Closing fisheries devastated Newfoundland. Should they come back?

This episode discusses the impact of lifting the commercial cod fishing ban in Newfoundland and the potential consequences of this decision.

1. The northern cod stock is still vulnerable, making the decision to lift the moratorium risky.
2. Historical overfishing has had long-term effects on cod populations, with recovery slower than anticipated.
3. Political decisions heavily influence fisheries management, sometimes overshadowing scientific advice.
4. There is a significant need for patience and a sustainable approach to managing fish stocks.
5. Renewed fishing could potentially undermine the slow gains made in cod recovery.

1: Introduction

Cheryl Sutherland introduces the topic and guest Dr. George Rose, who discusses the background of the cod fishery collapse and the recent lifting of the moratorium.
George Rose: "It's kind of in the blood to have this as an interest."

2: Historical Context

Discussion on the historical significance of cod fishing in Newfoundland and the environmental and economic impact of overfishing.
George Rose: "The fishery itself goes back to 500 years ago."

3: Moratorium and Its Impact

Details the reasons behind the 1992 moratorium and its drastic effects on the local economy and communities.
George Rose: "40,000 people apparently just all of a sudden had no livelihood at all."

4: Current Status of Cod Stocks

Analysis of the current health of the cod stocks and skepticism about the sustainability of reopening fisheries.
George Rose: "The northern cod is still at a fraction of historical biomass level."

5: Government Rationale and Critique

Dr. Rose critiques the government's rationale for lifting the moratorium, pointing out the lowered biomass thresholds and risks involved.
George Rose: "It's really rolling the dice with a stock that is, at the moment, not doing very well."

1. Advocate for Science-Based Policies: Support policies that prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term economic gains.
2. Educate on Overfishing Impacts: Spread awareness about the consequences of overfishing and the importance of recovery periods for fish stocks.
3. Support Sustainable Fisheries: Choose seafood from sustainably managed stocks and support local fishing communities adhering to responsible practices.
4. Engage in Community Dialogues: Participate in community discussions to balance economic needs with environmental sustainability.
5. Monitor Government Actions: Stay informed about government decisions on fisheries and their alignment with scientific recommendations.

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.

People

George Rose, Cheryl Sutherland

Guest Name(s):

George Rose

Content Warnings:

None

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George Rose
As a Newfoundlander, of course, it's kind of in the blood to have this as an interest.

Cheryl Sutherland
Doctor 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.

George Rose
The lessons from this have much broader implication for not only for Canada, but for, you know, human societies everywhere in the world.

Cheryl Sutherland
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.

George Rose
Oh, you're very welcome. Nice to be here with you.

Cheryl Sutherland
So Newfoundland's cod moratorium was recently lifted after 32 years. I'm just curious, what did you think about this decision?

George Rose
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. You know, 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.

Cheryl Sutherland
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?

George Rose
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.

Cheryl Sutherland
Is that a lot?

George Rose
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 ten 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 Two.

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 two, 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 sixties, 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 nineties, the fishery was closed, and it's been called the biggest layoff in canadian history. I mean, 40,000 people apparently just all of a sudden had no livelihood at all.

Cheryl Sutherland
So this moratorium, put in place in 1992 by the federal government, it essentially banned commercial cod fishing. You kind of talked about it a little bit, but let's get into it. Why did the federal government do this in the first place? What was their thinking here?

George Rose
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.

Cheryl Sutherland
As you mentioned, this was one of the biggest layoffs in canadian history. 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?

George Rose
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.

Cheryl Sutherland
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?

George Rose
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.

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.

Cheryl Sutherland
We'll be right back.

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Cheryl Sutherland
Let'S talk about where we're at today. What state are the northern cod in right now?

George Rose
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 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.

Cheryl Sutherland
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?

George Rose
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, nothing doing very well.

Cheryl Sutherland
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.

George Rose
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 goal posts 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 productivity is not impeded. You need a certain number of spawning fish, of adult fish in a stock, in order 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, or the old days anyway, because I've been at this for 40 years, what.

Cheryl Sutherland
Are the old days for you? What does that entail?

George Rose
The old days would be, for me, would be the sixties.

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, okay, 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 that 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.

Cheryl Sutherland
Everything you just told me, why do you think this decision to lift the moratorium came now?

George Rose
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.

Cheryl Sutherland
What will happen if the fisheries are reopened before there's enough stock?

George Rose
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.

Cheryl Sutherland
So what can be done right now, then, to protect the cod over the long term?

George Rose
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 patients up until now, remember, in the early nineties, 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.

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.

Cheryl Sutherland
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.

Unidentified Speaker
Right.

Cheryl Sutherland
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, what are the lessons learned here with this cod fishing situation?

George Rose
Well, the long term lesson has to do with overall sustainability and our lack of ability as a country and broader speaking is just people everywhere to live sustainably within the environment that we have.

The northern cod decline was one of the biggest decimations of an incredible natural resource that existed in the world, not just in Canada, but, you know, 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, 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 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.

Cheryl Sutherland
George, this has been a really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the show and giving us your knowledge.

George Rose
You're welcome.

Cheryl Sutherland
That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Kevin Sexton produced this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Fraynor is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.

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