Catholics and the business elite opposed confederation, and so supported the Tories while the rural protestants and poor fishermen supported confederation, which was backed by the Liberals and Joey Smallwood.
Yes.
The thing to understand about this is that in the 1940's, prior to Newfoudland joining Confederation, one of the main arguments against Confederation was the supposed ability of an independent Newfoundland to have closer relations with the United States, including a free trade deal, which Canada did not have at the time. So the St. John's business class was generally anti-Confederate because it hoped to trade with the much larger American market, but it became a sectarian issue among the working classes about the relative favorability of imperial Canada and the republican United States. This led to a kind of odd pattern in which urban Catholics were on the same side as Protestant business elites who joined the Conservative party after Confederation.
