Letter to a Fallen Angel

“The truth is that most Canadians know little about Atlantic Canada.”

That’s the one sentence from Margaret Conrad’s essay that spoke most tellingly to me. I’ll hazard she wrote it with the same weariness I read it. There are a basket of easy clichés and prefabricated pseudo-thoughts about the Atlantic provinces that some people cherish in place of any real acquaintance with the facts, the people or the region.

A few jokes about unemployment insurance, deploring the “dependency culture,” the “why don’t they move if there’s no work?” meme (not raised when it’s auto jobs in Windsor) and the “terrible burden” of Ontario “subsidizing the whole East Coast” pass for the sum of all knowledge. And, of course “they’re very friendly down there.” The view from the mainland is nearly as shallow as it is condescending.

I think, for example, it is fair to wonder what the response would be if, on a single day, 600,000 jobs were lost in Ontario. Every newspaper, radio and television station would start running daylong specials until eternity if such a shock to the central province’s economic, social and cultural existence occurred. But when 30,000 jobs, in an industry that could claim half a millennium’s tenure—the fishery—were lost in Newfoundland, it was hardly more than days when the “terrible cost” of assisting those hauled from an honest and ennobling occupation started to “worry” observers upalong. In Newfoundland, 30,000 is the equivalent of 600,000 in Ontario.

Problems or challenges in the Atlantic region do not rank with problems or challenges in the centre. That’s the hardest truth that people on the East Coast carry. And they do not rank because, unconsciously or otherwise, the far eastern margins of this country really are marginal to those who most think about, or move, the dynamics of Confederation.

Another hard truth carried by most people from the East Coast is that they are weary of trying to oppose or fix the lazy second-hand view of their life and circumstance. Special pleading is distasteful and unprideful both; and fishing for victim status, which is one definition of successful politics these days, is highly unattractive to those who, as will be clear on close examination, take more solace from stoicism than hope from whining.

I think Margaret Conrad’s essay is on many fronts dead-on. But that sentence was her fullest.