Mon., March 19, 2006

Peter Pickersgill
The Beacon, Gander, Newfoundland

On the front page of an independent weekly newspaper, there is an article about the trouble animal rights activists cause seal hunters every year.

The story suggests that one way sealers can undercut the criticism of activists is to make use of more than the tiny percentage of meat from the seals harvested. That way the protesters can’t claim these poor creatures are being slaughtered just so rich women can dress up in fur coats. On page two of a daily newspaper, there is a half-page article about a group on the Eastport Peninsula voicing concern about a Department of Natural Resources plan OK’d by the environmental assessment process. People who live on the peninsula are alarmed to learn this plan allows clear-cut logging of large areas of old-growth forest adjacent to the communities where they live.

These villages, unlike so many small places, are actually growing a little bit, because tourists have discovered the area is a paradise for boating and hiking. The cutting will be done by large forest companies, creating no local jobs and ensuring the first baby steps of tourist development and the jobs that come with them, will be stopped in their tracks. Who wants to hike in a clear-cut? On the front page of another weekly: Abitibi Consolidated’s annual cheque in lieu of taxes to the Town of Grand Falls-Windsor, normally $800,000, comes in $300,000 short. The mayor plans to ask why, soon. A radio show devoted to the fishery, has a clip of the fisheries minister stating he has received from Fishery Products International a letter announcing there are just two companies making offers to buy the Newfoundland assets of FPI that the board of directors deems satisfactory. Days later, the board unilaterally announces they have chosen one of the two.

The minister puffs up his chest and lays down the law: it is the government of Newfoundland and Labrador and no one else who will decide which of the two is better. Which of the two? Why only two? Forget that the FPI Act permits the government a vast range of options. Forget that FPI, strictly against the FPI Act, will have dismantled a company created with taxpayers’ money and made off with, by far, the most profitable part, the marketing arm.

A week or so later, the government announces that they have chosen a buyer for FPI. It’s the other one, the one FPI doesn’t want. I guess we showed them who’s in charge. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Almost everyone who knows the history of the fishery knows how the Water Street merchants had total and utter control of both the resource and the lives of the people around the bays and on the islands who caught and dried the fish and brought them to the capital.

The merchants set the price of the fish, inspected for quality and then exchanged the fish for the staples that would see the fisher families through to the next season when the exercise would be repeated all over again.

No cash changed hands.

The fishing schooners sailed home, those on board a little more in debt each year. Today, almost everyone bemoans what a cruel system it was that exploited outport people so mercilessly and worked them to an early grave. We wonder how fishers could have allowed themselves to be served so harshly. Thank goodness things are better today. Are they? It’s true that back then our people were forced to sell whatever amounts of our resources they could harvest to strangers who set the terms and established giveaway prices, take it or leave it. It’s also true everything was done by hand, so less of the resource was used, the sea was overflowing with fish and everyone had work. There were fewer roads, so fewer people had automobiles. There were none of the things we regard as indispensable today: pickups, quads, snowmobiles, washers, driers, dishwashers, televisions and cellphones.

Back then, people had nothing and nothing to spend it on. Today, we have much higher expectations of what we feel we need and our labour is not providing it for us. New ways of harvesting are depleting the resources from which our living must come in the future. We are still giving those resources away to strangers at prices they set. The difference is today the exercise no longer provides adequate employment. Back then, people created everything they needed themselves: boats, wharves, gear, houses furniture. They farmed and raised animals for food. People were self-reliant and ingenious. Many people still are today. But that spirit of self-reliance has to take another step. The old people’s self-reliance was based on judgment and logic, the judgment that once upon a time taught them the proper curve for the stem of a trap skiff or logically showed the best site for a house to withstand the weather.

It was a matter of saying yes to some ways of doing things and no to others. It still is.But today we need to apply it to different matters. Yes to some things and no to others. No to giveaways of our resources. Yes to taking charge of the way our resources are harvested and brought to market. No to clear-cutting of trees that surround our communities providing no jobs, stealing our firewood and despoiling the landscape that is starting to attract tourist dollars. Yes to establishing a means where regulations on harvesting do not appear magically from on high to control our lives, but are the result of genuine communication between harvesters and rule-makers. No to allowing fish companies created with our cash and controlled by our laws to set the terms and price of their own sale and selective dismantlement. No to Water Street merchants on steroids. Yes to a greener way of harvesting. No to granting resource companies concessions without iron-clad agreements that bind them to behave, or they will face penalties more severe than standing in the corner. Yes to refining what we harvest to a retail-ready state by the time it leaves the site of the harvest. No to shipping unprocessed raw material. Yes to research at our tax-funded institutions into new ways of processing, new products and the creation of new markets. No to being victims. Yes to taking control of our future.