Blogging in the province seems to have evolved to the point where we can have raging disputes on our respective blogs.
Liam O'Brien, chief schpeeler at Responsible Government League has taken exception to my comments on Iceland and an independent Newfoundland and Labrador. Liam takes issue with what he assumes are my points on the matter, suggesting that I am defending the status quo and supporting what I guess he would characterize as the evil Canadians. Here's the link to the post itself.
While his post is lengthy and well written, it suffers from a fundamental flaw: it misses the point entirely.
As noted in previous posts on this subject, the syllogism Iceland = Independent = Successful Fishery//Newfoundland=Not Independent=Fisheries Disaster doesn't stand up to closer scrutiny.
The idea of an independent Newfoundland managing the fishery as Iceland rests on a series of unfounded assumptions. Specifically these are:
- that Newfoundland is the same as Iceland in political, economic and social terms;
- that when dealing with fisheries management issues, local elites in an independent Newfoundland would have done something radically different than what occurred within Confederation; and,
- the current situation is entirely the result of Confederation and particularly the "fact" that Ottawa controls the backbone of "our " economy.
Let us dispose of these as quickly as possible and thereby set the stage for dealing with the substantive issue, namely what policy ought to be in place for the fishery offshore Newfoundland and Labrador.
Newfoundland and Iceland are the same. On the face of it, this is a difficult proposition to sustain. Iceland is a relatively homogeneous society in which language and religion, for example, are the same. There is no history of internal factional fighting on any denominational or other lines. The country is also outward-looking and was particularly so from the 1940s onward.
While Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are predominantly local-born (the ratios now are the same as in 1911) and speak English primarily, the place has a long history of fractious internal disputes along ethnic and religious lines. These were managed primarily by a division of political administration and public services among adherents of particular denominations. In hiring decisions, for example, Newfoundland's prevailing social structure at the time of Confederation did not place emphasis on qualifications; it emphasized one's religious beliefs. Ability was less important than what church one attended.
An Independent Newfoundland government would have acted differently from the post-Confederation governments. While this is a subject that has undoubtedly entertained many a discussion among undergraduate historians at the Breezeway or Ben's, it is difficult to predict with any degree of accuracy what might have occurred in an independent Newfoundland.
However, we can look at what existed in 1949 and at some specific examples to see if there is any evidence at all that Confederation constrained Newfoundlanders in any meaningful way in matters of fisheries policy.
Newfoundland in 1949 was and remains to a large extent a society which is focused inward. As much as there is a tradition of international sea-trading, most Newfoundlanders up to the time of Confederation had little experience of the world outside their own community. There remains a powerful insular, if not tribal, sentiment and one which is distinctly collectivist. Ask Margaret Wente about that.
One of the major factors affecting Iceland's economic success has been its emphasis on education. In Newfoundland, our education system remained wasteful and in many respects deficient up until the 1990s. Confederation did not produce any significant in this area; in fact, Term 17 (Denominational Education) was specifically included in the Terms of Union as a way of mollifying clerical sentiment in the erstwhile province. The established interests were primarily concerned with maintaining the status quo.
The same can be said of the economy. Both the anti-Confederate forces and to a certain extent individuals such as Ches Crosbie on the Confederation delegation were concerned with perpetuating the economic status quo in Newfoundland. They sought a continuation of the quasi-feudal fisheries economy as well as the continuation of the prohibitive tariffs on imported goods to the extent they could be sustained. I have already noted elsewhere the extent to which pre-Confederation economic policies in Newfoundland favoured the business class in St. John's at the expense of the majority of the population.
As for the fishery, as Raymond Blake has noted in his worthwhile but largely ignored book Canadians at last: Canada integrates Newfoundland as a province,(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) the fishery was ignored by the 1948 Newfoundland delegation to Canada. The only sections of the Terms dealing with fisheries issues continue the saltfish marketing board established by the Commission Government to flog a product that by the late 1940s was facing declining demand. [pp. 146-176]
Thus, at the time of Confederation, the economic and social elites were generally aimed at preserving the existing order in every respect. On the face of it, this is the antithesis of the situation proposed by the Newfoundland nationalists when using Iceland as "proof" of their argument against Confederation.
Again, as Blake notes (p. 147), "[i]f the governments [in Ottawa and St. John's] had pursued the policies recommended by [several inquiries and commissions into the fishery immediately after Confederation], they would have created a small corps of fishermen concentrated in a small number of communities engaged in both the salt and fresh-frozen fisheries from modern boats and trawlers with greatly increased capacity". However, by 1954 it was clear in Ottawa that there was no other work for the fishermen and their families who would have been displaced by such approaches.
For political reasons rooted in this province and in the Maritimes, Ottawa settled on some modest efforts at centralization of fishing efforts with improvements in living standards coming largely from income support programs. For those who argue that Ottawa ignored the Newfoundland fishery, be aware that the first post-Confederation fisheries development program was introduced by the Government of Canada on 05 May 1949, little more than a month after Union.
For his part, Smallwood initially hoped that his industrialization policies would give work to displaced fishermen. When his projects failed, as Blake puts it, "he turned his fury on the federal government, blaming it for the destruction of the fishery". How odd that O'Brien and others repeat the words of Joe Smallwood, their ancient nemesis. More importantly, though, the provincial government did not propose any significant alternatives to Ottawa's approach and, to add my own assessment to Blake, throughout the 1960s and into more recent decades, Newfoundland's own policies have largely been aimed at perpetuating the system of income supports from Ottawa first developed in the years immediately after Confederation.
Part of the nationalist "Iceland" argument contends that economic circumstances would have transformed, as if by magic, the insular, conservative - almost reactionary - social and political order in an independent Newfoundland into a bastion of self-confident entrepreneurship. In other words, those pesky federal social programs sapped local drive.
Sadly, there is little evidence to suggest a nationalist government in power behaved any differently than its predecessors. By the 1980s, the fishery was in crisis yet again and the Newfoundland government was nearly broke. It was also captained by an ardent Newfoundland nationalist, Brian Peckford whose chief lieutenant was to coin the phrase "the rack of Confederation" when describing the oil and gas ownership dispute. Despite the evidence from Iceland that was readily available at the time and a growing world move toward free trade and free markets, the political solution to the fishery offered by Newfoundland was strikingly familiar.
First, some fish processors were rescued from bankruptcy and reformed into Fishery Products International. The new company would be controlled by provincial legislation and, as it turned out, headed by a bureaucrat imbued with anything but an entrepreneurial trading objective. Fish prices were still set by collusion and the fish processing company focused its attention on supporting provincial social policy until the collapse of the cod stocks forced it to do otherwise.
Second, the government generally favoured a system which stuffed as many people into the fishery as the industry could manage. The situation described by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies is the result of exactly a policy aimed at using the fishery to take any and all comers irrespective of the impact such approaches had on the economics of the fishery. As Peckford himself said, he would rather see 20, 000 fishermen making a pittance than see half that number earn a living wage from the fishery. The most nationalist of Newfoundland governments, like most before and after, viewed the fishery as a social program, not as a business.
What more need be said to appreciate that there is little substantive evidence to support the nationalist use of Iceland as a model for an independent Newfoundland with a thriving fishery.
Ottawa controls "our resource". In 1949, Newfoundland had control over fish within its three mile limit. At Confederation, Canada's jurisdiction applied as so Newfoundland obtained a 12 mile buffer in which it could fish exclusively. Until the 1970s, when international law recognized a 200 mile exclusive economic zone, everything beyond first three and then 12 miles was the high seas. The fish were there for whomever could catch them. They were never "our" fish from the outset. Legally and in every other meaningful sense, the fish resources of the Grand Banks and elsewhere offshore Newfoundland and Labrador remain a world resource as they were in 1949. Our economic success or failure derives from our own attitudes, not our ownership of anything.
Under the Constitution, Ottawa controls access to the offshore fisheries resources. However, the Newfoundland government controls the processing sector entirely. In any discussion of fish policy these two things need to be taken together or, to extrapolate as Blake's argument, it is important to recognize that federal fisheries policy is rooted in local political forces in Newfoundland as much as anything else.
Newfoundland-based fish harvesting interests have never had problem gaining access to fish; indeed, until nature forced John Crosbie to close the ground fish fishery, Ottawa bent relentlessly to pressure from the province (initially, government, industry and the wider public and then later from the latter two) to maintain cod quotas at the highest possible levels. Domestic fish harvesters highgraded and engaged in other illegal practices all of which contributed to the decimation of the codstocks. Only in the late 1980s did the provincial government begin to call for reduced cod quotas but they were ignored by the contrary advice of Newfoundland's federal cabinet minister whose riding depended heavily on the fishery.
Conclusion: The title of this post comes from a Monty Python sketch in which a logician is lamenting wife's inability to understand simple formulations. Given the major premise that all fish live in water and the minor premise that all trout are fish, the logician's wife will conclude either that trout live in trees or that "I do not love her any more." (Hint: the sketch is really about the logician's lack of sense.)
In the same fashion, Newfoundland nationalists point to Iceland for nothing other than their completely illogical conclusion that responsibility for every problem with the province's fisheries can be laid squarely in the lap of the Government of Canada.
Yet, pre-Confederation history - particularly, the broader social and political forces at work - as well as post-Confederation evidence suggests that Newfoundland's fisheries problems are more deeply rooted. Hence, they are more difficult to address.
At no point in its history, has the government at St. John's been incapable of taking an approach to fisheries management within its jurisdiction and advocating changes outside its power that mirrored the Icelandic model. There were no legal impediments; none.
The reason why the government has consistently failed to advocate Icelandic solutions must come from some other explanations, of the types I have suggested here.
Fundamentally, fisheries policy is not a problem to be solved by determining which bureaucrats - those in Ottawa or those in St. John's - have the most control. Rather, the long-term solution to the problem of making the local fishery economically and environmentally sustainable lies in giving genuine power to those who actually engage in the industry.
That will be the subject of the next major post: "Better fewer, but better".
