What bothers me in the Wente-Williams uproar over Newfoundland, as well as the tsunami aid tsunami (as it’s been cleverly called), is that both echo with timeless, dualistic mythologies. What tends to be assumed in each is a strict separation between giver and taker; one side is worthy, the other is needy.

Yet haves and have-nots don’t usually just co-exist. They are intricately related. It’s like the rising gap between rich Canadians and the rest. The rich have got richer largely because the rest declined — via tax and program cuts etc. Newfoundland isn’t naturally poor. St. John’s was a bustling economic and cultural entrepôt when Toronto didn’t exist. It had the wealth of the sea and forests, it was the gateway to North America, its oldest continuous settlement. What did Toronto have going for it at the start besides some decent farmland nearby? But the British built it up in the 19th century as a counterbalance to the French in Quebec. Sure there were a raft of “factors” in its rise, but Ontarians have no right to feel economically or otherwise superior. They lucked out, for a while. Economic success is generally about power and luck, not character, merit or, for sure, nature’s bounty.

That goes globally. Britain and France were once contemptible outliers to the economic powerhouses of the Mediterranean. The “discovery” of the new world made them, Spain and puny Portugal, mighty economies. Britain destroyed India’s textile industry to create a market for its goods. It forced its way into China through the Opium Wars and subjugated China for a century, leading to — well, the odd situation there today. In the modern era, going back centuries, everything is an effect of everything else.

So when the haves, like Ottawa or the Western world, dispense aid or largesse to have-nots, such as Newfoundland or Africa, the attitude (“deadbeats . . . scenic welfare ghetto”) is out of place. The haves have often made the have-nots that way, or at least benefited from the process that did so.

Take Iraq, the very “cradle of civilization.” Twenty-five years ago, it was an oil-rich, industrialized, secular, well-educated society. Then it made a disastrous war on Iran, egged on by the West. Then came the ruinous 1991 gulf war, followed by years of crushing Western sanctions, and the recent war, with the ensuing chaos. It has been turned into a social and economic basket case from which the West proposes to rescue it with elections and aid. After a few more decades of this kind of intervention, will Canadian columnists start calling Iraqis welfare bums?

As for tsunami aid, no, I’m not going to say the West is responsible for the earthquake. But it wasn’t just standing around in the region waiting to give generously. U.S. intelligence abetted the 1965 Indonesian coup in which perhaps 500,000 people were murdered. Western countries, including Canada, backed the regime during its genocide in East Timor, in return for investment rights. In one of his splendid diatribes, Australian journalist John Pilger says the Howard government is now “denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some $8-billion. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world’s poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads.”

More generally, the effects of structural adjustment policies imposed on many such nations by Western financial bodies are estimated to kill millions of children yearly. One result is reliance on Western tourism, a debilitating and humiliating sector, which people turn to if other jobs are unavailable. It seems partly responsible for the deforestation of coastlines, leaving them vulnerable to the waves. Rather than viewing current aid as proof of a benevolent, disinterested West, it might make sense to take it as restitution, which I think is how many individuals, in their way, do see it.

But dualism is a tenacious mythology. It seduces both sides of the equation. Take the Newfoundlanders. Even they seem convinced, like desperate gamblers, that one final heave of the dice — now it’s oil — is their “last chance,” as they often say, to escape their needy, rotten destiny.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.