It had been a proud, self-governing British dominion after 1931, but fell on very hard times during the Depression and ended up being again governed by London, which wanted to rid itself of the colony after the Second World War, and so engineered its amalgamation with Canada in 1949, in what many in the province still consider an act of betrayal.
We are talking, of course, about Newfoundland.
The island of Newfoundland became England’s very first colony, in 1583, but mainland Labrador was part of New France until its conquest by the British in 1760. In 1763, the coast of Labrador was granted to Newfoundland "to the end that the open and free fishery may be extended and carried on upon the coast of Labrador and the adjacent islands."
The 1774 Quebec Act re-transferred Labrador to what was formerly New France but in 1809 it reverted to Newfoundland. The 1825 Labrador Act fixed Labrador’s southern border with Quebec at the 52nd parallel.
But title to the large interior of the territory remained unclear. Finally, on behalf of Quebec, in 1922 Ottawa submitted the dispute to the Judiciary Committee of the Privy Council in London, since both Canada and Newfoundland were then separate and equal members of the British Empire.
In 1927, the Privy Council fixed Labrador’s inland border on the watershed between the Atlantic Ocean and Hudson Bay. It coupled this to the 1825 straight-line border. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, it made sure to cement its Labrador border in the Terms of Union.
Quebec still regards this decision as unfair and refuses to accept Labrador’s southern, straight-line border. Some maps published by the Quebec government show the straight line as "non-definitive" and place the actual border further north. I have also seen non-official outline maps of Quebec which incorporate all of Labrador into the province.
So who owns Labrador? Newfoundlanders want to make sure the world knows its theirs. On December 6, 2001, an amendment to Canada's Constitution officially approved a name change from the province of "Newfoundland" to the province of "Newfoundland and Labrador." Now our newspapers and television broadcasts have to use the clumsy term "Newfoundlanders and Labradorians" to describe its inhabitants.
But that re-naming prompted the government of Quebec to reiterate its position regarding its land border with Labrador: "No Québec government has ever formally recognized the course of the border between Québec and Newfoundland in the Labrador Peninsula, as defined by the judgment made by the judiciary committee of the Privy Council of London in 1927. For Québec, this border has never been definitively defined."
In 2007, a map posted on the website of Quebec’s Natural Resources Department showed large parts of southern Labrador as being inside the Quebec boundary. "We don't like it," John Ottenheimer, at the time Newfoundland and Labrador’s Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, told CBC News. "We've seen this over the years -- it happens time and time again." And there the matter stands.
Labrador is ethnically as well as geographically quite different from the island of Newfoundland, and some of its people would prefer it became a separate province. A 1999 resolution of the Assembly of First Nations claimed Labrador as a homeland for the Innu, much as Nunavut, created that year, is for the Inuit.
Perhaps all this seems somewhat arcane today -- but no one 30 years ago would have predicted that Abkhazia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Transnistria would someday become war zones. But they did, after the countries they had been part of, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, broke apart. Borders that don’t matter much when they are internal lines on a map suddenly assume tremendous importance when they become international frontiers.
One thing is certain: Newfoundlanders will do their utmost to retain Labrador within its present borders. "Je me souviens" ("I remember"), Quebec’s motto, could just as easily be theirs.
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