Canadians at Last: The Integration of Newfoundland as a Province. 2nd ed.

Richard Wilbur is author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and H.H.
Stevens, 1878–1973, and co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy
Weirmen’s Story. His latest book is Horse-Drawn Carriages and Sleighs:
Elegant Vehicles from New England and New Bruns

Raymond Blake is a native of the Newfoundland outport of Pushthrough and
director of the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy at the
University of Regina. In this exhaustively researched book, he provides
a Newfoundlander’s view of how Canada incorporated its tenth province
to the benefit of both.

At times, the study gets bogged down in bureaucratic detail, an
unavoidable hurdle considering Blake’s necessary reliance on
departmental and private correspondence in both Ottawa and St. John’s.
Chapter themes on how unemployment insurance and old-age pension plans
were introduced to Newfoundlanders don’t make exciting reading. The
same goes for another chapter describing the unsuccessful efforts by the
island’s secondary manufacturing sector to get Ottawa to honour
special tax concessions some had enjoyed before union.

Two chapters have relevance far beyond the 1957 termination date of
this study. The first involved Canada’s efforts to get the United
States to relinquish its sovereignty over three military bases and the
second was to find a permanent solution to Newfoundland’s declining
fisheries. As later events have shown, American governments are hard
bargainers and they usually get their way in cases involving Canadian
interests. The Americans surrendered certain rights to Newfoundland
bases obtained through the Lend Lease Agreement, but got what they
really wanted—a 20-year lease to the Goose Bay Air Base in Labrador.
As Blake observes, “a special relationship might have existed between
the United States and Canada in matters of defence but, as the Canadians
had sadly learned, American interests came ahead of friendship.” Since
then, little has changed.

In his final chapter, Blake details Ottawa’s failed efforts to
rehabilitate Newfoundland’s “problem,” namely its fisheries. In
Ottawa’s defence, he concludes that “the fate of the inshore salt
fishery … was already sealed and … it would have declined in the
social reformation of the 1950s. Perhaps the best Ottawa could do was to
treat the symptoms and ignore the cause of the ailment. In practice,
that is precisely what it did.”

Canadians at Last remains a definitive study of the first decade of
Newfoundland as Canada’s tenth province. It’s to be hoped that Blake
will use his talents to address more recent events.