ABSTRACT
The eastern Canadian island of Newfoundland had a resource-based economy in the early 1990s, which was devastated by having been too reliant upon one particular renewable product that was over-exploited beyond its ability to recover. The product was fish, cod to be precise. Ocean resources had been the key to the region’s European settlement history and economy from the earliest days. Various European powers competed for these resources including, at first, Spanish, Portuguese and Basques. Red Bay, an isolated village at the end of a road that links just five settlements in southern Labrador and eastern Québec, was once a very significant European settlement. This was in the mid-sixteenth century when it was the centre of Basque whaling activities, focused around an offshore island, Saddle Island, which offered some defence. Significantly, the Basque interest faded once the stocks of whales were depleted. As in the rest of what became Eastern Canada’s Atlantic Provinces, two European powers remained active long term in the Newfoundland area, namely the British and the French. Both exploited the fish stocks, but it was the British who made most use of the island of Newfoundland as they processed the fish (by drying and salting) on the land rather than aboard ship as the French tended to do. Newfoundland ended up as a British possession, separate from Canada until 1949 when Newfoundland and Labrador voted to join the Canadian confederation. France retains a presence in the area as her once extensive North American empire became reduced to two islands off southern Newfoundland, what is now the ‘territorial collectivity’ of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. From these islands France controls her regional fishing interests.
