O my Canada, O my Newfoundland!

[steepholm]

Isn't it disconcerting when you find, at an advanced age, that you've been ignorant of a really basic fact in a subject about which you're supposedly reasonably well informed? I like geography and history, and if North America isn't exactly my area of special knowledge I'd still have expected to have heard that Newfoundland was, within living memory, an independent country. But until I happened to read it today, I had no idea.

Was I alone?

[Poll #1855055]

Have you had any similar ignorance depth-charges go off recently?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Well, duh, doesn't everyone" may be too strong, but I have known since childhood that Newfoundland only became part of Canada in 1949. I had an encyclopedia with a set of little plastic overlay maps illustrating the geographic history of Canada.

"Independent country", though - that may be too strong. When exactly Canada (and Australia, New Zealand, et al) became independent countries is an open question. 1867, the year of Canadian confederation, is not correct. Most scholars today plump for the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but as a marker of political independence that's retroactive, and earlier than would have been seen at the time.

And this establishment of legislative equality didn't stop Newfoundland from giving up its self-government in 1933-34 and reverting to a colony governed from London, which it retained until it became a Canadian province in 1949.

But if you were talking about the (white) dominions of the British Empire before 1934, yes, Newfoundland would have had an equal place on the list with the others. (South Africa was one too in those days.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I had in mind the period between 1931 and 1934, as the time when Newfoundland was independent in the same sense as Australia and Canada.

As far as I can gather, Newfoundland's independence was a victim of the Depression, an unusual fate.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It was, but what makes it less bizarre is that it wasn't really independence. No independence bells were rung in 1931, and as far as I know Newfies don't cherish the memory of their two-year (for that's what it came to) independence the way that citizens of, say, Texas or even California celebrate their brief independencies, not as a separate thing from the whole period of responsible Dominion government, which lasted 80 years. If Newfoundland had considered itself truly independent, the government wouldn't have taken the actions surrendering power to the British that they did.

Even in Canada, a sense of the country as an independent nation, and not merely a self-governing British dominion, only began to dawn during World War 2. Canada didn't appoint its first separate Foreign Secretary until 1946.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Australia's independence was foisted upon us by London. We still complain about that, from time to time.