Robert Bond and the Pink, White and Green: Newfoundland Nationalism in Perspective

Atlantic provinces as a single unit.1 He did so (probably) at the decree of the editors of the Canadian Centenary Series, whose view of the Canadian past was generally traditional and centralist. The essential story was assumed to be the evolution of Ontario and Quebec, and later the opening of the West. Atlantic Canada therefore merited only a collective volume up to 1867 in the Centenary Series, and has thereafter occupied a secondary place in the national narrative.2 As for (let alone Labrador) after 1867, Canadian historians still remain uncertain about what to do with it. The fact that experimented with political independence for some 80 years seems to have cast it as a perpetual and irrelevant historical outsider, in spite of a family resemblance and many links with mainland Canada. An outsider still seems to be, almost 60 years after it became a province, and the assertive local nationalism of many Newfoundlanders and their provincial governments since the 1970s seems at times to surprise and offend other Canadians. From the mainland perspective, Newfoundlanders tend to bite the hand that has fed and sustained them: Confederation: our blessing, their burden, as the poet Mary Dalton has put it.3 From the perspective, mainlanders fail to understand that the latest addition was once a country, that local nationalism has deep historical roots and that Newfoundlanders have an old and distinct identity. In this sense, is more like Quebec than any other Canadian province; yet while Quebec has a major role in defining the national agenda, (like the rest of Atlantic Canada) is marginalized, having a small population and therefore little political clout. Geographical extent, as in the North, is irrelevant. The word rather than the current official provincial label of Newfoundland and is used here deliberately, since this paper discusses and not Labrador nationalism. For many years, Labrador was treated as a subordinate dependency of Newfoundland, and the territory did not develop its own effective and separate political and cultural consciousness until the late 1960s and after. Since that time, Labrador has been recognized as the distinct region that it always was, with independent characteristics and identities. Labrador deserves another paper. With that qualification, how best to approach the question of a purely

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