Silences and Lies: How the Industrial Fishery Constrained Voices of Ecological Conservation
Abstract: In combination with historical research, this paper uses interviews of fishers, fishery workers, scientists, and Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) enforcers and observers to recount the communication processes that occurred before the 1992 collapse of the cod fishery in Atlantic Canada. As the fishery industrialized over the course of the twentieth century, those who worked in the industry became increasingly segregated. Distinct discursive realms emerged, among them "fishers' vernacular," "scientific language," "product talk," and DFO's "official word." There was little dialogue between the groups and little collective opposition to the overfishing. DFO's "official word" claimed that the stocks were strong despite protestation to the contrary from several fishers' groups and DFO's own scientists. The outcome for the region was economically and ecologically devastating.
Résumé : En combinaison avec de la recherche historique, cet article a recours à des entrevues avec des pêcheurs, des travailleurs de la pêche, des savants, et des observateurs et inspecteurs du ministère des Pêches et Océans Canada (MPO) pour examiner les processus de communication précédant l'effondrement en 1992 des stocks de morue au Canada atlantique. À mesure que la pêche s'est industrialisée au cours du vingtième siècle, les divers groupes oeuvrant dans l'industrie sont devenus de plus en plus isolés les uns des autres. Des discours distincts ont émergé, parmi lesquels « le vernaculaire des pêcheurs », « le langage savant », « le parler du marché » et « la parole officielle » du MPO. Il y a eu peu de dialogues entre les groupes et peu d'opposition collective à la pêche excessive. « La parole officielle » du MPO était que les ressources étaient abondantes malgré des protestations au sens contraire exprimées par plusieurs associations de pêcheurs et des savants du MPO même. Le résultat pour la région fut dévastateur tant au plan économique qu'écologique.
Introduction
The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) issued a series of moratoria on cod fishing within the 200-mile North Atlantic jurisdiction off the Canadian coasts beginning in 1992. The moratoria continue into 2002, and DFO officials cannot predict when the cod fishery will reopen. The collapse of the cod stocks and the subsequent moratoria left more than 40,000 people out of work in Atlantic Canada - the largest layoff in Canadian history (Binkley, 1995, p. 159). That figure represents only those people directly employed in the fishery, but the closure had ripple effects throughout the region.
Although the Canadian government provided economic assistance to people dependent on the fishery, many fishing communities experienced severe social problems including out-migration, suicides, increased drug and alcohol abuse, loss of homes, boats, and cars, and widespread hopelessness about the future (Stewart, 1994b, p. 1). Immediately after the moratoria went into effect, a task force described the situation in Atlantic Canada's fishery as "a catastrophe . . . so great and so horrendous as to challenge the ingenuity and creativity of the communities themselves and the nation as a whole . . . a catastrophe of Biblical scale" (Canada, Secretariat, 1993, pp. 1, 9). How this ecological and sociological tragedy came about is the story of the operation of an industrial fishery that limited deliberative rhetoric and provided no mechanism to conserve fish stocks. Individual actors in the system who might have influenced the outcome were constrained in a variety of ways and could not slow the fish killing to a sustainable level.
Regulations imposed by DFO and the demand placed on fishers by industry management compelled many fishery workers to lie or remain silent about the quantity of fish being discarded, caught, or processed. The accumulation of constraints on fishery workers, scientists, and DFO staff was so powerful that few voices were raised publicly in opposition to the system that was destroying vast quantities of fish and jeopardizing the future of the species, the industry, and Atlantic Canadian economies. Protests against the stock devastation, like those from the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association, were ignored (Candow, 1997, p. 153). The corporations that owned the fish processing plants disregarded the impending crisis because of the tremendous pressure they were under to maintain profits and jobs. Individual actors within the fisheries depended on the perpetuation of the entire system for their economic survival. Their interdependent functions, operating in separate companies, departments, or locations, precluded the raising of a collective voice, or even interaction with each other to share information. And the Canadian governmental body responsible for management of the fisheries, DFO (the only organization with the legal power to have taken into account the local information about the actual procedures and catch rates and act to slow down the fishing), failed to assess adequately the dangerously high levels of overfishing taking place.
Much sociological research has been conducted on the Atlantic fishery from historical sources and studies (see Candow & Corbin, 1997; Davis, 1991). There is also Ommer's (1994) and Neis' (1997) work in Newfoundland, and McKay and Acheson's (1987) and Matthews' (1993) work on common property. Of primary importance for this study is Finlayson's thorough analysis (1994) of the cultural constructs of fisheries science. Finlayson argues that science is as dependent upon contextual variables as any other construction of reality. He states that within the fisheries there are "aggregations of differentially knowledgeable individuals with unequal access to salient resources and subject to various, sometimes singular, constraints" (1994, p. 15). Based on a similar social constructivist view, I conducted this research into the various discursive realms of the fishery since the collapse of the cod stocks.
Like Finlayson's, this study is based on discourse analysis and requires acceptance of a social or rhetorical construction of reality. The reality in which the fishers operated included discourses ranging from newspaper articles to DFO memoranda to anecdotal evidence shared among fishers on wharves and in taverns. As Finlayson has argued, truth is illusive (1994, p. viii), and this study also attempts to construct a viable representation of the context in which the fishers worked and in which discourses interacted and constrained actors in various ways.
I conducted interviews in and around Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, from 1995 to 1998 with 20 people in the industry (fishers, fish plant workers, DFO enforcement officers, and observers) as well as reporters and scientists. Most informants would not be comfortable if their identities were revealed, and I have respected their wishes. Anecdotal evidence and personal testimonies are included as part of the discourse if generally supported with other evidence. I include news articles because they act as organizers of reality that feed into other discursive realms. And finally, I support as much as possible what the informants stated with evidence from scholarly literature. However, for this study I believe that it is not enough to rely primarily on the work of scholars, because, as Finlayson's (1994) and Neis' (1997) studies have shown, the devaluation of local fishers' knowledge is in large part the reason for the collapse of the fishery.
From this evidence, I suggest that as the fishery was broken into separately operating components, several distinct vocabularies emerged and therefore distinct realities, and that they remained isolated from each other. Political decisions were made without the benefit of the entire range of fisheries knowledge possessed by the various stakeholders in the fishery. In fact, cross-discussion and public consultation were even discouraged by DFO administration and policies. I examine the possible reasons why so much evidence of the potential collapse of the cod stocks was missed or ignored by both DFO and the media, and how the result was a limited debate that kept both fishers and the Canadian people from participating in the discussion.
The bulk of media coverage occurred after the collapse of the cod stocks, when the issue was "news." Like most other environmental disasters, the slow demise of an ecology does not make headline news, and the result is limited public debate about resource and environmental issues. This Canadian environmental catastrophe illustrates the importance of Habermas' conception of the "public sphere" as a place in which people come together and engage in dialogue as equal participants (Habermas, 1989) and Popper's conception of an "open society." As Popper noted, "Only political power, when it is used to suppress free criticism, or when it fails to protect it, can impair the functioning of these [democratic] institutions, on which all progress, scientific, technological, and political, ultimately depends" (1966, p. 218).
Throughout the industrializing process within the fisheries, discourses among the various actors overlapped, integrated, and informed each other. However, I look at four major discursive realms that emerged in the industrialized fishery. They include "fishers' vernacular," "scientific language," the corporate processors' "product talk," and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' "official word." Like Finlayson's social constructivist work, Michel Callon's study of scallop fishers in St. Brieuc Bay uncovers the ongoing attempts to translate between descriptions of nature among fishers and those of scientists (1986, pp. 186-233). In the case of the cod fishery, few translations were attempted between the separate worlds. Instead, fishery workers throughout the industry and officials with DFO conducted deliberations about the ecological conditions of the fish stocks in distinct discursive realms. The results were collective silences and constructed lies among the actors in the fishery. Few remained within the industry who did not know of the tenuous states of the cod stocks, but none were individually capable of slowing down the vast fish killing process that occurred in Atlantic Canada.
Construction of an industrial fishery
Because of the sheer numbers of Gadus morhua, the Atlantic cod, in the North Atlantic, this species was once the basis of a huge international fishery (Cushing, 1966). Legend has it that John Cabot, an early European explorer of North America, lowered baskets into the sea and the cod literally jumped into them, eager for the frying pan. The French and the English vied for control of both North America and the cod fishery by establishing outposts such as Louisbourg and Canso in what is now Nova Scotia, in some cases displacing the Native people who supplemented their winter ungulate meals with summer fish.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the cod fishery in Atlantic Canada was primarily a family-run salt cod industry (Binkley, 1995, p. 18; Davis, 1991, p. 61; Matthews, 1993, p. 30). Fishers sailed from their ports in schooners or dories to catch cod with handlines, longlines, or small nets. The women and children of the communities laid out the fish on beach stones or fish flakes (raised wooden lattices) to air and dry them. Most of this fish was sold to a fish broker and shipped to Caribbean and southern European countries, where the Catholic calendar of fast days created a good market for it.
Salt cod, however, did not appeal to an upscale North American market after World War II, and Stewart Bates, Canada's deputy minister of Fisheries, determined that Canada's fishery would industrialize (Wright, 1997, p. 195). He encouraged funding for fresh/frozen fish plants, helped establish trucking systems from Atlantic Canada to the major American markets, and encouraged investment in fishing vessels that could more efficiently harvest vast amounts of cod in an expanded offshore fishery. Steam trawlers had been introduced with some resistance in the early 1920s, but in them fishers began to reach fishing grounds farther from home (Balcom, 1995). Equipped with dragging equipment, trawlers towed huge metal doors along the ocean bottom, bulldozing the fragile seabed to collect bottom-feeders such as haddock, flounder, and cod. The seabed is also where these fish spawn, but in such a vast ocean it seemed unlikely that the damage would be irreparable. These ships brought their catches to fish processing plants located around the coastal perimeter of Atlantic Canada. Factory freezer trawlers began to ply the North Atlantic waters in the mid-1950s. These huge international ships, the size of ocean liners, had on board all the equipment necessary to catch the fish, cull them by species, clean and gut them, turn the offal into fishmeal, and quick-freeze the fillets (Warner, 1983, p. vii). Fishers no longer had to beat the clock to get fresh fish to shore. Once the holds of the trawlers were filled, the ships would return to port and unload their processed catch.
In the late forties and early fifties many small, locally owned fish plants in Canada were modernized or purchased by larger fish processing companies (Davis, 1991, pp. 71-72; Kimber, 1989, pp. 130, 142). A small-scale hunting and gathering economy that might once have been entirely within the auspices of one family was now divided and segmented into assembly line operations (Matthews, 1993, p. 137; Neis, 1997, p. 246). New markets were created for fresh and frozen fish through television advertising; through the emergence of supermarkets, with their frozen food sections and display cases; and through the demands of the fast-paced, mobile, North American lifestyles that required quick and easy foods (Kimber, 1989, p. 126). With the creation of new markets for fish, pressure mounted to increase fish yields. International fishing had taken place in the North Atlantic since the fifteenth century. However, by the mid-1970s Canada became concerned about protection of fish stocks in adjacent waters and in 1977 implemented the 200-mile limit of jurisdiction. Canada issued quotas to both Canadian and international vessels to fish in these waters and increased government regulation of the resource (Matthews, 1993, p. 40). Continuing a pattern of earlier grid plans, the sea was numbered like postal codes - 2J3KL, 4RS3Pn, 4VN - and DFO issued quotas to individuals, corporations, and countries with the proper licences to catch specific species in designated areas.
For as long as local memory serves, the cod fishery has had ups and downs - what fishers call cycles. Some years the fish just did not come close enough to shore for the inshore fishers to gather them, and those years would be calamitous for small outports in Atlantic Canada. But with the introduction of ships that could steam miles from home and sonar equipment that could track fish in any water, catches became more reliable, albeit with variations in catch quantities. The 1977 200-mile jurisdiction reduced the international presence in the waters substantially, and in 1982, the Canadian catch level was the highest on record (Dunne, 1990, p. 1). But by 1990, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong (Steele & Andersen, 1997, pp. 261-267).
Life in the fishery
Workers in the fishing industry became unwitting accomplices in the demise of their own fishery. Before the industrialization of the fishery, outport fishers' families lived precarious lives. Eventually many of the outports of Newfoundland that were accessible only by boat were closed and families moved to less remote towns in Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and mainland Nova Scotia where fish plants needed employees. Paid work was available for the first time, and these once relatively self-sufficient families joined the cash economy and lived in an industrial world - owning homes, owning cars, and eventually sending their kids off to school. No longer beholden to a fish broker, they took home hourly wages from the fish plant or a share of the catch working on the trawlers or draggers. But once fishery workers became dependent on a paycheque, they were reluctant to point out the potential deficiencies in the industrial system. Although many fishers' groups warned DFO of the impending disaster (Candow, 1997, p. 153), in general individual fishers were part of a collective silence in the face of the vast overfishing in which they themselves participated. Yet, walking away from the work was not an option. With families to support, mortgages to pay, and very few alternatives to fisheries work even in the larger fish plant towns, labour in the fishery remained, for the most part, silent.
As the Canadian offshore fishery expanded, the regulations controlling what could be caught and where it could be caught also expanded. A typical National Sea Products trawler captain would be sent to sea as often as was physically possible (Binkley, 1995, p. 89). The captains and crew received very few days off, and regardless of weather conditions, the ships were sent to find the fish. Many informants remember seeing trawlers leave ports just as a storm was hitting the shores - conditions in which no good independent captain would have set sail. One informant stated about fish plant decisions:
A lot of times they'll say, "Well, it's up to the captain." But I don't believe that for a moment. I mean, if you get three captains stays out and one stays in because he didn't like the weather conditions, well, that captain's not gonna be there. That's plain and simple. (Informant 1, 1997)
The fish plant's only concern, according to employees, was production volume. The market-driven approach to fish processing obscured ecological and climatic limitations.
Trawler captains were sent out to hunt fish with sealed orders known as "shopping lists." These lists told them the exact area in which they could fish and the exact species and quantities they were to procure. One observer stated:
NatSea had these shopping list cruises where they'd go out and say, "Okay, we have orders for this many redfish and this many flatfish, and this many haddock. And so this is how many you'll bring back." And of course the only way you could do that is massive discarding. (Informant 2, 1997)
The company made the captains wait until they had left port to open their orders to prevent arguments on the wharf over the lists. Most of the captains had many years of fishing experience and knew they would be unlikely to find the requisite fish in the locations to which they had been sent. If they did not return to the fish plant with the correct fish, the captains received stern reprimands or, indeed, threats of losing their jobs (Informant 5, 1996). Many of them therefore tacitly defied orders once they were on the high seas and caught the fish where they knew they could find them. Their paycheques and their crews' paycheques depended on bringing home the right quantities of the right fish. Those fish that didn't meet the "shopping list" orders were discarded as bycatch.
Crews followed their captains' orders even as they grumbled about the carnage and waste committed at their own hands. They dared not complain, for there were plenty of other workers willing to take their place if the captain fired them. A cook who had worked on a trawler remarked:
The company knew the fish was smaller and getting smaller, but the company was there for the money.… And the skippers had no choice - the captains had no choice either. But as a crew member we had no say at all whatsoever. We couldn't tell the skipper or the captain, "You don't shoot away here because the fish are smaller." We had no say in that. The company had the say. (Informant 3, 1997)
For miles around them the sea would appear frothy with the white flesh of floating fish bellies. Ship after ship fishing the same grounds were discarding their bycatch also. Not only were Canadian fishing vessels plying the banks and shelves of the North Atlantic; crew members remember that Russian, Spanish, American, and many other nations' fishing fleets lit up the pitch-black night. All held quotas for specific fish in specific areas - a system designed for conservation that instead created incentives to devastate the stocks. The trawler cook remembered: "At night, from the bridge, the lights from these foreign and domestic vessels made it look like a city at night. Looking at this you would come to realize: how can this continue if the fishing industry is going to survive?" (Informant 3, 1997). Another offshore crew member stated: "Sometimes it would be like a city in the nighttime. There might be 25, 30 other boats out there doing the same thing" (Informant 4, 1997).
By the mid-1980s, as it became clear that many of the captains' logs only vaguely resembled where they had been and what they had caught or discarded, DFO began an observer program. Hired through a contractor, observers were placed randomly on both Canadian and international fishing ships. They kept independent records that were turned in to the contractor and then passed on to DFO for comparison with the captains' logs. Although the observer program seemed logical and well-meaning to DFO directors, it simply added another set of constrained voices to the mix. In fact, most observers were not allowed to speak to the captains or crew about the voyages, and their silence created a threatening environment in which the fishing crew worked. One observer commented: "I really thought that I could do my job better if I could actually communicate with these people.… We were gagged; we were not supposed to talk about anything" (Informant 2, 1997).
Ships without observers violated quota regulations with impunity in order to bring in the fish required by their employer - the fish plant (Informant 5, 1996). When observers were aboard, the captains attempted to follow orders, but often the fish simply weren't there. Most hauls included fish they did not want - too small or the wrong species for the processing machines. High-grading required that the low-quality bycatch be either "dumped" or "discarded." "Dumped" fish never came aboard; the nets were cut and the fish were released before ever hitting the deck. "Discarded" fish was a euphemism for expelled bycatch - it was legal because the fish were brought aboard the decks, inspected or culled for the allowable fish, and then washed overboard.
Most discards were 100% washed over and any culling was for the observers' records. All these fish, whether dumped or discarded, were hauled up in huge baglike nets with thousands of pounds of fish in them, thus thousands of pounds of pressure, and only a few near the top of the net might survive the ordeal. So nearly all the fish, whether they were dumped or discarded, were returned to the sea dead. "Basically, once a fish comes into a net like that, especially if it's a dragger, once that hits the surface of the water, the majority of those fish are dead" (Informant 1, 1997). "They called it discarding, but everything is dead. Once it's on board, it's dead. At 6 to 9 knots towing you catch a school, they just get compressed" (Informant 2, 1997). Another offshore fisher recounted:
Every once in a while you'd clean the deck off by sticking the water hose on them and flushing everything back overboard again. And then start taking it aboard fresh again and then start cutting and picking out of it, with thousands and thousands of fish going overboard, steady. More went overboard than we were saving.… During that point of time, we might load up one of them draggers in five days with close to 300,000 pounds that we'd carry, and probably we hoisted in a million pounds of fish to bring that in. (Informant 4, 1997)
Fishers and observers noted that by the late 1980s more and more hauls were made but fewer and fewer fish were kept for processing. Sometimes as many as nine out of ten hauls were discarded (Informant 2, 1997). And although these conditions were often recorded by observers, their records seemed never to influence DFO policy. An observer recalled:
A couple of times I wrote down, "This trip should be stopped. The fish that they're aiming for are not here, so the vessels should be released from their current quota restrictions. Let them go east or send them home or something. This is genocide." (Informant 2, 1997)
One scientist speculated that a record of huge amounts of bycatch might appear as an outlier (statistical anomaly) in the DFO tabulations and be completely eliminated from the records (Informant 6, 1997). Some observers reported bribes from captains and warnings from DFO officials to confine any criticisms of federal personnel or descriptions of problems to "oral dissertation" (Thorne, 1985). Most observers, wishing to keep their jobs, "went along" with what the contractor expected. Their catch records would be higher than the captains' logs, since the captains were expected to lie, but lower than the truth. An observer stated: "The assumption is that the captains are lying and we're there to report the inevitable lie. They're assumed guilty.… Word came down from DFO to watch me, 'His counts are too close to the captain's' " (Informant 2, 1997).
DFO also managed an enforcement division to police the fishing industry. These officers had the power to board a ship and verify that the catch was within the legal limits. In the mid-1980s, DFO enforcement officers were armed with guns because tempers could run high when a fisher's livelihood was being questioned. But, like the observers, enforcement officers also felt that the information about illegal fishing they were able to glean was not put to useful purposes. Enforcement officers reported that their DFO superiors supported them when they busted the little independent fisher, but when they sought to prosecute transshipments of illegal fish, usually being off-loaded at large fish plants, they were discouraged from taking legal action. The government simply didn't have the funds to take a big fish plant to court. They used the little busts as examples to deter other little players from cheating, and they talked them up in the media. But this did nothing to dissuade the large fish plants from breaking the law. A former fisheries enforcer described the constraints involved with enforcement.
It's very easy to take the low-end guy to court and kick the shit out of him … it's really hard to do it with National Sea.… You need a lot of people to put a case together and if it doesn't pan out, you've just blown your entire enforcement budget. So they concentrate on getting the little guy, and on their books they'll say, "Well, they had so many charges on the ground fishery and so many convictions, and it looks good." (Informant 7, 1996)
Workers in the fish plants also saw the unprecedented quantities of fish passing under their hands. Yet they were encouraged through bonuses and incentives to speed up production. Some people simply could not keep up with the pace at which the fish moved through the plant, and often their co-workers would help them process the required amount to make their base pay (Informant 8, 1997). Most fishery workers were unionized, and the unions negotiated with governments and corporations to keep the fish procurement high and the jobs expanding. Some union members even pressured media personnel not to report the fishing situation in order to protect jobs for as long as possible. "The union did not want the fishery closed; it wanted jobs, union dues" (Informant 3, 1997).
From ships' captains to observers to packers, just about every person working in the fishery wondered how much longer it could last. Most of these people had vast experience with fishing on a smaller scale, but the volumes of fish that were dumped or cranked through the plants were unlike anything that had gone before. The result of various pressures on these workers was that every facet of labour in the fishery was constrained in their ability to report the devastation. It was talked about around kitchen tables, in pubs, and on fishing wharves, but it rarely entered a public forum for debate. Fishery workers felt powerless to shape the policies that DFO was setting - policies that eventually left them jobless.
Four distinct discursive realms
Fishers' vernacular
"Fishers' vernacular" was employed by labour in the fishery - dragger captains, crew members, longline fishers, and fish plant workers. Their discourses were discounted by policymakers because they existed primarily in oral form, used local idioms and descriptions, represented working-class culture, and were associated with seafarers' pre-modern traditions. Their ecological knowledge was, for the most part, ignored by DFO, the corporations, and the media. My examples of fishers' vernacular come from the town of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, which is a typical example of a community that was almost entirely dependent on the fishing industry for its survival. Although several small fish plants operated in this town of 1,200, the largest employer was National Sea Products, Ltd., which ran a modern industrial fish plant - the second largest in the province - that employed close to 500 people.
Although some of the labour in the Louisbourg fishing industry have high-school educations, even university degrees, few feel comfortable with "book learning." Most fishers can read and write, but they lack the verbal acumen to write letters or contribute information in the bureaucratic or technical jargon expected by officials of DFO and the media. When fishers in Louisbourg were especially moved to articulate their needs, they often asked people with more formal education to construct letters for them. The fishers' ecological experience was highly local - that is, they knew a great deal about the sea they fished from first-hand, generational experience. And this caused them to be suspicious of scientists who learned of the sea primarily through books.
Many fishers in Cape Breton, like their ancestors in Newfoundland, operate primarily in an oral tradition. Their articulations are idiomatic and include a high degree of local vernacular. For example, I have often heard one fisher ask another, "Arn?" (meaning "Are there any fish here?"). The response might be "Nar'n" ("No, there aren't any fish here"). Idiomatic names of fish species are sometimes substituted for proper or scientific names. The oral and highly idiomatic nature of the fishers' society usually made their discourse invalid in terms of scientific evidence and media representation. Yet as Neis (1997, p. 243) and Finlayson (1994, pp. 101-105) have pointed out, these fishers had intimate knowledge of the local ecology, often handed down for many generations, and their knowledge would have been invaluable to stock assessment. The fishers were fully aware of the overfishing that was going on in the industrial fishery, but because they were not consulted, their evidence was overlooked. One trawlerman noted:
It was like everybody knew what was going on. All you had to do was be at the Legion on a Saturday afternoon, and when the fishermen were in from fishing, or anytime the fishermen were in, they'd be talking about how much fish they'd caught and brought in. Say if we brought in about 200,000 pounds of fish, we probably would have thrown or destroyed another 200 to 250,000 just to get that many. (Informant 3, 1997)
Neis, quoting Finlayson, points out that most stock assessment was based on offshore trawls because "data from the offshore commercial fleet … were relatively easy to quantify and perceived as 'rational.' " Whereas data from inshore fishers were " 'largely opaque to statistical analysis' because 'results are not evaluated objectively but as an irreducible part of an individual's social and cultural reality' " (1997, p. 248).1 One inshore fisher recounted the changes as the stocks declined.
We were catching no more fish and we were increasing our gear and it seemed the only way to improve was to get another trap, just keep on getting gear, more gear. Started off one, now we got four. Even though we were increasing our gear the fish were getting much smaller. Fish wasn't half the size the last few years as they had been years before that. We had to catch twice as much fish for the same amount of weight. (Neis, 1997, p. 248)
Another fisher described the stock depletion in agricultural terms.
If you use a scenario of farming … imagine planting a certain amount of land to get so many bushels of grain, and every year having to plant more land to harvest the same amount. Eventually, there isn't enough hours to plant, and that's what happened to fishing. At first, we were putting in two nets, then four, eight, then 40 nets and two cod traps, just to keep up. (Momatiuk & Eastcott, 1994, p. 18)
Finlayson examined the "incompatibility of cognitive cultures" (1994, p. 106) that existed when scientists considered fishers' ecological knowledge. Offshore assessments, though viewed as more rational by DFO (p. 105), attempted to utilize sometimes invalid scientific methods in much too variable conditions. Leslie Harris (1990) noted that surveys were conducted every year in the same three weeks in October as a "constant" or baseline analysis. But the ecological conditions are not constant, and fish do not follow our calendars (Neis, 1997, p. 253). After the closure of the fishery, a DFO "sentinel" fishery was established to monitor the recovery of the stocks. Inshore fishers were sent to specific places on specific days to catch specific fish. Many of the captains and crew complained that there had never been fish in those places at those times, but decontextualized scientific methods prevailed against local ecological knowledge.
After the moratoria were imposed, the number of fishers in Atlantic Canadian communities was expected to decline because several financial packages were instituted that included retraining and relocating. Although these packages seemed fiscally sensible from the government's perspective, they were detrimental to the cohesiveness and the cultural values of the communities involved. Even though the work in all sectors of the fishery was gruelling and uncomfortable, it had provided a sense of purpose and a daily opportunity to interact with co-workers. After the closure of the fisheries, inshore and offshore crew members expressed a sense of loss in their lives, a feeling that their lives no longer had meaning or focus within their community (Informant 4, 1997). Plant workers missed the jokes and conversations that accompanied work in the processing factories. Although the financial packages supported workers through the ensuing years of unemployment, they did little to address societal and community needs. "It's a $1.9-billion incentive that the government in Ottawa said, 'We're going to give these people the money, and we're going to get them all out of the fishery,' which is a wonderful idea if we lived in Toronto, or if both sides of the street were lined with factories and other jobs" (Informant 8, 1997).
Reports about the effectiveness of the financial assistance packages suggested that inflexible attitudes among displaced fishery workers were keeping the programs from being successful. Most workers simply did not want to relocate, retrain, or invest in a new, and probably risky, business venture. Fishers believed that the programs failed not because of obstinate fishery workers but because the program planners had not taken into account the socioeconomic and cultural values within Atlantic Canadian communities. Lifelong investments in boats, homes, and gear had little value outside the community, and relocation was difficult and costly. Those displaced workers who complied with retraining requirements found themselves still unable to find work. One former fisher took the government's option to set up his own business. He learned that even if he kept his small store open 17 hours a day, 7 days a week, he still couldn't break even. Too many potential customers either had no money to spend or had moved away (Informant 9, 1996). He eventually closed the business in 2000.
Those least powerful within the fishery seemed to be receiving the bulk of the hardship and the blame for the collapse of the industry and its inability to adjust quickly to new circumstances (MacKeigan, 1997, p. 4). Although DFO spokespeople have claimed that DFO has scaled back its workforce, few people in Louisbourg see evidence of this. After a study in Atlantic Canada suggested that insolvent communities should be allowed to die, one former town councillor in Louisbourg wrote:
The scientists who miscalculated the cod quotas will not suffer the indignities of drawing [employment insurance] or asking for social assistance to feed their families.
The politicians who gambled away Atlantic Canada's future in high stakes games with the rest of the world will not be told to "dwindle away." The bureaucrats in the funding agencies will not be expected to "out-migrate" to imaginary jobs in other provinces that can scarcely better support follies than we can.
Only those people who had no real say in any of these decisions will suffer from them. Only the powerless will know the indignities of a system that is this flawed. (MacDonald, 1996, p. 5)
Scientific language
The second discursive realm I investigated was "scientific language" used by both independent and DFO scientists. This vocabulary was often incomprehensible to fishers and media representatives, and it was misunderstood or misrepresented by DFO administrators. Scientists talked to each other in laboratories and intradisciplinary journals, but rarely did their knowledge reach public forums for discussion.
DFO scientists were quick to point out that they did not set quotas or administer the fisheries. Their research is directed by DFO's science directorate, and they merely submit reports for consideration by the policymakers and quota allocators. Scientists outside of DFO are often hired by the department to conduct research on specific fishery ecologies. These fishery scientists both inside and outside DFO publish their findings in fairly specialized journals such as the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Through the latter half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, several scientists reported concern about discrepancies between different test reports of cod mortality. They suggested that DFO studies were reported erroneously. The public's access to the information being generated by scientists about cod stocks was limited, and stakeholders depended on DFO news releases for their information about fish stocks and the future of the fishery. Farrell & Goodnight's analysis of the rhetoric of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster is applicable here.
In many respects, the crisis was generated and sustained by the failure of technical reasoning to inform adequately public deliberation. By technical reason, we mean those modes of inference that are characteristic of specialized forums, wherein discourse is coded to fit functional demands of particular information fields and evaluated according to an array of state-of-the-art techniques. (1981, p. 273)
Scientific language in the fisheries collapse also was coded for particular functions. Myers, Hutchings, & Barrowman published an article entitled "Why Do Fish Stocks Collapse? The Example of Cod in Atlantic Canada" in Ecological Applications. They stated that:
Large discrepancies between the long-term patterns of abundance based on VPA (virtual population analysis) and research surveys are of great concern. For each of the six cod stocks considered here, VPA-based abundances consistently depict lower recruitment levels than do survey-based estimates. (1997, p. 103)
Few laypeople, including the media, would understand what this means. "Recruitment levels" refer to the number of young fish entering the stocks and are the basis for predictions about the numbers of fish expected in any given year. "Research surveys" are conducted and used by DFO scientists based on a series of trawl tows at random locations. Although these are intended to provide bias-free data, they may not reflect actual fishing conditions. "Virtual population analyses" - a different type of assessment based on actual fish landings - consider the age and species of fish when they reach the dock. In other words, the data DFO administrators used to set quotas and determine the amount of fish in the ocean were probably flawed. But the more conservative data were not considered by DFO administrators in their stock assessments and quota allocations, nor were they readily available to the public because of the specialized language used in the reports and their publication in journals with limited audiences. As Lyne & Howe have noted, "Most scientific debates rage within the pages of technical journals, never emerging into the light of public scrutiny" (1986, p. 132).
In fact, even the administrators setting quotas found the scientific language too turgid to understand. Rather than asking for additional explanations from the scientists, they instead limited the amount of scientific information they used in their stock assessments and quota allocations. This meant that when ranges of sustainable total allowable catches (TACs) were recommended by scientists, administrators had no understanding of the consequences of selecting the highest quota levels, and at times they even exceeded the highest limits recommended by the scientists (Donham, 1998, p. 19). They also were not fully aware of the variables that occur in any scientific estimates. After the collapse of the fishery, John Crosbie, the fisheries minister who announced the moratoria, shifted the blame to the scientists, stating:
It was thought that scientists could give you precise and certain knowledge of what the state of the fish stocks was, and it turned out that the scientists could not give you that. While their advice was always slavishly followed, it wasn't realized, certainly not by me, that it wasn't really possible to advise you to the tonne what a safe [catch quota] was. (Strauss, 1997, p. A6)
Yet the scientists were employed by DFO, the same department that manages the fishery, and they were certainly available to clarify their data - but were never asked to do so (Informant 6, 1997).
Scientists working with DFO were required to submit their scientific papers to two people in DFO whose comments were then forwarded, with their papers, to the Director of Science, who ultimately decided whether they would be published (Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, 1993, p. 7).2 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, DFO science was directed toward understanding the natural environmental factors that led to the collapse of the cod fishery. Scientists primarily investigated ocean salinity, ocean temperatures, seal population, and high mortality of young cod. Several scientists began to question the emphasis placed on environmental factors instead of overfishing and concluded that there were not adequate data to support environmental factors as the primary culprit in the collapse of the cod stocks. Myers, Hutchings, & Barrowman (1997) wrote a paper to that effect. They concluded that the collapse could be most reasonably attributed to overfishing, though a weakened stock, they conceded, might be further weakened by detrimental environmental factors. The paper was vetted through five reviewers, and eventually the Director of Science came to visit the scientists to express his concerns over the paper. In spite of attempts to protect the reputation of the department, the paper was finally published, and it acted as a catalyst for media investigations and public exposure of DFO science problems.
Scientists employed by DFO were also constrained by a "gag order." In a 1982 "Departmental Discipline Guide" prepared by DFO's personnel directorate, employees were informed of four levels of infractions that required disciplinary measures. The fourth category included "public criticism of the employer," and punishments ranged from one to two days' suspension to discharge (Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1982, Appendix A). Thus, internal whistle-blowers had no protection from job loss. One scientist noted, "If DFO doesn't want it to get to print, then no one ever gets to see it … there's all kinds of ways of hiding the truth or hiding what is said" (Informant 10, 1997).
Not until 1997 when Hutchings, Walters, & Haedrich published an article entitled "Is Scientific Inquiry Incompatible with Government Information Control?" were the DFO scientists' positions clarified. In this article, the authors described the political and institutional influences placed on DFO scientists that hampered their ability to do good science. They concluded:
We have given two examples of how nonscience influences can interfere with scientific information and the undertaking and conduct of fisheries research in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The present framework for linking science with management can [lead], and has … led to abuses that threaten the ability of scientists to understand fully the causes of fish declines, to identify means of preventing fishery collapses from recurring, to incorporate scientific advice in management decisions, and to communicate research in a timely fashion to as wide an audience as possible. (Hutchings, Walters, & Haedrich, 1997, p. 1208)
Product talk
The third discursive realm was industry's vocabulary or "product talk," which was based almost exclusively on the economics of the fishery. Reports were about market shares, job creation, and product development. "Product talk" completely disregarded the ecological context of the fishery and instead mingled with the decontextualized vocabulary of the North American consumer culture. Industry was heavily involved in DFO quota decisions and advocated a high-volume fishery to maintain shareholder profits.
During the 1960s, as the industrialization of Atlantic Canada's fishery progressed, fish plant executives stressed the demands placed on the industry to feed the burgeoning world population (Corney, 1963, p. 61; Finn, 1963, p. 47). Spurred by this perception of growing world demand for food, fish processing corporations expanded their fleets and their procurement capacities. In 1963, Dave Corney, general manager of Acadia Fisheries Limited, in Mulgrave, Nova Scotia, described the expansion.
Large scale construction of the most modern and efficient fishing craft in Canadian Shipyards has now reached peak proportions and it is evident that here on the East Coast a determined effort is being made to maintain and extend our harvesting capability.… The modernization and expansion of the fishing fleet has given tremendous impetus to the growth of new and modern processing, freezing and handling facilities … and this trend will assist to a high degree in deriving the maximum dollar return for the products of our East Coast waters. (1963, p. 61)
Corney's article included many of the key words that reflect the values of the industrial fish plants. These included "modernization," "efficiency," "expansion," and "profitability," all aimed at selling more product. Industry publications made virtually no references to the ecological state of the oceans or the fish in them, and instead spoke primarily in terms of control over Mother Nature. In order to show more profits, corporations sought to harvest more fish, process more fish, expand into more markets, and smooth out the cycles and vagaries of the fishery.
National Sea Products is one of the world's largest fish processors. In 1989 the company commissioned a book to document its tumultuous rise to riches, called Net Profits (Kimber, 1989). The book details the company's expansion, technologization, increased productivity, and innovative marketing schemes as small local fish processing companies gradually fell under the auspices of the big fish processing company - known colloquially as "NatSea." The book's primary focus is on corporate mergers, politics, and financial dealings. With the declaration of the 200-mile limit, assets of the five largest East Coast fisheries doubled, and National Sea was the biggest player in the business.
Most fishery workers I spoke with believed that there existed a very close relationship between the large fish processing plants such as National Sea and the federal government. The CEOs of the corporations continue to have close alliances with government officials, and they form the core group determining fisheries policy. "I think companies are regulating the government," stated one fisher (Informant 4, 1997). Kent Blade, in his article on the death of the Atlantic fishery, noted that:
this inner circle, led by DFO, is generally insulated from input by individual fishermen and the general public, except in crisis situations.… While individual fishermen and even representatives of fishermen's organizations cannot hope to gain entrance to this sub-government structure, large corporations like National Sea Products, Fishery Products International, and Clearwater Fine Foods, with their size, influence, and organizational structures are capable of "interfacing" with the federal government on their own. (Blade, 1995, pp. 121-122)
In addition to this direct influence, federal and provincial funding underwrites a substantial portion of these large companies, and therefore the governments have vested interests in maintaining close relationships with the corporations. Even after the ground fishery closure, the large corporations remained busy and profitable, thanks in part to the companies' diversity of products and their concentration of capital. The accumulation of power in the hands of these fish processing corporations further reduced the ability of smaller, inshore fishers to interact with DFO representatives and have a voice in their livelihoods. Yet the government supported this situation because fewer, large plants meant fewer fishers and "significant economies of scale" (Blade, 1995, p. 126). Consolidation made the industry much easier to control and regulate. Most fishers stated that it is only a matter of time before the entire industry is in the hands of a few corporations. "They also have a policy of pitting one fisherman against another fisherman.… The end result is they want corporations to take over the fishery" (Informant 11, 1997).
But this behind-the-scenes control is not what the fishery corporations talked about. They talked about the products they marketed, the jobs they created, and the money they gleaned from the sea. Net Profits describes the introduction of new products such as frozen fish sticks, "Captain's Chicken," and frozen fish and chips ("haddock-in-batter"). The book recounts the company's marketing dilemma with their haddock-in-batter.
The very success of haddock-in-batter led to a crisis for National Sea that eventually pointed up both the company's growing marketing strength and also its fundamental production weakness.
The production weakness was the reality that National Sea was dependent on a sometimes fickle Mother Nature to supply its raw material. Haddock-in-batter's popularity, for example, quickly led to a scarcity of fresh haddock, and that forced the company to switch from haddock, first to cod from frozen blocks and then eventually to a newly named species of fish known as Boston Bluefish … just the lowly pollock masquerading under a more attractive - and marketable - name. (Kimber, 1989, p. 129)
The success of National Sea Products' marketing campaigns became apparent as it attempted to secure additional quotas for the resource. The company's own newsletter stated: "At one point it appeared that haddock might almost be totally wiped out.… [But] through strenuous efforts of our people involved in these negotiations, we have managed to at least salvage enough haddock so that we can meet our basic market needs in Canadian Retails and Fresh Fish" (Cummings, 1987). That the species was in jeopardy was of little concern to the company. Once a market was created it had to be supplied. The company continued to generate greater consumption of fish products by "merchandising techniques [that] included fish nets, boats, paper mache [sic] fish, posters, live fish tanks, in-store sampling, recipe cards, and 'Fish Fact' sheets" (National Sea Products, 1987, n.p.) and by creating new species names for less palatable ones.
To meet the increased demands for product, corporations like National Sea instituted bonus systems for increased productivity. Although workers might double their speed, they were never paid double for their work. In the late 1980s, the company instead introduced competitions between and within plants that led to congratulations in the employee newsletter.
The night shift shed department crew was pretty excited when they learned they set a new record for unloading a boxed trawler on March 13, 1989 at Canso Division. There were smiles all around when the final tally of 3,078 white boxes of 422,000 pounds of fish off the Cape Fortune was announced.… Great job Canso! Try topping that one guys!! (National Sea Products, 1989, n.p.)
Yet behind the exclamation points and excitement, companies such as National Sea were finding ways to squeeze a little more profit out of their workers. Captains and crews were paid for their fishing trips based on the quality of the fish species they landed. On one occasion, a captain was paid for second-quality fish, but his wife, who worked in the Louisbourg plant, packaged the same fish to be sold as first quality (Informant 12, 1997). Later, another captain also was paid for second-quality fish, but kept a fillet to be tested. Unwittingly, DFO technicians tested it as top quality (Informant 5, 1997). Although these apparent deceptions seemed commonplace, workers who complained about this treatment had little recourse or means of reprisal. The company would simply fire the captains, since they had no union protection, with the result that most remained silent to keep their jobs and to keep their crews employed.
The discourse emanating from the corporations focused on jobs and profits. To satisfy the employer meant to move a lot of fish through the plant. But the great pressure being placed on the fish stocks by the kind of production going on at Louisbourg's National Sea plant did not go unnoticed by labour. One fish plant worker stated:
There was a lot of concern especially on the trawlermen's part because they saw … the small fish that was coming up and they saw the dumping. As far as being in the plant, we knew it was happening, but at the time I don't think there was much concern because I think we wanted to believe the scientists. We saw what was happening, but we wanted to keep our jobs, so we believed what we were told. (Informant 8, 1997)
Corporate literature deflected attention away from dwindling fish stocks and toward marketing, product creation, and jobs. The viability of the species was of so little concern to large corporations like National Sea Products that it practised "pulse fishing" - fishing that completely depleted one stock, then shifted to another to deplete it. In fishery management, market-driven discourse prevailed even within the regulatory bodies, and very little consultation occurred between DFO managers and fishers or scientists.
The official word
The fourth discursive realm was DFO's own reports, constructed as the "official word," which obscured the ecological and social consequences of the overfishing in four ways: 1) by diverting attention away from it to environmental factors, 2) by focusing on small-violation enforcement while much larger stock damage was occurring legally and illegally, 3) by communicating to fishers in legal and technical jargon that fishers had to hire lawyers to translate, and 4) by conducting pseudo-consultation with fishers and the public. While they purported to be acting to conserve the fish stocks, DFO officials focused blame on ecological conditions and fishery labour, ignoring the procurement techniques and production conditions of the fishery that they condoned.3 DFO directors had the power to select their version of the ecological catastrophe and legitimate the accounts they chose, thus DFO announcements often were accepted as "the way it was" in the fishery by the Canadian public, even though they were based only on superficial consultation with both fishers and scientists.
Like the fishing industry, DFO is comprised of many varied divisions and functions, and their interaction is limited. DFO's communication department and official spokespeople control all information released by the department. To the scientists, the inability to talk about their work hampered their ability to share knowledge. But, according to one scientist, to the bureaucrats, "it's a sensible policy. It's part of our media relations policy.… Controlling information is very important to a bureaucracy, and to allow individuals to speak on these matters would be a problem" (Informant 6, 1997).
To protect the department from public criticism, especially after the collapse of the cod stocks, DFO directors shifted the blame for the damage to environmental factors and the individual fishers (Donham, 1998, p. 19). Although DFO scientists had specific scientifically based explanations for the demise of the cod stocks, news reports stated that "federal scientists say they can't explain the decline [in cod stocks]" (Canadian Press, January 27, 1994, p. 1). One DFO spokesperson, Mike Hammill, stated that "Fishermen were probably the main culprits in the demise of the cod industry.…. But … that fish-eating seals may be a factor in the cod's failure to make a comeback" (Canadian Press, March 24, 1994, p. 9).4
News reports indicated that DFO officials "routinely destroy memos, minutes and other records to hide politically unpalatable science and thwart access-to-information requests" (Canadian Press, August 21, 1997, p. 10). Although a DFO official stated that the department has a "free flow of ideas and we encourage our scientists to do original research and to publish it," unidentified sources within DFO claimed that "the system controls very, very tightly ideas, attitudes and information flows" (Canadian Press, August 21, 1997, p. 10).
In the wake of several media stories about DFO "thought police," the department resorted to accusations of conspiracy against its critics. Scott Parsons, a DFO official, stated that "there's a deliberate effort under way to discredit the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, by a cabal of animal rights activists with a grudge against the government." Later in the same news report, Parsons admitted that "some allegations have been made by employees of the department. But he said 'the stories are essentially all false' "(Foot, 1997).
Information available to DFO management was systematically ignored or not incorporated in quota allocation, stock assessment, and public deliberations. This included information from shore monitors, enforcement officers, observers, and fishers. One scientist observed with regard to the situation that "Only certain people could look at any of the data within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It was ludicrous. There was more than a decade when no analysis was carried out of crucial data that reached the primary literature" (Informant 10, 1997). Most fishers, both captains and crews, agreed that DFO shore monitors and enforcement officers were aware of overfishing. But, according to a former National Sea Products trawler captain, the department and the large companies were very cozy. "They were the company. DFO was part of National Sea" (Informant 5, 1996). Referring to one of his supervisors, the informant stated: "That fellow … came from DFO to work for National [Sea] when the government changed. And now the government changed again and one that used to be one of our bosses is back working for DFO again."
As bringing in the same amount of fish began to take longer and longer, the fishers believed that DFO personnel must have known the situation, and moreover that if they did not, they were negligent in not finding out. An inshore longlining fisher noted that "in 1981, let's say, I could catch more fish in one day than I could catch in a week or a week and a half the last year I had the boat" (Informant 11, 1997). One crew member added that DFO officials should have known the state of the fishery. "They'd know by the expenses, the fuel, and by the logbooks that were kept by the captains, who mark down where they were fishing, if it was 120 miles or 320 miles from here, it was kept track of" (Informant 1, 1997). But there is some doubt about just what information DFO made it their business to acquire, because "[f]ishermen, especially those based inshore with fixed gear, had been saying for some time that there was a resource crisis" (Momatiuk & Eastcott, 1994, p. 21).
Although DFO observers were placed aboard the ships to witness hauls and record the tonnage caught, the information they gleaned was afforded little priority by the DFO bureaucracy. According to one scientist working with DFO, the low value given to observers' reports was evidenced by the department having only one person handle and record the data in Newfoundland. That person indicated that there might have been more to the statistics than what became departmental information. "He might have thrown out what he considered to be outliers," and he might have discarded some of the observers' comments (Informant 6, 1997). While DFO published official reports of 1.8% bycatch, observers who weren't "playing the game" were recording 70 to 80% bycatch and discard rates. DFO never investigated these discrepancies, even though they were often corroborated by trawler crews' personal observations.
As DFO officials sought little input from stakeholders in the fishery, they also did little to facilitate interaction between fishers and department officials. Complaints among fishery workers ranged from DFO's use of obscure language to pseudo-consultation to outright lies. One fisher stated, "They have committees and boards set up now where fishermen are supposed to have some input, and yet none of what you say is ever taken seriously" (Informant 1, 1997). An enforcement officer called DFO meetings "smoke and mirrors": "That's what they do. They get you there at the table, and then they say, 'Well, we consulted with you'" (Informant 7, 1997). Minutes of meetings kept by fishers rarely matched the "official" minutes DFO sent them, and fishers felt disenfranchised in the decision-making process. One scientist affiliated with DFO described a meeting in Bonavista, Newfoundland, including DFO and local fishers.
In the summer of 1995, DFO was going to different communities. They come in to the community, they go to a union hall at nine o'clock in the morning, they start showing overheads, lots of graphs, describing the state of the fishery today. And after about an hour and a half they say, "Now we want to learn from you. What kind of information can you provide? We want to interact." The next thing that happens is venting of frustration, anger, questions that for the most part have nothing to do with what they just talked about. The meeting ends at eleven thirty, quarter to twelve, everyone leaves the building, and the DFO people are saying, "My God, what a waste of time. They keep saying they want to interact more and this is the sort of thing we have to put up with." And then DFO goes to the next community to repeat the same thing. (Informant 6, 1997)
The scientist suggested that not only did DFO staff set the agenda in meetings with fishers, they also spoke a language that few fishers could comprehend. He stated: "When terms are used like 'fish mortality' or 'selectivity,' it was clear that the [fishers] did not understand what we were trying to get at. And this was leading to confrontation, but it really just came down to the fishing representatives not knowing what these terms meant" (Informant 6, 1997).
The initial bailout package for fishers went into effect, according to fisheries union representative Jim Gill, without any consultation with fisheries workers (Stewart, 1994b, p. 1). A year after the moratoria were enacted, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans asked for witnesses to express their views on the stop-gap financial packages in place to assist laid-off fishers. The committee planned to hold teleconference meetings in major centres across the Maritimes, and they encouraged individuals and organizations to:
submit written briefs to the Committee … in English, French or both official languages. If possible, briefs should be typed on 28 cm by 22 cm paper with margins of 3 cm by 2 cm. Public distribution of all briefs is left to the discretion of the Committee … [and] witnesses invited to appear before the Committee will be chosen from among those who have made submissions or who have requested to be heard. (Canada, Parliament, House of Commons, Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, 1994, p. 11)
The official demeanour of committee communication and emphasis on a formal written submission to this consultation process left most Cape Breton fishers without a voice and once again emphasized the "official word" that allowed little room for fishers' vernacular. Nevertheless, fishers attempted to comply, and they met before the teleconference to ask for more personal consultation with DFO representatives. Halifax was the closest teleconferencing site in Nova Scotia, but the expenses of a five-hour drive were nearly impossible for most island fishers (Rooyakkers, 1994, p. 3). Jim Gill told the meeting of fishers that:
the federal committee gathering input for improvements to the new fisheries aid package would not be visiting their communities. Instead, he criticized, fisherpeople are being told to travel to Halifax where they can speak to the Ottawa committee directly through a computer link.
"This is the response we're getting to this immediate crisis? I think it's time that the committee came here and listened to you and your problems," declared Gill. (Rooyakkers, 1994, p. 3)
Although a teleconference eventually was arranged from a Sydney location, which was accessible to most Cape Breton residents, public perception was that the consultation process was flawed. Many fishers preferred to speak in person to the committee, and repeatedly fishery workers asked for more input in the decision-making processes (Stewart, 1994a, p. 1; Stewart, 1994c, p. 30).
The overall effect of these communication policies and decisions was an attempt to control the fishery by one organization with one unified voice - that of the DFO. However, because the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is tied closely to Ottawa's political decisions, DFO administrators were pressured to keep as many jobs viable for as long as possible in order to avoid unemployment payments to laid-off fisheries workers. In addition, the department was urged to keep quotas high by fisheries unions whose role as labour advocates required that they lobby for sustained jobs. DFO reports also noted that fishing quotas issued to the international fleet were necessary for two reasons: First, that international fleets land fish in Canadian ports for Canadians to process (Underhill, 1994, p. C6), and second, that international markets purchase Canadian-caught and processed fish (Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1980, p. 6).
Of course, the result of this pressure to keep the fishery expanding resulted in disaster. Most of the public remained unaware of the impending stock devastation and had insufficient information about the operating procedures of DFO. The Canadian people expected that DFO officials had taken reasonable precautions by gathering the necessary information to conserve stocks as well as protect the socioeconomic well-being of Atlantic Canada. But instead, the only public agency with the power to reduce the number of fish being harvested, the DFO, insulated itself from public criticism and effectively diverted blame for the fish debacle to those least influential in fishery management.
Conclusion
The wide range of interests in the fishery and its dependence on an unpredictable natural resource make it extremely complicated, not only in its production and regulation processes, but in its international scope, and it may well exemplify the structures of global resource industries in the postmodern economy. Fish stocks know no national loyalty; markets have expanded well beyond regional sources; and labour expresses tensions between individual or community independence and participation in an ever-changing, highly structured global workplace. How industries such as the fishery will be regulated in the future is debatable, especially as national and local regulatory bodies are weakened in the global market. But the Canadian case illustrates the importance of recognizing the discursive dynamics of the industry and of including as many voices as possible in the mix.
The evolution from a pre-industrial or pre-modern, through industrial or modern, to a postindustrial or postmodern fishery could be considered inevitable, but each of these movements was not predetermined. Decisions were made at every step that resulted in the fishery that exists today. For the most part, individual fishers exercised little power in those decisions because power accrued to the centre - the large fish brokers, the corporations, and the government organizations. Important sectors of the fishery were completely denied access to the deliberations of the powerful, and the public never fully realized the severity of the fishery crisis until it became media news.
In addition to recognizing the imposed constraints on the actors in the fishery, the harder question that must be asked is how to organize an industrialized fishery in a way that allows free expression among its various parts. As much as any stifling of participation at the regulatory level, the very structure of the industry (comprised as it is of separately operating parts) led to the silences and lies that contributed to the demise of the cod stocks. The fundamentally economic nature of the system - in terms of paycheques, jobs, markets, and profits - provided insufficient space for dialogue about resource conservation.
The social theories of both Habermas (1989) and Popper (1996) might be usefully applied in better managing the fisheries, including the creation of an ideal speech situation and the political will to encourage universal participation. Although theories are always easier to construct than to implement in imperfect communication situations, clearly there are obvious and specific places where communication could have been more open and should now, without question, become so in the Canadian fisheries. Among fisheries scientists, knowledge and information must be fungible and easily accessible to the public, media, and fishers. Systems of rewards and promotions in this most crucial public sphere should not be based on a number of publications in obscure scientific journals, but on levels of community interaction and inclusiveness. Scientists must not only be allowed but indeed encouraged to speak openly, and not just through government-sanctioned channels. Additionally, companies gaining profit from natural resources should be required to publicize the relative state (abundance or scarcity) of those resources in a system of annual environmental assessments. As can be seen in the case of the fishery tragedy, their deliberations with government should be transparent and available to the public and media.
Most importantly, according to my research, fishery workers should be included in decision-making about the resource they alone may be positioned to best understand. In my view, their silence in the cod fishery decisions was a result of power differences and class status. Clearly they were not silent among themselves; but they were ignored or not listened to by decision-makers. Their knowledge and opinions must be considered by regulators as important as that of both science and industry. Yet their decentralized operations, non-unionized status, and general disillusionment with the political process made them easy to ignore in the decisions and events that eventually determined their futures. What is most important in the efforts to include them is political will. It is my opinion that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans should make its first task that of facilitation: it should create opportunities for cross-discussion between and among the different discursive groups in the fishery; it should open its science departments and decision-making to the public and expect public participation; and it should continuously check back to consider its role in creating or sustaining power differences within the fishery, find those weakest voices, and listen to them. It may be too late for the cod. Many predict the species may never recover sufficiently for commercial fishing. But we can hope that the lesson learned on the East Coast is recognized as a prescription for what not to do in natural resource management.
Notes
- 1
- Although the interaction between inshore and offshore fish stocks is not known, some fishers believe that fish stocks aggregate offshore, where the water is deeper and sometimes warmer, where there is more food, and where there is more room for manoeuvring. They believe, therefore, that the bulk of the fish are offshore, which is of course the reason the industrial fishery concentrates offshore. But as offshore stocks are depleted, the first place to feel the decline in stocks is the inshore fishery, as the fish shift to the offshore to fill the vacuum. When fish are generally abundant, the inshore will be prosperous. Inshore fishers act much like canaries in coal mines, since the inshore is the first place to sense ecological change. But DFO's assessments concentrated on offshore trawls.
- 2
- The document states that "The Employer may suggest revisions to a publication and may withhold approval to publish."
- 3
- Even as late as 1997, Fisheries Minister David Anderson stated that responsibility for the fishery rests with individuals as well as the government (Summit of the Sea, St. John's, Newfoundland, September 11, 1997, p. 4). Fred Woodman, chair of the quasi-official Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC), a partnership among industry, science, and government, stated at the same summit that "The fisheries crisis cannot be related to a single cause or blamed on a single group: it is the failure of our whole fisheries system: Tremendous harvesting capacity driven by greed and subsidy, an inadequate management system, and poor knowledge of the resource" (1997, p. 3).
- 4
- Lyne & Howe assert that "expert knowledge is not just a possession of speaker or writer, but is appropriated in different ways by different audiences" (1986, p. 132). In the case of seals, audiences across Atlantic Canada took the DFO science reports as evidence that a renewed seal hunt was necessary to protect cod stocks. Yet other scientists suggest there is little evidence that culling seals will improve cod stocks, because of the relatively low volume of cod that seals eat.
Interviews
Informant 1. (1997). Inshore and offshore fisher. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 2. (1996 & 1997). DFO observer. Baddeck, NS, & Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 3. (1997). Trawlerman. Arichat, NS.
Informant 4. (1995 & 1997). Inshore and offshore fisher. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 5. (1996). Inshore and offshore fisher and captain. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 6. (1997). DFO and independent scientist. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 7. (1997). DFO enforcement officer. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 8. (1997). Fish plant worker. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 9. (1996). Oral testimony to fisheries committee. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 10. (1997). DFO and independent scientist. Halifax, NS, & Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 11. (1997). Inshore fisher. Louisbourg, NS.
Informant 12. (1997). Wife of offshore captain and inshore fisher. Louisbourg, NS.
References
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