Greg Malone Don't tell the Newfoundlanders The true story of Newfoundland's confederation with Canada

Abstract

Greg Malone Don't tell the Newfoundlanders The true story of Newfoundland's confederation with Canada Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 314pp., $29.95 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-370-40133-5The incorporation of Newfoundland (and Labrador) as Canada's tenth province remains a highly contested political event for many, including Greg Malone, the author of the recently published Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders} Malone, perhaps best known as founding member of the comedy troupe CODCO, holds both a BA and an honorary doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and is well known in the province for his political activism, an activism that inspired him to write this serious book.1 2 The Newfoundlanders offers a detailed exposition of primary and secondary historical documents. The result is an expose of particular value to anyone interested in the complexity of post-WWII geopolitics. Malone's primary argument is that the Terms of Union are something rotten at the heart of the Canadian state, negotiated as they were illegally without the involvement of a democratically elected government of Newfoundland. Above all, his work reveals how those processes if not quite qualifying as a conspiracy at the very least reveal the Janus-faced nature of great power politics. The collection of primary sources, and the racialized and gendered discourses they reveal at the highest level of colonial and imperial geopolitics, is of particular value for those readers inter- ested in the practices of international elites during the fervent era that followed the Second World War.The Newfoundlanders can be logically divided into three chronological units. The first section covers the pre-1933 history of Newfoundland and explains the unique constitutional arrangement of the Island at the start of the Second World War. Chapters five through twelve cover the actual processes of Confederation, including the various delegations to Ottawa and London, the national convention, the referenda of 1948, and the negotiations of the Terms of Union with Canada. Finally, the author provides a personal interpretation to put the historical record into perspective for the current era, considering the implications of the Terms of Union for Newfoundland and Canadian politics in the 21st century.Opening with an overview of 19th and 20th century political history of Newfoundland, Malone emphasizes what he believes are the finer points of colonial administration in North America to set the stage for his primary argument: that Newfoundland's confederation with Canada was illegal based on the suspension of responsible government in 1933 by the British. From there he moves through the tale of confederation from 1941 to 1949, allowing the primary sources to speak for themselves in places. Intermixed with lengthy excerpts from both primary and secondary sources, Malone's prose, however, serves less as analysis of the historical record than as a thread connecting the myriad sources together in a narrative structure, providing background information on the cast of characters involved, and attempting to draw the reader to the author's point of view.The documents include excerpts from correspondence within the Department of External Affairs, communiques between Canadian High Commissioner Scott MacDonald and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, as well as documents composed by John Maynard Keynes, Sir Winston Churchill, and Lords Amulree, Beaverbrook, and Cranborne. From the interweaving of the words of practitioners of high geopolitics, readers gain a glimpse into the back room dealings that led to the disappearance of the little country that couldn't: the little country that couldn't exercise its right to self-determination laid out in the Atlantic Charter, ironically signed off its own shores, guaranteeing to the peoples of Europe the right to choose their own destiny; the little country that couldn't forge an alliance between sectarian and class divides that great powers have exploited since ancient times to divide and conquer those they rule. …