The poorest in North America
The poorest in North America - The unforgettable thing about Newfoundland for most of the years before Confederation — certainly for forty of those forty-nine years — is that we were poor. We were a poor people, a poor country; the poorest in North America.” As you might expect, a reader’s first question would be to ask when were those nine years that we could say we were not poor? From my (erratic and casual) reading of our history, there are two possible periods where it might be said we were not poor. The first nine years of the 20th century were not too bad. For example, Albert Perlin wrote (1959) that “the century was ushered in on a note of change.”