History of Newfoundland and Labrador

From the 1770s to the late 19th century, Moravian missionaries, Hudson's Bay Company agents, and other pioneer settlers along central Labrador's coastline learned to adapt to its rocky terrain, brutal winters, and its thin soil and scant sunshine.

Fishing-boat captains competed to arrive first from Europe in an attempt to become the admiral; soon merchants left crewmen behind at the prime shoreline locations to lay claim to the sites.

[28] Bond promoted the completion of a railway across the island (started in 1881) because it would open access to valuable minerals and timber and reduce the almost total dependence on the cod fisheries.

Founded in 1908, the FPU worked to increase the incomes of fishermen by breaking the merchants' monopoly on the purchase and export of fish and the retailing of supplies, and tried to revitalize the fishery through state intervention.

Morris began a grandiose program of building branch railways and adeptly handled the arbitration at the Hague tribunal on American fishing rights.

Without convening the legislature, Premier Morris and the royal governor, Sir Walter Davidson created the Newfoundland Patriotic Association, a non-partisan body involving both citizens and politicians, to supervise the war effort until 1917.

With inflation soaring and corruption rampant, with the prohibition of liquor in effect and fears of conscription apparent, the Association gave way to an all-party National Government.

British entrepreneurs set up a paper mill at Corner Brook in 1925 while the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company opened a lead-zinc mine on the Buchans River in 1927.

In 1927, Britain awarded the vast, almost uninhabited hinterland of Labrador to Newfoundland rather than to Canada, adding potentially valuable new forest, hydroelectric, and mineral resources.

[47] A royal commission under Lord Amulree examined the causes of the financial disaster and concluded: The twelve years 1920–1932, during none of which was the budget balanced, were characterized by an outflow of public funds on a scale as ruinous as it was unprecedented, fostered by a continuous stream of willing lenders.

The public debt of the island, accumulated over a century, was in twelve years more than doubled; its assets dissipated by improvident administration; the people misled into the acceptance of false standards, and the country sunk in waste and extravagance.

The glowing visions of a new Utopia were dispelled with cruel suddenness by the cold realities of national insolvency, and today a disillusioned and bewildered people, deprived in many parts of the country of all hopes of earning a livelihood, are haunted by the grim specters of pauperism and starvation.

[51] In 1940 Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to an exchange of American destroyers for access to British naval bases in the Atlantic, including Newfoundland.

American ideas regarding food, hygiene (and indoor plumbing), entertainment, clothing, living standards and pay scales swept the island.

Canada saw some value in Newfoundland's fisheries, raw materials, Labrador's hydroelectric potential, and 300,000 people of English and Irish descent, and expected that its location would remain important to trans-Atlantic aviation.

Smallwood was elected to the convention where he became the leading proponent of confederation with Canada, insisting, "Today we are more disposed to feel that our very manhood, our very creation by God, entitles us to standards of life no lower than our brothers on the mainland.

These efficient companies needed fewer workers, so about 300 fishing villages, or outports, were abandoned by their residents between 1954 and 1975 as part of a Canadian government-sponsored program known as the Resettlement.

The cod fishery which had provided Newfoundlanders on the south and east coasts with a livelihood for over 200 years was gone, although the federal government helped fishermen and fish plant workers make the adjustment with a multibillion-dollar program named "The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy" (TAGS).

Mechanization copied from Norway brought in cannon-fired harpoons, strong cables, and steam winches mounted on maneuverable, steam-powered catcher boats.

He emphasized modernisation of education and transportation in order to attract outsiders, such as German industrialists, because the local economic elite would not invest in industrial development.

That year Smallwood's government heavily advertised a "Come Home" program to attract as tourists Newfoundland expatriates, such as war brides in the United States and those who had left for work.

As the effects of the crisis were felt, and established state supports were weakened, tourism was embraced by a growing body of local development and heritage organizations as a way of restoring the shattered economic base of many communities.

Limited, short-term funding for some tourism-related projects was provided mostly from government programs, largely as a means of politically managing the structural adjustment that was being pursued.

[67] In 1996, the former federal minister of fisheries, Brian Tobin, was successful in winning the leadership of the provincial Liberal Party following the retirement of premier Clyde Wells.

Tobin rode the waves of economic good fortune as the downtrodden provincial economy was undergoing a fundamental shift, largely as a result of the oil and gas industry's financial stimulus, although the effects of this were mainly felt only in communities on the Avalon Peninsula.

Following Tobin's return to federal politics in 2000, the provincial Liberal Party devolved into internal battling for the leadership, leaving its new leader, Roger Grimes, in a weakened position as premier.

Premier Grimes, facing a pending election that fall, used the Gulf cod decision and perceived federal bias against the province as a catalyst to try to rally citizens around his administration.

It noted the following stressors in the relationship between the province and Canada: The report called for more collaborative federalism; an action team to deal with the fishery; further collaboration between Canada, Quebec; and Newfoundland and Labrador on the development of the Gull Island hydro site; a revision of the Atlantic Accord so that offshore oil and gas reserves primarily benefit the province; and an immediate and realistic negotiations on joint management of the fishery In October 2003, the Liberals lost the provincial election to the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Danny Williams.

Celebrations of outport life have been combined with a long-standing sense of victimization, offering a parade of historical scapegoats from the fishing admirals to powerful merchants used to explain relative backwardness and failure.

[81] Wayne Johnston's prize-winning novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1999) develops insights into the unique identity of the islanders and challenges prevailing misconceptions about the area among both residents and outsiders.