Members of a union call for free enterprise in their industry.
In reply, the leader of the government condemns violent protests and insists he would only speak with the officially- designated union, not what he refers to as a splinter group.
It sounds like something out of some Eastern European country as communism collapsed 30 odd years ago.
But it was Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province where this week fish harvesters blocked the entrances to the provincial government’s main buildings in St. John’s on Wednesday and forced the governing Liberals under Premier Andrew Furey to postpone the delivery of their pre-election budget.
Union members calling for free enterprise sounds absurd to anyone not familiar with the situation.
And to match its absurdity, anyone who had only seen a couple of pictures or video clips might have thought the whole protest was a riot and that the government leader’s condemnation of violence was justified. In truth, there was a few minutes of scuffling at one entrance that led to two people going off to hospital in an ambulance. One was a fish harvester who fell with a broken hip in the press of people and couple of police horses as the Premier’s chief of staff and a handful of others tried to get the under-equipped police to force a way through the angry protesters and get the few bureaucrats into the Confederation Building, where they did not urgently need to be. It smacks of a deliberate provocation.
Not long after, Furey’s communications director walked toward the protesters from another direction only to be stopped by union members, one of whom told her to go f*ck herself. It was good television, as her old colleagues at CBC demonstrated, but it smacked obviously of a foolhardy stunt or very poor judgment. Big on social media for a while but that and a couple bucks get you a real cup of coffee not real political impact.
Aside from those two rather short episodes, in which the Premier’s senior aides figured prominently, the whole thing was uneventful, which is especially odd in this age of smart phones and social media. That’s what made Furey’s rhetoric or the justice minister’s stern face at an afternoon news conference as out of step with reality as the idea of unions fighting for competition in the marketplace.
Except that’s all precisely in line with where we are in this third phase of post-Confederation politics. Disputes must happen in private, not public and so Furey clucked and tutted about all this supposed unruliness. The politicians will only deal with officially recognised groups, even though in this case, FFAW-Unifor which ostensibly represents both fish harvesters and fish plant workers, was driven by harvesters upset with the unions inaction over several years to resolve constant problems with the province’s fisheries management scheme.
For those unfamiliar, the government manages the fishery as a social venture, not an industry. A government-appointed committee sets prices fish plant owners pay for selected species ostensibly to balance out competing interests of all three interests - harvesters, plant operators, and plant workers but in practice it is about avoiding much needed change in the industry. Access to capital for both harvesters and processors have been frequent problems over the decades and the political interest in preserving small towns and small plants across the province has trumped other considerations. The result is a scheme in which neither party is happy. Fish plant workers, for example, cannot make a living from labour, relying instead on federal employment insurance to get them through the year.
A report in 2023 called for nine alterations to the existing scheme, saying that the current approach could not cope with changing market prices. The protests this winter are the latest in what has become annual unrest in the crab fishery, in particular.
At a news conference Wednesday, Furey endorsed the harvesters demands for competition and asked outside buyers to propose prices. He promised to investigate claims about the processors made by the protesters. But Furey denied there were any political problems at all.
That’s hard to reconcile with the disruption caused to Furey’s plans two days in a row by a group led by John Efford, a fish harvester and the son of a former fisheries minister and federal natural resources minister.
The harvesters are not the poor benighted fishermen of decades ago. Many operate multi-million dollar businesses with investors outside the province. They live and work outside St. John’s, which in itself added an extra dimension to the confrontation.
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Political power shifted in the province 20 years ago with rural Newfoundland and Labrador industries and interests taking a back seat to oil and gas and energy in Labrador. The fishery, like the forest industry lost its political influence. The protest this week shows the extent to which the existing corporatist approach, which has been frozen in place for 20 years, cannot cope with the modern political demands. The three political parties in the province all focus on urban middle class issues with little difference in their policies. Yet none have found a way to address the social and political changes in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. None have been able to win over these well-to-do and powerful leaders in their local communities.
The visual differences carried a great many messages that reflect the rural and urban divide, the townie-baynan split. The Premier, for example, standing in front of a Danny Williams-era logo and word mark for the province: three pitcher plant flowers and the name of the province in a Celtic script as if the province were Irish. People of Irish decent make up about a third of the population and they lived historically, in and around St. John’s and along the Southern Shore around to the eastern side of Placentia Bay.
Furey spoke in an accent indistinguishable from any other Canadian. He kept pronouncing the acronym for total allowable catch - the federally set maximum amount of fish harvesters can catch - as “tack” rather than by its initials, “tee ay see” as people in the fishing industry would say it.
By contrast, the harvesters spoke with many local accents and dialects, reflecting the counties of England and Ireland their ancestors came from changed over hundreds of years living here. They dressed in their working clothes, which for many around St. John’s fit for some with stereotypes about their supposed lack of education and intelligence like their accents do. This is a place, after all, where an Irish lilt is considered charming while those of people like Efford’s father and Efford’s fellow harvesters would be the mark of stupidity.
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In some of the public reaction to the protesters, especially in the calls for them to quiet down, there is also an element of an old class division reborn in recent years. Baymen are noble peasants when they behave and know their place under the control of townie elites but unruly, stupid brutes when they they do not. This sort of thinking leads to curious perspectives. One protester struck at the flanks of one police horse during the protest’s one moment of jostling and anger and made himself an easy target for those who decried the supposed abuse to the “poor horse,” which, being descended from horses ridden by European knights, dwarfed the short fisherman. They offered no sympathy for the humans.
In other public reaction, though, like VOCM’s streeters on Thursday morning, most spoke in favour of the protestors right to protest in a democracy. As for those like political science professor Alex Marland, who prissily advised the protestors to quiet down in one interview and get back to the bargaining table, ordinary people seemed not to mind. One noted that in British Columbia, where they were from, there are protests like this all the time. They are to be expected in a democracy, many felt.
Fisheries protests are commonplace in Newfoundland and Labrador, something which the elite reaction - whether government or prof in variety - did not seemed to know. They are seldom violent even at the worst times, like in 1992 when the cod moratorium led to 70,000 people or more leaving the fishery and the province. Fish plant workers repeatedly protested at the Confederation Building in the 1990s, entered the building, made great commotion, and left again, all without the need for police in military-style uniforms and automatic weapons to intimidate unarmed, noisy but non-violent protesters.
Fisheries protests in Newfoundland and Labrador lead to broken furniture but seldom broken bones. Even in the one example Marland offered, for instance, from his time as a communications director in Danny Williams’ first administration, the protesters vandalised the fisheries offices to vent their frustration. That’s it. Not normally acceptable behaviour, but as these things go, whatever force there is gets aimed at things not people.
Unless, that is, you get into a situation like the one that went out-of-control for a short while on Wednesday as a couple of police officers on horseback and a raft of poorly equipped officers - including the police chief - wrestled in large part because the police did not seem able to do what they needed to do, if they actually had a plan for the operation at all. Footage on television Wednesday night suggested both sides raced for the back door of the building and while no one seems to have even tried to force their way into the building, both police and protesters jockeyed for control of a small strip of ground, needlessly. There was no obvious control of the situation and both police and protesters seemed interspersed to a dangerous degree. This episode should lead to a review of police attitudes and tactics in dealing with protests but it likely won’t.
As much as Furey and his fisheries minister may want to meet the protestors demands, they know the consequences of treating the fishery as an industry like any other rather than as the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering it is in Newfoundland and Labrador. Transformation is an easy word to say. Change is hard, and in the fishery a change from tight control would threaten too many interests.
Open competition would take many fish harvesters and processors out of the business entirely or see their operations absorbed into larger and potentially foreign-owned businesses. Hundreds of fishplant workers would lose their only way to earn a living. Communities would disappear as well as the only local industry vanished. Government has no policy that would encourage local businesses to grow in their place, but that is another issue.
Efford knows it too but he also knows that with Furey wanting to go to the polls as soon as possible, it may be easier to wrestle significant concessions from the beleaguered Liberal government without risking the wholesale changes real free enterprise would bring. He’s clearly got a cohesive group, despite a long history of cleavages, and his own ability to speak and inspire his fellow fish harvesters makes him a formidable opponent. No one should ignore the political power displayed this week, something with which government could not cope and which the opposition party leaders could only look at with chins on floor in amazement.
No one should lose sight, either of two key aspects of this confrontation. First, the anger seen at the protest is not just about fish prices. All the issues that are angering people across the province are angering the harvesters too, including the cost of living and access to health care. Thursday’s budget offered them little relief in the near term. Pretty new shoes on Facebook, a budget tradition, are out of touch in a province where most people are worried about living costs and think this government is doing nothing to help them. That would make it very risky for Furey to call an election with the fisheries issues at least not settled firmly.
Second, Furey and the rest of the province’s politicians should watch their backs. Efford’s father recovered from a political setback by organizing people in the fishery. He fought for and almost won the Liberal leadership by organizing rural Newfoundlanders and Labradorians at the grassroots. John Efford clearly inherited many of his father’s skills. Some think Pam Parsons should take care. Pfft. Andrew Furey should watch *his* back. And if Efford has even only a tenth of his father’s ambition and skills, there is considerable potential in him and in this week’s protest to upset the political dominance by townies that came with Danny Williams’ election and change the political landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador as decisively as his father’s nemesis did.
Some people inside Confederation Building seem to realise that, as a low-rent bit of political provocation, the Premier’s rhetoric, and the over-loaded police presence on Thursday suggest.
They looked scared.
Thanks for the opportunity Ed…
Last weeks events have me rattled. Not about the unending reactionary fishery policy and protests but about the embarrassing display on how the House of Assembly was hijacked. While the House is supposedly sacrosanct….the inability to protect our institution needs further review. POGG did not prevail and this is troubling. Dramatics aside, we can certainly imagine what would happen if the French farmers decided to detour their tractors from the Champs-Élysées and head to the French Parliament to block their democratic proceedings. Opening their Legislature would certainly take precedence over the next day Court Injunction.
Everyone except our authorities seemed to know what was coming at them that morning. 2 horses, hastily clad RNC with the Chief paying a surprise visit donning his casual issued toque. Embarrassing and unprepared to say the least. When our House is prevented from doing its constitutional obligation things can slip on the slope pretty quick.
This is not about the right to protest and certainly not about a group drinking Tim’s and stoking a barrel on the parking lot of Strawberry Marsh Rd. It is about our authorities ensuring business in OUR House is not interrupted.
Brilliant article Ed.
This is a really balanced and impartial article on the state of the fishing industry in NL today.
I hope it becomes required reading within the Premier Furey and Minister Loveless's offices.
One small quibble:
Your statement "Open competition would take many fish harvesters and processors out of the business entirely or see their operations absorbed into larger and potentially foreign-owned businesses. Hundreds of fishplant workers would lose their only way to earn a living. Communities would disappear as well as the only local industry vanished. Government has no policy that would encourage local businesses to grow in their place, but that is another issue."
needs some elaboration.
Harvester workers are made up of two groups, enterpriser owners and crew members. There may be a few enterprise owners that will fold, but they may have folded anyway. As long as there is fish to catch the crew members will still need to be employed.
Similarly, in the processing sector, A few inefficient processing plants may change hands. but the workers will continue to be employed by new owners. In fact we may see some growth and revitalization of existing rural communities.
We have a shortage of plant workers and are importing some foreign workers. This practice is even more pronounced in the Maritimes.
With the continuing supply of crab, a 300% or greater increase in northern cod, and a massive supply of redfish in the Gulf and on the South Coast, growth and expansion should be the norm for the next few years. Unless, of course, as you correctly point out, the Provincial Government screws up yet again.