Editor’s Note: Maine fishermen have watched their traditional fishing species decline over the last several years, and industry groups and the government are working to avert disaster. Newfoundland saw declines too, but its government reacted by shutting down the fishery with no warning. This is the first of two reports that look at Newfoundland’s fishery today as a government support program is about to run out, and what the shutdown has done to fishing-dependent towns.

BONAVISTA, Newfoundland — It will be six years in July since the tragic shutdown of the cod fishery here. While the fish that sustained the island for 500 years show signs of returning, unemployed fishermen and plant workers know it will never be the same.

They also know if their fabled cod resource can be destroyed, no fish are safe anywhere.

Besides, the federal government is threatening to end their income maintenance and retraining program this summer, instead of in 1999 as originally planned.

With no income or employment alternatives in sight, many unemployed fisheries workers wanting to remain on the island may reopen the fishery themselves — with or without permission from the federal fisheries minister.

“We’re not having civil disobedience,” said Don Tremblett, 36, fisherman and the mayor of Bonavista. “We’re just going to enforce our rights.”

New England fishermen have watched their traditional species decline slowly over many years, but Newfoundland’s cod fishery was shut down abruptly and completely overnight. On July 2, 1992, in midseason, more than 20,000 of the island’s half-million people were thrown out of work.

Inshore fishermen warned managers for several years before the moratorium, saying fewer and smaller cod came in every spring. Federal fisheries scientists continued to support reduced, but still large, quotas until 1992, when they admitted they had overestimated stocks by 100 percent.

Laying the blame

Like most inshore trap and small-boat fishermen, Tremblett blames the collapse primarily on foreign and domestic offshore freezer trawlers, saying their huge quotas and wasteful practices killed both the turbot and cod fisheries.

“The sand on the beach couldn’t have survived the fishing pressure” from offshore trawlers, said Bonavista fisherman Jack Hayward, 64.

“Politics played a big part in the collapse,” said Tremblett. “The government didn’t want to offend the big companies.”

He made one offshore trawler trip in 1987, when cod already was endangered. “I saw enough to turn your stomach. But they never learn. The foreign trawlers are out there fishing our stocks now, with the government’s permission.”

Many observers called for a federal investigation to determine the cause of the collapse, but the government refused. George Baker, a member of Parliament, recently finished public hearings throughout the province to collect testimony from those affected by the collapse. Observers say his findings will lay blame squarely on federal management and high offshore trawler quotas.

Northern cod fewer

Bonavista and other northern Newfoundland communities fish northern cod, a separate stock from the Grand Banks cod caught in southern waters. Scientists at the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans say southern stocks show signs of rebuilding, but that recent acoustic surveys in the north show no cod in the bays.

“They’ve been wrong before, and they’re wrong now,” said Doug Sweetland, 48, another Bonavista fisherman. “We offered to help with their surveys, but they didn’t want us. They looked in all the wrong places and they didn’t find any fish.”

Even local fishermen in their 80s, fishing since they were young boys, say they’ve never seen so many fish in northern bays.

“But there’s no way they [DFO scientists] will listen,” said Sweetland. “They can’t accept that uneducated people might know something they don’t.”

Tremblett said he expects thousands of Newfoundland fishermen will take to the bays this spring when the cod arrive. He also says workers are ready to reopen plants. Cod is under federal management, but Tremblett believes the provincial fisheries minister would lend moral support.

“I cannot see [Fisheries Minister] John Efford going against thousands of Newfoundland fishermen,” said Tremblett.

Newfoundland prejudice

Minister Efford, a bayman from Port de Grave, understands the pain outport fishermen and plant workers experience as they face the prospect of leaving Newfoundland to find work when benefits end.

He blames the federal government for making the situation worse through “Newfoundland prejudice” and says, “This country — Canada — doesn’t know the real story.”

“The bureaucracy had people going over the TAGS program [The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy] with a fine-toothed comb” looking for ways to take people off benefits, said Efford. “They should be challenged in court, but they get away with it because it’s people with no money who can’t fight back.”

Efford expends a lot of energy now enlarging Newfoundland’s fisheries to include underused species. He relicensed many plants to process snow crab, previously just a bycatch, caught accidentally in cod nets. In 1995, the $2.50-per-pound price to the boats for crab brought Newfoundland seafood products their highest landed value — $550 million — but the price dropped each year. At the start of the 1997 season, crab fishermen refused to go fishing until processors raised the price to 90 cents a pound.

As have Maine fishermen, Newfoundlanders turned to harvesting sea urchins. They’ve increased fishing for shrimp, Icelandic scallops, surf clams, whelks, turbot, redfish, capelin roe, skate and kelp. They tried an experimental but promising king crab fishery. Rock and stone crab fisheries may follow.

More money is being pumped into aquaculture, a 1,500-ton industry farming steelhead trout, Atlantic salmon, scallops, mussels and rainbow trout. Several small companies are adding value by smoking seafood products.

Seals: cause and effect

These fisheries would pale in comparison to the seal harvest Efford wants. He believes seals are destroying the juvenile cod and tells of a 50-mile-long, 10-mile-wide, 14-fathom-deep body of small cod found by a Memorial University researcher on the Hamilton Banks off Labrador two years ago.

“Researchers can’t find any trace of them now,” said Efford. He believes one reason they disappeared is the growing seal population.

Scientists estimate Newfoundland’s seals number nearly 8 million and devour more than 100,000 metric tons of juvenile cod annually.

“There’s fear and concern cod won’t return as a commercial species,” said Efford, who wants the seal harvest increased from 1996’s 250,000 to 450,000 a year, both to protect cod and for the harvest’s commercial value.

Efford also plans to authorize a “tightly regulated test fishery” on cod this summer. A 1997 “sentinel” fishery found good-sized stocks on the southern coast, but insufficient for full-scale commercial fishing in the current conservative mood.

St. Shott’s

Meanwhile, unemployed inshore fishermen argue that while government is “erring on the side of conservatism,” offshore foreign and domestic trawlers allowed to fish legally inside the 200-mile limit can land 10 percent of their catch as cod when it is bycatch. Outside the limit, foreign trawlers still take what they want.

“What they get in a trip is enough to do us all summer,” said unemployed fisherman Peter Molloy, 49, of St. Shott’s.

St. Shott’s sits on a point in St. Mary’s Bay, where for centuries, as in all the bays, small, herringlike capelin rolled in faithfully each spring, filling every beach and cove. Adults and children would dip them off the shore or out of shallow water into wheelbarrows, horse-drawn carts or other conveyances to carry them home. Behind them, sure as the seasons, the cod followed, chasing their favorite food inshore.

Gerald Hewitt, deputy mayor of St. Shott’s, a gill-net cod fisherman since 1961, fishes out of the bay’s typical 25-foot open boat. He tried lumpfish last year, but fish were scarce and prices low. “I didn’t even make a dollar,” said Hewitt.

Hewitt bought a crab license three years ago. The first year he found crab two miles offshore. The next year, he went farther for fewer. Last year, he steamed out 12 miles and found none. Then he drove an hour and half to another town, steamed 12 miles out — another hour and a half with a 25-horsepower outboard motor — and still found little. He couldn’t land enough to pay for the travel.

Small-boat fishermen are trapped by Catch-22 economics. The government canceled a boat loan program to fishermen, and banks won’t look at them, but without bigger boats, the little guys can’t diversify.

“We need bigger boats” nearer 35 feet and enclosed, said Hewitt. “If we go to the bank for a loan, the first thing they ask is `How are you going to pay it back?’ and you can’t say with codfish, even though there’s a bit of it around.”

Like many fishermen, Hewitt worries the emphasis on diversification may bring greater grief to the fishery eventually.

“Shrimp is one of the main foods for codfish. If you catch it all up, the fish will move on,” said Hewitt. “Same as capelin. They’re cod food. There should never be a capelin roe fishery.”

“We can’t blame the foreigners [inside 200 miles], they’re here at our government’s invitation,” said Victor Pennell of Trepassey, who managed the town’s fish plant until it closed.

Where’s the money?

Newfoundlanders say Ottawa trades their cod for other products that benefit only mainland Canada, and ignores their right to the resource and to work that keeps them home. They say Ottawa’s foreign deals for Newfoundland fish bring in more than enough to fund TAGS, colloquially called “the package.”

Plant workers on TAGS also feel betrayed by their union, which still wants dues from the unemployed. They think government policies, with the union’s help, are designed to drive them from their outport homes. They say some of the $2 billion spent on retraining and income support can’t be accounted for, especially by their union.

A few months ago, dozens of unemployed plant workers tried to meet with visiting Prime Minister Jean Chretien. They were arrested and now face charges, although their gathering was peaceful and they never even saw the man. Their union won’t pay court costs.

In November, the government announced TAGS would end in May, a year early. In December, it extended the program through August, past peak cod fishing season, but fishermen say unless they know by May that benefits go through next winter, they’ll go fishing.

“I see the fish breaching in the water now like I haven’t seen since I was a kid,” said Peter’s brother, Jim Molloy, 52.

“We wouldn’t want to see the fishery opened the way it was, not for the offshore boats,” said Peter Molloy. “But they should open it enough to let us make a living. We don’t expect to get rich.”

“If they don’t open the fishery and they cut off TAGS, we’ll go fishing anyway. We won’t starve to death,” added Peter.

“If they put us in jail, we won’t starve to death either,” quipped Jim.

“The fishery’s a way of life, it’s a business. It’s our life, our lifestyle and our heritage, and we’re going back to it,” said Tremblett. “There’s absolutely no doubt about it whatsoever.”

“I don’t condone breaking the law, and I wouldn’t say go do it,” said Efford. “But I’d take them seriously and suggest the federal minister take them seriously.”