Fishing for support #nlpoli

When the going gets tough, the tough go fishing.

In this case,  a bunch of politicians in a tough spot with voters are fishing among a small bunch of politicians in Ottawa for support in their campaign to turn a deal achieved in 2013 into something else entirely.

This isn’t really news, by the way, but in the world of the provincial government these days, intergovernmental affairs minister Keith Hutchings sent out a news release on Friday to tell  everyone what was reported before Christmas.  That is,  Keith and Premier Paul Davis are trying to get federal members of parliament and senators a from Newfoundland and Labrador to back the provincial government in its latest war with Ottawa.

The Gathering Storm #nlpoli

Another week and another fish plant closes permanently.

This time it is one of the plants that should have been the basis of a vibrant fishery.  The Burin plant did mostly secondary processing rather than just basic processing turning fish into big frozen blocks for someone else to develop into a higher value product.

Those of us who warned that smashing Fishery Products International to pieces was stupid government policy take no comfort in this sort of development.

But there is no mistaking the pattern that the Burin closure continues.  it’s just the hurricane that will produce more dramatic change across Newfoundland than the 1992 cod moratorium ever did.

- srbp -

Sound Advice #nlpoli

Some people don’t like John Furlong’s ideas.

Here’s his latest one – on the fishery, again – but it is equally applicable to just about everything in the province these days:

Let's talk about every single issue that needs to be talked about and let's stop living in the problem and start living in the solution.

Sensible, rational ideas.

But just watch how fast people start screaming that Furlong should be strung up.

- srbp -

Best interests #nlpoli

Fisheries minister Darin King rejected Ocean Choice International’s proposal for exporting and processing fishery. He held a news conference on Thursday.

King claimed the decision is in the best interest of the people of the province. 

King also said the decision did not mean he was opposed to reform in the fishery.  By his decision in this instance, King was insisting that he  - as fisheries minister - must have the right to dictate what private sector companies will take as losses in order to maximise work in a fish plant in his own district.

That’s not reform.  That’s just more of the same fundamental premise that has created the financial, social and political mess that is the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador today.

At no point did King indicate how his decision was in the best interest of the province, although he went back to the same idea a couple of times to justify his decision.  There’s no surprise in that.  Politicians like to use that sort of self-righteous bullshit to justify all sorts of things.

There’s also no surprise that King and his cabinet colleagues took this decision at the start of the current polling period.  The provincial government’s pollster is in the field this month.  King’s announcement is a populist move to appeal to certain interest groups. King should know he’s in a very bad spot, though, simply by virtue of the fact the provincial Liberal fisheries critic is slapping King on the back and giving him a hearty “atta boy!”

The Liberals have perhaps the most backward, outdated policy in the fishery anyone could imagine.  Its elements look to the fishery long since past, not to the one that is emerging. 

In the fishery of the very near future,  fishing subsidies like federal employment insurance wage subsidies,  state-sponsored marketing schemes and the stalinist political control of the economy typified by King’s decision will all go by the wayside. International trade talks are already laying the groundwork for massive change. 

That looming change is one of the reasons decisions like King’s aren’t in the public interest at all.  They do not solve problems. They do not get people ready for what is coming.  They merely build up pressure such that when changes come, they are more likely than ever to be radical, uncontrolled and potentially financially and socially brutal. 

We are just in the early days of a period of revolutionary change in Newfoundland and Labrador.

You can see it coming.

All you have to do is look at how hard politicians of all three political parties and the FFAW are struggling against it.

- srbp -

Change in the fishery #nlpoli

Ocean Choice International’s Martin Sullivan was the guest this week on CBC’s On Point. That’s a link to a CBC story that includes the whole program.

The most obvious point about Sullivan’s argument is that it is – essentially – simple and sensible.  The company needs to export fish in a form the market wants.  The company was losing money in the two plants it closed.

The second segment of the show was an interview with fisheries minister Darin King.  The most obvious thing about King’s comments is that he now  - i.e. after OCI announced closures - sounds like someone who understands the need for fundamental changes in the fishery.  That’s something no one has said before, including Premier Kathy Dunderdale and her remarks blaming the union for not accepting a mere 18 weeks of work. 

In the political panel, former Tory cabinet minister Shawn Skinner suggests that the MOU process fell apart and that now OCI has pushed things forward. No surprise there for anyone who has been paying attention, but for some people this will be a smack in the gob.

No surprise either that Lana Payne had nothing positive to offer in either her assessments of the situation or possible solutions.  Siobhan Coady was marginally better, suggesting that the correct role for the provincial government was to squeeze the processors to ensure people in this province got work in at-sea processing.  That’s really just continuing the approach that created the current mess in the fishery and it’s not surprising that Lana Payne could chime in and agree with the idea.

Ditto Coady’s suggestion that the provincial government should be assisting the companies with marketing. That might have been a possible option a couple of years ago, but no longer.

But to then have Payne and Coady suggest that the provincial government needs to get on with the restructuring process was bordering on the laughable.  They just don’t get it.

All you have to do is go back and listen to Skinner again:  the MOU is dead and the government and the union are left to play catch-up as the companies drive the restructuring agenda.  That’s the reality and both Coady and Payne are woefully out of touch.

When you’re done with that, flip over to a commentary by fisheries broadcast host John Furlong:

Change is always hard. Even 'good' change. When you buy a house or have a baby or get a new job. Change is still hard.

It's even harder in the fishery. If you ask most people in the fishery today how they would like the fishery of tomorrow to look, they'll say "like it was yesterday."

That's not the way it's going to be.

Heck, the fishery of today isn’t the fishery of yesterday as much as some people have been trying to pretend otherwise.

- srbp -

Related:  “Building the fishery of the future”, one of the 15 ideas series (June 2011)

And so it begins (fishery restructuring version) #nlpoli #cdnpoli

News today that OCI will permanently close two of its fish plants is merely the start of it.

The hurricane of change that is sure to follow will make the 1992 cod moratorium seem like a gentle breeze.

- srbp -

Good to the last vote #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Two fish plant operators in the province want to see if they can make a few bucks making something to eat out of sea cucumbers.

For those who may not be familiar with the creatures, know that they are not some sort of undersea plant. 

They are a long tube of flesh with a hole at both ends (mouth and anus) and a tube in between connecting the two.  The creature pulls seawater in one end, extracts what nutrients it can find and pushes the water – and its own refuse -  it out the back end.

People eat these things.  Well, some people on the planet do  - mostly in Asia – and some of those people consider it a delicacy, apparently.

The provincial fisheries department has been eyeing sea cukes and urchins as potential species to exploit for well over a decade. The federal fisheries department produced a study in 2009 on the sea cucumber potential in the fishing zone on Newfoundland’s south coast that also encompasses St. Pierre and Miquelon.

What is striking about that study is how much biologists  - any biologists, not just DFO ones - don’t know about the little creature:

There is limited information on the life history of sea cucumber on the St. Pierre Bank (So 2009).  Most of the knowledge on this species in eastern Canada was obtained from studies in the St. Lawrence Estuary (Hamel and Mercier 2008). While some of this information may be relevant to  the St. Pierre Bank, more in-situ observations are required. Spawning time, for example, occurs from late March to early May on the St. Pierre Bank, which is earlier than in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Size at sexual maturity on the St. Pierre Bank is ~ 9-11 cm (Grant et al. 2006).  Growth  rates, age-at-maturity, recruitment processes and natural mortality are unknown; thus productivity and renewal rates are unknown.  Due to the plastic shape and variable water  content of the sea cucumber body, basic metrics such as size-at-age cannot reliably be  obtained. Dry and immersed weights are the most accurate measures of sea cucumber size.

All the stuff you would like to know in order to manage any fishery effectively?  Not one has a friggin’ clue.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the DFO paper recommends

“that fishing be limited  to the western region of the specific fisheries management zone covered by the study], maintaining the eastern region as a reserve until the effects of fishing can be evaluated. The exploitation rate is currently very low and it is likely that it could be increased without causing serious or irreversible harm.” 

The biologists admit they don’t know much and advise that no one should do anything too hasty for fear of repeating past mistakes.

A United Nations report issued in 2008 said that Pacific stocks of sea cucumbers with a high commercial value had already been decimated. The report covered all the known sea cucumber fisheries,. including the exploratory one off Newfoundland.

Now the potential industry we are talking about here in newfoundland and Labrador is currently less than 1,000 tonnes with a total value – according to the Telegram article linked at the front of this post – some somewhere around $500,000.  This is not very big, by any measure.

But the fact that some local companies want to go to commercial production on a species that has already been over-fished elsewhere is a sign of just how little some people in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and Labrador have learned in the 19 years since the cod moratorium.  How striking is the contrast between the scientists and the industry.

Read the reports from the fisheries departments, especially the federal one an you will see an abundance of cautious language.  If we’ve learned anything from the cod collapse – to paraphrase the report – we ought to go very carefully at fishing a species we know little about.

In the local fishing industry, that knowledge doesn’t seem to have penetrated some skulls.  It’s also yet another sign of what your humble e-scribbler ranted about last August when local media gave province-wide attention to a story on the possible commercial production of sea snails:

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.

A year after those caustic words appeared, the province is in the grips of a second election in a year, this one a provincial type.  The incumbent Conservatives have a report that shows rare agreement in the industry on the need to cut down the number of plants, plant workers and fishermen.

The Conservatives want nothing to do with it both for the financial cost implications and for the political cost implications as well.  Their current plan seems to be to talk and talk until time solves the problem for them.

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.

All three parties – Liberal, Conservative and New Democrat – have one goal:  reform the fishery in such a way that at the end of it, the whole thing is exactly like it is now.

The fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a problem of anything but politics and anyone other than politicians.

And in yet another great cosmic coincidence, noob Bloc NDP member of parliament Ryan Cleary held a news conference on Monday to tell everyone that he will do as he promised a few short months ago and introduce a private members bill in the federal parliament. 

Cleary wants to spend untold millions of tax dollars on an investigation into what happened to the cod and why they haven’t come back. he wants to find blame and lay, most likely at the feet of culprits he has already identified.  None of them are in the fishing industry in Newfoundland and labrador.  The bad guys are people in Ottawa.

In pushing for his Kangaroo Court, Cleary uses language that is colourful and evocative. He claims we do not have facts.

In truth, there is is no shortage of facts.

Cleary just refuses to accept them and act accordingly.

The problem is not that we are lacking in information.

The problem is that Cleary - like a raft of other self-appointed saviours of rural Newfoundland and the fishery from Smallwood to Rideout to Efford to Sullivan and Hearn before him - is running on precious little besides bullshit and ego.

Sure they are all compassionate and passionate in their dedication and commitment to the raggedy-arsed artillery of the best small-boatmen in the British Empire who will secure the future of the universe once the oil is gone yadda yadda yadda.

Big friggin’ whoopidy do.

Once you get past the stock rhetoric these guys toss out, you pretty quickly realise that Cleary is just the latest and windiest wind-bag in a very flatulent lot.  They all lack either an appreciation of the problem in the fishery or what genuinely needs to be done to sort it out. 

And if they know what needs to be done and why, then they lack the stones to do it.

You see, if fixing the fishery was a matter of passion, then the whole thing would have been done decades ago. God knows the fishery has attracted more passion over the years than you’d get from a bunch of lifers at Kingston Pen hopped up on saltpeter and Viagra.

Da byes have loved the fishery to death.

And still men and women are breaking their backs splitting fish and making slave wages for their efforts.

Men and women who are now pretty much done with their working lives and yet who can’t afford to retire.

Who some politicians won’t pay to retire even though that would be the decent thing to do.

And they struggle in an industry that lacks the technology to compete and the capital to buy the technology to sort itself out because…ah sure you’ve heard it all before.

You want some ideas on fixing the fishery? 

No problem.

The first idea is:  get the politicians out of it.

Cleary could be the single bravest politician in this province’s long history and scrap his election pledge. Stand up, Ryan, and be the first politician to say that people like you are full of it and need to stop pretending they can fix the fishing industry.

Find something else to rant about.

People will understand. 

He can take the money he’d waste on an inquiry and put it in a fund to help fish plant workers hobble away from the splitting tables with something vaguely approaching human dignity.*

Otherwise, the fishery will be for politicians what it has been since long before the collapse of Responsible Government in this place:  good to the last vote, and nothing more.

- srbp -

* edits for clarity

Just imagine…

For some reason, the Conservative government of Danny Williams wanted to smash Fishery Products International and sell off the bits and pieces.

FPI used to be a large and successful fish processing company based in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Now it doesn’t exist any more and the most lucrative bits and pieces wound up in the hands of people who don’t do much business in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Just imagine if certain powerful interests in the province hadn’t destroyed the company.  FPI might be doing what one of its former competitors is now doing:  trying to buy into the Iceland fish business.

High Liner announced late Tuesday that it made an unsolicited offer worth ¤340-million ($445.4-million) to acquire Icelandic, one of the three biggest value-added seafood processors to the U.S. food service market. It wants the company simply to bulk up its own business.

That wouldn’t normally be front-page news. But in this case, it was the main story in at least two major media outlets. Why? Because Icelandic is owned by a public pension consortium run by the Framtakssjódur Íslands fund. And the owners have excluded the Canadians so far from the takeover process. High Liner piping up publicly was akin to a foreign company telling Iceland’s politicians to smarten up and open up the sales process to more bidders.

There’s a fascinating story in the Financial Post on the whole thing.

The world is only as small as people imagine themselves to be and, for the past seven years, this province has been dominated by people whose vision is incredibly myopic.

The consequences of such limited thinking are all around us, from the fragile economy that worries the cabinet minister who helped create it to this sort of lost opportunity in the fishery.

- srbp -

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.

- srbp -

Related:

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

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.

- srbp -

Update:  The dog whistling worked.

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.

-srbp-

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?”

-srbp-

Good news on fishery

It may have taken a global crisis to bring everyone together but the provincial government, the Association of Seafood Producers and the Fish Food and Allied Workers union have reached an agreement to develop a plan on restructuring the fishery.

Working groups will look at financing, marketing and overall restructuring.

The process will be directed and overseen by a steering committee consisting of two representatives from each of the FFAW, ASP and the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture. An independent chair will be appointed by the Provincial Government and the working groups will be assisted by a facilitator from the department.

-srbp-

Burn your boats!

Over at labradore there has been some delight in poking at an opinion piece that turned up in the weekend Telegram and over at NL Press.

That’s the one that started out with the really creepy metaphor over the whole Danny/Randy thing:

On its face, this question reminds me of the pushy, unappreciative parent who says, "Fine, you got 90% on the test. What happened to the other 10%?"

As we noted before, Randy Simms is apparently the province’s – or Danny Williams’ – demanding father.

Ordinary political discourse is now reduced to someone’s psychological demons if that metaphor is to be believed. 

Then there is the logical implication:  if Randy is everyone’s Dad, then we might also wonder who Jeff Rose-Martland would have as the June Cleaver in this lost episode of Leave it to Beaver penned by Rod Serling.

Perhaps, if the classics are more you speed, you might be considering the prospect that, with a bit more thought, Rose-Martland  could have gifted the writers of the annual Review sketch comedy shows with a local version of Oedipus for next year. 

Anyway…

The latest labradore post on the subject shows only a tiny example of how this defence of the Premier’s testiness is actually an example of the very pessimism, negativity and crap the Premier was supposedly ranting about.

The negativity part is easy:  that would be the first line in which Jeff Rose-Martland accuses Randy Simms of making his comments out of spite.

Anyone who actually heard Simm’s lead-in that fateful day  - Rose-Martland certainly didn’t - or anyone who knows Simms would appreciate that such an imputation is not only being negative, it’s being pretty bloody vicious. Simms doesn’t have a spiteful, malevolent bone in his body.

The pessimism permeates the opinion piece.  It really comes to the fore when the writer likens the fishery to a bog. One presumes he meant quagmire and not a colloquialism for toilet;  that isn’t a safe presumption though, given the whole things slips to the Freudian fairly early on.

The crap part is actually the line which labradore reprints:

Premier Williams looks forwards to a prosperous future where Newfoundland is a successful industrial society, free from the vagaries of nature, and is working to accomplish that.

Now before going any farther let us note the sentence is constructed as if Mr. Rose-Martland is speaking authoritatively on behalf of the Premier or has some firm knowledge of the Leader of The Province’s policies.

The vision held by the Premier, we are told, is of a Newfoundland (but not  Labrador, apparently) society that is not only prosperous but industrial and, as a result ,not affected by nature’s caprice.

Let us begin by establishing that the whole statement is crap, as in nonsense.  Danny Williams and his crew may not have devoted sufficient attention to anything but the oil industry in the eyes of many but at no point has anyone from the administration, Williams included, suggested consigning the rest of the economy to the bog.

But look at the phrase:

…Newfoundland is a successful industrial society, free from the vagaries of nature…

There’s something about those words which is familiar.

Really familiar.

Wait a minute.

Not exactly those words, but something really close.

Hmmm.

That’s basically the Smallwood industrialization policy in the 1950s and 1960s:  everything from rubber boots to eyeglasses and ladies gloves, all as a wage-based alternative to the pre-Confederation fishery. Now to be fair, the policy embraced industrialization in the fishery as well but people don’t necessarily remember that, though.  They just remember what they think Smallwood said and the phrase that captures the idea: 

Burn your boats.

Rose-Martland’s understanding of recent history is clearly as off-base as his metaphors.  The current state of the fishery is not the result of the vicissitudes of fortune, the cruel hand of nature that sometimes delivers bounty and at other times starvation.

Rather, the local fishery in its current form is suffering from the combined impacts of at least two forms of human folly. 

The first is over-fishing perpetrated by the locals with as much zeal as the foreigners.  They decimated the cod-stocks, purely and simply.  Lest someone get a tad upset at that suggestion, let some enterprising person put the question bluntly to people like Gus Etchegary and not relent until he gives a straight answer on the fishing practices at FPI when he was there.

The other folly has been successive federal and provincial policies that have sought to keep the fishery organized as a social welfare program rather than let it develop as a sustainable industry.

Successive governments in both Ottawa and St. John’s have preferred, it would seem, to be engineers of a societal soul - with all its Stalinesque implications -  rather than allow the fishery to develop in such a way that the people engaged in it could earn a decent living by their own labour.  There have been impediments to progress, resistance to change that has come, as much as anywhere else, from politicians themselves. 

Those who seek change in the fishery and in other sectors of the local economy are not the people caricatured by Rose-Martland.  One can say caricature since his piece is built, for the most part on sheer invention.

The people about whom Simms spoke are those who are seeking to get beyond the current day, where government hand-outs make up the balance of a very meagre total income.

If Rose-Martland was actually paying attention to any current discussions,  he’d realize the only people hopelessly mired in the past when it comes to the fishery are the very people he claims are looking steadfastly to some supposedly idyllic future. 

The people talking about changes are the people in the industry:  processors, harvesters and plant workers alike.  The only people talking about stamping up the fishery workers, but only if necessary, to tide them over until maybe next year are the Premier and his fish minister. Both are currently out of the province.  One is on vacation.  The other is heading off to foreign lands as proof of how much he cares.  Well, that’s a paraphrase of the way his deputy put it.

The politicians and others trying to respond intelligently and thoughtfully to current economic problems should be troubled by the sort of endorsement that one finds in Rose-Martland’s piece for the current administration. 

Not only does his argument display an appalling  ignorance of the subjects about which he writes, it misrepresents the current government’s policy in the process.  There are enough people who believe that Danny measures the future in only barrels and megawatts, not in quintals and cords.  Rose-Martland doesn’t help matters with his self-confident assertions about what Danny wants, even if his assertions aren’t supported by evidence. 

The real political problems for the current administration come from the fact that - put aside all the money supposedly spent in the past five years -  the current provincial government has shown it has absolutely no idea about what to do with the fishery. 

Their policies have been a combination of status quo and  still more of the same, interspersed with a one-day gab fest that produced nothing meaningful and the break-up of Fishery Products International.  There may be people within the administration with new and good ideas, but thus far they do not seem to have impressed their colleagues  of the need for action. 

Even without any evident ties to the Tories, Rose-Martland the most ardent of Fans of the leader of The Province, the first Townie Premier in 80 years, will surely be taken as representing the way the townies are thinking about things out beyond the woods and the wilds.

The political problem is not that there are no ideas on how to bring about substantive change in the fishery, how to make it competitive and sustainable both for the stocks and for the people who depend on them.

The political problem is that the politicians seem unable or willing to bring about change.   If the fishery is a quagmire, it is a political one and only political leadership will avoid a disaster.

No good can come of just hoping the whole thing will pass away. Nor can any good come from what amounts to a work of fan fiction.  The Premier would be right to reject such a genuine mountain of pessimism, negativity and crap just as surely as he assailed Randy Simms for an imagined one.

-srbp-