On April 21, 1991, Brian Mulroney shuffled the deck chairs on the Titanic of his increasingly unpopular government and John Crosbie finally got his “nightmare job.” Crosbie knew that the fishery was Atlantic Canada’s most important file: 100,000 jobs, $3.1 billion worth of production, and 20 per cent of the Gross Provincial Product in the region, though just 0.9 per cent of Canada’s GDP. More important in the circumstances, the man whose family had made its fortune in fish knew that 1,500 communities depended on harvesting and processing cod for their survival. If the groundfish that accounted for 60 per cent of the landings in Atlantic Canada didn’t come back, those people would need someone in Ottawa who understood their plight.
No one had a better idea of what the troubled waters of the fisheries looked like than John Carnell Crosbie. Before running federally in 1976, Crosbie had been fisheries minister in the provincial government of Frank Moores, where he gained firsthand experience of the competing interests he now presided over. Despite the fact that an imminent stock collapse had been added to the usual problems, Crosbie vowed that he would “do the best I could.”
Valcourt’s eleven stormy months in the portfolio didn’t make Crosbie’s job any easier. Considered to be on the uncouth side of brash, Valcourt had offended just about everyone during his brief tenure as minister. NIFA president Cabot Martin was one of many dedicated detractors of the pepperpot from New Brunswick. “It’s been quite awhile since anyone in Ottawa has managed to break virtually all the basic rules of good fisheries management in one fell swoop,” he wrote in one of his columns.
Martin listed Valcourt’s many alleged sins: allowing the swashbuckling Newfoundland company, Seafreez, to freeze fish at sea (bypassing shore-based processing), permitting the company to use foreign fishing vessels, and authorizing it to catch 50,000 tonnes of caplin at a time when the stocks were near collapse and the cod that depended on them were on the point of starvation. Inshore fishermen suspected that the DFO’s stock assessments for caplin were as shaky as the ones for northern cod.
Ignoring protests from Newfoundland, Valcourt had also given the Nova Scotia deep-sea company, National Sea Products, enterprise allocations, a kind of quasi-property right, for northern cod. For his many contributions to Newfoundland’s decline, Martin nominated Valcourt for the “Saddam Hussein Award for creative fisheries policy.”
Crosbie laughed along with other Newfoundlanders, but he knew that even sharper barbs would soon be coming his way. For now, though, all was hearts and flowers. Even Liberal MPs such as Roger Simmons applauded Crosbie’s appointment, partly because they knew their legendary foe was headed into a political meatgrinder. But they also recognized that Crosbie was able, hardworking, and like a dog with a bone when he set his mind on a course of action.
But from the very beginning, Crosbie faced an industry where the mood was not one of cooperation or contrition for past sins, but rather of suspicion, blame-laying, and a withering selfishness over the disposition of the few cod that were left. As Crosbie put it, “There isn’t one decision you can take without a major battle going on as to what you should have done. For every winner, there are three losers. That’s the fishery.”
For all of its national reach, Fisheries and Oceans is one of the least known departments of the federal government. When Crosbie became minister, the DFO employed 6,149 people, 5,045 of them full time. Only a quarter were uniformed, including guardians, inspectors, and ships’ officers and crew. It was not many people to manage 244,000 kilometres of one of the longest coastlines in the world. With the declaration of the 200-mile limit, the offshore area accounted for 30 per cent of Canada’s total territory.
The DFO was the largest employer of biologists in the public service, and the second largest of research scientists and technicians. More than 2,200 DFO personnel worked as scientists or as scientific support. The department spent 28.8 per cent of its $800-million budget on science, with most of the $219.4 million going in support of fisheries management. Three-quarters of its in-house science and technology budget was spent on the East and West coasts of the country.
Crosbie had inherited a department that was primarily operational. The DFO conducts research, enforces regulations, inspects fish, produces navigational surveys, publishes charts, and manages 2,200 small-craft harbours around the country. But science was clearly the department’s essential mission, as one of Crosbie’s top officials made clear: “Science is the foundation of everything we do. Fisheries management requires a sound knowledge of fish stocks; habitat management is based on research on the impact of physical and chemical changes on fish habitat.” For DFO to fail in its science would mean that the department had failed utterly in its mission.
Unlike most federal departments, the DFO was heavily decentralized, with 89 per cent of its staff working in 7,000 regional offices, labs, field camps, and hatcheries all over the country. Harvest management was divided into science, allocation, and enforcement. Scientific advice determined estimates of stock abundance. The DFO then set annual predictions of stock abundance, which were used to establish the annual TACs and harvesting rules. It also negotiated the Canadian and foreign shares of allocations and licences, and monitored and enforced quotas. When necessary, it also prosecuted those who broke the rules. But by 1991 the fines had become so minimal, they were a standing joke in the industry, a minor cost of doing business in a common property resource.
On his first day on the job, John Crosbie was briefed about his new department. He was told that the TGNIF study led by Dr. Alverson had confirmed the results of the current assessment, that the northern cod stock had increased substantially since 1976. The decline in inshore catches was due to a combination of factors, including cold water temperature, the availability of caplin offshore as food, and the uneven distribution of offshore fishing. Although Crosbie was informed that the Harris panel had confirmed that the stock status had been overestimated, there was no sense of urgency in the briefing book. One sentence jumps out: “Scientific advice is that lower inshore catch-rates and smaller fish in the inshore fishery in recent years do not indicate stock decline.” Despite Deputy Minister Bruce Rawson’s spin, the picture that emerged from the secret briefing book he had prepared for Crosbie was ominous.
Rawson flagged a swarm of problems for his new minister, including poor catch-rates, horrendous foreign overfishing, and rising frustration within the industry at Ottawa’s inability to do anything about it. One of Crosbie’s problems was a renewed demand by Newfoundland that Ottawa give up its exclusive control over the fishery. Newfoundland had traditionally clamoured for a greater provincial role in fisheries management, an argument that packed more of a punch after the stunning decline of the northern cod. Like his advice to cut the TAC for northern cod and unilaterally take control of the offshore beyond two hundred miles, Harris’s recommendation for shared fisheries management had been rejected by Bernard Valcourt.
Clyde Wells was undaunted. In January 1991, Newfoundland had released a major report, “The Maloney Inquiry into the Alleged Erosion of the Newfoundland Fishery by Non-Newfoundland Interests.” In a way, it was Newfoundland’s advance claim for damages if the stocks collapsed. The previous October, Premier Wells had appointed former Newfoundland fisheries minister Aidan Maloney to investigate the decline of the Newfoundland fishery. His report focused on federal policies that gave non-Newfoundland interests access to fish stocks adjacent to the province, as well as DFO enforcement practices, which penalized Newfoundland fishermen while letting others away with poor fishing practices. Maloney called for greater provincial control over fish stocks, and “priority” treatment for Newfoundland in any future NAFO quota increases in 2J3KL. It was the least Ottawa could do, Maloney said, for past discrimination against the province with all the fish.
Wells endorsed the Maloney Report in the final days of 1990, and publicly pressed for federal–provincial “management” of the fishery along the lines of the Offshore Petroleum Board that regulated oil development in Newfoundland waters. Rawson was careful to point out to Crosbie what Wells was after. Wells wanted jurisdiction over the fishery left with the federal government, but day-to-day management shared by a Canada–Newfoundland board. Worried about being excluded from Newfoundland waters, the fishing industry and the remaining Atlantic provinces, led by Nova Scotia, all supported exclusive federal jurisdiction.
It cost nearly a billion dollars a year to run the fishery in Canada, and Crosbie knew that Newfoundland would like nothing better than to dictate the annual quotas to its own advantage, while sticking Ottawa with all the bills. Like Roméo LeBlanc before him, he believed that shared management would lead to endless strife, or what he jokingly referred to as “civil war.” He preferred following the letter of Section 91(12) of the Constitution Act of 1982: in tidal waters, the public right to fish is vested in the Crown, and the federal government exercises all powers with respect to harvest management, conservation, and protection.
The issue of shared management was not the biggest problem Crosbie faced. What threatened most was the towering anger building in Newfoundland fishermen as they watched foreign draggers thumbing their noses at Canada’s conservation measures while they were either fishing on restricted quotas or forced to stay ashore.
As a lawyer, Crosbie knew that our international fisheries relations were based on the Law of the Sea. Within its 200-mile zone, Canada has the right to establish the TAC and to allocate quotas to the various domestic fleets. But Ottawa also has an obligation to give other states access to fish deemed to be surplus to the harvesting capacity of Canadian fishermen. Accordingly, international cooperation on management and conservation was a complex process of horse-trading that involved still-forming international law and a variety of multilateral institutions. It is not accidental that the fishery has been, and remains, Canada’s most contentious foreign affairs issue.
Crosbie had problems with a number of fish pirates in and around Canadian waters, but few ways of dealing with them. Despite being members of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), the EC permitted its national fleets to fish in international waters at levels far higher than NAFO quotas. They weren’t the only culprits.
To diminish the pressure on fish stocks in waters adjacent to Canada’s economic zone, Ottawa had adopted what amounted to a cod-and-stick policy. In return for cooperating with the Canadian management plan, countries such as the former U.S.S.R., Cuba, Poland, Japan, Norway, and Denmark received surplus fish allocations within the 200-mile zone, as well as their traditional share of fish in international waters beyond 200.
The problem was that some countries, notably Spain and Portugal, didn’t play by the rules. There had also been a dramatic increase in fishing by non-NAFO members and flag-of-convenience vessels outside Canada’s 200-mile limit, including the United States, Korea, and Panamanian-registered vessels of uncertain origin. In 1990 alone, Canadian surveillance officers sighted 130 EC vessels in the NAFO area off Newfoundland. Although the fishing effort had increased, the estimated catches remained at 1989 levels, the historic sign that stocks were in decline.
Given the intricacies of international law, taking decisive action wasn’t as cut and dried as it sometimes looked. Every time Ottawa was tempted to do something about foreign fishing, a nervous federal mandarin was there to point out the hidden hook. In August 1989, for example, warrants were issued against the masters of two Spanish trawlers for fishing violations committed in Canadian waters. The two trawlers had recently tied up in St. Pierre and Miquelon and could easily have been arrested while crossing the Canadian zone. But fisheries officers did not board the vessels. As one senior DFO official put it, “France would make use of any such incident to support its contention that Canada’s interpretation of the Law of the Sea concerning ‘innocent passage’ threatens access to St. Pierre/Miquelon and therefore St. Pierre/Miquelon must have an area that extends out to the high seas.”
The “Perrier Initiative” of the Mulroney government was talk, talk, and more talk. Cabinet ministers raised the subject of overfishing with their counterparts in the European Community and other NAFO states at every opportunity, and as a result of these diplomatic efforts, Ottawa concluded that its best chance of persuading the EC to stop overfishing was to offer more fish inside the Canadian zone. It was not a strategy that anyone was anxious to explain to unemployed Canadian fishermen.
Crosbie’s first priority as the new minister was to stop foreign overfishing, which meant dealing with the Spanish and Portuguese. He knew firsthand how intractable the Portuguese were on the subject. One of his last acts as Canada’s minister for international trade had been to lead a delegation from Newfoundland on a four-day tour of Portugal to meet the prime minister, his minister of fisheries, and local vessel owners. The owners insisted that Canada’s problems were not caused by Portuguese overfishing, but by marauding seals and the small-mesh nets used by Newfoundland fishermen.
While accusations and counter-accusations flew, the provocations continued. The EC totally ignored the 1990 NAFO quota of 15,377 tonnes on the Nose and Tail of the Banks, setting its own quota of 60,000 tonnes. According to Canadian surveillance figures, Spain and Portugal then added insult to injury, taking 62,000 and 32,000 tonnes of fish respectively, while Canada desperately begged for compliance with conservation measures. Ottawa’s diplomatic effort continued but the countries of the EC simply fished harder than ever.
While foreign fleets pillaged the northern cod, reports from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Scotian shelf showed the same drastic decline in fish stocks as on the Grand Banks. Crosbie knew there wasn’t much time to come up with answers to the growing crisis.
Just a month before Crosbie took over from Bernard Valcourt, one hundred angry fishermen from the west coast of Newfoundland vandalized the DFO office in Port aux Basques. They were protesting the early closure of their traditional winter cod fishery in zone 3Pn, a step the DFO had taken because too many redfish were being caught as by-catch. When the protestors found the glass doors to the office locked, they kicked them in. Once inside, they threw computers, filing cabinets, and office furniture through the windows. By the time they were done, they had destroyed $100,000 worth of public property. Two days later, federal officials “found” an additional redfish quota and reopened the 3Pn fishery. A month after that, sixty fishermen staged a peaceful protest at the same DFO office, requesting an increase in their cod quota. Bureaucrats responded by adding 300 tonnes of fish to the original quota of 400 tonnes. Storefront bargaining was hard for Ottawa to resist.
Nervous mandarins continued to hope for a miracle. In June 1991, DFO scientists were set to review the assessment of the northern cod stock. The results would be discussed with industry stakeholders at a special meeting of the Atlantic Groundfish Advisory Committee (AGAC) scheduled for July. The DFO promised that the scientific advice for the 1992 fishing season would be finalized in time for the fall 1991 meeting of AGAC. The entire fishing industry held its breath.
Crosbie tried to maintain control of a potentially chaotic situation by doing what he could to ease the desperation of fishermen, companies, and plant workers caught in the cod crisis. He started by rescuing Newfound Resources of St. John’s, a consortium of sixteen inshore fish-plant owners who faced bankruptcy because they had lost their northern cod quota. Crosbie’s answer was to give the company a shrimp licence. The Nova Scotia Draggers Association immediately attacked the minister for showing favouritism to a firm from his native province.
There were more charges of favouritism at the end of July 1991, when Crosbie announced that the FPI plant at Gaultois would reopen to process redfish. Two hundred and fifty people were hired. But not everyone was as happy as the people of Gaultois. Over eighty Newfoundland fishermen threatened to fish illegally on the Grand Banks after Crosbie turned down their request for additional cod quota in zone 3NO, an area more than two hundred miles south of Newfoundland. The fishermen, who had a legal quota in zone 3L, claimed that the cod had migrated to 3NO because of unusually cold water temperatures. Crosbie rejected their demand. Canada had already agreed to the NAFO fishery management plan in international waters. If Ottawa didn’t observe the rules, how could the Spanish or Portuguese be expected to obey them?
Despite stern warnings from Crosbie, the fishermen sailed their longliners from St. John’s to 3NO and began to fish. When the skippers returned to port on July 24, 1991, several of them were arrested on Crosbie’s orders. It was the right thing to do, but the sight of Canadian fisheries officers arresting Newfoundlanders while foreign vessels continued to pillage the straddling stocks in the same waters appalled the province’s fishermen.
Captain Wilfred Bartlett of Brighton, Newfoundland, sailed his sixty-foot longliner to 3NO because it was the only destination left. In his opinion, the issue wasn’t legal but moral; he was after Newfoundland fish: “All of a sudden we’re not allowed to go and catch it. There’s nothing left for us anywhere else. I don’t want to go down in 3NO but out of desperation there is nowhere else.… What do you do? Do you stay ashore and starve to death? Or do you go and catch what you believe is yours? Or do you leave it there for the foreigners? That’s the question.”
By September 1991, the St. John’s Evening Telegram was calling for “gunboat diplomacy” to stop the Spanish and Portuguese from overfishing. Crosbie sent a letter to the editor reminding Newfoundlanders that firing on, or sinking, a foreign vessel on the high seas would be an act of war. Nor did Crosbie believe that trade sanctions were the answer. How could Canada impose sanctions against the EC, with its huge population of 325 million, when it purchased 20 per cent of Newfoundland’s and 8 per cent of Canada’s exports? Retaliatory sanctions could do a great deal more harm to the Canadian economy than they ever could to the EC’s. Crosbie pointed out that a jingoistic call to arms might make the public feel good, but that the people charged with governing the country knew how dangerously irresponsible it was in the real world of global politics.
As Newfoundlanders agitated for action against the foreign fish pirates, FPI announced that its plant at Trepassey would close on September 20, 1991. Six hundred and forty jobs and $14 million in wages were lost in a dozen rural communities around Trepassey with no other employment prospects. The curtain appeared to be coming down on four hundred years of history.
Crosbie briefed Clyde Wells on Ottawa’s progress in fighting foreign overfishing at a meeting in St. John’s on September 19, 1991. The two men agreed on one thing: the crisis in the fishery was taking on frightening proportions. As many as seven thousand fishery workers in Newfoundland alone would need financial assistance from government. The inshore fishermen had caught little more than half of their allocation, and they believed the federal government that had managed the stock and set the quotas was solely to blame. Exclusive jurisdiction and shared blame was a dog that wouldn’t hunt.
In October 1991, in response to the catch failure, Crosbie announced a $40-million assistance package. Three-quarters of the funds would go to Newfoundland. All told, ten thousand fishermen and plant workers in Atlantic Canada would receive cheques from Ottawa. Crosbie blamed the inshore’s empty nets on the ice that had remained on the Banks until August, preventing fishermen from getting their gear in the water. But the minister and his officials in the DFO were the only people who believed that Nature and not bad management was responsible for the disappearing stocks.
On October 9, 1991, Dr. Les Harris went on the CBC’s fisheries program in St. John’s and publicly wondered if the amazingly hardy fish would survive, let alone rebuild. On the same program, Dr. Brian Morrissey, the assistant deputy minister for science at the DFO, said that both the 1990 stock survey and commercial catch results showed that the northern cod stock had grown from the time Harris did his study from about 800,000 tonnes to 1,100,000 tonnes. He estimated the spawning biomass at approximately 270,000 tonnes, or a little smaller than it had been in 1977. Asked why there were no fish on the northeast coast, Morrissey theorized that the stock had moved south into zones 3K and 3L. Ottawa’s whistling past the graveyard was getting loud enough to wake the dead. As Dr. Harris said in a later interview, “I think our scientists saw their data from a particular perspective that the stock was growing at the rate they had projected, and the data were sort of made to fit the equation.”
In December 1991, when Crosbie announced the 1992 quota for northern cod, he reduced the 190,000-tonne TAC from the previous year by just 5,000 tonnes, noting that he would review the number later against the results of ongoing scientific investigations. Crosbie recalled, “There was no advice indicating at this time that there should be any further reduction. I was advised at this date that the northern cod stock was in better shape than it had been several years earlier.” The DFO continued to sleepwalk towards the abyss, having apparently convinced the minister that it would all somehow work out in the end.
On November 20, 1991, Premier Wells had asked Ottawa to use military force to stop foreign overfishing on the Nose and Tail of the Banks. Wells also wanted Brian Mulroney to tell the world through organizations such as NAFO and the United Nations that Canada would take unilateral action to protect the stocks. Crosbie considered Wells’s request to be “cheap political rhetoric,” and offered a warning: “The consequences to Canada of such outrageous, illegal, and belligerent actions in international waters would be incalculable and would affect far more Canadian interests than simply those of the people living in coastal Canada.”
But Crosbie was too seasoned a politician not to realize that public opinion in Newfoundland had turned against the Tories. Something had to be done about the fish pirates and done fast. In January 1992, he announced that Canada would press for international support of conservation measures at the UN. With Newfoundland getting more restless by the day, the federal minister set out on a two-week mission that would take him to London, Japan, and Hong Kong, where he hoped to win international support for a peaceful resolution of the overfishing crisis. He was beginning to look a lot like the Neville Chamberlain of the cod crisis.
On January 10, 1992, Crosbie travelled to London where he addressed a Royal Institute of International Affairs conference on international boundaries. Crosbie eloquently described the severe depletion of the fish stocks off Canada’s Atlantic coast caused by overfishing, primarily by members of the EC fleet, outside Canada’s 200-mile zone. He talked about the importance of developing international law with respect to the straddling stocks and called for international support for the principles established by the Law of the Sea Convention, but not yet ratified, to end their overfishing. Freedom of the high seas, he declared, had to mean more than the right to overfish and pollute.
Crosbie explained that his government was facing mounting pressure for unilateral action outside the 200-mile zone: “Such actions and their possible consequences are something that no state wants to consider. Time is running out for the resources being overfished and for fishing communities that depend on those resources. Tangible progress must be made in 1992 or other options will have to be seriously considered.”
Crosbie assured his audience that Canada would continue to pursue all avenues for a solution and wanted only “agreed, equitable, and enforceable rules governing the rights and duties of states.” Since 1986, the EC fleets had taken over 400,000 tonnes above NAFO quotas. This had reduced Canada’s own offshore fleet by one-third and created great hardship in traditional fishing communities, particularly in Newfoundland. Crosbie invited Spanish and Portuguese delegations to come to Atlantic Canada in March to see for themselves what foreign overfishing had done to the East Coast. The Europeans came and went, and their unrestricted fishing continued unabated.
Although Crosbie wasn’t saying it publicly, he was beginning to come around to the view that it was time to get tough with the EC. In response to a request from the prime minister, who asked Crosbie for his views on what the government should do with the balance of its mandate, he sent a letter to Mulroney on January 24, 1992. Crosbie explained that the most sensitive issue in Newfoundland was how to deal with EC overfishing on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks.
He noted that the provincial government was pushing hard for Canada to take over custodial management of the disputed area if the issue wasn’t resolved by the end of 1992. He told Mulroney that there was “tremendous” public support for the premier’s position in Newfoundland. “Our negotiations with the European Community to try to achieve bilateral progress failed,” he wrote. And although he still had hopes of achieving some progress on the issue of straddling stocks at the June UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, he told the prime minister what must happen if Ottawa ran into a diplomatic brick wall. “If there is not considerable improvement in our progress on overfishing with the European Community by the end of 1992, it is difficult to see how we can avoid taking some kind of unilateral action in 1993 to stop the overfishing now endangering the fish stocks of the northwest Atlantic.”
The second arm of the Canadian campaign was a legal one, based on “promising ambiguities” in the Law of the Sea convention relating to straddling stocks. Sixteen other countries had now endorsed Canada’s position, and all eyes would be on the subject at the Rio Summit. Crosbie liked the idea of having the fishery resolution adopted at the same gathering that would be examining other ecological catastrophes like global warming and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Canada intended to call for a conference on high-seas fisheries and a special session of NAFO to get better surveillance outside the 200-mile zone.
Desperate Newfoundland fishermen, meanwhile, were demanding an immediate cut in the cod quota and swift action against foreign fish pirates. Frustrated by what they saw as Ottawa’s dithering, they accused Crosbie of not listening to them. “Bunk,” he snapped. “I’ve been listening to them ever since I was elected … and I will listen to them, but I’m not going to carry out advice of theirs that I think is wrong. I’m not going to listen to advice that says, oh, reduce the TAC for the northern cod to 125,000 tonnes when there’s no scientific advice that says this should be done, or must be done. I’m not going to do something that I think is wrong for Canada.”
Crosbie believed that the only people who wanted the TAC cut were representatives of the inshore fishery like Tom Best, who wanted to see the offshore fishery disbanded, despite the prosperity the deep-sea sector had brought to Newfoundland. “Tom Best as an inshore fisherman expects that he will be able to fish and he doesn’t seem worried about the fact that all his brethren on fishing trawlers and all those who work in fish plants supplied by the offshore fleet will be closed, and they’ll be out of a job.”
In a way, Crosbie had it right. But in a bigger way, so did Tom Best.
Tom Best of Petty Harbour, one of the founders of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association, had been fishing for twenty-six years. What he saw in 1992 was a complete disaster. Eighty per cent of the fish landed in Petty Harbour were under twenty inches long. Ten years earlier, 80 per cent of the catch had been longer than twenty-four inches. Overall landings were down 75 per cent from what they had been a decade earlier, despite the latest technology and a doubled fishing effort.
Best thought that the solution to the fisheries crisis was a five-year moratorium on offshore fishing by both the domestic and foreign fleets. Trawlermen and plant workers who lost their jobs should be compensated, and the inshore fishery should be allowed to continue. “The inshore fishery has been around for four hundred years and we have never, ever done anything to put the fish stocks in the state they are in today. It has all happened in the offshore.”
To Best and most inshore fishermen, Ottawa was perpetrating a terrible injustice by making them pay for the sins of big fishing companies. People such as Fishery Products International president Vic Young, with their stock options and executive pension plans, would have secure futures no matter what happened. But inshore fishermen risked permanently losing everything they had because of the excesses of the offshore fleets.
Vic Young’s Nova Scotia counterpart, Henry Demone of National Sea Products, thought that Best’s suggestion for a five-year moratorium on deep-sea trawlers would have more credibility if the inshore sector wasn’t investing in new, middle-distance vessels that could fish as far offshore as seventy miles. In 1987, there had been seventeen middle-distance vessels that caught 1,300 tonnes of cod. By 1990, there were 114 vessels with landings of more than ten times that amount. Demone pointed out that the National Sea offshore fleet was highly regulated, used larger-than-regulation nets for conservation purposes, and landed its catch at three government-designated landing ports, Lunenburg, Louisbourg, and St. John’s. In the interests of prudent fishing practices, every vessel had a federal observer onboard. By comparison, inshore boats could land their catch anywhere and were not required to carry DFO observers.
Despite their defensiveness about offshore fishing practices, the big companies were as worried as any inshore fisherman about what was happening to the stocks. And it wasn’t just cod. Fishery Products International had also experienced a shortage of yellowtail flounder and American plaice. Catches for these species had dropped 30 per cent over the past three years. FPI had been forced to lay off two thousand workers over the last few seasons because there had simply been fewer fish to catch. Since 1989, the company had tied up seventeen of its fifty-five trawlers. In Vic Young’s words, FPI was reducing capacity, because overcapitalization forces you “to do the wrong thing with the fish stocks.”
As troubled as he was by declining stocks in other species, Young was mortified by the disappearance of the northern cod. For the first time in history, in 1991 FPI failed to catch any cod in area 2J. At first, the company thought it was because of ice conditions. But when FPI trawlers returned to the fishing grounds in the fall, there were still no cod in 2J. The only place the company found cod was in 3K, where it managed to catch its quota. But the fish were uniformly small. A terrible possibility presented itself. Was FPI catching the four- and five-year-old fish that the DFO was counting on to rebuild the stock? Ottawa insisted that the industry could take 180,000 tonnes of northern cod in 1992 without harming the stock. Asked about the assurances from the DFO, Young replied, “Now, I can’t say if they’re right or wrong. I can say I’m very uncomfortable with it. Why? Because I now see that there’s no fish in 2J. That makes everyone very, very uncomfortable.”
Young sympathized with John Crosbie’s dilemma. He understood that Ottawa had to balance stock conservation with community survival; in times of poor landings, that was a very difficult balance to achieve. He also thought that the focus of the federal government should be on the kind of gear that was killing smaller fish, which the small boat’s cod trap did as effectively as a trawler’s massive nets. Young believed that at least part of the solution was to increase the mesh size in the offshore, which had already been done once, and to ask offshore vessels to withdraw from any area where the catch was undersized.
As for foreign overfishing, Young fumed that what the Spanish and Portuguese were doing was “absolutely unforgivable.” Nor did he think John Crosbie’s diplomatic efforts would halt their destructive fishing practices. “The only reason he’s been unsuccessful is not because he hasn’t put the effort in. It’s because the Europeans are impervious to that kind of stuff. They don’t give a damn.”
Young wanted the Canadian government to devise the best possible legal strategy to unilaterally extend fisheries management to cover the straddling stocks. Catastrophe made for strange bedfellows. The head of Newfoundland’s fishermen’s union, Richard Cashin, for once agreed with the corporate princes. If Canada couldn’t get agreement with NAFO countries within six months, Ottawa should move unilaterally to extend jurisdiction beyond two hundred miles.
John Crosbie stuck doggedly to the strategy of diplomacy over gunboats, saying, “Now there isn’t another country in the world that will recognize our right to do it.… Canada has no more right to it, no more right to decide what should be done there, than 150 other countries in the world. This is the international high seas. If we did it, we would immediately be up against the whole world. We would risk all our other interests by such an act.… You’re not going to do it unless there’s absolutely no alternative.”
To an increasing number of Newfoundlanders, the view was taking hold that it was already too late. Liberal MHA John Efford predicted that both sectors of the Newfoundland fishery would close forever if Ottawa didn’t act immediately to end foreign overfishing. “The fact is, the fish stocks are near depletion and in one year or two years down the road, there’ll be no more fish for anybody to catch.”
Efford estimated that at any given time, there were over two hundred vessels fishing just outside Canada’s 200-mile limit off Newfoundland. Half of those were factory-freezers that stood eight storeys high. After taking a surveillance flight, Efford remarked that there were so many ships lit up on the Banks that it was like flying over a “floating city” in the middle of the Atlantic. Efford accused the foreign fleets of catching at least five times the NAFO quota and of destroying the spawning and juvenile cod in their relentless pursuit of fish.
Fishermen in outports like Port de Grave were “very frightened people,” Efford said. They faced the prospect of losing a lifetime of work building up equity in their boats and gear, assets that would be utterly worthless if the stocks disappeared. Newfoundland itself could not exist without the fishery, except as a shipwreck. “This will become a complete welfare state for the few people who decide or want to live here.”
Dr. Les Harris offered his analysis of why Ottawa was so slow to acknowledge a disaster in the making. When the scientists recommended that the quotas be cut in half, they created a terrible dilemma for politicians. The minister now had to tell fishermen and companies who had invested millions of dollars in the industry that they couldn’t have any fish. The alternative was to save the fishermen by allowing them to wipe out the stock. But in that case, Harris argued, Ottawa would end up in exactly the same position, except that the cod would be gone. He believed that the only answer was for government to support unemployed fishermen while the cod stock was allowed to rebuild. But unless Ottawa moved decisively, that option would soon be off the table. “It seems to be too big a pill for the politicians to swallow … that the species, the survival of the species, is more important when the chips are down than what happens to any number of individual fishermen in a particular year.”
With Dr. Harris’s pill stuck firmly in his throat, John Crosbie did his best to fight a rearguard action against critics who wanted him to dramatically reduce the northern cod quotas before it was too late. While he tried to focus on foreign overfishing and a federal fish-aid package to deal with continuing catch failures, Crosbie was bombarded by anecdotal evidence that the DFO had been tragically wrong about the fish stocks.
Behind the scenes, Crosbie’s officials were telling him that the biomass was better than it had been in 1977, but had only increased threefold rather than fivefold, as DFO scientists had previously predicted. They insisted that the present course would lead to higher catches, although scientists were still examining the fall research surveys. Crosbie knew what that meant: the advice for 1992 could still change. That had happened once before after the Alverson Report was released in 1987, and John Crosbie hadn’t been amused.
“I was alarmed, and not only alarmed but I was disgusted, I was enraged, I couldn’t even begin to describe how I felt when I heard that particular year … the quota for 1989 should be reduced.… A huge, I mean incomprehensible, incredible change in the advice. Naturally, I was disgusted beyond all belief.”
Though he was privately furious with his DFO scientists for their wildly fluctuating advice, he accepted their latest assurances and refused to consider reducing the quota to 125,000 tonnes “unless there was very convincing scientific evidence that the fish stocks otherwise were going to disappear altogether. And there is no such evidence.” DFO scientists had not recommended a TAC reduction to 125,000 tonnes, he insisted, unless they were “giving advice to someone who doesn’t get through to me.… They haven’t done it. And until they do, I’m not even going to consider it.”
Asked if the small fish that were being caught inshore signalled the imminent collapse of the northern cod stock, Crosbie claimed that all the big fish were being caught in zone 3NO because cold water had kept the cod from coming in to the northeast coast. (The meandering and sometimes fatally frigid Labrador current can, in fact, freeze a whole population of fish if it overtakes them. At temperatures of minus two degrees Celsius, cod have been hauled up frozen solid in fishermen’s nets.) Confronted with the fact that fishermen hadn’t even been able to catch the federal quota in the last fishing season, Crosbie observed that the fishery was a very fickle business, as historical catch records showed: “There’s always good years and bad years, and there always is going to be.” The question was not whether there should be draconian cuts to the cod quota, but “whether you’re going to have a rural life in Newfoundland and Labrador or Atlantic Canada, or not. There is no rural economy in Newfoundland outside the fishery.”
While he was scolded, advised, and vilified by every Newfoundland reporter with a byline, Crosbie sought a diplomatic solution to what he thought was best presented to the world as an ecological problem. But his hope of embarrassing the Europeans at Rio was fading. Although Canada had sixteen co-sponsors for its resolution to protect straddling stocks, none of them were “major nations,” such as Japan, the United Kingdom, or the United States.
On the domestic front, demands were getting shrill for unilateral action against foreign fishermen. Irritated by the constant criticism that Canada was behaving like a wimp, Crosbie reminded his critics that there was another side to the overfishing problem that few Canadians wanted to talk about. “We’re no angels here. The fishermen that you hear complaining all over Eastern Canada — many, many of them are guilty of overfishing, discarding, throwing away smaller fish. The fishery in the Gulf [is] almost ruined. The foreigners didn’t ruin the fishery in the Gulf. We ruined the fishery in the Gulf.”
In contemporary Newfoundland, it is a toss-up as to who is the poet laureate of the inshore fishery, Cabot Martin or Dr. Leslie Harris. In addition to a rich and detailed understanding of the industry, both men have the gift for expressing the deeper cultural underpinnings of cod. For Martin, the cod crisis was much more than an unemployment problem.
“I think that there is a big world problem here,” he said in an interview. “It is food.… Here in Newfoundland, it means the destruction of a wage economy. In most of the underdeveloped world it means the loss of a source of food for very, very poor people. There’s also a historic problem here of not understanding the limits of nature, not understanding environmental risk. They learned in northern Norway the hard way. Do we have to destroy the basis of our society and our culture and our history to learn that lesson?”
Martin compared what was happening in the fishery to people on the edge of a desert chopping down trees to cook their food, knowing full well that the desert would get bigger as a result of their action. In a similar way, both the offshore and inshore fishery were authors of their own demise. “You have this terrible problem of the big companies trying to keep their quarterly dividends up, or their quarterly losses down; and you get the inshore fisherman starting to implement destructive techniques because he is trying to keep bread on the table and he has to try to get his unemployment straightened away for the winter.”
Martin believed that everyone in authority had slipped into a state of denial while the sea was being made into a desert. Until people saw the crisis of the northern cod in the same light as the destruction of the Amazon jungle, old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, and whales and seals, the politicians and bureaucrats would maintain the status quo. But a hard rain had begun to fall on the East Coast fishery and there were no easy choices left for leaders like John Crosbie. “To cut the quota means to inflict pain, and most politicians don’t want that,” Martin said. “So the terrible tendency is not to do anything, to put off making the hard decision.”
Martin himself was convinced that the evidence of a terrible crisis was overwhelming. Between 1870 and 1950, people rowed out to their cod traps or fished with hook and line or longlines and landed over 200,000 tonnes of fish every season. In 1991, an improved and far more efficient inshore fishery landed just 35,000 tonnes of cod. “There is no doubt, in any knowledgeable person’s mind, that there is a disaster and the disaster is here.… You know that politicians have hard responsibilities, but there is a point at which some element of basic truth has got to come through.”
Martin blamed the demise of the cod on the corporate–bureaucratic alliance that ran the fishery and Ottawa’s unwillingness to recognize the obvious. Even though some unions and fishermen’s groups advised the minister, Martin believed that it was the big companies that called the shots. “Basically, if National Sea or FPI don’t agree with something, there is no consensus and there is no advice that goes forward.… What you’ve got is nineteenthcentury thinking dressed up in modern clothes. It is very much of a ‘the ocean is inexhaustible and cannot be harmed’ approach, and we go to the end.”
The end was now in sight.