The Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly.

• Author: Marland, Alex
• Position: Report

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly to increase public awareness of its procedural functions and provide the basis for a comparative analysis with other legislatures. The article includes a history of the legislature; the socio-demographics of MHAs; the resources of MHAs and party caucuses; and the relationship between government and opposition. The analysis includes the role of the Speaker, legislative committees, the procedure for bills, and the difficulties of mounting an effective opposition amidst lopsided majority governments.

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It is said that the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly has probably been the scene of more political and constitutional crises than all other provincial legislatures combined. (1) The path to democratic government in Newfoundland, like many of its highways, has been a bumpy, winding and foggy journey. The European-influenced political era began when fishermen arrived in the late 15th century. Until 1610 the area was "a kind of no man's land, without law, religion, or government ... only ruled in a rough way" by merchants and pirates. (2) Land settlement occurred from the early 17th to the early 18th centuries, a period characterized by power struggles between fishing admirals and colonists, and which was followed by the rule of naval governors. In 1711 an assembly of the naval governors was convened and a code of laws was established. The governors were appointed by Britain and they ruled over the ship captains, known as fishing admirals, who governed fishing communities.

Political agitation by St. John's residents such as William Carson in the early 19th century convinced the British Parliament to grant a bicameral legislature to the colony in 1832. Eligible male voters would now be able to elect 15 representatives to the lower house, the House of Assembly, by publicly announcing their choice to election officials. The governor and seven appointees comprised the upper house, known as the Legislative Council. These unelected men held political control and made spending decisions for the island's 75 thousand residents, but they were required to consider the views of the elected members. The nine electoral districts were located only on the eastern side of the island on the Avalon, Bonavista and Burin peninsulas.

The formation of the House of Assembly presents an interesting question: when democracy is first achieved but there is not yet a legislative building where do the members meet? The answer and the many subsequent movements of the Assembly symbolize developments in Newfoundland politics.

From the outset Newfoundland's representative government was disorganized and haphazard. The first session of the legislature was held in 1833 in a St. John's tavern and lodging house (across from the current war memorial). The appointed council, appropriately enough, met on the upper floor and the elected representatives gathered on the ground floor. However the establishment's operator, Mary Travers, was not paid her monthly rent. As the story goes, she proceeded to sell the Speaker's chair, a desk and the sergeant-at-arms' regalia including the mace, sword, suit and hat at an auction. (3)

The second session convened that same year at another location, the Old Court House. However, not only was it too small, but proceedings had to be delayed because the legislature needed papers that had been stored in the desk taken by Travers, which the tavern operator refused to return unless she was paid for five months' rent. She was eventually compensated without apparently disclosing that the desk, and thus the papers, had in fact been sold. Many of the items were eventually bought back from the purchaser and meetings continued in the Old Court House while a permanent building was being planned and erected.

The bicameral legislature lasted for a decade. Initially, the lower house was "a very respectful body', but the Legislative Council and elected officials "immediately disagreed" over even "trivial details', and both houses proved to be uncompromising. (4) This contributed to inciting religious, class and partisan clashes including rioting during elections and many legislative deadlocks; electoral districts, after all, had been distributed on the basis of residents' religious denomination. (5) Due to all the feuding Britain suspended the Newfoundland constitution in 1842 and combined the appointed and elected members into a unicameral legislature.

The Amalgamated Assembly began meeting in 1843, with 10 appointed members of the Legislative Council sitting with 15 elected representatives, and the council continuing to retain executive powers. This was far more productive but residents' desires for responsible government persisted and in 1846 a petition was sent to Britain requesting as much. That same year, the Old Court House was destroyed by one of several fires that would consume St. John's, forcing the legislature to convene for two years at an orphan asylum. That is, until the orphanage's operators ejected the legislators so that the space could be again used for classrooms.

The unicameral experiment lasted only half a decade. In 1848 Britain re-established separate lower and upper houses, but rejected requests for responsible government, believing that the colony was unprepared for this development. For the next two years assembly meetings were held in a building owned by one of the members of the legislature. Finally, in 1850, sessions could be convened in the newly constructed Colonial Building on Military Road in St. John's. Nearly a century later, tobacco smoke would have to be removed from ceiling frescos during a restoration effort, and the neo-classical structure would be declared "Newfoundland's most important public building" (6) for its design and especially its political history.

Responsible Government

Responsible government emerged in the colony of Newfoundland in 1855 which meant that the political executive would be accountable to the Assembly. The administrators of government ('cabinet') would now largely be elected MHAs, including the first premier (Philip Francis Little), a colonial secretary, a receiver general and a surveyor general. These men were technically subservient to an appointed governor and their business was scrutinized by a 12-member appointed Legislative Council; Britain remained in control of international affairs. Thirty MHAs represented 15 districts, mostly coastal, and by now extending to the southwest of the island which contained about 124 thousand residents.

Despite the arrival of responsible government, political and religious fighting persisted in both the bicameral legislature and in public. Factions squared off during elections and in 1861 soldiers shot at the St. John's rioters who had initially surrounded the Colonial Building, killing three of them. Nevertheless residents were unified by a developing Newfoundland identity and they bristled at the idea of a formal union of British North America's colonies. Two Newfoundland delegates participated in the 1864 Quebec conference on confederation but there were concerns about the terms of union. In 1869, two years after Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had united as the Dominion of Canada, pro-confederation candidates were soundly defeated in a general election in Newfoundland, formally signalling the public's rejection of a union with Canada.

Political frustrations inevitably arose between Newfoundland, Canada and Britain, particularly over the colony's desire to sign a trade pact with the United States. Once again there were internal tensions.

In 1886 a mob seeking employment on the railway broke into the Colonial Building chamber and in 1874 Newfoundland's financial institutions crashed, and were replaced with Canadian banks, but there was still opposition to joining Canada. Newfoundland took another step to move beyond its colonial status when it became a semi-autonomous British dominion in 1907.

When Britain's Statute of Westminster took effect in 1931 the Dominion of Newfoundland, as with the Dominion of Canada, was granted legal freedom from British laws where it so chose. However the legislature, unlike in Canada, did not adopt the Statute and therefore seemed content to be subservient to the British Parliament. At the time Newfoundland politicians were preoccupied with addressing a crippling post-war debt at the onset of the Great Depression. Newfoundlanders needed political leadership, stability and vision. What they got was political scandal.

One hundred years after Newfoundland had been granted the right to elect political representatives, its Minister of Finance, Peter Cashin, resigned. He publicly alleged that Prime Minister Richard Squires and the cabinet had been pocketing public money and falsifying minutes of council. This "crucial moment" in 1932 was the start of a chain of events that would lead to the collapse of responsible government. (7) The scandal brewed for months until a large mob stormed and ransacked the Colonial Building. The prime minister hid in the basement and only evaded harm by running through a residence, over some fences and into a taxi. It is less well known that the mace and the sergeant-at-arms' sword once again disappeared though, as with the Mary Travers incident, they were eventually returned. Newfoundland's politics, like its finances, was in shambles.

Commission of Government

In response to this untenable economic situation, Britain formed the Amulree Royal Commission. The Commission's report into the colony's politics and finances predicted "imminent" bankruptcy (8) and determined that Newfoundland "required a rest from politics". In 1933 a Committee of the Whole (that is, all members sitting as a committee presided over by the deputy Speaker) in the House of Assembly decided to request an end to both responsible and representative government...