Still, the fishermen drove away — back to home communities and boats scattered around the island — disappointed with not getting answers to a net load of questions.
The about 30 fishermen — many of whom had protested at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans office last week in support of fisherman Richard Gillett and his 11-day hunger strike — had turned their attention to the office of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers’ (Unifor) on Hamilton Avenue Monday morning.
The fishermen wanted a meeting with FFAW President Keith Sullivan and other executive members to voice their concerns about what they perceive as a lack of good representation and to get answers to outstanding questions they say the union avoids.
When the fishermen arrived, the building was empty and locked. The RNC soon arrived on the scene and monitored the protestors. Not far away, the RNC’s public order unit (riot squad) geared up in case they were needed.
Some fishermen had tied a rope to the main doors of the building with the intent to tie the other end to a pickup and pull the doors open.
“I untied the rope,” Fogo Island fisherman Rod Rowe said. “I wanted to keep the protest peaceful.
“We want a meeting with the union, want them to tell us why our message is not getting to Ottawa. If the minister of fisheries in Ottawa doesn’t know what the fishermen want, how can he fix it? We are not asking for more quota, we want our message to get to Ottawa and we feel the union is not doing that.”
RNC Supt. Joe Boland came to speak to the fishermen assuring them the force was not taking sides but had a duty to uphold public order meaning that they will work to ensure safety of all involved — the fishermen, union members and staff, and RNC members — and to protect property.
“Public order for us is making sure everybody is safe. It’s not about suppressing any group,” Boland said. “There are laws that we have to uphold here in this city and we are going to uphold them. So, if we can facilitate a peaceful resolution here today…
“We will facilitate a meeting away from here with spokespeople from this group.”
Fisherman Brent Adams from Marystown said the meeting should take place in the union building.
“This is our building. We paid for this building. Why not meet here?” he said. “They (FFAW executive) should all resign.”
The fishermen had one condition for a meeting — that members of the media be allowed to attend.
In the end Boland told the group the FFAW executive agreed to meet with 12 representatives of the group of fishermen, but the meeting could not take place until Wednesday morning to give out-of-town FFAW executive members time to travel to St. John’s.
The union stated it would not allow media to attend.
The fishermen said the delay to a Wednesday meeting was a tactic by the union to end the protest, knowing that most of the protesters would not be able to stay in the city until that time.
Don Spence, a fisherman from Port au Choix, said the FFAW is afraid to face the public on television and answer questions directly from fishermen.
“If the FFAW is not doing anything wrong, why won’t they have an interview on live TV?” he asked. “Obviously, you got something to hide if you won’t go on live TV. I’ll go on live TV because I’ve got nothing to hide. They got me broke.”
The FFAW issued a news release Monday charging that the protest at the union office was organized by FISH-NL (Federation of Independent Sea Harvesters of Newfoundland and Labrador), the breakaway group aiming to represent the province’s harvesters by forcing a vote among the province’s fishermen to determine who will represent their interests in the future.
“Today’s protest at the Richard Cashin Building was organized by FISH-NL in order to generate support in light of its struggling union drive that was rejected by 75 per cent of fish harvesters,” the release stated.
“We have learned throughout this process that there is little that (FISH-NL president) Ryan Cleary and the FISH-NL leadership will not do to draw attention and boost their profile. Unfortunately, this includes taking advantage of the challenges in the fishery by pitting harvester against harvester, promoting lies and mis-stating facts, and fuelling an environment of tension and animosity that makes it difficult to engage in productive discussion. Given the challenges in the fishery, the lies and anger of FISH-NL have only served to benefit those who wish to undermine the strength of inshore harvesters.
“We will meet with harvesters, but we will not meet with FISH-NL. We take the concerns of our members seriously: these concerns will not be used as an excuse for a spectacle. This meeting will occur in private without media attendance.”
Some of the issues fishermen spoke of Monday include:
• Rob Rowe, fisherman for 33 years: “We got a turbot fishery that hasn’t been touched in years, and we’ve got very little (quota) to catch. We see (turbot) coming up in our crab pots day after day. When I started first, I had about 500 nets, a 10 or 11 day trip, and would catch 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 pounds. Now I go out with 90 nets and am only allowed to catch 18,000 to 20,000 pounds. I haul the 60 nets and there’s my quota and I have to dump the rest. And that’s because of what happened right here in this union office.”
• George Keeping, long-time fisherman from Fortune: In 2006 the federal government took away our right to fish halibut and they took 90 per cent of our scallop grounds and gave it to the offshore fishery. We’ve been arguing and fighting with this union since 2006 about this. We haven’t got no further ahead. The union that we have sir is a union that is a corporation making millions of dollars. I pay between $500 and $600 an hour to have a monitor take the scallops out of my boat. I could have a lawyer do it for that. They (FFAW) are actually paying the monitor less than $15 an hour. Where’s the other $585 going to?”
• Wayne Meade, Grand Bank fisherman: “The public doesn’t know what’s going on in the fishery. Like, I had a scallop licence for 25 or 30 years and overnight we lost our rights to our scallop licences.
In 2006 they boxed in two areas (of the fishing grounds) for Clearwater and the offshore companies in Nova Scotia. They left us to fish up on the northwest part of the banks where there were no scallops.
We want our scallop grounds back and we want our 10 per cent bycatch of halibut back. We want what they took from us. I was a year and half trying to find out from the union why they cut the halibut quota from 10 per cent to three per cent and never got the answer. I got the answer from (Newfoundland MP) Judy Foote. She said the FFAW had asked for it. Judy Foote told us she was stunned when they asked for it.”
• Glen Best, Fogo fisherman: “We have problems with resource so what we need now is flexibility to be able to run our business the way we need to run it. In two years we lost 66 per cent of our quota. Now we are told we have to build a boat and pay for it by fishing 33 per cent of the quota. How are we going to invest that capital in a new boat and we haven’t got the resource to pay for it? We need to be able to buddy up (harvesters join together to fish their quotas in one boat to save on costs). When is the union going to listen to us? They won’t even take it into consideration. They’ll go off to a meeting and do what they want to do.”
