Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to speak before you as part of your study on northern cod.
My personal experience with northern cod began as a child in the early sixties when I would walk with my father and my grandmother to Mr. George Temple's stage at the bottom of Bull Arm, Sunnyside, Trinity Bay. My science experience with northern cod began in earnest in 1992, two years after completing my Ph.D. at Memorial.
Since then, I have contributed more than 70 research papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on various things: the ecology, life history, reproduction, genetics, fisheries history, and population biology of northern cod. I appeared before this committee on the topic of northern cod in 1997 in Ottawa, and, as the chairman indicated, in 2005 in St. John's.
Although the earliest documentation of a Newfoundland cod fishery dates from 1504, northern cod have almost certainly been fished since the late 1400s. Harvests are estimated to have been less than 100,000 tonnes each year until the late 1700s, and from the 1830s until the late 1960s, catches were typically between 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes each year.
This apparently sustainable level of catch, coupled with some assumptions about a sustainable harvesting rate, implies that the spawning stock size of northern cod from the late 1700s to the mid-1900s was perhaps in the order of 1 million tonnes to 1.5 million tonnes. Today it's estimated to be 300,000 tonnes.
Following the introduction of European-based trawlers in the late fifties and the early sixties, catches increased to a historic high of 810,000 tonnes in 1968, before collapsing in equally dramatic fashion in 1977, when Canada extended its fisheries jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles. Controlled in part by total allowable catches established by Canada, catches increased gradually to a post-1977 high of about 270,000 tonnes in 1988 prior to the moratorium.
We've just heard something about recent changes in technology, but technological changes have occurred throughout the 500-year old fishery. During the first three centuries, northern cod were taken mainly by baited or unbaited hooks, either from relatively large vessels on the banks or small vessels inshore. In the 1790s, the French introduced the bultow, baited, multi-hook line trawls, or longlines.
Cod nets or gillnets were introduced in the mid-1800s, followed by the cod trap in the 1870s. Bottom trawls were introduced just before the 20th century. These were initially towed by steam-driven side-trawlers before the advent of stern-hauled bottom trawl nets from factory-freezer trawlers in the second half of the 20th century.
These technological efficiencies, which have occurred throughout the centuries, had their greatest impact on northern cod from the late fifties to the mid-seventies, contributing to the massive overfishing that set the stage for a collapse in the early nineties.
When the moratorium was announced, it was estimated that northern cod had declined by 99% when compared to the size of the stock in the early 1960s. Globally, this was an unprecedented depletion for a bottom-dwelling, long-lived marine fish.
Such a massive depletion draws attention to a standard tenet in population biology, and it's one of the reasons the recovery of northern cod has been so slow and uncertain. That is, that small populations are more vulnerable to unexpected natural and human-induced disturbance than large populations. Put another way, after the moratorium, the unprecedented magnitude of depletion impaired the ability of northern cod to increase in the face of environmental conditions to which northern cod had been able to persist in the past when it was much larger. In other words, the smaller size of the northern cod stock made it less able to buffer natural environmental change.
Research indicates that fish stocks that decline to less than 10% of their maximum are likely to experience prolonged and highly uncertain recovery. The magnitude of loss of northern cod easily exceeded this threshold.
So, magnitude of depletion affects recovery, but fishing is also likely to have played a role. Although the 1992 moratorium significantly curtailed fishing activity, the catching of cod did not end. The yearly reported catch of northern cod from 1993 to 2009 was about 3,000 tonnes per year.
This might not sound like much, but for a depleted population, the impact can be significant.
For example, six years after the moratorium, in 1998, a directed commercial fishery for northern cod was reopened. The fishery was characterized as a limited fishery because the catch quotas were small relative to the quotas of the 1980s. But from a science perspective, the catch quota in and of itself is of no consequence. What matters is the size of the catch relative to the size of the stock from which the catch is taken.
In my view, this limited fishery, from 1998 to 2002, nipped early signs of recovery in the bud. If a lesson is to be learned from this ill-advised fishery, it is that it is necessary to have catch quotas be part of a management plan for which rebuilding targets and harvesting rules are clearly articulated, quantitative, transparent, and scientifically defensible.
Recovery targets and harvest control rules are two key elements associated with credible fishery management plans intended to achieve high-yield sustainable catches in the long term, yet they do not exist for most of our depleted cod stocks more than 20 years after their demise, and northern cod is one of those. In addition, the only existing harvest control rule for a Canadian cod stock solely under Canadian jurisdiction is unhelpfully open to multiple interpretations and unlikely to be very enforceable. It states that when the area 3Ps cod stock is below its limit reference point, “consideration may be given to whether directed fishing will be permitted at some level.” It goes on to say that fishing “should not be approved if the decline [below the limit] is substantial and should not continue for an extended period without evidence that recovery will occur within a reasonable timeline.”
So there are a lot of words that can be interpreted in many different ways, and such ambiguities are unlikely to lead to clear action when trouble is detected. It is instructive to compare the language associated with this 3Ps cod harvest control rule with one recent international effort initiated by fisheries management agencies to strengthen the scientific integrity of a harvest control rule for the largest cod stock in the world, off Norway.
From a sustainable harvesting perspective, it is fundamentally important, I think, that scientifically rigorous targets and harvest control rules be established. Without them, neither society nor industry can assess the degree to which a proposed catch level is consistent with the objective of achieving a particular target within a defined period of time. In the absence of targets and harvest control rules, there is no rigorous means of auditing the effectiveness or tracking the record of fisheries management actions. Efforts to recover northern cod could be strengthened immeasurably by a scientifically credible recovery plan that is entirely consistent with international best practices, such as those adopted for all commercial fisheries in the United States and the European Union. It would also, of course, be entirely consistent with Canadian sustainable fisheries policy, the implementation of which has been slower than perhaps is warranted.
This science-based recommendation carries considerable benefits, I think, from a communication perspective. Management strategies need to be scientifically credible in an international context to achieve fisheries sustainability certification, something of increased importance to all kinds of seafood industries. Management strategies that are transparent and quantitatively based strengthen the ability of society to audit their effectiveness.
This recommendation to establish scientifically credible target reference points and harvest control rules will require a stronger role of science than perhaps what has been evident thus far. This could be achieved, for example, by having science alone determine limit and target reference points, as is done in the U.S. and in Europe.
Once these have been established, harvest control rules might then emerge from discussions with various stakeholders, but they should be quantitative, unambiguous, and well-founded scientifically.
Thank you once again for the opportunity to offer these opening remarks. I look forward to addressing any questions the committee might have as a result.
Thank you.