SIGNS OF THE TIMES

By Barry Stagg

May 1996

TITLE: Madness : Man, Fish or Beast?

Mad Cow Disease in Britain is a monstrous triumph of modern technology over common sense. The very act of feeding sheep guts to cattle is repugnant, stupid and an utterly ordinary bureaucratic decision. Doubtless many thick "cost -benefit analysis" studies were produced in white collar ghettos to get that pastoral practice off and running toward Hell.

The terror of this disaster is still coming into focus. It may be a catastrophe that has already spread beyond the British Isles to mainland Europe. Certainly the diet of millions will be altered for the foreseeable future. The calculations of the world's food supply must be re-considered as the staple protein source of the Western World becomes associated with a plague of unknown proportions. The attack on our food supply is bureaucratic in origin. Indeed this is not the first example of public pestilence unleashed by banal and indifferent public policy. The Fish Crisis that Newfoundland continues to endure is an earlier example of the same sad and destructive rule of public regulators over people and food stocks.

It was the same form of smug and blind policy-making that allowed and virtually mandated the vacuuming of the cod stocks from the Grand Banks. Bureaucrats in offices a thousand miles from the salt water decided on a ruinous fishing policy for Newfoundlanders and went home at five o'clock . Silly politicians like former Prime Minister Kim Campbell capped off the destruction by refusing to even enforce Canada's sovereignty against the deliberate predators from the Eastern reaches of the North Atlantic. Smiles and handshakes and blind ,indifferent ambition went nauseously on as the fish stocks rotted away .

It was no political accident that Campbell, the heroine of the chattering classes, took the Conservative Party into an abyss in the 1993 federal election. Her arrogant lecture to Newfoundlanders on the election trail refusing and ridiculing military intervention on the fishing grounds was a snapshot of her wrong-headed campaign.

British Prime Minister John Major seems dedicated to following Campbell down the path to political Hades for his Conservative Party. Rather than owning up to governmental neglect and ignorance, he and his followers have foolishly attempted to minimize the disaster as if it were some sort of local calamity. The similarities to the Cod Crisis are eerie.

The pathetic impact of both debacles is on the ordinary citizen. The fishing industry that was Newfoundland for hundreds of years lies in ruins, the victim of bureaucratic nuclear war. British beef farmers go in an instant from prosperous success to purveyors of plague. The fishermen and the farmers are tagged as the authors of their own misfortune by a world insulated from the land and sea by sidewalks and airports.

The fishing people of Newfoundland took heart from the support of the British fishermen of ports like Newlyn in Western England when the court of world opinion was being marshalled against Canada in ruthless fashion by the Spanish and their European Union partners. Now the fishing people of Wesleyville and Catalina should reciprocate that support when the beef harvesters of Britain face a similar man-made calamity. This is a time for unity among rural people.

The common bond between the land and sea that cemented the economy of Britain through the age of Empire is now stretched to international proportions. The descendants of the Devon and Cornish families who fished the Newfoundland banks are the people of Newfoundland . There is still a strong and emotional link between these two islands that escapes the understanding of both the inhabitants of central Europe and central Canada.

Reform of the politics of both countries is pivotal to surviving the crises now confronting the harvesters of both nations. What passes for party politics in Canada and Britain is increasingly seen as choices between rivals grown too comfortable with the sharing of the spoils of office. The electoral destruction of the Kim Campbell's Tories in 1993 is no more than a pre-saging of what should beset Chretien's Liberals in the next Canadian general election. Just as John Major faces political annihilation in Britain so should the Liberals walk the same plank laid out by Brian Mulroney for Ms. Campbell. The Liberals with their greasy affirmation of the GST illustrate their complete brotherhood with the Tories.

Recent by-elections show the Liberals well on their way to marginalizing all populist opposition by shoring up the Tories against the Reform Party. There is a crisis of leadership at the federal level and bureaucratic disasters like the Cod Crisis are inevitable consequences of politicians grown together with the civil service gentry.

Mad Cow Disease is a bureaucratic by-product. As a result, British voters will give dithering John Major a well deserved heave-ho. Canadian voters must have a single alternative to Chretien's Liberals in order to carry out the same act of political cleansing.


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