I get defensive about the homeland. Newfoundlanders get a bad rap, and there was even a time when I believed the stereotypes. But I after some digging, what I found was not a group of people so dependent on the welfare state that they couldn’t succeed, but instead a people who had so much sucked dry by the Canadian government, with nothing but broken promises in return.

I don’t think I could put it better than Gil Dalton’s letter from 2005 in response to a horribly uninformed opinion piece on the Globe and Mail.

Now, with a potentially contentious battle on the horizon over the Hebron oil field, I expect to hear more of this uninformed stereotyping. So, I encourage anyone and everyone to read the stories linked here, including this piece, which inspired me to write this.