Quebec and Newfoundland Are Waging a Shady Cold War Over a Mountain

Ah, Newfoundland and Quebec. Like cats and dogs, cops and robbers, or journalists and Steve Bannon self-cocksucking jokes, they are an ancient and bitter rivalry so fierce it has the power to move mountains. Or, at least, the borders around them.

The source of these two province's current strife is Labrador, the vast northern wilderness on the east coast of mainland Canada—and, lately, the tallest mountain in the country east of the Rockies.

Lower Canada and the Rock have vied for ownership of Labrador since the first European settlers arrived, and the legal status of the Big Land has a correspondingly long and colourful history. Britain's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ultimately awarded the territory of Labrador to the Dominion of Newfoundland in 1927, and Quebec has been fuming about it ever since.

(Quebec has no one to blame but themselves, of course; Newfoundland tried to sell them Labrador in 1925 as one of the island's many harebrained get-rich-quick schemes, and they refused the deal. They would later get their revenge in the 1969 Churchill Falls Agreement, which drove Newfoundlanders so insane that they opted to bankrupt themselves with the Muskrat Falls project rather than try to negotiate again with French Canada. Every now and then some government office in Quebec will publish a new map showing a chunk of southern Labrador as part of their jurisdiction, which inevitably prompts a week of fresh meltdowns about it on Open Line.)

Labradorians living on the border are aware of the tension and are more than happy to play each side against each other as the situation warrants. Once upon a time Blanc-Sablon, a small fishing town on the Quebec side in the border, openly mused about their desire to defect to St. John's from Quebec City, much to our delight. These days, the situation in Newfoundland being what it is, it's L'Anse-au-Loup on the N.L. side longing to join Quebec on the hope that their provincial government can actually afford to pave the roads.

Which brings us to Mount Caubvick. There is no better microcosm of our two provinces' mutual bitterness than the tallest peak of the Torngat mountain range, which happens to straddle the Labrador border. (The peak is 10 metres east on the Newfoundland side.) The Québecois—who, famously, souviens—named the peak Mont D'Iberville after a celebrated Francophone naval captain best remembered in Newfoundland as the butcher of the Avalon peninsula, who sailed up and down the coast setting everything on fire before burning down St. John's. This is a "fuck you" so impressive I can only admit my awe before the master trolls of the National Assembly.

Newfoundland, meanwhile, didn't even bother to give the mountain a name until 1981, when the island's first fit of neo-nationalism was reaching a fever pitch. They named it Mount Caubvick after one of the Inuk women who accompanied the explorer George Cartwright on a trip to England in 1773. She was the only survivor when her group contracted smallpox in Europe, and her return to Labrador was instrumental in bringing the disease down upon her people. Giving her name to the mountain also seems like a "fuck you" of monumental proportions, although here directed less towards Quebec than to the Indigenous peoples of Labrador, who have a terrible habit of frustrating the petty imperial ambitions of the St. John's merchant princes.

That a remote and forbidding mountain should cast so much shade across both sides of the border is perhaps not surprising given how notoriously sensitive both provinces are. It would be a deceptively easy solution to the conflict to let Labradorians themselves name their own mountain —easy in that it is reasonable and straightforward, deceptive in that giving these people a say in their own destiny goes against everything these two great provinces stand for.

Personally, I prefer the Solomonic solution. The federal government should step in and settle this for all time by splitting the difference. "Mount Equalization" has a real ring to it, don't you think?

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