When I first read "Assigning blame for lost jobs helps no one" I gasped, shook my head, and then settled into a period of remorse - as yet another Newfoundlander and Labradorian had been overcome by a rogue wave hitting the beach off the Fisheries Broadcast.
John Furlong's article does nothing more than justify apathy, dissuade questions and accountability, and marginalize any person who is fighting for the survival of the fishery (that is in any other way than resettlement and downsizing).
I took from his piece that one who owns assets has the answers and those who work within the sector do not. The Corporate merchants - they are the ones we need to look to for the way forward.
This story followed another by Furlong titled, "Change in the N.L. Fishery: Get used to it" and are both pro-apathy pieces from the Fisheries Broadcast host.
Fortunately for John - his corporation saw fit to have an entire program on this resource and not replace it with one called The Supermarket Broadcast - in recognition of that renewable natural resource. But he will get to retirement on it - unless perhaps the Sullivan's file a complaint with Stephen Harper and get the show cancelled before Furlong's on-air farewell.
To compare the loss of fishplants and that industry in dozens of rural communities to the loss of a supermarket in the middle of St. John's is absurd and irresponsible. Further if the oil economy is right - there may be a replacement in the area sooner rather than later - as the buoyant population of the city - and the free-flowing wealth will be catered to.
Then Furlong goes on to talk about the racket regarding the loss of the train. We all got over that right? What a joke. The highway cannot tolerate the traffic of heavy vehicles, we do not have a divided highway across the province, we have lost the ability to have fed input (cash) as we gave that up to for a piece of a road being widened without any ongoing funds for maintenance. As for the narrow gauge argument - that was propaganda as well - as many still exist or have made some changes to standard gauge and remain a very efficient, reliable, method of transporting goods and in many cases people.
The townies did not "need" it therefore it can go. There were political buddies that made money on the changeover to highway transport. Just to make sure it never came back - a quick destruction of the assets was employed and now we get to fight over snowmobiles, atv's or hikers.
Looking for answers is a real problem for Furlong and he is asking that you stop too. As one of the richest pieces of geography on the planet we had better keep looking for answers or future generations will have nothing left. In Furlong's world there would not be a need for a new host for the Broadcast in the future - who would listen? The Penney's Barry's and Sullivan's of the world do not need the CBC and may in fact hate tax-dollars being used for it. What they need is increased profits, greater access to the raw resource, and little to no interference by the owners of the resources, the people - through their elected bodies (both provincial and federal).
As the owners of what was one of the best renewable fisheries in the world, significant hydro-electric resources, forestry resources and fresh water coupled with non-renewable wealth such as minerals, oil, and gas - we have not done very well have we?
This quote from Furlong is particularly disturbing:
"We live on what used to be the world's richest fishing grounds. Year
after year we turned out a fishery that was uneconomical, not very
competitive and pretty well uninspiring. There's plenty of blame to go
around to explain that."
Okay John, what happened to the resource? When was it uneconomical? Was it more beneficial for the merchant, the fisherman, or the plant-worker? When was it "not very competitive" - and how was it uninspiring? There's plenty of blame you claim - okay John - who is to blame? What is the role of the federal government? Who will make up for the billions in lost revenue to this province? If you do not want to consider workers, communities, or entire populations as relevant - how about the cash?
Your outward feelings on people like Dr. Phil Earle or Gus Etchegary are also quite revealing. What do you think their agendas are? Who are they trying to harm? Why are they so dismayed at what is happening? Is their information incorrect? Are they nuisances for continuing to ask questions? Do you believe they do not want a positive outcome? Are you annoyed because they want answers? Do you find them foolish for wanting a reason for the collapse - in order to find the best way forward for all our people not just the merchants?
The moratorium was supposed to be over by now - the stocks were supposed to be recovered - what happened to that? What does John Crosbie think went wrong with that? If there has been a harm and a party was constitutionally or legally responsible for the management - then there is blame and there is compensation. We have not been compensated John. You do understand John that a supermarket in St. John's is not a renewable resource nor is it or was it the responsibility of the federal government to manage. You do understand John - the government believes that the retail market in the St. John's area is so hot - that we have jobs now that can't be filled - so likely there will be immediate and like opportunities to those displaced by that closure in Churchill Square. You do know that many of those working in the retail sector are doing it while attending university or college or may be supplementing retirement income. You also know that most in the fishery are in it as a lifelong occupation.
I wonder if the employee in a St. John's supermarket somehow cannot find work in this "hot" retail market suddenly found that they could not pay their mortgage due to revenue loss - would they suffer a devaluation of that asset? This in comparison to somebody losing a job in a rural community - that also happened to lose the entire industry - rendering their asset essentially valueless. Do you John see any difference there other than the one difference you did quote?
You do realize John that a supermarket being lost is not going to cause too much economic upheaval over the next 20 years - whereas the loss of natural renewable resources will cripple us when the oil is gone. What is the difference between the two from a straight economic perspective?
If you believe that no further study is needed to determine cause - then tell us what was the cause? If that cause or causes include the federal government mismanaging the resource - then there has been an injury and where there is injury there is remedy through compensation.That compensation would do a number of things; including but not limited to - allow the proper compensation for lost wages, career, and asset devaluation - no different than what would be awarded in other litigation's such as victims of accidents. The compensation would allow the province to complete more not less scientific research of the fishery. The compensation would allow the survival of communities until the resource recovers or until other industrial opportunities are found. It would also allow those affected start-up funds for other ventures such as the development of land in St. John's purchased at $4000 an acre. Perhaps the fishers should be awarded provincial parks, or rivers for small-hydro development. Perhaps the entire quota should be delivered to the communities, fishers and plant-workers to sell in Asia.
Why are any resources in the hands of an OCI as a corporate entity when owners of the resource are shut out?
What Furlong has concluded is the who,what,where, when and why is discouraged while "get used to it" apathy is encouraged. Do not be fooled by this approach people - the continued destruction of this industry and resource will harm your children and their children much more than the closure of a supermarket in Churchill Square and will impact our ability to deliver health care, education, and build essential infrastructure a decade out.
If you can at all believe that the oil resources will eventually be exhausted - it is not a stretch for you to consider what next.
In every other resource sector, hydro-electric, mining, forestry, and oil we have been a population that has not processed enough finished product - and as a result we did not enjoy maximum industrial benefits. If other countries and provinces can create wealth - without their own resources - but simply by processing ours - we have to ask ourselves - what are we doing?
If we do not ask why - or who is to blame - we will NOT find a solution that works for people - we will simply capitulate to a few wealthy shareholders who will take whatever we will give them - the less they have to commit the better.
OCI knew what they were doing when they got the buy from FPI and from the time they got their hands on it - was the time they started to plan to reduce commitments and maximize profits. This is fine for a supermarket chain - it is not fine for a natural - renewable - resource owned by the people.
There is no doubt the answer is giveaway - now we MUST ask why we continue to allow it.
John Furlong has his own opinion and we are allowed to have ours. We are permitted to ask questions and demand answers despite John's feeling that this is a waste of time.
We don't have to "get used to" anything - in fact we are fully within our rights to tell those we elect and employ that we will not get used to it and if you can't do what we need and want - we can hire somebody else.
The slow death of communities and the fishery sector has been in part very orchestrated and very planned. Bit by bit - while urban populations are bored and growing with a temporary oil bonanza - one by one rural communities are being decimated. The townies do not want to hear the "whining" of fishermen - in a sense telling their great-great grandparents to shut-up.
Part of the placation of the fishermen and plant workers was a new boom in the shellfish sector. What John will become of that? We are only mismanaging that because we are suffering from the mismanagement of groundfish.
Watching each other bleed until enough of us are gone - is not the answer. Stepping up to the plate - showing some real guts and fighting for what is right - includes the asking of questions.
Two interesting story ideas for John:
1. Is your job being impacted by the disaster?
2. Why do more rural Newfoundlanders and Labradorians carpool than commuters in the city?
Thank you to social media - for I fear that if mainstream media still had control - we would know nothing of our impending death. That is unless is was crime in the courts or carnage on the highway.
If we believe that the only wisdom is that which comes from our elected government or journalists - apathy has won. There is nothing in the world more damaging than good people encouraged to do nothing and actually listening to that advice.
One thing has become completely predictable - the mantra of "stop asking questions". What's up with that?
11 comments:
Casey:
Obviously Furlongs perspective was/is very limited.You are right when you say no one wants to ask the tough questions. To many people want to sweep this (problem) under the rug and hope that it will go away. If someone or some group don't step up and take the bull by the horns, so to speak it will be to late. It really is very sad that people in the media don't use their position to ask the tough questions and bring about real change instead of just talking about it.
Was John Furlong not a Conservative candidate for Harper's party a few years back? His agenda and perspective seems geared toward the modern-day fish barons like the Sullivans. He is, if so inclined, a hypocrite to hold the position he does on the Fisheries Broadcast.
It seems to me that the Sullivans are also very well connected politically with both the provincial PC's and the CONS in Ottawa. They are driving the boat for the disastrous changes in the fishery that will benefit the corporate sector, such as the Sullivans' own fishing empire. Is it all a little too convenient?
We ae being told the fishery must change but for whose benefit? The control by larger copporate entities seems to be pushing everyone else out. Something is drastically wrong when a common resource is becoming dominated by powerful corporations.
Really Hard to believe those comments actually came from John Furlong as he well knows the diffirence... Only thing that I ever heard in the past that comes close to John's comparison is when former fisheries minister Jackman compared the closure of the plants to the closing of a car lot in st. johns... as a car dealer said to me..your going to see the closure of a lot more car lots if the plants close... as for the fishrey being un-economical.. just ask a few corporate heads like john Risley , Derek Rowe and others how un-ecomomical the fishrey is... has nothing to do with assigning Blame.. confusing romance with realism or rhetoric as Mr. Furlong suggests.. it has all to do with pointing to the facts and the survival of workers their famalies and communities that helped make millionaires out of a few.. and if OCI is permitted to proceed with their plan.. History will repeat that again.. They must be stopped.
Sue:
You still never answered the question. Are there too many fish plants in this province, and should some of them close? This is the crude point that John furlong was making. The answer is YES. There are too many plants, and economics says many need to close. I agree with many of your points about the blame for the fishery woes being rooted in Federal Mismanagement, but regardless of this, it still does not change the fact that a lot of plants need to be closed.
Excellent job Sue on explaining to the people who may be convinced by the government or the media that what John was saying is the right thing. John should start another program called The Business Broadcast. He who controls the media controls the mind and I guess that is why John Furlong can make such stupid statements and not factual statements. It seems OCI has someone else in their pocket!!
I'm not really sure what one can fault in Furlong's editorial. His point is that a loss of employment has the same effect on those who find themselves unemployed whether they work in the fishery or in a supermarket. Both need to look for work, retrain, and, in the short term at least, will find it more difficult to feed their families. His point is to ask why those connected to the fishing industry get preferential treatment?
Some would argue that the fishery is obviously what NFLD was built on and therefore commands (and requires) that special attention. But to what end? The cod stocks collapsed in the late 1980s due to overfishing...400 years of over fishing that were capped off with the arrival of the foreign factory ships in the post war era and the adoption of the same techniques by Canadians in the 1970s. But we need to own that legacy. Fishermen are the ones responsible for the collapse of the stocks. When Crosbie promised that they would be restored in 20 years he was wrong and the biomass will probably never recover. Whose fault is that? Those who fished out that biomass from 1610 to 1992. Did the government mismanage the fishery? Of course it did! But, to what degree does that alleviate fishermen from their share of the responsibility? Like it or not, much of the damage to the inshore stocks (as well as those to the north and on the banks) was done long before Confederation.
Furlong's point, I think, is that it is pointless to look for people to blame because it always comes full circle -- and to deny that it does is counterproductive and counterfactual. In no other industry does the concept of blame carry any weight. If a plant/factory/store shuts its doors because its unprofitable elsewhere in Canada, government can help people transition to a new job, retool the plant, or choose to do nothing. When GM closed its plants in Ontario a few years ago, the Ontario government intervened...but in the form of a loan to allow the company to retool its plants to produce cars that the market demanded.
Like it or not, the market for fish is changing. Those who want to buy Yellowfin and Red Fish want to buy it whole (for a whole variety of reasons). They do not want it processed. So if that is the case, then the processing plants don't have a market for their product. I don't see Newfoundlanders lining up at the supermarket to buy processed Yellowfin and Red Fish. And in the absence of a local market, I'm not sure how we could expect the fish plant operators to keep producing something they can't sell. Its just supply and demand. What happened to Dominion in Churchill Square is what happened to the fish plant in Marystown: the profits were not there and the store closed its doors. Its terrible and unfortunate but I'm not sure what else could have happened.
Nobody has answered the Question..Would you operate a business that was not profitable.??
If we believe the audit that was done,then this plant has to close.
People have answered the question, the Audit was not factual in Marystown plus this company is making millions of dollars of our resource. With such a gift given to OCI and with the millions they are making from the fish being sent overseas this company should take some of the profits to create jobs in the province, sounds like a fair deal to me, we let them become millionaires and they create meaniful jobs in our province, Also the fisheremen only fished the quota that was given to them, DFO was supposed to have gathered the information and told the fishermen what the quota would be, so how can you blame the fishermen.
Some Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have been so vociferious over the destruction of their fishery, under the jurisdiction of Ottawa because of the pressure that has been put on the stocks to satisfy Foreign Trade, that Ottawa has, no doubt, seen appropriate to advise its Media Personnel, or those who sympathize with it, to put the boots to those who are causing the racket. There are too many International Trade Contracts tied up in Ottawa's exploitation of the fish quotas, that if it were to do anything to appease or repatriate some of the jurisdiction of the fish quotas back to our province, Canadian Foreign Trade could possibly collapse. Ottawa has a conundrum and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is the only entity with the economic problems created from that conundrum. Its ordinary inshore fishers have been shafted and so are the fish plant workers who depened on the ordinary fishers for fish to be processed.
It is time for Ottawa to figure out a solution, they cannot go on pretending the problem doesn't exist any longer. The honest people of Newfoundland and Labrador have caught on to the ruse that was perpetrated on them for 62 years.
Dave Callahan said ,
I am very surprised that John Furlong would take this position. He should know better that he is only becoming a mainlander who doesn't care in our view now.
I for one can tell you that we have for years fought , albeit not hard enough , to stop the dessimation of our most valuable (and supposedly renewable) resource , our fishery.
All the while , the federal government did SFA to help us , and our provincial governments past and present should be more concerned about gunboats now , than federal research vessels and union mystery ships .
We need to take matters into our own hands , and go out and start firing a few more rounds over the bows of ships in our waters . What do we do , we send a friggin plane out belonged to PAL under hire to take a snap of the offenders inside committing offences. WOW , they must be some bloody worried about all of that. The federal government bailed on us , and we haven't shown any backbone ourselves . That in a nutshell is the root cause of all of this , and as far as I am concerned , there are people who should be blamed for screwing all of this up and causing this to happen. However that brings us to another problem , accountability , for which there is none , and that is a crime in itself , because the dumb arses that should be blamed , cannot be. Its a strange world we live in , and getting stranger .
Its time we started to bring back accountability , and we need to have people in the fishery that have more "guts" , than the average capelin.
Dave Callahan , never anonymous
A talk show host should be in neutral when it comes to such public concerns as the life or death of rural Newfoundland.It seems as if he(John)is the potters clay and OCI the potter.DFO has always been a pain since 49 and we've been under their thumb ever since.Wonder whatever happened to our three mile limit?
Post a Comment