Canada’s foremost fisheries biologists say Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s plan to rebuild Atlantic cod is “riddled with weaknesses from a science and policy perspective” and “it’s unclear whether it will help or hinder a cod recovery.”

The commentary, published last week in Policy Options, is the latest criticism of the federal strategy, which was released in December and is among the first plans the department has produced since 2019 amendments to the Fisheries Act requiring it to protect habitat and rebuild populations of critically depleted fish.

Next year marks 30 years since the 1992 cod moratorium, when the federal government shuttered Newfoundland and Labrador’s cod fishery. Although cod remains under moratoria, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reopened a small, inshore commercial cod fishery called the “stewardship” fishery 15 years ago. 

Jeffrey Hutchings, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax and lead author of the commentary, said the plan downplays science showing the greatest threat to cod is overfishing. He said overfishing played a primary role in the 1990s collapse and the failed rebuilding ever since. Part of the problem, he said, is Fisheries and Oceans Canada puts economic and commercial interests ahead of science and conservation efforts. 

“Politicians were ill-equipped to balance interests of the environment, sustainability of coastal communities and the employment they need, with pressures from industry to keep catching more and more cod,” he said of the collapse. “Underlying all of that was advice from scientists in the background.” 

He added that the rebuilding plan changes little by way of fisheries management.

The fishing village of Red Bay in NunatuKavut, on the south coast of Labrador, was one of many communities severely impacted by the 1992 cod moratorium. Photo: John Angelopoulos

According to the plan, “natural causes,” such as the effects of warmer ocean temperatures and starvation due to depleted capelin, cod’s primary fish prey, are preventing a cod comeback more so than fishing. And yet, the plan offers no actions to counteract these threats and doesn’t even mention “climate.”

Meanwhile, the organization representing the Southern Inuit of Labrador said the plan represents a missed opportunity for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

The strategy outlines Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s objectives and management measures for helping northern cod (a population of Atlantic cod) out of the critical zone. But without actions, targets and timelines, it’s unclear how, let alone if, that will happen, Hutchings said. 

This week, Fisheries and Oceans Canada will release its northern cod scientific assessment, which is expected to show the stock is still in the critical zone, where it’s hovered for the better part of the past 50 years.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has long overlooked the role of overfishing in cod collapse: scientists

Julie Diamond, regional manager of resource management and integrated fisheries for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Newfoundland and Labrador, said one of the primary goals of the cod rebuilding plan is “to try to strike that balance [between] promoting the growth of the northern cod stocks, but still providing regional fishing opportunities.” 

The plan sets out rules for monitoring the health of the stock and guiding annual fishing limit decisions in the stewardship fishery. Determining fishing limits rarely leads to consensus, Diamond said. As history shows, conservationists err on the side of keeping fishing removals as low as possible, while those with a commercial stake often want more leeway on quota. 

Indeed, when the cod rebuilding plan was announced, ocean conservation charity Oceana Canada argued the federal fisheries department swung too high, saying the plan “fails to include the fundamental elements necessary to rebuild stocks.” 

In contrast, Keith Sullivan, president of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union, said the plan swung too low, calling it “a major setback for the development of a sustainable cod fishing sector in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.” 

Kris Vascotto, executive director of the Atlantic Groundfish Council, the non-profit industry association representing year-round groundfish harvesters in Atlantic Canada, landed in the middle, saying the plan strikes the right balance, creating stability around catch, while allowing the cod population room to recover. 

Fishermen filet cod in Newfoundland. In 2006, Fisheries and Oceans Canada reopened a small, inshore commercial cod fishery following the 1992 moratorium. Photo: michael_swan / Flickr

Fisheries biologists, meanwhile, have criticized the federal fisheries department’s actions to increase fishing pressure on critically depleted cod stocks. 

In 2019, George Rose and Carl Walters published a study showing that Fisheries and Oceans Canada had underestimated the role of overfishing and overestimated the role of natural causes in the collapse as well as in more recent recovery efforts. The finding suggests the federal department’s decision to increase the cod fishing quota in the stewardship fishery runs counter to the best scientific advice, Hutchings says. 

Back in 2017, Rose and another colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, wrote an open letter to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, urging the department to hold off on ramping up the northern cod fishery given stocks were “still well below historical norms.” 

But the department had already more than tripled the northern cod quota from 4,000 metric tonnes in 2015 to 10,000 tonnes in 2016 and 13,000 tonnes in 2017. The allowable catch has remained near 2017 levels ever since, despite the department’s own confirmation of a stalled cod recovery.

The cod rebuilding plan makes no reference to the Rose and Walter study, an omission Hutchings and others have suggested may be intentional given the evidence counters the fisheries department’s practice to increase northern cod catch levels. Diamond was unable to respond to this claim.

Climate change poses one of the biggest threats to cod, yet it’s not mentioned in rebuilding plan

The rebuilding plan acknowledges environmental conditions, especially warming waters, are a contributing factor to cod’s natural mortality, but doesn’t account for this threat. “Climate change should have been at least mentioned in the plan,” said Dave Reddin, a retired fisheries biologist who spent 35 years working for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in St. John’s. 

While science can explain how the ocean is changing due to the global climate crisis, it cannot yet explain how cod will respond, he said, save for the expectation that coldwater marine species will follow cold marine waters, meaning northern cod are likely to swim northward. 

Robert Rangeley, Oceana Canada’s science director, said Fisheries and Oceans Canada could have accounted for climate change by undertaking a climate vulnerability assessment to better understand how northern cod may react and respond to climate-related ocean changes. Such an assessment would identify vulnerabilities (for example, in cod reproduction rates and diet) created by issues like ocean warming and acidification.

Reddin said addressing climate change in the plan would make it clear the federal department is prepared to put conservation ahead of commercial interests. 

If the federal government lists cod as endangered under the Species at Risk Act, it would also have to take decisive action to protect the species, such as restricting fishing, something critics say it might not want to do due to the socioeconomic impacts. Photo: Derek Keats / Flickr

Reddin also pointed to Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decision to not list cod as endangered under the Species at Risk Act, despite repeated recommendations to do so by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, an independent scientific body.

Hutchings, who chaired the committee from 2006 to 2010, noted that listing a species under the act would compel Fisheries and Oceans Canada to implement protections, such as a halt to all fishing activity.

“Almost any species of commercial value does not get listed,” he said. “A whale, bird or reptile, sure it will get listed. A caribou, maybe. But a marine fish of any commercial value? Not likely.”

Compared with shellfish like crab and shrimp, groundfish such as cod are not high income earners for the province’s commercial fishery, which was valued at $1.4 billion in 2019. But the 14,501 tonnes of cod harvested off of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2019 still garnered $26 million on the export market, according to the Seafood Industry Year in Review 2019.

Critics say rebuilding plan fails to consider capelin, cod’s primary food source

One of the greatest threats to a cod comeback, according to the rebuilding plan, is declining capelin stock. And yet, the plan offers no actions for the commercial capelin fishery. The plan should have explained how cod can recover under current capelin and cod fishing levels, Reddin said. 

While capelin catch limits have generally decreased since 2015, they rose in 2019, during a global capelin shortage due to decreased supply throughout Europe. That year, Newfoundland and Labrador capelin earned $41 million in export value, 65 per cent higher than 2018, while several European countries instituted capelin moratoria to allow the stocks there time to recover. 

Earlier this month, World Wildlife Fund Canada called on Fisheries and Oceans Canada to institute a moratorium for the 2021 Newfoundland and Labrador capelin fishery to allow the stock time to recover as well as to encourage cod stock recovery. More recently, Oceana Canada called on Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan to do the same. 

Rangeley said inaction on capelin suggests the fisheries department didn’t consider how species interact within the marine ecosystem. “Part of the problem is we don’t manage our fisheries in an ecosystem context,” he said. “We manage as if they’re out in the water with no other influences, as a single species and a single stock.”

Fishermen catch capelin off Quirpon Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Capelin is a small fish that feeds a variety of species from Atlantic cod to humpbacks to puffins. Photo: Sean McKinnon

In March, Fran Mowbray, a biologist and the capelin stock assessment lead with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in St. John’s, presented the capelin scientific assessment, which showed the population is a fraction of what it once was with no prospects of recovery under current conditions. The assessment will inform the federal department’s commercial capelin fishery decisions, expected in mid-April along with decisions for the stewardship cod fishery. 

“[Capelin is] what we call a keystone species or linchpin species,” Mowbray said in an interview. “It really has an impact throughout the ecosystem.”

Despite the latest science, some in the commercial industry are urging the federal fisheries department to open this year’s commercial capelin season. But others within industry think it’s time to reexamine the capelin fishery, especially for the sake of cod.

“We need capelin,” said Alberto Wareham, president and CEO of Newfoundland’s Icewater Seafoods, which operates the only plant in North America exclusively dedicated to processing Atlantic cod. “The other things cod are eating are not putting weight on them. DFO needs to invest more in the capelin science.”

The NunatuKavut Community Council, the representative governing body for approximately 6,000 Inuit of south and central Labrador, is recommending the federal government halt the 2021 capelin fishery altogether. 

Fisheries management decisions fail to consider Indigenous Knowledge

When Canada modernized the Fisheries Act in 2019, strengthening the role of Indigenous Peoples in fisheries management decision-making was among the key changes. The cod rebuilding plan targets the largest commercial Atlantic cod fishing zone, half of which is off NunatuKavut’s coastline.

Diamond, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, said the department hosted more than 20 consultations with stakeholders, including Indigenous stakeholders, since it initiated work toward a cod rebuilding plan.

However, Todd Russell, president of the NunatuKavut Community Council, said the federal plan represents a missed opportunity for reconciliation and he’d like to see Fisheries and Oceans Canada meaningfully involve Indigenous perspectives in decision-making. 

“We’re finding our knowledge has not been fully appreciated for the value it can bring to modern-context fisheries management and there’s been decisions that have continued to keep our communities marginalized,” Russell said.

“DFO, in my view, has not done enough,” he continued. “In fact, they’ve done very little to understand the opportunity that exists for reconciliation in the fishery. Every fisheries minister has been mandated to look, to seek and to pursue reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples through the fishery and how the fishery is managed. And we don’t see that.”

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This article was written by Michael Harris and originally published on iPolitics.

“The iPolitics story by Michael Harris published on February 7th, 2013 is untrue. There have been no changes to the Department’s publication policy.”

These words landed on my computer screen like a mortar shell after I wrote a piece outlining disturbing changes to DFO’s publication policy.

The statement, issued by DFO communications staffer Melanie Carkner, went on to list all the ways the department disseminates information — none of which were at issue in my column.

Why would they be? I was writing about how DFO muzzles its scientists, not its herculean public relations effort, which I do not dispute. To me, public relations is the opposite of both journalism and science; it’s what someone wants you to believe, rather than what is shown to be believable by the facts.

One of the people I interviewed for the February 7 article was Jeff Hutchings, former head of the Royal Society of Canada, and Killam professor in the faculty of science at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is an internationally known fish biologist — a hero in his profession. Hutchings eventually gave me an extensive comment for attribution about the dangers presented by the change in DFO publication policy.

During the catastrophic cod collapse off Newfoundland, while DFO was providing credible evidence that it could not manage an aquarium, Hutchings was standing up for good science. He was one of the only scientists, along with the late Ransom Myers, courageous enough to raise the issue at the heart of the matter: the deadly role that politics played in the cod collapse by suppressing science that collided with policy. I chronicled that process in my book Lament for an Ocean.

It is worth noting that since the 1992 moratorium, the large-scale commercial cod fishery has remained closed at a cost of billions of dollars to the taxpayers of Canada. That outcome flowed from a DFO tainted with politics and corporate priorities — and a minister’s office given far, far too much discretionary power to overrule inconvenient science. The moral of the story? Good science is what saves us from disastrous policy and the astronomical costs associated with getting it wrong.

Good science is what saves us from disastrous policy and the astronomical costs associated with getting it wrong.

After DFO denied that there had been any change in publication policy, I contacted Professor Hutchings again. Having independently confirmed the information I had before he spoke for the record in my original column, he was not circumspect. “What a load of crap,” he said.

That was also the opinion of several scientists I contacted.

Then I was treated to a surprise. Under the headline He Said, she said…who is lying?, I came across a story about my column and DFO’s denial that was posted on the Internet on February 10, 2013. The author of the anonymous posting began with DFO’s statement that “there have been no changes to the Department’s publication policy.”

The very next line, from a person who was obviously a DFO scientist, was this:

“Here is the e-mail I got from my division manager on January 29th, 2013: ‘Subject: New Publication Review Committee (PRC) Procedures for C&A Science …’

“This message is regarding the new Publication Review Committee procedures for C&A Science…”

The email noted that the new policy was to take effect on February 1, 2013.

The author included in his Internet post departmental documents outlining the new policy and a detailed administrative chart showing the publication procedures that came into force after February 1. After laying out his information, the author concluded, “You decide who’s being untruthful.”

I second that opinion. If you wish to read for yourself what he had to say, his comments and documents are posted on unmuzzledscience.wordpress.com.

Here, precisely, are the changes that the new policy denied by DFO usher in. Review procedures now apply to any paper with a DFO scientist as an author, instead of just those papers where a DFO scientist was first author.

Secondly, the author of a paper no longer signs off on the copyright on behalf of the Crown. That means that a bureaucrat who did not contribute to the work in question, and did not have a hand in the science undertaken for the paper, now has the power to stop publication by refusing to sign off on the copyright.

Here’s how a university scientist explained his experience with the old system, where he co-produced a paper with a DFO scientist: “We’ve had a manuscript ‘in review’ with DFO waiting for sign-off for almost one year now due to the DFO co-author. I’m about ready to stick the manuscript up on the web and abandon the publication, try to start over with new funding and without DFO involvement.”

Under the new system, DFO can prevent publication by withholding copyright sign-off even if a DFO scientist played only the slightest role in the production of the paper. In other words, the system has gone from bad to worse for scientists and given bureaucrats greater killing power.

Meanwhile, someone in Fisheries and Oceans Canada is channeling their inner dominatrix.

On the heels of DFO’s new publication approval policy, written about in this space last Friday, another new policy landed in the in-boxes of government scientists on February 7.

This new policy, which comes into effect immediately, requires DFO scientists to seek approval from the Regional Director of Science in order to even apply for any researching funding. In concert with the new publication policy, the restraints on Canadian scientists are tightening.

“This change in funding policy is a big deal…the Experimental Lakes Area would not have been able to do much of the acid rain research we did, all of the reservoir research we did, and the ongoing METALLICUS experiment. On the other hand, isn’t this what Harper wants? When I was at the Freshwater Institute, DFO was giving me awards for getting this outside funding,” one non-DFO scientist told me.

The big worry among scientists is that the new policies could be used to make it impossible for government scientists to do any “unmanaged” research in the future. That’s because whatever they do now will be tightly controlled from the onset – from funding applications through to the final step of communicating research findings to the scientific community and the general public.

With the rapid development of the Alberta oilsands a key priority of the Harper government, the need for independent science has never been greater. Under the new DFO policies, government could stop publication of studies like the one recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in the United States. That federally-funded study linked oilsands activity to the deposit of toxic hydrocarbons in Alberta wilderness lakes, closing the door on the claim by industry and government that the pollution could be coming from natural sources.

Question: if scientists wanted to pursue the unfinished business of the oilsands research just published by the National Academy of Science, going beyond hydrocarbons to look at the levels of other contaminants such as heavy metals, mercury or soot, would they get the green light from DFO under the new funding policy?

The Harper record on the science file provides no reassurance that it would. The prime minister has retooled the mission of science institutions like the National Research Council, where pure science has been replaced by applied science of direct benefit to industry.

The PM has said that not everything can be a park. Agreed. But his government has gutted environmental legislation and engaged in particularly destructive meddling in fisheries legislation. Even Conservative cousins like former fisheries ministers John Fraser and Tom Siddon have told the Harper government that the new policies are dangerously ill-considered. They were shunned, their advice was ignored.

Tom Flanagan inadvertently suggested a possible explanation for that cold shoulder in a December 2, 2012 speech at the Salt Spring Forum: “Stephen sees through an economic lens, not an environmental one.”

You may have noticed that there are very few names attached to the quotes in this column. That may have to do with something else Tom Flanagan had to say about his old friend in that speech at the Salt Spring Forum.

After praising the PM’s intelligence, he said of Stephen Harper that he was “morose, secretive, suspicious and vindictive. These may not be traits you want in your next-door neighbour, but they are very useful in politics.”

No one in the scientific community has any reason to doubt the PM’s power to punish. Science budgets have been savaged. Everything has been slashed and corseted with little regard for the unique contribution that science makes to protecting society.

During the uproar caused by the Harper government’s closure of the ELA, some of Canada’s top scientists exchanged e-mails, opining that the shuttering was not about saving a measly $2 million a year. It was about making sure that one of the world’s leading freshwater research facilities didn’t come up with any inconvenient science that might get in the way of the Bitumen Express currently roaring down the tracks.

It’s a very bad sign when the best of us become anonymous.

Image Credit: DFO report, Canada's Policy for Conservation of Wild Pacific Salmon.

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