Some Canadians may be dismayed by the recent conclusions of Oceana’s 2020 Fisheries Audit.
The organization reports that only one-quarter of the country’s fish population can be tagged healthy.
Many of our species, including cod, are in fact struggling and barely surviving.
The outcome certainly does not surprise me, as someone involved in the fishing industry here since 1947, but it still alarms me.
I was part of a delegation of 14 who organized the Save Our Fisheries Association (SOFA) in 1971 because we were all so concerned about the health of our fish stocks. Shortly after, we headed to Ottawa to make a presentation on the declining fishery resources to three cabinet ministers: Don Jamieson, Jack Davis and Mitchell Sharp.
These three ministers expressed shock and requested we make an abbreviated presentation to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and senior cabinet ministers. They, too, were floored by the data we shared — all backed up, by the way, by the very competent Wilfred Templeman, Newfoundland’s leading research scientist at the time.
Davis, who was federal fisheries minister, was instructed to send a telex to Premier Joseph Smallwood making a commitment that the federal government would extend fisheries jurisdiction over the complete Continental Shelf to take control of our fish stocks and stop the massacre.
Of course, we know that promise was never kept — and our province and the country have since paid the price.
In 1949, when Newfoundland entered Confederation, the federal government assumed control over the management of our fish stocks. Within less than a decade there was documented evidence the fish stocks were in sharp decline. This became evident in 1992 when the cod moratorium bomb slammed into our province.
Fast-forward to 2020, and it is not the pandemic that so much worries the Fisheries Community Alliance (FCA) that I am a part of, but what Oceana has reaffirmed — that our concerns, which shocked Ottawa in the early 1970s were never addressed, and in fact it got worse and worse until the moratorium in 1992.
It should be a crime that during that 50 years absolutely nothing was done by the federal government to restore the resource; and worse still, nothing done by successive provincial governments to force Canada to comply with the terms of union, which was to manage this common property resource on behalf of the people.
Oceana’s report concludes that failure to act now means losing out on the “massive long-term potential” of wild fish to support the planet and the future of coastal communities and the “Blue Economy.”
We didn’t call it the Blue Economy then, but we have gone blue in the face talking for decades to politicians about managing the ocean and rebuilding fish stocks to benefit our people.
FCA has not given up the fight, but it is important for people to realize that the Oceana report is not news — it is a sad echo from 50 years ago when our resource was, even then, in deep and dire trouble.
Gus Etchegary, chairman
Fishery Community Alliance
