One lesson that I learned early in my career as a news reporter is that you don’t want to mess around with angry fishers from Newfoundland.
Watching inshore crab fishers from the province storm into meetings by government officials in St. John’s on CBC television last week protesting plans by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for this year’s snow crab quotas brought back memories of Newfoundland’s inshore cod fishers going on the rampage when Ottawa announced it was shutting down that industry indefinitely in 1992 when cod stocks collapsed.
I lived and worked in a small fishing and mining community on Newfoundland’s north coast at the time, and the fishermen in the community were among the best people that I’ve ever had the privilege to call my friends.
I had known them for years and never saw any of them angry until the announcement of the cod moratorium, which they rightfully perceived as a threat to their very existence.
When Newfoundland was first officially discovered by European powers in 1497, it was said that the cod on the offshore Grand Banks were so plentiful, they stopped the sailing vessels dead in their tracks.
These fish stocks provided a living, albeit a hard and dangerous one, to fishers in Newfoundland for centuries.
After Newfoundland and Labrador joined Canada in 1949, the responsibility for the cod and other fisheries fell into the hands of the bureaucrats in Ottawa, and the mismanagement began almost immediately.
These desk-bound office workers and scientists believed the resource was inexhaustible, and Ottawa started to use it as a bargaining chip in international trade talks that saw huge fleets of big foreign ships coming to our shores for decades taking as much cod as their vessels could carry.
I remember in the 1970s and 1980s when fishermen were telling DFO managers that cod stocks were being depleted and what they were managing to catch were smaller and fewer than they had ever been.
These managers didn’t listen of course, so the rape of the cod stocks continued.
That eventually led to disaster and it fell to John Crosby, a prominent Newfoundland politician who was the minister of Fisheries and Oceans at the time, to tell approximately 30,000 people whose families had lived off the sea for countless generations that they were out of a job.
Word had, of course, gotten out and thousands of furious fishermen descended on St. John’s to confront Crosby at a meeting he had called to inform the province that the cod fishery was shutting down.
I have to say that I greatly respected Crosby for coming to Newfoundland to make this announcement and not doing it from the safety of Parliament Hill.
Crosby was getting ready to talk to the press, fishery leaders, government and other officials in the large auditorium at the swanky Newfoundland Hotel in downtown St. John’s when large crowds of big, burly and infuriated fishermen easily pushed past a contingent of police and security teams that had set up at the entrance of the hotel and quickly made their way to the auditorium.
The police in the auditorium shut and locked the doors and tried to brace them with chairs, but the screaming mob quickly smashed their way through anyway and headed directly to Crosby shrieking and shouting the whole way.
But Crosby, who was not a little man either, stood his ground as the police tried frantically to usher him to safety out of the auditorium.
Crosby pushed them away, turned toward the oncoming fishermen and bellowed at the top of his lungs “I DIDN’T TAKE THE G— D—- FISH OUT OF THE SEA!”
That pretty much stopped them in their tracks and, while they still looked like they were ready to tear the place apart and their leaders surrounded Crosby and began a loud and aggressive conversation with him, nobody touched him.
Eventually, they listened to what Crosby was telling them about what Ottawa was preparing to do to compensate them until the cod stocks replenished themselves and, while they were very skeptical about what became known as “The Package”, they calmed down enough to let Crosby have his full say and questioned him on many details.
Of course, that was 31 years ago and the cod stocks have never replenished themselves enough to allow a commercial fishery again and probably never will, but I was still impressed with Crosby’s bravery in standing there in front of that large mob of incensed and potentially dangerous men who looked like they were ready to rip him limb from limb.
I suspect they were surprised by his audacity and boldness as well and, although they likely knew their lives were about to be dramatically changed, they decided they didn’t want to take it out on this man who dared to stand up to them.
It was one of the most memorable episodes of my long career.
robert.barron@cowichanvalleycitizen.com
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