There must have been an underlying air of irony as groundfish industry stakeholders met in Barcelona, Spain on April 26 to discuss the ongoing Northern cod fishery improvement project (FIP).
Stakeholders included Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), Marks & Spencer and Youngs Seafoods from the United Kingdom, Sysco France, High Liner Foods from Canada/United States and producer organizations in Canada, including Ocean Choice International, Icewater Seafoods, the Association of Seafood Producers and the Atlantic Groundfish Council. Participants also included representatives from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Marine Stewardship Council.
While many of the younger generation in attendance would have little or no memory of the events of 1992, there were certainly some veterans in the room that could feel the ironic overtones as they sat there in Western Europe, three decades on from the infamous July 2, 1992, announcement of the cod moratorium.
It would be an understatement to say a lot has happened over the last 30 years. The impacts that surfaced and/or combined that led to the collapse of the cod fishery are now almost legend. This debate has raged now for several generations and will continue on for many more.
Overfishing of the stock, more specifically foreign overfishing, has always been earmarked as one of the major factors leading to the demise of this centuries-old industry.
Sometimes, especially over the course of 30 years, it is easy to lose sight of the specifics surrounding some of the factors leading to John Crosbie’s now-infamous announcement.
Sometimes, one needs to have a gentle or not-so-gentle reminder of what exactly was going on with the cod fishery off the east coast in the mid 20th century.
Fisheries veteran and advocate Gus Etchegary is one of those individuals that has been working tirelessly to ensure the causes of the moratorium are never forgotten.
Etchegary recently highlighted a 60-year-old Maclean’s Magazine article that is quite telling, if not shocking, in the detail it described about foreigners fishing off our shores, particularly the former Soviet Union.
Today, Russia is capturing the world’s attention for all of the wrong reasons because of its brazen and unwarranted military offensive into neighbouring Ukraine.
But in June 1962, Maclean’s contributor John Harbron described in detail what he called the “first wave of history’s biggest fishing offensive,” — made up of 25,000 Soviet fishermen aboard a fleet of 200 ships, scouring the offshore fishing grounds of Newfoundland.
Harbron did not exactly mince words when he started his article with “A few hours by trawler from Canada’s Atlantic coasts, the Soviet Union is carrying out the biggest, most relentless fishing operation in history. It threatens the livelihood of 45,000 Canadian fishermen, the economy of the Atlantic provinces, the east coast’s $60,000,000 fish-selling business and ultimately, the future of all fishing for the men of sixteen countries who fish the waters off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.”
Not exactly a subtle warning to the governments and regulators of the day.
Harbron explained that at the time, the Russians were newcomers to the Newfoundland fishing grounds. “Before 1960, no North Atlantic fisherman had ever seen a full-scale Russian fishing fleet. That summer, 180 Soviet ships arrived together about 100 miles off Newfoundland. Some were as big as small trans-Atlantic liners; many were freshly launched 3,500-ton stern-ramp factory trawlers, of a design and performance older banks fishermen soon learned to recognize and all of them had come in convoy from ports 4,000 miles away on the Baltic Sea or Arctic Ocean. Their crews totaled 25,000 men and in the Commons, Newfoundland Liberal J. R. Tucker complained, ‘There are more Russians out there than Newfoundlanders.’ Tucker wasn’t joking; there are only about 18,000 fishermen in Newfoundland.”
In the article, Dr. Wilfred Templeman, chief biologist at the Newfoundland fisheries research station, was quoted as saying, “A Newfoundland dragger trying to fish with the Russian fleet would be like a man on a bicycle in New York traffic.”
Federal officials in Ottawa also expressed concern over the fishing practices of the massive Soviet fleet. One civil servant stated that “their huge nets literally roll up the sea and sweep up all the fish. They leave nothing in the water. They throw no fish overboard. You don’t even see a dead fish floating belly up. Their whole operation is like a giant carpet sweeper at work.”
Harbron compared the 1960s Russian fleet to a city at sea.
“The citizens are sailors, factory hands, fish handlers, manufacturers, maids, waitresses, doctors, shopkeepers and scientists. Some foreign fishermen have been invited aboard Russian fishing ships at sea to watch movies. John Stimberis, a New Englander on the trawler Wisconsin, visited a Soviet fishing supply ship last fall and said later he’d never seen, on any American merchant ship, furnishings to match the Russians’. He couldn’t get over the bulkhead-to-bulkhead carpets. His hosts gave Stimberis perfume and cigarettes, but he wasn’t so impressed by Russian luxury that he didn’t report later that the Russians were using fine-mesh nets and crowding American ships off George’s Bank, south of Nova Scotia.”
While Harbron’s eye-opening article focused on the Soviet fishing armada, one can’t lose sight of the fact that they were only one of the many countries scooping up fish off eastern Canada at the time. Countries including, France, Spain, Portugal, Japan and the U.S. to name a few, were very active as well and some continue to be to this day.
As well, by the 1960s, the majority of these internationally-flagged fishing vessels were equipped with the latest radar, sonar and electronic navigations systems that allowed them to catch more fish than ever before.
Also at this time, offshore Canadian fishing vessels were also getting larger and adapting this new technology. This domestic fleet modernization led to peak Canadian catches in the late-1970s and early-1980s.
Needless to say, at this time, groundfish was being removed from the waters of Newfoundland at an alarming industrial scale — inconceivable, vast totals that will probably never be actually known.
As the 30th anniversary of the groundfish moratorium looms and one looks back over the last three decades of debate over the cause of the cod collapse, the question still lingers — what have we learned from the past? Are we destined to make the same mistakes again?
As American poet Nikki Giovanni once said “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.”
