>Do you mind if I send this on
>
>M
>
By all means. You might remind them that The Living Beach is $32.95 at
their nearest bookstore, too.
Cheers,
Don
Silver Donald Cameron
Temporary: (until April 15/99)
Box 1928, Point Roberts WA 98281
(360)945-2084 fax (360)945-2086
Permanent:
D'Escousse, NS
B0E 1K0
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 03:28:11 -0800
From: Silver Donald Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Michael Gurstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GLOBE AND MAIL COLUMN February 12, 1999[GLOBE 20]
TWO MILES OF EARTH
by Silver Donald Cameron
"Rap er away!" calls Alex MacDonald, and we laugh as the cage begins its
long drop into the depths of the earth. Someone starts a song, and we sing,
in four-part harmony:
*Down deep in a coal mine, underneath the ground
Where a ray of sunshine never can be found..*.
Down, down, down. On the surface men are listening to the music fading as
we fall.
A coal mine is a maze of rough tunnels branching off into utter darkness.
You stumble on railway tracks, blundering behind your comrades into
narrower, lower tunnels. A coal-cutter screams, a huge circular saw slicing
off the black face of a wall. Wiry little miners shovel coal into midget
railway cars. The miners are sooty black; even their faces are relieved
only by the flashing white of their eyes and teeth. They dart out from
rough alcoves in the wall, grinning, shaking hands. They speak, but you
can't understand. This mine is in Tangshan, China. Your companions are The
Men of the Deeps, Cape Breton's famous coal-miners' chorus. And now, in the
depths of the earth, we sing for our Chinese brothers.
*Digging dusty diamonds, all the seasons round,
Down deep in a coal mine, underneath the ground.*
The year is 1976, and The Men of the Deeps are the first Canadian cultural
group to tour mainland China. The singers have all worked underground, and
the group is not supposed to include any writers or photographers. So I
impersonate a miner, singing first tenor. We travel together for a month,
singing five, six, seven times a day in factories, agricultural communes,
railway stations, even in the streets, on the Great Wall and in Tienanmen
Square, not yet cloaked in infamy.
We sing the story of Cape Breton mining, the vast sheet of coal stretching
out under Cabot Strait perhaps as far as Newfoundland; my companions have
spent their lives working miles out *under* the sea. We sing about the
"pluck- me's," the company stores which bound the miners in poverty. About
kids going to school in midwinter dressed in flour sacks. About the 1925
strike, when miners' families were ridden down by company horsemen and a
miner named Bill Davis was shot dead by company thugs. (In the Cape Breton
coal towns, June 11 is "Davis Day," a public holiday.) And about the
fighting unions, which ended the worst of the exploitation though the
families of the 26 miners killed in the privately-owned Westray mine in
1992 might bitterly argue that point.
Coal mining is an ugly industry. Coal is a dirty, polluting fuel, and, as
an old Lunenburg doryman said about winter fishing, mining is &"a
disgustin' job. A fearful disgustin' job."& I sat one evening in the Peking
Hotel with Art and Aubrey Martell. Outside our window lay the Forbidden
City, where Chairman Mao lay dying, but we talked about the bond between
the miners and the pit ponies that lived completely in darkness and
ultimately went blind.
&"In the winters we were just like them,"& said Aubrey. &"Went out in the
dark, worked in the dark, came home in the dark. Didn't see sunlight for
days on end."& Bobby Roper's head had been crushed in a mine accident, and
Murray Graham once clung to the side of a cage when the bottom ripped out
of it, spilling his buddies down the shaft to their deaths.
And yet -- like fishermen, firemen, soldiers -- injured miners generally go
back to their terrible work. It's the comradeship, they say. Mining lured
immigrants from Poland, Ukraine, Italy, the West Indies, making Cape Breton
the most cosmopolitan community in the Maritimes. The mines welded them
into brothers. Black or white, Catholic or Protestant, miners will risk
their lives for one another. The miners live by what the ancients knew as
&"manly"& virtues loyalty, courage, strength, compassion. They do their
best and endure their afflictions. &"These,"& wrote Herodotus, &"having
done what men could, suffered what men must."&
What is lost in the closure of the Cape Breton mines is not merely an
outmoded industry but a heroic and mythic story, with its own social order,
its own giants, its own family sorrows, its own culture. These are splendid
men, and this is the end of their story. Hear the harmony fading in the
soft evening air of Peking:
*Eight long days, and some were rescued,
Leaving the dead to lie alone;
Through all their lives they dug their graves:
Two miles of earth for a marking stone,
Two miles of earth for a marking stone.*
30
*Silver Donald Cameron is a Cape Breton writer. The Men of the Deeps tour
Ontario in April; three of their 12 concerts are already sold out.
SUNDAY HERALD COLUMN -- February 10, 1999 [HH9906]
THE DEATH OF KING COAL
by Silver Donald Cameron
Of all the disagreeable qualities of the political right, perhaps the most
distasteful is its barely-veiled delight in attacking the helpless and
punishing the innocent. Its god is The Market, and anything which
interferes with the unconstrained operation of The Market is Bad.
Especially in the Maritimes.
Consider, for example, the right-wing response to the closing of the Cape
Breton coal mines, which are subsidized and therefore Bad. Admittedly, for
anyone who cares about Cape Breton *and* about the environment, the coal
industry is a genuine conundrum. The product is unprofitable, and it
pollutes; and mining itself is dirty, dangerous work. How can one be in
favour of mining and burning coal?
On the other hand, how can one be in favour of stripping away the jobs
which support 1200 families in a region of chronic unemployment?
Will the closures actually save any money? Devco's mining operations
actually turned a profit every year from 1993 to 1997. Its losses mainly
stem from pensions, Worker's Compensation obligations and other
non-operating costs -- which will have to be paid whether the mines operate
or not. Last year, Devco required $22.1 million in subsidies, but returned
$35 million, directly and indirectly, just in federal and provincial taxes.
Some of the newly-redundant miners and their families will have to be
publicly supported through EI, welfare, pensions or whatever. The damage
will be heavy, and there will be no net savings to the taxpayer.
And in the broader picture, how is it that $22 million is too much of a
subsidy for energy from Cape Breton coal, while $197 million is a perfectly
reasonable federal subsidy for nuclear energy, which is based almost
entirely in Ontario?
None of these complexities trouble The Globe and Mail, the house organ of
the free marketeers, which magisterially pronounces that Ottawa has
"subsidized Cape Breton into an economic coma" by failing to give it "a
clear signal that it, like other communities in this country, would be
expected to pay its own way in the world." Stupid, lazy Capers. Happily,
however, "the entrepreneurial talent and inventiveness of the people will
be unleashed by the death of coal." Same people, but their intelligence
will be enhanced by a good dose of suffering.
The Globe blames "an earlier generation of powerful politicos"
specifically Dave Dingwall and Allan "MacEachan," whose name it can't spell
for cynically promising to keep the mines open in return for Cape Breton
votes. There is an element of truth in this, certainly, but it is hardly
the core of the matter.
The current generation of miners was hired in the 1970s, when Tom Kent was
President of Devco, effectively both King of Coal and Governor of Cape
Breton. At the time, the future of the world's energy supplies seemed
extremely precarious. OPEC had driven oil prices to $40 a barrel, and
economic analysts, with their usual blinding foresight, were predicting
that the price might reach $100 by the end of the century. Kent became
convinced that a modernized, efficient coal industry could be profitable
and successful as indeed it would have been, if the prophecies had been
accurate.
They were wrong, as it turns out. But Kent's decision looked like a shrewd
move at the time, even with oil prices remaining in the $40 range. Who
would have guessed that energy prices, in constant dollars, would be making
historic *lows* at the end of the century, forcing even the Alberta economy
into a slump? The cruel irony is that the Cape Breton coal industry -- like
many other primitive industries in Canada's colonized economy -- was
torpedoed not by corrupt politics, but by The Market.
Nevertheless, the decision to shed the mines is unlikely to be reversed. So
what do we do now? The package proposed by the feds includes $68 million of
"economic development and retraining." Not much, though it could provide a
good start. But the history of The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy, which made
similar promises, is hardly reassuring. The TAGS clientele was much larger
than the feds anticipated, and while the training funds proved a bonanza
for the trainers, they were disconnected from the development effort and
thus did little for the trainees. Very few development dollars actually
reached the community groups which were doing the active work of
development. And all the "adjustment" components of the TAGS program were
eventually axed in favour of short-term income support.
In short, TAGS was a fine program on paper, but it required resolution,
flexibility, vision and a willingness to devolve money and power to the
communities themselves. Has Ottawa acquired those qualities recently? Don't
ask.
And will the beloved forces of The Market compensate for the feds'
deficiencies? Not likely. Capitalism is like fire: a good servant, but a
poor master. No social system is so creative in organizing and improving
production, and if economic productivity were the sole human value, slavish
devotion to The Market would be a sufficient social philosophy. But Cape
Breton's renewed agony requires a vision more human and more intelligent
than the brutal and simplistic ideology of the right.
30
SUNDAY HERALD COLUMN -- February 17, 1999 [HH9907]
CONJURING JOBS
by Silver Donald Cameron
In all the depressing verbiage about the future of Cape Breton after coal,
the most disheartening was Senator Al Graham's assurance that the island's
people will be "consulted" about job-creation ideas. As Nova Scotia's
representative in the federal cabinet, the Senator is a pivotal player in
whatever comes next -- and the Senator doesn't get it.
Last October, Dr. Teresa MacNeil reviewed the record of Cape Breton
development efforts before an international conference in Baddeck. ADA,
ARDA, Industrial Estates, Devco, DREE, DRIE, ECBC, ECB, ACOA. "Dr. Teresa,"
as she is known everywhere, swam vigorously in this alphabet soup. She sat
on boards, chaired special task forces, knew the players. The effort was
sustained, imaginative and sometimes successful. Perhaps the most creative
period was Tom Kent's helmsmanship at Devco during the 1970s, which gave us
the resorts at Dundee and Whale Cove, the beginnings of aquaculture, the
first good maps of Cape Breton, The Men of the Deeps and much else. That
period, says Dr. Teresa, left us with "important and viable legacies in
every sector of the economy." Later, the creation of Enterprise Cape Breton
generated $463 million in new investment in just five years.
But the people of Cape Breton remained "spectators" throughout. Government
agencies did things for us and sometimes to us, but never *with* us. When
the Deep Thinkers of Upper Canada berate Cape Breton for failing to
understand that it is "expected to pay its own way in the world," to quote
The Globe and Mail, they simply miss the point. Cape Breton has always been
run by foreign companies and government officials. Cape Bretoners have
often been "consulted," but they have never really been allowed to
interfere in their own affairs. And much of the money spent here has been
used to thicken the alphabet soup rather than being applied to actual
job-creation.
Dr. Teresa discerns a future in information technology, and cites the
Strait East Nova Community Enterprise Network (SENCEN), a partnership
between three Strait-area Regional Development Authorities and the Strait
Regional School Board. SENCEN is designed to bring information technology
into the daily lives of people in five counties, and because of it, the
Strait area has more Community Access Project sites than the entire
province of Saskatchewan. As a result, Pleasant Bay and New Harbour, half a
day's drive apart, can exchange ideas and experience, learn from one
another, lobby jointly for necessary change, and do business anywhere in
the world. The result may be a new form of community, an
electronically-facilitated "virtual" collectivity made up of existing
physical communities. And SENCEN would then be a key part of the
infrastructure for a new economy.
But this alluring notion requires that the communities already be motivated
and entrepreneurial. Ultimately, the most successful job-creation
initiatives are always driven by the people in the communities which need
the jobs. As Dr. Teresa notes, the heart of the matter is adult learning.
Cape Breton's communities have to develop themselves, building their own
understanding, setting their own goals, developing their own strategies,
expending their own sweat and reaping the rewards or suffering the
consequences accordingly.
Knowing this, how should we spend the new funds designed to ease the
transition to a coal-free economy? We should invest heavily in the
desperately under-funded but deeply-rooted University College of Cape
Breton, which has crucially stimulated Cape Breton's small but lusty
entertainment and high-tech sectors, and is already a fully partner in the
Cape Breton County Economic Development Authority. We should pursue Smart
Community status and funding. We should ask Cape Bretoners for their own
ideas, and seriously consider their proposals.
We should find the community groups and small businesses which are already
generating employment, and ensure that they get the resources they need on
terms they can bear. We should link training to job-creation, spending
money only on training for jobs which will actually exist. We may accept
that some miners, like some fishermen, will never work again -- but we
should tie their early-retirement pensions to community work, providing a
source of free labour to the community groups while retaining a sense of
purpose and function in the lives of the retired.
Such a program means taking power and money away from government and giving
it to communities, with very little central control over how they use
it.The more they succeed, the more self-confident and independent they will
be and the less inclined to take direction from anyone else, including
government. If the communities fail, the feds will take the heat; if they
succeed, the communities will take the credit. Scary stuff.
But the alternative is more futile "consultation," more dithering by
bureaucrats trying to be entrepreneurs, more organizational sludge, more
failure. Cape Bretoners will pay for the failures anyway. They should be
allowed to make their own decisions, try their own ideas. Only then can
they be asked to take responsibility for the results.
30
Silver Donald Cameron
Temporary: (until April 15/99)
Box 1928, Point Roberts WA 98281
(360)945-2084 fax (360)945-2086
Permanent:
D'Escousse, NS
B0E 1K0
(902)226-3165 fax (902)226-1904
"There is only one thing that I will not concede. That it might be
meaningless to strive in a good cause." -- Vaclev Havel
