Nova Scotia (50 page)

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 relatively 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.

Seals for Scapegoats

When the cod started to disappear,
some Nova Scotian fishermen and spokesmen for the big corporations
looked for a scapegoat. Instead of blaming government or
themselves, they blamed it on the seals. Seals ate too much cod and
they carried cod worms and disease. Grey seals, in particular, were
seen as competitors. Some fishermen from Cape Breton to the South
Shore carried rifles to shoot seals on sight. Television footage
showed frustrated and brazen fishermen recklessly massacring seals
at sea or near shore in front of the camera, and calling for
another all-out war, this time directed against these benign
creatures who had fed and lived in the North Atlantic long before
man had arrived on the scene.

   
The debates raged as to whether seals were responsible for
the loss of cod.  The number crunchers who had been so inept
in tallying the fish stocks came to the fore, arguing that the grey
seal population in the Northwest Atlantic was 200,000 and growing.
Supposedly they were munching up 40,000 tons of cod a year. Nova
Scotians, still mostly embarrassed and enraged by the bloody sight
of fishermen butchering seals for worldwide TV, were slightly
relieved when Dalhousie University researchers in 1994 came up with
a birth-control vaccine for seals that could be fired into a seal
with an air rifle. The best place to find the female seals was on
Sable Island and that’s where Dr. Robert Brown and his
sixteen-member team injected the first 200 seals. The program might
sound better than blasting seals into extinction, but one might
worry over the ethics of it all. Is it right to sterilize one
species to suit the needs of another? Brown suggests that if each
seal eats a ton of fish a year, that much can be saved for our
consumption with each baby seal that is prevented from coming into
the world. This might well be a moot point if the cod never make a
comeback anyway.

   
Dr. David Lavigne, a zoologist at the University of Guelph,
however, opposed the birth-control campaign, arguing that as fish
stocks fall, so too will the population of seals. This sounds like
death by starvation to me and I’m not sure that’s more humane than
a birth-control bullet in the butt of a mamma
seal.

   
Still other researchers who monitor the sea suggest that the
death of all those once-plentiful fish might simply be chalked up
to “change of habitat.” The water temperature has dropped slightly,
reducing reproduction. Perhaps global warming has led to an
increased melt in the polar ice, ironically producing colder water
and colder water makes it less likely for fish to breed. Another
argument put forward is that tiny but persistent quaontities of
oil, heavy metals or other chemicals are doing the
damage.