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Getting angry for the wrong reasons

I used to live in Newfoundland. A piece of rock tilted long ago by the weight of glacier ice, it rises in usually bitter solitude from the floor of the North Atlantic.

I used to live in Newfoundland. A piece of rock tilted long ago by the weight of glacier ice, it rises in usually bitter solitude from the floor of the North Atlantic. The weather whips out cold winds, relentless snowfalls and brilliant summers, which culminate in smashing rains before the whole cycle starts anew. Like many of its people, droves of whom are economic refugees in desperate flight for mainland job markets, bits and pieces of the island occasionally tumble into the ocean, never to return.

I used to live in Labrador, too. That’d be Newfoundland’s mainland counterpart. Farther north and remote beyond sanity, it’s colder, harsher and less populated still. I’m talking frost in August. People living in Goose Bay, an air force town at the end of a treacherous 550-km gravel highway, refer to the rest of the country — or the world, for that matter — as the “outside.” That’s ominous stuff. Remote is just a flimsy word in a useless dictionary when you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere on the inside. And, when nowhere is everywhere, “remote” does nothing to describe your surroundings. It’s like calling Ted Bundy aggressive, like saying Chris Farley had a buzz. You’re right, of course, but only in the dimmest of ways.

Every year, hardy and hardened folk from both the island and mainland make their way onto the ice flows, where, with rifle, hakapik or both, they slaughter harp seals in numbers established by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. This year, the cull is set for 275,000 animals, up from last year’s 270,000, which was down from over 300,000 the year before. Watch the news: They’re doing it right now, a cross-section of Maritimers shooting and clubbing in tow.

Every year, the seal hunt galvanizes much of the Western world, where human life has reached a level of luxury so high some of us no longer see much value in it. By some of us, I mean people like Paul Watson. A sea-faring environmental type, Watson recently told the media that the death of a few sealers off the coast of Cape Breton was indeed a tragedy — but more tragic still is the death of all those seals.

I’m reminded of some urinal advertising I came across in the Mountain Square bathrooms. There’s a picture of a pint glass accompanied by some text informing me first of the seal hunt and then that my beer is getting warm. “Get angry for the right reasons,” it says. How about ridiculous statements from cult-of-personality activists unable to correctly prioritize the value of various life forms? You pretty much need a cold beer to wash down shit that thick.

Unfortunately, shit and protest go hand-in-privileged-hand when it comes to the hunt. As mentioned — and for the record — it’s harp seals they kill, not those cuddly white-coated cuties you see in activist propaganda. That’s been illegal for sometime.

And what about Paul McCartney and Heather Mills? A couple of years ago, they lent their exhausted celebrity to the anti-sealing cause, wandering around uselessly in a bubble of flash-bulbs and tape recorders, completely unaware of where they were geographically: When invited by Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams to visit his province and bear witness to the hunt, they told him they were already there doing just that. Except they were in P.E.I., where there are seals, yes, but only a small hunt compared to the so-called Front off the coast of Newfoundland. It’s nice, when telling people what to do and feel, to have at least the most basic grasp of relevant information, don’t you think?

There’s so much wrong with this picture. Partially at stake is the unity of Canada itself. This is a country rent by regionalism. All along our 6,000 kilometres of national highway, we find people steeped in the pride of place, a barely excusable sentiment that pits province against province, region against region. Newfoundland and Labrador is a sad example of this thinking.

In part because of their hard-luck history, compounded further by differences in accent, tradition and geography, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are often consumed by the xenophobia of extreme pride. I stuck out sorely because my last name has the sort of syllabic head-count that immediately identifies me as someone from the landlocked mainland. I was derisively called a Canadian — a Come From Away — and the implication was that they were not.

Danny Williams, meanwhile, exploits this to a masterful end, overcoming scandal after scandal by positioning the rest of Canada as a common enemy. In 2007, the government’s Speech From the Throne quoted rhetoric from Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. The widely publicized equalization fight between Williams and Stephen Harper drove the wedge in deeper still. Underpinning all this is a notion that Canadians west of the Cabot Strait do not and will not understand Newfoundland’s way of life — too occupied are we, in their view, by our warming beers.

And then there’s the sheer amount of energy spent on opposing the hunt, which is mind-boggling. At a time when society regularly ponders its physical waste stream, why is no one sounding the alarm over the amount of thinking we piss away? Who can honestly say the lives of 275,000 seals should rightfully occupy more synaptic surges than the lives of far more Darfurians? Who dares to say a spike driven through the head of a seal is more upsetting than a gun barrel shoved up the vagina of an African herder’s wife or daughter? I could go on, on and on some more.

The world is often a sinister place teeming with division, violence and outrage. To worry in large numbers about small problems does nothing to address This Stubborn Mess. We need, as someone once said, to get angry for the right reasons.