By Barry Stagg
January 1997
Churchill Falls: Crucible of Confederation
Joe Smallwood won his last Newfoundland general election in 1966. He would never again carry the province as he had so handily from 1949. 1966 was the year Smallwood agreed to the Churchill Falls contract in all its ignominy. 1966 was the year that Newfoundland's own revolt of the young and educated began not unlike the rather more prominent"Quiet Revolution " in Quebec. Smallwood's abdication of the public trust so amply illustrated in the Churchill Falls frenzy was to be his justly deserved downfall.
No amount of revisionist piety in 1984 or any other time could mask that Smallwood had surrendered Newfoundland's economic and social birthright to a pack of philistines rotating through the corridors of power at Brinco and in Quebec City and Ottawa. In Cabot Martin's excellent article in the Globe and Mail on November 23,1996 (The truth behind the Churchill Falls deal) Smallwood is quoted defending himself from charges that it was his incompetence or stupidity that led him to approve the deal. Smallwood in his 1984 conversation with Martin related a personal request from Prime Minister Pearson to accept the deal on Quebec's predatory terms. Smallwood told Martin that he honoured the prime minister's request. Martin rationalizes the deed by recalling the tenor of the times--the FLQ terrorists in Montreal and the like.
It is readily accepted that Smallwood was neither ignorant nor stupid. He knew the danger of selling electricity at the border. He knew that Ottawa wanted Quebec to have this one-sided deal. He agreed. As the steward of Newfoundlanders birthright, he agreed. As sovereign leader of Newfoundland, he agreed. He held the power to sell Churchill Falls on behalf of his people and he gave it away . On some romantic whim he authorized the most basic violation of Newfoundland sovereignty. He held absolute power over Newfoundland's interest and he badly abused it in the name of Canadian patriotism and the yet uncoined "national unity".
Just as Mount Cashel's clerical rapists had absolute dominance over their victims in that era so had Smallwood complete dominance over Newfoundlander's public property. Maybe the FLQ crisis and Montreal mailbox bombs are not the right gauges of the tenor of the times in 1966. Autocratic paternalism expressed so monstrously in Mount Cashel was articulated again in the economic denuding of Newfoundland that was the Churchill Falls contract. Surely that provides more true context for the Newfoundland situation. Certainly Cabot Martin and that first rush of Newfoundland baby boomers knew then of the awful totality of the Smallwood power in the province.
The logic put forth now is that Smallwood was being a supreme Canadian patriot in honouring the Pearson request for surrender of Newfoundland's interests to Quebec. The context is that this was just another whimsical exercise of autocratic power by a Newfoundland leader who was the embodiment of that atavistic method of government.
The idea that Newfoundland's Canadian loyalty was being forged in the battle against Quebec separatism is beyond rational belief. If Smallwood did have a critical meeting with the prime minister and gave up Churchill Falls as a result then those acts are indictments of Confederation rather than the substance of any patriotic crucible. Newfoundland's nationhood was forged in the blood and glory of Beaumont Hamel in 1916. The Smallwood orchestrations of 1966 are shallow insults to the fighting Newfoundlanders of that era.
Perhaps in 1997 we have to examine our own bourgeois underpinnings to understand the curious ambiguity toward Churchill Falls. The acts of economic subjugation of 1966 brought Newfoundland the solicitous brow- mopping of our ever ready crew of domestic missionaries. Pearson's and Trudeau's fiscal do-gooders found solace for Newfoundland's poor in the steady flow of transfer payments . As an explanation for Newfoundland's continued difficulties some mainland missionaries fell back on the old reliable saws about backward provinces with third world economies and questionable attitudes toward wildlife. It gave them a break from touristing through the local Indian reservations on their way to pray and bank. The steady electric light in Toronto and Montreal made it easier to compose these profundities.
Patronizing practitioners of paternalism found a ready-made agenda in the economic basket case of a province with the world's largest hydro-electric project and not enough common sense to hold on to it. Sweet martyrdom was ours. All we had to do was hold out our hands for our personalized charity boxes all neatly packaged in cheque form.
Thirty years of economic emasculation has taken its toll. Churchill Falls was to have been Newfoundland's Jerusalem. The return to Jerusalem is still a mighty goal.