government for a local, appointed government consisting of three representatives from Newfoundland and three from Britain. The commission that recommended this solution heard it a lot from local business and community leaders about how ill-suited Newfoundlanders were for self-government, how they’d never wanted it in the first place, and how it was time to take a break from democracy. "The average person here,” Eric Bowering of Bowering Brothers told the commission on Newfoundland’s future, “is such that we ought never to have had self-government. We are not fit for it.”
The Commission Government wasn’t an external idea forced on the unwilling Newfs, as Sid Noel circa 1971 had it in Politics in Newfoundland, reflecting in the process a view popular then and now among so-called Newfoundland nationalists. In fact, a decade before the end of self-government, no less a leader than Sir William Coaker thought it best if his country were ruled for a decade by a dictatorship - his word - of 10 of the leading men of the country. Coaker admired Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. In Coaker’s scheme, there’d be three districts created for each of main religious sects - three Roman Catholic, three Methodist, and three Anglican - who’d vote in a total nine of the dictatorial cabinet. The nine elected would then pick a 10th man to be to the prime minister to head the dictatorship.
“Such a policy pursued for ten years,” Coaker told a meeting of his union members, “would produce reforms, establish industries, procure retrenchment, and place the fishing industry on a sound, business-like basis. It would cut out graft, reduce the Civil Service list to its proper proportions, dispense for a period with the animosities and bitterness of party strife and permit the country to concentrate upon vital matters that await solution, without having before its eyes day by day, as now, the spectre of the voters turning them out of office, because graft was limited or jobs and pickings were unobtainable, or what the owners of inferior fish would do with their vote and influence in the event of being graded inferior by the proper inspection.”
When Bowering said ordinary people, he wasn’t including himself, of course. Like Coaker, he was blaming anyone not like himself. Not as educated or wealthy or as powerful. Union leader Coaker was far from even being a Newfoundland Huey Long by the time he was cooking up his own version of fascism as the solution to all “our” problems. He was a cabinet minister and political ally of Richard Squires, the Prime Minister chased out of office in the early 1920s in a corruption scandal, and then in his second time as Prime Minister, chased from the House of Assembly and across Military Road by a mob in April 1932 in the midst of the country’s final financial and political collapse.
Bowering and others like him made a scapegoat to blame for Newfoundland’s political and economic failure. Much, much easier on their nerves, bank accounts, and their political power to do that than accept responsibility for making the mess or cleaning it up. They wanted to secure their own influence and power even at the expense of democracy. They and their heirs went back to the theme after 1949, saying that not only was Confederation a conspiracy but that the vote had been rigged one way or another. The majority who voted for Confederation had been duped by Smallwood and Canadian money, they claimed and some still claim, in the same way the same people blame(d) the Unfit for destroying the country in the first place.
At the same time that Newfoundland was collapsing under the economic strain and political fracturing in the 1920s and 1930s, so too was Germany. The two situations were not identical in all respects but it is both fascinating and uncomfortable to look at the two countries and the way in which there are some disquieting similarities.
Germans blamed the Jews. In Newfoundland, the townies blamed the baymen. There are reasons why the Germans were murderous and the Newfoundlanders merely pathetic but you can seen broad similarities. And to be clear, even though there were differences in outcome there were people in Newfoundland just as in Britain, Canada, and America who thought *exactly* like German Nazis or Italian Fascists on issues of race and social organization. No one should assume that the local variants in Newfoundland and Labrador were cartoons, didn't really mean it, or were any less purposeful as those they aligned with, resembled, or admired.
In such minds, there is Us and there is Them. The bad that happens to Us is because of Them. In the 1970s, the Newfoundland nationalists turned to another version of the Them against Us conspiracy this time with a foreign enemy to play Them while letting the definition of Us appear broad enough and hoping memories were short enough to keep the Unfit from figuring out what was going on. Most didn't and still dont.
There’s another connection between between Deutschland and Neufundlund than the love of dictatorship and fascism among chunks of the society. One of the contentious issues between Britain and Newfoundland through the late 1920s and early 1930s was the prospect Newfoundland would not make its debt payments. Britain refused to accept the notion and tried through its own means and with the Canadians help to prevent Newfoundland's default.
This wasn’t some abstract notion or high principle on Britain's part. Germany was threatening default, and did default in some cases, on its financial obligations coming out of the Great War and reparations. While no one at the time ever drew a direct connection - as far as the written record shows - it’s hard to imagine British officials ignored the potential use by Germany of Newfoundland’s default - had it happened - to bolster its own case. As the same people were dealing with the same things at exactly the same time, they’d have been blind to miss it.
In the same way as it's interesting to look at two different situations in the past, it’s fascinating to compare Newfoundland in the past and Newfoundland and Labrador today and see equally disquieting similarities. The link in the Coaker quote will take you back to a 2020 post at the old Sir Robert Bond Papers about the refusal of so many leading citizens these days to talk about the future of Newfoundland and Labrador and getting to grips with the ongoing financial mess the government is in.
That's a huge part of what went on a century ago and the motivations align with those today. Those already dominating want to ensure their continued dominance. The people advocating against democracy then hoped they still control things just like their intellectual heirs within the last decade. You can trace a line through the nationalist rhetoric then and now all of which is rooted in ensuring who stays in political control.
There’s another post from 2019 about the way elites concoct self-serving narratives to steer public discussion or, in some cases, to suppress it. Baymen can be sturdy noble peasants one day or dupes the next, as the needs of the moment dictate.
We tend not to think of our own politics being like politics elsewhere but it was less than 20 years ago that a Premier could talk openly of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians as a “dying race” and no one - especially not the supposedly most progressive people in the province - would question the talk of race in the modern day let alone the policy of paying women to have babies to fend off implicitly the alien hordes. The same people also joined with what the same Premier described as a “Reform-based conservative party that is more ideologically right wing” to support policies ranging from the “Do-Me-For-Danny” breeding scheme through the idiotic Muskrat Falls scam to the plan to bring home ex-pats rather than let the economy and society grow through general immigration. These are all deeply conservative views support for which cut across all party lines in *today's* Newfoundland and Labrador.
More recently, a government of a different political stripe barred entry to the province for anyone not from here originally or with family here in an outrageously racist decision that was upheld by a local Supreme Court justice. Around the same time, he House of Assembly unanimously voted to give the justice minister the power to lock people up without taking the infractions to a judge for a warrant first. These are not progressive, liberal actions in response to any situation.
In itself, the Uber announcement isn’t any of those sorts of things about blamebut it is about cobtrol. The disconnect between the triviality of the announcement itself and the hype given it by the Premier, one of his cabinet ministers, two other celebrities, the Mayor of Sin Jawns, and the townie Board of Trade, is very much part of a political culture with suppression, distraction, and avoidance baked into assumptions. Take it with the other announcement last week, one the celebrity Premier and another of his ministers skipped because they are following the policy two-step of pandering on the one hand and picking a made-up fight on the other. They avoided an announcement that met a vital local need in order to put on a show, all in hopes of fooling enough of the Unfit to keep them in office once an election comes.
There’s a reason why our collective course seems locked in and inevitable even if it wasn’t then and isn’t now. It’s because the people running the place - inside and outside government - focus on self-interest or trivia or anything else that isn’t stuff that would give us a secure, prosperous future as a self-governing society. They do what’s easy, what's in their best interest, and then pretend their interest and everyone else's are the same, that what enriches them doesn't beggar the rest of us.
Doing that doesn’t take leadership.
Isn't leadership.
To change course off the track we are on to repeat the past but worse, we need leadership, real leadership, perhaps for the first time in our history.