I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t intrigued by Canada’s easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve never been there, but it calls to me in much the same way many distant parts of Canada, like Haida Gwaii and the far north, call to me. I hope someday I’ll be fortunate enough to visit more of our country’s far corners. 

In Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019), Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) paints an intimate portrait of the island portion of her home province—not only how physically beautiful it is, but where it’s come from, what its people have endured, and where it’s going. 

In the early chapters of this moving memoir, Verma depicts in vivid detail what life was like for her grandparents, Pop and Nan, and great grandparents. They raised their family in a one-room wooden house. Wood was the only fuel used for cooking and heating, in a home that lacked indoor plumbing and was lit by a kerosene lamp. Wood was also used to build the boats that kept the island’s bountiful cod fishery alive.

Fishing was a hard life, one most parents didn’t wish for their children. And indeed, Verma’s parents did not grow up to be fishers but became skilled professionals in a hospital in Corner Brook. Yet the fishing way of life is also one that many remember fondly, in spite of both hardships and risks that most of us can barely imagine. Verma writes:

When it comes to a career at sea, practice brings some degree of perfection, but luck comes into play a lot of the time too. That’s what comes to mind as I recall what Gene told me about navigating tricky weather in his fishing days. “People used to say to me, ‘It’s thick with fog. You’re not going out today.’ I said, ‘Honey, I got a compass, I knows where I’m to.’ But I said, ‘The other fellers can’t find me.’ On a fine day, yes no trouble. Anyone could go to fish on a fine day, but I often went forty days out here and never saw land. Forty days in the fog day after day after day, nothing, only fog. I could only see to the end of the boat. But I was happy. I would sooner be out there than in here.” And yet, Gene is well aware of the risks of being “out there.” He told me of one dicey situation when he went overboard.

“I went in with an anchor. One Saturday evening, it was thick with fog and mad rough. We were setting a net from here to there somewhere. I was … hauling up the anchor and I don’t know what happened. It happened so fast. Rope come off … and I went down. It got dark. I could see a rope, so I grabbed the rope. The anchor was hauling me down. When the anchor got on the bottom, I got the rope off me and I started to come up. And next thing, I could see the propeller on the boat spin because I had only just slowed the gear. Anyway, I come up and I grabbed the rail of the boat and I got a bit of air.”

The cod fishery supported Newfoundland fishers for hundreds of years. But after World War II, as fishing methods improved, drawing fleets from as far away as Portugal to the Grand Banks and taking far more fish than could be sustained, the government of Canada finally admitted that without dramatic changes, the once-teaming cod population was in danger of extinction. 

The cod moratorium, announced July 2, 1992, immediately put 30,000 fishers out of work—the largest layoff in Canada’s history. It was supposed to last two years; it lasted three decades. Within ten years, Newfoundland’s population dropped by a record ten percent. The moratorium was finally lifted in 2024, but whereas total allowable catch (TAC) at the fishery’s peak was around 240,000 tonnes, it’s now 18,000 tonnes.

Cod Collapse is a story of hardship and loss, but it’s also a story of survival and recovery. It’s a story about a young woman moving away and distancing herself from the place she grew up, not least because “Newfies,” as I remember myself (with shame, now) referring to Newfoundlanders as a kid, who were for many years the butt of Canadian jokes. It’s a story about reconnecting with a past and feeling deep pride in it. And it’s a story about finding other ways to make a sea-faring life work—other fisheries, such as lobster; other ways to use the ocean, such as the offshore oil industry; and other ways to make a living off the land, such as tourism in one of the most ruggedly beautiful corners of our country. 

I’m immensely proud to be a Canadian, proud of every corner of this country, the many I haven’t seen as much as the relatively few I have. Books like this only make me prouder. It’s an amazing land we live in, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. And in an era when our sovereignty is threatened by outside forces, writers like Verma help us all to build that pride by telling the stories of those who make this country what it is. 

Here’s another book about fish, with a very different perspective:

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

And here are some books about Canada that inspire pride:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.