Nova Scotia

by Lesley Choyce

  Seals for Scapegoats

  When the cod started to disappear, some Nova Scotian fishermen and spokesmen for the big corporations looked for a scapegoat. Instead of blaming government or themselves, they blamed it on the seals. Seals ate too much cod and they carried cod worms and disease. Grey seals, in particular, were seen as competitors. Some fishermen from Cape Breton to the South Shore carried rifles to shoot seals on sight. Television footage showed frustrated and brazen fishermen recklessly massacring seals at sea or near shore in front of the camera, and calling for another all-out war, this time directed against these benign creatures who had fed and lived in the North Atlantic long before man had arrived on the scene.

  The debates raged as to whether seals were responsible for the loss of cod. The number crunchers who had been so inept in tallying the fish stocks came to the fore, arguing that the grey seal population in the Northwest Atlantic was 200,000 and growing. Supposedly they were munching up 40,000 tons of cod a year. Nova Scotians, still mostly embarrassed and enraged by the bloody sight of fishermen butchering seals for worldwide TV, were slightly relieved when Dalhousie University researchers in 1994 came up with a birth-control vaccine for seals that could be fired into a seal with an air rifle. The best place to find the female seals was on Sable Island and that’s where Dr. Robert Brown and his sixteen-member team injected the first 200 seals. The program might sound better than blasting seals into extinction, but one might worry over the ethics of it all. Is it right to sterilize one species to suit the needs of another? Brown suggests that if each seal eats a ton of fish a year, that much can be saved for our consumption with each baby seal that is prevented from coming into the world. This might well be a moot point if the cod never make a comeback anyway.

  Dr. David Lavigne, a zoologist at the University of Guelph, however, opposed the birth-control campaign, arguing that as fish stocks fall, so too will the population of seals. This sounds like death by starvation to me and I’m not sure that’s more humane than a birth-control bullet in the butt of a mamma seal.

  Still other researchers who monitor the sea suggest that the death of all those once-plentiful fish might simply be chalked up to “change of habitat.” The water temperature has dropped slightly, reducing reproduction. Perhaps global warming has led to an increased melt in the polar ice, ironically producing colder water and colder water makes it less likely for fish to breed. Another argument put forward is that tiny but persistent quaontities of oil, heavy metals or other chemicals are doing the damage.

  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. Nob
ody, 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.

  Beyond the greed and the exploitation, Nova Scotia’s history is also a story of recovery, self-reliance and searching for something better. Nova Scotia was a disappointment at first to many of the Loyalist refugees like Jacob Bailey who found the appearance of the coast inhospitable and the citizens on the Halifax wharves uncivilized. To modern immigrants like myself, however, the landscape is rugged but inviting, the society relatively kind, gentle and civilized compared to the rest of North America. Economically we are poorer than many, but in terms of the quality of life, I am certain we are much richer than most.

  Ice Islands in the Sea

  An important part of the story of contemporary Nova Scotia takes us back to where we began. This is ultimately a province shaped by the sea. Here is a chunk of land, nearly an island, that is surro
unded by water and influenced by the great elemental forces of the North Atlantic.

  In April of 1987, after a very cold winter, the pack ice moved out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, pushed out past Cape Breton and drifted down along the Nova Scotian shore as far as Halifax Harbour. Only once before in the previous forty years had ice closed down the harbour, halting ferry services and the movement of huge container ships. At Lawrencetown Beach, the amazing blue-white islands of ice, in an infinite assortment of fantastic shapes, stretched out to sea as far as the eye could behold. I walked with my young daughter along the shoreline, dazzled by the ice islands beaching themselves like crystalline whales upon the shores here. Later, alone, I foolishly danced myself from one ice island to another far out to sea where I had never before stood on anything solid. When the wind shifted so that it was now blowing off the land, I had to make a hasty retreat as the pans began to shift and buckle and to drift away from the coast. My heart was pounding by the time I took my final step ashore onto solid land and lay down on the sand to watch an immense armada of white boats of ice set sail for southern waters and dissolution.

  The Flood Tides of Christmas

  Just three days before Christmas of 1995, I watched as storm surge waves slammed up and over the natural beach barrier of stones at Lawrencetown, flooding my neighbours who live in houses built in low-lying grasslands near the sea. There is no question that the sea is attempting to reclaim big portions of coastal Nova Scotia. Records show that storms and excessive high tides along the Atlantic coast have accounted for flooding up to six metres above the usual high tide markers at regular intervals. There are certain pieces of real estate around here that the sea would like to consume.