Joey Smallwood. - Photo courtesy of Family Collection, Premier J. Walter Jones

In his day, Joey Smallwood was revered and reviled.

And to this day, this province's paradoxical first premier shapes the way the people of Newfoundland and Labrador feel about provincial politics and our relationship with Ottawa.

That's the message in a new documentary about Smallwood that will air March 1 on the Canadian Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) - the first in a 10-part series on Canadian provincial leaders.

The 30-minute program opens with the sentence, "He changed the map of Canada," and continues, "as premier he was revered as a saint and condemned as a dictator."

Holly Doan, the producer of "The Premiers," says the Smallwood saga is the best story of the lot, and is probably her second-favourite episode in the series.

"There was the triumph of Confederation and there was the disaster of some of the other economic plans," she says from Ottawa.

Smallwood is a character Central Canadians think they know, she adds.

"They think they've got the story on the funny little Liberal with the bowler hat and the glasses."

But she says most Canadians don't realize Smallwood left a legacy of conflicting influences.

Poverty to power

The documentary tells of Smallwood's early years, growing up in poverty in St. John's at a time when many people in the province had molasses for lunch and codfish for supper, and where disease and malnutrition could lead to an early grave.

And it talks about Smallwood's secret shame - that his father was an alcoholic, and how Smallwood did not distinguish himself until he was in his late 30s.

"Nearing middle age," the narrator says, "a friend said 'he had nothing going for him.'"

His daughter, Clara Smallwood Russell, remembers lying in bed one Christmas when her mother called up the stairs to say that Santa Claus hadn't come.

Fortune finally smiled on Smallwood when he left his newspaper career to become "The Barrelman" on radio, and he became a household name in the province.

"He called it his first break in life," the documentary says.

It was his reputation as The Barrelman that helped Smallwood become director of the Newfoundland Confederate Association, which championed Confederation.

"If it weren't for Joe Smallwood, probably the vote would have been different and we would not have been members of the Canadian federation," Smallwood's granddaughter, Dale Russell Fitzpatrick, says in the documentary.

"One Newfoundlander told a visiting reporter, 'Smallwood was the only one that ever did anything (for the province). He's the only one that ever tried,'" the narrator says.

The documentary talks about some of Smallwood's triumphs, including Confederation Building, which - at 12 storeys - was reportedly the tallest building in Atlantic Canada when it was constructed.

It also tells how Smallwood championed education, elevating what had been Memorial University College to a degree-granting institution and increasing funding for schools from $4 million to $100 million a year.

It suggests Smallwood was trying to play catch-up, considering that 25 per cent of people in the outports were illiterate.

Trial and error

But much of the documentary dwells on Smallwood's failures.

"If I made mistakes they were mistakes of the heart," it quotes Smallwood as saying.

It cites his early political setbacks and his failed attempts at organizing a union, in detailed interviews with people including Lt.-Gov. John Crosbie and Ed Roberts.

"He hated feasibility studies," said Crosbie. "He didn't want to hear something wasn't feasible because it must be done. It was develop or perish. If the thing is not feasible - too bad, we're going to do it anyway."

CBC producer Doug Letto, who wrote a book on Smallwood's economic development policies, concurs.

"He just threw money at industries and created them and hoped that somehow they would work. They just didn't," says in the documentary.

Roberts says Smallwood was not a negotiator.

"He was a salesman. If you were bargaining with him, all you had to do was keep saying no and he kept putting more on the table to try to persuade you," he says.

The documentary talks about some of the company Smallwood kept - advisers who came back to haunt him.

Alfred Valdmanis, the former director general of economic development, took kickbacks and spent three years in jail.

Smallwood's business partner, Oliver Vardy, was charged with fraud, fled to Panama and died before his trial.

Robert Pitt, the editor of the "Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador," describes how Smallwood tried to distance himself from these people in his later years.

"He was talking to a photographer about a photograph he had that was taken in the '50s. There was one person in the picture that he wanted removed. Could it be done?" Pitt says Smallwood asked the photographer.

The person he wanted out was Valdmanis.

And then there were the failed industries, including a rubber boot factory that Letto describes as a complete bust.

"The boots came unglued at the heel. They couldn't even sell the boots to Newfoundland fisherman, even at a discount," he says.

But the hydroelectric deal with Quebec over Churchill Falls remains Smallwood's big blunder.

Pitt says Smallwood told him he never saw the contract, but Pitt seems unsure whether he believes Smallwood on that point.

Former premier Brian Tobin sums up the debacle.

"It's better to do no deal than do a bad deal. Nobody wants to make a mistake of historic proportions like Churchill Falls," he says.

Test of principles

In his early days, Smallwood was a socialist who used to say the business district on Water Street "was cemented with the blood of the workers."

He says he still believed in the socialist ideal while he was premier, nearly tripling spending in his first decade in office.

But those ideals would be tested in 1959 when loggers in the province went on strike.

"If one had to look for a day when his star began to wane, it would probably be ... his major intervention into that strike," says former cabinet minister Aidan Maloney.

Smallwood called the strikers communists and the union a gangster union.

"His decline and fall began with the breaking of that strike," says Ed Finn, who was a journalist at the Western Star at the time.

The later years

But Smallwood's fall was as slow as a feather on a light breeze. He clung to power for more than another decade after the strike.

Crosbie calls him a dictator of a banana republic, and according to Doan, Crosbie's venom for Smallwood survives to this day.

"The hatchet was never buried," Crosbie says on screen. "If it was ever buried it would've been buried in my head."

Doan says some of the things Crosbie told her were not included in the documentary.

"John Crosbie ... probably said some things he should not say as a representative of the Crown," she says with a laugh, adding she's saving those comments for her own memoir.

Crosbie contends that Smallwood was paranoid in his later years.

"(Cabinet would) sit down and listen to Smallwood for an hour and a half, and if you asked a question you became suspect," he says.

Tobin puts it this way: "His flaw was believing there was no successor worthy of him. His flaw was clinging onto power past the point where his service had been done."

Finn weighs in on how that affected Smallwood's legacy.

"He had all of the qualities to be one of the country's political greats. And instead, I think he'll go down as one of the worst," says Finn.

The Telegram asked Doan if she thinks Smallwood's supporters will view the show as too negative.

"I'm sure the family will feel that way," she says, but notes they've heard it all before.

Doan says she spoke with family, colleagues and enemies.

"When you check all those boxes, you get a round picture," she says.

Doan says the most important thing is that the story is told by people from this province, and not historians or political scientists from elsewhere.

dbartlett@thetelegram.com

THE PREMIERS

Here is the broadcast schedule for "The Premiers" series on CPAC. The show airs at 10:30 p.m. Sundays, starting next week with Joey Smallwood.
March 1- Joey Smallwood of Newfoundland and Labrador
March 8- W.A.C. Bennett of British Columbia
March 15- Maurice Duplessis of Quebec
March 22- William Aberhart of Alberta
March 29- Louis Robichaud of New Brunswick
April 5- Leslie Frost of Ontario
April 12- Tommy Douglas of Saskatchewan
April 19- Robert Stanfield of Nova Scotia
April 26- John Bracken of Manitoba
May 3- J. Walter Jones of Prince Edward Island
Where to find CPAC in St. John's
Rogers- channel 104
Rogers Digital- channel 198
Star Choice- channel 396
Bell channel- 512
Aliant channel- 999
Source: Canadian Public Affairs Channel