What do you do when the cod’s gone?
What do you do when you send your men out in their boats and they all come back empty handed?
What do you do when the government says it's time to pack it in?
It’s a question on everybody's lips out here.
Because what do you do when you've built your entire society on one skill, and it is absolutely not transferable.
What do you do when it’s gone?
Well, if you’re the island of Fogo in northern coast of Newfoundland, you have a rich lady build a hotel.
Fogo is real Newfoundland.
I’d almost call it Newfoundland’s Newfoundland.
It's a little bit colder, a little windier, and has a little bit more fishing,
but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
Its shops are small and they always seem to be closed.
One of them specializes in quilts and jam.
Two items that go notoriously poorly together.
There’s even a town on this island that has dedicated itself to the nation of Ireland.
Population, I don't know, two hundred or something.
They’ve certainly got the accent.
I think the absolute best way to describe it is quaint.
As soon as you get off the ferry you realize this place is special.
It's everything that the postcards say this province is supposed to be.
Fishing ships and colourful houses beam out over the coast as if they’re standing up to the weather like a dare.
Docks stretch out towards aging shacks on the harbour, and the gravestones bear names
long since made anonymous by the salt-blasted wind.
This is real Newfoundland all right.
Well, everything except for that giant inn.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
This isn’t a hit piece.
I don’t hate this hotel.
I’m not here to be a contrarian just because a solution somebody came up with was imperfect.
Lord knows there’s enough of that on the internet already.
But I did come to Fogo to find a story, and this is the obvious story.
You don’t have to ask around town to find out what everybody’s talking about,
you just have to look at the horizon.
The millionaire and her giant hotel.
The woman who found the secret to making trickle-down economics work.
In 2001, then 43 year old Zita Cobb came into a great deal of money.
The tech bubble had treated her well, and her hard work had paid off in ways most of us can barely even fathom.
It was an amount of money that no one person truly needs.
An amount of money that makes normal people uncomfortable.
And like a great many normal people who find themselves with an unexpected fortune,
she set about returning the favour to people who had helped her along the way.
Now I can't say for certain, because I’ve never met Zita Cobb,
but I suspect like most of us, she took care of her family first.
She probably bought them some of things that they'd always wanted but never could be able to afford.
And from there, she probably moved onto her friends, maybe over-tipped some waitresses,
and even bought herself a vacation or two.
Maybe even a new car.
But the thing about Zita, though, is that she wasn’t from the city.
Even though that’s where she’d made her money, her story started here in Fogo.
I suspect that it was early on that she realized that the real thing she wanted,
and the things that having money meant to her, were all wrapped up in this island.
It was natural that this is where she wanted to help next.
When she came back here, things were dire.
You didn’t need a census to know that the population was declining.
You could see it in the arena at games.
It was amazing that they could even host a team at all.
Given how few children were still around, it seemed almost a farce to even have a school.
Work was virtually non-existent, people were leaving for the mainland cities in droves,
and there was little reason to hope for any better.
It was an island in desperate need of some money.
So Zita attempted to provide that money.
At first, she just gave cash direct.
A scholarship.
Millions of dollars to help local students find the education they’d need to succeed like her.
In theory, a kind and beneficial thing.
But it backfired.
While the road was paved with good intentions, the real effect was that it drew more children away to mainland.
The best and brightest, cherry-picked for removal.
At a local town hall, she got an earful from islanders who were doing their best not to look the gift horse in the mouth.
And to her credit, she listened.
So she went back to the drawing board.
She asked herself that same question that thousands of towns around the world have been asking.
What do you do when the cod’s gone?
And out among those old rusted fishing boats, Zita came to an answer.
If the engine dies, you build a new engine.
A giant symbol of prosperity for everyone to see.
In Fogo, with few resources left, she proposed they sell something ingenious.
She recognized that in an inauthentic world, many people are willing to pay a premium for authenticity.
For seclusion.
Famous people, particularly.
For someone living in an artificial environment, this sort of leave it to beaver, white picket fence,
wholesome reminder of yesteryear image that we were all sold on TV is like nirvana.
And it exists here.
For real.
The houses on this island are quaint.
Its citizens are polite and wholesome.
It’s a society in stasis.
And she set out to offer a taste of that life.
But it wouldn’t come cheap.
The inn she built in Joe Batt’s Arm cost 41 million dollars, the majority of which she paid herself.
To rent a room costs nearly two thousand a night, and there's a minimum stay of three nights.
It certainly isn’t for people like you and me.
It’s for an unnamed them.
But whoever they are, they’ve definitely got money to spend.
And this is the hot new place to spend it.
They say that the architecture blends into the landscape, but since I read that on their website,
you can safely guess it’s just a marketing pitch.
Instead, I’ll just show you and let you be the judge.
Personally, I kind of like it.
But I also kind of hate it.
It feels very Northern, if nothing else.
But no matter how you feel about it, though, one thing is for certain.
It looms above this landscape.
It isn’t just the largest thing out here, it makes the next largest thing feel small.
And I suppose it well should.
It’s the new symbolic engine of Fogo island.
Rippling out from its weird stalky base is a tourism magnet that’s bringing life back to these shores.
The inn itself doesn’t bring in a ton of money, though.
Beyond the construction boom, it has very few rooms and caters to an insular clientele
who don’t often eat Newfoundland’s rural delicacy of chicken fingers from a gas station.
But fame brought news cameras.
It brought images of celebrities to mainland screens.
The amount of free coverage that the island got reached into the tens of millions of dollars.
It was the type of campaign that a tourism board could only dream of.
And it worked.
After all, I’m here.
And I’m certainly not the only one.
The cottage industries on this island are booming.
I mean, on an island with around five restaurants there’s a specialty store that sells homemade quilts.
And jam.
That’s it.
And it makes money, apparently.
That should be a story all by itself.
Clearly, plenty of people are coming to see what all the fuss is about.
Substantial new developments are visible in every town on the island.
Be they from here or from away, there’s a lot of new money in Fogo.
But the reality is, that the hotel itself is unsustainable.
And that isn’t a stain on its record either, I’m not being a contrarian here.
It's just the reality of being a trendy, expensive place.
There aren't many people who are going to the vacation highlights of 1988.
Certainly, they’re expensive, but they aren’t truly so expensive that I see them paying back the build cost any time soon.
If ever.
I don’t know their financials and could therefore be completely off base, but from what I can guess from their public statements,
Zita’s not expecting to make too much money back from her investment.
And that would make sense, because she does appear to be giving away all of her money.
Ten years before she built that inn, she’d created a foundation called Shorefast
that's dedicated to bringing everyone else along for the ride.
Through its doors, she’s spent millions helping to build up the island’s tourism infrastructure
without destroying what makes it unique.
It offers micro-loans to local businesses, funds the arts, upkeeps island heritage,
and attempts to bridge the gap of skills required to make the most of the present tourist boom.
In effect, it’s a decade's old lump of money put aside to help any islander who has a good idea.
And that's cool.
There’s nothing in her actions to make it seem like any of this is about commercialism.
It was never about getting her name out there.
It was never about the inn.
It was always about the island.
The inn was just an engine she built, so you’d watch this video.
So as much as I want to make a story about this monument to extravagance,
of the uber-wealthy towering above the common man, I can’t.
As much as I want to make this story about a woman with too much money trying to play god, I can’t.
I can’t be that contrarian.
Because Zita Cobb is doing something good here.
This inn, no matter how big and flashy, wasn’t what replaced the cod.
Zita was.
So if you’re an extremely rich person watching this story: take note.
Trickle-down economics works.
It's just that for it to work, you have to overturn your entire chalice.
You have to actually care about the people who are being trickled to.
And you have to give them virtually everything that you have…
and if you do that, things can be good again.
Almost as good as when there was cod.
This is Rare Earth.
[singing] [barking] [laughing]