5 - Language attitudes and language change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Outsiders' views of Newfoundland and Labrador
On 3 November 2008, NL, for the first time in its fifty-nine-year history as a member of the Canadian Confederation, assumed the economic status of a ‘have’ rather than ‘have-not’ province. The province's new revenues from offshore oil meant that it was no longer dependent on the Federal government in Ottawa for annual equalisation payments, designed to produce comparable standards of education, health care and infrastructure throughout the country. At the same time, Canada's most populated province, Ontario – which for many years had driven the Canadian economy – was demoted to the status of ‘have-not’ province. The irony was not lost on Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. The change represented a much-celebrated development for a province which, over the previous half-century, had been typically seen as the poor cousin of the Canadian Confederation, with all the negative ramifications that such a view entails. This opinion had often found a strong, and official, voice. Thus in the 1980s, the mayor of Canada's then most prosperous city, Calgary, referred to migrant workers from eastern Canada as ‘bums and creeps’, and residents of the Atlantic provinces were likewise styled as ‘welfare bums’ by the then premier of Ontario.
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- Newfoundland and Labrador English , pp. 132 - 156Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010