Canada at War: EXTERNAL AFFAIRS: No Confederation

When Humorist A. P. Herbert visited Newfoundland in 1943 as a member of the British Parliamentary commission, he found nothing funny about the plight of that Atlantic island. Said he of Britain’s oldest colony, which temporarily gave up Dominion status in 1934: “Little Newfoundland is about the most . . . complicated puzzle in the whole imperial scene. Something of the religious, political and, indeed, industrial problems of Ireland and of India … all the problems of empire are crammed into one . . . place.”

The Dominion’s Office in London never published the commission’s formal report. But last week in London the commission’s chairman, Labor Peer Lord Ammon, put his own recommendations on record. He rejected as “unacceptable” the solution for Newfoundland’s problems most often proposed by outsiders: confederation with Canada or the U.S.

Britain’s Plan. Lord Ammon’s solution would keep Newfoundland a British dependency. He did not think the island ready for self-government again, proposed instead: 1) Newfoundlanders be allowed to elect three members of the six-man commission now ruling the country; 2) substantial grants by Britain to put the country on its feet; 3) a ten-year plan to build up neglected social services and to develop resources.

Under Lord Ammon’s plan, Britain would underwrite Newfoundland’s short-term liabilities: lack of education among the people, the island’s towering public debt.

But the mother country would gain some long-term assets. She would have a say in the disposition of the island’s enormous undeveloped resources (including those in virtually unexplored Labrador). She could still oversee Newfoundland’s strategic command of the sea and air approaches to the Western Hemisphere and the aviation bases at Goose Bay in Labrador, Gander on the East Coast, the U.S.-leased airport at Stephenville. These were reasons enough for Britain to keep her hand in Newfoundland affairs; why, as Newfoundland’s trustee, she refused to commit herself on postwar air rights in Newfoundland territory at the Chicago air conference.