In the spring of 1996, a Portuguese fish company, Impormarisco, purchased and reopened Diamond Industries, an idle fish plant in Sandy Cove on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. The firm was prepared to process whatever the fishermen brought in. The new owners planned to sell in the lucrative European market, where the quality of fish demanded was very different than in North America. Europe consumes 33 per cent of total world seafood imports, and is a logical market for Newfoundland and Labrador. The company had already sent live lobsters to test the market, and to see if the creatures survived the journey. Impormarisco planned to process turbot, caplin, lumpfish roe, herring, and even salt cod if they could get fish from the Barents Sea. They renovated the plant to make it more efficient, installing more cold storage so they could sell when market conditions were best.
The plant is a good example of the type of niche processing that can be done in Newfoundland. Small, smart, flexible, linked to fishermen in the community, the company processes what is available, and wastes nothing, trucking in product if necessary. Above all it has market connections for a high-end product. It is part of the effort in Newfoundland to overcome the province’s old reputation for low-quality, high-volume fish, and establish a new one for added-value, upscale products.
This wasn’t the only good news on the East Coast.
In early 1996, Newfoundland’s fisheries, food, and agriculture minister, Bud Hulan, told a St. John’s Board of Trade business seminar that the outlook for Newfoundland’s fishery was excellent despite the demolition of the groundfish industry and the demise of the cod. The 1995 value of crab, shrimp, lobster, clams, turbot, herring, and other fish was $300 million, the highest landed value in the province’s history. The export value of seafood products topped $500 million, up $50 million from the year before.
Shellfish were now the most important species in the Newfoundland fishery. Sea urchins for the Japanese sushi market and rock and toad crabs were some of the new species being exploited. International trade in seaweed products was now worth a staggering $3.5 billion, and the province had three species of kelp in abundance along the south coast that could be harvested.
It was the same story in Nova Scotia. Although certain communities were beggared by the groundfish crisis, landings of other species hit a record high, mainly due to buoyant lobster, scallop, and crab prices. In 1994, two years after the start of the northern cod moratorium, revenues from fish landings were $498 million, a 7 per cent increase over the previous year. Processing increased that figure by another $500 million, pumping a billion dollars into the provincial economy. Two years later, Nova Scotia seafood exports totalled a record $799.4 million, a slight increase over 1995 figures. For all the bleating from the East, some people were still making a great deal of money from the fishery.
But behind these rosy numbers lurked some deeply troubling facts. The processing capacity in Atlantic Canada remained about four times higher than landings justified. A bevy of industry analysts agreed that overcapacity was really a way of getting UI funds into the depressed region. Everyone, including governments, was part of the scheme. Plants would operate for peak periods, employing as many people in the community as they could, who would go on UI for the rest of the year.
The Newfoundland government rejected the option of buying out excess capacity because the province couldn’t afford it. Although everyone knows capacity has to be reduced, no one seems to be able to agree just how to do it, despite government studies and a lot of industry input. In March 1997, the new Newfoundland fisheries and aquaculture minister, John Efford, announced a new licensing framework for Newfoundland’s restructured processing sector. Central to the restructuring were core multi-species plants that had an average annual production of 1,000 tonnes of groundfish from 1987 to 1991. With the development of quality assurance controls from the dock to the plants, and restrictions on the export of unprocessed fish, the industry was headed in an entirely new direction from its historical place in the fishery. The plants would be licensed to process all species but crab and shrimp from zone 4R off the west coast. Plants without core status could continue to operate with existing licences, or expand through licence transfers.
Of the 212 plants in the province licensed for primary processing, 99 have freezing capacity for groundfish. Under the new regulations non-core plants not currently licensed for freezing will not be given freezing authority, although they can combine their capacity with plants that do have freezing licences.
Another troubling fact was the state of the shellfish industry. While the total groundfish revenues for Newfoundland fishermen had collapsed from about $155 million in 1989 to only $26 million in 1996, shellfish revenues for crab, shrimp, and lobster had jumped from $51 million to $192 million during the same period. The harvesting and processing of crab provided work for 7,000 people, and many crab fishermen cleared $100,000 for about eight weeks’ work.
With so much money to be made, dissension had grown in the industry over the issue of crab licences and quotas, and many more Newfoundlanders were going after crab. In 1995 there were 1,200 crab fishermen, in 1996 there were 2,800. Those who took part got less money of course, but more people were eligible for UI. Unfortunately the new entrants set out for the crab grounds just as prices dropped because of competition from the Russian and Alaskan fisheries, and the Japanese recession.
In 1995, the landed value for all species of crab in Newfoundland was about $181 million, but in 1996 it had dropped to $84 million, even though actual crab landings were up and more people were working in the industry. In 1997, Newfoundland processors were offering less than 75 cents a pound for crab, about a quarter of the price just two years before. When processors tried to explain market conditions and give the reasons why they could not pay 1996 prices, the fishermen walked out of the meeting and 96 per cent of them voted to strike. They complained that crab buyers were trying to pass “the entire burden of the market onto the shoulders of fishermen.”
On April 24, 1997, just three days before the election call, 150 inshore fishermen who held temporary crab permits gathered in St. John’s to send a strong message to Fred Mifflin. They were not happy with their crab allocations. Two weeks earlier, Mifflin had announced the 1997–98 snow crab management plan for Newfoundland and Labrador. The minister had increased the total quota by 15 per cent to a record 44,315 tonnes. A 42 per cent increase in quota was given to temporary permit holders (their quota increased from 4,160 tonnes in 1996 to 5,895 tonnes in 1997 and 1998). As Gerard Ryan of Ferryland said, “We got a resource that’s at our doorstep and we’re told we are not allowed a half decent quota to stick her down until the cod comes back. TAGS will be cut off in 1998, and we got to have revenue.”
The increase in quota for temporary permit holders fishing from boats under thirty-five feet broke down to less than 8,000 pounds per boat, a quota the fishermen grumbled was hardly worth gearing up for. They demanded 20,000 to 25,000 tonnes per boat. Ryan said, “We’ve been fighting over crumbs for years and we are not fighting over crumbs any more.” Their small boats could not fish farther than twenty miles offshore, and they wanted larger boats kept out of their twenty-mile zone, since crab allocations on paper were useless if the larger boats came in and cleaned out the crab close to the shore. One of the fishermen summed things up neatly: “We want our share of fish, and that’s the bottom line.”
On May 27, 1997, over three hundred crab fishermen from around the province came to St. John’s for a rally. The protesters marched to the Confederation Building to register their anger over regulations that prevented them from exporting their catch to plants outside the province for better prices. The regulations had been put in place to keep processing jobs in the province.
Provincial fisheries minister John Efford met with the angry group in the lobby of Confederation Building. They threatened to close down every fishery in the province if they didn’t get the answer they wanted. Over shouts from the crowd, the minister reminded the group that there were 6,000 crab plant workers in the province who would be at his doorstep protesting and blocking the crab as it was loaded on the trucks, if he lifted the regulation. Percolating under the crab protest was anger about user-fee increases by the DFO. One crab fisherman had paid $250 for a licence in 1993, now he was faced with paying about $10,000 for licence fees, observer coverage, and dockside monitoring.
On June 3, the day after the federal election, Efford announced that he would temporarily lift the ban on exporting unprocessed crab for thirty days. The next day, protesters, angry that the restriction would be lifted for only thirty days, and that outside buyers could only purchase the crab through a local fish buyer, chased Efford out of Mary Queen of Peace Hall in St. John’s, where he was attempting to explain to five hundred fishermen why he had lifted the restriction. When a fisherman tried to get up on stage to address the crowd while the minister was speaking, he was pulled back by a police officer and the other fishermen rushed to his aid.
Efford was escorted to a waiting car by the officers and driven to safety. The mob turned its attention to rocking a police car, which they tried to prevent from leaving. When police used pepper spray in an attempt to disperse the crowd, the fishermen hurled rocks, injuring one of the officers.
A tentative deal wasn’t struck until July 11, when Premier Tobin stepped in and urged processors and fishermen to come to an agreement before Newfoundland lost its entire 1997 crab fishery. It was the first time in his eighteen-year political career that Tobin had jumped into the middle of a collective bargaining process. He didn’t ever intend to do it again, but there were too many jobs at risk and just too much money on the table. Crab fishermen finally dropped their pots in the water almost five weeks late; they had to fish until the end of October to get the full quota. As the season progressed, Japanese markets declined further as crab from Alaska, Russia, and Greenland hit the market.
After the collapse of the cod stocks there was increased pressure not only on crab but also on other stocks from fishermen trying to earn a living.
The northern shrimp fishery is relatively new to Canada, having been developed in the mid-1970s. Our fleet consists of twelve modern and expensive Canadian-registered factory-freezer trawlers. John Efford wanted to increase jobs by adding shrimp to plants already processing crab and other species. He didn’t like the fact that large overseas vessels were catching shrimp and either processing it at sea or abroad. If the quota was going to be increased, the minister wanted it to go to Newfoundland, to people coming off TAGS. No one mentioned that the shrimp fishery is one of the most destructive on the planet. The small-mesh nets used catch everything, including very small fish.
On April 23, 1997, Fred Mifflin flew to Newfoundland to announce that the new shrimp quota would be 59,050 tonnes, a whopping 57 per cent increase. The additional shrimp was expected to generate an extra $75 million in the local economy, and provide work for 1,500 fishermen and plant workers. The total value of the shrimp fishery in 1997 was expected to be about $215 million.
The shrimp fishery is carried out from Davis Strait south to NAFO zone 3K. Shrimp were abundant in part because there were few northern cod to prey on them. Catch-rates for shrimp had increased dramatically after the cod biomass began to decline, yet in almost thirty years we have never caught the shrimp quota.
Henry Demone made an interesting observation: “You cannot catch shrimp in small vessels, bring it in and process it on land and hit high-quality markets. The Japanese will not even have a discussion with you about that. They want frozen-at-sea quality. They want very specific quality standards on a product before they will buy it from you. We basically set up an industrial structure which guaranteed that the new 20,000 tonnes of shrimp are low value, and low margin.”
Demone believes no lessons were learned during the latest crisis in the fishery. “You can look at some of the decisions that were made in the crab fishery and in the shrimp fishery, and you can say it’s the same mistakes all over again. You know the government is under a lot of pressure from communities. You go back ten years ago and a crab fisherman and a cod fisherman were equal peers in the community. The cod disappears in Canada, the crab disappear in Alaska, the yen doubles in value, and all of a sudden the cod fisherman is on TAGS, and the crab fisherman is making a six-figure income. Now my attitude to that is force him to pay taxes but don’t destroy the industry in the process. But [instead] they issue new licences. They bring new people into the business. They put enormous pressure on the resource just when the scientists say, ‘We think we are going into a down period for crab.’ ”
Fishermen who turned to lobster, Atlantic salmon, and scallops have similarly put these species at risk. By January 1997, conservationists were cautioning there would soon be a crisis in the entire East Coast lobster fishery. There are signs that there may be a regionwide collapse comparable to what happened to the cod stocks. Landings in the Atlantic region are down 25 per cent since 1992. Catches in southwest Nova Scotia are still good, but that may have more to do with increased fishing effort than healthy stocks. About 85 per cent of marketable lobsters are being fished every year. There are about 10,000 full-time lobster fishermen in Atlantic Canada, and a lot of poachers. It is the old sad story of taking too much and leaving too little for the stock to regenerate.
In May 1996, the TAC for caplin was reduced by 16 per cent off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Earl Johnson, an inshore fisherman from North Harbour, Placentia Bay, said he would sooner see it cut altogether. For years, fishermen had warned that the caplin couldn’t take the fishing pressure they were subjected to, yet a provision that closed the caplin fishery in areas where the fish were smaller than fifty per kilogram in 1995 was lifted by Mifflin. By 1996 the sight of millions of the tiny fish swimming to the shore to spawn in the coves and bays of Newfoundland was a thing of the past. The few fish that made it that year were undersized and often in poor condition.
In June 1996, the Atlantic Salmon Federation asked Mifflin to shut down the commercial salmon fishery off Labrador immediately. The latest data showed stocks were critically low. The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, made up of distinguished scientists from both sides of the Atlantic, was so worried about the stock that it called for zero harvest of large salmon off southwest Greenland and North America.
By 1996 scallop stocks had collapsed in the Bay of Fundy. After a period of phenomenal incomes with no conservation measures, the inshore scallopers had fished them out. Catches had declined from a peak of 6,000 tonnes to an unfilled quota of 1,200 tonnes in 1996. It was estimated the catch would be less than half that amount in 1997. Three hundred fishermen and their families depended on scallops for their livelihood; some inshore scallopers were making less than two dollars an hour.
They demanded a portion of the quota that had been given to the offshore scallop fleet in a 1986 deal agreed to by the two sectors. Having challenged the deal in court and lost in July 1996, the inshore fishermen turned to the time-honoured methods of getting their way. Two hundred protesters took to the streets and pitched a large tent in front of the HRDC building in Digby.
In early April 1997 protesters again occupied the Digby HRDC office, and when that didn’t seem to get enough attention they also occupied the offices of South West Nova Liberal MP Harry Vernon and the DFO in Yarmouth. The scallopers feared they would lose everything they had worked for all their lives if they didn’t get access to more scallops. For many, their only alternative would be welfare when their EI payments ran out in May.
On April 18, 1997, Mifflin sent a letter to the inshore scallopers rejecting their demand for 600 tonnes of scallops from the offshore grounds. Instead, the minister offered them access to 100 tonnes from the midshore, in an area that had not been fished for a decade, and which conservationists wanted protected. The deal was on only if they gave up their occupation of federal offices in Digby and Yarmouth. The protesters ended their sit-ins only after they were promised a meeting with DFO officials.
In January 1997, nearly one hundred offshore scallop fishermen were laid off in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, by Clearwater Fine Foods, National Sea Products, and FPI. Six draggers were tied up. A deckhand on a scallop boat can make about $70,000–$90,000 in a good year, so the layoffs had a devastating impact on the community. The unemployed scallop fishermen refused to accept the company line that the layoffs were a conservation issue. They saw it as a move to increase company profits by employing fewer fishermen in state-of-the-art vessels that could take just as many scallops. They began showing up at nomination meetings to make sure their situation was turned into an election issue. They would have to stand in line.
On September 18, 1996, Fred Mifflin announced that Newfoundlanders could go fishing the following weekend. The minister’s riding covers one of the largest fishery-dependent areas in the country, and he had been under tremendous pressure to allow a “food” fishery. From Friday to Sunday, people could catch up to ten cod a day for their personal use. (A fall 1995 food fishery had been cut short by Brian Tobin because the fish were small and so scarce that people found it difficult to catch their limit. Still, about two thousand tonnes of cod was caught in an eight-day period.)
Officially DFO scientists supported the food fishery in 1996. Scott Parsons, the assistant deputy minister of science at the DFO, said that although there was no hope for a commercial fishery in the near future, he had advised Mifflin that a very limited and tightly controlled food fishery was acceptable. In some of the small communities in Mifflin’s riding many people questioned the wisdom of the decision. They were not alone.
An internal memo authored by DFO scientist Peter Shelton, an expert on northern cod who was based in St. John’s, referred to the May 1996 stock status report that said stocks were still at an extremely low level and that any schools that existed should be preserved. Shelton wrote, “I was therefore quite dismayed by the report that a recreational food fishery will be allowed because of scientific evidence from the sentinel fishery of an improvement in the status of the cod stock.” He continued, “I am disappointed and disheartened that important decisions are being made that disregard the scientific advice from this region.” Shelton maintained that the inshore stocks that would be fished, “could hold the key to stock recovery, and therefore must be conserved.”
The DFO was focusing a lot of scientific attention on these inshore stocks. Shelton knew from his own work that the 2J3KL cod stock was still at a very low level. There were very few fish over age nine in the population, and even if a strong year-class survived it would be several years before the stock was out of immediate danger.
The Reform Party’s fisheries critic, Mike Scott, accused Mifflin of putting politics ahead of scientific advice and claimed that Mifflin’s staff was aware of internal DFO concerns but went ahead anyway. Mifflin countered that he had never seen Shelton’s memo. “I consult my scientists and they tell me something and I respond to it,” he said. “The buck stops with [the senior scientist]. He weighs the information. I can’t read every letter that is written to every scientist.”
Scott Parsons said the memo gave a false impression that the Newfoundland region of the DFO had advised against a food fishery. He said Mifflin was given the current stock status report and information from the sentinel surveys up to the end of August. The minister had even asked Parsons and William Doubleday, the director general of the DFO’s fisheries and oceans science division, to make personal observations of the sentinel surveys in various parts of Newfoundland during the month of August. Doubleday was also an “ex officio” member of the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council. Parsons said, “I advised the minister that a very limited food fishery, tightly controlled to avoid abuses, is unlikely to impede the recovery of inshore stock components. The suggestion or allegation that the minister didn’t listen to his scientists or ignored scientific advice is false.”
Scott Parsons and William Doubleday have been in charge of DFO science since the mid-1980s. Despite dramatic evidence from their own scientists, the Keats Report, and the Alverson Report that the stocks were being fished twice as hard as everyone believed, it took Parsons and Doubleday two years before they recommended lowering the 1989 TAC.
In 1988, some DFO scientists had recommended drastic cuts in the TAC. Yet according to John Crosbie, Doubleday had said a TAC of 235,000 for 1989 would not endanger the stock. The science bureaucrats had smoothed out dissenting opinions and told the minister what he needed to hear. He, in turn, used “science” to justify what he needed to do politically.
For the 1996 food fishery, 13,000 to 15,000 people were expected to get out their handlines and angling rods, and it was thought the catch would be between 500 and 750 tonnes. Jiggers were not permitted. Newfoundlanders headed out to the coves and bays in anything that would float. The fish were generally in good condition, although, as in 1995, it took a long time to catch the limit in most areas. Over a six-day period (a second weekend of fishing was added) there were about 21,944 vessels on the water. An estimated 1,230 tonnes of cod were caught.
The decision to have a recreational fishery outraged Earle McCurdy, who accused Mifflin of trying to buy votes: “It’s a case of too much politics and not enough common sense. I’m disgusted with the whole crowd of them, federal and provincial, for clamouring for this thing when we haven’t even got enough fish — or we’re told we haven’t got enough fish — to have a commercial fishery.”
The food fishery was announced just one day after new EI rules were tabled in the House of Commons for self-employed fishermen. A sceptic might wonder if the two events were related.
On October 3, 1996, Mifflin tabled the federal government’s new fisheries legislation in the House of Commons, the first overhaul of the act since the days of Queen Victoria. The legislation had sparked a great deal of protest when it was introduced by Brian Tobin ten months earlier and had been allowed to die on the order paper. Like the lofty goals of the Kirby Report fifteen years earlier, the aim of the legislation was long-term stability in the industry. The bill proposed that the fishermen themselves would have a role in the management of the industry through partnership agreements. The DFO would retain overall responsibility for conservation and management, but fishermen would play a role in quota monitoring, data collection, and catch inspections. Hoping to avoid more protests, Mifflin said this time there would be extensive public hearings on the new legislation.
In the same month that the bill was tabled, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) placed the Atlantic cod on its red list, suggesting it was in danger of extinction. Under IUCN criteria, populations that had dropped by at least 20 per cent in ten years were considered vulnerable. A population drop of 50 per cent placed the species on the endangered list. According to the DFO’s own assessments, the northern cod stock had dropped by as much as 99 per cent.
The IUCN’s World Conservation Congress, held in Montreal during the week of October 14, 1996, attracted two thousand people from around the globe. Prime Minister Chrétien delivered the keynote speech, but behind the scenes there was a fight to get northern cod off the endangered list. In the end, Canada persuaded the Congress to review the criteria for ranking marine species, and got the IUCN to include a caveat saying a 20 per cent decline may not always be evidence of the threat of extinction for marine species.
Fisheries Minister Mifflin insisted that Atlantic cod were not at risk of extinction, despite the IUCN red list. An October 11, 1996, DFO press release stated, “The Minister noted the encouraging results from the sentinel surveys for cod throughout Atlantic Canada this year.” Scott Parsons said, “While the populations of Atlantic cod are low, this species is far from being endangered and the current extensive recovery plan, which includes moratoria on fishing for most stocks, has arrested the declines and set the stage for recovery.” Parsons insisted the IUCN criteria for the red list were “fundamentally flawed and require revision,” and that fluctuations were quite normal for marine species.
Six months later, in April 1997, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) updated its annual list of endangered or vulnerable plants and animals, adding 15 new species for a total of 291. The Atlantic cod was not among them. COSEWIC is composed of both government and independent experts and is supposed to operate at arm’s length from the government, much like the FRCC. Species on its annual list are designated to get special protection. By mandate, the process is supposed to be strictly scientific, not political, but its advice carries no legal weight, since cabinet has to approve the list it produces. According to an article by Pauline Comeau in the July 1997 issue of Canadian Geographic, the DFO had intervened to prevent COSEWIC from listing cod as an endangered species.
Comeau reported that a three-year study commissioned by the committee and carried out by fish ecologist Dr. Kim Bell of Memorial University had concluded that cod should be placed on the list. Using both Environment Canada and COSEWIC guidelines, the cod were endangered. Comeau told the press that William Rowat, deputy minister of fisheries, sent letters to senior officials in provincial fisheries departments and natural resources departments in an effort to discredit Bell’s study.
Five years after the Earth Summit in Rio, the Sierra Club of Canada did a report on Canada’s progress. It gave the federal government a D for protecting marine biodiversity and criticized the DFO for blocking effective endangered-species legislation, lobbying international scientists to remove the northern cod from the IUCN red list, preventing COSEWIC from listing Atlantic cod as an endangered species, and opening the food fishery in Newfoundland just before the 1997 election. The report minced no words: “This pattern of irresponsible decision-making, placing the survival of a species at risk, borders on the criminal.”
While people were voting in the February 1996 election that brought Brian Tobin’s Liberals to power in Newfoundland, there were twelve EU trawlers on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks (eleven Spanish ships and one Portuguese). There was also an Estonian vessel trawling for redfish, and a Japanese trawler fishing for the same turbot as the Spanish. Things had definitely improved. At the height of the Turbot War a year earlier, there had been almost fifty trawlers working the stocks. But observers on board each vessel and tough inspections had made it much more difficult to cheat, so it was no longer economic to send as many ships to the overdrawn Banks.
At the end of the war, Canada had traded the EU a greater share of the turbot quota for the right to put observers on all ships. (In 1996, Canada had only 3,000 tonnes of the 20,000-tonne NAFO quota, compared to 11,000 tonnes for the EU, which prompted Newfoundland MP George Baker to muse over who had really won the Turbot War.) Relations between Canada and Spain had been strained since the Estai incident, although the two nations had jointly sponsored a resolution to halt the deterioration of global fish stocks for the sake of future generations at a week-long Inter-Parliamentary Union conference in Istanbul, Turkey, in April 1996. Over six hundred representatives from 118 countries unanimously adopted a twenty-four-point resolution urging governments to ratify international conventions that would preserve fish stocks.
But when Canada and the EU had begun negotiations for closer trade, political, and security links, a month earlier, Spain had requested an important caveat: EU negotiators must be bound by the wishes of individual states during the talks. Both Spain and Portugal would be vocal. The cooperation pact was supposed to be signed in Lisbon on December 3, 1996, at the biennial meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, but at the end of November, Spain threw several obstacles in the way and negotiations stalled. Spain wanted a “clear commitment” that Canada would not seize ships suspected of overfishing outside its 200-mile limit.
In September 1996, NAFO held its annual meeting, this time in St. Petersburg, Russia. On September 16, Fred Mifflin announced that NAFO had taken the important step of recognizing that Canada should determine the TAC for northern cod, both inside and outside the 200-mile zone, until the year 2005. Foreign catches would be limited to a maximum of 5 per cent of the TAC, and fished outside the zone. The minister crowed, “This decision effectively commits NAFO members to continue to honour the northern cod moratorium and prevents the buildup of foreign effort on the Nose of the Grand Banks that could jeopardize the rebuilding of the northern cod stock. Northern cod is the lifeblood of hundreds of coastal communities in Atlantic Canada, especially in Newfoundland and Labrador.”
Even Emma Bonino, the feisty fisheries chief of the EU, was being a conservationist. In October 1996 she recommended a 40 per cent reduction in catches, smaller fleets, and a $4.7-billion program to retire or retrain EU fishermen. Bonino claimed that only these measures could prevent “the law of the jungle” from destroying Western Europe’s fishery. The EU nations recognized there was a problem, but as usual, there was no consensus about how it could be solved. In December 1996, the EU fisheries ministers struck an agreement to set up a satellite system to track vessels. The new system, to be in operation by mid-1998, will allow conservation officials to identify vessels and record their location and activities. The technology promises to be a lot less expensive than building and manning fisheries protection vessels.
Conventional monitoring on the Grand Banks has been working since Canada signed an agreement with the EU in June 1995. In the eighteen months after the agreement, there were only four known violations, compared to fifty-eight in 1994. Two of the latest violations were for using undersized nets, the same infraction that sparked the Estai incident. The other two were for misreporting catches.
In March 1997, a Spanish trawler was kicked off the Grand Banks when it was caught lying about how much turbot it had taken just outside the 200-mile limit. Mifflin announced on March 10 that the Hermanos Handon IV would not be able to return to NAFO-patrolled waters until 1998. NAFO inspectors from the EU had reacted quickly when Canadian inspectors boarded the ship. The fisheries agreement with the EU was working.
The 1996 Atlantic Groundfish Stock Status Report released on June 27, 1996, said the cod stocks were still fragile but that the decline seemed to have stopped. It noted that individual fish were healthier, but there was no abundance of young fish. The report was presented to the FRCC, and the FRCC advisory panel in turn gave its advice to Fred Mifflin and prepared an annual report after holding public consultations in September. FRCC chairman Fred Woodman told reporters that some FRCC members were disappointed at the recruitment levels. They had hoped there would have been more young fish.
“If I was a fisherman,” Woodman said, “I’d have such a pain in my stomach that I wouldn’t know what to do next. We do seem to have a good spawning component, which seems to be mature fish in Smith Sound, Trinity Bay, which we hope are going to be protected and left alone to spawn.” Woodman also said, “What we have to be careful of is that we must not yield to pressure that we have to open the fishery when we’re not ready. We could do irreparable damage to a very fragile stock that’s out there.”
Fishermen on Newfoundland’s south coast and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were arguing that the cod stocks were strong enough to support a limited commercial catch in their areas. Sentinel fisheries had high catch-rates, by-catches of cod were high, and acoustic surveys had recorded some large schools of fish. The FRCC moved cautiously, holding public consultations with scientists and fishermen in July about reopening certain inshore areas.
In October, the FRCC released its 1997 recommendations for the forty-seven Atlantic groundfish stocks. In “Building the Bridge: 1997 Conservation Requirements for Atlantic Groundfish,” Fred Woodman noted that there was strong pressure from fishermen for a 20,000-tonne TAC for 3Ps cod, “to give fishermen what they need to make a living.” The report pointed out that scientific reports, sentinel fisheries data, and anecdotal information often presented differing interpretations of the health of the stocks. The fishermen reported an abundance of inshore cod that were in good condition, as did the sentinel fishermen, leading them to conclude that the stock was making a recovery. Yet the 1996 DFO stock status report indicated an average 1990 year-class and no strong year-classes after that date. Despite a moratorium since 1993, the 1996 RV estimate was only “slightly higher” than the 1994 RV survey, which had shown the offshore stock was at its lowest level since 1978. “In some cases, such as 3Ps, it is not clear if enough information will be available in the foreseeable future to answer all concerns about the state of the stock,” Woodman wrote. The most recent stock status report for 3Ps had stated: “A re-opening of the offshore fishery is not supported by trawl survey data. Given the uncertainties and the lack of firm conclusion on current stock size in the inshore, it would be necessary to get more positive signs before considering a re-opening of the fixed-gear fishery at historical levels. There is an unquantified risk of over-exploitation.”
Nevertheless, on October 24, 1996, Woodman and his FRCC panel recommended that 3Ps (off the south coast of Newfoundland) be reopened for a commercial fishery in 1997 with a TAC of 10,000 tonnes. The FRCC also recommended “the cautious and prudent low-level re-openings” of commercial cod fisheries in 4RS3Pn (northern Gulf of St. Lawrence) and 4TVn (southern Gulf of St. Lawrence and Sydney Bight). A TAC of 6,000 tonnes was given to both these fisheries despite stock status reports that said the biomass levels remained low and that recruitment was poor. When some industry observers expressed the hope that this was “not a political ploy to appease people,” Woodman insisted that the council’s recommendation “has nothing to do with politics.” The news about the recommended openings of certain fisheries was released to the media, just after the important World Conservation Congress meeting in Montreal, where Canada lobbied so hard to get cod off the endangered species list.
Many believed the FRCC had succumbed to political pressure, and there was widespread criticism of the report. Mifflin decided to delay making the decision until after the industry submitted its conservation harvesting plans, which would supposedly protect the stocks from accidental over-exploitation.
There were many good aspects to the FRCC report. It called for enforcement of small-fish protocols, gear that would let small fish escape, firm sanctions against dumping and discarding, area closures to protect juvenile and spawning congregations, improved surveillance and monitoring, and increased penalties for those caught cheating. The suggested reopenings just didn’t fit the tenor of the rest of the report, nor did they satisfy the FRCC’s own criteria for reopening a fishery. Something else jumped out of the report. The FRCC recommended that there be no recreational or food fishery in areas still under a moratorium. This was an interesting recommendation, since Scott Parsons had earlier denied that Mifflin had opened the September food fishery against his department’s scientific advice.
On April 17, 1997, just days before the election call, Mifflin announced his decision to reopen the cod fishery along the south and west coasts of Newfoundland. This was not the northern cod, and the quotas of 10,000 tonnes for the south coast (3Ps) and 6,000 tonnes for the Gulf (4RS3Pn) were conservative compared to the boom years, but the joy at the prospect of getting back on the water in May was infectious. There were predictions that up to seven thousand fishermen and plant workers would get back to work. Under the terms of the 1994 Canada–France Agreement, France would get 15.6 per cent of the cod TAC in 3Ps and 2.6 per cent in the northern Gulf. Mifflin assured everyone that the fishery would be stopped if there was any indication that conservation measures were not respected, or that the stocks could not sustain the quota level. He insisted the decision “has nothing to do with votes.” After taking a few token questions, the minister beat his customary hasty retreat.
The FRCC had also recommended a TAC of 6,000 tonnes for the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence in 4TVn, which borders the Maritime provinces. But a DFO press release said that in 4TVn “the Minister took into account the large number of fishermen who, concerned with conservation, suggested greater caution.” What the minister didn’t say was that a formal risk analysis by some concerned scientists showed that if the recommended 6,000 tonnes of cod were harvested in 1997 there was a 50 to 60 per cent probability that the biomass of reproductive cod would decline. No such risk analyses were done for the two areas that were opened.
Fish ecologist Dr. Kim Bell, who had recommended that cod be put on the endangered-species list, said, “I can only hope that they know something I don’t know. If they don’t, it’s a big mistake.” Even fisheries scientists such as George Rose at Memorial University, who supported the reopening of the stocks, worried that not enough monitoring would be in place to assure that the fishery proceeded as planned. Unfortunately there was a fine old tradition in Newfoundland of ignoring DFO rules if you could get away with it. No one knew if the catch-rates would hold up under a commercial fishery. Earle McCurdy supported the reopening. “There’s some who would wait until doomsday until they get some guarantee that no matter what you do it can’t possibly harm the stocks,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ll never live to see that kind of guarantee. At any time, reopening is a leap of faith.”
There was one other problem that was almost overlooked in the rush to get back on the water: markets. No major U.S. chains used Canadian cod any more. Prior to the moratorium McDonald’s had purchased about twenty-six million pounds of cod a year. Since Barents Sea cod was abundant and of high quality, and there was now market competition from other species such as catfish from the southern U.S. and Alaskan pollock, cod prices were actually 10 to 20 per cent lower than when the Newfoundland fishery had closed in 1992. Would there be markets for the Newfoundland cod? Would the fish be caught and not sold? During the five-year hiatus, only three companies had stayed active in the cod market: FPI, National Sea, and, in a small way, Clearwater, at its plant in Glace Bay. To get back into the business, companies that had closed their plants five years earlier would have to catch up on processing technology as well as re-establish their markets.
Ransom Myers, until recently one of DFO’s top scientists, and now Killam Chair of Ocean Studies at Dalhousie University, told the Globe and Mail that the stocks were still at a very low level, and that there was no scientific basis for reopening the fishery. Myers thought the opening was a political decision that could delay the recovery of the stock. He told another reporter, “The collapse of the cod stocks in Eastern Canada has been an economic and ecological disaster.… The reopening of the fishery at this point makes it very clear that nothing has been learned.”
On April 18, 1997, Fred Woodman appeared on the TV program “@discovery.ca.” He told the audience that the stocks had stabilized, and had even increased. He said, “We feel quite comfortable” with reopening the cod stocks, adding that the sentinel survey showed new fish and growth in the biomass.
On the same program, Ransom Myers said the decision to reopen the stocks was “an absolutely disastrous decision” that followed a long line of disastrous decisions at the DFO. The DFO’s own stock assessment for the cod in the northern Gulf, which was available on the DFO’s “Sea Lane” Web site, said: “No strong year-classes have been observed during the survey since 1992,” exactly the opposite of what the supposedly independent FRCC was saying. (Right after the show, the previously reliable DFO Web site mysteriously went down, and remained down for a week. When “Sea Lane” finally came back up on May 6, there were no stock status reports, although they were eventually posted in a different location on the Web site.)