The political economy of fishing in Newfoundland*

The political economy of fishing in Newfoundland* DAVID ALEXANDER In the Social Contract Rousseau stated that "should the sea be girt with rock and the land be inaccessible, it were well to live mainly off fish. The life of those inhabit·ing such areas will be tranquil, better and perhaps , happier than that of many others." On the face of it, the principle should apply to no land more firmly than Newfoundland. But it was the weakening of the fishing economy that led Newfoundlanders reluctantly into Confederation. Since 1949 its failings have contributed in a major way to the province's low levels of personal income, horrendous unemployment and desperate search for industry to shore-up a disintegrating rural· society and to contain a flow of migrants in search of work. It is an ultimate ·irony that in the modern trawler sector - long predicted to be the happy wave of the future settlement of the recent three month strike providing trawlermen with a possible income of $13,000 for hard and lonely work, will require Ottawa to subsidize the fish companies . The 'fishing cris·is' has been with us so long that it is easy to forget that something is badly wrong. In a world supposedly short of food, and in a province located on a resource which attracts a scor·e of distantwater fishing fleets, the fishery should be a strong pillar of the provincial economy and able to generate, directly and indirectly, high levels of employment and satisfactory earnings for fishermen, plant workers and fish companies. Newfoundland was settled, as everyone knows, because it was a useful place from which to fish and on which to cure fish. Until thi-s century the only fish that attracted much interest was cod, and this was caught mainly by small-boat fishermen who salted it for export to Europe and the Western * This paper was written while the author was on sabbatical leave with assistance from the Canada· Council, for which the author ls very grateful. 32 hemisphere via large export-import firms increasingly centred in the city of St. John's. Until the last decade of the 19th century, the codfishery employed more than 80% of the labour force and, contrary to popular assumption , provided a standard of living in conjunction with other market and nonmarket sournes of income, which was not particularly inferior or less stable than that enjoyed among working people elsewhere in the Western World. For a complex of reasons, Newfoundland's fishing economy deteriorated steadily in the first half of the 20th century, and it ·is from the history of these decades that the Island earned a reputation as a woebegone country. This deterioration was generated by a combination of external and internal factors. The external problem was that the Western World drifted away from relatively free trade and easy convertibility of currencies, especially after the Great War. A major element in Newfoundland's 19th century prosperity, however, was the absence of discrimination in distant markets and the ability to sell fish in, say, Italy for lira or sterling and to convert this easily into dollars for imports of food and manufactures from North America. A related problem was the st·eady appreciation of North American currencies relative to the European, which meant that the export yields from Europe secured ·increasingly l·ess imports from North America. The internal problem was that by 1918 the industry . needed a large injection of capital, new technology, and production and marketing reorganization to meet Norwegian and Icelandic competition in the more rigorous mark·eting conditions of the 1920s and '30s. An attempt at such reforms was initiated by Sir William Coaker through his Fishermen's Protective Union and pol-itical party (which has interesting parallels with Western farmer movements of the same period) but they failed in the face of obscurantist conservatism among elements of the mercantile elite, and the country drifted into the economic and political collapse of 1933. Revue d'etudes canadiennes In Newfoundland's pantheon of foreign devils, the Commission Government which Britain established in the bankrupt Dominion is outranked only by Mainlanders and the CNR. There is a certain irony in this because the...