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  • Connections: Newfoundland’s Pre-Confederation Links with Canada and the World
  • David MacKenzie (bio)
Malcolm MacLeod. Connections: Newfoundland’s Pre-Confederation Links with Canada and the World Creative. xv, 304. $22.95

This book is essentially a collection of previously published articles and essays. The articles are reprinted without significant revision: several of them are over twenty years old. It is not completely clear why it was necessary to republish them now, other than to make things a little more tidy by gathering the articles together between the same covers. The title Connections is used thematically to recognize and acknowledge the connections - or 'linkages' - between Newfoundland and Canada and, to a much lesser degree, other countries. And using this large, all-encompassing idea of connections provides justification for a collection of rather disparate essays on topics ranging from post-secondary education in Newfoundland, to German U-boats, to Atlantic sealing tragedies, to the 1917 Halifax explosion, to the man who invented the fish stick.

Readers interested in the history of Newfoundland will likely already be familiar with the best essays in this collection - the chapter on the subsidized steamers between Newfoundland and the mainland, the examination of pre-Confederation educational links between Canada and Newfoundland, and MacLeod's extended review essay on the important work The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation. The latter is a critical examination of the absence of Newfoundland from much of that textbook, but otherwise, most chapters in Connections end on a variation of the principal theme, with Newfoundland 'behaving, and being treated, very much as if she were already part of the Canadian confederation.'

MacLeod's goal is to uncover the myriad connections that existed between Newfoundland and Canada in the years before the final negotiations that brought in Newfoundland as a Canadian province in 1949. MacLeod explores this 'outwardly-oriented connectedness' and concludes that 'Newfoundland was - tied is too strong a word - was related especially to Canada, and also to other foreign societies, by many different kinds of links and connections, affecting every walk and sphere of life.' Thanks to these linkages, MacLeod suggests that the perception of Newfoundland as isolated and 'British' is outdated. 'Newfoundland in the first half of the twentieth century was a unique little nation well open by geography, language and traditional inclinations to receiving and registering influences from other countries of the Atlantic.' It is an [End Page 464] important point that, as a result of the increasing social, economic, and military connections with the outside world, Newfoundland was modernizing, its economy was diversifying, and its people were intermingling and exchanging ideas with outsiders. But, do all these connections add up to the conclusion that there was a kind of inevitability in the entrance of Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation? MacLeod is unwilling to take that last step, which is probably wise. 'Nothing in history is inevitable,' he writes. Nevertheless, MacLeod adds, 'Newfoundland by the mid-twentieth century could be thought very ripe for seriously considering a move to join the Canadian union.'

If he won't go so far as to say that union between Canada and Newfoundland was inevitable, MacLeod is much more forthcoming in his positioning of Newfoundland as an integral part of the Atlantic region long before it became a part of Canada. Early in the book he asserts that Newfoundland 'has always been closely and naturally associated with the Maritime provinces, regardless of whether some of those jurisdictions were or were not constitutionally linked to Ontario-Quebec at the time. That is, region not only predates confederation, it is indifferent to it.' It is a persuasive argument that MacLeod makes convincingly again and again, by tracing the regional links and exploring the problems and concerns shared within the Atlantic region. In the end, MacLeod concludes, 'community is thicker than constitution.' That would make a fitting subtitle for the whole book.

David MacKenzie

David MacKenzie, Department of History, Ryerson University

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