The Current - What the Fogo Island Inn can teach us about ‘Made in Canada’

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

After making a fortune in tech, Zita Cobb went home to her home community in Newfoundland hoping to revive its economy. She believes the success she's had could be a model for other Canadian communities — especially ones that are threatened by Donald Trump's trade war. We talk to her about how leaning into Canadian values, and the things that make local communities special, is the key to global success as part of our ongoing series Taking Care of Business. If you liked this interview, you might also want to hear our conversation with Murad al-Katib, CEO of AGT — also known as the Lentil King of Saskatchewan. At a time when many Canadian businesses are trying to diversify products and reach new markets, he has actually done it.

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That's vote.com. Thanks for listening. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. We have been talking on this program recently with business leaders about how Canadian business is weathering the storm from the stout. You have tariffs, you have global competition, you have trade turmoil. It is tough out there.

My next guest has ideas on how to strengthen the Canadian economy by sticking close to home. Zeta Cobb made her fortune in technology during the boom years of the 1990s. For the past two decades, though, she has been focused on philanthropy and revitalizing the place that she grew up in, a remote outport community and rural Newfoundland. She built a world-class luxury hotel there. It's called the Fogo Island Inn. She also started a charity called Shorefast that helps strengthen local economies. Zita Cobb joins me in our country.

Toronto Studio. Good morning. Good morning, Matt. We were just out in Newfoundland not so long ago doing a program from there. And everybody that we talked to, every single person talked about how special this place is, that there is something that pulls people to the place, pulls people back to the place. You were pulled back. Why did you go back? I think I was always going back from the minute I left without really knowing it. I think Newfoundlanders have a particularly intimate and deep relationship with place. And I lived through the resettlement years of the 60s. And I think that makes you anxious to be away from the place and realizing also that it could happen that we could be separated from place, which is our most foundational relationship. How can you tell the Newfoundlanders

in heaven? Word of one's moaning and groaning. We want to go home. We always want to go home. Describe Fogel Island for somebody who has never been? It's almost four times the size of Manhattan. It has 11 communities. It's like a microcosm of Newfoundland and Labrador in a way. What do you mean? Because it's like the big island distilled. And it's big enough to fascinate you endlessly and small enough to love. I love it, obviously.

I grew up in one of those communities. I was born in 1958, so I grew up in the 60s, which was exactly the time of the collapse of the insurer fishery. When you were away, what was it that you missed? I mean, we'll talk about what you've created, but what did you miss? What personally did you miss about the place? Well, people who live on the ocean, live, maybe they have this in Saskatchew on, too, live with an uninterrupted view of the horizon. I think that we are the luckiest people on earth. Because you always live with a sense of possibility, and you always are very aware when you live on a small island, how does the part belong to the whole?

And I think that's a question for Canada. How does this part call Canada belong to the whole of the world? And that connective tissue is where our energy should go. building connective tissue that supports all the parts. You mentioned the tough times. And I mean, Fogo Island has been through as much of the fishing industry in and around Newfoundland has been through very, very rough times. Why did you feel that that place was the right place for something like a luxury tourism outpost? We have assets in our country, you have 5,000 approximately incorporated communities, of which 634 are indigenous communities.

I think each and every one of those places hold assets that have intrinsic value. Fogo Island is one of those places. Toronto is one, because it's one incorporated monster place, you have communities in Toronto that are called neighborhoods. And we have to start with what do we humans need? We're physical creatures, we're social creatures, we're meaning-seeking creatures. We need place because place holds nature and culture. and those are the intrinsic assets.

I grew up knowing that feeling I was in an intact community. We didn't have running water, we didn't have electricity. My parents couldn't read, but it felt like we pretty much had everything until we got blindsided by the world coming at us in the way it did with the industrialization of the fishery. And the collapse of the insurer fishery led to a lot of despair. I think we understand in Newfoundland that places like our ship, we have to take care of the ship. And an understanding that it's precarious is a prerequisite to thinking about permanence. I mean, there are a lot of communities across this country, to your point, that are in, we use this word all the time, this existential moment, right? They're in this precarious kind of state. What do you think places, and we'll talk more about what you've created, but what do you think places that depend on

steel or the auto sector or aluminum, what could they learn from what you have gone through on Fogo Island? Because those people feel like the cliff edge is right there and they can't imagine what is going to be on the other side of that and it feels as well they're being edged toward it. Do you know what I mean? Well for sure our job in the present or everybody's job is to mediate the relationship between the past and the future and the past doesn't pass. It's not like we will ever forget that we were inshore fishing people, even though that's not what we do now. I think it's understanding the methodologies to build bridges between sectors and places. What does that mean?

That means we have historically thought about the economy as being made up of sectors or industries, you know, somehow loosely organized or shaped by government. And we've always thought about places as being where laborers, lives, you know, that this is where we get the input to production, as opposed to, and I think this is the reorienting we need of our whole economic thinking, we'll be to say, well, what is Canada? Let's just start with that. Let's forget sectors for a moment. Let's just start, let's just start fresh. Wouldn't that be nice? We almost could, but, you know, the past never passes, passes, really, so it's with us. But we are where we are. So what is Canada? Joe Clark said it

best. Canada is a community of communities. And so, and, you know, we're struggling, I think, as a country to have the right connective tissue. We certainly don't have the right connective tissue of transportation across our country or north, south, east, west. We have very little horizontal connective tissue. We certainly don't have it in, in finance of the 5,000 communities, probably only 500 of them have access to commercial banking. And I think we don't have a unifying narrative for our country. That's connective tissue as well. But I think the connective tissue is, and it's maybe hard to figure out what does that mean for Brand Canada, we are the sum of our parts.

And so if we want to build an economy, we have to figure out how to build an economy that creates the enabling conditions for the parts. So what does that mean? That means, so let's take any place up to 5,000, take Vogel Island, take any place. Sue St. Marie or Windsor, Ontario, where the auto sector looks like it's going to go across the border. Exactly. So this is where we are now. And what else is in Sue St. Marie besides, I don't know, does Sue St. St. Marie have auto plants? Certainly. Steel. They have that sector. They have that industry sector. So that may not be going away. I mean, rough times or rough times. They eventually turn into something else. So do what we can. And I haven't been in Sue St. Mary. It's not the best example. do the best we can to make the most of what we have. But at the same time, and I think that's the

challenge is to keep an end mindset. And at the same time, let's look at this place called Sioux-St. Marie. If we practice in Sue St. Marie, what we have practiced on Fogo Island since the 60s, which is called asset-based community development, and the questions of asset-based community development are beautiful and simple and lead us to what it is we need to do. And they are, what do we know here in this place? What do we have? What do we love? What do we miss? And the most important question, which takes you to economy and economic developments, what can we do about it? Right. So on Fogo Island, when we went through that process, it turns out that we are culturally predisposed to profound hospitality. That's a Newfoundland Labrador trait. And we don't have a world-class inn. So you don't have to be all that smart in that process to figure out, oh, we need to build an in. And so then you go, oh, well, if we're going to build an in, what does that mean? Well, we have to build a brand. Oh, wait, you have to build a brand. Oh, wait. You have to be all that. to be able to get there. So we have to figure out how to create the enabling conditions for transportation. And wait, we have to let people know that we're here. And so on and so on. That is

development. And I think that's a part of the also the reorienting of our economic thinking is too often we've looked outside to say, oh my goodness, well, if company A is going to leave or industry sector A is going to leave, let's go find someone else to come. Rather than looking inside to say what you have. Look inside. The answers are here. So describe what the inn looks like, what the inn is, because that's the roadmap to get to what you created. What did you create? That's it. The inn is a kind of a Trojan horse for a set of ideas and for the things we know and have and love and want to give it a chance at another 100 years.

It's a place that that particular hospitality, when hospitality is done properly, local people are like ambassadors for their own places. I know the whole tourism sector is in a bit of a talk about existential crisis because there's been a lot of mass tourism in the world and you'll hear about it everywhere. And I think Canada, this is another great example. And maybe people of Sioux-St. Marie might want to think about it. A good shout out to the Sue St. Marie folks here on this program, but continue. Yes, well, I'm going to have to go there now.

We're building a national network, so maybe they'll join us. But if you just think about tourism, it's a good example, actually. As a sector meets place, because it's the sector that needs to really meet. place, build those bridges. Canada lags behind the OECD in tourism. It's only 2% of our GDP. It's 10% of our employment. The OECD numbers are more like 5%, close to 5% of GDP. We are not even in the top 10. So if you said, let's look at our country, let's get a big map of the 5,000 communities. Just look at the sector called tourism and say, we want to grow our GDP, we want to grow our economy, and we want to underpin the places we live, because that is what the economy's

for. We must remember what's the economy is for. And we want to put places in the economy, just use tourism. We have said, well, where are tourism assets? Where do people live that they have cultural and natural assets? That their dreams include welcoming people to their communities. Okay, well, what do we need to do? How do we go from a vision of what something can be to development? Like we have to be development-minded, not just investment-minded, so that we support the things like nature and culture. What you have built is, I mean, it's very niche. I don't know if it's the right word,

but it is a very niche market that you are attracting. It is... I think that that mat is at the essence of Canada's wrong thinking. But it is, I mean, just practically, it's, the room start, it's very expensive, the room start at 20,000. And that's a big market in this world. $2,500 a night. Exactly.

It's certainly not. for everybody. Most people would not be able to go there. We only have 29 rooms. We don't need most people to come. So that was a question. Are you comfortable with something like that? Absolutely. Because why did we, why do we build an end? We built an end to put another leg on the economy of Fogel Island in a way that complements a fishery, which we happily still have a fishery, and to strengthen the economy for the benefit of the community. So we could have built an end that had 500 rooms that cost a whole lot less. I don't think that would serve.

the visitors. I know it wouldn't serve the community. As one woman said, we're only 2,500 people. We can only love so many people at a time. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, host of the podcast backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Join us every Friday for funny, fictional, feel-good family stories about Dave, his wife Morley, and their kids, Sam and Stephanie. And for behind-the-scenes stories about what it's like to live life out on the road, on a tour bus, living out of a suitcase, traveling, across Canada. New episodes every Friday, subscribe for free, wherever you get your podcasts. What are the benefits of being exclusive? Well, fewer feet on gentle lichens, not wearing out

the community, being able to run the inn, which we do, it's owned by the charity, but we run it as a social business. That doesn't mean a socialist business. Social is a good thing. And a social business means we pay people as much as we can possibly afford, not as little as we can get away with. You said fewer feet on the likens. Do you worry about that idea of over tourism? I mean, we've talked to people all around the world who are protesting, furious about the number of people who want to come to their beautiful place.

I'm going to go backwards to come forward to talk about tourism. There's a great book written by an economist who's at the University of Chicago, and heaven's knows, the University of Chicago has a lot to pay back the world for, given the Milton Friedman, school of thinking because the purpose of a business is to do way more than to just make profits for its shareholders because a business is a beautiful thing that can do things for humans in the places they live. So let's go backwards. Rajan, who is at the University of Chicago, wrote a book called The Third Pillar.

And he says this super beautiful thing. Human societies rest on three pillars, governments, markets, and communities. we have hollowed out community pillars steadfastly for 50 years, and that has consequences. Nothing is ever going to get done until it gets done by somebody in a place. And the key to, I think, Canada's future and to tourism are going to come to that is that these three pillars need to be in balance, and we need to find some better ways to coordinate across the pillars, because it'll take all of us. And communities can do things that markets can't do, markets can do things that communities

can't do, and governments can do things that neither of the other two can do. So if you take tourism, if we set out as a country to say, we want it to be at least 5% of our GDP, we want to be in the top 10 destinations, we certainly have the cultural and natural assets to do it, it would take all three pillars. Communities need to want it, and they need to set the table, because hospitality without communities leading, it's like we're all coming over to your house for dinner. I don't think we're going to get the best you. I, and communities are absolutely right to push back on what has happened with mass and herd tourism. But I would say that that's a kind of tourism that has been had too much market in it, too much corporatism in

it, not enough community, not enough planning for communities. If you look at Canada, we have to solve the problem of regional air access. And it's not going to get solved by itself. It takes all three pillars. And we live in a country where air access is considered a user pay kind of thing. It's somehow how we've evolved. That doesn't work because transportation and air access is a part of development. That's an enabling condition for the economy. So the federal government, which often uses airports as places that they take money out of, need to think differently about what is an airport for. And tourism, trade follows tourism follows trade. And so if we can get transportation working in this giant country of ours. So it's easier for people to get around.

And easy for the economy to develop. I mean, transportation is, if we thought about our country as starting to develop now, which we need to think about it as starting to develop now, we would look at transportation and go, absolutely. We don't even know each other. Like we're all sort of, as I go back and forth across the country, it couldn't be more different to be standing in Estevan and standing in Comfort Cove. I haven't been to Suez-A-Marie.

That's up next. So I think there's, it's, the contexts are so different. across our country. Culture, and that's why we have so many cultures. Culture is a human response to a place. That's where imagination comes from. And we can harness the imaginations that we have and not trying to squeeze it into some kind of existing corporate model.

We can build businesses. Can you explain how you did that on Fogel Island? Part of that is about, I said, in the introduction, that there's the charity, Shorefast. I mean, the name speaks to that work that you're doing, right? The name, a shorefast is a tether. It's a line that connects a traditional cod trap to the shore. And it's a metaphor.

May we always be shorefast here in our place or in our places. We started from, what do we have, what do we know, what do we love, what do we miss, what can we do about it? We set up the registered charity of Canada called shorefast. We took money, a lot of it from my career. And I would say being a sane person, I came home, and I spent the money. by investing it in place on development. The planning horizon is 100 years for the end.

And it's somebody else's job to figure out how to make it work, but that's our job. And we were really focused on how does the part belong to the whole. How does Fogo Island belong to Newfoundland and Labrador? How does it belong to Canada? How does it belong to the world? What do we uniquely have and care about that we can offer to the world? I really love this poem by a New Zealand poet,

and I think we followed the poem. The art of walking upright is the art of using both feet. one is for holding on and one is for reaching out and using business it is such a powerful tool and it's a place we can work with imagination

now of course we started with art because art is a way of seeing and understanding the world that without it we're half blind and it really helps shape our business thinking and I think both ways I think they're mutually reinforcing and we decided

we're going to build an end We're not going to build any inn. We deliberately didn't look at other fancy inns in the world because we don't want to copy anything. If you build something of the fabric of a place, it will be, by definition, unique and specific. And that's original. In the world we live where there are so many, oh, if I do that, it's going to work and I'm going to copy what they did. It is a plague of sameness that destroys the human spirit. I think we're offering things of value to the world.

But it's not just the physical structure. I mean, it's also the way that the inn works with the people who were there. The sense of connection, I mean, a practical sense of connection with the businesses and with individuals who are there, right? I mean, go back to the essence of what is tourism and why do we travel? We travel to learn. We travel because we're nosy about each other. We don't travel to stay in a place that was just like the place you just stayed, you know, three weeks ago. And so we took the opportunity.

We made everything in the end. If we could make it, we made it. And if we couldn't make it, we bought it from as close to home as possible. We pay a lot of attention to where the money goes. Because money is a thing. We invented money. It has a job to do too, which is to support life, to support nature and culture. And so how do we recruit money to support nature and culture?

Every dollar we spend, we think about where it goes. and we created something which is now trademarked and we're rolling it out with organizations across the country called Economic Nutrition. It looks like the label you see on the back of your oats or any other thing you might have had this morning. And it simply tells you if you stay at the inn and as you pointed out, it's not a small amount of money,

it's the right amount of money because we practice right pricing. We tell you where the money goes. How much gets allocated to be spent for the people who work there? 50%, by the way. Most corporate models, 30% goes to the people who work there. Tourism is too often a poverty-generating machine. And we break it down to whatever advertising, all the other costs.

And then we tell you, I think, most importantly, where the money goes geographically. How much days on Fogu Island? How much days in Newfoundland and Labrador? How much days in Canada? What does it meant for the community? What does it mean for the island? Well, the inn and Shorefast and the undertakings we have.

We have a little furniture business as well. We have an ice cream shop, which is probably the most loved of everything because it contains all 26 kinds of local berries. Employment, for sure, it's the obvious one. We've added $250 million to the GDP of the island in these undertakings in the last decade. I'd say one third of the households on the island

directly are involved economically through employment or being contractor suppliers to various things. We don't buy lettuce from a giant food company from away. We buy lettuce from someone on Fogo Island. And if it's not the time of year for lettuce, the other guy, I'm really sorry, you're not going to get lettuce. Yes, exactly.

And so it's like using business and business mind at ways to support the things we love. And this is a methodology that we have worked successfully on Fogo Island, and we think that methodology can be applied to different contexts. So we have now launched a Canadian Institute for Place-based economies called the Shorefass Institute. And it's a learning platform for good and best. practices and so that we're building a network so people can learn from each other.

Sue St. Marie can learn from people on Fogel Island or people in Prince of Ber County or people in Victoria. If you want to know how the economy of a place is doing in our country, it's really hard to get that information because it's all aggregated upward. Maybe you can get it at the provincial level, maybe sometimes the regional level, but very difficult. And what our goal is with the Institute is to foster and support economic stewardship. Do you think that we'll keep people here? You worked and came from a sector where you see a lot of people now who are fleeing this country. They don't see in information, technology, in that world an opportunity here.

And they will go south Silicon Valley and elsewhere because they don't see, they don't see an opportunity here. Do you think that that would help keep people here? I think what we need is a small set of miracles. And a miracle is nothing more than a little tiny shift in how you see something. And so to the people flee, I would ask them to take a minute and look at the country we have.

It's a gift. We have a tyranny of gifts. And we can be a country of levers or a country of complainers or we could be a country of doers. Every single person can do something. I do know doing what we did on Fogo Island was very frustrating

because we are not well aligned across the three pillars. We have struggle, we still struggle with air action. access. We struggle with a regulatory regime that you think is meant to put you on business by testing every last thread of patients that you have. So we could just give up. Do you think we're small-minded in that way? That's just about risk. Do you know what I mean? The people will often say that maybe they'll go to the states or maybe they'll go elsewhere because they're willing to

roll the dice and that we think small. I don't know if we think small. Maybe we think small. I think we're cautious. I also think in our country, most Canadians and certainly most Canadians I know, get up in the morning, and they have a sense of us, they have a sense of we, which is a wonderful thing. We don't go out and do stuff generally without thinking about the other person and what the other person might think or whatever, but it can be self-cancelling. And I think we've tipped to the self-cancelling. I think when we get frustrated, we just become complainers. And if something, one little thing moves, it's so encouraging, you just keep going.

Do you think we have, just I'll let you go, but do you think we have it in us? And do entrepreneurs in this country have it in them? This is a really hard moment right now. The news is terrible, and it feels like the country, it's not just a 51st state business, but it feels like the country is, the wolves are at the door. Do we have it in us to meet the moment? Absolutely, we do. I think we have to keep our powder dry.

We've never been tribal. Let's not turn into that. And just look at what's in front of us for what to do. There's not a place in this, I mean, I'm across the country a lot. I see people hurting for sure and fearful. the minute you actually turn to action, go out the door, what can I do here? Actually, then the world kind of starts to move with you. I know that sounds very Pollyanna, but you'll certainly feel better.

And if you feel better, you'll do better. And it's about doing. I actually think we're, I feel like we're just starting to be born into our own selves. We're just being born into ourselves. Yes. We'll leave it on that poetic note. Zeta Cobb, thank you very much. Thank you.

Zita Cobb is the innkeeper, the Fogo Island Inn. and the CEO of Shorefast. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.