Life After Confederation Transcript

00:00

Bernice Morgan: Confederation is the Civil War. Like the South never forgot the Civil War. There’s people in Newfoundland who never forgot the Confederation battle. Everybody had an opinion. I mean, some people actually argued about it and fought about it. And there were people who left home in a rage and slammed the doors. I presume they reconciled with their families afterwards. But it was really emotional.

Kate Jaimet: In 1948, the people in the British colony of Newfoundland faced a choice. They could become an independent country within the British Commonwealth, or they could vote to join Canada in Confederation.

Richard Cashin: Confederation was the best thing that happened to us.

Katheen Knowling: The only one who didn't sign the agreement was a man called Ches Crosbie because he felt it was unfair. And I think he was probably right.

Bernice Morgan: I suppose we were fortunate. My God, we could have become like Cuba, a subsidiary of United States, you know?

Kate Jaimet: What happened after the referendum? How did life in Newfoundland change? And did Newfoundlanders make the right decision? This is the third episode in our Stories Behind the History special series on why and how Newfoundland joined Canada.

In the first two episodes of this series. We discovered how Newfoundland went from a North Atlantic fishing station to a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, and we saw how self-government was lost after Newfoundland sank deep into debt due to railway construction and the heavy costs of the First World War.

We found out how the Second World War brought prosperity to the island and renewed calls for self-government, which led to a popular referendum. After a fiercely fought battle of rhetoric the majority of Newfoundlanders voted to join Confederation. And on March 31st, 1949, Newfoundland became Canada's 10th province.

For this special series, I traveled to St John's, Newfoundland to interview former premier Clyde Wells, bestselling author Bernice Morgan, artist Kathleen Knowling and former federal MP Richard Cashin about their memories of pre confederation and to ask them if they think Newfoundlanders made the right choice when they joined Canada.

02:42

Flight Attendant: We do request that you remain seated with your seatbelt securely fastened until the captain has turned off that seatbelt sign and it is safe to stand on your feet. On behalf of the Porter team, we thank you for being with us. We wish you a wonderful evening here in snowy St. John’s.

Bernice Morgan: In my memory. It was April the first April Fool's Day. The financial year ends in March. So we had to come in on April Fool's Day. And it wasn't a holiday because people were really afraid there was going to be riots. I think the authorities thought so there was no holiday. In my memory, it was rainy and foggy, which it probably was. And I seem to remember that some people had black ribbons tied out on their door knob.

Now, there might have been some rejoicing, but I don't remember that feeling. I remember a feeling of sadness.

Kate Jaimet: This is writer Bernice Morgan.

Bernice Morgan: And all of that might be my imagination, but that's the feeling I remember,

Kate Jaimet: Because a lot of people thought they were going to be Newfoundland, was going to be independent again. It was going to be a country.

Bernice Morgan: That's right. And a lot of people had the feeling that if we were to decide to go in to join Canada, even people who thought it might be a good idea, thought we needed a period of independence between having a dictatorship, which was what the commission government was, and Confederation, where we would have gotten back on our feet. And voted with more in a more balanced way.

My father in law always said that the group of people who took over and rushed us into Confederation would not have existed if it hadn't been for the First World War, because so many of the educated, articulate people who would have guided us were killed.

Kate Jaimet: What changed after Confederation? What do you remember having changed?

04:50

Bernice Morgan: Damn little for me. My father, who was a carpenter, kept on doing the same things. We lived in the same house, you know, we had the same textbooks, went to the same school. We had the same denominational system, saw the same American movies on Saturday. Could order things from Sears without paying tax on it.

Dozens of small businesses closed up. You know, I walked around with my husband one time before he died around St John's, and he could point to places you know, small businesses like Tin Smiths, clothing stores, mattress factory, printing shops, shoe manufacturers, tobacco manufacturers, they all closed.

Kate Jaimet: Was that because people could buy duty free from Canada?

Bernice Morgan: That's right. Like you could a tobacco factory here in St John's as a condo now couldn't compete with Imperial Tobacco, so they ended up closing down.

But, a huge number of offices and office jobs were opening up because I when I came out of school, I got a job at Central Mortgage and Housing, which was just opened a branch here. So there was a lot of government jobs that weren't for the same people who had to close down because they had skills that were not applicable or they were older.

06:21

But there was a lot of for the young people, too, were things opening up.

Kate Jaimet: When you look back, do you think it was the right decision?

Bernice Morgan: I wish we could have made it under less duress. I wish. But I think that that's to think that that kind of thing could have happened without an orator like Smallwood and without underpinnings of manipulation. I don't think it happens anywhere in the world.

So I think it was inevitable that it would have happened. I have a really bad, bitter feelings about what happened to the fishery and too many other things, the forest, the mining. What we've become here in Newfoundland is exporters of raw material. We export raw material, which means we export jobs and we import the finished product and that can only be sustained as long as we have a good communication and ships coming in and out.

If it's cut off, as we discovered in Covid, as Canada, in fact it's governing Covid because Canada is becoming more and more of the same kind of offshore, bringing things in. If you don't make things inside your own country, there are times when you are going to be really short changed and into terrible emergency. But here we don't make. We make almost nothing.

07:49

Kate Jaimet: And you do you think that would have been different if if that had remained independent?

Bernice Morgan: It would have a different if we'd had a good government, which is the dream. I think that the fact that there's a federal government as well as a provincial government does install a certain degree of checks and balances into the political system.

Huge amount of bureaucracy and payoffs and things, but also a certain amount of let’s not do that or let's think about it twice. We rarely think about it twice, of course, but our history is just terrible. It's just graft and mistakes. And I do think that the federal government might control put a little bit of sanity into the system, sometimes also bail us out. You know, occasionally.

Kate Jaimet: So on the whole, the right decision or not, you sound really ambivalent.

Bernice Morgan: I am ambivalent. Yeah. I’m very ambivalent.

Kate Jaimet:  And maybe that makes sense. I mean, maybe there are pros and cons, right?

Bernice Morgan: In a perfect world, you know, But there's not a perfect world. And people are manipulated and bribed in every situation.

Kate Jaimet: So in a perfect world, what would a perfect world have been? Do you think?

Bernice Morgan: A perfect world would have been that we would have had five or ten years of independence with some intelligent government and someone who knew the debit from credit and controlled our resources, and if we had to sell them, sold them to the highest bidder, not to not gave them away as Smallwood gave them away, absolute chaos.

But that's not going to happen. You don't see that anywhere. You know, I suppose we were fortunate. My God, we could have become like Cuba, the subsidiary of United States. You know?

10:01

Kate Jaimet: So in the end, when you look back, was it the right decision that the Newfoundlanders made in that vote in 1948?

Richard Cashin: The only mistake we made we should have done in 1867.

Kate Jaimet: That's Richard Cashin. And he is of course talking about the original Canadian Confederation of 1867 that brought together Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Newfoundland had participated in one of the Confederation conferences at that time but had chosen not to join.

What changed after Confederation?

Richard Cashin: The social benefits were big, of course. They were ballrooms, old age, pensions, all those programs that that was an immediate change that affected people. And then we had the Government of Canada taking over some of the responsibilities that would have been Newfoundland, and they had money.

And also so the whole plan was very beneficial. And who gave us confederation? Women.

Kate Jaimet: Why? Why was it the women who gave us Confederation?

Richard Cashin: Two reasons. Generally they’re smarter.

Kate Jaimet: Okay.

Richard Cashin: And the baby boomers and all that. And also they're the ones on the front line. They had to worry about what was happening in daily lives. Women they had to bring up children. Where the hell were the husbands? Working in Labrador? Or wherever the hell it was.

Kate Jaimet: Were there any negatives? Were there any people who didn't benefit from it?

Richard Cashin: They were always the odd one of a sort of problem. And then in the seventies, these things happened to young people. I used to call them the robber mongers. They thought, Well, Newfoundland should have been independent. I remember once being in a pub now my late wife's family of course was Confederate to our present job, and our uncle was a priest.

And of course, she had traveled around with her father into these desolate little spots. I remember once in this pub, the Duke, the dark horse, used to have a group gathering and my wife was meeting me there. And this I, one of the romantics, said, here comes your wife. I'd like to meet her. I said, If you talk that crap, you better have a jockstrap on because she wouldn't tolerate that.

Kate Jaimet: Is there still a Newfoundland independence movement?

Richard Cashin: If there is, it's in the head of one or two people. I don't think I ever was. It was never nothing serious. There were a few people that talked about it, you know, but that was probably framed by a few too many wrongs.

13:08

Kate Jaimet: What changed for your family, if anything, after Confederation?

Kathleen Knowling: First of all, not very much changed after Confederation. We did expand. We started the first supermarkets in Newfoundland and eventually sold out to Loblaws.

Kate Jaimet: That's Kathleen Knowling. Her family owned the department store, Heirs and sons.

Kathleen Knowling: Then what happened? And it wasn't actually Canadian. It was things like Walmart coming in, that kind of thing.

And then Sears came in, you know, the bigger stores came in and of course, they could out of buy us. And we gradually we moved from downtown. We sold the premises downtown and moved to Churchill Square and expanded the supermarkets. And we did very well. We did very well.

Kate Jaimet: So the changes were not immediate after Confederation?

Kathleen Knowling: No. Things like the closing factory, the shoe factories, things closed down pretty soon. But for a long time, Doc Martens were produced around the bay in Carbonear I think.

Kate Jaimet: I didn't know that.

Kathleen Knowling: Yeah. And then they finally. They closed down, too. But changes happen.

Kate Jaimet: Do you think it was the right decision overall? Looking back?

Kathleen Knowling: Well, I think it was the right decision done in the wrong way.

Okay. Let's vote for independence. Get to our House of Assembly, then we'll debate Confederation with Canada. That's the way to think about it carefully.

I think we probably would have voted to join Canada. I think we would have made a tougher bargain, which I think we should have made a tougher bargain. Joey never bargained. He he kind of you know, this was his big triumph. And the only one who didn't sign the agreement was a man called Ches Crosbie, because he felt it was unfair. And I think he was probably right.

Kate Jaimet: What do you think Newfoundland should have gotten that it didn't get?

Kathleen Knowling: I don't really know enough about it. I think we would have had more protection for our fishery. I think we would have had possibly more investment in some kind of infrastructure. You see, Canada has been pretty brutal to the Maritimes. Are you from Central Canada?

Kate Jaimet: I am from Ontario. I confess.

Kathleen Knowling: Well, when ships landed in Halifax that Halifax was very prosperous and the ship of the goods went up. Central Canada now, with the sometimes ships sail up. They bypassed Halifax and bypassed the Maritimes. Bypassed Newfoundland. Yeah. And I think that perhaps the Maritimes, I wonder if perhaps the Maritimes should unite.

16:21

Kate Jaimet: So how do you think it turned out? Like, was Confederation the right decision?

Clyde Wells: Yes, the wrong decision was made in 1867.

Kate Jaimet: That's Clyde Wells, former Premier of Newfoundland.

Clyde Wells: Newfoundland was like the rest of the people in the rest of Canada. And if you go back to 1867, the rest of the people in Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island there, although Newfoundland was predominantly English. There were French people here, Scots and Irish, and they were the same, so same source as people in the rest of Canada.

So Newfoundland should have been there and Newfoundland is physically part of North America and is much closer to North America and has a closer connection with North America than it does of the U.K., 1800 miles across the North Atlantic.

Kate Jaimet: Why do you think it was a better outcome for Newfoundland to become a province of Canada than to go back to and become its own country?

Clyde Wells: We were too small a population and we wouldn't have an economic union with Canada. Trade with Canada would be would be barred and interfered with by customs barriers, protectionist provisions and so on.

We couldn't we couldn't really we were too small an entity competing in the North Atlantic. So we became a province of Canada like every other province of Canada. Yeah, that sums it up. And that's all it could be. Can you imagine the political furor and it would have created in Nova Scotia if Newfoundland had special terms? So these nationalists, the Newfoundland of the last three or four decades, and there's some of them still around.

It was terrible. We should have had our own government so that we could negotiate a better deal with confederation. We could not have negotiated a better deal because the deal we got was that we became a province like every other province. And the British North America Act applied to Newfoundland as fully and to the same extent.

Kate Jaimet: What do you think drove Joey Smallwood to be so passionate and and so committed to to Confederation?

Clyde Wells: He was an old style liberal politician in Newfoundland prior to suspension of self-government in 1934, And he was an admirer of Richard Squires, who was one of the last Premiers and a bit of a scoundrel. Or quite a scoundrel, just a bit of a scoundrel. And he supported the fishermen and the labor movement. He was active in the labor movement and was a liberal, so he was opposed to the interest of the business and elite interests in St John's, and he saw that Newfoundland would not really make it on the own again if we did.

That Confederation was the only sensible thing to do. And my own, despite my differences with the man, he had great bitterness toward me in the last years of his Premiership. Despite that, I acknowledge that he personally has made a greater contribution to the welfare people of Newfoundland than any other person in our history.

20:19

Kate Jaimet: I'm standing here on Signal Hill looking out at St John's Harbour on the one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, and I'm thinking that if Newfoundland benefited from joining Canada, then it's equally true that Canada benefited when Newfoundland and Labrador came aboard.

Newfoundland and Labrador have a wealth of natural resources from the fisheries to offshore oil, hydroelectricity, and in the energy future, wind and tidal energy as well. And I'm willing to bet that on a per capita basis, Newfoundland and Labrador have contributed more comedians and actors to the Canadian arts and entertainment scene than any other province. Think of Rick Mercer, Mary Walsh, Kathy Jones, Johnnie Harris, Mark Critch, to name just a few.

And it's not just that the hospitality and friendliness of the people of Newfoundland and Labrador can only be a positive influence on the Canadian national character.

So happy 75th Anniversary of Confederation. Newfoundland and Labrador. I'm Kate Jaimet and this is Stories Behind the History.

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The Stories Behind the History podcast is produced by Canada's History Society with special thanks for this episode to Richard Cashin, Kathleen Knowling, Bernice Morgan, Clyde Wells and Patricia and Gerry O'Brien.

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To subscribe to the magazine, go to CanadasHistory.ca/Subscribe. Our theme music is the Red River Jig, performed by Alex Kusturok from his album Metis Fiddling for Dancing. I'm Kate Jaimet. Thanks for joining me.