And Cape Breton coal may be in demand again. In 2005 the government of Nova Scotia approved applications for surface coal exploration and mining – another name for strip mining – in the Sydney coalfield. The Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources estimated about eight million tonnes of coal in Cape Breton could be mined by “small surface operations” or strip mining. The department assessed the market value of the coal at between $300 million and $500 million and estimated this would generate up to 100 direct jobs and more than 200 indirect jobs.
Chapter 44
Chapter 44
Pushed to the Point of Extinction
As I look out the window of my home, out across the vast expanse of the blue November Atlantic, it’s easy to imagine that I’m looking at sea where very little has changed in thousands of years. Beyond the sand dunes is the same salt water, the same wind-spirited waves, and above, the same cumulus clouds driven by the restless winds. Everything seems to be as it should be.
What I can’t see is how much has changed beneath the surface of the waves. It would be an exaggeration to say that the fish are all gone. Some species still thrive, while others, such as the cod, have been brought to near extinction, primarily by humans. The Grand Banks that once teemed with sea life are bereft of much of the life it once knew. John Cabot had written of the sea that could be harvested of cod by merely dipping baskets from the side of a ship. Now, on that same patch of ocean, it might be nearly impossible to find a fully grown cod. We have allowed for a kind of salt-water holocaust and now the social and economic after-blast has come to ldhaunt us here in our very lives ashore.
The phrase the “death of the fishery” may sound like melodramatic politician’s rhetoric to landlubbers beyond the Atlantic Provinces, but here it has profound, ominous implications. Something has gone out of this world, our maritime world, and we may never be the same. We will be the worse for it; many of us will be forced to leave the shorelines and our homes.
Those scientists best equipped to tell us about what went wrong suggest they are not a hundred percent certain. We fished too much, that’s for sure. We fished carelessly and stupidly. And nature figured into this as well. Something changed – most likely the water temperature. A scant degree or two was enough to throw off the cycle of reproduction. Will the cod and other decimated stocks of fish come back? Perhaps, the experts suggest . . . with a little luck. On the other hand, there is no compelling hard evidence to say that the cod population can bounce back. As we’ve done with so many other species, we may have pushed this one to the point of extinction.
Uncontrolled and Overfished
Early in the eighteenth century, fishermen in the French fleet off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia began to notice some decline in the fish population. And then things got worse. Canadian historian Christopher Moore came across the writings of a 1739 “expert” on the fishery who reported, “There has not been the slightest appearance of fish stock this fall. This has greatly astonished our fishermen – who will all be wiped out.” This news may offer some small comfort and hope to those of us here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the fish population is cyclical. It has disappeared before and returned. With a little luck, we’re just in a bad patch for the cod themselves and for the fishermen who scoop them from the sea.
The other possibility is this. As the cod population dwindled, rather than backing off and allowing for a natural cycle of decline and recovery, we fished on, harvesting those few survivors who could have been breeders leading toward a recovery. In other words, when the cod numbers were low, we swooped in for the kill. If that’s the case, cod fish may be gone for good.
As technology advanced, we were painfully slow to realize its deadly side effects and legislate some kind of control. The situation off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland was obviously complicated by the fact that it wasn’t just Canadian fishermen involved, but ships, some of them massive factory ships from around the world, harvesting fish.
The story of government controls of fishing in the second half of the last century begins in 1949 with the formation of an international commission (ICNAF – thle International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries) whose job it was to do research and “bring order” to fishing in this part of the Atlantic. ICNAF was later renamed NAFO (Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization) and, despite some symbolic attempts at control, the Northwest Atlantic was a bit of a free-for-all until 1970 when the Gulf of St. Lawrence, at least, was declared an exclusive Canadian fishing zone. The following year, actual fishing quotas were set for all NAFO members, but not all countries were in the club and not everyone, including some members, would play by the rules.
By 1974, number crunchers in the fishing industry realized that something big-time was going wrong. There was a major drop in the size of the catch on the Labrador and Grand Banks. At least twenty countries were overfishing. In 1975, Canada responded to one of the worst offenders by closing her ports to the Soviet fleet. Canada became even more protective after that, declaring a 200-mile limit in an attempt to insure “control”a over what fish were left in this corner of the Atlantic. This move, which angered much of the international fishing community, helped Nova Scotian fishing companies to survive, but it may have proven to be merely a postponement.
Nonetheless, Canadian catches were up for five years after that and government began to speak of something called a Groundfish Management Plan. But if the fish were somewhat protected, the biologists, oceanographers anewd even the companies involved in fishing were not. In 1978 the federal fisheries lab in Halifax was closed. In 1981 and into 1982, there was a financial crisis in the industry because of high interest rates, huge inventories and a lack of interest on the part of buyers. Ironically, the market was glutted with fish and it was wrecking the business. In response, the feds poured fifteen million bucks into “inventory relief” for the compa.nies.
The Scale of Social Disruption
So, while businessmen were still trying to figure out how to “manage” the resource, government was slashing the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on into 1985 and 1986 – at the very time that more research should have gone into insuring a stable future for fish in the sea, not in the can or freezer.
Then something weird happened in 1987: a very good year. The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council called it the “best year ever for the Atlantic fishery [with] landed value of $791 million.” But those few scientists left working for DFO saw forces other than economic ones at work on the fish population. They saw populations of haddock and cod going down, not up, and allowable catch limits were tightened. This led to the closing of fish plants in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; foreign fishing companies with plants ashore here pulled out.
In May of 1990, the Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program was announced and APEC would cry out that “the scale of social disruption caused by proposals to rationalise the sector is unprecedented.” People would lose their jobs, companies – big and small – would go belly up and fishermen would cease to fish. Coastal towns would die and an entire way of life was close to disintegration. And all the while, the once bountiful cod was headed toward extinction.
That same APEC report argued that fishing was the single most important industry in our region, with more than 100,000 people directly employed in harvesting and processing, and many towns entirely dependent on the resource. That was then.
As the federal government screwed the lid down tightly on the fishing business, it created other massive spin-off losses in shipbuilding and repair, manufacturing, transportation and the like. All this came on the heels of the unprecedented short fishing boom that resulted from initiation of the 200-mile limit. In a short time, more fishing licences had been issued, more families had become dependent on fishing income and more people had become dependent on the Unemployment Insurance factor, allowing them to go on “pogie” for the time they could not fish. Young people quit school and fished because it all looked so attractive. Then the bottom dr
opped out and these under-educated young men and women became part of the fallout from a very short golden age of fishing.
Inshore/Offshore
The whole fishing industry is a pretty complex entity rarely understood by anyone who is not directly involved in it. The so-called “fishery” employs everyone from corporate managers to trawler captains to the lone inshore fishermen with one boat and on to the coastal dweller who harvests Irish moss. The term “fishermen” has also given way to simply “fishers,” to include the many women who work in the industry.
While larger ships have traditionally left port in Nova Scotia to harvest from the Grand Banks (once the richest fishing ground in the world, now an undersea desert), men and women with smaller vessels fish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence’s Northumberland Strait, the Bay of Fundy and the Scotian Shelf, which stretches from Yarmouth to Cape Breton.
The harvest is divided into groundfish, pelagic and estuarials, shellfish and seaweed. Groundfish refers to fish that feed on the ocean floor such as cod, turbot, haddock, halibut, hake, plaice and sole. Pelagic and estuarials are the surface-schooling variety – herring, mackerel, hark, smelts, tuna and salmon. Atlantic shellfish include lobsters, crabs, clams, mussels and shrimp, among others. Seaweed is also considered a fisheries resource. Dulse and Irish moss are primarily the only two varieties harvested here.
Important distinctions have been made between the inshore and offshore. Inshore fishermen have smaller boats and use traps, weirs, gill nets, longlines, seines or trawls. This area of the industry employs the highest nu*mbers, while offshore fishermen work from ships over thirty metres long and travel further out to sea to fish. The line between the two industries begins to blur as inshore fishermen, out of necessity, buy advanced technical gear and go further out to catch fish. It seems that everything about the industry is at the whim of a whirlwind of economic, governmental and biological factors.
Economic cycles prompt a boom-and-bust scenario; environmental factors may be doing the same. Government friendliness to the industry appears idiosyncratic, and to top it off consumer interest in fish seems to ebb and fdlow like the tides and not always in sync with any of the above. Nothing is new about this haywire condition, but it makes life quite difficult for a fisher or an employee in a small-town fish plant who needs a dependable wage to feed a family.
If You Can’t Fight ’em, Join ’em
Meanwhile, back to the sorry saga of how the fishing business went bust. The federal government came to the aid of the big fish companies, such as Nova Scotia’s National Sea Products. Now companies like NSP would operate with a quota system which should have allowed them to avoid the glut/shortage syndrome. They’d fish to maximize profits by catching only what the market demanded. This was a good trick, if it all worked according to plan. They had bigger, “better” ships – draggers that cost over a million bucks each and needed heavy financing. A new ship with all the latest gear was designed to pull in 200 tons a year and that should have taken the guessing entirely out of fishing.
Inshore fishermen, on the other hand, would argue that they were being squeezed out by the giants. It was harder to compete with a big company’s prices and their control of the market. The inshore fishermen had a few good years, as well, and in order to keep up with the big guys, invested in new boats, taking on significant debts with the hopes it would all pay off sooner or later.
By 1990, it was clear that all the good intentions for a modernized industry had run afoul. The fish were disappearing, thanks to all this efficiency. Consumers weren’t all that hungry for fish and there were too many fishermen fishing too few fish. The government intervened again by cutting fish quotas. Processing companies closed down and the buzz word in government circles was “rationalization.”
The years 1976 through 1990 saw an array of massive government reports, policy statements, task forces, reviews and adjustment packages. Common themes included controlling domestic and foreign fishing (well, overfishing, really), conserving and rebuilding the fish populations, community survival and new options. The Harris Report of 1990 spoke of extending the 200-mile zone. The author of the report suggested that “serious thought be given to the possibility of participating in the rape of the ‘Nose’ and ‘Tail’ of the Bank . . . since European Community countries already take every fish they can possibly catch.” If you can’t fight ’em, join ’em, the rationale seems to have been.
But Leslie Harris, author of this report, was just being facetious. In an interview with Silver Donald Cameron, he was willing to come clean and tell it like it really was, stating flatly, “Our technology has outstripped our science. We have underestimated our own capacity to find, pursue and to kill . . . The state of our ignorance is appalling. We know almost nothing of value with respect to the behaviour of fish. We don’t even know if there’s one northern cod stock or many, or how they might be distinguished. We don’t know anything about migration patterns or their causes, or feeding habits, or relationships in the food chain. I could go on listing what we don’t know.”
The problem the scientists faced seems like a simple one. Nobody knew exactly how to come up with an accurate fish count. Counting the catch didn’t necessarily tell you how many fish were in (or left in) the sea. I’m not exactly putting the blame for the death of the fishery on the poor researchers who couldn’t figure how to count fish. It was a pretty daunting task and becoming more difficult as funds dried up. One method was known as “catch-per-unit-of-effort,” but as the technology kept changing, it grew ever more difficult to find the right measuring stick.
The word “management” was often tossed around at DFO, but the net effect was that there was little control when it was most needed. Unhappily, everyone saw the “biomass” shrinking and began to tighten the total allowable catch. But it was all too little and too late. Just when we needed those dedicated but somewhat befuddled DFO researchers the most, Ottawa had slashed funding, closing that Halifax fisheries lab in 1978 and the Marine Ecology Lab in 1986, and cutbacks went on and on toward the end of the century. It’s a classic case of the Eighties and Nineties slash-and-burn scenario, whereby diminished funding in the name of shrivelling the deficit would wreak economic ruin far into the future. Bad political moves dictated by the corporate agenda continue to come back to haunt not only the corporations themselves but the people of Atlantic Canada as their livelihood from fishing disappears.
Death by Dragger
This all leads us back to the big question: exactly who or what killed off all the fish? The federal government thought they were “managing” the underwater stock as if it was a rambling herd of cattle. But it was not. Whether it was foreaigners or our own fleet, much of the blame can be placed on the draggers. Technology ruled the sea and if it was bigger, it was considered better u– more efficient. Around the world, draggers have devastated the ocean floor and they continue today, hauling in everything they can scrape up, tossing back the unwanted species and only keeping the desirable catch. The so-called by-catch is dumped back into the sea, dead. Some of it includes the big numbers of the desirable species like cod that are considered too small. Those adolescent cod, however, are never going to have a chance to grow up. It didn’t take a DFO Ph.D. to figure out that this style of fisyhing was very bad news. Since the 1960s or earlier, inshore fishermen on the wharves of Causeway Road in Seaforth or out on Big Tancook Island could tell you that the big fleet of draggers was killing the sea.
Aside from killing millions of unwanted fish, the other problem with the draggers is that they rake across the bottom of the sea floor. Afterwards, there’s nothing left in many cases for fish to eat. The feeding grounds and breeding grounds have been decimated as if by some all-out military assault. All this could be avoided if fish were simply caught with baited hooks “the old-fashioned way.” Even a massive array of longliner hooks and lines wouldn’t inflict the kind of damage the draggers have on the Atlantic waters. Only bigger fish would take the larger hooks and there would be relati
vely little by-catch. i
As you might guess, Canadians were not alone out there on the Grand Banks with their draggers. They were kept company on the Nose and Tail and elsewhere by the Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans, Soviets, South Koreans, Panamanians and Americans. NAFO was supposed to have some control but everybody blatantly ignored the rules, including member nations. In 1986, the quota for all of Europe was set at about 23,000 tons, but the entire European Union hauled in more than 172,000 tons, with Spain and Portugal taking the lion’s share. In 1988 when NAFO tightened the symbolic belt, the EU still took more than 66,000 tons, possibly because the fish population ewas already in a crash dive.
Was Canada as bad as the rest? Well, draggers were still chewing up the floor and dumping the by-catch, all perfectly good fish, just not what was needed for the market and possibly not what was in their licence to catch. The system was turning out to be both illogical and punitive to the fishermen and to the fish. In an all-out war (and what else could this eradication of a species be called?) the generals might call it collateral damoage. There were too many draggers and, in southwest Nova Scotia in particular, too much illegal fishing of all sorts. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald reported, in fact, that it was likely that fifty percent more fish were taken by inshore fishermen than were actually reported. It was estimated that the illegal fishing business was netting a solid $100 million or more. e
As the fish began to die off, fishermen had to sail further out on the Scotian Shelf. They needed bigger boats as they headed way out toward Sable Island or George’s Bank. To buy the big boats, they had taken out loans and had to pay back the banks. They had to come up with a big catch if they wanted to stay solvent. So they fished further out and they took more fish – illegally if necessary. Some were actually getting quite rich in the short run, but, like the big draggers and the foreign fleets, they were devastating their future.
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