From the 1933 Amulree Commission: "Rival politicians were accustomed to make the wildest of promises involving increased public expenditure ... electors in many cases preferred to vote for a candidate who was known for promoting his own interests at the public expense" #nlpoli

"Some years before the War politics in Newfoundland underwent a process of "modernisation" which was responsible for the introduction of ... tendencies which inevitably conduced to the personal enrichment of the politician in office, and of his relations, friends and supporters"

very very very little has changed !

The Amulree report should be read extremely critically for a bunch of reasons, among them the way it attempts to frame problems specific to the material functionimg of St. John's political and merchant class as a general moral sickness ailing the province 1/2

but it still provides a fascinating overview of the political culture at the time, and a pretty substantive accounting of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of newfoundland's political economy which to this day remain unresolved

It is also in many places a pretty obscenely conservative piece of writing, blaming workers for a lack of initiative and referring to bridges and roads as "luxuries". And of course, as an essentially British, bourgeois piece of analysis, it seizes on this moral failure idea.

Since bourgeois analysis precludes suggesting economic reforms that would alter Newfoundland's class structure (and address the central contradictions of its political economy), the Amulree report concluded that Newfoundland is simply not capable of democratic governance

But then of course again, you've got some great, timely passages: