The unfortunate thing is that the moratorium is 25 years old. There was some recovery on the St. Pierre Bank off the southern coast of Newfoundland, a very important bank, with a tremendous fishery, actually—yielded about 80,000 to 90,000 tonnes a year.
There was a slight recovery, maybe 10 years ago, and DFO made the big mistake of reopening the fishery when the base of the fishery, in terms of year class—one-, two-, three-, four-, five-, six-year-old fishery—was not there. They opened it up with a 20,000 tonne quota, and only one and a half years later had to reduce it to 8,000 tonnes because the scientists doing a little work on it saw the thing on the way down again.
Now that fishery, which had been historically 75,000 to 80,000 tonnes, today is.... Some scientists, in universities particularly, are saying it should be on the endangered list. This is one of the most important cod stocks we have. We haven't learned anything. This thing has happened over a long period of time. If you look at any of the graphs the scientists have produced, you can see the impact of overfishing and going down...for example, some people are talking about 300,000 tonnes in northern cod at the present time.
In 1962, the spawning stock in that cod was two million tonnes. The spawning stock was under seven years. In addition to the two million tonnes, there was a fishery that was over seven years old, and that was estimated to be something in the order of a million tonnes. Today it's 300,000 tonnes, allegedly. Again, some of the fishermen are questioning that, and I don't blame them.
We're not doing any science. We're not doing the work. There's no science. Therefore, in the longer term.... The economy of this province is going to be based on the success or failure of the fishery in this province in the years to come.
Oil is not renewable. Minerals.... I come from a mining town; I know. Mining is non-renewable, but the fishery is renewable. Here we have the potential for one of the largest fisheries in the world. The population of the world is going from six billion or seven billion, up to 10 billion. The demand for fish is growing. I have contacts in the U.S. and Europe in marketing. There are two million tonnes of cod fillets alone sold in the U.S. annually. This friend of mine is someone who markets the Bering Sea cod, and he's selling 35 million pounds of cod.
For anybody to be talking about looking for markets.... It's not a question of looking for markets; the markets are there. It's a question of good, solid fisheries management that produces good, solid, market-sized fish that are firm, good quality, and can be produced as fish nuggets, fish loins, fish tails, and a variety of packages that the food industry, either retail or food service, has taken from us for years and years.
Once upon a time we were a main competitor for Iceland and Norway. As a participant in marketing, I can tell you there were times we sat down and beat out the Icelanders and the Norwegians on contracts with universities. I remember one distinctly with UCLA, in California, with 80,000 students on campus. They wanted a particular product. They gave us all an option to provide it. We spent a year, had machines built, produced cod lines, and got the contract, at 20 cents over the market, as a result of it.
All that's gone, because in the process of this going downhill, from 1965 to 1971, the size of cod as documented by Department of Fisheries officials in production plants went down from an average of 4 pounds to 2.2 pounds. The catch at sea for a 100-foot trawler, a side trawler in those days, went down from 2,000 pounds a fishing hour to 880 pounds. That's the story of the Newfoundland fishery.
A change has to come, and a change has to come by rebuilding our scientific capability, beginning now. A large body of fisheries of various species and so on has to be properly assessed so people aren't guessing and arguing about whether it's 300 tonnes or 500 tonnes or whatever. That's the job of DFO, not WWF. It's the job of DFO. These are the ones that are responsible in Norway—the government—and in Iceland. They refused to join the common market. Why? To protect their fisheries.
I was invited, prior to the last vote taken in Norway, to make four or five speeches from Hammerfest in the north to Oslo in the south to give them our experience in Newfoundland. Not that my presentation had that much effect, but it was the last time that Norway voted not to join. Why? Because Spain, Portugal, Russia, and 20 other countries would converge on their fisheries and beat the hell out of them.
