Imported Outrage, Local Silence

“Teach your children well, their father’s hell did slowly go by…” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

In 2022, I went home and was asked a question about Roe v. Wade. Not by an American, but by Catherine Fenwick — a government worker in rural Newfoundland. The question wasn’t about abortion access here, which is shaped by Canadian law and provincial health care. It was a partisan test, a way of sorting people into sides of a U.S. culture war that isn’t even ours.

Her brother, Michael Fenwick — also a government worker — went further, publicly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death on Facebook (another link) (Image, Image, Image, Image). The irony is hard to miss: people who hold positions within government, where neutrality and professionalism should matter, are speaking in borrowed tones of U.S. extremism. These are not people who lived the fights they reference. They have likely have spent much time in the U.S. in a really long time, yet their language is saturated with its culture wars.

This is the paradox: local “leaders” who claim to defend Newfoundland’s autonomy while importing someone else’s fight wholesale. Their voices are credentialed by government roles, but their rhetoric is lifted from American polarization. The playground graffiti in Cape St. George (Image, Image, Image)— with queer slurs scribbled beside “Rest in hell Charlie Kirk” — is just the children’s echo of the same process. Imported language becomes the stage, while local governance and lived issues remain unsaid.

Leaders by Borrowed Script

Even if today’s local leadership has tempered their tone, the record from 2022 remains. In the moment when help was offered, when questions of local governance, land, and resources were on the table, they didn’t ground their judgment in Newfoundland’s needs. They reached for the nearest imported script — Roe v. Wade, Charlie Kirk, American partisan tests — and used those to decide who belonged and who did not.

That is not leadership rooted in local reality. It is leadership outsourced. The paradox is that even those claiming to stand for Newfoundland’s autonomy were acting in service of another country’s ideological battles. The filter they applied was not “Does this strengthen us here?” but “Does this sound like us versus them in the American frame?”

And here’s the lasting question: if leaders judged by that standard once, what faith can anyone place in their neutrality now? Even if they walk it back, the pattern is set. Leadership by borrowed script is not leadership at all — it is mimicry, and mimicry cannot defend a community from the pressures it actually faces.

Masks, Ideology, and the ETC

The leadership of the ETC began in 2022 with a striking image: board members masked up, presenting themselves as responsible stewards of community health and public trust. Among them were Catherine Fenwick and Martin Chaisson, who was then retiring from Heritage Canada.

Not all of them shared the same liberal ideology. But it was that framework — the optics of deference, the tone of cautious alignment with the federal line — that set the pattern. It was under this influence that Rae delayed the petition. It was under this framework that my own contributions were dismissed. And it is this same pattern that explains the lack of progress over the past three years.

The paradox is that the ideology that branded itself as “protective” and “inclusive” instead produced paralysis. Local leadership postured in masks while echoing scripts from Ottawa, but when it came to action — land, governance, resistance — they stalled. And in that stalling, the fight was lost not to external power, but to internal hesitation.

Unhinged Parity

This isn’t confined to one side of the spectrum. On the left, borrowed outrage shows up as Roe v. Wade tests or death wishes for American pundits. On the right, it takes the form of short, unhinged videos — clips and rants shared like gospel, each one claiming to expose “the truth.” The problem is they only tell the truth half the time. The other half is distortion, exaggeration, or performance designed to trigger a reaction⁶.

Both habits come from the same root: importing conflict wholesale, instead of grounding judgment in our own experience. Left or right, the pattern is mimicry. The conversation isn’t about Newfoundland’s real problems — fisheries, schools, land claims, energy politics — but about whatever thirty-second video or headline just spilled over the border that day.

And so, leadership fractures in the same way the playground graffiti does. One pole says “Rest in hell Charlie Kirk,” the other scrawls insults lifted from internet subcultures. Both are fragments of the same paradox: truth and lies mixed together, borrowed wholesale, painted onto our walls without ever belonging here.

The Trump Distraction

Canadian media doesn’t just report on Trump — it feeds on him. Every scandal, every outburst, every insult is replayed through a Liberal editorial filter, reinforcing the idea that Trump is the symbol of chaos, hate, and regression. That framing is useful. As long as Canadians are fixated on Trump, they are less likely to look critically at Ottawa’s own policies. While outrage circulates about an American president, the Canadian government quietly implements its own agenda — Paris Accord targets, green energy projects, wind-to-hydrogen schemes¹²³⁴.

For Newfoundland, the irony is obvious. Trump’s rhetoric against the Paris Accord could bolster local resistance to wind projects. But instead of using it strategically, people discard it out of hand because the source is taboo. The outrage imported from Canadian news channels and partisan feeds is so strong that it prevents locals from recognizing when a global figure’s stance could serve their cause.

The Disconnect on Paris

For months, no one understood my angle with the Paris Accord. When I raised it, people couldn’t relate it to the local fight. They saw turbines and land leases, but not the treaty obligations and global frameworks driving them. To many, the Paris Accord was an abstract, faraway agreement — not the reason Ottawa and St. John’s were so determined to brand Newfoundland as a “green energy hub”¹.

Even those closest to the struggle rejected the connection. My own aunt, Shelia Hinks — one of the Native women who ended up in court in 2023 — dismissed my Paris Accord information outright. “I only care about what happens to Port au Port, not anywhere else,” she told me. It was as if the global agreement steering local policy was invisible, because it didn’t wear the label of “local.”

This pattern isn’t just anecdotal. Scholars have already noted how grand policy schemes like the Paris Accord create local paradoxes — shaping community realities without communities recognizing the source of those pressures⁷. Newfoundland’s case is no different.

That disconnect is exactly why imported outrage is so effective. People are trained to react instantly to Trump or Roe v. Wade, but they have no frame for seeing how the Paris Accord lands in their own backyard. The global fights they can’t influence occupy their attention, while the global agreements that do shape their lives go unnoticed.

The Futility of Imported Outrage

The irony is that none of this noise — not the Roe v. Wade tests, not the Kirk death wishes, not the unhinged thirty-second clips — has ever delivered real political change here. It feels like power because it mimics the style of movements elsewhere, but it does not alter the institutions that govern Newfoundland. It only shapes who gets shunned at a meeting, or who feels emboldened to scribble on a playground pole.

That’s the deeper paradox: both left and right copy the tone of revolution while leaving the structure untouched. The mass media reinforces this by rewarding extremes — what is loud, what is fast, what is divisive⁶. They produce noise, not leverage. They create enemies, not reforms.

Research backs this up. Newfoundland’s municipalities operate under what economists call a “soft-budget constraint” — a structure where local governments depend on provincial bailouts rather than genuine fiscal autonomy⁸. Imported outrage doesn’t change that structural weakness. If anything, it distracts from it.

If anything, this imported outrage makes real change harder. People learn to respond only to the extremes, and in doing so they lose the habit of building coalitions, of debating policy, of imagining anything outside the script they’ve borrowed. The fight becomes performative, not transformative.

Imported Wars, Local Silences

My own work has relied on U.S. culture war references, yes — but only as a diagnostic lens. I use them to show how deeply they have seeped into Newfoundland, how they distort our debates, how they drown out the questions we need to ask about our own governance. That is different from parroting. It is comparison, not allegiance.

By contrast, what I’ve witnessed locally is surface-level mimicry: leaders and government workers adopting outrage that isn’t theirs, repeating slander, or enforcing partisan tests as though they were Newfoundland’s own. It isn’t analysis. It’s reflex. And in that reflex, we lose the ability to defend what is ours.

That is the paradox I keep circling back to: the loudest voices in Newfoundland claim to be defending our culture, but the language they use to do so is borrowed wholesale. Imported outrage fills the air, while the silence around our own structures grows heavier by the day.

The Cultural Hollowing

The louder our leaders insist they are defending Newfoundland’s culture, the clearer it becomes that they are repeating someone else’s script. The fights are borrowed. The insults are borrowed. Even the silences are borrowed. So what does that leave us with?

Does Newfoundland today even have a culture of its own, or has it been reduced to a performance — a way of making light of politics so that no one ever has to face it directly?

And if most of the leadership of these groups are so caught up in this ideological war, what does that mean for their children — who grow up learning the slurs, the memes, the divisions — before they ever learn the politics of their own place?

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang it best: “Teach your children well.” The message wasn’t just about love — it was about responsibility. What children absorb from their parents, their teachers, their leaders, becomes the framework they carry into adulthood. If what we teach them is borrowed outrage, empty insults, and endless mimicry of American politics, then that is the inheritance they will carry. Not strength, not sovereignty, not stewardship — but noise.

If Newfoundland wants to claim a culture of its own, the lesson has to change. We have to teach our children well — not with borrowed fights, but with the truths of this place, the histories and struggles that belong to us.

References

[1] UNFCCC. (2015). Paris Agreement. United Nations. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf

[2] Government of Canada. (2016). Canada’s Mid-Century Long-Term Low-Greenhouse Gas Development Strategy. https://unfccc.int/files/focus/long-term_strategies/application/pdf/canadas_mid-century_long-term_strategy.pdf

[3] CBC News. (2022, August 15). Canada, Germany to sign hydrogen deal in N.L. CBC.

Article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/canada-germany-hydrogen-1.6551250

Government page on the agreement: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/climate-change/memorandum-understanding-advancement-canada-germany-hydrogen-alliance

[4] Atlin, C., & Stoddart, M. (2018). *Governance in Times of Crisis: The Muskrat Falls Case.* Memorial University Harris Centre. https://www.mun.ca/harriscentre/media/production/memorial/administrative/the-harris-centre/media-library/Times_of_Crisis_Muskrat_Falls.pdf

[5] Bavington, D. (2011). Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. UBC Press. https://www.ubcpress.ca/managed-annihilation

[6] Mason, L. (2018). *Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.* University of Chicago Press.

Publisher page: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo27527354.html

PDF Excerpt (course intro): https://press.uchicago.edu/dam/ucp/books/pdf/course_intro/978-0-226-52454-2_course_intro.pdf

[7] Van Assche, K., Greenwood, R., & Gruezmacher, M. (2022). The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 38(3),101212. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522122000197 (Local Download)

[8] Guo, X. (2025). Optimal Transfer Mechanism for Municipal Soft-Budget Constraints in Newfoundland. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02171 (Local Download)

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