Canadians (41 page)

“In 1975,” Michael Harris writes in his powerful 1998 book
Lament for an Ocean,
“there were 13,736 registered inshore fishermen in Newfoundland; by 1980, that number had ballooned to 33,640. There wasn't a politician in the land who was prepared to accept the consequences of restricting entry to the fishery.” The federal government brought in the unemployment insurance that made seasonal work more attractive while the provincial government offered incentives and grants. Licences and quotas were easy to get, and so fish plants went up in unlikely places. And the discrepancies between reported and actual catch were never properly addressed. It was clear from the mid-1980s, Harris argues, “that the fishing industry could not support the number of people who depended on it for a living.” Harris was simply ahead of the times on this story.

In the fall of 2006 the journal
Science
reported on a massive international study that predicted the collapse of the entire world's fishery by the middle of this century. In the words of lead researcher Boris Worm, a Canadian, “I think we're smart to realize where we're heading, and avoid it.”

All the same, it was not hopeful news for those Newfoundlanders who believe that if the cod isn't already back it's on its way soon. The study also found that 29 percent of the fish and seafood species are currently being caught at less than 10 percent of their historical high catches. Canada, Worm said, is already starting to scrape “the bottom of the barrel” in opening a fishery for sea cucumbers and hagfish in Cape Breton.

“After that, it is jellyfish—and then no more.”

IN THE LATE WINTER of 2005 I drove from downtown St. John's out to Conception Bay and a small community called St. Philip's. I'd come to visit a man called Gus Etchegary. In his home, high on the bluffs overlooking the spectacular bay, the eighty-year-old retired fish plant manager pulled out huge multicoloured bristol-board graphs to demonstrate his own theories of the fishery's demise.

“Honest to God,” he said while assembling his massive charts, “I hate all the whining and griping. I hate it. But there'd be no need for any of it if our resources had been managed properly.”

Joining Confederation back in 1949, he said, was nothing short of a shotgun marriage forced on islanders by Great Britain. The worst part of it, he continued, was the transfer of control over the fishery to Ottawa, not to St. John's. His charts showed massive catches each year from 1875 on: decades of consistent 200,000- to 300,000-tonne takes, with another 75,000 tonnes or so going to foreign fleets. And still, year after year, the fishery recovered.

After 1949, however, everything began to change. Cod stopped being salted and was instead frozen. European war fleets were turned into fishing vessels, with trawlers and then freezer trawlers moving in to take what used to be caught by jigging with line and hook. By 1968, Etchegary said—thick finger hammering at a spike in the chart—the foreign catch had
soared to 810,000 tonnes. “And that wasn't even accurate. They were underreporting.”

The spawning stock shrank, the catches fell year after year, and eventually the fishery collapsed. “The fish,” Etchegary said, “never had a chance to recover. Just think of it. A totally renewable resource worth more than $3 billion a year—lost to mismanagement. We should be making a significant contribution to the national economy, not always being criticized for having a handout.

“And here we are, for Christ's sake—we're destitute.”

MAINLANDERS TEND TO SEE Newfoundland as forever on the receiving end of equalization payments—and, indeed, roughly one of every three dollars Newfoundland spends today does come from those federal payments. But for Betty Fitzgerald, too many Canadians likely agreed with Stephen Harper when he spoke of a “culture of defeatism” in the East.

Newfoundland, in truth, often led the country in growth in the early part of this century, its percentage increase in gross domestic product rising more quickly than other provinces' in part because it had been so much lower to begin with. That growth, however, is another story in the urban–rural split. St. John's and its suburbs were booming, with housing prices going up, SUVs in the driveways, a thriving university, and myriad new developments in oil and high tech that had nothing to do with the vanishing fisheries.

Those not living on the more prosperous Avalon Peninsula, on the other hand, could feel things slipping away. And yet they were determined to find some catch that would allow them to remain. At one point close to tears herself, Fitzgerald shook with anger: “People call us crybabies— well, I've got news for them. We're not crybabies. We're fighters. And now we're going to have to prove that we're fighters.”

Newfoundlanders are tough. You have to be tough to survive here. The history of Newfoundland is filled with shipwrecks and seal hunt disasters and lost fishing vessels. Its early governors used to bail at the first sign of snow until in 1817 orders came from London that the current governor,
Admiral Francis Pickmore, must stay over and thereby demonstrate to the locals that their betters were truly better. In the spring Pickmore headed back to London—in a coffin.

“A person might live to the end of his days,” Newfoundland humorist Ray Guy once wrote of the resilience of Newfoundlanders, “and never cease to marvel and wonder, one way or another.” The wonder today is whether the province is up to battling what may prove the toughest element of all: economic reality. With collapsing fisheries and few jobs, the small places are shrinking, the people leaving for better opportunities either in St. John's or, more often, on the mainland.

This “emptying out,” of course, is also occurring in Saskatchewan, northern and northwestern Ontario, northern Quebec, the rural parts of Atlantic Canada, and isolated pockets right across the country. But only in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador is it necessary for those running for premier to talk about stopping the flow and even bringing the young people back. And only in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador—whose half-million people live on a land mass the size of Japan, with the lowest population density of all Canadian provinces—has out-migration become part of a larger story of discontent.

So serious did this become that in 2002 a Royal Commission began conducting hearings on “Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada”—a provincial venting that produced eerie echoes of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future a decade earlier. Canadian civil wars, it might be said, are fought sitting down or, in their most physically active form, standing patiently in line for microphone no. 3.

Vic Young, the erudite St. John's businessman who chaired the Newfoundland commission, was fully aware of the growing discontent. “We brought enormous riches into Canada,” he announced at the opening session of this $3 million navel-gazing exercise. “Our fishery, our forests, our hydro power, oil and gas reserves, our people, our strategic location. But we find ourselves at the bottom of the ladder. How can there be such a disconnect between what we brought into Canada and where we are today?”

That disconnect had outraged an increasing number of provincial personalities, including James McGrath, former federal fisheries minister in the brief 1979 Joe Clark government (“I wasn't there long enough to do any damage”) and former lieutenant-governor of the province. “Why is it,” the man with the thick glasses and wild head of white hair asked when I visited him at his “town” home in St. John's, “that we're one of the wealthiest pieces of real estate on the globe and yet we're perceived as the basket case of Canada?”

Newfoundlanders, McGrath said, were fed up with playing the hapless buffoon to the rest of the country, the punchline to so many jokes and, in the fall of 2006, the subject of ridicule in a car commercial for the manner in which they speak. Thanks to education and the sophistication of modern communications, the new Newfoundland, he believed, had finally grown out of its “incredible inferiority complex.” “We are,” he said, “no longer ashamed of our culture and our accents.”

McGrath had come to believe that for Newfoundlanders Confederation was a raw deal that verged on “cultural genocide.” Ottawa destroyed the fishery. Ottawa wants its share of oil royalties. Ontario takes the iron ore away for processing. Quebec takes hundreds of millions of dollars a year away in electricity. Those who'd been against Confederation in 1949—and the McGrath family numbered among the St. John's “townies” who opposed it—are back in full voice, joined by a frustrated youth whose province keeps leading the country in economic growth yet cannot offer them work.

“In 1949 we had a $40 million surplus,” McGrath argues. “We had no debt. We had the world's biggest fishery. We had untapped mineral resources in Labrador. We didn't even know about the oil and gas off our shores or about the hydroelectricity from Churchill Falls. That's the ‘basket case' we were when we came into Canada. And now there's this perception in Canada that Canada would be better off
without
this basket case?”

The growing frustration even led to a province-wide demand for a proper balance sheet that would prove Newfoundland has more than held its own in Confederation. One local newspaper,
The Independent,
concluded that since 1949 Canada has benefited by $53.5 billion, with a provincial return of only $8.9 billion. The federal government, on the other hand, cited other statistics to argue that billions more have flowed into the province than out.

In typical Canadian style, province and federal government were heading in opposite directions.

In early 2005 the new and nervy premier, Danny Williams, ordered the Canadian flag be removed from all provincial buildings. The revolutionary pink, white, and green flag of the original colony went up poles all over the island. Williams also rather brilliantly turned desperate federal campaign promises into a new deal on oil royalties and protection under the absurdly complicated equalization program. There were political and financial victories, but still the out-migration continued—in particular to Alberta and its high-paying jobs in the oil industry.

Newfoundland's toughest question of all—how to keep the young from leaving—was something the Royal Commission left alone. Perhaps it knew the answer and felt it better left unsaid. After all, Clyde Wells had swept to power in 1989 with the help of an impassioned call for jobs that might bring loved ones back from the mainland. One 1999 study even claimed that, at the rate people were leaving, by 2030 the population level would fall to what it was fifty years earlier when Newfoundland first became part of Canada. Another, kinder study done for the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies projected on the basis of current trends that the population in 2036 will equal that of 1960.

Bonavista is typical. Since the fishery went down, the once-bustling little town has lost more than a thousand residents—one in every five— and almost all of them young people who headed off to find their futures in some place that was not Bonavista and did not involve a collapsing fishery. Mayor Betty Fitzgerald was sitting on seventeen different committees trying to figure out how to bring new hope and new work to her little town. There'd been a few nibbles from tourism, but tourism, like the former fishery, is seasonal.

It would never be the magic formula so desperately required.

THE SEARCH FOR NEW IDEAS is nothing new in Newfoundland. Fears that the fisheries alone would never be enough were voiced from the day it entered Confederation. “We must develop or perish,” Joey Smallwood told Newfoundlanders. “We must develop or our people will go in the thousands to other parts of Canada. We must create new jobs, or our young men especially will go off to other places to get the jobs they can't get here.”

Smallwood created an Economic Development Department in 1950 and put a mysterious Latvian, Dr. Alfred Valdmanis, in charge, paying him the unheard-of salary of $25,000 a year to come up with new ideas. The department built a chocolate factory in Bay Roberts, a battery plant in Topsoil, a glove factory in Carbonear, a leather goods factory in Harbour Grace, a rubber boot factory in Holyrood. There was a knitting mill, a cement plant, a shoe factory—all founded on Valdmanis's ill-founded theory that a war-damaged Europe would never recover its industrial might in time to hold on to its traditional markets. “As from the spring of 1952,” Valdmanis confidently predicted, “there won't be further unemployment in Newfoundland.”

Valdmanis, of course, failed to recognize the Marshall Plan's effect on Europe's recovery. The projects failed. Doug Letto, the St. John's author of
Chocolate Bars and Rubber Boots,
calculates that over six years the schemes ate up $26 million. Following decades would see the Come-By-Chance oil refinery, the Marystown Shipyard, a phosphorus reduction plant, a scheme to produce hydroponic cucumbers, plans for forest products, iron ore, oil and gas, nickel—all held to be the answer, with some outright disasters, the others never quite answer enough.

As Newfoundlanders themselves often say, “Pigs may fly, but they're very unlikely birds.”

“Our young are gone,” the mayor of Bonavista said. “There's nothing here for them. Since 1992 it's been a struggle to keep as many people here as you can.” The facts back her up. According to a telling chart in the
St. John's Telegraph,
the province's population numbered 570,181 in 1984, among them 52,963 men and 52,520 women in the twenty to twenty-nine age group. Twenty years later the population had
fallen to 517,027 with only 33,299 men and 34,955 women in their twenties. It was pretty obvious who was getting out. And with 20 percent of the 2004 population above age fifty-five, it was equally obvious who was staying on.

After touring the province with a microphone open to anyone who wished to step up, the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada reported in 2003. “Into it, predictably,” wrote my
Globe and Mail
colleague Jeffrey Simpson, “poured a torrent of grievances, a deep sense of unfair treatment and misunderstanding from Canada, and revisionist histories of the good old days.”