Nova Scotia (51 page)

   
Ray Rogers, an environmentalist who spent twelve years as a
fisherman in southwest Nova Scotia, has an altogether different
theory. He believes that the problem may relate to the size of cod
“schools.” Codfish move en masse with the smaller fry following the
bigger ones who have adapted and know the ropes of sea survival.
Rogers surmises that it’s possible that all the larger cod have
been caught, leaving the immature fish to guide the rest. If the
“teenage” cod don’t know what they need to know for survival, then
the whole school is in real trouble. They don’t know where and when
to migrate, so the patterns for natural survival are altered toward
an inevitable kind of mass suicide.

   
There is no precise, clear and certain answer to the question
of who destroyed the cod, but it is obvious that humans were part
of the equation. And the problem is not a simple one. The cod may
be gone and they may be gone for good, fished until they were no
more.

Imagining the
Alternatives

In Atlantic Canada, as the sorry
truth of the fish business settled in, governments spent nearly $2
billion over a five-year period to help workers forsake the fishing
industry forever and learn to do solmething else. This meant, in
many cases, leaving the fishing communities.

   
In the 1990s, money continued to drain out of
the government agencies responsible for research and for protecting
the fish. Powerful
laissez-faire
advocates in the industry argued that government should get
out of the mess altogether and let the experts – fish corporations
– manage what’s left of the ocean’s resources. Forget the little
guys; they’re not as efficient as the larger operations, the
argument goes. Big business favoured the ITQ option. That’s an
individual transferable quota whereby a company could harvest or
sell its right to a certain fixed quota of fish, whichever is most
profitable.

   
Most independent fishermen didn’t like this idea, fearing
that they and the smaller companies would soon be swallowed up into
one mega-company that controls everything. This concept was
modelled on a frightening Reaganistic policy of deregulation,
leading to private ownership of natural resources. It’s partly
based on the false assumption that the new owners of the depleted
ocean stock would look after their fish in their own best interest.
If private enterprise has done little to protect the fish in the
past, one might wonder, why would this change in the future? In
Iceland, the introduction of ITQs was met with widespread strikes
and in Norway, protests made the government back away from the same
plan.

   
Nova Scotia has been far too slow to invest in a big way in
the most obvious of alternatives: aquaculture. Salmon is the
biggest crop. Norway, far ahead of Canada in salmon aquaculture,
apparently made good use of research done in the 1960s at Bedford
Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia to speed ahead its own
industry.

   
In 2000 the total value of aquaculture for Atlantic Canada
was in excess of $288 million. In 2005 aquaculture in Nova Scotia
was worth more than $44 million to the province, still a long way
behind the industry in New Brunswick, which in 2000 pulled in more
than $210 million.

   
In this province, many traditional fishermen have fought
aquaculture, fearing it would infringe on territorial rights or
otherwise interfere with what is left of the natural fish stock.
The government has been slack in getting the engine of aquaculture
really going. We have fallen behind neighbouring New Brunswick and
have a long way to go to catch up. The potential is good but
possibilities remain relatively unexplored for the farming of
salmon, cod, halibut and all manner of shellfish.
 

“The Dog that Walked …”

In 1991 John Crosbie of
Newfoundland, former fisheries minister, had this to say about
federal attempts at managing fish in Atlantic Canada: “Like the dog
that walked on its hind legs, it is remarkable not because it walks
poorly but that it walked at all.” Such was Crosbie’s way of
summarizing the situation. It would be another Newfoundlander and
federal fisheries minister, Brian Tobin, who, to follow Crosbie’s
simile, would have to shoot the walking dog, shutting down the cod
and flatfish industry in the Atlantic in 1994, putting 35,000
workers out of jobs.

   
NAFO had hired a group of scientists in 1991 to look into the
decline in the fishery and the report that emerged recommended a
moratorium on cod and reduction in redfish quota. NAFO member
countries voted to ignore the report and keep on fishing. A
well-intentioned but gutless (or gutted) organization, NAFO had
little leverage in making the facts work toward solving or reducing
the problem.

   
In 1994, the federal government tossed some more money at the
human victims in this story. The TAGS program (The Atlantic
Groundfish Strategy) put nearly $2 billion into an assistance
package for fishers and plant workers. It was a kind of
unemployment program that also included money for skills training,
counselling and generally getting people out of the fishing
economy. Few glowing stories of overnight financial recoverry and
new, permanent jobs have come out of the program, and as the money
ran out, fishing families longed to return to the relatively good
days of the past when a fishing man or woman could be self-employed
and relatively independent. Not only have the fish disappeared, but
a way of self-sufficient living, cherished by shore-dwelling Nova
Scotians, is gone forever.

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

The Politics of Place

In
January of 1996, the Halifax
Mail-Star
reported
that Nova Scotia premier John Savage was interested in opening up a
dialogue with the other regional premiers concerning a new form of
Maritime Unionl – consolidating New Brunswick, Prince Edward lsland
and Nova Scotia into one province. Nobody, however, jumped up and
down in wild enthusiasm for this idea.

   
Consolidating and downsizing government, it seems, has become
a sort of infectious disease. In 1995, Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford
and all of Halifax County were rolled into a new “supercity” – the
Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). Now, everybody along this
shore from Hubbards to Ecum Secum, officially at least, has become
a citizen of the new, modified if not improved, Halifax. There was,
of course, no referendum. If there had been, the vast majority
would have been opposed to the move, one deemed as being good for
us, leading to leaner government, supposedly lowered debt and all
of the et ceteras. So, one night I went to sleep in my own bedroom
at Lawrencetown, the next morning I woke up sand I was in Halifax.
Like magic. It’s a little bit too reminiscent of the way Nova
Scotia was dragged against its will into Confederation by Charles
Tupper, a wise man, a visionary of sorts, but certainly not a
politician who saw his mandate to uphold the will of the populace.
Far from it.

   
In 1995 Quebec came perilously close to separating from
Canada. Invariably, the news commentators, when they spoke of
Atlantic Canada, talked of how we’d be “cut adrift.” Here was a
fright even more chilling than being folded into a supercity or
blended into a single, bland Maritime province. Would we slip
backwards into the past as the rest of the world raced on without
us into the future? Would we truly feel cut off from the rest of
Canada, our voices drowned out in the new political battle lines
drawn up by the reformers? Or would we, like Jonah, be swallowed up
by a whale as we drifted away from the centre of a Canada that
could not hold fast to us?

   
The whale, in this scenario, of course would be the United
States. And then, once digested by the beast, would we become some
kind of Third World appendage, a cheap labour pool for wealthier
American industrialists to draw on? Blessedly, none of these
questions would have to be answered for now. Who knows? Perhaps it
was the pity bestowed upon us by that minute percentage of
Quebeckers that saved us from drifting out of Canada in the wake of
separation.

The Inspirational
Province

Oddly enough, I’m not as troubled
by all of the political uncertainties as I could be. For me,
personally, the politics of Nova Scotia has always performed on a
small stage compared to the more grandiose venues of cultuwre and
environment. My vision of this province as it exists today is of an
intoxicating mix of people and places, stories and storms.
a

   
At a book-launch party in West Chezzetcook for a local
history book, a seventy-six-year-old Acadian man pulls me aside and
tells me about the good old days when thousands of metal containers
of booze were smuggled up and down the inlet on barges lightly
covered over with a layer of stone and sand as if it’s just an
everyday shipment of gravel going down the shore. Another local
Acadian, an artist from Grand Desert named Joe Purcell, tells me
nearly true and fabulous tales about growing up around here in the
1960s among some of the craziest, friendliest people on the face of
the earth.

   
When I turn on the radio, I hear that Nova Scotian Celtic
music has found its way into the mainstream. The Rankin Family, the
Barra MacNeils, Ashley MacIsaac and Natalie MacMaster, to name a
few, have found the right studio mix to blend traditional
heart-piercing sounds and songs with contemporary stylings. A
morning drive to Cape Breton or even Antigonish County, and I’d
have no trouble tracking down a fiddle-player or a bagpiper who
would be more than happy to give me a rendition of something even
closer to the roots – maybe a tear-magnet of a tune, like the air
titled “Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of His Second
Wife.”

   
I open a book and read the poetry of Black writers like
Maxine Tynes, George Elliott Clarke or David Woods and realize that
these are voices speaking truths of Nova Scotia that are
revelations to us all. Eskasoni poet Rita Joe, who died in 2007,
wrote with eloquent sadness,

• I am the Indian,
  

• And the burden
  

• Lies yet with me.
  

and I am haunted by the evocation.
In another poem she summed up with a gentle irony the centuries of
despair brought on her Mi’kmaq people by the invasion of
Europeans:

• Seeing
  

• What wrongs have been
  wrought,
  

• Native ways seem not so
  wild.
  

For me, the words of these writers
transcend the myopic wisdom of government departments and news
commentators.

   
In looking for an image for a book cover, I go to Halifax to
the office of Visual Arts Nova Scotia, where I search through a
collection of photographs and images of paintings, sculpture,
weaving and other crafts. I am stunned by the sheer volume of
beauty created by artists living and working in this province and
walk back out onto the grey Halifax street with explosions of
colour swimming in my head, having viewed en masse the work of such
artists as Al Chaddock, Charlotte Wilson Hammond, Carol Kennedy,
A.J. Gray, Geoff Butler, Margo Metcalf, Jeff Amos and dozens
more.

   
Not a stone’s throw from my house, a sculptor named Luigi
Costanzo creates exotic, erotic shapes from chunks of marble the
size of old Volkswagen Beetles. Down on the South Shore of the
province, a retired street musician named Darren Arsenault finds
beach rocks and takes them back to his workshop in the town of
Rosebud, crafting them into zen-like pieces of art. But when asked
what he does for a living, he smiles and says that he “just drills
holes in rocks.”

   
The phone rings as I walk in from a cold, clear snowy day and
a Vietnamese refugee living in Halifax asks if I would be willing
to look at her autobiography – her story of escape from war-torn
Vietnam, her struggle to stay alive in a Thai refugee camp, her
exodus to Canada. I say yes. I know that her story is as much a
part of this province as that of the Loyalists who came here in the
nineteenth century. Not long after that I receive another call,
from a Bosnian man, another immigrant who moved here in retreat
from war, searching for sanity and peace. He has written poetry
about his experience and wonders if I would take a look at
it.

   
I moved here myself in 1979, as a sort of refugee from a life
and a lifestyle that simply felt alien to me. I had scouted the
planet for that “sane and safe and beautiful place to live,” and
nowhere felt like here. If reincarnation is a reality, it wouldn’t
take a psychic to convince me that I lived here in another life
but, alas, I have no concrete memory of any of it. I just know that
when I’m walking the shoreline, studying the waves, feeling the
sand and stones beneath my shoes, the sky still blue and generous,
at those moments, I am at peace with both myself and with
history.

   
Writing this book has not always been pleasant. History is an
unhappy business. Before I began my wrestling match with Nova
Scotian history, I was primarily familiar with the here and now –
the sane and beautiful place that is still out there every morning
when I look out my bedroom window across the wide Lawrencetown
Marsh. But now I know more about what went wrong here than I know
about what went right. History, as far as I can tell, is mostly the
legacy of mistakes. Mistakes and failures, perhaps, are what make
history interesting. Survival, too, is part of that legacy.
Survival in the face of disasters is sometimes a matter of stamina,
persistence, sheer willpower or, quite often, pure luck. The
Halifax Explosion was an accident of profound magnitude. But if we
had had nuclear weapons in 1917, the Halifax Explosion might have
destroyed most of the province, not just a chunk of North End
Halifax.