The SUVs Of The Sea

CBC's National is running a piece at the moment about how, due to a policy restricting the length of hulls to 65 feet, new fishing boats are being built higher to allow larger volumes of fish catch and more fuel. These higher hulls are less stable and more prone to being overturned in rough seas. The slant (it seems obvious to me) is that the government is to blame for unsafe boats being allowed to sea.

Pardon me, but isn't this pretty obviously a case of business misconduct? The shipyard built the Ryan's Commander (the featured boat in the piece) and should have known what the stability of the ship was. More generally, these boats are being built in this way specifically to evade the regulations - if people built boats that were reasonable, this wouldn't have happened. Blaming the government for this is like blaming the government for SUV's higher body count. If people drove reasonable cars, it wouldn't matter what the regulations were.

Of course, a boat that was built to a reasonable plan wouldn't have enough fuel to get to where the fish are - they can't go far enough out from land to find the fish. So, to take Jared Diamond's analysis from Collapse, we've got resource depletion causing serious economic and personal hardship. Problem is, rather than trying to explore new types of economic arrangements for the maritimes, we're perpetuating the unsustainable patterns that got us here in the first place. Isn't that AA's definition of insanity - repeating the same action, expecting a different result?