Being reliant on the fishing industry wasn’t so bad for Newfoundland

I have no doubt at all that Professor Raymond Blake, who teaches history for a distant mainland university, was entirely factual in declaring, as The Telegram reported in its March 12 edition, that for Newfoundland before its joining Canada there existed “geographical isolation, limited literacy rates, and an economy reliant on the fishing industry,” besides difficulty in travel and communication.

However, it was not immediately clear to me that these conditions then actually prevented everyone from at all prospering.

I deem it possible that reading and writing were not then requisite for learning, or teaching, what most then would need to know so as to thrive, and that most might not much have needed to communicate with many distant or to travel far from home. Indeed, Professor Blake seemed later to concede this latter.

More especially, I feel somewhat strongly that being “reliant” on their own ability to catch fish was morally, and maybe even pragmatically, far better for Newfoundlanders than to need others to employ them in the petroleum industry for money to buy fish.

It was also far better than needing billionaires to “give them jobs” in an ”information technology” that seems to me to be far more technological than it is genuinely informative.

Those pursuing such employment seem not to realize that at least a man catching fish meets directly one of his own needs and is able to meet a need of others who may have themselves produced something he deems worth exchanging some of his fish for and who also deem his fish worth gaining thus.

Such exchanges would be a proper exercise of justice in economics, which now we badly lack and our governments, especially the federal one whose duty it mainly is, have no notion of enforcing.

In any case, being “reliant on the fishing industry” seems to have been more conducive to security of the economy in Newfoundland before Confederation than anything we have since relied on has turned out to be. It would not entirely astonish me if someone were eventually to discover that the federal government had caused our fishery’s failure in the interests of the rival industry, which it seems has derived at least a little benefit from that failure.

Professor Blake lauded the provision of “economic support” by government. I deem it likely that expecting such support drains us of the fortitude to forgo what we cannot effect for ourselves and so forestalls our rebelling actively against governments evidently unjust.

That it remains difficult, as Professor Blake observed, for those visitors who visit because they like visiting to travel all over Newfoundland in a short time, as perhaps only such visitors really wish to do, does not bother me at all.

But maybe many such visitors would not so much wish to visit Newfoundland if it had not been what it was before too many consented to its becoming merely part of Canada.

Colin Burke (born before 1949) Port au Port