by Greg Malone
C.D. Howe quietly extracted the billions of dollars’ worth of the iron ore out of Labrador West for the Canadian heartland—Ontario and Quebec—with virtually no residual benefit for Newfoundland. Lester Pearson later gave the revenues from the Upper Churchill to Quebec when he refused to require Quebec to allow Newfoundland to transport its power from the Upper Churchill Power Project in Labrador through Quebec to markets in the United States. Instead, Newfoundland was forced to sell its power to Quebec at fixed 1960s’ prices. “Smallwood was not allowed to dot an ‘i’ on the deal, and was forced to support it publicly for the sake of appeasing Quebec and Canadian unity.”2 As a result, Quebec earns from $2 to $4 billion annually from the power it resells from Newfoundland and Labrador to the US market. Newfoundland gets enough to maintain the facility to keep it operating for Quebec’s advantage.
If Newfoundland had been allowed the benefit of just one of those two resources, it could have underwritten its independence, including the Swedish social welfare package that Canada adopted. As it was, the full benefit of the Upper Churchill wealth went to the province of Quebec, where René Lévesque boasted it gave economic backbone to its separatist posture. In 1927 the province of Quebec and the federal government, along with the Dominion of Newfoundland, had submitted the Labrador boundary dispute to the Privy Council in London. The Privy Council confirmed Newfoundland’s jurisdiction, a decision that was not accepted by the province of Quebec. With Confederation, however, Quebec did finally acquire Labrador’s resources. That astonishing transfer of hydro wealth to Quebec both humiliated and impoverished the newest province. Those who were unaware of the fix in 1949 could see it clearly by 1969. As A.P. Herbert remarked: “A Frenchman said that Labrador was the country that God gave to Cain. History may say that it was the country Britain gave to Canada.”3
For nearly five hundred years since its discovery by the Europeans, Newfoundlanders had prosecuted the fishery. The fishery was the raison d’être for Newfoundland—the reason people came and settled here and went on to develop the culture and lifestyle they enjoyed. Within fifty years of Confederation and federal management, the Newfoundland fishery had collapsed and the great North Atlantic cod stock, the largest biomass on the planet, was on the verge of extinction. But this precipitous decline didn’t seem to matter to the Canadians.
The Newfoundland provincial government and the Newfoundland people participated with the rest of the world in the continuous and reckless over-fishing and in the disastrous dragger technology that devastated the ocean floor and the spawning grounds. It was the federal government, however, that bartered away huge fishing quotas to foreign powers for trade concessions. Korea got its fishing quota off Newfoundland when Quebec got a car plant from Hyundai. The Russians got fishing quotas in Newfoundland for buying Canadian wheat. Landlocked Ottawa did not understand the fishery or appreciate its importance, except as a bargaining chip for the heartland. Ultimately, central planning from Ottawa proved to be disastrous for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Natural resources should never be controlled by an absentee landlord—in this case Ottawa. The country of Newfoundland may not have been any wiser in its fisheries management, but at least the fishery would have mattered more to Newfoundland.
Canada got what it wanted out of Newfoundland—Labrador and the Grand Banks. These resources far more than paid for the pension and baby bonus cheques from Ottawa. But Ottawa was careful to style itself as the saviour and to portray Newfoundland as a dependant, a second-class province, even a beggar. The myth of Canadian generosity was an easy sell to the Canadian media. The burden, the problem child, had been passed from one empire to another. But Canada had fought long, hard and dirty to acquire it, and, as soon as it had the prize, the extractions could begin.
Ches Crosbie’s fears proved only too accurate. Once the resources and the revenues were pouring out of the province to central Canada, Newfoundland was mired in debt after only eight years of Confederation. In 1956 the royal commission to examine Newfoundland’s financial position was established, as promised by Term 29 of the Terms of Union. The commission’s recommendations fell far short of what Smallwood had hoped for, and what Newfoundland’s own royal commission had recommended was necessary to rescue the province from the financial problems created in 1949. But John Diefenbaker’s new federal Conservative government was unmoved. It was then that Smallwood, the “Apostle of Confederation,” donned the black armband of the Responsible Government League. By that time, there was nowhere left to turn.
Canada failed utterly to develop the new East Coast it had acquired. Geoff Stirling, Newfoundland media magnate and one of Crosbie’s lieutenants in the Union with America party, concluded thirty years later that Confederation in Newfoundland had delivered “the worst roads in Canada, no real development money, just handouts.”4 Newfoundland was never adequately connected to the mainland, because no one thought there would ever be any development on the Island. Above all, costs were to be kept to the minimum: the railway was closed, and the poor ferry service kept the province isolated from the mainland. The Liberal culture of dependency there did not begin to change until 1984, when John Crosbie and Premier Brian Peckford negotiated the Atlantic Accord, which attempted to give back to Newfoundland the benefit of some of the resources it had brought with it into Confederation. Interestingly, the federalist John Crosbie was the son of the nationalist Ches Crosbie and a minister in Brian Mulroney’s Cabinet. But substantial material change did not come to the Island until Premier Danny Williams was driven on December 23, 2004, to take down the Canadian flag in the Newfoundland legislative building in his fight with Ottawa to give the province more of its offshore oil revenues. His government’s support shot up from 41 percent to 86 percent.5 The Williams government finally forced Confederation to work for Newfoundland and Labrador, and not against it.
As Jim Halley summed it all up:
Newfoundland was a prosperous country in the first part of the twentieth century. We were taken advantage of during the Great Depression in ’33, not helped, but taken advantage of, by Great Britain and then again by Great Britain and Canada in ’49. When it was suspended in ’33, ours was the oldest Parliament in the empire except for the one in Westminster. In the ’30s and ’40s we were looking at an exciting future for our country. We had TWA, Pan Am, British Airways and Trans-Canada Airways. You could go to Gander, take your pick and fly anywhere in the world. We had two steamship lines, Furness Withy and Furness Red Cross, and twice a month you could put your car on board and cross over to England. We had passenger boats to Boston and New York. We lost all that when we joined Canada, and TCA got a monopoly here. We went from being an international hub to a Canadian backwater overnight.
When we joined Canada, we lost everything. We lost Labrador for all intents and purposes. Canada got the iron ore and the hydro for Ontario and Quebec. We got the cost of running the place. We lost the Grand Banks and all the revenues from that. We brought the Grand Banks into Canada with us when we came. They’re the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, not the Grand Banks of Ontario, or even Quebec, and, as Averill Baker wrote, our continental shelf is ten times the size of any other province’s, with ten times the potential for jobs, and there should be a separate Newfoundland and Labrador Accord to deal with this vast resource instead of having it all rolled into the Atlantic Accord. If we were independent we’d have 100 percent of our oil and gas, not 40 percent, and we might still have our fishery, as Iceland does.
But we lost everything when we joined Canada, lost the over-fly rights and the revenues from Gander and Goose Bay. Lost our customs revenues. Lost our manufacturing industries to Canadian goods.
We lost our ability to develop our own country or province because we lost control of our resources to Ottawa—which you can see in the official papers is all Ottawa ever wanted out of Newfoundland. So it should not surprise anyone that they had no plans or vision for the newest province. They actually planned for the depopulation of the place so it would cost them les
s in services.
If we had control of our own resources, we would be one of the most prosperous countries in the West, or the richest province in Canada. According to a UN survey, Newfoundland is the second richest jurisdiction in resources on the planet after Kuwait. Ontario and Quebec have gotten the benefit of that wealth, and they called us a burden, you know. The problem with the fix of ’49 is that the crime goes on and on. That’s why we need the truth. Justice requires as a bare minimum that we negotiate the Terms of Union with Canada. We cannot say re-negotiate because they were not negotiated in the first place. The people of Newfoundland wanted work, not welfare, but we got welfare. That is changing only recently because Danny Williams fought for 40 percent of our offshore oil. With that 40 percent we’ve been able to stabilize. If we had what was rightfully ours we wouldn’t need Canada. That’s the dirty secret Ottawa doesn’t want anyone to know. They hit the jackpot when they got Newfoundland and Labrador, and they covered it up with a lot of noise about welfare.
I was at dinner with Jack Pickersgill in 1992 and I asked him why Canada would have wanted to negotiate with a National Convention instead of a duly elected Newfoundland government. Pickersgill smiled and replied: “Because we never would have gotten you so cheap.”
So we need control of our Grand Banks back, we need 100 percent of the oil and gas, just as Alberta gets from the tar sands. We need at least joint jurisdiction of our fisheries. There are a lot of things that need to be looked at, such as an elected but equal Senate. And we need to be better connected if we’re going to be part of Canada in the twenty-first century. Long ago we should have had a ferry service from Corner Brook into Quebec, but if we can’t get any of that, we can separate and put a ferry through to Maine. It might be easier and, as an independent country in the twenty-first century, we might have a better chance than a forgotten region of Canada. Independence would be good for Newfoundlanders, good for our character, good for our self-esteem and good for our children. It’s our choice now. Chrétien’s Clarity Act gives us that choice. Certainly we are only as valuable as the value we set on ourselves.
If you permit yourself to examine the truth for a moment, you have to consider that responsible government did actually win. Newfoundlanders voted for responsible government and for independence in 1948. If you start with that realization, everything looks very different. Responsible government won in spite of “limitless funds” and the high-pressure tactics and schemes of Great Britain and Canada. From the announcement of the elections for the National Convention in December of ’45 to the final vote in July of ’48, it took the UK government almost three years to deliver on constitutional obligations, which had already been delayed by another year. It took that long to wear down the Newfoundlanders into accepting Confederation and hopefully achieve the maximum conditions for a win. In spite of all that, responsible government won by a very slim majority, an astonishing achievement for a small but plucky nation. We did well in ’48; it was the British and the Canadians who let their end down.6
EPILOGUE
In the early 1970s, like so many of my generation, I went to Toronto a Canadian and came back a Newfoundlander. Although we were largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the events described in this book, we were confronted on arrival with the wall of ignorance and prejudice that followed in its wake. When people discovered I was from Newfoundland, they would laugh openly in my face and ask if I had ever seen a television set and if I really lived in an igloo. At the plant where my brother-in-law worked, every Friday afternoon his co-workers would raise their arms and say to him, “This one’s for Newfoundland”—meaning that the afternoon’s work would go to support a dependent Newfoundland. They were unaware of the trainloads of iron ore from Labrador that kept the heartland humming and built the skyscrapers of North America.
This unacceptable situation required redress, so my friends and I wrote a theatre show to satirize both Canadians’ attitudes and our own. It was called Cod on a Stick and it was a hit both in Toronto and at home in Newfoundland. Our company, CODCO, eventually did a TV series on CBC in the late 1980s and early ’90s—in Halifax, of course, not St. John’s. The weekly show was liberally laced with savage political satire and, eventually, questions were raised about it in the Canadian House of Commons, asking whether it was appropriate for the government, through the CBC, to support such controversial and subversive material. We felt satisfied that in some way we had hit our mark. I am forever grateful to the few brave souls at the CBC who helped us in our “mission” to change attitudes.
Today Newfoundlanders are still on the move, looking for the work that Confederation failed to provide in the newest province. Now they are headed further west, all the way to Alberta. It is with heavy hearts that they leave, and they are confronted on arrival with the same condescension and contempt that confronted us in the early 1970s in Toronto. Too often their children are called “stupid Newfies” in Alberta’s schools, exactly as they were in the classrooms of Ontario years earlier. We have paid a heavy personal price for Confederation. However, we cannot be too selfish, for surely no territory needed an influx of fun-loving, hardworking Newfoundlanders more than the humour-challenged heartland. Alberta was for many years a burden on the federal treasury: its new-found respect in Canada comes from a deposit of hydrocarbons north of Edmonton, the controversial tar sands. Newfoundland’s rising status can likewise be pegged to deposits of hydrocarbons off our east coast. Alberta gets 100 percent of its resource; we get 40 percent—which is considered generous—and you might say that Newfoundland enjoys about 40 percent of the respect that Alberta does. We all look forward to a future where respect is not pegged to deposits of hydrocarbons or minerals, where people will be respected simply because that is their right as human beings.
As for me, the only firm constitutional conclusion I can come to is that I am from the country of Newfoundland, the Promised Land. I carry a Canadian passport because Newfoundland was occupied by Canada in 1949 by means of a constitutional coup arranged with Great Britain. That said, it is also true that Newfoundland’s joining up with Canada made sense, not only geographically, but politically and socially too. It may well have happened later and under different circumstances if it had not been forced on Newfoundland in 1948.
Although Newfoundlanders would make great Americans and would be free in the United States of the negative preconceptions that have hampered them in Confederation, Newfoundland has more in common with Canadian social and political mores than with those in the States. Canadian social policy, leaning to the left on issues such as health care and provincial and human rights (including minority, women’s, children’s and gay rights), has kept the country compassionate and livable. Our problems with Canada are political, not personal.
It is unfortunate that, in its haste to get Newfoundland on its own terms, Canada did not honour Newfoundlanders’ inherent right to self-determination. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Confederation is marred by a history of connivance, duplicity, mendacity and abuse. It is hard to see how a union so fraudulently attained can be said to have been attained at all. The Terms of Union are little more than the unilateral conditions of occupation by the stronger power. They were and are unnegotiated and, by any standard of democracy, unbinding on the population of Newfoundland and Labrador. The union, so dreaded by Norman Robertson, is arguably illegal after all, and Newfoundlanders but bastard Canadians. The “various possibilities” of Attlee’s violations are unending.
Most Newfoundlanders today are unaware of the connivance and plots of Ottawa and London to grab our province for Canada. Yet we know instinctively that our Confederation with the mainland is in some way crippled. The discovery set out in this book of the real reasons underlying these misconceptions and miseries will, I hope, bring a degree of sanity and understanding to the pain and confusion we have endured since 1949.
In the preface to his volume of Newfoundland documents, 1940–49—a compilation of the top-secret correspondence between Canada a
nd Great Britain on Newfoundland’s Confederation with Canada—editor Paul Bridle, the acting high commissioner to Newfoundland at the time of the referendum, was moved to write: “Canadians reveal themselves, at the political level, as remarkably patronizing towards Newfoundlanders.”1 Then he concluded on a note of hope: “The editor commends the book to his old friends in Newfoundland, confident that the truth that is in it, if it will not make them free, will at least give them food for thought.”2
It has certainly given us food for thought. The true history of Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada has the potential to make us free, in the same way that the articulation of sovereignty and nationhood by the province of Quebec has liberated Quebecers despite their continued federation with Canada. The truth about our history has the power to help us redefine our perspective on our place in the Canadian federation and the world. As Newfoundland slowly gains more control over its resources, it will be empowered to determine its own destiny in a way it was not permitted to do in 1948. Perhaps one day soon the diaspora will return, our sons and daughters will remain at home, and, if they so choose, Newfoundland and Labrador will be an independent country once again, unfettered and free of the attitudes of alien nations off her shores.
The novelist Paul West once described Newfoundland as “a community of Irish mystics cut adrift on the Atlantic.”3 To outsiders standing in seeming security on the mainland, it may appear that we are cut off, but Newfoundlanders see things differently. We are not adrift, we are home, in the place where the Irish mystics dreamed of going.