April 17, 2025 • 44 mins
Zita Cobb’s story isn’t just worth hearing—it’s worth hugging. In this episode of Chatter That Matters, you’ll meet a woman who helped to transform Fogo Island, one of the most remote and rugged places in Canada, into a beacon that attracts the world. Zita's perspective on hospitality, community, and the miracles of reimagining a place will change how you view tourism, shifting from merely visiting to truly experiencing Mother Nature and Human Nature.
Zita speaks with wisdom carved from the rocks of a small fishing village in Newfoundland and Labrador, where everything her family knew was taken away, forcing them to leave. Many years later, Zita returns to collaborate with the community to create Fogo Island Inn and within it a vibrant circular economy.
I then close the show by sharing my thoughts on why the world needs more Canada and how Canada must build a stronger tourism sector.
Thank you to RBC for making Chatter That Matters, and our weekly show about positivity and possibility, possible.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
I tried something different last week, and I'm gonna continue with it.
And that is to record the opening after I've recorded my
interview with my guest. And the reason being is it gives
me time to reflect and hopefully present why I
think their story and lessons in life matter to you
and to me and hopefully to a lot of people. My guest today is
(00:26):
Zita Cobb. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy.
A miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I've heard
such incredible things about this beautiful force of
nature. Her intellect, her emotional capacity,
and her ability to do is unlike anything I've ever seen.
(00:49):
Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and supported.
I think what we're missing and if if there's one thing, if I had a
magic wand, is to build an architecture for
collaboration in each place and across the pillars.
And why this story is so important is that she's applied
all of this to where she was born and in doing
(01:10):
so, has been part of creating a gift not only to the
community that lives there, the world, especially
the part of the world where humans still wanna be
human beings. We know how to make things. If it's made out of wood, we
can make it. We know how to make furniture. We know how to make quilts.
We know how to grow things. We know how to fish. All of those things
(01:30):
we would need to bring to bear to welcome guests and take care of
them. And And so it's like a way through practice of keeping our
skills and our knowledge and building a platform to practice
hospitality. I hope you enjoy
getting to know Zita Cobb as much as I did.
(01:51):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Zita Cobb, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Thank you, Tony. Great to be
here. Now my audience is all over the world, and I'm sure
(02:13):
most of them have heard of Newfoundland. Some might even even gone to a
play. But I just love you to just take a moment and
describe what I personally consider one of the most beautiful parts
of Canada. Honestly, one of the most beautiful parts of, the world. Well, the
province is called Newfoundland and Labrador. We must never forget about Labrador.
And it is it holds up the Northeast Part of
(02:35):
Canada. And it's, it gives new meaning to the word
rugged in terms of its landscapes. It's a very, very old
landscape. The part that I'm from is the Northeast
Coast, and that's rougher than rough in terms of
landscape. And the rocks that I grew up on are 400,000,000
years old. There's something about the soul of
(02:58):
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians that comes out of those rocks and
comes out of that North Atlantic and that kind of epic
and difficult and noble set of relationships.
So let's talk about epic, noble, and in
some ways, how challenging it was to grow up there. I was because as a
young girl on Fogo Island, you grew up with this
(03:20):
incredible community, but not with the luxuries that most people take
for granted, running water and electricity. Yeah. I think I had the real luxuries.
The island of Fogo Island is about just under four times the size of
Manhattan, so quite a large island with 10 different communities. I grew up in
one called Joe Batt's Arm, which when I was growing up had about
900 people. I grew up with this deep intimate
(03:42):
relationship with place and with rocks
and with the ocean, and we had this
confidence from competence. And we always
knew we could make a living. We fed ourselves. We as you say,
we didn't have electricity, and we didn't have running water, and we had very little
health care. So it wasn't fun when someone had a
(04:04):
toothache. I also, spent one year of my
childhood life in a sanatorium because I had TB when I was
five and six. I understood what it
means to be in an active everyday
relationship with people and place. You also mentioned in
several interviews a defining moment in your life as when your
(04:26):
your father burnt his boat. I'm an eighth generation Fogo
Islander. People started to arrive from Europe,
to Fogo Island in the mid sixteen hundreds. Generation after generation
after generation of us have made a living on the North Atlantic fishing
in little boats that we built ourselves, like my father who built
his boat. When the industrialization of the
(04:49):
fishery arrived, and it took no time at
all to take just about every last fish out of the water because we humans
are very effective when we get focused on something, He
couldn't see a future. You know, he came home on that
that exact day with one fish. Threw it on the kitchen
floor, and we all kinda stood there looking at this one fish on the kitchen
(05:10):
floor, and he just simply said, it's over. When I talked earlier about, you know,
we're confident people, that confidence comes
from the knowledge of the place. Nature knows everything. And every
once in a while, we pay attention to it and we learn. Nature knows the
cure for cancer. And people who have kept
a steady, uninterrupted relationship with nature know stuff.
(05:32):
That's where innovation is from. So now you take someone, my
father, who couldn't read. His whole life was fishing, and now there are no more
fish. For him, I think the burning of the
boat was not willing to
suffer the indignity of watching it fall apart
and to pull it up on the shore and watch it decay. It was a
(05:54):
protest, anger. I think he meant it to be symbolic
for us kids to say, stop dreaming. And did
you have a chance later in life to talk to him
about that moment? Because he, you know, he takes the family to Ontario.
I can't imagine what it would be like to walk in his shoes at that
point. It would be like, to me, a refugee
(06:15):
leaving everything they know and coming to another part of the world and knowing nothing.
There's a beautiful song about that time of when the Newfoundlanders had to
go. And some of them were part of the kind of forced
resettlement, and some of them, like my father, just decided it was
done. And the song there's a line in the song called The Outpour People, and
it is this. They moved without leaving and
(06:37):
never arrived. And you could certainly say that about
my father. And he went from being the most dignified
person you'd ever know to someone who struggled for dignity. They I went to
Ottawa to go to university to study business because that's what he said
I had to do to figure out how this money thing works before it eats
everything we love. And they went and my parents and
(06:59):
my youngest brother went to Scarborough where, of course, Scarborough had a lot of
Newfoundlanders. And many of my brothers were in Scarborough. So that's why
they landed there. First time in his life, he had to have a bank account
because they had to pay the rent. He really hated having to go over to
the bank and make an x in front of these young people
who were working at the bank. I can imagine. So he wanted to
(07:20):
learn to write his name. I tried to teach him, and so,
yeah, I started with the alphabet like you would, did not go well.
And so finally he said to me, which was brilliant, of course, he said,
I don't need to know all of that. It's just a shape. So he
used to go and draw. It was as if it was a drawing, his signature.
I have to believe not only his mental health, but your physical health would
(07:43):
suffer when you go from being someone that had stature and
someone that was the head of the family and and now going into
a world where, as you said, he was embarrassed because he couldn't even sign his
name. It has to be difficult as a child to see confidence
disappear in somebody that you've entrusted your life to for so many
years? It was I mean, in some ways, it was funny because they couldn't they
(08:05):
would go to the grocery store and not be able to navigate. You know, they
spent weeks trying to find cabbage, and they thought iceberg lettuce was
cabbage. They'd never seen such a thing. So it was always these very funny stories.
I was younger because, of course, in Newfoundland, we only had grade 11. So when
I started at Carleton, I was 17. I had just turned 17.
But, you know, my father is was a tough cookie
(08:26):
mentally and physically. He was able to kinda zoom
out and understand what was happening to him. And, you know, it didn't
deteriorate into manifestations of despair you see when people lose
their dignity. I think he just found he he just found other
outlets. And I think he looked at the whole society that he'd been
now cast into with kind of humor. We're gonna
(08:48):
fast forward a little bit. But before we get back to what you're doing in
the sense of place, the next move on the chessboard for you is
you had a very successful career in high-tech, and you did
extraordinarily well. So for someone that came out and was sent to learn
business and figure out this money thing, you figured it out pretty well.
You know, it's kind of a funny thing. I went, to university to study
(09:11):
this money thing with, probably a a bit
of anger about the money thing. Like, I have to stop this
money thing. You know? And in the studying of business, I
actually fell in love with what it could do. In that time, I don't know
if you remember the book Small is Beautiful, it came out when I was in
university. Business is about how the
(09:32):
part belongs to the whole. And this kind of cauliflower thinking and thinking about
fractals and thinking about that Fogo Island is just one little
floret in a big cauliflower. What matters is the
stem that holds us all together. How do we get all the
flows, the economies, like the flows of things to this
all the florets so that they have nutrition, so that the
(09:54):
cauliflower is well? So that really changed how I thought about business
and and economy and the link between business and
economy. Tell me how the whole high-tech world came on because
you're starting having this interesting philosophy. And I guess technology in many ways
is the the lifeblood of the cauliflower, if it's done right. Yes.
And I grew up in a place that was deeply, and still is,
(10:16):
deeply innovative. I mean, this is a sounds like a bit of a crude thing,
but, you know, this joke about Newfoundlanders is, Newfoundlanders can put the arse in a
cat. And it's true. We can figure anything out. And because we
we approach it with the belief that we can, and the reason we feel we
can is because we've had to. I love working with
people who love figuring stuff out. I actually started my career because, you know,
(10:38):
I'm a Newfoundlander. I I worked in the oil patch for a while. I worked
for Shell Texaco first and then Shell. I was responsible for a gas field in
Southern Alberta. And I met this
contractor that was doing cold regions research, left the oil
companies, and I joined this little company that, at the time I joined
them in Calgary, had 80 people in
(10:59):
Canada. And some were in Calgary and and focused on the Beaufort. And
some were in Ottawa, focused on cold regions technology and icebreakers and all
of that. And it was owned by a
US company that had been started by two guys who came out of the US
Coast Guard. I loved those people. Like, I still do. They
were mostly engineers,
(11:21):
scientists that were doing numerical modeling and things like that. And
my career really was do everything that they shouldn't be doing. So, of
course, you know, I was a controller and human resources and
purchasing every single thing. I saw my career as create the
enabling conditions so that these people can innovate.
You're a microcosm of the of the cauliflower even within that business.
(11:43):
You are the stem. I never thought of it that way. I really didn't. But
that is how and that's what what I'm good at and what gives me joy.
What does the floret need, and what do these, inventors need? So
then I when I left then I joined a company called what was
that I joined at JDS Optics, based in
Ottawa and founded by four people who came out of Bell
(12:04):
Northern Research. It was the most beautiful company. It
was privately held. And I joined in
1989 and right at the time that and it was involved in wave
division multiple I mean, in fiber optics. Wave division multiplexing
was really just becoming a big thing. And so I was with that company until
02/2001, and it grew to 40,000 people. And in my last
(12:27):
two years with the company was a time of integration. I bought
40 companies around the world. It was crazy. When we return, things get really,
crazy. When we return, things get really, I don't
know, powerful for me. We go beyond Newfoundland
and Labrador and talk about what happened and is
happening on Fogo Island. This incredible
(12:48):
connection with culture and humanity and nature. People from
all over the world wanna make it their place to be. It's also a
place for locals to be purposeful, to give and receive
gratitude, and to really bring to life the power of
humanity when it's working together within a circular
economy. I'll build on that after my chat with Zita.
(13:13):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman, host of Chatter That Matters, presented by
RBC. Ideas matter. Ideas are the oxygen of human
endeavor. They breathe life into how we work, live, and play. Ideas
let us create and innovate and overcome complex and often
challenging circumstances. Big or small, revolutionary or evolutionary,
almost every positive step forward begins with a good idea. So bring
(13:35):
your ideas to RBC because they matter, and they'll bring theirs because
you matter. Ideas happen at RBC.
I used to work for a man who come to work as a technology company
every day, and he'd say, the most most important thing is to keep the most
important thing the most important thing. I think the most important thing
was said by Schumacher in the seventies, nature and culture are the
(13:56):
two great garments of human life. And business and technology are
the two great tools that can and should serve them. My guest today is
Zita Cobb. She came from a small fishing village,
built an extraordinary career in finance before returning back
to that village, and working with everyone there to create
the Fogle Island Inn. And the lessons learned are
(14:18):
lessons could benefit all of Canada.
You could have just spent the rest of your life enjoying life. I mean, you
did very well intellectually, emotionally, financially. It was a great
run. But you chose to come back to Fogo Island.
I mean, this is somebody that's traveling all over the world, buying businesses all over
the world, and that that that's part of the story I was fascinated
(14:41):
with. That was this always a calling for you or did it get to a
certain part of your life where you said it's now or never? I'm just curious
what was the magnetic qualities that would bring it back. You know, I never
lost my relationship with place, with Fogo Island ever. I mean,
I was always going back and forth. I always had this idea I wasn't gonna
live very long because in my family people tip tend not to live all that
(15:02):
long because we have heart disease. We're, like, half Irish bat you know,
bad hearts. As a child, it was always my plan
that I am going to sail back across the ocean. I wanna
go and see where these ancestors came from, and I want to have that experience
of sailing. And so the first thing I did, and and I
actually bought the boat before I left JDS, is I went
(15:24):
sailing. So I lived on the boat on sale for five years. The first thing
I did at home that was specific to what's mine to do
was I started a scholarship program for kids leaving the high school there to go
to university. And I was at home
for a review of the scholarship as a public review of the program,
and a woman set up and said, you're just
(15:47):
paying our kids to leave. Can't you do something to make
work? Her question set off a whole
bunch of thinking. The answer kind of presented itself. I
was sailing, and I stopped one day in Mystic Seaport, which
is America's, you know, museum of its relationship with the sea.
In Mystic is a is a banking schooner, was a Newfoundland
(16:10):
banking schooner called the the Dunton, Leonard Dunton. And the
day I was there, there were a bunch of Newfoundlanders there doing a demonstration for
the making of fish. At that very moment, I
was in touch with my good friend Pete from the island, and
he said, oh, you had a terrible letter from the mayor that your house my
uncle had passed away and left me a little house, like a little salt box
(16:32):
700 square foot house. Your house is an eyesore, and you either have
to fix it up or tear it down. Tell them we're gonna tear it down.
What am I I mean, what am I gonna do with a falling down house?
Then later that afternoon, I'm standing at Mystic Seaport looking around the
Leonard S. Dunton, a Newfoundland banking schooner was saved.
Somebody thought that was worth saving. And I thought, what am I doing?
(16:53):
I have the means to save this house.
I have the means to do a lot of things.
If I'm not going to do something on Fogo Island, do I expect you to
come do it or someone else to come do it? These things, like,
place holds the things that have inherent value to my
ability to make meaning and I think everybody's ability to make meaning.
(17:16):
Here I was standing in this place that I was so grateful existed
because it really gave us access to the past. It it gave us
access to the relationships from the past and the knowledge from the past.
And and I was gonna just tear down my own. Ed, did you, at
that point, consider it a calling or
something I should do as part of my portfolio
(17:39):
of interest and activities? Because it truly became a calling. I
think it it grew. I think it did start with a, like, a little
miracle. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy.
The miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. If I had been standing anywhere
but Mystic Seaport, I'm not sure the little miracle would have set off in
(18:01):
my head. But it was a little bit like pulling a thread on
a sweater that you just you thought you were just pulling that little thread, and
then you realize this is connected to the whole sweater. And before you realize that,
you gotta knit a whole new sweater. And so I I think it,
was a series of little miracles that started with that. So let's
talk about place based economics because
(18:22):
you've framed your TED Talks, you've framed a lot of your
conversations around this sense of place.
And I think other people have talked about it as the circle economy. The
indigenous certainly talk about it within their world. Just how do
you define it, and why aren't we not all
embracing it? I think we're suffering from a kind of place
(18:43):
blindness. Place is a funny thing because,
like, everything is bound up with its opposite. So if you were in a place,
and I know a lot of people and a lot of my friends who were
born and raised in small, faraway places, they
would feel imprisoned to think that they they couldn't leave.
You know, they didn't see it as, like, a gift to be a part of
(19:06):
the place, and they wanted to get away from it. So the possibility
of moving and being in motion is so appealing
to all of us that when the idea of a global
village, oh my god, there's all these systems that support you can live where you
like and all of this, we just forgot that we
are embodied creatures, that we are
(19:27):
social creatures, and that we are meaning seeking creatures.
And when you think about place, place holds nature. And
culture is a human response to a place, it's the sum of what we have
learned and shared in this place. And those things are integral to meaning
making. So I think we rushed away from place a bit too soon, and then
we woke up and realized, oh, hang on a second. There isn't a global village
(19:49):
at all. There's just a whole bunch of villages. We
allowed an economy to develop, a global economy,
globalized economy to develop, that forgot to knit
the places into it. So the really, the global economy
became, you know, a whole bunch of institutions and organizations
loosely organized by governments that place wasn't even a
(20:12):
consideration, let alone a design element in the economy.
So that's what I think we're trying to solve for now. Because, you know, I
think ultimately humans are lazy. We are lazy. And so it's
like, oh, jeez, we have to go back and clean up and take care of
the place. Yeah, yeah, we do. We're not going to solve a housing crisis by,
you know, talking about it or wishing it so. We're going to, like, figure out
(20:32):
how to make this work. And so I think the economy should be the
sum of its parts. I mean, I could do a whole talk now, which is
Canada, much less than the sum of its parts. And
it is. We have 4,500 amazing communities that are incorporated,
and God knows how many more that are too small and not yet incorporated
and maybe never will be. Maybe that's fine. But if you think
(20:54):
about the economy as think about it as plumbing.
Well, if the plumbing works, it includes all the little toes
and fingers of a place, like a country. That's
a beautiful economy. Lifts up, serves, it underpins
places. And if it underpins a place and places, then it
underpins lives. Well, let's go back to your cauliflower analogy because I I love
(21:16):
what you're presenting to me. But I would argue that in Canada,
I would argue in many places around the world, we've cut off the stem. It's
to other people's advantage, whether it's social media to herd you in their
places with like minded people who like like minded content or
politicians who see divide to conquer as their
means to an end, we've lost that sense of
(21:38):
identity. So even if we had 4,500 of these little
florists out there starting to realize that this connected, we're better
and stronger, there's a lot of people that are wanting to build a
mode around each one of those communities because it serves to their advantage
versus what you talk about, which I also love, was the sense that
this culture is a manifestation of the place you're in. Yeah. I I think when
(22:01):
we lose our places and I lose our relationship with
places, culture is local. And when
those relationships get stretched or broken, I
think we're we get lost. I spend a lot of time thinking about where do
values come from and how do values shift? Because obviously they do.
There's a connection to actions. Right? Actions shape norms.
(22:24):
Norms shape beliefs. Beliefs shape values. If
you are connected in a place and and an active member of
a community that has I mean, that's the beautiful thing about community
is a place. There's all kinds of people there. And whoever you know, all kinds
of ages and just all kinds of points of view that you kind of you
would need a kind of social literacy to live with people. Because
(22:46):
sometimes, like, I grew up next to my father's brother. Those two men did not
like each other. And we knew it. But it never was sort of
open animosity. It was just you're living next to people
that, in their case, they didn't really like each other. But they needed each other.
And so we mucked along together. And out of that came
a set of values around how we treat each other. So if you
(23:08):
take people away from place and take away the necessity to actually
get along with other people, how do we orient? Where are the North
Stars? We all have very vibrant virtual lives
now that in some cases have almost supplanted our physical
lives. And we have retreated from the physical lives because in our
physical lives, oh, my God, people are a pain and your hip hurts and everything
(23:30):
online is so much easier. We don't like that friction of the physical world.
And if we are unrooted from past and
relatives and history and all of that, it's easy to believe the stuff
you see and read. We're very vulnerable. So you're countering,
and we're gonna talk about the Fogo Island Inn and how that
has become a place that is world renowned. So that lady that
(23:53):
said, why are you creating scholarships for people to leave?
You've created an entity where people believe people from all over the
world have come in. And I understand part of it is what you call this
thing about, I guess, a, b, c, d, this asset based
community development or Shorefast. So for the people that
haven't experienced Fogo Island, what would they experience
(24:15):
coming there? And then let's get to the STEM, which is the sense of a,
b, c, d. It it is, as we jokingly say, far away from
far away, its own rhythms and rituals
and is intact. It hasn't been flattened
by the commercialization of every single thing. You're not gonna
find the stuff you see chain after chain after global
(24:39):
chain. You just don't see that. And its landscape is so
shocking, I think, to most people that the minute you get off the ferry,
your imagination wakes up because it's a step out of time in a
way, but it's actually not behind time. I think it might be ahead of time.
People who grow up on a small island like we
did, who are confident, then the key is confidence. Like, if we
(25:02):
break the confidence of a people, we have broken the people.
Fogo Islanders have their confidence. And when they're confident, they
are super open to visitors, like, super
open. I think people are shocked that everybody talks to
you. And And Mary Walsh, she says, people think that Newfoundlanders
are friendly. Mary Walsh says, no, no, we're just nosy. Very nosy.
(25:24):
So, like, who are you? And what's your story? And what's your home? And
what can we learn from each other? It's a very natural
part. So when you go through ABCD, I mean, you
could look at Fogo Island and say, my gosh, it's a bald rock in the
North Atlantic and the cod collapsed. Like, what's the point? There's no electricity, no running
water. We gotta get the people out of there. Some government officials thought that.
(25:46):
And into that breach arrived the National Film Board of Canada
with this beautiful project called Challenge for Change. It was an anti
poverty, program project trying to understand the root
causes of poverty, urban and rural. And a filmmaker named Colin Lowe
arrived with the University from St. John's Memorial. And they didn't have any
answers. They just had questions. And this is the beautiful thing. And basically
(26:08):
what they were asking people is, well, what do you know? What do you have?
What do you think you have? And what do you think could be done? And
of course, local people know stuff. Deep cultural
knowledge. But nobody ever asked them questions. And out of that came,
this is back when I was 10, building a slightly bigger boat so we could
go to the Midshore. That's how we held on. Those people of my parents'
(26:30):
generation made a co op, so we held on. In our case,
going through a similar process, you realize, we're
deeply hospitable people. We should have we should have a world class inn.
The things and knowledge that we have that we can put into that inn is
rare. It's not broken. What was the tipping
point that had you going from, wow, we've got
(26:53):
hospitality, we know how to do things, we should create a world
class into actually putting a shovel in the ground. I think
it's when you do it with others. So I worked very closely with two of
my many brothers. I think if it had just been us in
our close conversation, there's always the option to
back away from it. It's like, Yeah, you know, I don't feel like doing it.
(27:15):
I want to go back. I mean, the hardest thing for me was to give
up sailing. That was really hard. But because this became a
community wide, island wide conversation, you're hardly gonna
say, well, I changed my mind. I think I wanna go sailing. Like, I think
it's about the commitments we make to each other. I don't remember there
being a moment that we weren't gonna move. Because once you start,
(27:35):
once you start the conversations, if they're open conversations, then
it it doesn't even belong to me. It belongs to us. Am I
going to let you down? No. This co op,
this collective of consciousness and energy and
heart, It also seems to be manifested in even how
you run your business because it's very transparent. People
(27:57):
really understand how it all works.
That counters the principles of a lot of people that feel control
comes from knowledge. Knowledge gives me power. And
you're saying the opposite that by surrendering that knowledge, it gives
us collective power. Yes. Exactly. And it certainly gives us more pleasure. And the
other thing about the inn, of course, we didn't start, I don't own the inn.
(28:19):
Like, I don't own anything on Fogo Island except my car and that
little house that I did fix up and I now live in. The inn belongs
to the community because it's owned in this model. It's owned actually by the charity
called Shorefast, owns it. It's operated by a separate
board that's called Shorefast Social Enterprises. But the beneficial owners
are people of Fobo. I didn't I mean, I'm I'm on this planet a bit
(28:42):
longer than I ever thought I would be. But when the time comes to go,
nothing needs to be done. Arrangements don't have to be made. And so I think
the focus on transparency around the business model is maybe it's a
little bit back to my father saying, you gotta go and figure out how this
money thing works. Otherwise, it's gonna eat everything we love. Well, I
am very excited about how money can work. I'm horrified by
(29:03):
how it does work when it doesn't have a relationship with place.
Helping make that visible and helping more people understand that. Like, I think the
most important form of literacy we need in this world now
is place literacy and economic literacy. And I don't mean
by economic literacy financial literacy. I mean more people that
understand how the economy works. Like, what are these flows? It's like a
(29:27):
big plumbing system. And I think one of the greatest risks we
have is that people feel, and many do, utterly
powerless. People would rather have a conversation about their sex life than the
economy. Because to most people, it's something that happens to them.
And they're frustrated by it and they're just trying to survive it. But we are
all economic actors, and we can all be
(29:49):
economic stewards. How do we take what all of you
have created and bottle it in a way that some of the
other 4,500 communities in Canada are struggling for
a sense of place, who they are, why they matter, the questions you
ask time and time again, the questions that was answered by the National
Film Board. How do we bring that so that we can start
(30:11):
making our destiny more a matter of choice than leaving it to
the chance of a world that I don't
necessarily have to even connect to? We're building a
National Institute for Community Economies, which will have a
network associated with it and a digital platform, but it's a it's a way
of gathering the good and best practices for community
(30:33):
economic development. I mean, we can build a country where
all investment is development, and that is such
beautiful work. And that is where money
meets place. Money making and meaning making are not
opposites. They can come together. The more of us
that are engaged in this and aware of that, the more we're gonna get this
(30:55):
right. Like, we can do cultural and social and local development
at the same time as we're doing investment. Investors
growing a capacity to understand place will help. I mean,
I think the work really is how do we reconcile the
management of institutions with the management of place and
places. That's the work and that's the magic. I mean, and if you
(31:18):
think about Canada and these 4,500
incorporated communities, we have very little horizontal
musculature as a country. We're like, it's all these kind of vertical
silos that are either political or private.
So at every turn, you realize that the
regional economy or the provincial economy or the national economy is not
(31:40):
organized to intersect with place. I can't get
ferry schedule to line up with a plane schedule to come together. They just don't
connect because they're optimized in two different systems.
The Department of Education doesn't optimize for local. It optimizes for
the effectiveness or efficiency, not even effectiveness
of itself, not the kids that you're trying to educate.
(32:03):
Bringing place into all these systems makes those systems
stronger. I I think that's the answer to resilience. I mean, resilience is
ultimately local. If you had a magic wand and you're going in these communities,
where's the biggest barriers that if you could just take that
friction away, such great common sense? We organize
ourselves around a poem. And the poem is the art of walking
(32:25):
upright, is the art of using both feet. One is for
holding on and one is for reaching out. And you gotta do them both
or you're just gonna fall down. And every community is a bit different, but
there's a lot in common. First of all, it's understanding yourself in the
world. Understand how you fit into the
regional and the provincial and the national and the global. That
(32:46):
takes skill sets and experience sets that many local
people don't have. That can be solved. I think the thing
that is sometimes the hardest, and I see it in big and small
communities, is there are very few architectures for
collaboration within the place. So I could name so many
communities across the country where you've got the city councils that are doing what they
(33:08):
think, you know, my favorite question to ask in any place, who's
responsible for the economy here? Must be the mayor.
The mayor will be like, no, that he's if it's a he, responsible for
the barking dogs and collecting taxes and how do we keep the water running here.
I mean, I think what, Hazel McCallian said about Canada
I see this a lot, which is, you know, the federal government has all the
(33:31):
money, the provincial governments have all the power, and the municipalities have all the
problems. What she didn't say is, all of our assets,
all of our assets as a country are in a place somewhere.
Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and
supported. So I think what we're missing, and if there's one thing, if I had
a magic wand, is to build an architecture for
(33:52):
collaboration in each place and across the
pillars. So where the mayors or the councils come together with the
business community, come together with the not for profits, come together with the educators,
because it really actually takes all of us. And to all see
ourselves as stewards of our place and the best way to steward your
place is steward your economy and that we can do together.
(34:15):
What about the what I call the invisible bars of status quo? Because
I come to a meeting. I oh, yeah. Let's do it. But then I walk
back and the last thing I wanna give up is what I feel I'm entitled
to. I wanna preserve my status quo,
whether that's power, that's influence, whether that's a level
of entitlement because I've I've done this job for so many years.
(34:36):
How do you break that apart? Because when you're talking about collaboration,
when I see a silo, I see a moat, and I don't see a lot
of drawbridges. And in fact, the middle ground is getting completely
disappeared by a bigger and bigger moat. There is a process. There are many
processes for that, but you're I couldn't agree with you more, Tony. Like, that
people get very rigid around what they need to believe for whatever
(34:58):
reason they need to believe that we can't touch this. There's a fellow, and he's
from Alberta, named Doug Griffiths. He's he heads the Chamber of Commerce
in Edmonton now. He was on MHA, and he wrote a
book called 13 ways to kill your community, which
is well worth reading. There is a a case study about our
work that gets at some of this. They developed something called the
(35:20):
PLACE model. It's an acronym. It's the l. It's about linking
outsiders and insiders. And a part of our process and what we
want to build into the institute's knowledge that we wanna get out in the
world and add to is this holding on and reaching out. I think
about it as hospitality. Someone has to set the table. So if if you're a
family that fights with each other a lot, nothing like someone coming over
(35:43):
from dinner, you know, for your dinner tonight to say, okay, stop fighting. Can we
please set the table? Just stop fighting and act nice. And by the time the
visitors have left, you're actually talking to each other differently. So I I think that
is an important part of the flow of energy in a place that
helps lessen the moat. How far do we have to
get to precarious before we have that
(36:04):
willingness to act? Very good friend of mine is from,
Africa. And he said, you know, we we used to be happy with one meal
a day and we fought hard for a second. And if we ever got three
meals, it was an extraordinary day. So we were always hungry.
We weren't entitled. He said his biggest surprise when he came to
Canada was it wasn't about working for that second meal
(36:26):
or being consumed about finding that second meal. It was expecting
that second meal. And I'm wondering if part of our society,
we've gotten to this point because as much as we want
that future, we're not standing on enough shifting sand to say
we gotta make a leap for it. We have difficulty also making a relationship
with the future. One of my favorite books is The Leopard,
(36:49):
which is set in Sicily. It's written in
1958 at the time of the reformation when all of the institutions had outlived
their usefulness. And society they were struggling to figure out the
path. And the great line from that book is, if you want
things to stay the same, things have to change.
Can you figure out that your two meals are not gonna be
(37:10):
guaranteed? It's a twofold thing. It's because we do want we tend to
want to defend what we have or think think we have and fail
to see the future and fail to see that it's precarious unless we can figure
out a world that works for more people. But the first thing
is, which is I think where place I I see the place as the answer
to everything, obviously, is if you see the world as a zero sum
(37:33):
game and you're at the center of it, then you're never
going to be open to anything. I tell you,
if you actually show up in a community and start to
muck along with people, you will not see your the more or less is
there a song game, and you will not see yourself at the center. And the
minute that little miracle happens, everything changes
(37:55):
because in your life arrives this powerful
thing called us. My guess, my last question for you,
because I've I've taken so much of your time today, have you found your place?
My place has never changed, you know. I mean, I I am made
of Fogo Island and, you know, that's how I orient in this
world. Ottawa is absolutely my second
(38:17):
home, and my work is about
how we put place in the economy. We have to get accounting
to change. As long as the balance sheet doesn't show any of
our actual assets, we're not gonna change what we do.
I think about fish. You know, I jokingly say my
father, you say, well, who in their right mind would catch all the fish? And
(38:39):
he said, well, you could blame the policy makers. You could blame the the corporations
that own the boats, but I don't. I blame the accountants
because we were busy counting the fish we took out of the water and not
the fish that were left in the water. I always end my podcast with my
my three takeaways, and I don't even know where to begin because I've just been
so moved by listening to your, you know, the world according
(39:00):
to Cita Cobb. I guess the first word is the sense of how
important place is. Realize that our past, present, and
future are connected. And having a constant conversation,
not being afraid to plant roots. And then the second thing is just building on
that, the florets and this cauliflower and that we're all connected,
but I really see this energy force. Your place in
(39:23):
many ways is is that connective tissue. I think everything you've
done in your life has been about connecting things, you know. And when I look
at that business that you had, it was always about connecting the moving pieces,
and we bought and we sold and we brought this back together, but always
trying to make something. But I think the most important thing is, I'm
not saying it was a throwaway, but it was a simple sentence. It was a
(39:44):
whole concept of confidence. How important it is that we
have confidence. If we don't have confidence, we are
vulnerable. We're vulnerable to social media. We're vulnerable to being divided by our
politicians. We're vulnerable in so many different ways, but we have
confidence in in our place and our place within that
place. I think it's one of the most powerful lessons I've heard on chatter that
(40:06):
matters, and I thank you for that. And I just thank you for spending so
much time with me today because you're just a beautiful human being.
I'm so happy your place is in Canada. It's our
place together, Tony, and we'll have more conversations. Many
more. I've got the greatest
job in the world. I get to share stories of people like Zeta
(40:27):
Cobb, beautiful human beings, human beings
in a constant conversation mother nature
and human nature, creativity, and collaborative,
circular economy, sharing the wealth of so much to learn from
stories like hers. And it wouldn't be possible, Chad, if it
matters, without RBC. So just for the RBCers out there listening, thank you. You should
(40:48):
be so for the RBCers out there listening, thank you.
You should be so proud what your organization does as an entity or through
its foundation to make such a positive impact on Canada.
Today, I wanna talk to you about Canada's new economy.
What are we gonna create that creates positive
energy and purpose, profit, taxes,
(41:11):
where wealth is shared evenly versus put in the hands of a few,
where investments are made with intent. I started thinking of our
legacy industries and wondering, could they ever change to do
that? Private sector, public sector,
unions, special interest groups, would they ever trust each other? Would all
they all feel that one was trying to win over the other. I'm not
(41:34):
sure. I've never really met a person that's willing to give up anything
that they feel they work for or deserved. So I thinking, well,
what else can we do? And one of the areas that came to mind and
why I did back to back shows, first with Ben Cowan Durr,
with his golf courses in Cape Breton, world renowned. And today with Zita
Cobb, is tourism. Tourism
(41:56):
brings so much magic. Happy people
today all armed with camera, video player,
and a social media empire. Time in life where we
are so thirsty for human nature, mother
nature, the nature of things versus the reality of
today. And an industry that when you think of your nature
(42:18):
as a stage and what happens around it is the
experiences that you create, authentic and real,
not synthetic like you might find in Vegas, but
real. It's what people want nowadays. And where else but
Canada? Our landmass, our beauty. I mean, I see
a longevity center near our hot springs, And
(42:40):
everything is about living longer and better.
I see what we can do with culinary, multicultural,
ecotourism, adventure tourism. Send me your place in the
world, and I promise you I'll send back an
idea that nothing less will give you a point of discussion.
(43:01):
Tourism means the world to each of us, to all of us.
And tourism can be one of the pillars that ignites
Canada's new economy. And next week,
we're gonna talk about farm to fork, and why food means the world
to all of us, and why Canada can become a superpower
in food. It's
(43:24):
Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening to my rant. Thank you RBC,
and let's chow down.
I tried something different last week, and I'm gonna continue with it.
And that is to record the opening after I've recorded my
interview with my guest. And the reason being is it gives
me time to reflect and hopefully present why I
think their story and lessons in life matter to you
and to me and hopefully to a lot of people. My guest today is
(00:26):
Zita Cobb. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy.
A miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I've heard
such incredible things about this beautiful force of
nature. Her intellect, her emotional capacity,
and her ability to do is unlike anything I've ever seen.
(00:49):
Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and supported.
I think what we're missing and if if there's one thing, if I had a
magic wand, is to build an architecture for
collaboration in each place and across the pillars.
And why this story is so important is that she's applied
all of this to where she was born and in doing
(01:10):
so, has been part of creating a gift not only to the
community that lives there, the world, especially
the part of the world where humans still wanna be
human beings. We know how to make things. If it's made out of wood, we
can make it. We know how to make furniture. We know how to make quilts.
We know how to grow things. We know how to fish. All of those things
(01:30):
we would need to bring to bear to welcome guests and take care of
them. And And so it's like a way through practice of keeping our
skills and our knowledge and building a platform to practice
hospitality. I hope you enjoy
getting to know Zita Cobb as much as I did.
(01:51):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Zita Cobb, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Thank you, Tony. Great to be
here. Now my audience is all over the world, and I'm sure
(02:13):
most of them have heard of Newfoundland. Some might even even gone to a
play. But I just love you to just take a moment and
describe what I personally consider one of the most beautiful parts
of Canada. Honestly, one of the most beautiful parts of, the world. Well, the
province is called Newfoundland and Labrador. We must never forget about Labrador.
And it is it holds up the Northeast Part of
(02:35):
Canada. And it's, it gives new meaning to the word
rugged in terms of its landscapes. It's a very, very old
landscape. The part that I'm from is the Northeast
Coast, and that's rougher than rough in terms of
landscape. And the rocks that I grew up on are 400,000,000
years old. There's something about the soul of
(02:58):
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians that comes out of those rocks and
comes out of that North Atlantic and that kind of epic
and difficult and noble set of relationships.
So let's talk about epic, noble, and in
some ways, how challenging it was to grow up there. I was because as a
young girl on Fogo Island, you grew up with this
(03:20):
incredible community, but not with the luxuries that most people take
for granted, running water and electricity. Yeah. I think I had the real luxuries.
The island of Fogo Island is about just under four times the size of
Manhattan, so quite a large island with 10 different communities. I grew up in
one called Joe Batt's Arm, which when I was growing up had about
900 people. I grew up with this deep intimate
(03:42):
relationship with place and with rocks
and with the ocean, and we had this
confidence from competence. And we always
knew we could make a living. We fed ourselves. We as you say,
we didn't have electricity, and we didn't have running water, and we had very little
health care. So it wasn't fun when someone had a
(04:04):
toothache. I also, spent one year of my
childhood life in a sanatorium because I had TB when I was
five and six. I understood what it
means to be in an active everyday
relationship with people and place. You also mentioned in
several interviews a defining moment in your life as when your
(04:26):
your father burnt his boat. I'm an eighth generation Fogo
Islander. People started to arrive from Europe,
to Fogo Island in the mid sixteen hundreds. Generation after generation
after generation of us have made a living on the North Atlantic fishing
in little boats that we built ourselves, like my father who built
his boat. When the industrialization of the
(04:49):
fishery arrived, and it took no time at
all to take just about every last fish out of the water because we humans
are very effective when we get focused on something, He
couldn't see a future. You know, he came home on that
that exact day with one fish. Threw it on the kitchen
floor, and we all kinda stood there looking at this one fish on the kitchen
(05:10):
floor, and he just simply said, it's over. When I talked earlier about, you know,
we're confident people, that confidence comes
from the knowledge of the place. Nature knows everything. And every
once in a while, we pay attention to it and we learn. Nature knows the
cure for cancer. And people who have kept
a steady, uninterrupted relationship with nature know stuff.
(05:32):
That's where innovation is from. So now you take someone, my
father, who couldn't read. His whole life was fishing, and now there are no more
fish. For him, I think the burning of the
boat was not willing to
suffer the indignity of watching it fall apart
and to pull it up on the shore and watch it decay. It was a
(05:54):
protest, anger. I think he meant it to be symbolic
for us kids to say, stop dreaming. And did
you have a chance later in life to talk to him
about that moment? Because he, you know, he takes the family to Ontario.
I can't imagine what it would be like to walk in his shoes at that
point. It would be like, to me, a refugee
(06:15):
leaving everything they know and coming to another part of the world and knowing nothing.
There's a beautiful song about that time of when the Newfoundlanders had to
go. And some of them were part of the kind of forced
resettlement, and some of them, like my father, just decided it was
done. And the song there's a line in the song called The Outpour People, and
it is this. They moved without leaving and
(06:37):
never arrived. And you could certainly say that about
my father. And he went from being the most dignified
person you'd ever know to someone who struggled for dignity. They I went to
Ottawa to go to university to study business because that's what he said
I had to do to figure out how this money thing works before it eats
everything we love. And they went and my parents and
(06:59):
my youngest brother went to Scarborough where, of course, Scarborough had a lot of
Newfoundlanders. And many of my brothers were in Scarborough. So that's why
they landed there. First time in his life, he had to have a bank account
because they had to pay the rent. He really hated having to go over to
the bank and make an x in front of these young people
who were working at the bank. I can imagine. So he wanted to
(07:20):
learn to write his name. I tried to teach him, and so,
yeah, I started with the alphabet like you would, did not go well.
And so finally he said to me, which was brilliant, of course, he said,
I don't need to know all of that. It's just a shape. So he
used to go and draw. It was as if it was a drawing, his signature.
I have to believe not only his mental health, but your physical health would
(07:43):
suffer when you go from being someone that had stature and
someone that was the head of the family and and now going into
a world where, as you said, he was embarrassed because he couldn't even sign his
name. It has to be difficult as a child to see confidence
disappear in somebody that you've entrusted your life to for so many
years? It was I mean, in some ways, it was funny because they couldn't they
(08:05):
would go to the grocery store and not be able to navigate. You know, they
spent weeks trying to find cabbage, and they thought iceberg lettuce was
cabbage. They'd never seen such a thing. So it was always these very funny stories.
I was younger because, of course, in Newfoundland, we only had grade 11. So when
I started at Carleton, I was 17. I had just turned 17.
But, you know, my father is was a tough cookie
(08:26):
mentally and physically. He was able to kinda zoom
out and understand what was happening to him. And, you know, it didn't
deteriorate into manifestations of despair you see when people lose
their dignity. I think he just found he he just found other
outlets. And I think he looked at the whole society that he'd been
now cast into with kind of humor. We're gonna
(08:48):
fast forward a little bit. But before we get back to what you're doing in
the sense of place, the next move on the chessboard for you is
you had a very successful career in high-tech, and you did
extraordinarily well. So for someone that came out and was sent to learn
business and figure out this money thing, you figured it out pretty well.
You know, it's kind of a funny thing. I went, to university to study
(09:11):
this money thing with, probably a a bit
of anger about the money thing. Like, I have to stop this
money thing. You know? And in the studying of business, I
actually fell in love with what it could do. In that time, I don't know
if you remember the book Small is Beautiful, it came out when I was in
university. Business is about how the
(09:32):
part belongs to the whole. And this kind of cauliflower thinking and thinking about
fractals and thinking about that Fogo Island is just one little
floret in a big cauliflower. What matters is the
stem that holds us all together. How do we get all the
flows, the economies, like the flows of things to this
all the florets so that they have nutrition, so that the
(09:54):
cauliflower is well? So that really changed how I thought about business
and and economy and the link between business and
economy. Tell me how the whole high-tech world came on because
you're starting having this interesting philosophy. And I guess technology in many ways
is the the lifeblood of the cauliflower, if it's done right. Yes.
And I grew up in a place that was deeply, and still is,
(10:16):
deeply innovative. I mean, this is a sounds like a bit of a crude thing,
but, you know, this joke about Newfoundlanders is, Newfoundlanders can put the arse in a
cat. And it's true. We can figure anything out. And because we
we approach it with the belief that we can, and the reason we feel we
can is because we've had to. I love working with
people who love figuring stuff out. I actually started my career because, you know,
(10:38):
I'm a Newfoundlander. I I worked in the oil patch for a while. I worked
for Shell Texaco first and then Shell. I was responsible for a gas field in
Southern Alberta. And I met this
contractor that was doing cold regions research, left the oil
companies, and I joined this little company that, at the time I joined
them in Calgary, had 80 people in
(10:59):
Canada. And some were in Calgary and and focused on the Beaufort. And
some were in Ottawa, focused on cold regions technology and icebreakers and all
of that. And it was owned by a
US company that had been started by two guys who came out of the US
Coast Guard. I loved those people. Like, I still do. They
were mostly engineers,
(11:21):
scientists that were doing numerical modeling and things like that. And
my career really was do everything that they shouldn't be doing. So, of
course, you know, I was a controller and human resources and
purchasing every single thing. I saw my career as create the
enabling conditions so that these people can innovate.
You're a microcosm of the of the cauliflower even within that business.
(11:43):
You are the stem. I never thought of it that way. I really didn't. But
that is how and that's what what I'm good at and what gives me joy.
What does the floret need, and what do these, inventors need? So
then I when I left then I joined a company called what was
that I joined at JDS Optics, based in
Ottawa and founded by four people who came out of Bell
(12:04):
Northern Research. It was the most beautiful company. It
was privately held. And I joined in
1989 and right at the time that and it was involved in wave
division multiple I mean, in fiber optics. Wave division multiplexing
was really just becoming a big thing. And so I was with that company until
02/2001, and it grew to 40,000 people. And in my last
(12:27):
two years with the company was a time of integration. I bought
40 companies around the world. It was crazy. When we return, things get really,
crazy. When we return, things get really, I don't
know, powerful for me. We go beyond Newfoundland
and Labrador and talk about what happened and is
happening on Fogo Island. This incredible
(12:48):
connection with culture and humanity and nature. People from
all over the world wanna make it their place to be. It's also a
place for locals to be purposeful, to give and receive
gratitude, and to really bring to life the power of
humanity when it's working together within a circular
economy. I'll build on that after my chat with Zita.
(13:13):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman, host of Chatter That Matters, presented by
RBC. Ideas matter. Ideas are the oxygen of human
endeavor. They breathe life into how we work, live, and play. Ideas
let us create and innovate and overcome complex and often
challenging circumstances. Big or small, revolutionary or evolutionary,
almost every positive step forward begins with a good idea. So bring
(13:35):
your ideas to RBC because they matter, and they'll bring theirs because
you matter. Ideas happen at RBC.
I used to work for a man who come to work as a technology company
every day, and he'd say, the most most important thing is to keep the most
important thing the most important thing. I think the most important thing
was said by Schumacher in the seventies, nature and culture are the
(13:56):
two great garments of human life. And business and technology are
the two great tools that can and should serve them. My guest today is
Zita Cobb. She came from a small fishing village,
built an extraordinary career in finance before returning back
to that village, and working with everyone there to create
the Fogle Island Inn. And the lessons learned are
(14:18):
lessons could benefit all of Canada.
You could have just spent the rest of your life enjoying life. I mean, you
did very well intellectually, emotionally, financially. It was a great
run. But you chose to come back to Fogo Island.
I mean, this is somebody that's traveling all over the world, buying businesses all over
the world, and that that that's part of the story I was fascinated
(14:41):
with. That was this always a calling for you or did it get to a
certain part of your life where you said it's now or never? I'm just curious
what was the magnetic qualities that would bring it back. You know, I never
lost my relationship with place, with Fogo Island ever. I mean,
I was always going back and forth. I always had this idea I wasn't gonna
live very long because in my family people tip tend not to live all that
(15:02):
long because we have heart disease. We're, like, half Irish bat you know,
bad hearts. As a child, it was always my plan
that I am going to sail back across the ocean. I wanna
go and see where these ancestors came from, and I want to have that experience
of sailing. And so the first thing I did, and and I
actually bought the boat before I left JDS, is I went
(15:24):
sailing. So I lived on the boat on sale for five years. The first thing
I did at home that was specific to what's mine to do
was I started a scholarship program for kids leaving the high school there to go
to university. And I was at home
for a review of the scholarship as a public review of the program,
and a woman set up and said, you're just
(15:47):
paying our kids to leave. Can't you do something to make
work? Her question set off a whole
bunch of thinking. The answer kind of presented itself. I
was sailing, and I stopped one day in Mystic Seaport, which
is America's, you know, museum of its relationship with the sea.
In Mystic is a is a banking schooner, was a Newfoundland
(16:10):
banking schooner called the the Dunton, Leonard Dunton. And the
day I was there, there were a bunch of Newfoundlanders there doing a demonstration for
the making of fish. At that very moment, I
was in touch with my good friend Pete from the island, and
he said, oh, you had a terrible letter from the mayor that your house my
uncle had passed away and left me a little house, like a little salt box
(16:32):
700 square foot house. Your house is an eyesore, and you either have
to fix it up or tear it down. Tell them we're gonna tear it down.
What am I I mean, what am I gonna do with a falling down house?
Then later that afternoon, I'm standing at Mystic Seaport looking around the
Leonard S. Dunton, a Newfoundland banking schooner was saved.
Somebody thought that was worth saving. And I thought, what am I doing?
(16:53):
I have the means to save this house.
I have the means to do a lot of things.
If I'm not going to do something on Fogo Island, do I expect you to
come do it or someone else to come do it? These things, like,
place holds the things that have inherent value to my
ability to make meaning and I think everybody's ability to make meaning.
(17:16):
Here I was standing in this place that I was so grateful existed
because it really gave us access to the past. It it gave us
access to the relationships from the past and the knowledge from the past.
And and I was gonna just tear down my own. Ed, did you, at
that point, consider it a calling or
something I should do as part of my portfolio
(17:39):
of interest and activities? Because it truly became a calling. I
think it it grew. I think it did start with a, like, a little
miracle. We need lots of miracles, but miracles are actually quite easy.
The miracle is when someone has a slight shift in how they
see the same thing. If I had been standing anywhere
but Mystic Seaport, I'm not sure the little miracle would have set off in
(18:01):
my head. But it was a little bit like pulling a thread on
a sweater that you just you thought you were just pulling that little thread, and
then you realize this is connected to the whole sweater. And before you realize that,
you gotta knit a whole new sweater. And so I I think it,
was a series of little miracles that started with that. So let's
talk about place based economics because
(18:22):
you've framed your TED Talks, you've framed a lot of your
conversations around this sense of place.
And I think other people have talked about it as the circle economy. The
indigenous certainly talk about it within their world. Just how do
you define it, and why aren't we not all
embracing it? I think we're suffering from a kind of place
(18:43):
blindness. Place is a funny thing because,
like, everything is bound up with its opposite. So if you were in a place,
and I know a lot of people and a lot of my friends who were
born and raised in small, faraway places, they
would feel imprisoned to think that they they couldn't leave.
You know, they didn't see it as, like, a gift to be a part of
(19:06):
the place, and they wanted to get away from it. So the possibility
of moving and being in motion is so appealing
to all of us that when the idea of a global
village, oh my god, there's all these systems that support you can live where you
like and all of this, we just forgot that we
are embodied creatures, that we are
(19:27):
social creatures, and that we are meaning seeking creatures.
And when you think about place, place holds nature. And
culture is a human response to a place, it's the sum of what we have
learned and shared in this place. And those things are integral to meaning
making. So I think we rushed away from place a bit too soon, and then
we woke up and realized, oh, hang on a second. There isn't a global village
(19:49):
at all. There's just a whole bunch of villages. We
allowed an economy to develop, a global economy,
globalized economy to develop, that forgot to knit
the places into it. So the really, the global economy
became, you know, a whole bunch of institutions and organizations
loosely organized by governments that place wasn't even a
(20:12):
consideration, let alone a design element in the economy.
So that's what I think we're trying to solve for now. Because, you know, I
think ultimately humans are lazy. We are lazy. And so it's
like, oh, jeez, we have to go back and clean up and take care of
the place. Yeah, yeah, we do. We're not going to solve a housing crisis by,
you know, talking about it or wishing it so. We're going to, like, figure out
(20:32):
how to make this work. And so I think the economy should be the
sum of its parts. I mean, I could do a whole talk now, which is
Canada, much less than the sum of its parts. And
it is. We have 4,500 amazing communities that are incorporated,
and God knows how many more that are too small and not yet incorporated
and maybe never will be. Maybe that's fine. But if you think
(20:54):
about the economy as think about it as plumbing.
Well, if the plumbing works, it includes all the little toes
and fingers of a place, like a country. That's
a beautiful economy. Lifts up, serves, it underpins
places. And if it underpins a place and places, then it
underpins lives. Well, let's go back to your cauliflower analogy because I I love
(21:16):
what you're presenting to me. But I would argue that in Canada,
I would argue in many places around the world, we've cut off the stem. It's
to other people's advantage, whether it's social media to herd you in their
places with like minded people who like like minded content or
politicians who see divide to conquer as their
means to an end, we've lost that sense of
(21:38):
identity. So even if we had 4,500 of these little
florists out there starting to realize that this connected, we're better
and stronger, there's a lot of people that are wanting to build a
mode around each one of those communities because it serves to their advantage
versus what you talk about, which I also love, was the sense that
this culture is a manifestation of the place you're in. Yeah. I I think when
(22:01):
we lose our places and I lose our relationship with
places, culture is local. And when
those relationships get stretched or broken, I
think we're we get lost. I spend a lot of time thinking about where do
values come from and how do values shift? Because obviously they do.
There's a connection to actions. Right? Actions shape norms.
(22:24):
Norms shape beliefs. Beliefs shape values. If
you are connected in a place and and an active member of
a community that has I mean, that's the beautiful thing about community
is a place. There's all kinds of people there. And whoever you know, all kinds
of ages and just all kinds of points of view that you kind of you
would need a kind of social literacy to live with people. Because
(22:46):
sometimes, like, I grew up next to my father's brother. Those two men did not
like each other. And we knew it. But it never was sort of
open animosity. It was just you're living next to people
that, in their case, they didn't really like each other. But they needed each other.
And so we mucked along together. And out of that came
a set of values around how we treat each other. So if you
(23:08):
take people away from place and take away the necessity to actually
get along with other people, how do we orient? Where are the North
Stars? We all have very vibrant virtual lives
now that in some cases have almost supplanted our physical
lives. And we have retreated from the physical lives because in our
physical lives, oh, my God, people are a pain and your hip hurts and everything
(23:30):
online is so much easier. We don't like that friction of the physical world.
And if we are unrooted from past and
relatives and history and all of that, it's easy to believe the stuff
you see and read. We're very vulnerable. So you're countering,
and we're gonna talk about the Fogo Island Inn and how that
has become a place that is world renowned. So that lady that
(23:53):
said, why are you creating scholarships for people to leave?
You've created an entity where people believe people from all over the
world have come in. And I understand part of it is what you call this
thing about, I guess, a, b, c, d, this asset based
community development or Shorefast. So for the people that
haven't experienced Fogo Island, what would they experience
(24:15):
coming there? And then let's get to the STEM, which is the sense of a,
b, c, d. It it is, as we jokingly say, far away from
far away, its own rhythms and rituals
and is intact. It hasn't been flattened
by the commercialization of every single thing. You're not gonna
find the stuff you see chain after chain after global
(24:39):
chain. You just don't see that. And its landscape is so
shocking, I think, to most people that the minute you get off the ferry,
your imagination wakes up because it's a step out of time in a
way, but it's actually not behind time. I think it might be ahead of time.
People who grow up on a small island like we
did, who are confident, then the key is confidence. Like, if we
(25:02):
break the confidence of a people, we have broken the people.
Fogo Islanders have their confidence. And when they're confident, they
are super open to visitors, like, super
open. I think people are shocked that everybody talks to
you. And And Mary Walsh, she says, people think that Newfoundlanders
are friendly. Mary Walsh says, no, no, we're just nosy. Very nosy.
(25:24):
So, like, who are you? And what's your story? And what's your home? And
what can we learn from each other? It's a very natural
part. So when you go through ABCD, I mean, you
could look at Fogo Island and say, my gosh, it's a bald rock in the
North Atlantic and the cod collapsed. Like, what's the point? There's no electricity, no running
water. We gotta get the people out of there. Some government officials thought that.
(25:46):
And into that breach arrived the National Film Board of Canada
with this beautiful project called Challenge for Change. It was an anti
poverty, program project trying to understand the root
causes of poverty, urban and rural. And a filmmaker named Colin Lowe
arrived with the University from St. John's Memorial. And they didn't have any
answers. They just had questions. And this is the beautiful thing. And basically
(26:08):
what they were asking people is, well, what do you know? What do you have?
What do you think you have? And what do you think could be done? And
of course, local people know stuff. Deep cultural
knowledge. But nobody ever asked them questions. And out of that came,
this is back when I was 10, building a slightly bigger boat so we could
go to the Midshore. That's how we held on. Those people of my parents'
(26:30):
generation made a co op, so we held on. In our case,
going through a similar process, you realize, we're
deeply hospitable people. We should have we should have a world class inn.
The things and knowledge that we have that we can put into that inn is
rare. It's not broken. What was the tipping
point that had you going from, wow, we've got
(26:53):
hospitality, we know how to do things, we should create a world
class into actually putting a shovel in the ground. I think
it's when you do it with others. So I worked very closely with two of
my many brothers. I think if it had just been us in
our close conversation, there's always the option to
back away from it. It's like, Yeah, you know, I don't feel like doing it.
(27:15):
I want to go back. I mean, the hardest thing for me was to give
up sailing. That was really hard. But because this became a
community wide, island wide conversation, you're hardly gonna
say, well, I changed my mind. I think I wanna go sailing. Like, I think
it's about the commitments we make to each other. I don't remember there
being a moment that we weren't gonna move. Because once you start,
(27:35):
once you start the conversations, if they're open conversations, then
it it doesn't even belong to me. It belongs to us. Am I
going to let you down? No. This co op,
this collective of consciousness and energy and
heart, It also seems to be manifested in even how
you run your business because it's very transparent. People
(27:57):
really understand how it all works.
That counters the principles of a lot of people that feel control
comes from knowledge. Knowledge gives me power. And
you're saying the opposite that by surrendering that knowledge, it gives
us collective power. Yes. Exactly. And it certainly gives us more pleasure. And the
other thing about the inn, of course, we didn't start, I don't own the inn.
(28:19):
Like, I don't own anything on Fogo Island except my car and that
little house that I did fix up and I now live in. The inn belongs
to the community because it's owned in this model. It's owned actually by the charity
called Shorefast, owns it. It's operated by a separate
board that's called Shorefast Social Enterprises. But the beneficial owners
are people of Fobo. I didn't I mean, I'm I'm on this planet a bit
(28:42):
longer than I ever thought I would be. But when the time comes to go,
nothing needs to be done. Arrangements don't have to be made. And so I think
the focus on transparency around the business model is maybe it's a
little bit back to my father saying, you gotta go and figure out how this
money thing works. Otherwise, it's gonna eat everything we love. Well, I
am very excited about how money can work. I'm horrified by
(29:03):
how it does work when it doesn't have a relationship with place.
Helping make that visible and helping more people understand that. Like, I think the
most important form of literacy we need in this world now
is place literacy and economic literacy. And I don't mean
by economic literacy financial literacy. I mean more people that
understand how the economy works. Like, what are these flows? It's like a
(29:27):
big plumbing system. And I think one of the greatest risks we
have is that people feel, and many do, utterly
powerless. People would rather have a conversation about their sex life than the
economy. Because to most people, it's something that happens to them.
And they're frustrated by it and they're just trying to survive it. But we are
all economic actors, and we can all be
(29:49):
economic stewards. How do we take what all of you
have created and bottle it in a way that some of the
other 4,500 communities in Canada are struggling for
a sense of place, who they are, why they matter, the questions you
ask time and time again, the questions that was answered by the National
Film Board. How do we bring that so that we can start
(30:11):
making our destiny more a matter of choice than leaving it to
the chance of a world that I don't
necessarily have to even connect to? We're building a
National Institute for Community Economies, which will have a
network associated with it and a digital platform, but it's a it's a way
of gathering the good and best practices for community
(30:33):
economic development. I mean, we can build a country where
all investment is development, and that is such
beautiful work. And that is where money
meets place. Money making and meaning making are not
opposites. They can come together. The more of us
that are engaged in this and aware of that, the more we're gonna get this
(30:55):
right. Like, we can do cultural and social and local development
at the same time as we're doing investment. Investors
growing a capacity to understand place will help. I mean,
I think the work really is how do we reconcile the
management of institutions with the management of place and
places. That's the work and that's the magic. I mean, and if you
(31:18):
think about Canada and these 4,500
incorporated communities, we have very little horizontal
musculature as a country. We're like, it's all these kind of vertical
silos that are either political or private.
So at every turn, you realize that the
regional economy or the provincial economy or the national economy is not
(31:40):
organized to intersect with place. I can't get
ferry schedule to line up with a plane schedule to come together. They just don't
connect because they're optimized in two different systems.
The Department of Education doesn't optimize for local. It optimizes for
the effectiveness or efficiency, not even effectiveness
of itself, not the kids that you're trying to educate.
(32:03):
Bringing place into all these systems makes those systems
stronger. I I think that's the answer to resilience. I mean, resilience is
ultimately local. If you had a magic wand and you're going in these communities,
where's the biggest barriers that if you could just take that
friction away, such great common sense? We organize
ourselves around a poem. And the poem is the art of walking
(32:25):
upright, is the art of using both feet. One is for
holding on and one is for reaching out. And you gotta do them both
or you're just gonna fall down. And every community is a bit different, but
there's a lot in common. First of all, it's understanding yourself in the
world. Understand how you fit into the
regional and the provincial and the national and the global. That
(32:46):
takes skill sets and experience sets that many local
people don't have. That can be solved. I think the thing
that is sometimes the hardest, and I see it in big and small
communities, is there are very few architectures for
collaboration within the place. So I could name so many
communities across the country where you've got the city councils that are doing what they
(33:08):
think, you know, my favorite question to ask in any place, who's
responsible for the economy here? Must be the mayor.
The mayor will be like, no, that he's if it's a he, responsible for
the barking dogs and collecting taxes and how do we keep the water running here.
I mean, I think what, Hazel McCallian said about Canada
I see this a lot, which is, you know, the federal government has all the
(33:31):
money, the provincial governments have all the power, and the municipalities have all the
problems. What she didn't say is, all of our assets,
all of our assets as a country are in a place somewhere.
Our entrepreneurs are all in places. They need to be fed and loved and
supported. So I think what we're missing, and if there's one thing, if I had
a magic wand, is to build an architecture for
(33:52):
collaboration in each place and across the
pillars. So where the mayors or the councils come together with the
business community, come together with the not for profits, come together with the educators,
because it really actually takes all of us. And to all see
ourselves as stewards of our place and the best way to steward your
place is steward your economy and that we can do together.
(34:15):
What about the what I call the invisible bars of status quo? Because
I come to a meeting. I oh, yeah. Let's do it. But then I walk
back and the last thing I wanna give up is what I feel I'm entitled
to. I wanna preserve my status quo,
whether that's power, that's influence, whether that's a level
of entitlement because I've I've done this job for so many years.
(34:36):
How do you break that apart? Because when you're talking about collaboration,
when I see a silo, I see a moat, and I don't see a lot
of drawbridges. And in fact, the middle ground is getting completely
disappeared by a bigger and bigger moat. There is a process. There are many
processes for that, but you're I couldn't agree with you more, Tony. Like, that
people get very rigid around what they need to believe for whatever
(34:58):
reason they need to believe that we can't touch this. There's a fellow, and he's
from Alberta, named Doug Griffiths. He's he heads the Chamber of Commerce
in Edmonton now. He was on MHA, and he wrote a
book called 13 ways to kill your community, which
is well worth reading. There is a a case study about our
work that gets at some of this. They developed something called the
(35:20):
PLACE model. It's an acronym. It's the l. It's about linking
outsiders and insiders. And a part of our process and what we
want to build into the institute's knowledge that we wanna get out in the
world and add to is this holding on and reaching out. I think
about it as hospitality. Someone has to set the table. So if if you're a
family that fights with each other a lot, nothing like someone coming over
(35:43):
from dinner, you know, for your dinner tonight to say, okay, stop fighting. Can we
please set the table? Just stop fighting and act nice. And by the time the
visitors have left, you're actually talking to each other differently. So I I think that
is an important part of the flow of energy in a place that
helps lessen the moat. How far do we have to
get to precarious before we have that
(36:04):
willingness to act? Very good friend of mine is from,
Africa. And he said, you know, we we used to be happy with one meal
a day and we fought hard for a second. And if we ever got three
meals, it was an extraordinary day. So we were always hungry.
We weren't entitled. He said his biggest surprise when he came to
Canada was it wasn't about working for that second meal
(36:26):
or being consumed about finding that second meal. It was expecting
that second meal. And I'm wondering if part of our society,
we've gotten to this point because as much as we want
that future, we're not standing on enough shifting sand to say
we gotta make a leap for it. We have difficulty also making a relationship
with the future. One of my favorite books is The Leopard,
(36:49):
which is set in Sicily. It's written in
1958 at the time of the reformation when all of the institutions had outlived
their usefulness. And society they were struggling to figure out the
path. And the great line from that book is, if you want
things to stay the same, things have to change.
Can you figure out that your two meals are not gonna be
(37:10):
guaranteed? It's a twofold thing. It's because we do want we tend to
want to defend what we have or think think we have and fail
to see the future and fail to see that it's precarious unless we can figure
out a world that works for more people. But the first thing
is, which is I think where place I I see the place as the answer
to everything, obviously, is if you see the world as a zero sum
(37:33):
game and you're at the center of it, then you're never
going to be open to anything. I tell you,
if you actually show up in a community and start to
muck along with people, you will not see your the more or less is
there a song game, and you will not see yourself at the center. And the
minute that little miracle happens, everything changes
(37:55):
because in your life arrives this powerful
thing called us. My guess, my last question for you,
because I've I've taken so much of your time today, have you found your place?
My place has never changed, you know. I mean, I I am made
of Fogo Island and, you know, that's how I orient in this
world. Ottawa is absolutely my second
(38:17):
home, and my work is about
how we put place in the economy. We have to get accounting
to change. As long as the balance sheet doesn't show any of
our actual assets, we're not gonna change what we do.
I think about fish. You know, I jokingly say my
father, you say, well, who in their right mind would catch all the fish? And
(38:39):
he said, well, you could blame the policy makers. You could blame the the corporations
that own the boats, but I don't. I blame the accountants
because we were busy counting the fish we took out of the water and not
the fish that were left in the water. I always end my podcast with my
my three takeaways, and I don't even know where to begin because I've just been
so moved by listening to your, you know, the world according
(39:00):
to Cita Cobb. I guess the first word is the sense of how
important place is. Realize that our past, present, and
future are connected. And having a constant conversation,
not being afraid to plant roots. And then the second thing is just building on
that, the florets and this cauliflower and that we're all connected,
but I really see this energy force. Your place in
(39:23):
many ways is is that connective tissue. I think everything you've
done in your life has been about connecting things, you know. And when I look
at that business that you had, it was always about connecting the moving pieces,
and we bought and we sold and we brought this back together, but always
trying to make something. But I think the most important thing is, I'm
not saying it was a throwaway, but it was a simple sentence. It was a
(39:44):
whole concept of confidence. How important it is that we
have confidence. If we don't have confidence, we are
vulnerable. We're vulnerable to social media. We're vulnerable to being divided by our
politicians. We're vulnerable in so many different ways, but we have
confidence in in our place and our place within that
place. I think it's one of the most powerful lessons I've heard on chatter that
(40:06):
matters, and I thank you for that. And I just thank you for spending so
much time with me today because you're just a beautiful human being.
I'm so happy your place is in Canada. It's our
place together, Tony, and we'll have more conversations. Many
more. I've got the greatest
job in the world. I get to share stories of people like Zeta
(40:27):
Cobb, beautiful human beings, human beings
in a constant conversation mother nature
and human nature, creativity, and collaborative,
circular economy, sharing the wealth of so much to learn from
stories like hers. And it wouldn't be possible, Chad, if it
matters, without RBC. So just for the RBCers out there listening, thank you. You should
(40:48):
be so for the RBCers out there listening, thank you.
You should be so proud what your organization does as an entity or through
its foundation to make such a positive impact on Canada.
Today, I wanna talk to you about Canada's new economy.
What are we gonna create that creates positive
energy and purpose, profit, taxes,
(41:11):
where wealth is shared evenly versus put in the hands of a few,
where investments are made with intent. I started thinking of our
legacy industries and wondering, could they ever change to do
that? Private sector, public sector,
unions, special interest groups, would they ever trust each other? Would all
they all feel that one was trying to win over the other. I'm not
(41:34):
sure. I've never really met a person that's willing to give up anything
that they feel they work for or deserved. So I thinking, well,
what else can we do? And one of the areas that came to mind and
why I did back to back shows, first with Ben Cowan Durr,
with his golf courses in Cape Breton, world renowned. And today with Zita
Cobb, is tourism. Tourism
(41:56):
brings so much magic. Happy people
today all armed with camera, video player,
and a social media empire. Time in life where we
are so thirsty for human nature, mother
nature, the nature of things versus the reality of
today. And an industry that when you think of your nature
(42:18):
as a stage and what happens around it is the
experiences that you create, authentic and real,
not synthetic like you might find in Vegas, but
real. It's what people want nowadays. And where else but
Canada? Our landmass, our beauty. I mean, I see
a longevity center near our hot springs, And
(42:40):
everything is about living longer and better.
I see what we can do with culinary, multicultural,
ecotourism, adventure tourism. Send me your place in the
world, and I promise you I'll send back an
idea that nothing less will give you a point of discussion.
(43:01):
Tourism means the world to each of us, to all of us.
And tourism can be one of the pillars that ignites
Canada's new economy. And next week,
we're gonna talk about farm to fork, and why food means the world
to all of us, and why Canada can become a superpower
in food. It's
(43:24):
Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening to my rant. Thank you RBC,
and let's chow down.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com