Sisyphus' Rock (Paperback)

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams once declared apropos provincial politics that "we can't allow things that are inaccurate to stand." Taking him at his word, Drew Brown presents an engaged analysis of the class interests and ideological distortions underlying the island's politics in the 20th century. From the collapse of democracy at the outset of the Great Depression to the collapse of the cod fishery at the end of the century, Drew traces the way the state has worked in concert with private capital to entrench the power of a local commercial elite over the political process in Newfoundland and Labrador. Covering the dynamics of pre-Confederation national politics, Joey Smallwood's ill-fated industrialization program, Resettlement, the birth of the petroleum industry and the collapse of the North Atlantic Cod fishery in the early 1990s, this is perhaps the most compelling analysis of Newfoundland and Labrador's political and economic history to appear in some time.