How a Meteor Crash Made Newfoundland Confront Its Future

The sky is falling in Newfoundland and Labrador. Literally, I mean—a bright green light tumbled out of the sky above St. John's harbour Monday night and burned up somewhere in the woods out by Cape Spear.

Stars don't normally fall out of the sky in our ancient capital city, so CBC reported that there was some confusion about what it happened to be. A few people worried that it might be the opening salvo of a thermonuclear war. Others expected alien emissaries to touch down in Shea Heights and immediately get knifed outside Valley Convenience.

As is often the case, the truth turns out to be pretty mundane. The Orionid meteor shower happens around this time in October, so the astronomical consensus is that while it was spectacular, it was a pretty run-of-the-mill meteor.

What about the astrological interpretation, though? Personally, I'm not especially inclined to read signs among the stars. But you have to admit that this meteor is especially well-timed to be an evil omen for the Rock—even leaving aside the start of Scorpio Season.

Classically, comets, meteors, and other strange celestial phenomena were always viewed with dread and suspicion. The ancient Greeks believed they unleashed earthquakes and tidal waves, while the Romans saw them as an omen of impending famine or war. Medieval Europe chalked them up as a generally evil power, heralding everything from crop failure to dynastic collapse to a fresh outbreak of the Black Death. And while we live in more enlightened times (the occasional comet-cult mass suicide notwithstanding), the sight of a bright light falling from the sky is still an uncanny encounter.

All things considered, Newfoundland and Labrador is probably not facing the imminent threat of war or starvation. (Unless it's a particularly brutal winter and the ferries can't cross the straight and we burn through the island's meagre and insecure food reserves, but that's pretty unlikely, right? Definitely don't think too hard about it.) But the meteor does come on the heels of a deluge of bad forecasts for the province's future.

First off, the latest Vital Signs report dropped last week, carving a few of our fears in stone: the oil boom is definitively over and more people are falling into poverty. Food bank use in the province is twice the Canadian average and fewer than half the population feels particularly secure in their jobs. Young Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are particularly hungry, insecure, and economically anxious, and any sense of optimism for the future is pretty dim for those of us unable to drop everything and start a soap factory in Bonavista.

This report, in turn, shores up a report from Memorial University's Harris Centre last month predicting that the province is on track to lose 40,000 people over the next twenty years. The population will get steadily older, with healthcare and homecare expenditures bogging down everyone still at working age. Swathes of rural communities are expected to disappear entirely, and those left behind will gradually be abandoned by a cash-strapped provincial government.

Finally, the morning after the meteor blew up across the harbour, the Auditor General delivered his latest report on provincial finances. Turns out Newfoundland and Labrador is carrying its highest-ever net debt—$13.6 billion—and there is almost no relief in sight, thanks to the demographic and geographic problems outlined by the Harris Centre.

(Also, please do not ask about the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project.)

Then again, an omen is what you make it. The good news about all of these ominous social problems is precisely that they are social. They are caused by human beings living together and they could be fixed by those human beings getting together and making a concerted effort to changes things for the better. Newfoundland history at its best is one of moderately demented people doggedly trying to make life on this blasted rock flourish and we have a rich tradition of productive insanity to draw from.

The bad news is that there is nothing written in the stars or elsewhere suggesting that the people currently involved in running the province have either the drive or the vision or the guts or the intellectual heft or any of the basic self-awareness required to turn our future forecast of trash into treasure.

Unless of course it actually was aliens, in which case all bets are off. But let's be real. If aliens did touch down in St. John's, they're only here to watch NTV.

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