Western Producer staff
As the new year begins across the West with the normal pinch of optimism about better prospects ahead, spare a moment to think about a Canadian tragedy unfolding half a country away.
The East Coast fishery is devastated.
For reasons of history and temperament, no part of Canada should be more sympathetic and supportive than the Prairies. These could be echoes from the historic soul of the West itself.
It was an image guaranteed to bring a prairie person to attention.
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“Imagine if the minister of agriculture went to Regina and announced that farmers couldn’t plant or harvest wheat for the foreseeable future. That’s what has happened here.”
A Newfoundland fishermen’s union official was on television, commenting on the latest, most devastating news.
Fisheries minister Brian Tobin had just announced that a partial fishing moratorium imposed last year will be expanded this year to cover almost all the ocean and inland waters off the coast.
Overfishing, changing water temperatures and other factors have sharply reduced stocks of cod and other fish.
At least 35,000 people in an already economically-depressed region will be without work next year because of the fishing ban.
“The fishery is Canada’s oldest industry,” said Tobin.
“For the nearly five centuries since European explorers first came to our shores, there has been a great cod fishery off our coast. This year, there will be virtually none.”
The fishery truly is to Atlantic Canada what agriculture has been to the Prairies.
It has sustained a rural lifestyle and small towns, providing jobs. It has given life in the region a flavor, an ebb and flow that is unique in the country.
Now, it is gone for the foreseeable future and the people are reduced to living on the dole.
It is like a government order to virtually cease agriculture on the Prairies until the soil regenerates.
Imagine the turmoil, political and social upheaval that would create. Despite recent years of low grain prices and destructive trade wars, it is a scenario the present generation of prairie people can barely consider.
The old-timers could. In the 1930s, nature and man did to prairie soils what nature and man have done to the oceans in the 1990s.
The rains stopped. The topsoil blew away. Crops withered or did not grow. A region was devastated and for many, it must have seemed that the prairie desert would never bloom again. Thousands left.
The rains did come again and those who survived the Depression once more prospered on the land. East Coast fishermen hope for the same happy ending.
One of the historic ironies is that while the Prairies endured their tragedy 60 years ago, East Coast fishermen sent tonnes of salt cod westward to feed farmers who no longer could feed themselves. Cod stocks seemed limitless.
Now, while the Prairies gear up for record production in the years ahead, the sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters of those generous fishermen no longer can go to sea to harvest their crop.
