Good morning
I'm a journalist with 20 years in the business, almost all of it in Newfoundland and Labrador. My work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, to a variety of responses. I am currently editor of the St. John's Telegram, and I write two columns and six editorials per week. I plan to put up some of my work here, along with other comments about provincial and national issues - the opinions expressed are my own, and not those of my employers.
Russell Wangersky
Saturday's Editorial
They are preternaturally ugly little creatures, with their stalked and plastic-looking eyes and their five pairs of gangly and reaching legs. A boatload of them has - to the uninitiated - the frightening horror-show look of a Stephen King novel, or the otherworldliness of science-fiction villains. They reach and pluck and tumble over each other, awkward and ungainly out of the water, and they can give you the crawly feeling of reaching into a tool box and finding large spiders before you find your tools.
But to those who know them well, having a hold filled with iced snow crab - slowly blowing their thoughtful shiny spit-bubbles - was something akin to having a hold full of money.
The important word in the above sentence is the word "was."
Wednesday night, crab fishermen got word of a decision many expected, but that everyone dreaded. In addition to reduced quotas and, in some areas, a shorter fishing season as well, fishermen found out what the opening price was going to be for snow crab - a lowly $1.05 per pound.
Crab is the species that has been the undisputed king of this province’s fishing industry for the past few years, but this year’s opening price is the lowest price offered for crab since 1998.
The price has to move, if for no other reason than the endless equation of supply and demand - at this price, few fishermen can effectively supply the market. Caught between high costs - including the ever-rising cost of fuel and insurance - and low returns, a crab price of $1.05 per pound is the kind of price that may mean fishermen will have to keep their boats tied up. If enough do, the supply of crab will shorten enough for prices to rise.
Except for one little problem.
The head of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union, Earle McCurdy, says the price, which will remain in place at least until April 22, could drive fishermen out of business. Why? Because fishermen may have no choice but to fish, because sitting at the dock means huge investments in vessels and gear, with their financing costs mounting by the minute.
It has other implications as well, not the least of those on the economy of rural Newfoundland and Labrador. If fishermen stay ashore, plant workers won’t get the weeks they need to get through the winter. If fishermen wait for better prices - especially those in areas with already-shortened seasons - plants will face a glut of crab, and plant workers will still be short the number of weeks they need.
It’s a problem with serious ramifications - and the problem is that, in the fishery, it has always been thus. When we’ve had fish, we haven’t had good prices. When we’ve had good prices, we haven’t had fish.
Crab has been the only fishery - except for one brief point with shrimp - where an astute fisherman, armed with good timing, good equipment and the right licences, could actually make some money.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised about the fact that snow crab look so much like something from another planet - their fishery, at least for a few years, looked like something from another planet as well.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein once wrote that the moon is a harsh mistress: well, the moon tugs the sea, and all the creatures beneath it. And the sea, it seems, is equally cruel.
And Friday's
Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post was the first, in the National Post’s business section Tuesday.
He came out in a column headlined "Williams plays a Chavez role," describing Premier Danny Williams as "Hugo Williams," comparing the premier to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who recently began taking over oil operations run by foreign oil giants.
It is the easiest of arguments - using a comparison to belittle a person, rather than addressing their point.
Welcome to the knee-jerk pinstriped reaction of the national business press.
Wednesday, the Post ran a question-and-answer piece, asking Williams how he felt about being compared to Chavez.
Thursday, it was the Globe and Mail, with columnist Deborah Yedlin opining that "Newfoundland might come to be known in energy circles as Canada’s Venezuela."
The Post’s Mark Milke also waded in on Thursday, with "Newfoundland’s Conservative Premier Danny Williams not only replicates Hugo Chavez and Vladmir Putin, but also former Newfoundland premiers." Yikes.
National business reporters suffer from their own version of Stockholm syndrome: bottled up with business types for long enough, they begin to believe the rarefied hot air they’re inhaling. In the United States, the Enron and WorldCom scandals brought a sharp review of just how tight the ties were between the business press and the businesses the press was supposed to be watching.
"In many cases, (the business media) has compounded the problem by engaging in superficial cheerleading and personality-driven business reporting that, in hindsight, portrayed some villains as heroes," a Washington Post columnist wrote.
Post-Enron, there’s a new reality in U.S. business reporting: the San Francisco Chronicle quoted David Calloway of Marketwatch.com as saying the skepticism has to be palpable: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
But to get back to the sudden desire by Canada’s business press to find a Venezuelan nationalist wolf inside Danny Williams’ clothing.
There’s no doubt that Williams’ comments about pushing ExxonMobil out of the Hebron project are out to lunch, the same as his posturing about expropriating the Stephenville paper mill was. It’s possible to bluff and sabre-rattle to your heart’s content, but the moment a government actually seizes someone’s property, well, the whole playing field changes.
You simply can’t expect business to invest in a region if it feels its investment is at risk. Most businesses will just look somewhere else for something else to do.
It may be a convenient way to vilify a premier who doesn’t seem to be willing to play by the established rules.
What Williams has said is that the deal offered by the Hebron consortium doesn’t measure up, and he has discussed a variety of options for solving what he views as an impasse with one partner in the project.
What the business press has chosen to do is to focus on one of those options, and then paint Williams as an unstable radical.
Name-calling is easy: what’s fascinating is how easily the same comparison seems to flow from so many different scribes within so few days.
It almost seems as if they’ve been hearing it all from the same place.
Russell Wangersky
Saturday's Editorial
They are preternaturally ugly little creatures, with their stalked and plastic-looking eyes and their five pairs of gangly and reaching legs. A boatload of them has - to the uninitiated - the frightening horror-show look of a Stephen King novel, or the otherworldliness of science-fiction villains. They reach and pluck and tumble over each other, awkward and ungainly out of the water, and they can give you the crawly feeling of reaching into a tool box and finding large spiders before you find your tools.
But to those who know them well, having a hold filled with iced snow crab - slowly blowing their thoughtful shiny spit-bubbles - was something akin to having a hold full of money.
The important word in the above sentence is the word "was."
Wednesday night, crab fishermen got word of a decision many expected, but that everyone dreaded. In addition to reduced quotas and, in some areas, a shorter fishing season as well, fishermen found out what the opening price was going to be for snow crab - a lowly $1.05 per pound.
Crab is the species that has been the undisputed king of this province’s fishing industry for the past few years, but this year’s opening price is the lowest price offered for crab since 1998.
The price has to move, if for no other reason than the endless equation of supply and demand - at this price, few fishermen can effectively supply the market. Caught between high costs - including the ever-rising cost of fuel and insurance - and low returns, a crab price of $1.05 per pound is the kind of price that may mean fishermen will have to keep their boats tied up. If enough do, the supply of crab will shorten enough for prices to rise.
Except for one little problem.
The head of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union, Earle McCurdy, says the price, which will remain in place at least until April 22, could drive fishermen out of business. Why? Because fishermen may have no choice but to fish, because sitting at the dock means huge investments in vessels and gear, with their financing costs mounting by the minute.
It has other implications as well, not the least of those on the economy of rural Newfoundland and Labrador. If fishermen stay ashore, plant workers won’t get the weeks they need to get through the winter. If fishermen wait for better prices - especially those in areas with already-shortened seasons - plants will face a glut of crab, and plant workers will still be short the number of weeks they need.
It’s a problem with serious ramifications - and the problem is that, in the fishery, it has always been thus. When we’ve had fish, we haven’t had good prices. When we’ve had good prices, we haven’t had fish.
Crab has been the only fishery - except for one brief point with shrimp - where an astute fisherman, armed with good timing, good equipment and the right licences, could actually make some money.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised about the fact that snow crab look so much like something from another planet - their fishery, at least for a few years, looked like something from another planet as well.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein once wrote that the moon is a harsh mistress: well, the moon tugs the sea, and all the creatures beneath it. And the sea, it seems, is equally cruel.
And Friday's
Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post was the first, in the National Post’s business section Tuesday.
He came out in a column headlined "Williams plays a Chavez role," describing Premier Danny Williams as "Hugo Williams," comparing the premier to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who recently began taking over oil operations run by foreign oil giants.
It is the easiest of arguments - using a comparison to belittle a person, rather than addressing their point.
Welcome to the knee-jerk pinstriped reaction of the national business press.
Wednesday, the Post ran a question-and-answer piece, asking Williams how he felt about being compared to Chavez.
Thursday, it was the Globe and Mail, with columnist Deborah Yedlin opining that "Newfoundland might come to be known in energy circles as Canada’s Venezuela."
The Post’s Mark Milke also waded in on Thursday, with "Newfoundland’s Conservative Premier Danny Williams not only replicates Hugo Chavez and Vladmir Putin, but also former Newfoundland premiers." Yikes.
National business reporters suffer from their own version of Stockholm syndrome: bottled up with business types for long enough, they begin to believe the rarefied hot air they’re inhaling. In the United States, the Enron and WorldCom scandals brought a sharp review of just how tight the ties were between the business press and the businesses the press was supposed to be watching.
"In many cases, (the business media) has compounded the problem by engaging in superficial cheerleading and personality-driven business reporting that, in hindsight, portrayed some villains as heroes," a Washington Post columnist wrote.
Post-Enron, there’s a new reality in U.S. business reporting: the San Francisco Chronicle quoted David Calloway of Marketwatch.com as saying the skepticism has to be palpable: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
But to get back to the sudden desire by Canada’s business press to find a Venezuelan nationalist wolf inside Danny Williams’ clothing.
There’s no doubt that Williams’ comments about pushing ExxonMobil out of the Hebron project are out to lunch, the same as his posturing about expropriating the Stephenville paper mill was. It’s possible to bluff and sabre-rattle to your heart’s content, but the moment a government actually seizes someone’s property, well, the whole playing field changes.
You simply can’t expect business to invest in a region if it feels its investment is at risk. Most businesses will just look somewhere else for something else to do.
It may be a convenient way to vilify a premier who doesn’t seem to be willing to play by the established rules.
What Williams has said is that the deal offered by the Hebron consortium doesn’t measure up, and he has discussed a variety of options for solving what he views as an impasse with one partner in the project.
What the business press has chosen to do is to focus on one of those options, and then paint Williams as an unstable radical.
Name-calling is easy: what’s fascinating is how easily the same comparison seems to flow from so many different scribes within so few days.
It almost seems as if they’ve been hearing it all from the same place.
posted by Russell Wangersky at 4:24 AM
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