Government of Canada Accidentally Wades into Another Ethnonationalist Minefield

Fellow Newfadorians, I write you today in righteous fury. The Canadian government’s official Twitter account recently tweeted several images of Canadian-themed Pokemon in a desperate bid for brand engagement. Among the other hamfisted stereotypes presented as part of this G-rated thirst-trap, we are presented with a Newfoundland dog in an oil slicker named “Newfie.”

(The tweet has since been deleted, but screenshots live forever.)

Chalk this up to another foreign relations disaster. Everyone knows “real” Canada starts and ends in Halifax, and every culturally-insensitive tweet further proves it. We give Canada our sovereignty, our fishery, our resource revenues, our brightest minds and strongest workers, the thankless blood sweat and tears of 69 arduous years, and this is the best we can get? Maybe for Justin Trudeau’s next summer staycation he can come down to St. John’s dressed up in a rhinestone-speckled Sou’wester. The insolence of our Laurentian oppressors knows no bounds.

The tweet is brutally unfunny, which I consider an affront to both my cultural heritage and the established canon of good Newfoundland/Pokemon jokes.

But also, the word “Newfie” is very problematic and bothers a lot of people.

Historically, as far as anyone can tell, the term “Newfie” originated during World War II during the construction of the American naval base at Argentia. One American lieutenant expressed his opinion that the Newfoundland labourers were as “lazy and shiftless” as African-Americans, and from the mother of all N-words allegedly sprang the lesser Newfie epithet. (An equally plausible alternative is that future premier Joey Smallwood told a version of the “contemptuous American call us Newfies” story on his 1930s radio show The Barrelman.)

The sentiment wasn’t unique to the Americans; the British also saw us as a species of degenerate Irishmen. They just gave us a cutesy name that has stuck ever since, the shame-filled shadow cast by our fragile national pride. The Newfoundlander is sharp as tack and sociable, thrifty and hard-working, warm and generous. The Newfie is a drunken thief and a welfare cheat, a frantic maniac throwing garbage and screaming “K-ROCK ROCKS” out the truck cab window before flipping it 20 times on the Outer Ring Road. The brighter you light up the former, the darker the shadow it casts.

This may shock the casual observer because if you visit any store in rural Newfoundland or go to George Street, you will see the word everywhere and everyone seems cool about it. A lot of locals are pretty cool about it, because no one cares about the history of the term and it just means you’re from the island and you like to party. But a lot of other people—anyone who has been the Token Newf in a mainland workplace, certainly—find it distasteful, and that is totally fair. Or at least fair enough for someone to issue a memo to all the comms people about it. Doesn’t Canada’s youngest province deserve at least the same pedantic political correctness everyone else gets?

Anyway, they took it down so no harm no foul. Just bask in the power of social media activism, folks. The fury of the Newfoundlander scorned can indeed move mountains. Today it’s just some poor intern who wanted to tweet about Pokemon. But tomorrow? Tomorrow we take Mont D'Iberville.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.