By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 7, 1997; Page A13

The people of this province don't get their hopes up easily. They have seen seemingly endless shoals of cod fished to exhaustion, a once-armada-like seal hunt declared unfashionable and millions of watts of hydroelectric power sold at bargain rates to the benefit of Quebec and the United States.

And that's just within the last generation.

"There are many strands to the Newfoundland soul, and one is a razor-sharp cynicism," said Bruce Porter, editor of a literary magazine in this historic port city, one of North America's oldest. "We have been hoodwinked too many times."

Yet even the most hard-edged in this province of skeptics find it hard to deny that better times may be brewing.

Two hundred miles offshore, the first of what are expected to be several oil rigs now stands in the North Atlantic, iceberg-proofed and anticipated to pump its first crude by year's end. On the rugged interior of Labrador, joined with the island of Newfoundland under the same provincial government, development of the world's largest nickel mine at Voisey's Bay proceeds with the promise of thousands of construction jobs and nearly 1,600 permanent positions.

In addition, provincial officials say that efforts to steer Newfoundlanders away from centuries of fishing and into technology-based jobs are paying off, as local companies sprout in fields such as telecommunications, navigation and mapping.

Culturally, although united to Canada less than 50 years ago and then only grudgingly, the island today colors the national airwaves with a popular political satire show, fiddle music and an unmistakable Gaelic brogue.

If the image of Newfoundland is framed by its position as Canada's poorest province, the reality is of a self-reliant people who have survived on "the Rock" for nearly 500 years and may finally get the full rewards of their durability.

"Newfoundland has a very one-dimensional image in Canada," as a place forever in economic straits and in need of propping up by the rest of the country, said Carmelita McGrath, a St. John's writer. In fact, "people here are so used to being on the edge, there is no shame in it."

The broad statistics are discouraging: unemployment in excess of 19 percent; education levels far lower than the Canadian average; a population that is aging as youths and young adults move to boom provinces like Alberta and British Columbia, or even south to Nova Scotia where opportunity is perceived to be better. In a work force of around 225,000, more than 100,000 receive unemployment insurance at some point during the year.

But those numbers do not tell the full story. Joblessness in St. John's, where the population clusters, is far lower than in the rest of the province. And even those spread among Newfoundland's numerous rural villages are by no means poverty-stricken.

Sometimes carved out of cliff sides and typically centering around a wharf or small manufacturing facility, towns such as Carbonear, on Conception Bay, 30 miles west of St. John's, appear modest, but solid – not wealthy, perhaps, but making do. Home ownership rates are high, often with no mortgage attached, and people are used to supplementing whatever money they earn by hunting or growing their own food, and chopping firewood for fuel.

"Ten thousand dollars goes a lot further in rural Newfoundland" than in urban areas of mainland Canada, said Robert Bugler, a statistician for the provincial government. "You tag people as being in poverty, it is a stigma" that does not necessarily reflect their ability to make a living.

"People treat this as a very traditional way of life," said Charles Furey, Newfoundland's minister of industry, trade and technology.

For much of the time since explorer John Cabot is believed to have landed here 500 years ago, that tradition centered around fishing for the Atlantic cod that teemed along the Grand Banks so thickly, history has it, that the first colonists caught them in buckets. The fish helped sustain tens of thousands of Newfoundland families until 1992, when the federal government declared a moratorium on the fishery. Modern trawling technology, poor science, mismanagement, perhaps even climate change and the resurgence of a predatory seal population – all were blamed for the disappearance of a world-renowned resource.

The moratorium struck a devastating blow to the island's culture; economically, it also deprived many fishermen of a staple cash crop and left some villages without the fish-processing plants that formed their economic centers.

The federal government partly offset that with a $1.5 billion income assistance program. Twenty-eight thousand Newfoundlanders, more than 10 percent of the labor force, qualified for the aid, and their resettlement into other jobs has been slow. More than 22,000 still receive assistance, which is due to expire next year.

Even in the fishing industry, however, the worst may be over. Many fishermen have diversified into crab, capelin and other species to replace the income lost from cod, and the total value of the province's annual catch is now larger than it was in the years before the moratorium.

To Eugene Moss, captain of the fishing boat Nancy Lynn, the situation is more equitable today as well, because the moratorium drove away the larger commercial trawlers, allowing the catch to be spread more equitably among Newfoundlanders. The cod disappeared early from Moss's native Bonavista Bay, and like many, he adapted.

"The way it's going now, it seems like more people are making an income," Moss said. "It's spread out better now."

Still, the fishery remains a precarious foundation for the economy, which is why provincial officials point to the 1 million-ton, $4.5 billion Hibernia platform and its potential sister rigs as important economic bridges to a day when young Newfoundlanders will stay in school as long as other Canadians and feel they can prosper as easily at home as elsewhere.

The search for oil offshore began in the 1960s, when geologists noted similarities between Canada's eastern waters and Europe's oil-rich North Sea. Since then, feuding between the provincial and federal governments over royalty rights, and doubts about the commercial viability of drilling in such treacherous waters, delayed efforts to tap the resource, estimated in the billions of barrels.

Hibernia, the first of the rigs, was towed to its location in the spring, an event that prompted black-tie galas and the launch of a local Hibernia Beer, its bottle bedecked with a picture of the gargantuan oil facility. The rig is equipped with serrated edges around its base to fend off icebergs, but more importantly is guarded by over-the-horizon radar and a team of ships ready to lasso even the most treacherously submerged "growler" and nudge it off course.

Actual employment amounts to only about 600 jobs. But provincial and company officials say they already see a more important long-term effect as local firms compete for the more than $300 million worth of goods and services that Hibernia will need each year to operate.

Optimism over such projects is hardly universal. Fishermen complain that union rules prevent their unemployed colleagues from competing for oil industry jobs. Others note that the crude oil from Hibernia, owned by a Mobil Oil Corp.-led consortium, will be refined elsewhere. As with the hydroelectric power of the Churchill Falls project, exported under a decades-old contract with Quebec at a near-loss to Newfoundland, the province once again will not benefit fully from one of its own resources.

And there is always the sneaking suspicion here that things won't work as planned. People note that, just as an early exploratory rig capsized in the Hibernia field in the 1980s, killing more than 80 crew members, bad economics, bad weather or bad luck could still hamper Hibernia and throw successor projects like the planned Terra Nova rig off track.

But in small communities like Hopeall along the Newfoundland coast, the new opportunities are registering, even among those with deep roots in the island's traditions. Craig Collins, after several years on construction sites in the southern United States, returned here this year, angry about some of the changes but also cheery in a very un-Newfoundland way about the future.

"If my grandfather knew you could not go out here and jig a cod for your dinner, he'd roll over in his grave," Collins said. But with a nickel smelter to be built nearby, creating hundreds of jobs, he is not feeling sorry for himself or his province.

"In the next 15 years this place is going to really pick up," he predicted.