Feeling a bit territorial: We might not be that good at the whole province thing

Last week, while speaking to reporters during the budget lockup, Health Minister John Haggie mused about the difficulties of rural access to health care.

"If you use driving time, for example, as an arbitrary yardstick of proximity to primary or emergency care, those have been obstacles because basically, whilst we call ourselves a province, we are actually aterritory."

Germ of an idea there.

With "everything on the table," as the premier puts it, and our economy imploding, maybe a downgrade from provincial status should be considered an option by the best and brightest now being convened in various committees and task forces.

Seamus O'Regan keeps saying we have to be where the puck is going, not where it is. The rubber disc having been Bobby Hulled off a cliff, perhaps it's time for a fundamental rethink.

What would we really lose if we went from province to territory besides a level of government bureaucracy? The provincial public service has a secondary role as a social program, providing income support to people, like Charles Bown, otherwise unfit for work. Looking at the federal bureaucracy, it's clear Ottawa could easily take up that slack; there are even such positions at CBC HQ.

We would be spared the indignity of having to pay Ed Martin's legal bills.

Confederation Building could be converted to a long-term-care facility, officially.

The idea that we aren't great enough in number to be a meaningful polity isn't new. Smallwood, the huckster who launched the catastrophe of provincedom, got his start dissing the joint.

Joey thought we were something yet lower down the ladder than a territory, declaring during the National Convention. "We are not a nation. We are a medium-sized municipality left far behind the march of time."

Seeing how St. John's is run, I believe we would all prefer the territorial designation to municipal. Nationalism may be a dark impulse, provincial pride lacking in ambition, but aspiring to township is giving up altogether.

Once the die was cast in 1948, we lost access to the levers that now control our fate, things like currency or immigration. We got saddled with the unpleasant jurisdictions like health and education.

Our members of Parliament have shown they have as much sway as would none. In fact, if we cut loose the seven dwarfs we would be robbing Ottawa of the pretence that someone was up there representing our interests.

Born and raised here, I've long tried to be optimistic about our prospects. I held out until the Muskrat Falls inquiry. That finally did me in.

In truth we never assign the best and brightest to the tasks at hand; those in power instead call on their cronies. We play to our weaknesses.

We are incurious about better practices, be they Icelandic, Tasmanian or Norwegian. We are struthious and anti-intellectual. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador has managed to turn the world's best wild-caught seafood, lamb, pork, root vegetables, honey and wild berries into a food security problem.

We might not be that good at the whole province thing.

Homemade problems

Many of the cockups who were at the helm of Nalcor as they bankrupted the province of Newfoundland and Labrador remain in their posts because someone thought they were needed to finish the job, which seems now to have been holding our head underwater until we drowned. Most of our problems are homemade.

"The Newfoundland and Labrador Territory" has a ring to it. It possesses more music and mystery than "the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador," which makes the place sound, well, provincial.

There are things to be discovered out in a territory. A province is a collection of rules and regulations. There is freedom to roam in a territory, whereas a province is all about surveyed boundaries, deeds and fences. Huck Finn reckoned he should "light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it."

For us it's Aunt Haggie telling us not to lick the shopping carts but tearing across the bogs on our quads, dumping our garbage in the woods. It's clear we share an antipathy to order.

I still meet the rare optimist who figures the clean air and water, the comparative safety of the streets, the abundance of natural resources, the stunning natural world and the culture will, in a shrinking world, inevitably attract hordes and so address our fundamental problem, demographics.

And I suppose if you owned a tech outfit in San Francisco and were choking on the smoke of the fires engulfing your city as you hopscotched over the feces of the homeless and dodged stray bullets, with Trump in the White House, relocating to St. John's and taking your business with you might not seem like such a bad idea.

That bright future had better hurry up.

Otherwise we'll be changing status as we did in 1949, only this time I have doubts we'll get to vote on it.

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