Thanks to the success of some unconventional crops grown last summer, western Newfoundland might soon add canola and grapes to its list of agricultural products.
Working with independent farmers, the provincial Department of Fisheries, Forestry and Agrifoods experimented with the two crops that aren't traditionally grown in the province.
The hope was those first-time crops could sow the seeds for new farming industries.
While canola farming is big business in the prairies, it's unheard of in Newfoundland and Labrador.
"Yes, we're a lot different from Saskatchewan, but perhaps we might have a little better conditions than Iceland or northern Norway," said Kavanagh, the province's alternative feed co-ordinator.
[. . .]
It turns out she was right. Planting 12 hectares on private farmland on the island's west coast, in Pasadena, Kanvanagh said the yield was ¾ of a metric tonne per acre — which is on par with the rest of Atlantic Canada.
[. . .]
Like canola, the idea to grow grapes in Newfoundland was germinated in another province.
"There was a huge opportunity for grapes [in Nova Scotia]," says Newfoundland and Labrador's fruit-crop development officer Karen Kennedy. "And there was no one commercially growing grapes here."
Buoyed by stories of backyard gardeners growing grapes, Kennedy planted the first experimental vines four years ago in Humber Village, a small community in Humber Valley, as well as in Brooklyn, on the Bonavista Peninsula.
They are arguably the least friendly neighbours in Confederation.
Newfoundland and Labrador has been feuding with Quebec since before the Atlantic province joined Canada, with a barely hidden animosity driven by border disputes and hydroelectric power feuds that have wound through courts for decades.
Which is why headlines were made last month when Quebec began talking about possibly “burying the hatchet” on an epic scrap over the lopsided Churchill Falls hydro deal. Premier Philippe Couillard told reporters that it’s not just energy issues — the two provinces can collaborate on other things and need to build more neighbourly ties.
But there is deep skepticism in Newfoundland and Labrador, which has a population smaller than metropolitan Quebec City and a collective wariness borne of distrust.
Premier Dwight Ball says he’s open to talks with Quebec, if they help his province. But any real rapprochement sounds far off.
The premier of Newfoundland and Labrador confirms that flooding of a reservoir at the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric site is underway.
Premier Dwight Ball says initial flooding will bring the river to springtime levels, similar to where “Mother Nature” raises waters during the season.
[. . .]
The Nunatsiavut Government, NunatuKavut Community Council, and the Innu Nation agreed that initial flooding is necessary but say it is possible to keep water levels at around 23 metres above sea level.
The aboriginal leaders urged the province to prioritize health concerns related to methylmercury contamination in its management of multibillion-dollar hydro project.
This October the city of St. John’s will be playing host to a three-day celebration of Inuit art, culture and knowledge.
The 2016 Inuit Studies conference, co-hosted by Memorial University and the Nunatsiavut government, will bring researchers, storytellers, Elders, and artists together to explore the diverse and unique culture.
The conference will run concurrent to two festivals, the katingavik Inuit arts festival and iNuit Blanche, St. John’s first all-Inuit, all-night art crawl.
The katingavik festival will be a three-day celebration of Inuit film, music and visual arts. iNuit Blanche will feature more than 25 performers spread throughout downtown St. John’s.
The theme of this year’s festival is Inuit traditions, with a focus on Inuit inclusion and Inuit ways of knowing. This is the second time Memorial has hosted the conference and it has been held in in Quebec City, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and Iqaluit, to name a few.
“(It’s held) anywhere where there’s a great deal of interest in Inuit culture,” said Dr. Tom Gordon, conference organizer. “But in those 40 years it’s never been hosted by an indigenous government. It has always been a university or research institute. For us, what we’re really proud of, is it a full on collaboration with the Nunatsiavut government.”
Ottawa is throwing its weight behind an effort to repatriate the remains of two Indigenous people taken from a Newfoundland gravesite in 1828 that are now at a museum in Scotland.
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly has taken the unusual step of notifying the director of National Museums Scotland that Canada will make a formal demand.
The remains are Nonosabasut and his wife Demasduit, two of the last Beothuks, an Indigenous people declared extinct in 1829. Some historians have claimed the Beothuks were the victims of genocide.
[. . .]
The federal letter revives a campaign by the Newfoundland and Labrador government, and the chief of a Mi'kmaq band, to have two skulls and related burial objects returned to Canada.
"This is wonderful news," said Chief Mi'sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation of Conne River, N.L., that claims kinship with the Beothuks. "When they come back to Canada, I want to travel with them."
By his own admission, former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams entered politics in 2001 to turn his proverbially have-not province into the master of its own destiny.
For too long, Newfoundland had sat angrily by while its fishery resources were dilapidated by the federal government and the benefits of its vast hydroelectric potential, including the massive Upper Churchill generating station, accrued almost entirely to Quebec.
“After years of watching in frustration as opportunities for growth were missed, lost or mismanaged, I had enough,” Mr. Williams said in a speech this April. “From the fishery to the Upper Churchill, I was determined to change our path in the history books.”
It seemed to work out for a while. An oil boom and a deal with Ottawa on the province’s offshore resources enabled Newfoundland to move off the equalization rolls for the first time in 2007. And Mr. Williams capped off his premiership in 2010 by launching a $6.2-billion hydro project on the Lower Churchill River, free of what he called “the geographic stranglehold of Quebec.”
Newfoundlanders, it seemed, were indeed becoming masters in their own house.
Well, the oil boom has gone bust, driving the province’s public finances to the bottom of the Canadian heap, and the projected cost of the 824-megawatt Muskrat Falls hydro project now under construction on the Lower Churchill has been revised skyward to a staggering $11.4-billion. Muskrat Falls has become a millstone around the neck of an already down province.
Of all the ocean views that can take your breath away on the beach of Heart's Content, it's safe to say you wouldn't look twice at the rusty old cables that run across its rocks and out to sea from the small town — population 375 — perched on the shores of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.
But 150 years ago a single cable forever changed the way the world communicated, as the first successful transatlantic subsea cable, able to send and receive telegraphed information, solidified a link between the old world and the new for the first time.
Prior to July 27, 1866, if you wanted to send a message across the ocean, it would be carried over in a ship's cargo hold. In 1865, the news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination arrived in Europe a week after that deadly shot rang out through Ford's Theatre.
But the subsea cable consigned that level of communication patience to history that July day, as a ship landed on the town's shore, bringing with it a cable that stretched all the way back to Valentia Island, Ireland. With that, the small cable station in Heart's Content became the starting point for all those 21st-century text messages now built into everyday life.
"This is where we truly began. There are some books that dub us the 'Victorian internet,'" said Tara Bishop, an interpreter at the Heart's Content Cable Museum, a small station which has gone from being a hub of communication processing to a provincial historic site, and now thrust back into the spotlight as the epicentre of the town's 150th anniversary celebrations of the event that ushered in a technological revolution.
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