There’s never been an independence movement in Newfoundland and Labrador in all its political history, which is from about 1825 onwards.
In all the 199 years since, not a single group of people stood up and said *we* ought to be an independent country separate from everyone else, standing on our own feet.
Not even a single person really, at least not anyone with any standing, knowledge, or support.
In the land that it is supposedly so amazingly more Irish than all the Irish people in Ireland itself, there’s plenty of people named Michael Collins over the past couple of hundred years but none of them wanted independence for Newfoundland and Labrador from anyone else, stood up and said it.
Responsible Government League, someone yells from the back of the room.
The crowd that fought against Confederation and in favour of what the referendum ballot in 1948 described as the form of government that existed before 1934.
Potentially.
But consider two key details of what that earlier form of government meant.
First, the London delegation from the National Convention went to London looking for a financial backer. Worst case, they wondered, and things went sour like they did in the 1920s and 1930s, would you crowd in London bail us out financially without us giving up self-government.
No said the Brits. Haven’t got the cash. You remember that big noise a couple of years ago? That war (making air quotes). Well, it practically busted us financially. Some of your lot must remember because you were over here helping us beat back the Nazi hordes.
Look, we are still rationing food and stuff, for frig sake, and besides, there are plenty of other things for us to worry to worry about like say ther russians and the Chinese, and as far as the empire goes, the Indians who we just helped be their a separate friggin’ country. Well, two really to be perfectly accurate.
Or the bunch down in Africa all likely to start clamouring for… you know… independence now that they have seen what happened in India. Standing on their own two feet not coming looking for Great White Mother to look after them any more.
At this point, Peter Cashin famously came back to Newfoundland and cried about a great but entirely imaginary conspiracy to sell Newfoundland down the river to Canada.
Ever since then, there’s been a bunch who haul out that quote as if there really had been a conspiracy. Made a movie out of it. Some comedian wrote a book about it, which - to show just how stunned people are - they sell as if the story in it were true. Call it history. But it is made-up. A fairy tale. Utter nonsense.
What all those budgells miss as they chirp in their cage is what triggered the claim, namely the unwillingness of the British to help Newfoundland *not* be independent.
Second, that actually fit with the way many people in Newfoundland and Labrador thought of themselves. They were British. Even today about 95% of the population is descended from people from England, Scotland, Wales, and southern Ireland, with 60% being descended from English. The economy was tied to Britain. People followed British customs. Drove their cars on the left side of the road and so on.
So Newfoundlanders and Labradorians weren’t really looking to be independent, separate, or even a self-supporting part of the larger British empire and commonwealth. Given the trauma of what happened 15 or so years before the National Convention was still fresh in everyone’s mind, that’s hardly surprising. People knew how far behind the rest of the world they’d fallen in the 15 years of Commission Government.
That’s a big part of the argument that Melvin Baker and Raymond Blake make in their 2019 book, Where once they stood. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians - the latter voted for the first time in the election to the National Convention - wanted “full participation in the state’s economic, social , and political life.” And they were evenly divided about whether they’d best get that as a separate country or as part of Canada. They were British, thought of themselves as British, and Canada was - as Joe Smallwood and the Confederates reminded them - another British place. The vote came after a vigorous and very public debate about the future of the country but it was ultimately a very close vote.
What’s remarkable about the vote for our purposes was not how close it was but how in the years immediately afterward no one organized a political party that said the best place for Newfoundland and Labrador was outside Canada, as an independent country. The first election in Newfoundland and Labrador after Confederation, in the summer of 1949 saw a turnout at the polls that has not been matched since. And despite winning barely more than half the districts in the second 1948 referendum, the Confederation team, now under the Liberal banner, took all but five districts. In the legislature, where some districts elected more than one member, the Liberals held 22 seats to the opposition Progressive Conservatives’ five. That doesn’t look anything like a coutnry evenly split between province and independence.
There was more to that shift in popular support than doing everything possible to “make it work,” as Don Jamieson, a campaigner for union with the United States, put it in his memoir No place for fools. The absence of independence as an option *after* the close outcome of the 1948 referenda and the ease with which anti-Confederates accepted the new political system are themselves telling. The country turned to economic and social development for the next 20-odd years. That’s what people were looking for and they apparently had no trouble accepting Canada and being Canadian as the way to be prosperous and self-governing again.
The transformation in Newfoundland and Labrador after 1949 was radical, as Joe Smallwood and the Liberals reminded everyone ate very turn. Miles of roads where there’d been none before, then miles of road paved. Schools built. Hospitals opened. Town councils created. New jobs created. Babies born. Population record broken. Cash flowed from Ottawa. All accounted for repeatedly until 1972 and for that matter long after Smallwood was out of office.
By the late 1960s, though, all of this shininess had become old stuff. A new generation, most born before 1949 but who’d come of age after Confederation, wondered what came next. They chafed at Smallwood’s dictatorial ways, wanted done of his control over government spending and the ever-present threat that a failure to return him to office with his followers in tow would leave a family without a job and the community wanting again, as it had in the old days. They wanted what everyone.
There’d been the big downturn at the pre-Confederation mine on Bell Island and the migration of workers and their families to Ontario. Others had been to Ontario, some to stay while others returned. What stung and what stuck was the attitude in Canada that Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders as poor, backward, and stupid. Brian Peckford remembered in his memoir The past in the present the brief time he spent living in Toronto with his family on Metcalf near Parliament. The place where immigrants lived, as he describes it, and the feeling that he and his family were “alien and different”, of being very much “outsiders.” Peckford says it was “not very pleasant.”
In the 1970s, then we had not just a reaction typical of North America and the west in the aftermath of the Summer of Love or the upheavals in Paris and Los Angeles but also a generational shift in Newfoundland and Labrador society in its own right. They wanted more. They did not want putdowns. They wanted respect. The explosion of creativity in music, writing, the theatre reflected people searching for themselves collectively and for a new understanding of their place in the world.
Not surprisingly, in this time of rejection, rebellion, and experimentation, people found the old themes of the anti-Confederates easy to take up. Joan Morrisey’s song Thank God we’re surrounded by water or Dick Nolan’s Aunt Martha’s sheep had similar themes of putting one over on the Mainlanders or pushing back against them. Canada was an exploiter, replacing the British, supposedly, conniving to take and control Newfoundland’s resources and profit from them while the locals were left poor. The tropes were familiar. And they stuck around. A prominent economist who was a mild critic of the Muskrat Falls project had been a student in the 1970s. He offered the view in the early 2000s that the history of Newfoundland was one of struggle for control of its own resources.
In this version, the old anti-Confederate lines married the more recent example of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution which was also about a minority struggling against Canada for control of its own destiny. There is no accident that Frank Moores’ government created Newfoundland Hydro just as Quebec had put together private electricity companies to form Hydro-Quebec a decade and a bit earlier. There was lots in the local political set of ideas that copied Quebec as much as the same peopled vilified Quebec for also exploiting Newfoundland’s supposed weakness. The idea at the start was the same, though: use the new, state-owned company to drive economic development but as early dreams met hard reality, Quebec became just another example of Canadian exploitation of impoverished Newfoundland.
Nothing embodied the struggle for control over resources as the fight with Ottawa for mastery of offshore oil and gas. But while that was a genuine dispute over resource control, what the arguments about supposed Canadian exploitation of Newfoundland revealed more clearly was the extent to which whatever was driving Newfoundland “nationalism,” it was not based on the same foundations as Quebec’s political and social upheavals in the 1950s and 1960s that culminated in the Quiet Revolution.
To the contrary, Newfoundland “nationalism” recycled old lines that dated back to the 1860s in some instances or brushed off lines used by the elites during the Commission Government, replacing Britain as the exploiter in their narratives with “Canada.” But even there, the political and economic roots of the epithets were not actual exploitation but frustration that the Newfoundland elites did not have the sway they’d held before 1934.
Jim Overton argued in his seminal and unmatched critique of what he called Newfoundland “neo-nationalism” that the arguments about exploitation and victimhood deliberately avoided discussion of what was actually going on and what had actually gone on Newfoundland in the earlier decades. It allowed elites to control the political agenda. Any demands for redress if local grievances had to wait until the “national” struggle was resolved. He was bang on. If there was a problem in Newfoundland, the local elites blamed it on foreigners.
Overton did not delve into the history of Newfoundland but even a quick glance at the time after the grant of local self-government in May 1855 would recognize that Newfoundland had control over its own resources from the beginning. There had been no fight. There was no fight.
The real issue was what had the locals had done with the resources over which they had unquestioned control. That is the very question the local elites did not care to talk about and that avoidance was not an accident. After all, they and their associates controlled the country and gave to foreign investors the right to exploit local resources in exchange for low wages, low taxes, and a few jobs. The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company in central Newfoundland and the Reids were two of the best-known examples and in 1949 Smallwood and the Liberals followed the same well-trod path. The only difference was that the post-Confederation government gave the whole of the country that was left to a single entity: BRINCO in Labrador and NALCO on the island.
While they may have got their sums wrong or trotted out old slogans simply out of convenience, the governments in Newfoundland and Labrador in that second post-war phase of political, social, and economic development (1872 to 2003) were still eager to transform the new province and former country as people had wanted in 1948. There was very much a widespread discussion of who we were as a people and what our place was to be. And while much of the popular talk was still of “Newfoundland” as the official name of the province had it, Labradorian identity emerged in a new flag, a short-lived political party, and among Indigenous people, a desire to organize themselves along the lines of their Canadian relations to take the most advantage possible of federal funding programs.
Yet at the same time that they copied outside models, the economic, political, and social leaders in Newfoundland and Labrador ignored in the process the traditional power structures of their own province. At the peak of Newfoundland’s “nationalist” revival, for example, the Peckford government expanded sectarian control of education, ostensibly to buy support in 1982 for the repatriation of the constitution and the introduction of a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The political parties did not represent ideological difference of conservative and liberal, not of Left, Right, and Centre but of the old Confederate and anti-Confederate labels baked in during that 1949 campaign. That’s why the New Democrats of eastern Newfoundland become Progressive Conservatives faster than Liberals if there is a choice to be made among them.
In some ways the early part of that post-1972 phase looked like what had been before. After 1985, though, conversations change about the economy and the churches. In the economy, a new consensus rejected the old pattern of megaprojects and deals with big investors. There'd be no more give aways. There'd also be a different role for government. The new way would be local entrepreneurs building on local strengthsa nd knowledge.
The church’s place in society was about to change, too, just as in the late 1980s, new ideas emerged about the relationship between government and people, and government and businesses interested in economic development. Supported by popular will expressed in votes on education, the majority voted to give up their rights in education and put an end to the social and political dominance of a handful of Christian sects. The scandals of child abuse in church-run orphanages hastened the decline of church power. Reforms in health care also took the churches and religiously inspired charities out of health care. Both would be run for a short while by locally-elected boards responsible for education and health across 16 regions of the province. And in economic development, offshore oil development agreements and the new mine at Voisey’s Bay were not the familiar give-aways of wealth for a handful of jobs.
The impact of the cod moratorium and the loss of 70-odd thousand voters in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, weakened the political strength rural Newfoundland and Labrador had enjoyed since Confederation balanced against St. John’s interests. As described in an earlier column, the election in 2003 brought to power a party that demolished the changes that had come in the second post-Confederation phase.
A series of changes in health care and education in the early 2000s - ostensibly to deal with the government’s financial problems - demolished locally-controlled, democratically-elected boards and replaced them with centrally-controlled bureaucracies. The House of Assembly has been systematically reduced in size and in the number of sitting days since 2003, bringing it to a historically low position as nothing more than a rubber stamp for decisions made in secret among a handful, representing either officially approved groups or those with enough cash to buy political attention. It would seem some times that the old class-system of Newfoundland and Labrador society, the old political ways, and the old-economic habits are back.
And while the goal of every government after Confederation until 2003 had been the end of federal handouts, the governments after 2003 could not do more to get back on the federal dole. In 1990, many Newfoundlanders and Labradorians found it offensive when John Crosbie warned them about the risks of biting the hand that fed them when they did nothing but express their concerns about Meech Lake. After 2003, Liberal governments boasted of their close ties to Uncle Ottawa’s chequebook that would, among other things keep things as they were and avoid any change to who controlled and who benefitted most from government spending.
What’s most curious about the current period, 75 years after Confederation, is that while we once talked among ourselves and about ourselves openly and for the most part freely in order to figure out who were are and where we want to go, these days there is little or no talk of much at all. What little talk there may be is often wildly ignorant - like the Premier’s recent mention of 500 years of supposed fights between merchants and fishermen, for example - or full of externally-rooted and always demeaning narratives about a poor and backward people, like the resurgent popularity of the word “Newfie” when referring to anything but the dog or the fabricated “history” of Indigenous people and Africans in Newfoundland and Labrador. The continued popularity of “screech-ins” is a whole other issue. The reference to Newfoundland before 1949 as merely a colony of Britain, run by the British, keeps alive the popular ignorance about this place and its people that allows the flase narratives to thrive.
In that second phase, we had CODCO, Figgy Duff, Thomas Trio, Wonderful Grand Band, and Great Big Sea. These days we get Republic of Doyle, Hudson and Rex, or Son of Critch, shows with little more than a thin local skin on them to distinguish them from the entirely American formulas they follow. People talked about ideas raised by books and films like Wayne Johnston’s The colony of unrequited dreams, Rare Birds, or Secret Nation, but these days the equally compelling and very local themes of Hollow Bamboo get no popular discussion at all.
The difference between these past 20 years and any time before that, especially in the 50 years or so from the National Convention until first oil, could hardly be any greater. That is what we should think about most on this 75th anniversary of Confederation and and into the years beyond: how far we have come in so long a time and yet how far backward we have gone as well, in so short a one.
And we should ask who “we” are, how we relate to those who went before, and what sort of society do we want to have for ourselves and our children and grandchildren and for those who choose to come here and build with us. Until now, we have bristled at dependency and subservience as readily as did our ancestors. We may not have talked of independence from Canada but understood it was and is possible to live as a distinct and self-governing people within Canada. There is no contradiction, as the Blame Canada commission found, in wanting a distinct province and the society that governed within a united Canada. The vision of 1948 is not finished and what we were before then - truthfully, honestly - is not something we should so readily ignore as we look to the future.
Who are we, people in Newfoundland and Labrador?
What do we want of our society, uniquely, distinctly within Canada or, for that matter and if need be, without it?
It is only in finding the answer to those questions that we may truly say that we stand today where once the people of 1948 truly stood.
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Victimhood and Newfoundland nationalism
“To be a Newfoundland nationalist is to look at a problem facing your community and invariably point to some foreign power as the cause.”
The boogeyman did it: Steve Crocker, Lisa Moore, and explanations for Muskrat Falls