Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature

4. Uncivil Servitude: The Service Sector

87 Uncivil Servitude: The Service Sector 4 | Along with the more fundamentally modern, industrial, and corporatized visions of physical labour in the Maritimes and Newfoundland explored in the previous two chapters, another signiicant element of work in the region that runs counter to traditional stereotypes is the pronounced shift of the economy toward the growing service sector. If, as Margaret Conrad and James Hiller argue, the four decades after the Second World War are a better candidate for the real golden age of the region, that prosperity came largely not from the traditional resource sectors but from “the burgeoning trade and service sectors, and [was] often tied to state spending” (2001, 199). Indeed, by the turn of the millennium, fully two-thirds of Atlantic Canadians were working in the service sector (Workman 2003, 40). This shift has obviously reshaped the social fabric of the region and is increasingly relected in Atlantic-Canadian literature, particularly, as we will see in the next section, in the vigorous engagement with tourism as a dominant industry in the service sector. Some writers have also turned their attention to the world of public service, and their work often relects an acute consciousness of how that sphere is being reshaped by larger political and economic forces, generally to the detriment of the quality of those services and to those in the position of providing them. “Can I have your sin?”: Sheree Fitch’s “Civil Servant” Although known and celebrated principally for her writing for children, New Brunswick poet Sheree Fitch has also written for adults, and her 1993 poem “Civil Servant” not only provides an example of these concerns with life in the service sector but also cleverly dramatizes the underlying tensions of the 88 Section 1: I’se the B’y That Leaves the Boats region’s reliance on a service economy in a climate of scarce employment. Playing on the word “sin” as the acronym for “social insurance number,” Fitch’s speaker, who works in an unemployment insurance ofice, imagines herself as St. Peter, inquiring about the “sins” of the sad souls who parade by her desk. Despite the lighthearted premise, “Civil Servant” poignantly evokes the bitter humiliation of the ofice as a kind of bureaucratic purgatory for the unemployed, as well as the tenuous irony of the speaker’s own employment , working as a manager of those who have no work. Furthermore, Fitch stresses that the tensions that characterize the unemployment ofice are particularly acute in economically depressed regions, as every day her speaker is “reminded of regional / despair-ity” (Fitch 1993, 72). As Fitch highlights, the bureaucratic interaction between the employed and the unemployed staged in the unemployment ofice is a recipe for resentment, because “people without jobs / get desperate” (70). Running beneath the poem is a current of simmering hostility and potential violence, for which the speaker routinely arms herself: “every day I sharpen / hb pencils / my daggers / in case anyone should threaten me” (70). Underscoring not just the anger that an impersonal bureaucracy cultivates but also the social and economic oppression it embodies, she imagines to herself “the battle with pencil and paper and pen / staple gun,” after which the loor is stained with ink drawn directly from the veins of sin-illed civilians and the civil servants whose job it is to smile while we tell lies like it will only be a little while then someone will take care of you (70) She also describes the very real altercations that come with the position because of her literal placement at the divide between those who have work and those who don’t: the time “a man / threw his record of employment / across the desk at me,” and the time that, after consoling someone who told her “there were no groceries” the week before Christmas, she was spat on and verbally abused, “what the fuck do you know / stupid bitch you got a job” (71). Despite the power the speaker is perceived to have and represent, however , the crisis of conscience she experiences stems from her perception of 89 Uncivil Servitude her own lack of power. Cleverly playing on the image of the civil servant as confessor, she describes how she has no power to give to give absolution or even a bit of hope that someday the phone will ring the job they have been waiting for is theirs (72) Essentially seeing herself as a conspirator...