Who remembers newfie jokes?

Or would they be Newfie jokes now? Capitalization is everything.

Once upon a time, Canada was awash with Newfie jokes. 

How many newfies does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. One to hold the lightbulb and two to turn the ladder.

To be perfectly honest, I don't recall precisely what triggered my Newfielia, since it was well past 4:20 in the afternoon, but we were just having a discussion about what caused the extinction of the newfie joke.

The Farm Manager puts it down to political correctness.

I'm not so sure. Political Corectitude didn't really go full throttle till the advent of the internet, and especially, smartphones. 

I believe Newfie jokes were in decline long before that.

Why?

I believe it largely had to do with other Canadians, ie the rest of us, getting to know Newfoundlanders up close and personal. 

Over the years, a lot of us had the opportunity to do just that. After Joey Smallwood brought the Newfies into Canada, they were soon overwhelmed by tough times. Newfies began the exodus from their Holy Land that, after a brief respite around the discovery of oil offshore, continues to this day.

Then the cod fishery collapsed, after years of mismanagement by professional experts in Ottawa, and the outflow of Newfs doubled.

That's why there's a Newfie diaspora across this country today. The biggest Newfie social club is in Cambridge Ontario.

Back in my jouneyman welder journeying days, the four provinces I worked in I always worked elbow to elbow with Newfies. They were everywhere!

And they were the most decent of down-to-earth people. All the maudlin cliches in Come From Away are true. 

I remember when my old pal Kipling and I were heading out west to make our fortune. Kipling piled my Dart GTS into a snowbank a hundred miles east of Winnipeg, because he fell asleep at the wheel at a hundred miles an hour.

It's dead of a minus forty winter night, and two longhairs are standing beside the Trans-Canada highway, and after standing there for a lot longer than you would imagine, given the reputation of this country as a land of kind and compassionate people, what finally pulled over to give us a ride was a Ford station wagon that already had five Newfies in it.

You can almost hear their conversation.  Ay Buddy, we should pick up Buddy and other Buddy. Aw come on Buddy, we already got Buddy and Buddy and whats-his name in the back. You mean Buddy? Ya. Well fuck off then, ya can't just leave Buddy out there freezin to death...

Anyway, all the Buddies scootched over and off we went.

So, ya. Why would you want to make fun of people who treat you like that? Newfie jokes died out because once you got to know Newfoundlanders, you just had too much respect.

But times have changed. Newfoundland, or more correctly, "Newfoundland and Labrador," have sprung a fresh Newfie joke on us. You see, while the Newfoundlanders are kind and trusting people, over the years they put too much trust in the kind of slippery folks who were running the rest of Canada, those fancy MBA types with law degrees and a few years at a major US investment bank. 

Generally speaking, that's not the kind of people regular folks should put their trust in, as the Newfies have discovered to their horror.

Today Moya Greene released her long-dreaded report on the economic future of a province run into the ground by four generations of well-educated experts.

Guess what? The "Modern Monetary Theory" that allows our federal government to explode deficits out the ying-yang doesn't apply in the case of Newfoundland. Nope, the same expert class that ran the ship aground is now recommending tough love, and lots of it.

That means drastic spending cuts, drastic cuts to social welfare, in a province already beset by poverty, cuts all over the place, and of course, the situation is so dire that we'll be forced to sell off all sorts of public assets. Oh, and raise taxes!

Hey Newfoundland, the joke's on you again!

Maybe it's time to contemplate Newfoundland independence.