Live Small PT 2: Mistakes charge compound interest

I wager that 9 of 10 Canadians wouldn’t recognize a giant codfish if they tripped over one.


[“Photo from Seacoasts of Canada by P. Berton”: GH]

However, 10 of 10 won’t likely ever be blessed with the opportunity to trip over one in their lifetime.

Why do I say this?

“...on July 2, 1992, with the celebratory clamour of Canada’s 125th birthday party still ringing in his ears, John Crosbie, then minister of fisheries and oceans, conceded a fact that he had earlier tried to deny but that a small group of scientists and inshore fishermen had already realized: the cod were gone.

“The situation was so desperate that all commercial fishing was outlawed for two years, a moratorium that had to be extended and is still in force. The shock that followed was like an earthquake: hard to believe, difficult to explain, not easy to accept.


[“There are limits to what we can and should do.”]

“Since that time some Maritimers have talked wistfully of the “return” of the cod, as if some pelagic pied piper has spirited them away temporarily to lurk in an obscure backwater before returning to the fish pastures of Newfoundland. It is exactly that kind of wishful thinking that lies behind the original decline of the East Coast’s greatest natural resource.

“Like the salmon fishers of the West Coast and the prodigal whale hunters of the Arctic, human predators plundered the Atlantic of its bounty with little thought for the future, believing, against all evidence, that the supply of cod was limitless.” (Chapter 8, Seacoasts of Canada)

Such foolish mistakes - “nature will supply all forever” - charge high compound interest.

Almost 20 years have past since thousands of Newfoundlanders pinned their hopes on the limitless supply of cod. Two decades of tough times, some would surely say.

But they’re a rugged, proud people. Many have survived to this day by other means.

Many now trust that the Alberta oil sands and offshore oil and tourist dollars will keep the home fires burning.

I wish them all well and that the lessons learned about East Coast cod will help those living on another East Coast - in a land far away - escape the same upheavals.

More to follow (from far away).

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Please click here to read Live Small PT 1.

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