Q&A | Historian busts myths on why Newfoundland chose Confederation
Raymond Blake says people voted for a new way of living in 1940s
Even 75 years later, Confederation can still be a hot button issue between friends and family in Newfoundland and Labrador, who still debate the merits of becoming a Canadian province.
Raymond Blake, a professor at University of Regina and co-author with Melvin Baker of Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland's Rocky Road to Confederation, says factors like migration, proliferation of radio, the Great Depression and the Second World War likely influenced voters decision to cast ballots in favour of Confederation.
Blake, who now lives in Saskatchewan, is originally from the now-resettled community of Pushthrough, on Newfoundland's south coast.
Blake spoke with On The Go host Krissy Holmes. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you describe the media landscape at that time and how people would have been getting this information?
A: If we just focus on the 1940s, one of the things that's happening is a lot of Newfoundlanders are leaving the fishing boat. There are about 15,000 Newfoundlanders that were fishing before the beginning of the Second World War. And when broke out, there were new jobs because Americans had come here with a number of bases. The British were here. The Canadians were here. And they saw on those bases a different world than they saw growing up.
Many Newfoundlanders who served in the Canadian Forces went overseas and they saw something quite different than they had seen in their small fishing villages or even the larger ones.
And of course we have the advent of radio and people are learning about things through radio. And so, they began to see a different world.
And of course, the big issue that's critical — the National Convention. Elected in 1945, [it] sat for two years and it was broadcast every night that it was in session.
They were hearing debates about the real policy issues of the time. So people were getting this information from many sources.
There's so many dynamics at play here, even the contrast between the rural-urban divide.
When the vote was taken in the final referendum in July 1948, there's a very real split between the Avalon Peninsula and the rest of the island. Even as you move further west on the Avalon, they're more likely to be confederate than they are for the responsible government league.
I think people who live in and around St. John's had a different sense of the Newfoundland nation. They had a different sense of what Newfoundland meant to them.
Religion probably played a role and a number of people have argued that it did. The Irish Catholics voted differently than some of the Protestants who lived in different parts of the country. There are lots of dynamics at play here. And it's never as simple as, "They voted this way because there was one religion and another."
How exactly did the people decide how to vote? What were the major deciding factors?
This is common throughout much of the literature, that Newfoundlanders were bribed by the baby bonus.
There was a new conception of the state of emerging and not just in Newfoundland but in Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and Great Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Coming out of the Great Depression, there were terrible times in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, right across the country. And then we had six years of "total war." Everything from rationing and deprivation. And people were saying, "Once the war was over, hey, we ain't going back. You know, that was an awful existence."
What we're seeing happening around the world is governments are beginning to say, "We need to create a new social security system." The relationship between the government and the state and the citizens has got to change. And we can't just sort of say, "Oh, if you're unemployed, tough. Pull up your bootstraps and make it work for you."
Confederates did this very clearly and said, "It doesn't really matter what sort the constitution is. What matters is whether or not people have a decent life." And the confederates begin to argue that the social programs — unemployment insurance, veterans benefits, old age pension, health care — all these things matter.
The Newfoundland Rangers report back to St. John's in 1946 and 1947 — when the debates were going on in the National Assembly — and they're saying, "Look, hey, the people in Belleoram, the people on the south coast, the people in Northern Peninsula, in St. Anthony's? They are galvanized by this. They are excited by this and they are curious."
And they're saying, "Hey, put simply, bring it on. This is a world that I want to live in." Quite different from what they had endured in the 1930s.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from On The Go
