The destruction of the northern cod was not a one-act play, but a pageant of greed that went on for decades before the curtain finally came down. At every step of the way, Cassandra wailed, but no one listened.
Between 1956, when the first factory-freezer arrived on the Grand Banks, and 1977, when Canada’s 200-mile limit closed the barn door after the horse was gone, inshore cod catches in Newfoundland plummeted by two-thirds. There was no mystery; most of the fish was being taken offshore before it could migrate into coastal waters. For most fishermen who went to sea in boats up to sixty-five feet long (the conventional definition of inshore to midshore vessels), the fishery was as marginal an occupation as it had ever been. It was the unemployment insurance cheques from Ottawa that was the most significant catch in many of Atlantic Canada’s outports and villages.
Inshore fishermen were entitled to expect Ottawa’s financial support. They had watched in anger and impotence while foreign trawlers and factory ships pillaged Newfoundland’s fishing grounds. They saw the niceties of international law grossly violated. Foreign trawlers frequently trespassed inside Canada’s three-mile limit, ripping up inshore gear in their relentless pursuit of fish. They weren’t overly concerned about being arrested, since Canada’s sole patrol vessel on that coast was too small to go out on windy days, as the St. John’s Evening Telegram wryly reported in 1967. Dissatisfied with the fair-weather enforcement of the Department of Fisheries, many longliner captains chose to stay ashore rather than risk losing their expensive gear to marauding foreign fleets.
But not all of the stock damage in Newfoundland had been done by the world’s distant-water fishing fleets. Between 1917 and 1954, long before the Fairtry hauled her first trawl, inshore catches of northern cod had already declined from 335,000 tonnes to 180,000 tonnes. Although not nearly as obvious as innovations in the offshore, the inshore fishery had experienced steady technical improvements to its gear that dramatically increased its killing power and put even greater pressure on declining stocks. For hundreds of years, the traditional fishery had operated from small boats, usually less than thirty feet long, that fished within sight of land. They could not put to sea in bad weather or stow big catches because their holds lacked refrigeration. In the inshore sector, vessel size was a built-in guarantee of conservation.
But in 1951, trap boats and longliners made their appearance in Newfoundland. Ten years later, longliners were fishing the near-shore shoals that inshore fishermen had previously been unable to harvest because of the distances involved. For the northern cod, there was no place to swim, no place to hide.
Mechanized net hauling, baiting, and setting of line trawls, more efficient cod traps, radar, satellite navigation, and echo sounders theoretically allowed inshore skippers to take more fish in the few months of the year they could operate than ever before. But there was a paradox. Despite more efficient gear, and larger vessels that allowed them to venture out to more distant fishing grounds, catches did not increase. Even the appearance of continued traditional landings was deceptive. The inshore was in fact catching fewer fish per unit of effort. In other words, it now required a much greater fishing effort to take the same number of fish. The new technology was merely allowing inshore fishermen to catch almost all of the fish that managed to escape the offshore slaughter.
Occasionally, the new technology led to fishing practices as destructive in their own way as the monstrous excesses of the factory-freezers. Gill-nets, for example, caught almost everything that swam into them, including the large, spawning mother cod. If these nets were lost in a storm, they could “ghost fish” for years, since they were no longer made of biodegradable cotton, but of material that never dissolves in seawater.
At the same time as the gross number of fish was steadily declining, the number of inshore fishermen was on the rise. Governments had always treated the fishery as the employer of last resort in Atlantic Canada. A confidential 1970 memorandum to the federal cabinet that sought to outline a plan for the economic rationalization of Canada’s fisheries stated: “The main objective of government policy has been to maximize employment in Canada’s commercial fisheries.” The department kept pumping out licences with little regard for the marine environment or the state of the stocks. In 1976, Canada had about forty thousand registered fishing vessels, 95 per cent of them under twenty-five gross tonnes, on its east and west coasts. All of them fished within a day of their home port. The inshore fishery was getting to be a very crowded place.
Unemployment insurance was one of the prime reasons that the number of fishermen dramatically increased at a time when the stocks were actually in decline. Even though they are self-employed, fishermen have been able to collect UI (now EI — employment insurance), since 1957. From the beginning, qualifying for UI has been a financial priority of the small-boat operator. The regulations are complex, but for most of the program’s existence fishermen have been able to collect UI from November to May if they worked ten weeks in the inshore fishery.
Newfoundlanders recognized a good thing when they saw it. By 1964, just seven years after fishermen’s UI was introduced, and with no increase in the general population, there was a 33 per cent increase in the number of inshore fishermen. During this same period, the inshore catch of northern cod per fishermen fell by 50 per cent.
Between 1956 and 1968, total landings of groundfish had risen from about 540,000 to 1,473,000 tonnes, an increase of about 175 per cent. Most of the increase was northern cod in zone 2J3KL, which runs from southern Labrador to the Avalon Peninsula. Dr. Leslie Harris of Memorial University in St. John’s attributes the beginning of the end for the northern cod to the excesses of the foreign fleet during this period.
“I think that the first great assault on the northern cod, the one from which that stock has never really recovered, was almost totally a foreign assault,” he says. “This was back in 1968, 1969, and ’70 when the Germans first, and then subsequently other East Europeans, developed the technology to allow them to fish in deep water and ice-infested waters. This was the first assault on a pristine cod population, the Hamilton Bank stock. This was the first time it was fished during spawning.”
The 2J3KL cod was the single most important stock for Newfoundland, accounting for 80 to 90 per cent of the total groundfish catch in the inshore fishery. In 1968, a record 810,014 tonnes of northern cod were harvested, but as the offshore trawlers did their deadly work, the results began showing up inshore. Between 1959 and 1974, the inshore harvests of 2J3KL cod declined dramatically from 160,000 tonnes to a mere 35,000 tonnes. Stocks were heading towards a collapse and people began to bail out of a dying fishery. In 1960 there were about 10,337 inshore fishermen in 2J3KL; by 1972, that number had dwindled to 6,592.
At the same time, fish prices weakened in the United States and the Middle East oil crisis drove up the cost of going fishing. By 1974, the Atlantic groundfish industry was in crisis, logging one of the poorest fishing years on record. The offshore harvest reached 338,000 tonnes (roughly ten times the inshore catch), just 57 per cent of the 657,000-tonne TAC for northern cod. Fishermen’s nets were beginning to provide better data on what was going on in the ocean than sophisticated mathematical projections.
The fishing establishment resisted the bad news. At a May 1975 meeting of the Fisheries Council of Canada, an organization of fish-plant owners, one marine biologist insisted that 2J3KL cod was not being overfished according to official regulatory criteria; at the same meeting, an assistant deputy minister in the Department of the Environment described the Atlantic groundfish industry as being in “a very deep crisis.”
By June 1975, the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fishery (ICNAF) assessment committee responsible for the 2J3KL stock finally admitted that its earlier projections had been mistaken and reduced the TAC by half; 300,000 tonnes for 1976. Fish companies were incensed, complaining bitterly that they couldn’t make it through the fishing season with such paltry quotas. In order to prevent industry-wide bankruptcies, the federal government set up a special aid program which eventually cost taxpayers $150 million. It would be the first of several huge bailout programs made necessary by misguided optimism about the state of the stocks.
Throughout this period both Ottawa and St. John’s continued to look to the fishery to solve chronic unemployment on the East Coast. Between 1970 and 1981, the federal government subsidized the construction of replacement fishing vessels to the tune of 35 per cent, a policy that encouraged an aggressive expansion of the inshore sector. The provincial Department of Fisheries in Newfoundland offered a 30 per cent fishing-gear subsidy to help small-boat fishermen acquire the latest technology. Coupled with full tax exemptions for fuel and equipment used at sea, it was a powerful incentive for more Newfoundlanders to join the fish-force.
The result was astonishing but predictable. In 1975, there were 13,736 registered inshore fishermen in Newfoundland: by 1980, that number had ballooned to 33,640. There wasn’t a politician in the land who was prepared to accept the consequences of restricting entry to the fishery.
The fishing grounds were overcrowded in the summer season and the collision of fishing technologies became a source of bitter conflict. Domestic inshore trawlers often repeated the excesses of their foreign counterparts, using superior technology to take a disproportionate share of the stock. Gill-netters complained that their catches were too low and that their gear was regularly destroyed by trawlers or trap fishermen. They responded by increasing the number of nets in the water to catch the same amount of fish. When that failed to increase their catch, they began applying for ottertrawler licences themselves. Although Ottawa tried to restrict entry to this fishery, unions and the provincial government exerted political pressure. New licences were grudgingly granted, but granted all the same. By the early 1980s, not long after the former gill-netters got into the lucrative trawler fishery, another tremor went through the industry: there was a critical shortage of fish in some key inshore fishing grounds.
The unconscionable expansion of the fishery at the expense of disappearing fish stocks was made possible by the way the industry is regulated in Canada. Fishermen operate in a byzantine environment where the federal and provincial governments lock horns for political rather than fishery reasons, which in turn pits inshore against offshore interests, province against province, and even community against community.
At the heart of the political collision is a single, destructive fact. Although Ottawa owns all the fish, the provinces are responsible for fish processing. Since both levels of government use the fishery for political advantage, the industry frequently comes down to a game of bureaucratic blackmail. If the province, for example, licenses new fish-plants in outport Newfoundland, as it did in expectation of a fishing boom after Canada declared its 200-mile zone in 1977, Ottawa comes under great pressure to increase the inshore quota to supply the plants with fish. If the minister refuses to allocate more fish, the result is a vote shortage at the next federal election; if he submits to the blackmail, the stock suffers. In the early 1980s that is exactly what happened. In 1982, scrambling to react to the crisis in the water, federal regulations were tightened to discourage the expansion of the inshore fishery. For once, the provincial government followed suit, terminating its disastrous gear-replacement subsidies. The fishery was not yielding the returns everyone had hoped for, and the industry sank into its worse crisis in a hundred years, just when the country was hit with killer interest rates.
Hooked on the myth of the ocean’s inexhaustible bounty, bureaucrats devised a federal fisheries policy that was skewed by incompatible visions of what the industry should be: a social fishery that employed and subsidized thousands of Canadians, or a big business that ran on the principles of economic viability and the demands of the market. Under successive federal governments, the economics of the fishing industry were balanced against the reality that most inshore fishermen in the Newfoundland industry can’t make enough money to survive. With few or no local employment alternatives, and forced migration an unpopular last resort, politicians tended to let a bad situation get even worse. In the 1980s, without anyone noticing, the DFO’s mandate underwent a sea change. It became a specialized social welfare department in which the biology of fish and the conservation of stocks were often afterthoughts.
While the trawls and nets worked the crowded sea, international developments were having a profound affect on the fishery. After the Second World War, American President Harry Truman claimed ownership of seabed resources out to the edge of the continental shelf off the coasts of the United States. Several South American countries followed suit, claiming ownership of their territorial seas to a distance of two hundred miles offshore. The First United Nations Law of the Sea conference was held in Geneva in 1958. The conventions it passed formally recognized what several states had already declared unilaterally: the right of coastal states to seabed resources such as minerals and hydrocarbons and sedentary fishery resources on their continental shelves. The right to so-called finfish resources remained unresolved.
A second Law of the Sea conference was held in 1960 with virtually no results. Canada failed to win recognition of her territorial sea to six miles, and couldn’t persuade other fishing nations to accept an exclusive Canadian fishing zone six miles beyond her territorial sea. As long as the international community bickered about control over fish resources, management of stocks was impossible.
In 1949, the Americans and a few West European nations fishing in the northwest Atlantic established ICNAF. The purpose of the body was to manage the Atlantic fisheries at their so-called maximum sustainable yield. Although ICNAF had the power to advise its members on conservation under the terms of its convention, the organization concentrated on collecting scientific data and proposing regulations on such matters as the mesh size of commercial nets.
As early as 1965, ICNAF was voicing concerns about overfishing and the need for quotas. Nothing was done until national quotas were set for haddock and American plaice in 1969. By 1972, other quotas had been established, including one for northern cod. But commerce so completely overshadowed conservation that the total allowable catch for 1973 and 1974 was in excess of the maximum sustainable yield.
It hardly mattered. Stocks off Newfoundland had been so depleted by then that the actual harvest was far below the established TACs; fishermen were able to land only slightly more than half of what they were allowed to catch in zone 2J3KL, the richest fishing grounds on the Grand Banks.
In 1964, the Canadian government enacted the Territorial Sea and Fishing Zones Act, which unilaterally established a nine-mile “privacy fence” beyond the three-mile limit. In 1970, an amendment to the act combined the two zones into a twelve-mile territorial sea. The act also transformed the Gulf of St. Lawrence into an exclusive Canadian fishing zone. These unilateral moves upset Canada’s international trading partners, including the United States, who wanted to preserve the freedom of the high seas for their distant-water fishing fleets.
While the Americans complained about Canada’s privatization of her coastal waters, Washington was under mounting pressure at home to do the same thing. Although American coastal states such as California had pushed the U.S. Congress for jurisdiction over near-shore waters for years, both the Nixon and Ford administrations had resisted. They wanted to protect the legal position of America’s long-distance fishing fleet and weren’t anxious to set a precedent that would lead to successful prosecutions of U.S. vessels fishing in international waters. In the end, though, American legislators had to bow to international trends in law of the sea.
As the competition for fish increased, it was inevitable that individual countries would move to protect their own stocks. With the Americans and the Mexicans moving unilaterally to an extended fisheries jurisdiction, Canada could wait no longer. On June 4, 1976, Canada’s minister for external affairs announced in the House of Commons that Canada too would unilaterally establish a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) off our coasts as of January 1, 1977. The next day, the Globe and Mail quoted the minister as saying that the poor state of fish stocks and the future of our coastal communities “made this action imperative.”
The announcement was met with euphoria in Atlantic Canada. Newfoundland’s minister of fisheries, Walter Carter, was ecstatic. He told the Globe that he believed the stocks could be rebuilt and that Newfoundland fishermen would cooperate, even if quotas had to be temporarily slashed in the rebuilding phase.
Just as the new zone was being declared, there was a boom in the Newfoundland fishery. Cod landings were the highest they had been in five years and prices skyrocketed. The jubilation in Atlantic Canada ignored some stubborn facts. Even with reduced fishing by the foreign fleets, there was still serious domestic overcapacity. Yet, instead of reducing or freezing the size of our fishing effort, the federal government permitted further expansion.
Ironically, it was foreign fishing nations that first benefited from Canada’s 200-mile zone. Since 95 per cent of Canadian fishing boats were not large enough to operate in the new EEZ, joint ventures were set up with foreign fishing nations such as West Germany. Under the terms of these deals, a German factory-freezer trawler would contract to take 600 tonnes of frozen cod blocks to a Canadian processor in Newfoundland, and in return, kept 300 tonnes for its home market.
In October 1978, a new fisheries organization was created to replace ICNAF: the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). Fisheries regulations on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks, as well as the Flemish Cap, would be the responsibility of NAFO, which started to function on January 1, 1979.
It wasn’t long before conservation became NAFO’s most pressing problem. Until the fish shortages of the early 1970s, the foreign fleets were not interested in pelagic fish (which live near the surface of the water) such as caplin, because it was a “low-value species.” But the fish-hungry Soviet fleet discovered that caplin had great value as the raw material for fish meal. No one stopped to consider that caplin was also the favourite food of cod. Even though every fishermen in rubber boots, including the captains of the factory-freezer trawlers, knew that the entire inshore fishery was based on the cod following the caplin into shallow water every spring, Canada gave the U.S.S.R. a 266,320-tonne quota of offshore spawning caplin in 1978.
It was a disastrous mistake that showed how little we knew, or cared, about ocean ecology. The small silver fish, which looks like a freshwater smelt, spawns at the southeast shoals on the edge of the Grand Banks, although most spawning occurs on or near pebbly beaches. Word that the caplin are running was a welcome sign of spring in Newfoundland. Outports celebrated the arrival of the “caplin scull” with “scoffs” and parties, knowing that the cod would soon be following their favourite food inshore. The caplin massed just off the island’s rocky beaches, where they could be scooped up in buckets for local frying pans. Marine biologists believed that the inshore and offshore caplin were two separate stocks, but no one really knew for sure. As the offshore catches increased (300,000 tonnes were caught in 1974 alone), outport fishermen observed that the caplin weren’t coming ashore in nearly the same numbers.
The Russians waited anxiously for the run of Canadian caplin in 1978. Their own government had severely restricted the caplin catch in Soviet waters, closing it altogether in some places, because the stock had collapsed from overfishing. Canada’s largesse must have seemed puzzling. Everyone knew that if you fished caplin too heavily, the cod would eventually begin to starve and cannibalize each other, just as they had in the Barents Sea. With their own waters fished out, the Soviets sent forty fishing vessels to the northwest Atlantic, twenty-five of them to the Newfoundland zone. But in 1978, Nature had the last, grim laugh. With the Russians, Japanese, and Norwegians all poised to snatch their quota of Canadian caplin, the magical silver fish failed to appear in either the inshore or offshore. After just three years of aggressive overfishing, the crucial caplin stocks had all but disappeared.
Outraged at the collapse of this crucially important fish, the Daily News in St. John’s called for a ban on all foreign fishing of caplin. Fishery Products Ltd. was opposed to the idea because it had shore-based caplin reduction plants, which were being supplied with fish by vessels from Iceland, as part of a joint venture. The company appealed to the industry’s standard stalling tactic to protect its investment — a call for more research. One scientist who was consulted by the companies reassured people that fluctuations in the caplin stock were normal and blamed cold water for delaying that year’s spawning season. But by mid-summer, when the caplin still had not appeared, even the president of Fishery Products Ltd. realized with a shudder that the stock had been wiped out.
Arthur May, then director of resource management for Fisheries Canada, the precursor to the DFO, demanded to know what the foreign trawlers just outside the 200-mile zone were doing while they waited for the caplin. ICNAF had died and, as NAFO had not yet come into effect, there were no international controls on fishing on the high seas. What was happening was an outdoor abattoir operation without limits. The foreign fleets were taking as much fish as they could to fill their holds, but the pickings were getting slim. Underutilized species such as scad and blue whiting, once considered junk fish for fish meal, were now taken for the table in an experimental fishery by the British. Consumers ultimately rejected them because of their dark flesh.
Although northern cod in the 2J3KL zone was the worst casualty of overfishing in the 1970s, it was by no means the only one. The crisis was nearly as deep on the southern Grand Banks in the NAFO area known as 3NO. During the twenty years it had been exploited prior to 1977, the cod stock in the area had been ravaged by Spanish pair trawlers. In the mid-sixties, the harvest had exceeded 220,000 tonnes; by 1977, it was reduced to just 17,600 tonnes.
What was left of the stock did not move inshore, but migrated to the Tail of the Banks outside the new 200-mile zone. In 1979, Canada announced that only two Spanish pair trawlers would be allowed inside the 200-mile zone. Nevertheless, nearly all the Spanish pairs showed up in 1980 planning to fish the Flemish Cap and other international fishing grounds with straddling stocks. Canada ordered them off on the basis that Spain was not a member of NAFO, threatening to force the vessels into St. John’s for inspections. The southern Banks cod stock was in such terrible shape that NAFO decided that a moratorium on cod was necessary for the 1980 season.
As an non-NAFO member, Spain promptly announced that she wouldn’t recognize the moratorium and continued fishing outside Canada’s 200-mile zone. Only when Ottawa threatened to ban all Spanish trawlers from Atlantic Canadian ports did the vessels withdraw. Overnight, trawlers flying the flags of non-NAFO, South American countries, began to hunt the endangered 3NO cod just outside the 200-mile zone. These vessels bore an uncanny resemblance to the Spanish trawlers that had just retreated from the Banks. Under existing international law, there was nothing Ottawa could do about these flag-of-convenience fish pirates, or so the bureaucrats who ran the show at the DFO believed.
Canada’s fisheries policy was a nightmare from which the country was having difficulty awakening. In the two decades before Ottawa established the 200-mile limit, Canadian fleets had taken only a small portion of 3NO cod, most of it as by-catch. The largest share was taken by Spain. Concerned about just how much fish was being wasted by the Spanish, the fisheries department chartered a pair of Spanish trawlers and went fishing. To everyone’s horror, it was discovered that over 45 per cent of the total catch was flounder — all of it was dumped.
A tragedy was in the making on the Grand Banks. By 1981, not even the most selfish politician or malleable mandarin could deny it. The East Coast fishery needed to be rescued.
Ottawa sent a mathematician with a puckish smile and a flair for political fixing to do the job. Had Michael Kirby, whose roots were in Newfoundland, understood the problem that awaited him, he might have stuck to simpler matters like patriating the constitution.