Editor's notebook (Law Now).

• Author: Mildon, Marsha

I was living in Norway in the 1970s when I first became aware of the law of unintended consequences. The Norwegian government was determined to support the long term existence of the small fishing outports on the deeply indented coast. At that rime, the fishing villages largely existed on subsistence fishing done in small rowboats, but the young people were rapidly moving to larger towns or to the capital, Oslo.

To give families the opportunity to catch more fish, thus allowing more young people to stay in the villages, the government supplied each family with a larger boat and outboard motor. This would allow the fisherfolk to take longer trips to sea, to stay at sea longer, and thus, to catch more fish. What the government had neglected to observe in its plan was that motor boats require gasoline and oil, both commodities being sold for money, in the larger regional centres. The fishing families now had to go to those centres to buy gas and oil, and also to sell more and more fish in order to pay for the fuel for the longer and longer trips -- and so the circle went. Within rive years of the start of the motor boat project, the Norwegian outports were virtually ghost towns, denuded of population by the very tool meant to save them.

How does this relate to Canada and to LawNow you ask? I believe it relates significantly to the two topics, of this issue of LawNow: poverty and global business. Some readers may find this juxtaposition somewhat jarring. After all, the recent battle in Seattle during the WTO meeting has highlighted all too well the chasm between proponents of global business and market deregulation and those who fear that this same global deregulation will destroy their nations' ability to legislate their own health, social, educational, labour, and environmental safety nets.

However, I would like to suggest that the feared negative effects of global business on our social safety net, and the feared negative effects of national regulation of business for social or environmental reasons are both the effects of the law of unintended consequences: the result of single issue, tunnel vision decision-making. As this new century gets underway, we must consider these topics as parts of a whole, rather than as isolated and contrasting poles of discussion. The 1990s aphorism, think globally, act locally, must be understood with two meanings. Not only must we think about the effects of our legislative and judicial decisions on the entire...