Good to the last vote: Grit version #nlpoli

Not to be outdone by the Dippers, the Grits and their leader Kevin Aylward will release their fisheries policy on Friday at 11:00 AM at the Delta Hotel in St. John’s.

This one should be a doozie.

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Good to the last vote: NDP paints own caricature #nlpoli

Your humble e-scribbler said it most recently just a few days ago:

The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs.  Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.

The province’s New Democrats unveiled their fisheries policy on Thursday.  It calls for increased government intervention in the fishery and an essentially open-ended commitment to public spending to keep plants open that are no longer financially viable or that are having problems due to excessive government intervention in the fishery already.

Here are some choice bits from the very brief NDP news release:

[NDP leader Lorraine] Michael says government must immediately reopen the plant [at Marystown] while the audit is going on, giving workers more employment.

The NDP wants the federal government to help fund the scheme in a perversion of the Employment Insurance system that looks more like make work than not:

In addition to demanding the immediate reopening of the plant, today the NDP is calling for the redirection of traditional Job Creation Partnership-type programs into the plant to ensure long term employment for fish plant workers.

And if that wasn’t enough, the New Democrats want to increase the government role in the fishery even more:

Michael also noted that since the plant is currently closed, the redfish concession given to OCI, which was agreed to by plant workers in order keep the plant open, should be revoked until the plant is reopened.

Now everyone should know that this specific release is aimed at a seat the NDP thinks they can win.  But the principle behind it is exactly what your humble e-scribbler predicted.  The NDP want to continue the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering begun decades ago with a return to the worst of the policies that helped create the current mess in the first place.

You couldn’t write a better parody of an NDP fisheries policy if you tried.

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Building the fishery of the future

To look at the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador is to see as clear an example as one may find of the fundamental bankruptcy of the sort of old-fashioned politics that has existed from the earliest of times and that persists right down to modern day Ottawa.

It is not business, as your humble e-scribbler has said before, as much as it is a Frankenstein experiment in social engineering.  Politician after politician after politician has used the fishery for his own political gain. The fishery is the heart and soul of the province, we are told.  Mention fishing and you will find politicians eager to display their passion to rise to its defence against all manner of assailants, most of them entirely fictional.

Is there fundamentally any difference between John Efford, say, and Ryan Cleary? 

Absolutely not.

Cleary with his crusade to find out what happened to the fish is merely the latest version of the old blow-hard Newfoundland politician.  Cleary’s already mounted his ass and headed off to find the missing fish.  If by some miracle, Cleary gets the crowd in Ottawa to fund the junket-commission he wants, he will look, inevitably, in all the places where the information isn’t.  If he doesn’t get the cash – as he won’t – Cleary will claim this is yet another example of Canadian exploitation of the poor benighted fisher folk who form the moral core of a long-suffering society blah blah blah blah.

Either way, Cleary will garner  column inch after sound bite from reporters at home who are always ready to spew the bullshit to the punters or from mainland scribes hard up for copy and who know as much about the eastern-most part of Canada as the average Hmong tribesman does and seem to care even less.

Passion is their thing.  After an early embarrassment and dismissal from cabinet, John Efford rebuilt his political profile as a fisheries crusader who was as full of it as Cleary is, or Tom Rideout or any of a dozen others.

For politicians, all this will be good to the last fish. Kathy Dunderdale is vowing to step into the latest problem at the Marystown plant so that fish are processed in the province and not sent outside where they can be turned into food or some such far more cost-effectively than they can be handled in places like Marystown. 

This is the same problem, incidentally, that Fishery Products International had with the same species and the same plant on a few years ago.  Kath should recall.  She and her colleagues decided the way to handle that was to smash FPI to bits.  The lucrative bits went to foreigners.  The headquarters building changed hands a couple of times within a year and now houses some lovely provincial government tenants. The other bits wound up going to Ocean Choice, the Torily-connected fish processing company that is now experiencing some sort of karmic retribution. 

What goes around, comes around, apparently and in a small province, it seems to pick up speed on the return trip.

So firmly entrenched is the political desire to interfere in the fishery that the current fisheries minister is refusing to accept a dramatic proposal from the fishermen and the processors to do the sorts of things people have been saying they needed to do for years. 

The current provincial government’s decision only further emphasises the extent to which the fishery is controlled by people who have no business in the business.

The solution is to turn control of the industry over to the only people who can decide for themselves how best to run it:  processors and harvesters.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the first bold proposal to reform the fishery is for the provincial government to accept the recent fisheries reform proposal without further delay.

The second idea is to eliminate all subsidies to the industry within two years. They drain the provincial treasury and serve only to prop up businesses that otherwise wouldn’t make it.

The third idea is for the provincial government to abolish processing licenses with the elaborate red tape restrictions that go with it.  The current system helps to keep too many people and too many plants working in an industry featuring low wages, limited capital for investment and with no prospect that new workers will enter the industry to keep it going.

Instead, license processors as businesses under occupational health and safety rules or anything similar legislation. Beyond that?  Nothing. Let processors open plants, close plants or reorganize plants as they see fit based on the business’ finances.  If a plant goes bust, then it goes bust. 

The end result will be fewer plants but fewer plants is exactly what the industry needs.  Where those plants will be and how many that will exist are not things anybody can or should predict.  What will emerge at the end of the change will be stronger companies that are more likely to survive in a highly competitive global market.  In the end there might only be one big company – looking, not surprisingly like FPI – and a bunch of small niche companies.  There could be a couple of bigger, integrated operations but the people in the industry will be able to make a decent living from their work and their industry will be more attractive than the current mess is.

Fish harvesting also needs an overhaul.

The fourth idea is to establish a system of fish auctions using internationally recognised grading systems would improve quality and the cash that fishermen get for their landings.

Processors from any province would be required to bid for landings at the auction sites in a daily competition. Alternately, processors could operate their own fleets or make supply contracts with harvesters.  The two systems could operate side-by-side but harvesters would have a choice. 

Increased competition would also ensure they wouldn’t be victimised in a system like the old one where they had no choice but sell to the handful of locals in a closed system. It would also give fishermen greater control over their own individual operations.

Changes to the harvesting side of the industry will need federal involvement, but federal politicians and bureaucrats would have good reason to support a system that reduces the political and financial headaches of the current system.

Fish harvesting businesses would also profit by the fifth idea, the elimination of the byzantine system of gear restrictions and vessel size restrictions that serve no useful purpose in a modern industry that is run as an industry. “Buddying-up”  - having several licenses on one boat – is an example of how people in the industry are already trying to make sensible changes to meet the economic pressures of the industry.  They are limited in how far they can go, however, by the inertia that keeps in place a system of rules that may have worked decades ago but that simply make no sense any more.

Something that may have worked once but that no longer makes any sense:  that is really the tale of the entire fishing industry in Newfoundland and Labrador, if not all of Atlantic Canada.

To build the fishery of the future, we have to let go of ideas that simply make no sense any more.

We must turn the industry over to the people who are trying to make a living in it.

They know best what to do.

We just need to give them a chance.

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Updated Bonus Idea: Dismantling the Stalinist provincial bureaucracy that is stifling the fishery at the provincial level will allow the fisheries department to focus on new priorities. 

The biggest of these would be encouraging aquaculture .

The next biggest would helping to promote a new identity for local seafood based on quality.  This would be a key part of ensuring the future fishery is internationally competitive.

Political impotence and the little blue pills

Fish minister Clyde “The Finger” Jackman is going to fight to save a local coast guard co-ordination centre and its dozen jobs.

Well, that’s what the torqued CBC headline says. 

The provincial government he’s a part of has a financial mess of its own creation on its hands and no plan to deal with it and Jackman has been the major obstacle to serious fisheries reform in the province but that’s another issue.

But why does Jackman have to fight for anything at all with the federal Conservatives under Stephen Harper?

After all Clyde and all his provincial Conservative buddies campaigned vigorously for the federal Conservatives in the recent general election.  Well, okay some campaigned more vigorously than others but you get the idea. 

They shouldn’t have to do anything but pick up the phone and ask their friends to fix things back up again.
Jackman’s help in the last federal election apparently counted for exactly jack-shite.  He met with his federal counterpart, uttered a few choice words and left empty-handed, much like those people in the fishery who worked hard, gave Jackman a report on restructuring and then watched the minister fling it back in their faces for no good reason.

That’s likely to be as effective as what CBC’s report quotes as Jackman’s advice to other seriously interested in this issue:

"I've encouraged people, you know, to write to the minister to do what they have to get their points across," said Jackman.

Much like the fisheries reform thingy.

But why should anyone have to do anything?  Kathy Dunderdale can just call her friend Stephen Harper and the whole thing will be solved.  After all, the Premier made her choice, is proud of her choice and thinks she did a wonderful job even if the overwhelming majority of voters – including rafts of her own supporters – went with another choice.

Kath and her Krew are rapidly becoming the poster children for political impotence.

Not the cure for it mind you.

Just fine examples of political dysfunction…

And of course how this bunch of little blue pills can’t cure it.

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Fried Clyde dumps Danny’s fish policy

Remember earlier in the month when fisheries minister Clyde Jackman abandoned the fisheries reform process?

Let’s just take a jump back to something that stood out from his newser at the time:

What Jackman did mention one too many times for comfort was the idea that some people think time will take care of the whole thing.  In other words, in an industry dominated by people rapidly approaching retirement, most of the people who would be “restructured” will simply leave the industry on their own if nothing else happens. He also talked about signs that prices might be climbing again soon, perhaps another clue as to what some in the provincial government might be hoping for.

No surprise, then, that Jackman is on the front page of the Telegram on Tuesday with this to say:

“…how can I justify, going forward looking for $190 million dollars, to justify a 30 per cent reduction (in harvesting), when the report clearly says that if you leave it alone it will restructure to an even greater degree than the ask that the FFAW put forward?”

How indeed, except that there is a difference in sheer human cost between an organized series of cuts and the wholesale slaughter that may well leave nothing much in the fishery to restructure when it is all over. You can see the same thread running through the front end of the letter Jackman sent to the processors and the union representing fish-plant workers and fishermen, now called “harvesters” in polite circles.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Jackman’s letter is that he winds up abandoning the position he and his colleagues championed for seven years. Gone is taxpayer-funded bailouts and buyouts.  In two successive federal elections, Jackman and his colleagues tried to get commitment after federal commitment to doing just that.

What’s even more bizarre  - some might say disingenuous - about the Dunderdale’s government’s supposed concern for public spending is that it doesn’t apply to things like Muskrat Falls. 

It’s also a bizarre strategy to take in an election year especially when there are so many rural seats the Tories currently hold but where their grip might be weakening a bit.

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Association of Seafood Producers responds to Jackman

Below you’ll find the complete text of a statement issued Tuesday by the Association of Seafood Producers.

Key bits:

• ASP clearly supports the process that led to the report and the report itself, describing Tom Clift’s work as “a comprehensive analysis of the predicament facing the industry” and as something that lay the groundwork for “a planned landing”
• By refusing to take the report to cabinet, fisheries minister Clyde Jackman is apparently breaking one of government’s commitments in the memorandum of understanding.
• The processors were looking for government assistance in securing a loan to help pay for the industry down-sizing, not a simple request for cash as the fisheries minister suggested.

:

You an find the Telegram’s online story here.

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MOU PIFO

A classic Telegram editorial, your humble e-scribbler once wrote, consists of a summary of an issue concluding with a blinding insight into the completely frigging obvious.

Such is the Saturday Telegram offering, this time on the latest fisheries report unveiled and summarily rejected on Friday by fisheries minister Clyde Jackman:

Something has to be done. It may end up being a half-measure, or even less.  But the sheer size of the problem is now abundantly clear.  And for the industry, it has to be terrifying.

Four phrases.

Four penetrating insights into what is obvious to even the most casual observer of the fishery over the past 30 years.

That closing paragraph is right up there with Clyde Jackman’s claim on Friday that the MOU process was not a waste as everyone now had a detailed description of how bad things are.

Who didn’t know that already?

Well, besides Clyde Jackman, evidently. 

To be fair to both Jackman and the Telegram editorialist, though, they really are just a reflection of the fundamental problem that has plagued the fishery in this province since 1949.  People know what needs to be done to turn the fishery into an industry that is sustainable and relatively prosperous.  People in the current cabinet know.  People in past cabinets have known. Those who know and who are willing to do it are hampered by those who know nothing and others who vigorously oppose any changes at all. 

In the meantime, the only people suffering are the people in the industry.  Eventually time will take care of them.  Clyde Jackman kept mentioning that last Friday.  He really didn’t need to.

Everyone knows it.

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Jackman runs from fisheries restructure report

Fisheries minister Clyde Jackman is running as fast as he can from a fisheries restructuring report that recommends restructuring the fishery.

This is not a surprise for a minister who appeared clueless on the issues in his own portfolio when he admitted first receiving the report.

This is not a surprise given that the current administration like pretty well all its predecessors of  either blue or red persuasion have run from meaningful fisheries reform as fast as their little legs could carry them.

The only change in the past year seems to be that the industry has gone from midway up sh**t creek to being pretty close to the headwaters.

Bottom line:  we are still in an election year with a Tory leadership out there waiting to get settled afterward.  No politician of any political stripe is going to advocate what needs to happen (the report would be a good starting point) under either of those circumstances. And for the Tories in power, they have a double reason to stay as short-sighted as they can.

Anyone still wonder why Danny left in such a gigantic hurry?

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Tom Rideout meets the Bride of Frankenstein

Anyone who wants to understand the reason why the fishery in this province remains an economic and social disaster need look no further than recent comments by the former Premier and former fisheries minister who had not one but two kicks at the portfolio.

Tom Rideout spoke to a young audience in Corner Brook the other day. As the Western Star reports it, Rideout gave only two options for the future:

One option is to let the private sector take over the industry — whereby non-profitable plants will eventually close and licences will lapse, solving the problem of over-processing capacity.

“It will be messy, but it will solve the problem,” he said.

However, as the past has shown, he said, whenever a processor closes a plant, often another group will claim they are able to do it better.

“The communities get together, their political leadership get together, they demand the licence be transferred, the new operator limps on from one crisis to another, and the communities continue to what I would call a slow march to their own death,” he said.

The second option is for government to buy out processors in geographically defined regions of the province. He said there are many employment opportunities on the Avalon Peninsula, that the plants in these areas can be be more easily closed and these areas could survive.

By his own version, Rideout served as fisheries minister in the 1980s –at a time of supposed boom – and then served in the same job about 20 years later, at a time when things were much worse.  Rideout’s version of that in-between time [CBC audio link] is, to put it generously, a bit self-serving.  For the moment, however, let us stick with Rideout’s version of events in the 1980s and then the later bit within the past few years.

During Tom Rideout’s tenure as fisheries minister in the 1980s, the fishery was in the early stages of a decline that led, ultimately to the 1992 cod fish collapse.  The policies at both the provincial and federal level encouraged people to fish anything and everything that could be caught.  The boom, as Rideout sees it, was entirely a time of artificial plenty brought about by policies that contributed significantly to the 1992 collapse. Things looked good but anyone who wanted to see could tell things were bad.

If we did not know this from other comments, as we do, we know that the fishery was in a very difficult state because Rideout tells us that in his interview with CBC.  Someone else can ask why it is that Rideout at one time claims things were great when he was minister and at the same time acknowledges the arse was pretty much out of ‘er at the same time. 

Suffice it to say that Rideout’s appreciation of his original tenure, therefore is superficial, at best.  He apparently has no grasp of what happened in the 1980s. he has some understanding of the basic  problem – too many people, too few fish – and the political dynamic that helped to create it in the 1980s when he was minister.  This is the same dynamic that took hold once again in the late 1990s when another fisheries minister did what Rideout and his cabinet colleagues did in the 1980s.

That is, they operated under the assumption that the provincial government must interfere in the fishery to a degree it does not do in other sectors of the economy.  You can see this in the way Rideout describes the two options, quoted above. In both, it is the provincial government that manages the fishery as it does now by controlling the issuance of licenses.

What Rideout describes as “letting the private sector take over” is, of course nothing of the sort. He is basically describing the situation that exists today.  That’s how he can then describe this part of the scenario:

“The communities get together, their political leadership get together, they demand the licence be transferred, the new operator limps on from one crisis to another, and the communities continue to what I would call a slow march to their own death…”.

If the fishery were left to run as a business, there would be no licenses to transfer based on political criteria.    A company could apply for a license to operate business and, so long as it met the same business regulations as all others, it would open. Licenses would be issued only on the basis of operating a business, not on the location of the plant, the type of fish or anything of the sort.  These are all artificial restrictions on business that reflect the very situation in the time Rideout was first the fisheries minister that created the political morass that continues today.

As long as the plant could make money it would stay open.  If it could not make money, then it would close.  Period.  Rideout is apparently concerned about workers.  Well, undoubtedly some bright people could figure out how to deal with that just as bright people in other industries do now.

That is what would happen if the fishery were run as any other type of industry.  And incidentally, the fishery department would comprise a few officials in another department of food related industry or something of the sort.  A small fishery department would be nothing but a reflection that government finally got out of the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering Rideout  - and a great many others - helped run.

Rideout’s second scenario is nothing more than a dolled up version of the first, but with a much greater financial burden for ordinary taxpayers in the province.

In short, whatever Tom Rideout told that young and impressionable audience in Corner Brook a couple of days ago, he showed them how persistent is the thinking that created the mess in the fishery and that continues to torture the men and women of the province today with the same blinkered thinking.

Rideout is right about one thing though, aside from his admission that like the rest of us he has made mistakes.  Rideout is right that nothing of any consequence will happen as long as we are in this pre-election period.  We can add to it the pre-leadership period and then right after that, the next pre-election period. That is always what happens as long as politicians of a certain type want to play God in the fishery.

Until politicians decide to get themselves out of the fishing industry altogether, the people involved in the industry are doomed to live daily in reruns of the same social slasher film.

Update:  Here’s the CBC online version of Rideout’s comments.

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Related:

• Good to the last fish
• And it only took a year
• Up the creek with Jackman and Rideout

What’s happening?!!!

Well, in the world of provincial fisheries not much of any value to people in the fishing industry.

In July, the provincial government announced it would start spending cash duplicating scientific research on some fish stocks that was already being done elsewhere. “Study” is what some government’s do when they lack the political mojo to do something concrete. Nothing screams impotence like the July fish science announcement.

Somewhere along the line, the provincial fisheries department hired Fred Stubbs to handle media in the department.

Hence Friday’s announcement of an announcement previously announced.

And they will be studying a fish stock which is – in case someone missed the announcement in 1992 – under a fishing moratorium.

Odd they missed that little tidbit of information. 

It was in all the papers.

Anyway, there are two bits of actually useful information in this vacuous POS from the fish department:

First, we now have a date when the Irish will send us their boat.

Second, we also know of yet another junket to Ireland that produced nothing other than expenses that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador will have to cover.

There is a third thing, but that isn’t really in the release.  It’s what’s not in the release. The provincial government is going to spend bags of taxpayer cash to study cod, a species that is commercially extinct and that could easily become biologically extinct as well if we aren’t careful.

What isn’t in the release is a mention of species that people in this province depend on to earn a living and about which the scientific and commercial fishing community know relatively little.

Crab.

Shrimp.

Stuff like that.

If we are going to spend public money, surely we should be spending it to gather information we don’t have on fish stocks that are commercially important.

Hiring out-of-work Irish crews to study cod seems like a monumental waste of time.  Well a waste of time unless you want to distract attention away from the government’s complete impotence when it comes to fisheries issues that matter.

Someone check Clyde Jackman’s luggage and make sure he didn’t lose the memorandum of understanding file in some Galway motel.

That’s the last thing fishermen need.

Okay.

The last thing they need other than a $14 million study of northern cod.

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Edit:  removed question mark not needed.

Good to the last fish

Two stories this week each highlighted in their own way the ongoing and largely ignored fisheries crisis in Newfoundland and Labrador.

On the one hand, you have a story about a fish plant converting to produce canned whelk – sea snails – for an overseas market. A local fish company will – as the Telegram described it -  “start with between 12-14 positions for four to five weeks with a possibility of future expansion.”

That story made the major media in the province.

The second story was a hearing by a provincial government agency into a request by another local fish company to move one of its processing licenses from one community on the province’s northeast coast to another on the southeast coast.  The plant is only major employer in the northeast coast town. There are no other economic prospects in the area for the plant’s aging, seasonal workforce.

For those who may not be familiar with the fisheries crisis in this province, let us put it as succinctly as possible:  there are fewer and fewer fish in the ocean.  You can see this in the fact that fish plants have now turned from processing  the creatures that swim through the water using their fins and tails to packaging up things like snails and jellyfish.

They call it fishing out the food web.  Humans started at the top with the really big animals.  Over the centuries and with no apparent slackening of blood-lust, they’ve collectively managed to demolish species after species around the globe until the humans now catch the tiny thing those bigger fish used to eat.

Toward the end of his life, the late Jon Lien used to do talks about this sort of thing.  He had a foil packet covered in Japanese or Korean writing stashed under the podium as a prop.  At the right moment in his talk, Lien would hold it up to the audience and ask if anyone knew what was in it.

None did.

Dried jellyfish was the answer, processed by a local plant and shipped off to the East as a snack food.

Yes, friends, we are moments away from a krill fishery.

At the same time, there are still thousands of people in Newfoundland and Labrador trying to squeeze a very meagre living from processing fish for a few weeks a year and then collecting government hand-outs for the rest.  A report delivered to the current administration when it was still young pointed out that the typical fish plant worker made less than $10,000 a year from labour, picking up another $5,000 in employment insurance premiums.

There are still way too many of them – plants and plant workers – for them all to make a decent living from what fish, and now snails, there is to turn into frozen blocks. The only thing that has changed in the better part of a decade since that report is that the workers are finding it harder and harder to collect enough weeks of work to qualify for the EI.

Oh yes, and the prospect of a fish plant adding up to 15 jobs for a month stuffing slimy globs of flesh into tins makes province-wide news as a positive thing.

As it turns out, there is some sort of poetic symbolism in all this.  Around the time that a bunch of West Country merchants backstopped Giovanni Caboto’s explorations five centuries ago, British fishermen were trying to find a new place to wet their lines.  Seems they’d managed to clean out their own grounds and had started to spread farther and farther in search of new species to decimate.

They found such a place in the waters off Newfoundland where the cod were supposedly so plentiful they could be had by lowering a basket over the side of the ship. Now cod are a species declared commercially extinct in 1992 and teetering on the edge of ecological extinction.

Yet still there are people who want to keep fishing them. And jellyfish, slugs and in the not-too-distant future, perhaps sea snot or microbes.

As depressing as it seems, there are solutions. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in a  recent review essay in the New Yorker, 

M.P.A.s [marine protected areas], smart aquaculture, and I.T.Q.s [individual transferable quotas] —these are all worthy proposals that, if instituted on a large enough scale, would probably make a difference.  … it is in “everyone’s interest” to take the steps needed to prevent an ocean-wide slide into slime.

It is indeed.

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As pure as the driven snow…

But besides the scientific reasons, Gilkinson said there is a political reason for the trip as well.

He said under United Nations rules, coastal states are obligated to “identify and characterize” VME’s adjacent to them.

“It’s important these areas be identified and mapped,” said Gilkinson.

Curious how a news story can include more than a little bit of editorialising.

That quote is from an August 2 story in the Telegram on the recently completed exploration of areas offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. Notice that following the obligation of coastal states to conduct oceanic research is considered by the Telegram to be a “political reason”.

The project turned up a couple of dozen new species, and generally added significantly to our collective knowledge of the east coast offshore. But that is “political”, as if international obligations – United Nations rules – put some kind of tarnish on things.

Notice as well that while the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had a leading role in this expedition, the Telly story didn’t do much beyond mention that the guy they quoted worked for the federal fisheries ministry. He was – in the words the Telly writer chose – merely “on the trip” that was “out of” the Bedford oceanographic institute.

Incidentally, Bond Papers told you about this expedition back on July 21, while the ship doing the work was still offshore Newfoundland.

Now by contrast in early July, the Telly nearly blew a collective blood vessel endorsing the Premier’s decision to drop millions of provincial taxpayers dollars on studying how many fish are in the ocean.  The research is supposed to help “us” make better fisheries decisions.

At no point did anyone at the Telly suggest that this little expenditure might be political.  No one bothered to point out in the Telegram, that the “us” spending the money only has to decide how many fish plants to license. That doesn’t require a detailed knowledge of capelin populations near the southeast shoal.

The announcement came based in no small measure on the unfounded claim that the federal fisheries department had basically given up on research altogether.  Nothing at all political in those false claims, apparently, at least as far as the Telly was concerned then or is concerned now.

And of course, this recent expedition in no way proved the inherent bullshit in the earlier claims about DFO and and its supposed lack of fish science.

Nope.

According to the Telly, only the federal program had any hint of politics in it.

The provincial government’s news, by contrast, was apparently as pure as the driven snow and in no way looked like a pile of snow on Duckworth Street at the end of a long hard winter…well at least as far as any possible hint of political motivation might be concerned.

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And it only took a year…

Fisheries reform is a success.

Well, that is if “success” means employing legions of bureaucrats to engage in endless meetings that produce exactly nothing after a full year of meetings.

Under the terms of agreement setting up those meetings, all the work was supposed to be finished seven months ago.

And it’s not like you haven’t heard this before:

Knowledge is not the problem in the fishery.

Impotence is.

And no amount of money, no army of scientists, no fleet of research vessels will ever find a little blue pill to cure that problem.

 

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Are you smarter than a cheese grater, now?

Remember that fisheries research cash announcement that seemed to have been cobbled together within the past six weeks?

Well, there’s a bit more evidence of the whole thing was baked up in a few weeks.  The evidence comes from the release of a consultation document to support development of a coastal and oceans management strategy by the provincial governments.

Environment minister Charlene Johnson is in the thick of it, once again, with this quote from the news release:

“Our oceans play a very valuable role in our ecosystems and it is important that we employ an appropriate policy framework for their management,”…

Charlene has an interest in and jurisdiction over the ocean.

Interesting.

In late May – about six weeks ago – she sure didn’t.

That’s because, according to Johnson, “if the Leader of the Opposition was so concerned about the environment and offshore she should have asked me a question where jurisdiction does fall under my department and that is when the oil reaches the land, Mr. Speaker.”

In that same session, natural resources minister Calamity Kathy Dunderdale went so far as to put a specific delimitation on where the shore began: the “Minister of Environment and Conservation … has no responsibility beyond the high water mark.”

Dunderdale – who is also Danny Williams’ hand-picked choice as second in command on the good ship Williams – also had no trouble defining where the fisheries minister stood:  his “did not go any further than that either as far as the offshore was concerned.”

How truly odd, then, that the other minister involved in the oceans strategy consultation was none other than Clyde Jackman, minister of fisheries and aquaculture.

Now we’ve already had more than a few chortles  at Dunderdale’s expense over this whole issue of jurisdiction. Okay so maybe there were a few guffaws too. But for an administration  whose deputy premier only a few weeks ago was adamant that  ministers had absolutely no responsibility for what went on below the high water mark on the shore, this new document is a gigantic change of direction.

All in six weeks.

But that’s not the end of it.

This new strategy is supposedly about…well, let’s let Charlene tell us:

“Our goal is sustainability and ensuring we use our resources effectively…”

Laudable stuff, indeed.

The word “sustainable” occurs no fewer than 36 times in the consultation document itself, usually in conjunction with the word “manner”, as in things must be done in a “sustainable manner”.

The responsibility for this sustainable stuff rests with none other than Charlene Johnson and her intrepid little department:

The Department of Environment and Conservation is responsible for developing and implementing the Sustainable Development Act, the Sustainable Development Strategy, and coordinating interdepartmental interests. It supports the Sustainable Development Roundtable, comprised of stakeholders from around the province, and
the development and monitoring of indicators to ensure development adheres to the principles of sustainability. (p.13)

Sustainable Development Act?

Yes, that would be the same piece of legislation that was part of the Tory campaign platform in 2003, passed into law in early 2007 but never implemented.

The roundtable?

Doesn’t exist, apparently.

And that sustainable development strategy?  Well, if the Act had been put into effect, then the whole thing would already exist. Instead, government is trotting out yet another consultation to develop yet another strategy on things which apparently are beyond its ministerial competence and all of this is being done before they bother to put into an effect a commitment made in 2003.

For those who are counting that is a total of seven years to get exactly nowhere.

The Sustainable Development Act required that cabinet approve a comprehensive strategic environment management plan for the whole province within two years of the Act coming into force.  In other words, if this Act had been put into effect the year it was passed, the entire province – including the fisheries related bits – would already have a plan.

And then five years after that, the whole thing would be reviewed again complete with public consultation.

To put it bluntly, had the current administration done what it committed to do in 2003 and what it finally got around to passing through the House of Assembly in 2007, this entire business and a whole lot more besides would already be done or well under way.

As it is, one has to wonder why the SDA remains in mothballs and why this  particular “consultation” appears now, out of the blue, and focuses – as it appears – on areas over which the provincial government has no legislative jurisdiction.

Taken together with Friday’s announcement, it looks a we bit curious if not downright suspicious.

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Related:

• “Your serial government at work” (2007)
• “To listen to old, archived messages, press 2…” (2006)
• “Res ipsa loquitur, once more” (2005)  a.k.a. “…and there shall be plans, and planning for plans and plans to co-ordinate the plans of the planning for plans…”

And no fish swam

For an administration that has always been better known for delivering the sizzle rather than the steak, Premier Danny Williams’ announcement Friday of almost $14 million for fisheries research marks another achievement.

The announcement garnered swift editorial and political support. The Telegram gushed from the first sentence of Saturday’s editorial:

As a general rule, more information is better than less. And that's why the announcement that the province is getting into the fisheries research business in a big way is good news.

So too did the opposition leader, Yvonne Jones and fisheries critic Marshall Dean.  They think that the “funding allocation by the provincial government for fisheries science research is welcome news that should boost the industry’s chances to survive in the long-term.”

Even the language the Premier and the Opposition Leader used was similar.  As Williams put it:

No longer will we exclusively rely upon the research of others to guide the fishery into the future. Today, we once again take control of our destiny by investing in our own fisheries research and development.

Jones chimed in:

Clearly, one of the building blocks in this process [of rebuilding the fishery] has to be sound research that we can trust and use to make strategic management decisions in this industry.

All this is wonderful.  Memorial University and its Marine Institute get a bag of cash with which to hire some new graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.  Dr. George Rose gets a new job as the head of  something to be called the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystem Research.

Even the Irish government is happier after Friday.  The financially strapped country will get a bag of cash – the better part of half the total announced – to help operate its seven year old fisheries research vessel, the Celtic Explorer.

Friday’s announcement is three years overdue. The Progressive Conservative 2007 election platform included these commitments:

• invest $5 million a year in the province's research and development Crown corporation and dedicate $1 million of this funding exclusively for oceans research, [and…]
• provide $6 million for fishing industry research and developmental work over the next three years, which will include work associated with the development of new species, new products, new markets and new techniques to harvest, handle, process and market our marine fish resources.

The program announced on Friday seems to have less to do with genetic engineering [2007’s “development of new species”] or marketing and industry diversification as it does something else that does not appear to be defined beyond the notion that locally generated science might somehow be different from that produced by foreign infidels. The research vessel seems to be an idea cooked up on the spot by Danny Williams during the last provincial campaign.

Much about the announcement seems to be ill-defined.  The whole premise – that local scientists might discover some truths that others haven’t found or are hiding – is, itself, highly suspect.  Rose, for example, and other scientists at Memorial are quite knowledgeable about the fisheries ecosystem.  They and their predecessors have been studying the ocean and the creatures living in it for decades.

Perhaps that lack of definition is because the whole thing was hastily pulled together. It would appear that Friday’s announcement didn’t really exist until some six weeks ago. A month and a half ago, the provincial government was getting a political pounding for the latest in what has been a series of failures and fiascos.  The government has no fisheries policy worthy of the name;  that too has been painfully obvious from problems in some sectors of the fishery and the decidedly poor progress on the memorandum of understanding.

What better way might there be to get out of a raft of political sinkholes, one can imagine the Old Man thinking, than to change the channel.  Announce more cash for something  - it’s always about the money with these guys - and trot out the stuff that’s always worked before: the old pseudo-nationalist rhetoric. Never mind that the announcement will fall on a Friday smack in the middle of a holiday long weekend.

The one thing we know about this announcement is that it wasn’t about “[b]etter fisheries management through better fisheries science” and “an opportunity to improve and sustain this industry.”

The problem in the fishery today is the same as it was 18 years ago.  The problem is not a lack of knowledge, scientific (biological) or otherwise. The problem is a lack of political will to make decisions for a fishery that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

Cod stocks collapsed because politicians opted to meet the demands of their constituents to keep fishing at unsustainably high levels when the scientists  - federally-funded scientists - said it would be a good idea to slow down or stop.  John Crosbie closed the fishery in 1992 because he had no choice.  There were no more fish.

And there never will be any more cod or any other fish stock for that matter as long as people disregard knowledge and make decisions based on unvarnished self-interest.  Whether it is the head of the hunters and gatherers union who wants to increase quotas on an endangered species (cod), to Open Line callers, or the blocheads who think cod jigging is some sort of racial entitlement or to the politicians  - federal and provincial  - who side with them daily, they all speak based on something other than sound, verifiable knowledge.

So spending $14 million won’t make a difference to that.

Spend $140 million.

Same result.

Heck, spend the entire anticipated cost of the non-existent Lower Churchill project - $14 billion – and you will still have the same calls for continued fishing.

Knowledge is not the problem in the fishery.

Impotence is.

And no amount of money, no army of scientists, no fleet of research vessels will ever find a little blue pill to cure that problem.

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Update:  The dog whistling worked.

Fragile Economy: now three steps back …and loving it

Not only did the provincial government explicitly refuse to participate in talks that would diversify the provincial economic trade base, its members are proud of it:

PREMIER WILLIAMS: Mr. Speaker, what this government is very, very proud of is we are the only jurisdiction of thirteen jurisdictions in all of Canada who has not gone along with the European Free Trade Agreement which Canada is trying to enter into. We are the only ones who have stood our ground and said we are not prepared to agree unless there are certain conditions. The seal industry, of course, is obviously one; the shrimp tariff is another one. …

But if that wasn’t bad enough, the Premier justified the position by claiming that it had worked in one important respect:

We have been very successful in having the shrimp tariff reduced and, in fact, removed over time. It has made a huge difference to the shrimp industry. [Emphasis added]

The first problem is that “we” – the Premier and his ministers – didn’t have very much to do with lowering the shrimp tariff in the first place.

And the second problem is that “we” did not accomplish this by boycotting important trade talks.

Sure the Premier and his fisheries minister took a much publicised junket to Europe, but there isn’t much sign they did much else except try to take credit for lowering the shrimp tariff back in 2007 before the trade talks were on. Someone else did the work.

By the way, if you take a look at that last link you’ll see this line:

Fishery Products International said about half of its shrimp is exported to the United Kingdom alone.

That would be the same Fishery Products International that had a European trade division “we” helped sell off in the break-up of FPI.

But anyway, not only are “we” no longer one step back, “we” are now not even a mere two steps back.

Provincial trade policy is effectively three steps backward:  headed in the wrong direction, proud of it and then justifying the gross strategic mistake by claiming credit for things the backward-assed policy didn’t do in the first place.

If the first step toward any solution is admitting there’s a problem, “we” are a long way from solving very much when it comes to provincial trade policy.

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Quiet: Genius at Work

Those people who worked diligently to smash FPI into tiny bits can see how much their handiwork is benefitting people who don’t live in Newfoundland and Labrador:

Around the world, he could see two models of integrated seafood companies that were able to grow: They focused on being very efficient at primary production, or they specialized in value-added processing, sales and marketing.

High Liner took the second tack and Mr. Demone eventually got out of the fishing fleet business, which had been his company's, and his family's, historical foundation.

The company got another boost recently by picking up assets in the selloff of FPI Ltd., a troubled seafood company based in St. John's. That brought a strong food service business in the United States, as well as production capacity in Newfoundland and Labrador. Recent results reflect the first synergies from that purchase, Mr. Demone says.

Meanwhile in Newfoundland and Labrador, the geniuses who brought you the original fiasco are still at work offering the same old solutions to the same old problems.

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Related:

• “The FPI-competitor myth…”

Up the Creek with Jackman and Rideout

And neither had a paddle to get anyone out of the mess which is the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Latest word is the Sullivan family – close Tory ties there or what? – cannot do any better a job running the fish plants they got from the smash-up of Fishery Products International than the crowd who ran FPI.

There is nothing new in any of the latest demands.  The Sullivans want to ship yellow-tail flounder to China because it can’t be processed profitably in this province. 

Mind you this is exactly what FPI did to subsidise the plants it used to own. Last going off, the fisheries minister of the day undertook a prosecution of FPI under the fish export regulations which  - like so much of government policy toward FPI - certainly had the stink of being politically-motivated and insubstantial all over it. 

Rather than bother commenting on the current demand from the company, let’s just review some of the recent history on this via some old posts. 

What you’ll quickly discover is that the current problems are essentially the same as the old ones.  In other words, fish minister Clyde Jackman is dead wrong if he thinks the problems fish minister Tom Rideout faced were different from the ones Jackman is facing today. 

You’ll also find their solutions today are going to look all too familiar as well. They are both up the same creek without anything that even looks like a paddle. The fish plant workers and fishermen who suffer as a result are farther up the same creek and they don’t even have a canoe.

And of course nothing at all will happen with any of it because the only man who apparently is allowed to make a decision in the current administration is currently laid up in hospital for another few weeks.

• June 2005:  “The tragedy of common-place thinking”
• November 2005:  “The return of Backuppable Tom”
• November 2005:  “The FPI-competitor myth and one of the real problems”
• March 2006:  “FPI, Tom Rideout and the future of the fishery”
• March 2006:  “Was Rideout asleep in the wheelhouse?”

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The shrimp industry explained

Derek Butler in the Telegram.

As usual there’s way more to the issue than meets the eye.

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The result of fisheries mismanagement

Once upon a time, Fishery Products International built a state-of-the-art shrimp processing plant that would have provided employment to its work force 48 weeks out of 52.

The project was contingent on the provincial fisheries minister showing some sense in handing out shrimp processing licenses.  It depended on provincial politicians not trying to shift all the displaced cod and other plants with which the province remains grossly oversupplied onto other species like shrimp.

And, as it turned out, it also depended on provincial politicians not actively collaborating with efforts to smash the company that ran the plant and then sell off the bits and pieces – including the highly successful brands and the marketing arm – to anyone who wanted to scoop up the remains.

All it needed was a plant able to complete internationally run by a local fishing company big enough and well enough established to compete successfully around the globe.

That didn’t work, did it?

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