Thank you for taking the time to hear from the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union on this important issue.
As the fishery scientist with the FFAW, I will focus my remarks on lessons learned and lessons forgotten from the collapse of the northern cod fishery in the 1980s and 1990s, and we'll also comment on our concerns with how the federal government chose to end the cod moratorium.
What I'm going to do here is step through some of the research around the northern cod collapse and why it matters.
It's been over 30 years since the collapse of the northern cod fishery, yet the timing and explanations for the collapse remain contentious. When the northern cod assessment model was developed, it included extremely high natural mortality between 1992 and 1994, and subsequent variations of the northern cod assessment model, including the one used in the 2024 assessment, all attribute the collapse to an unknown natural mortality event.
Now, for those folks who are not at stock assessment meetings on the regular...at its most basic, a stock assessment model tracks recruitment, growth and death in a fish stock. There are only two ways to kill a fish in an assessment model. It's either attributed to fishing as fishing mortality, or it's everything else, which is that grab bag of a natural mortality. That includes unaccounted-for fishing mortality and discarding, as well as everything else. In the official DFO stock assessment version of an event, something unknown knocked out millions of fish in the early 1990s. The loss of capelin can explain some of that collapse, but not much.
However, the DFO stock assessment is not the only peer-reviewed and published account of the stock collapse. Academic research from the mid-1990s onwards showed sequential decline in fishery catch rates of inshore gillnet fisheries in the early 1980s, midshore and offshore gillnet fisheries in the late 1980s, and then from the Canadian trawler fleet in the late 1980s as well. Research papers from the mid-1990s showed that offshore catch rates declined first in the north and that these Canadian draggers were fishing on pre-spawning and spawning aggregations.
Multiple research papers on the collapse of northern cod showed that northern cod became increasingly concentrated, shifted south and were distributed deeper throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These changes contribute to, number one, increased vulnerabilities, particularly to offshore dragger fleets, and number two, to over-estimation of stock health.
The term “hyperstability” was coined by Dr. George Rose and Dave Kulka, and it was used to describe how fishing fleets can maintain high catch rates, even during stock collapse. This happened with northern cod. That particular paper has been cited over 400 times, and I say that metric to indicate that these issues are well known within the fishery science community.
More than 30 years later, there's still no agreement on how, why, when and importantly where northern cod collapsed. However, one of the lessons that we could have and should have learned was that changes in fish distribution matter.
Northern cod is a stock complex. This means that codfish are not evenly distributed throughout Newfoundland and Labrador waters. There are multiple distinct spawning areas, and most fish annually migrate between particular offshore spawning areas and inshore spawning areas. Updated information and research on these questions, on these linkages, is fundamental for rebuilding a sustainable fishery.
One of the reasons I object to the reopening of the trawler fishery is that there has been no recent work on cod distribution, recovery and vulnerability during the winter and pre-spawning and spawning periods. The most recent acoustic survey of spawning aggregations occurred in 2015. Which pre-spawning and spawning aggregations are recovering and which are not? We don't know.
I expect that recovery is not evenly distributed across historic spawning areas, and I expect that, in part, because the recovery of the fishery is uneven in the inshore, with much-improved catch rates from the inshore sentinel survey in the north in 2J and northern 3K, but no increase at all in southern 3L.
Historically, these different inshore fishing grounds were linked to particular offshore spawning areas. Is the recovery that we're seeing now reliant on one or two spawning areas? None of these questions was reviewed at stock assessments prior to the minister's decision.
Why did the minister reopen the northern cod fishery to Canadian and international bottom trawl fleets without doing due diligence and assessing stock distribution and vulnerability during the winter and spawning period? Due diligence and a lesson learned would have meant research and review of up-to-date acoustic tagging data and linkages between feeding and spawning areas. It would have meant identification, documentation and, importantly, conservation of spawning aggregations.
The motion also included—