Is the inshore fishery an unsustainable, EI-subsidized dinosaur—or the vital economic and social lifeblood of coastal communities?

“There is a particular way of life in the Atlantic Provinces: there is a value here, a quality of life, that many places lack. And much of it is associated with the fisheries…

~Former Federal fisheries minister, the late Romeo LeBlanc, from a speech delivered in Halifax on October 22, 1974

On a typical workday Mike McGeoghegan will rise from bed at 4:30am and be at the wharf shortly after. He’ll step aboard his 40-foot Cape Islander, Charlie’s Ark, in the morning darkness and flip on the cabin lights. He’ll check the oil and make sure he packed his lunch—“because you don’t want to forget that,” he says.

If the wind on the Northumberland Strait is “really blowing” he’ll chat with his fellow fishermen about the day’s forecast. By 5am he’ll untie Charlie’s Ark from the wharf and start motoring out of the harbour that cuts into his home village of Pinette, a hamlet on Prince Edward Island’s southeast coast.

If McGeoghegan is lucky, a bit of pre-dawn light will reveal the red clay banks of Point Prim, or even cows grazing in green pastures. “Sometimes early in the morning you’ll see the farmers working their fields,” he says. “Then you get to the Point Prim Lighthouse and you start moving away from land, into the open water.”

McGeoghegan (pronounced mic-gay-gan) has been fishing for 35 years. He built Charlie’s Ark from lumber he felled in the nearby woods. And he’s proud to say his five sons are all involved in the fishery in some capacity. (He helped build the boat from which his eldest son, Charlie, the local MLA, fishes for lobster, scallops, crab, herring and mackerel when he’s not sitting in the provincial legislature.)

“Fishing is not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” McGeoghegan says. “It’s like farming. You have to experience it to understand it. It’s something you’re born into. You grow up in it. You can smell it in the air. You can taste it. It’s part of your life.”

Yet McGeoghegan, like many of his fellow inshore fishermen in Atlantic Canada, is worried about the future of that way of life. Inshore fishermen’s groups across the region are convinced the federal government will soon significantly alter their $2.8-billion industry—the region’s single largest private-sector employer—as part of a “modernization” effort.

At stake, fishermen argue, is nothing less than the survival of Atlantic Canada’s 1,300 coastal communities, many of which depend on the inshore fishery for their economic and social wellbeing.

The relationship between inshore fishermen and Ottawa has long been shaky. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the current anxiety expressed by East Coast fishermen stems, in large part, from a discussion document issued by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).

The report, “The Future of Canada’s Commercial Fisheries,” was released in early 2012 but has since been removed from DFO’s website. It disappeared at some point after fishermen’s groups from across Atlantic Canada began protesting what they believed were impending—and unwanted—changes to the inshore fishery, which is comprised of more than 10,000 licence holders plus crew members.

The 31-page report discussed a number of topics, including bycatch regulations, threats to sensitive benthic areas, and the depletion of fish stocks. But it wasn’t the actual contents of the report that rattled fishermen; they were more concerned by what the report lacked: specifically, any mention of the owner-operator and fleet separation policies, two key rules that help regulate Atlantic Canada’s inshore fishery.

Put in place in the late 1970s by much-admired longtime Liberal fisheries minister, and New Brunswick MP, Romeo LeBlanc, the two policies are unique to Atlantic Canada and thus differentiate the East Coast inshore fishery from its West Coast counterpart.

The owner-operator policy stipulates that the holder of a fishing licence must actually be in the boat doing the fishing. The fleet separation policy, meanwhile, restricts corporate ownership of fishing licences. The goal of the two policies is to maintain the independence of the inshore fleet by prohibiting the corporate consolidation of licences, and by keeping licence ownership out of the hands of processing companies.

“Those who work in the fishery should enjoy the wealth of the resource. Not someone sitting in a condo in Florida,” said then-fisheries minister Loyola Hearn in 2007.

Many fishermen’s groups assumed that the complete absence of the two policies in the DFO document signaled their likely death. They predicted independent fishermen would disappear in the wake of big corporate boats; with local captains and crews out of work, coastal communities would crumble.

Earle McCurdy, president of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union, was among those sounding the alarm. The FFAW is the largest private sector union in Newfoundland and Labrador, representing 15,000 workers, most of them in the fishery, from captains to processing plant workers.

McCurdy outlined his concerns in the summer 2012 edition of his group’s magazine, The Union Forum. The headline of his President’s Message cut to the point: “‘Modernization’ agenda spells danger for coastal communities.”

McCurdy warned that elimination of the owner-operator and fleet separation policies would transform the East Coast fishery into its ugly British Columbian cousin.

“There is nothing modern about the situation in British Columbia,” he wrote. “Anyone can buy and sell licences and quotas and lease them at exorbitant rates to the people who actually own and operate fishing boats and catch the fish. The inevitable result of this kind of system is that the people who actually catch the fish get the short end of the stick: every time.”

Wrong-headed policy changes, he added, could also recreate conditions found in New Zealand, where deregulation has made fishing licences and quotas “tradable commodities.”

“Over time, the fish became consolidated in few and fewer hands. The people with the deepest pockets bid the highest for the quotas,” he wrote. “The connection between the fishery resources and the adjacent coastal communities was severed.”

According to McCurdy, one of the two authors of the DFO report worked for a time with the New Zealand fisheries department; he also claimed the authors are “both known for their pro-privatization, anti-fleet separation views.”

“The agenda of the DFO Ottawa bureaucracy would be the beginning of the end of the link between the fishery resources and the coastal communities. At least the old resettlement program made its objectives clear,” he concluded. “Fish harvesters, plant workers and coastal communities are in real danger if the deregulation agenda is implemented. After that, it will be too late.”

Inshore fishermen’s groups across the region echoed McCurdy’s concerns. A coalition of organizations formed, all united in their opposition to industry deregulation. In addition, many fishermen complained of a lack of government consultation.

The uproar eventually forced DFO Minister Keith Ashfield to release a statement stressing the Harper government’s “commitment to Canada’s traditional fisheries.”

“Let me be absolutely clear: the fleet separation and owner operator policies in Atlantic Canada will remain intact,” Ashfield noted in his September 21 statement, adding that he was “angered” by claims to the contrary.

Still, the New Brunswick MP reiterated that changes are needed. “I believe there are ways to make the fishery function better while preserving the fleet separation and owner-operator policies so that the traditional fishery remains and is improved for future generations,” he continued.

(Despite requests, Ashfield was not made available to discuss the government’s plans for the inshore fishery.)

Did the minister’s comments ease tensions? To an extent. Yet the fact remains that Ottawa is discussing a “modernization of fisheries management.” But what does that actually involve, and how will it impact the coastal communities that rely on the inshore fishery for their economic survival and social heritage?

Earle McCurdy is unsure.

The problem is that one person’s definition of “modernization” is another person’s term for destruction. “There’s nothing modern about feudalism, which is what some people have in mind by the so-called modernization agenda,” McCurdy says, pledging that fishermen’s groups will remain “vigilant” in their monitoring of DFO policy changes. “We just wonder how many times we have to prevail on this debate before they stop going back to square one.”

“We need to think beyond catching the maximum number of cod per hour per man. When fish are counted, it’s people that count. Any project or plan in the fisheries has really one basic criterion of judgment: does it improve life?” ~Romeo LeBlanc

Tony Charles, a fisheries researcher at Saint Mary’s University, in Halifax, also believes there’s good reason to remain vigilant. He says the DFO’s report calls for change and modernization while offering “off-the-mark” concerns about the current setup. The report, he adds, also does not make clear what form changes should take.

Charles points at references to “stable sharing arrangements” and “stability in allocations.” He worries the government might be “misguidedly” mulling the introduction of quotas into the lobster fishery. Such a move would allow quotas to be transferred and stockpiled, thus centralizing the now “competitive and prosperous” lobster fishery.

A professor in the schools of business and environment, Charles has seen first-hand the result of a consolidated fishery. Ten years ago he travelled to the West Coast with a group of East Coast fishermen. They saw fishing boats half sunk in BC harbours, abandoned because the owners sold their fishing licences.

Licences and quotas were consolidated into “very few hands,” he reports. The result: some coastal communities were completely removed from the fishery.

Charles argues that DFO’s talk of “efficiency” is possibly code for “centralizing the fishery” on the East Coast. “It’s hard to tell what the future could hold. There’s nothing in the report that would go against the possibility [of ending] up with just one fishing company, with a bunch of hired hands and few big boats,” he says. “There’s nothing in the report that celebrates the diverse and decentralized nature of our fishery. There’s nothing that celebrates the idea that the fishery is the backbone of hundreds of communities.”

The problem, as Charles sees it, is that DFO is not mandated to look out for coastal communities. Thus little consideration is given to the fishery spinoffs that help coastal communities survive, including fish processing and tourism. From Peggy’s Cove to Grand Manan Island to Battle Harbour, East Coast tourism relies heavily on scenic harbours, fishing communities and Cape Islanders tied up at local wharves. “To some extent the fishery is not only the backbone of coastal communities, but also the backbone of the tourism sector,” Charles says.

A consolidated fishery could mean fewer coastal residents, thus fewer coastal communities, fewer fishing boats—and perhaps fewer tourists. “They’ll never say precisely that they want to privatize or centralize the fishery. They won’t say they want to destroy coastal communities across Atlantic Canada; not surprisingly they’re not going to say that,” Charles adds. “But that may well be one of the implications of their policy.