Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders Read online

  Also by Greg Malone

  You Better Watch Out

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2012 Greg Malone

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Malone, Greg

  Don’t tell the Newfoundlanders : the true story of Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada / Greg Malone.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40135-9

  1. Newfoundland and Labrador—History—1934–1949. 2. Newfoundland and Labrador—Politics and government—1934–1949. I. Title.

  FC2174.8.M36 2012 971.8′03 C2012-902097-4

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover images: (bottom) The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library;

  (flag) © Andreykuzmin/Dreamstime.com;

  (ripped paper) © Carlosphotos/Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to James T. Halley,

  a great Newfoundlander who believed that

  his countrymen and all Canadians deserve the truth.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  1 The First Stone: From Dominion to Colony

  2 For All Mankind: The Commission of Government

  3 Attlee in Newfoundland: Holding On for Britain

  4 Problem Child: The 1945 Deal

  5 The Fairest Possible Start: The National Convention

  6 Cold Shoulder: The Newfoundland Delegation to London

  7 Warm Welcome: The Newfoundland Delegation to Ottawa

  8 Words, Words, Words: The Referendum Ballot

  9 Limitless Funds: The First Referendum Campaign

  Inserts

  10 A Poor Majority: The Second Referendum Campaign

  11 The Right Sort of People: The Second Delegation to Ottawa

  12 Celebration

  13 All for the Best

  14 Neither Worthily nor Well

  15 To the Victors Go the Spoils

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Credits

  APPENDICES

  A. Dramatis Personae

  B. Chronology of Main Events

  C. Maps of Dominion of Newfoundland and Labrador and Canada’s Atlantic Provinces

  D. Results of First and Second Referenda

  E. Terms of Union, 1949

  F. “Keep Up the Fince,” Harold Paddock

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  “In December 1945 when the big announcement came from London, I was a law student at Dalhousie University in Halifax,” James Halley told me. “I and several other students were milling about in the hallway talking about this great news in the paper from St. John’s: ‘Newfoundlanders to Vote on Future Government.’1

  “We were all very excited because we had been waiting for this for many years. I and my friends had grown up under British rule since 1934, and now it seemed we were going to have elections and control of our government again. So this was a great moment for us.

  “We were very optimistic about the future in Newfoundland in 1945. The war had been good to Newfoundland. We were prosperous with so much American and Canadian and British activity during the war. Newfoundland was central to wartime and civil aviation, with two of the largest airports in the world at Gander and Goose Bay. American, British and Canadian Airlines had landing rights in Newfoundland. The fishery was good, and it seemed that Labrador might well hold vast mineral and hydro wealth. So we were looking forward to a new and exciting future for our country.

  “There were several of us there talking about what it all meant—me and Lloyd Soper, Abe Shipman and George Hawkins, all law students. We talked about staying linked to Britain in some way, but mostly we talked about getting control of our own government back and becoming an independent country once again, as we had been for almost a hundred years. Then George Hawkins interrupted us.

  “ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘Newfoundland is going into Confederation with Canada. The deal is already done.’

  “We were stunned. I couldn’t believe what he was saying to us.

  “ ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘England sent people over from the Exchequer and the Dominions Office to Ottawa in October, and the deal is done.’

  “ ‘What deal? What are you talking about?’ we asked.

  “ ‘Well, England is broke after the war, so Canada agreed to write off Britain’s war debt to Canada and give them a big loan at low interest, and, in return, Britain agreed to work with Canada to put Newfoundland into Confederation.’

  “I could not believe he was saying this, I just could not accept it. But I knew he wasn’t lying. He knew what he was talking about because his father, Charles Hawkins, later a senator from Nova Scotia, was then a prominent member of the Liberal Party.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said George, ‘my father was with the team that negotiated the deal. It’s all done.’

  “I was shocked. Surely, I thought, the British government would not do such a thing. They would not set up a National Convention in Newfoundland just for show. Surely there was still some chance for the people to have a say and change that outcome.

  “I returned home for Christmas, two days by steamer—we used to travel by steamer then, it was great. All the talk in St. John’s was about the coming National Convention, but I could get no further information on what George Hawkins had said.

  “That’s a long time ago now, but what he told us that day has been on my mind ever since. I think of it all the time, and now I want the people of Newfoundland to see how it was done. And I want the people of Canada to know it because I don’t think they would approve of it any more than we do.”

  This account was one of the highlights in a series of conversations I had with Jim Halley about his recollections of the events that led to Newfoundland joining Canada in 1949.

  “The truth, as so often happens,” he continued, “is not commonly known.”2

  James Halley, QC, was a prominent member of the Newfoundland and Labrador legal community. A man of great presence, wit and conviction, he was my friend and mentor for many years. I first met Halley during the public campaign in 1994 to stop the privatization of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro and prevent its falling into the hands of its nemesis, Hydro-Québec. The success of that campaign empowered the people of Newfoundland and Labrador to hold on to a very valuable asset. Halley was an ardent nationalist, and he supported anyone who might do some good for his beloved Newfoundland. “The great injustice,” as he put it, which had been done to Newfoundland in 1949 preoccupied him throughout his entire adult life. He believed that the true story of Newfoundland’s union with Canada had never been adequately told to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador (or to Canadians elsewhere), and that this ignorance of their own history has put Newfoundlanders at a perpetual disadvantage in that great Confederation.

  Over the years, Halley amassed a large collection of research materials relating to Newfoundland’s federation with Canada. He became an e
xpert on that tumultuous period of our history in which he himself had been an active player fighting for the return of responsible government. Halley wanted to tell the story of Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation by using the words of the Canadians and British themselves, in their own official documents, and creating a brief chronological record of the most relevant and revealing passages in a way that would make this history accessible to the average reader. At the same time it would create a paper trail of Canadian and British activities in Newfoundland from 1941 to 1949.

  Before he died in 2009, Halley extracted a promise from me to write such a book. He presented me with his collection of research materials and, over the course of 2008, I recorded many lengthy interviews with him on the subject. In the years since, I have added context and additional commentary to this basic framework. I hope the result proves worthy of his vision—and that it will be useful to all those people who sense there was something not quite right about Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation but are not sure what went wrong.

  After 1949, the idea that Great Britain had conspired with Canada to place Newfoundland into Confederation with Canada was met with disbelief and derision in historical and political circles. Until the early 1990s, the official “Joey Smallwood” version of Confederation history as written by the victors was accepted almost without question. It held that Newfoundland had freely chosen federation with Canada—without any interference from either Britain or Canada.

  Then in the 1980s and ’90s, official documents covering the period from 1941 to 1949 were released in Ottawa and in London—and they contradict that interpretation. Particularly useful are the documents on confederation with Newfoundland released by the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, compiled and edited by Paul Bridle, a senior civil servant who had worked on the Newfoundland project throughout the 1940s.

  The Bridle documents, along with other sources, reveal a very different version of history—one more in line with popular belief in Newfoundland than with official accounts. The numerous dispatches, letters and top-secret memoranda between the highest levels of government in London and Ottawa make it clear that there was considerable sustained collusion between Canada and Great Britain to put Newfoundland into Confederation on Canada’s terms, with a significant quid pro quo for Britain in return, as the “honest broker” of the deal.

  The long and sorry record of the deliberate effort throughout this period to keep Newfoundlanders ignorant of these top-secret deals and arrangements puts the entire effort into the category of conspiracy at the highest levels. The lofty ideals of democracy and self-determination for which two world wars had recently been fought and won were ignored. Newfoundland was not to share in that principled victory for which it had sacrificed so much. Self-determination seemed to be there, but on close inspection it proved to be only a chimera, an elaborate show. Newfoundlanders did not determine their own future in 1948; rather, it was determined for them by the governments of Canada, Great Britain and, to a degree, the United States.

  The gains of this conspiracy were all for Canada and Britain; the loss was all for Newfoundland. Along with her sovereignty, Newfoundland lost her right to negotiate terms with Canada on an equal basis. That right was abrogated by Great Britain, which negotiated in its own interests. Newfoundland did not make the deal or even accept it. The Terms of Union with Canada were accepted by the British-appointed Commission of Government of Newfoundland.

  The constitutional arrangements whereby confederation between Canada and Newfoundland was effected were extraordinary, dubious, and as controversial in London and Ottawa as they were in St. John’s. The 1949 confederation was not effected through the British North America Act, which had been set up precisely for that purpose more than eight decades earlier, simply because Canada did not want to negotiate with an independent Newfoundland government. Instead, Canada preferred to negotiate with Britain while Newfoundland was temporarily under British control. So other means were employed, outside the British North America Act, secretly and at considerable effort.

  To understand why Britain was able to hand Newfoundland over to Canada in 1948, we require some knowledge of how Great Britain came to repossess Newfoundland in 1933. That year, after a century of self-government, the legislature of the Dominion of Newfoundland, the oldest in the British Empire outside Westminster, was suspended. Great Britain once again assumed direct control of the Island, and Newfoundland was reduced to the status of a crown colony. This reversal was not only unique in the annals of imperial colonial history but was completely opposed to the direction of thinking in the twentieth century. It caused a stir in the Dominions Office at Whitehall, and Paul Emrys-Evans, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for dominions affairs, was moved to write: “The idea of a Dominion reverting to the status of a Crown Colony was almost unthinkable. There was no provision in the Imperial structure for such a contingency.”3 Yet provision was made, once again at Britain’s insistence. As St. John Chadwick, the financial adviser to the Commission of Government put it: “In its time the Island has rung more Constitutional bells than any other Colony.”4

  1

  THE FIRST STONE:

  FROM DOMINION TO COLONY

  It is commonly believed that Newfoundland was Britain’s oldest colony, and certainly it is referred to as such by those official bodies that should know best—the Dominions Office, the British government, and the Crown. Yet that is not exactly true. Newfoundland was Britain’s oldest possession and nearest overseas territory, but the Island was always too valuable an asset for England to allow it to be colonized. Europe initially came to Newfoundland for fish, and even before John Cabot officially discovered it in 1497 for Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, Portuguese, Dutch, Basque and Norman boats were fishing on the Grand Banks and their crews had already worn a path alongside the harbour in St. John’s where Water Street lies today. By 1530 as many as 150 English vessels had stopped fishing in Icelandic waters and moved on to the Grand Banks, and, in 1583, Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, was moved to dispatch Humphrey Gilbert to take possession of this “Newfoundelande” for the English Crown.1 By the late 1700s, twenty thousand English seamen were employed in the annual fishery, with a total value of £600,000. The French, Spanish and Portuguese were also extensively involved. Newfoundland fish was big money.

  Unlike other North American colonies that required plantations and communities of people to grow sugar, cotton or tobacco, Newfoundland’s primary resource was based not on land but offshore, and the entire operation could be hauled back to England after the fishing season was over each year. “In the spring either in ballast or laden with goods and provisions for the seamen, the sack [supply] ships left Britain for Portugal or some other foreign country to secure adequate supplies of staves and the all-essential supply of salt,” one expert explained. “On arrival at Newfoundland they obtained in exchange cargoes of dried fish for the West Indian or Mediterranean ports. Late in the autumn these ships returned to England with wine, oil and other commodities from abroad or with the more precious bullion received in payment for the salted cod.”2

  The workmen, fit and trained on the fishing boats, went back to serve in England’s growing navy. Neither the English merchants nor the English Crown wanted any competition for this trade or these men from colonists settled in Newfoundland, so colonization was suppressed by the Western Charter of 1634 and again in 1698 by the Act to Encourage Trade to Newfoundland. Amazingly, this prohibition stayed in effect until the early 1800s.

  Settlement could not be stopped, however. Planters could be flogged or burned out by the ruthless “fishing admirals” who ruled arbitrarily over the Island, or they could be dispossessed without recourse to any justice save that of their tormentors. In response, and especially to be near the valuable fishing grounds, settlers fanned out into the innumerable coves and bays around the Island’s 6,000 miles of coastline, where they could live and fish as far from English justice as possible. Although there w
ere thousands of these outports around the coasts, their population, except for a handful of larger communities, was often no more than a few hundred people, too small for the development of municipal governments. Consequently, the tradition of settlement in Newfoundland was very different from that of the North American mainland. The Newfoundland experience until well into the nineteenth century was not that of lawful colonists building up the civic institutions of a state, but one of rugged individualists, shy of all civic authority. Even in the 1930s, the Englishmen on the Amulree Royal Commission who were sent out from London to determine the political and financial circumstances of the Island were shocked to find hardly any municipal government outside the city of St. John’s.

  The legislature in St. John’s did not have the support of local and municipal democratic institutions, simply because there were none. Democracy had never been fostered. Newfoundland had had to fight to get representative government in 1832. Full responsible government was gained in 1855, when Britain finally agreed that it “ought not to withhold from Newfoundland those institutions and that civil administration which, under the popular name of Responsible Government, had been adopted by all Her Majesty’s neighbouring possessions in North America.”3

  From the mid-1860s onwards, British policy favoured a Canadian Confederation as the way to resolve the military and financial security of its remaining North American colonies, including Newfoundland. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister as of 1867, shared that goal of a nation stretching from coast to coast. But it was not the wish of the young country of Newfoundland, which resisted all efforts to draft it into the Canadian fold.

  Newfoundland did attend the Quebec Conference of 1864, and in 1895 the government of Prime Minister Sir William Whiteway sent a delegation to Ottawa to negotiate possible terms for Confederation. But for reasons both good and bad, Newfoundlanders ultimately decided not to join Canada. The Newfoundland bank crash of 1894 brought Canadian banks and currency to the Island as the price of Canadian credit and greater financial stability, but the relationship between the two neighbouring countries remained prickly. In 1905, after Prime Minister Sir Robert Bond successfully negotiated a free-trade agreement for the sale of its fish with the United States, the Island’s biggest trading partner, Nova Scotia immediately pressured Ottawa to persuade London to demand that Washington cancel the treaty. That often seemed to be the pattern when Newfoundland fortunes competed with Canadian interests. It was almost impossible for Newfoundland to forge an independent economic or political course without leave from the formidable trio of Britain, Canada and the United States.