Disappointed with the cultural consultations in rural N.L.
I went to the cultural consultations meeting at Twillingate last evening (only one more Twillingate person there) and was never so disappointed.
A crowd who knows nothing about how our outport fishing culture has changed in a lifetime, and the saddest part is — don’t want to know.
Which is understandable, I suppose for someone who grew up in a city — never saw a cod trap full of fish and never experienced the freedoms that a person of my generation did as a child growing up in a small
fishing village — which is the Newfoundland culture perpetuated in tourism ads, but which
in reality has been laid to rest by an unknowing government and a self-serving industry and their union lobby group.
The only positive thing about the evening was the blurry snap I took of a fox running along the shoulder of the highway with a rabbit in its mouth, as I was coming home.
The rabbit, I thought, symbolizes our outport fishing cultural freedoms and the fox the Professional Fish Harvesters Board, the FFAW, and an unknowing and uncaring government which allowed this self-interest group to remove free enterprise and democracy from the fishery — the backbone of rural communities and the reason they came to exist in the first place.
Because of ludicrous rules restricting young people from taking over an existing enterprise, we see a path unfolding where all the harvesting capability will in the hands of a very few harvesters.
Not good for rural fishing villages, for democracy or for Newfoundland in general!
Sad this morning.