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I hold Destination Cape Breton in high esteem. But I respectfully urge CEO Terry Smith and his colleagues to do some serious reading and ethical reflection before courting more superyachts to our island, as they are presently doing.
Pursuing superyachts is akin to changing Cape Breton’s brand to align with over-the-top excess. It tells the world that, over here, we have no environmental or social values or credentials.
Do we really want to swoon over oligarchs, grotesque greed and often dirty money? Do we want scarce public money to be subsidizing the marketing, infrastructure and support services for self-serving billionaires?
This is not a rhetorical flourish. There are a lot of very bad actors in the “community” of ostentatious superyacht proprietors.
To help us all to reflect, I would like to offer some reading recommendations.
Loopholes
Consider starting with Evan Osnos’s detailed essay in The New Yorker magazine (July 18, 2022), entitled “The Haves and the Have-Yachts.”
What emerges is a portrait of owners who want to make a gleeful show of being wasteful – just because they can.
They tend to operate outside the reach of law enforcement and the rule of law.
Osnos interviews Alex Finley, a former CIA officer. She takes a keen interest in the uber-rich who own these vessels.
The superyacht bad guys are not just the loathsome Russian oligarchs, she observes.
“The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism — this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” Finley notes. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens.”
“So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”
Harmful polluters
Journalist Joe Fassler has a shorter essay in the New York Times (April 10, 2023). It’s called “The Superyachts of Billionaires are Starting to Look a lot Like Theft.”
He leads off with a description of the 2022 World Superyacht Awards gathering, which leaves him appalled.
Fassler concludes that, “Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate.”
He acknowledges the role of other polluters, the massive coal fire plants, and so on. But Fassler refers to psychology research. He notes that global solidarity to save the planet is hard to achieve when these superyachts are getting even bigger – and finding new ports of welcome – while the rest of us are ordered to make sacrifices for the planet.
Citing the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier, he observes that people “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part.”
Unsavory “performers”
For more exhaustive academic research, I recommend the work of British scholar Emma Spence, including her essay “ Unraveling the Politics of Super-rich Mobility: A Study of Crew and Guest on Board Luxury Yachts.” (It’s a chapter in the multi-authored 2015 book The Mobilities of Ships.)
Spence spent several years on board luxury yachts. She studied how their owners, guests and crew “perform” among each other and in the port towns.
Even as whims are fulfilled around the clock, it’s a bizarre and vacuous existence.
Finally, I want to recommend two old Canadian classics by Stephen Leacock. They’re not about superyachts, but about values.
Leacock, the renowned humorist, was actually a professor of economics and political science.
In 1914, Leacock wrote Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. The characters are very wealthy, but morally bankrupt, elites in a big American city.
It’s satire. It’s funny. But it’s also a social and ethical critique.
Arcadian Adventures is a counterpoint to Leacock’s earlier Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, written in 1912. That fictional Canadian town – “Mariposa” – could well be Baddeck or Mabou or St. Peter’s – even today. The little tome still feels current.
Soulless hoarders
But despite Mariposa’s gossips and eccentricities, if you had told Leacock that the soulless hoarders from Arcadian Adventures were heading for the small town on individual floating estates – even just for a visit so that the citizens could gawk at them – he would surely have started to cry.
Leacock wasn’t a righteous moralizer, and he recognized his own imperfections and his own position of privilege as a professor. But he would perceive the in-your-face, entitled super-rich as likely to throw the community off its moorings and ultimately impoverish it.
I hope Destination Cape Breton will realize that here and now.
Dr. Tom Urbaniak is professor of political science and director of the Tompkins Institute at Cape Breton University. His latest book is In the Public Square: A Citizen’s Reader.
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