I thought the New Foundland episode was beautiful with all the colored cottages, but kinda sad.
Sad.
Its heartbreaking.
Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. Its fishery was the main resource that Newfoundland brought to the table, when it joined Confederation.
Those working in the coastal Cod fishery, warned, for over a decade, that modern trawlers, foreign trawlers, were strip-mining the spawning grounds. The (Federal) ministry that set the foreign quotas ignored them, and asserted the Cod stocks were healthy, and kept giving foreign countries fishing licenses... until the fishery had been depressed so low a moratorium was imposed, on everyone.
I can't remember how long ago that was... maybe two decades. At that time there were fishermen who had been apprentices when Newfoundland joined Confederation, who were quite bitter, and said, that if they knew Ottawa would ruin the fishery, by failing to protect it from strip-mining foreign trawlers, they never would have supported joining Confederation.
For what it is worth, strip-mining foreign trawlers were the initial trigger for the Somali pirates. Somalia too had a small fishers, taking a sustainable catch, off its shores. When the country fell into chaos unscrupulous owners of big mordern foreign trawlers exploited the lack of a central government to come in and vacuum up Somali's fish at an unsustainable level.
The result? All the fishermen, with their little boats, were out of work. They knew what had happened, and were bitter. The most hot-headed among them started to venture out, armed with a couple of AK47s, to capture foreign vessels, to get even with the foreign community who stole their heritage of fishing, that stretched back centuries.
Officially, Newfoundland is waiting for the Cod stock to recover to the point where fishing can resume. When the moratorium was imposed some people thought it might recover within a decade. But it doesn't really look like any meaningful recovery has taken place.
reply
share