Joey Smallwood and Newfoundland

Photo: The Independent

If Confederation can be attributed to the "Fathers" who made it happen, and Louis Riel can be credited with the political creation of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, then Joey Smallwood definitely gets the credit for joining Newfoundland to the Canadian federation. Smallwood campaigned and cajoled to bring Newfoundland into Confederation, telling his fellow-Newfies they were "not a nation...but a medium-sized municipality...left behind by the march of time." (Canadian Encyclopedia)

Newfoundland joined Canada as a province in 1949, extracting certain concessions from the federal government in exchange, including the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway across the new province. To bring Newfoundlanders along, Smallwood fought the businessmen with vested interests in keeping things as they were -- tipped greatly in their favour.

This former union organizer, journalist and pig farmer became interim leader after the successful referedum, and later Liberal Premier Smallwood of the new province of Newfoundland. He led the government for the next 25 years.

A sense of living conditions in the outports in the early days can be gleaned by reading authors including the controversy-loving Farley Mowat and the brilliant CBC journalist Rex Murphy, or by soaking in the wonderfully lyrical works of novelist Michael Crummey, especially Galore, in which he reveals "the cultural DNA" of his home province.

Another legacy of the old times is a Newfoundland musical group called the Masterless Men. This term is a reference to the time when indentured labourers from Ireland who had been press ganged onto British ships escaped from the fishing company owners, settling in the outports to seek their own survival and become men without masters -- masterless men. Their lyrical ballads songs have strong Irish roots. There were Roses evokes the pointlessness of the violent divisions beween Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.

I have personal ties to Newfoundland. When my mother married my father in Newfoundland in 1945, in order to join him in Alberta, she had to emigrate. For years she kept old Newfoundland stamps and a bit of money in her trunk. Throughout my childhood, Mom used to "get to her trunk" from time to time and show these artifacts to us kids, just to prove that Newfoundland really had been another country when she lived there.

In 2003, the last time we went back to visit "the old rock," we were taken to Trinity Bay to witness the pageant, a paean to the intrepid early fishermen and an expose of the brutality of the owners. The actors played out the scenes where they really took place, and of course there was plenty of music. Many of these people had been retrained to perform after being put out of work by the drastic decline in fish stocks that all but closed the centuries-old Newfoundland fishery.