The Decibel - Closing fisheries devastated Newfoundland. Should they come back?

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Last week, the federal government ended a 32-year ban on commercial cod fishing off the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. It reverses a policy decision that devastated the province and led to one of the biggest mass layoffs in Canadian history. While the reversal may seem like a reason to celebrate, some people in the industry are criticizing the news.Dr. George Rose, a fisheries scientist at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, has been studying the Northern cod population since the 1980s. Though he’s optimistic about the eventual return of the industry, he warns how this decision could undo decades of work.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

As a Newfoundlander, of course, it's kind of in the blood to have this as an interest. Dr. George Rose is a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, and he's been studying Newfoundland and Labrador's northern cod for almost four decades. Cod was once an abundant fish in the province, with sales worth $700 million annually. In the 1990s, the industry collapsed, and the federal government implemented a ban on commercial cod fishing that led to one of the biggest layoffs in Canadian history.

But last week, that ban was lifted. The lessons from this have much broader implication for not only for Canada, but for, you know, human societies everywhere in the world. Some people are celebrating the decision. But to others, the timing of the announcement is a bit fishy. Today, we're talking to George Rose on what the return of commercial cod fishing means for the Atlantic province and why there's been pushback.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. George, thanks so much for being here today. Oh, you're very welcome. Nice to be here with you. So Newfoundland's COD moratorium was recently lifted after 32 years. I'm just curious, what did you think about this decision? Well, I'm a bit of a skeptic. I think it's too soon. I understand completely why the federal government wants to get a commercial fishery back on the go in Newfoundland and Labrador, particularly on the northern cod. But there's a problem. According to the most recent science, the northern cod is still at a fraction of historical biomass level, and it's failed to show any significant increase in the past seven to eight years.

And probably the most questionable thing is that it's forecast by DFO science itself to decline in the coming years, even with no fishery. So it seems to me it's hardly a basis to introduce two new fisheries as the management plans to do. To me, it's kind of rolling the dice with one of Canada's most important fisheries. And just to say DFO is the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I do want to give a bit of context here. Before the moratorium, George, can you tell us historically how important was the cod industry to Newfoundland and Labrador, and I mean, by extension, Canada? Well, it's hard to overestimate the importance of it. You know, the fishery itself goes back to 500 years ago when the first Europeans came to North America. It was essentially an untapped resource. The First Nations people who lived in Newfoundland and Labrador and indeed through all of Atlantic Canada and down into New England, they certainly

harvested some cod, but in very small numbers. They had so many other resources available. But when the first Europeans came and found the Grand Banks and Newfoundland, it was like they'd never seen anything like it. The fish were so abundant. I mean, there's famous stories about catching fish in baskets and so on. And that fishery went on and harvested in the order of 200 to 400,000 tons. Is that a lot? That's a lot of fish every year for hundreds of years. I mean, this is what you have to put in context. This wasn't like a 10-year fishery or a one-year fishery. This was hundreds of years. And really, if we sort of bring the timeline up, in the 20th century, despite all of the fishing that had been done over hundreds of years, the stocks were still

in reasonable shape. But it all unwound after World War II. And the problem was the advent of new, larger ships that could cross the Atlantic Ocean easily, not the old sailing ships that used to come across and take months with people and fish, but great big massive motherships and trawlers and so on. And after World War II, you had a hungry Europe and a hungry former Soviet Union and all of the nations that make up that former conglomerate, they were all hungry and they came across to fish. And basically they did the stocks in, almost all of them, from Labrador all the way down to New England. And those stocks have never really recovered from that devastating fishing, which happened in the 1950s and in particular the 1960s.

And we tried, I say we as a country in Canada, we tried to bring those stocks back. But unfortunately, I think we believed a little bit too much that the fishing that the foreign fleets had done in the 60s, that we could replicate that, that we could actually fish as much as they did. But it wasn't sustainable. And the stocks went down again. And in the early 90s, the fishery was closed. And it's been called the biggest layoff in Canadian history. I mean, 40,000 people apparent just all of a sudden had no livelihood at all. So this moratorium put in place in 1992 by the federal government, it essentially banned commercial cod fishing. You kind of talked about a little bit, but let's let's get into it. Like, why did the federal government do this in the first place?

Like, what was their thinking here? Well, the thinking was that the stock had crashed so low that it really could sustain no more fishing. And, you know, the idea at the time was that we should all try, you know, that includes everybody who was involved in the fishery, everybody from science to management to the fishermen and the fishing communities themselves, we should all try to rebuild this stock. And the only sensible thing at the time was to close all fishing for all intents and purposes on the stock. It was very difficult and it was very hard on a lot of people, but it was absolutely necessary at the time. As you mentioned, this was one of the biggest layoffs in Canadian history and more than 30,000 people lost their jobs in Newfoundland, which was devastating for the province. You're

a scientist, but you're also a Newfoundlander. What was it like to see your community go through that? It was horrible. It was really heartbreaking. People that you knew, people that were related to you, colleagues when you're involved in the fishery, It was a terrible business, but it had to be done. So at the time, the government said the moratorium would last for two years. Obviously, we know that that didn't happen. But what was the science saying at the time? I don't think anyone who had any real knowledge of this stock believed it was going to come back in two years. In fact, I was with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the time and a colleague of mine at Memorial University, we published a paper in 1993 that said basically that it would take decades for this stock to recover.

Now, that didn't get a lot of airplay at the time because it was not something people wanted to hear. And I think, you know, when I look back at that, I think that two-year thing was more a political decision, probably in some ways a good political decision, because at the time, tremendous support was put in place for the people who had been displaced. And that was necessary. And I think if the politicians had believed that it was going to take decades, maybe that support would not have been forthcoming. We'll be right back.

Let's talk about where we're at today. What state are the Northern caught in right now? After a long period in the 1990s, the stock actually continued to decline, or at least appeared to decline. And I was doing surveys at the time during the spawning period. And we first started seeing spawning aggregations, big ones, in the order of 50,000 to 100,000 tons of fish. We first started seeing that in 2007, 2008. And then it continued. And up until 2015, the stock was growing well. It was growing as well as anyone could expect, and a lot better than a lot of people would have expected. So that brings us up to about 2015 and things were looking really good. But since then, it's stalled again. It's not declining, but it's not increasing. And under a rebuilding strategy that we would like to have for that stock, it should be increasing every year and it's not. So, you know, this is one of the fundamental

reasons why I'm very skeptical about this new management decision to reopen new fisheries on that stock at this time. Okay. So we have this stall and in the meantime, the government says they are moving forward with caution and they're committed to building back a sustainable and economically prosperous industry. And so now this moratorium has been lifted. So what do you make of their rationale here as to why they're moving ahead with this, lifting this moratorium? From the science side, I just don't think it holds water. I don't think this is the right time to be moving ahead. I'm all in favor of moving ahead. And I have been, you know, I've spoken on this over the decades that this has been going on. Yes, we should all have the goal of trying to rebuild this stock and rebuild its fisheries to something maybe not exactly like it was historically, but something like it was historically.

The ecosystem is still there. You know, the waters are still there. And it could be, again, a very, very important industry, not only in Newfoundland and Labrador, but also for the world, because it's a major food supplier. It has been for hundreds of years. We're all in favor of that. But I just I think right now, it's really rolling the dice with a stock that is at the moment not doing very well. I want to dig into this rationale for the government. Last fall, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans changed the way they measure the health of the cod stock. Can you just tell me what the significance of that is? Well, it's highly significant in terms of what management does. But the thing that people don't realize, and you know, there was a lot of press about this, how fish stocks are basically managed

is by setting kind of yardsticks or goalposts on how the stock biomass is, how big the stock is. And the lower limit is a limit that puts the stock in a critical zone where there's not supposed to be any or much human removals at all. That is, there shouldn't be any fishing, basically. And then above that, there's a cautious zone where there might be some fishing, but it's supposed to be also very, very limited until the stock reaches a level where its for them to reproduce properly. And what DFO has done is lowered it considerably. We used to think, if I can go back to the good old days, I mean, or the old days anyway, because I've been at this for 40 years. What are the old days? What does that entail? The old days would be, for me,

would be the 60s. In those days, we used to think that the stock needed a million tons of adult biomass, a million tons of adult fish in order for it to produce as it did historically. Now, that has been kind of whittled down, and it came down to about 800,000 tons in a couple of studies, one done by DFO. We're only going back now maybe a year or two. It was at 800,000 tons. And myself and a colleague at UBC did an independent study of this, and we came up with a very similar answer, maybe a bit higher. But this past year, DFO undertook some new analyses and claimed that we only need 300,000 tons of fish. This is a fraction of what we used to think was necessary for this stock to be fully productive. And that's the key. We want it to be fully productive. We don't want to impede that. So that's made it

easier for management to come and say, OK, we're out of the critical zone. We're out of it now. Therefore, we can have a commercial fishery. That's the logic that I've heard used, but it really doesn't hold water. And I won't be a believer in that new reference point until I see strong production in the stock coming from that lower spawning biomass, which is at maybe, it's probably at around 400,000 tons right now. So it's above the lower reference point, but not much, only a little bit. But it has not shown the production anywhere near the production that that stock had historically. Given everything you just told me, why do you think this decision to lift the moratorium came now? Well, you know, I don't

know myself. I try to look at things from the science standpoint, but I have many friends who are more politically inclined than I am, you know, think that politics is interfering with the management of the fishery. And it's hard to see how that has not had some impact on this. What will happen if the fisheries are reopened before there's enough stock? Well, this is the kind of nightmare scenario. Are we going to drive that stock down again? This would be a horrible outcome if that's what comes about because of this. And I've said before, it's like we're rolling the dice, taking a big, big chance. And the stakes are very high. There have been independent economic studies done, a couple, which show the potential of that fishery, what that

fishery could be, in other words, to Newfoundland and Labrador and to Canada and to the world, for that matter, what that stock could be if we help it to rebuild to anything like it was historically. Remember, historically, this was one of the biggest fisheries the world had ever seen. It was huge. And now it's not. And so there's been a lot of intent to try to get it back to something like that. And I think that this step that's been taken now by the federal government is not going to help. We're risking the longer term, even medium and longer term benefits that this stock could have to Newfoundland, Labrador and Canada. So what can be done right now then to protect the cod over the long term?

Well, I would have liked to see that the moratorium was kept on. Perhaps the inshore fishing communities could have been allocated some additional fish. That's subject to argument, but it certainly could have been justified in some ways to help them out and leave it at that. And wait, we've got to have patience. We had a lot of patience up until now. Remember, in the early 90s, we were down to tens of thousands of tons in spawning biomass. We're now up to perhaps 400,000 tons of spawning biomass. That's an accomplishment. You know, that's not a failure of management. It's not a failure of what we've done as a country or as a fishing industry. That's a success. And I really

believe we should continue that success and not nip it in the bud now, years too soon. Just to end here, George, I kind of have a philosophical question for you, because it seems to me ultimately to be a question of balancing very difficult factors, right? You have the science and you have the politics and economics of managing an industry. And these decisions have huge impacts on people's lives, right? You know, we have people that rely on fishing for their livelihoods, but also this is a finite natural resource. And Canada has other natural resources that are finite that we're thinking about when we're talking about climate change and all these other things that are

happening. I guess I wonder, like, what are the lessons learned here with this cod fishing situation? Well, the long term lesson has to do with overall sustainability and our lack of ability as a country and broader speaking as just people everywhere to live sustainably within the environment that we have. The northern cod decline was one of the biggest decimations of a incredible natural resource that existed on in the world not just in Canada, but globally. This was one of the most tremendous natural resources that we had, and we destroyed it. That's the big picture lesson on this.

And then it comes down to, okay, but can we, after doing things that have really destroyed a resource, can we bring it back? And I think the lesson there is a more positive one, that what we've seen in the past 30 years indicates to me that, yes, we can. We don't always have to destroy these natural resources. We can actually help them, and it benefits us.

It benefits the resource, obviously, and we can do better. But it takes a lot of discipline, takes a lot of patience, and it takes a lot of, you know, political will to do the right thing and not just the expedient thing at the moment. George, this has been a really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the show and giving us your knowledge. You're welcome. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Kevin Sexton produced this episode.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Eva McLaughlin, and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.