Canada
In 1925, Canada officially claimed a sector of
the Arctic. Canada claimed the sector between 60 degrees west longitude
and 141degrees west longitude. The idea of claiming this sector
had first been put forward by Senator Poirier in a speech made in
the Canadian Senate on February 29, 1907. The sector claimed by Canada
has appeared on maps since 1925.
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Photograph of Saint John Vocational School
In 1927, another important boundary was defined by the Imperial Privy
Council: the line between the Dominion of Canada and the colony of Newfoundland.
The colony of Newfoundland had long claimed a strip of land along the
coast of the continent, which came to be called Labrador. The Province
of Quebec, on the other hand,
believed that the interior part of Labrador should be part of its own
territory. The controversy raged on for many years, until the governments
of Canada and Newfoundland submitted the matter to the Imperial Privy
Council. The boundary it defined in 1927 is the one still in use today.
Quebec
To the east of the province of Quebec, bordering the Atlantic Ocean,
lay a dependency of the colony of Newfoundland called Labrador. The creation
of Labrador dates to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. In 1774, Labrador
was transferred to Quebec, but it was returned to Newfoundland in 1825.
Newfoundland had lost the Magdalen Islands in 1809; it had also lost Anticosti
Island and the north shore of the St. Lawrence in 1825, but it had retained
Labrador.
Although Labrador had been tossed back and forth between Quebec and
Newfoundland, its land boundary had never been determined. This had
first been raised in 1888 when a judge in the Newfoundland Supreme Court
observed a difference between the jurisdictional extent of Newfoundland
and a map of Labrador.
In 1902, a company called the Grand River Pulp and Paper Company received
leases from the Government of Newfoundland, to cut timber in the area
of the Hamilton River (now called Churchill River). The Government of
Quebec, however, said that the area was part of its territory, and that
the right to cut timber had to come from the Quebec Department of Lands,
Mines and Fisheries. The dispute was referred to the Government of Canada.
Its decision was that only coastal areas and islands were included in
Labrador, and that the area in question was neither. The Government
of Newfoundland disagreed, so the two governments agreed to ask for
a decision from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
The Privy Council looked at the arguments of both sides in the dispute.
It decided to use the "height of land" (or watershed) to decide
on the question for a variety of reasons. First, it recognized that under
international law, occupation of a sea coast included the right to all
the lands drained by the rivers that empty into the ocean. Second, the
watershed was, for a great distance, the boundary that the Hudson's Bay
Company had used. Third, the Privy Council considered that the words "coasts
of Labrador", as used in 1825, meant to include all the territory
included in the watershed. The decision of 1927 gave all of the watershed area to Labrador.
The animation Territorial
Evolution 1867 to 1999 shows sequentially the history of the
political boundary changes in Canada from Confederation to the creation
of Nunavut.
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