Goin’ Down the Road
On Friday, March 24, the CBC’s flagship newscast broadcast a piece on Newfoundlanders making the trip to Calgary to earn a fortune in construction work.
This is not uncommon, and it may be that two-thirds of Newfoundland’s male population has taken up temporary residence in Alberta. It is exactly what is predicted by classical economics: people will move to where the jobs are, provided the rewards are great enough that they outweigh the costs of moving. Behavioural economics might tell us that if the rewards are really spectacular, people will move despite the emotional cost of leaving ancestral home and family.
The report followed a handful of men who went to Calgary to earn big bucks to provide a better life for their families. They and their wives had worked in a fish-processing plant that had shut down, and the opportunities at home weren’t nearly as lucrative as a stint in Calgary construction. Harbour Breton, a town of about 2000, claims to be enjoying economic growth, but the examples listed on the town’s website are “an increased number of residents becoming self-employed in a variety of ventures from photography and lawn care to sewing shops and sawmills.”
Didn’t I grow up hearing exactly this report? It was with a strong sense of deja vu that I listened to the report of dying towns in Newfoundland, Alberta riches, price and wage controls – oh, wait, that last hasn’t come up again. But the broad outlines of the report sure brought me back to a 70s childhood. One of the irritating things about historians is that they are always telling you that something very similar already happened. And one of the irritating things to historians about most public discourse is that its historical sense is so shallow you can barely splash around in it.
The 1970 film Goin’ Down the Road is not about Newfoundlanders, but the plot is much the same. Two buddies leave Cape Breton to seek their fortune on the mean streets of Toronto. The film shows urban life at its most desolate, as the men struggle with the demands of jobs, new girlfriends, and a strong sense that they will never belong. Pop culture encyclopedia Mondo Canuck says that the movie “established the Canadian male as one of the most persistently impotent and unappealing characters in world cinema – a trait which endures to this very day, and which has probably taken an incalculable toll on the collective national ideal of masculinity.” The more recent film waydowntown emasculates Calgary office workers, though it’s hard to imagine this movie being made now. It was a product of Alberta’s bust years, and while its grim satirical mood may return to Calgary, it sure doesn’t look like that will be any time soon.
What was offensive about the National’s report was its insensitive attempts to stuff the Newfoundlanders into a crude version of Goin’ Down the Road characterizations. They were rubes – gawking up at the tall city buildings. (At least the reporter noted the vast distance between Calgary and Newfoundland when he said that none of them had ever been so far from home: Ireland is closer to Newfoundland than Calgary is.) Of course, the footage of the men glancing up at the tall buildings was easily obtained, since the reporter had asked them to meet him at the Calgary Tower. I’d look up at the top of the tower, too, if I were headed to that tourist attraction.
The report also showed the six men in their 2-bedroom apartment. This was presented as a mild hardship – who among us more sophisticated folk would choose to live that way? - but all they wanted was a place to eat and sleep. Why not double or triple up, and save as much money as possible?
Funny that the report never mentioned anything specific about money. Maybe that’s considered crass in television reporting. At any rate, a 50-hour week in construction in Calgary, combined with minimal living expenses, sounds like a recipe for making a very satisfying amount of money in the shortest time possible.
But money is never mentioned in any of these reports on rural East Coasters. Lobster fishermen do pretty well, I understand, but when they were being interviewed on CBC a few months ago, their funny accents and fishing boots were a distraction, and we never learned how much money these small business owners typically earn. It’s an unexamined part of the Canadian mythscape – the poor, rural, working-class East Coast male, unable to take his place among his proud ancestors who provided for their families for centuries. It’s not that this is entirely false, but it’s very difficult to find a person beneath the layers of expectation and stereotype.
The men’s wives had all worked at the fish plant, too, but we heard very little of their stories. They were the ones left behind, to raise children and keep up the home while their husbands were away earning money.
And this is one thing that is odd about this entire story of Newfoundlanders seeking riches in Alberta, both in its contemporary and 1970s versions: these fish plant workers were the beneficiaries of an earlier resource boom – an abundance of fish that lasted for centuries, and drew people to live in a starkly beautiful but often unforgiving part of the world.