Anniversary Crisis

As darkness fell on central Newfoundland one evening last week, two bands of men ranged along a provincial highway. Ten Mounties on foot kept a wary eye on more than 100 picketing loggers of the striking International Woodworkers of America, set on intercepting non-I.W.A. loggers. When the I.W.A. halted a sedan to threaten the four passengers in it, the Mounties radioed Grand Falls for help. More Mounties and provincial constables rushed to the scene. Police night sticks and loggers' crude clubs swung through the chilly air. Provincial Constable William J. Moss, 24, caught a blow on the head from a birch club, died in a hospital 30 hours later of a fractured skull and brain injuries.

Outwardly, the loggers' strike is a jurisdictional struggle between the I.W.A. and the newly formed Newfoundland Brotherhood of Woodworkers; more profoundly, the island's economy is at issue. Two big newsprint producers, Anglo-Newfoundland Development Co. Ltd. and Bowater's Pulp & Paper Mills Ltd., are faced with the rising cost of cutting logs in Newfoundland's skimpy forests. Newfoundland Premier Joseph Roberts Smallwood, fearful that further cost increases might endanger the companies' operations, moved in to settle the dispute at Grand Falls. Liberal Smallwood, once a union organizer, rammed a bill through the provincial legislature decertifying the I.W.A., while personally creating the rival N.B.W.W. Most Newfoundlanders, including Smallwood's Conservative opposition in the legislature, agreed that the province's solvency was at stake, sided with the Premier.

Doubled Income. Newfoundland's crisis comes on the tenth anniversary of its conversion from a lowly dependency of the British Commonwealth Relations Office to a full-fledged Canadian province. To thousands of transatlantic air travelers who have seen the fueling base at Gander airport, the province appears to be little more than a barren rock jutting out into the North Atlantic sea and air lanes. It is a land of clammy summer fogs and lashing North Atlantic storms; its climate and soil are so forbidding that the islanders must import a full 90% of their food. St. John's was the last spot of North American soil that Charles Lindbergh glimpsed as he headed eastward in his epic flight to Paris; from Newfoundland's Signal Hill Marconi received the first transatlantic radio message.

A race of hardy men who for centuries wrested a precarious living from the offshore fishing banks, Newfoundlanders are turning away from the sea to more rewarding work ashore. Now the island's pulp and paper mills, its mines, its green harvest of federal social welfare payments, and the payrolls of four U.S. air and naval bases all contribute more to the economy than the island's once all-important fisheries. Before confederation, Newfoundlanders earned an average of $150 each per year; they have boosted this to $775, but their standard of living still lags far behind that of other Canadians, who average $1,395.

Northern Future. Bow-tied Joey Smallwood, once a St. John's newsman, has been Premier through the whole decade of confederation. When he first took over, he earmarked some $25 million for an industrial development program that is beginning to produce results. Government-aided surveys turned up fabulous deposits of iron ore in Newfoundland's mainland territory of Labrador; one is now being mined, the other is scheduled to go into production in the 1960s. In Newfoundland and Labrador, surveyors uncovered promising finds of copper, lead and zinc, asbestos, fluorspar, gypsum and uranium. Perhaps even more significant was the exploration of sites on Labrador's Hamilton River that could develop as much hydroelectric power as Grand Coulee and Hoover Dam combined. Next step: to develop a market for this untapped storehouse of kilowatts.

With such prospects, most Newfoundlanders were able to bear the anniversary crisis in the forests without losing hope for the future.

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