The fishery is in crisis.
Not the latest crisis.
*The* Crisis.
The crises are coming so regularly in the fishery now that the turmoil is not merely a regular and easily fixed event but the sort of continuous crisis that usually comes before a big change. Like the series of small tremors before a big earthquake or volcanic eruption. In this case, the change the fish harvesters are pushing for would end the political and social compact at the heart of fisheries policy since Confederation.
We know this is a much bigger crisis than a fight over prices because of what the association that represents plant owners said after the government reached an agreement with harvesters a couple of weeks ago.
For one thing, Jeff Loder said that what he understood about the agreement from the fisheries minister is not what he’s heard de facto harvesters’ leader John Efford say of the deal. That’s not good no matter the reason for the differences in the stories.
For another thing, Jeff Loder said the obvious. There is excess processing capacity. Adding more capacity - that’s what the harvesters’ idea of free enterprise means - would likely see permanent plant closures in some parts of the province and permanent job losses for fish plant workers.
Loder’s not exaggerating. But what makes this statement so important is that the fisheries compact that drives fisheries policy aimed at avoiding just that outcome, as harvesters well know. That means the harvesters are pushing this policy in order to break the compact and fundamentally change fishery policy. It’s a revolutionary situation.
And if the minister has a different understanding of what is going on, then the government does not have any idea what to do now that the political consensus that has last 75 years is shattered already or is splintering in front of our eyes.
Confederation materially changed the lives of everyone in the new province of Newfoundland and Labrador. But it did not change fundamentally the political, social, and economic order of the old country of Newfoundland. That’s not by accident.
In the fishery, both the Government of Canada and the Government of Newfoundland agreed to manage the fishery to avoid significant social change despite Confederation. They would preserve communities as they were and avoid mass migration to the Mainland of Canada or in one or two major centres in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Over the decades after Confederation, both governments did everything they could to keep communities and people in place, regardless of the consequences. They even tried to push more people into the fishery at one point even though economically it could not support the ones who were already trying to make some part of a living from catching or splitting fish.
Both federal and provincial subsidies equalled the landed value of catches through the 1980s, which is arguably both the peak of the fishery and the start of the long collapse first of cod and then other stocks. The The fishery was not economically or ecologically sustainable. Such was the bankruptcy of the policy that in the early 21st century, a typical fishplant worker in Newfoundland and Labrador only made $15,000 a year with only two thirds of that coming from actual work.
This was a direct result of the governments’ policy, which was to keep as many people involved in the fishery as possible. Supporters of the scheme consider it more important to preserve a job or a plant or a community - as the more grandiose and delusional would say - the backbone of our society and economy than it is to have a healthy fishing industry in which each person can gain a living wage from direct labour alone.
The results of this twisted notion are obvious. Both governments supported the cod fishery to near extinction for the species despite dire and accurate warnings from scientists that stocks were disappearing very quickly. Local companies fished illegally got away with it. Former fish plant executive Gus Etchegary was famous for justifying the amoral and illegal schemes of his company while at the same time he blamed everyone else for the collapse of the cod stocks he and others willfully and knowingly destroyed.
With the closure of the cod fishery in 1992, the provincial government pushed plants to switch to other species, despite the experience with cod. It issued more and more licences and in the process undermined the model plant in Catalina. Built as as part of a fundamental change in fisheries policy, the Catalina plant was intended to offer workers upwards of 48 weeks’ work a year between a combination of processing fresh shrimp catches during the season and banked stock during the off-season. The pressure on stocks had a predictable effect and as crab and shrimp supply buckled under the weight of the fishery both governments continued the old policy based on out-dated thinking.
Fishery Products International had become a successful global company, able to attract outside investment and market local fish products into the American markets and, in its later days, into the European Union through its British subsidiary. Rather than support FPI as it grew and changed, the provincial government under Danny Williams and fisheries minister Tom Rideout partnered with local fishing interests to destroy the company through relentless political attacks and rigged prosecutions for supposed violations of conditions on the company’s processing licences. So nakedly political was the attack on FPI that cabinet received regularly briefings on the court cases while Williams accused FPI shareholders of doing what his government was trying to do; break up the company.
In the end, the company broke and the provincial government allowed small local processors to scoop up the plants in a market already glutted with capacity and in one of the stupidest of many stupid moves, allowed outside companies to buy up the FPI brand and the American and British subsidiaries making it harder for local companies to market their products globally. The Pea Seas persecuted other processors over licence conditions for political reasons and when the Government of Canada tried to open free trade with the European Union - a key potential market for Newfoundland Labrador seafood - the provincial government tried to scuttle the deal with ham-fisted games.
The two governments weren’t working on their own, though. Local fishing companies, voters, and the union that represented both harvesters *and* fish-plant workers backed the scheme. They endorsed all the arcane rules about boats sizes over the decades because the Stalinesque scheme of social engineering kept them all working at something, backed by federal and provincial spending. The conflict of interest baked into the structure of the Fish, Food, and Allied Workers union only survived because of the implicit understanding among all those involved in the fishery, including the governments, that they were all against change and would smear whatever economic value there was in the fishery across as many dinner tables as possible. The result was a fishery in which all made a little money..
What’s truly remarkable though is that the scheme didn’t stop change completely. There’s was no way to avoid the loss of 70-odd thousand people in the wake of the cod collapse and in the years afterward, the number of people in the fishery dropped steadily as fish plant workers aged-out of the physically demanding work or gave up the hard lifestyle and moved to other work elsewhere in Newfoundland and Labrador or elsewhere in Canada. Few people entered the fishery, with the result that especially in fish plants, many companies in the over-capacity processing sector now import labour at higher cost from outside Canada.
On the harvesting side, the switch to different species meant a switch to different gear and boats, which led to larger and larger enterprises. But the capital needs of these new businesses left many cash poor while at the same time luring investors including sofa-skippers - investors with no attachment to the fishery otherwise, usually from the mainland - as well as financial deals that tie some harvesters to specific processors. One of the sofa-skippers from Ontario turned up during the price fight in 2023 to demand that the provincial government bail him out from the losses on his six-figure share he’d bought when prices and profits had been high the year before. Such a demand is only possible in an industry that is closer to another government-owned business than a sustainable profitable industry.
Government after government in Newfoundland and Labrador has managed the fishery since Confederation not as an industry but as part of a political and social experiment enabled by the financial strength from Confederation and the federal government. Other government policies either supported the fisheries compact or grew out of it. Economic development policy is the most obvious one that has been continuously driven by the assumption that where people lived was where the industries had to be, instead of treating workers as moveable, which they are. In Newfoundland and Labrador, government bureaucrats and politicians are also deeply involved in picking which companies get to set up shop here, as they do in the fishery, despite their inability to ever pick a winner in any industry at any time. The central conceit of any Newfoundland government since Confederation has been to copy all the biggest economic, political, and social failures of the last century from the Soviet Union to Cuba and Venezuela.
Even resettlement reflected the need to keep people generally in the same area where they’d been even if it wasn’t in the same house or same community. To understand the political opposition to change, one need only consider the deep-rooted opposition to resettlement itself, even though it was actually quite modest in the scope of it. In the 1990s, the Pea Seas could use it as a political weapon and even today, there is anger over what happened in the 1950s and 1960s and firm opposition to any resettlement scheme today.
Such is the opposition to letting even dead communities go that one incorporated town has a population of four, all members of the same family, who make up the town council, supported by a provincial government that maintains the roads and ploughs the snow in winter. In Little Bay Islands a town on an island off the north coast before it recently resettled, there was no one to work in the local fishplant for the last few years of the community’s existence as the year-round residents were all too old to work. No problem. The provincial government operated a daily ferry solely to bring workers to and from the plant from their homes on the main land of Newfoundland.
You should now be able to see not only the roots of the current financial crisis but also the social and political opposition to any form of change, no matter how necessary, that has shaped Newfoundland and Labrador since Confederation and that continues to shape what government does.
Except that we are seeing in the fishery could well be a change of truly historic and in many ways unprecedented shape and size. Harvesters alone cannot drive the change to its finish, though. There are other political and social forces that will shape the outcome. We haven’t seen those emerge publicly yet. We do not know if the old myths about the fishery and its social importance are strong enough to overcome the political drive led by the harvesters. Given who they are and where they are from, it would seem that rural Newfoundland and Labrador could be ready to reinvent itself. But will the political forces in St. John’s that now dominate provincial politics go along with it?
In Newfoundland and Labrador, we don’t often see sharp changes or even sharp divisions across society. Confederation appeared to be a close vote but the consensus behind the referenda results was for something different than we’d been before 1949 - as Melvin Baker and Raymond Blake have argued - but at the same time there was a consensus best seen in the reluctance to support any sort of dramatic change. People were ambivalent or unclear about whether Canada or independence would deliver the future they wanted but once they started down the Canadian road, they seemed to find unity in opposing any changes to their way of life. As much as Baker and Blake are right in their assessments, the post-Confederation conservatism of the same society begs to be examined more closely.
What we must see as well if we look back on the last century or so of Newfoundland and Labrador history is the failure of the leading elements of society to understand how the society it worked, how it fit into the larger world, and what changes would be necessary to achieve the goals not just in the late 1940s and afterwards but in the time between the formation of the coalition government in 1917, through the turbulent political ‘20s, until the collapse of self-government in 1933-34.
Because no one thought of other ideas, there was no way to convince people of anything different, least of all what a newgoal might look like and what steps the political society would need to take to get from where they were to where they wanted to be. The Overton Window - the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time - was almost shut tight before Confederation. It opened wider in the second post-Confederation phase but these days it is a very narrow slit again and for many of the same fundamental reasons, the inherently conservative nature of post 2003 politics looks very much like the world of a century and more ago. In the absence of political leadership, there is no alternative to stagnation and collapse or radical and uncontrollable change, usually triggered or imposed from outside.
The dominant groups may have changed - bureaucracies and unions instead of merchants and clerics - but the result is the same sort of conservatism that prefers the return of ex-pats to the arrival of new citizens and with them change and growth. It was not so along ago that union leaders, future union leaders, and Pea Sea politicians alike could praise the idea of homing pigeons coming back for all the new jobs. These days we welcome Ukrainians but that is less part of a coherent policy as something grown quickly out of that other staple of local policy, the brain fart. The idea of creating a society built on openness and innovation is on no political agenda in Newfoundland and Labrador. Few are even talking about it privately.
“Should sanctioning occur on Muskrat Falls in the fall,” then-Pea Sea politician Paul Lane told the House of Assembly not so long ago, “we know that there is going to be a great boom and a great need for skilled trades; this motion is just basically strengthening our resolve to ensure that we are ready as a Province to meet those needs so that we can ensure employment for our people, that we can keep our young people home here in Newfoundland and Labrador; not only keep our people home, but bring our young people back home, young people who have had to leave over the years in search of work, to have the opportunity to be able to actually bring those people back home to Newfoundland and Labrador where they belong with their families, Mr. Speaker. [emphasis added]”
There are always other factors at play though and as much as it is tempting to consider today as just a repeat of the past - then as tragedy, now as farce - history does not repeat itself, even within the same society. We may be at the beginning of a wider social upheaval 75 years into Confederation than we have seen at any time since 1855. The latest crisis in the fishery may be the one that breaks through the constraints and triggers other social and political changes, just as in the early 1970s. Or it could be smothered. Without leaders of any kind who can describe a path different from the one we are only, when a crisis like the current one in the fisheries emerges we do not know what comes next.
This very thoughtful piece deserves much discussion on so many points.
While I see the evolution of the social economy differently from Ed's, we both agree on the inevitable social and economic reckoning. The current demographic structure and political voice of smaller communities are key factors in this. We can't keep 'kicking the can down the road,' much like we do with our provincial debt.
Significant changes are coming to the processing sector of the fisheries sector, although that sector has been downsizing since the late 1980s. There is likely over-capacity in the harvesting sector and social and political opposition to change. Change has economic, social, and psychological costs, and our natural tendency is to maximize our current well-being and push any adjustment later, preferably onto someone else.
Meanwhile, we should remember the aquaculture industry and the remarkable success of Cooke's.
As for rural communities reinventing themselves, it is unlikely since older folks like me don't have the energy or appetite for it. These communities are being reinvented from the outside by people, often from urban areas, as their go-to place in the summer.
There is the issue of political leadership. Given the experience of good people such as Clyde Wells, who cared and tried, is leadership possible in the shire?
Good commentary