To the editor:
Well OK, I’m sitting around getting irritated again, reading what I think is your “softball” coverage of the Atlantic Canada fishing industry, so I thought I should pick up the pen and start grumbling.
Bob Gustafson starts his article, “Report: Atlantic snow crab fishery is in trouble” in the September issue, with the following sentences: “When the Atlantic Canada cod fishery collapsed, fishermen turned to snow crab to support themselves. Now, the lucrative snow crab industry is in trouble, according to a report delivered in June to federal Fisheries and Oceans Minister Geoff Regan…” He goes on to summarize some of the issues affecting the fishery, in the usual gummy and hard-to-figure-out bureaucratic language used in such reports.
With his use of the passive voice, Gustafson makes it sound like the Atlantic Canada cod fishery “collapsed” due to some mysterious natural force that had nothing to do with the fishing industry, like Hurricane Katrina blowing into New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico or something, and that fishermen, finding themselves innocent victims of the situation, then had no choice but to start fishing snow crab.
In actual fact, the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada (including the regulators, scientists and politicians) was what caused the Northern Cod disaster. They are the authors of their own misfortune. They just don’t like to take responsibility for it – especially in public. Unfortunately, reporters like Gustafson help them in this.
A more honest, informative, and helpful opening might have read “Having decimated the Northern Cod stock, which at the time was one of the largest wild fish populations in the world, from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, then consumed billions of dollars in additional taxpayer subsidies in the late 1990’s while deciding which species to target next, and then turning its attention to snow crab, the Atlantic Canada fishing industry has once again, sadly but predictably, shot itself in the foot and created another ecological and economic mess in the northwest Atlantic.”
That might get some decent thinking, and conversation, going…
Bart Higgins
Boston