CedarTea

Lefty critter living in a windy rural Ontario town on the shores of Lake Huron. Settler on Treaty 45-1/2 lands. Love to talk labour and ecology. Hell yeah punk DIY culture.

pronouns: he/him

Last Notes

2025-02-10 21:21:55 UTC

- reply

So to wrap up, what I want to get across, is that if you want to avoid economic annexation, you should do away with the idea that "Canadians would never go along with it". Newfoundlanders have much more nationalist sentiment than anywhere else in anglo Canada, I assure you. There are still Newfoundland tricolour flags flying all over the province. Can't miss them. I've got one not far from me while I type this. But nationalism is poor filling for your kids' empty stomachs.

2025-02-10 21:16:14 UTC

- reply

Interestingly, the separatist sentiment is almost diametrically opposed to a lot of the grievance in Alberta separatism. That's off topic. Just a note.

2025-02-10 21:14:58 UTC

- reply

Now, aside from the truncated possibilities, there's threads of an issue here that run through modern NL separatism, which get brushed off as "Lazy Newfies demanding handouts". The minimum wage has stagnated, the baby bonus has been long cancelled, and EI is under threat every time the CPC comes near federal power. These were the terms of confederation that so-called Canada repeatedly acts to renege on. Not that we're alone being betrayed by the honour of the crown, obviously.

2025-02-10 21:06:45 UTC

- reply

So what Smallwood pitched was the Canadian minimum wage, the pogy, and the baby bonus. This was especially popular in the outports where they never saw any of the war money that came into St. John's. What was not allowed on the table was that NL could develop these things themselves. The powerful merchant class was running the No ballot, under such pricks as the Cashin and Crosbie who wanted to keep a stranglehold in the name of their business interests.

2025-02-10 20:41:58 UTC

- reply

the previous government. It was that UNP aberration, under pressure by the British, that dissolved democracy in NL, not a bottom-up decision to hand it over to a British-appointed commission. The reason that the UNP was able to be pressured into this was the need to take out loans to cover the crises brought about by its own mismanagement. This unelected commission was still in place by the time confederation occurred in 1949.
Canadian and American military spending in NL brought the dominion..

2025-02-10 20:35:12 UTC

- reply

Lesson 2: You need to stand up some sort of dual power that can prevent politicians from speaking on your behalf
There are two main villains in the story here I want to point out: NL PM Alderdice and later NL Premier Smallwood.
Reading through *ahem* certain histories, you'll hear that NL willingly gave up democracy to establish the Amurlee Commission during the Great Depression. What's erased here, is that Alderdice gained power through a backdoor political coup after riots brought down...

2025-02-10 20:25:12 UTC

- reply

Alright, I realize it's gonna be too much to ask for people to go borrow a bunch of books and sift through archives or whatever. I'm not a historian and I don't have an easy quick resource handy for you, but I've got a lot of bitter oral history rattling around in my head. I'll distill and share a few lessons I took from that oral history, through my own anarchist lens (bias, if you prefer).
Lesson 1: Don't trust the British
This one is self-explanatory, I think.

2025-02-10 17:44:17 UTC

- reply

Like, I realize it's gonna piss in your nationalist cornflakes to examine the propaganda you got from your 4th grade teacher that Canada saved the stupid Newfies from themselves because we were too drunk to manage our finances, but there's useful things there for you to learn right now. I promise.

2025-02-10 17:41:43 UTC

Now would actually be a fantastic time for Canadians to learn about the economic annexation of Newfoundland.
Just sorta seems... relevant?

2025-02-10 17:39:41 UTC

- reply

I think one important thing to note here, is that there's not really a singular Anglo-Canadian culture beyond the white wasp expansion of John A. There are, however, LOTS of different little regional pockets of culture and history that exist within the Canadian anglosphere. Many of these have strong artistic traditions already. This speaks really well to the point that @npub1xyr…332r made above, I think. A militant pluralism is a lot more defensible here than a hegemony imo
@npub1jay…80k8

2025-02-10 00:20:20 UTC

Canadian nationalism?
Sorry, best I can do is anti-american agitation

2025-02-06 18:39:28 UTC

- reply

I agree with a lot of this. "Canada first" is not a tenable response and I'm sorry that you and others have felt the brunt of that. I try to do what I can to stop the upswell here, but it feels like it's always one step forward and two steps back. I can't answer for our state, our media, or for that fascist upswell any more than you can for those systems in the US.
And what's left from that is how to respond and find some way of reorienting. Right now, this includes boycotts.

2025-02-06 17:57:21 UTC

- reply

I'm having trouble reconciling this with your post the other day. If this issue were a simple question of duelling nationalisms, I'd be right there with you, but there's much more in play here than that, which I think you at least partly alluded to.
Having american goods turn profits on canadian shelves right now has the potential to cause us more than wounds to our pride or financial pain in this moment. And regardless of your financial pain points, this undermines that collective action.

2024-07-30 20:58:46 UTC

- reply

Just waiting for her to come out in support of Assad or something at this point

2024-07-05 20:51:28 UTC

- reply

As far as I can tell, the party took zero meaningful actions to lessen the threat of fascism after their election in 2020. Like, their plan is just "if we're in power for these 4 years then there won't be fascism". The courts *kinda* took action, but the dems did not.
If anything, they acted to undermine real antifascist action by:
1) Increasing funding for law enforcement
2) Co-opting real resistance
3) Normalizing fascist policy
4) Giving people a false sense of security/victory