As government tried to reshape industry, the moratorium was a crossroads for individual fishermen

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BONAVISTA, N.L. — Editor's note: Thirty years ago, the cod moratorium devastated Newfoundland and Labrador. It forced Newfoundlanders to make hard choices — do they stay and retrain, or do they leave behind parents and friends and cast their fate to the wind and hope for a better life elsewhere? Over the next few days, the Telegram will take a deeper look into the impact the moratorium had on our province.

On May 1, 1994, The Evening Telegram — as it was known then — dedicated most of that day’s paper to an in-depth series called “Empty Nets.”

Reporters travelled to some fishing communities across the province, speaking to fisherman and others on how they were faring and what their hopes were for the future of their towns and the cod fishing industry.

The paper contained broader perspectives from leaders of the day, columnists, editors and articles by freelancers. Even the sports department chimed in.

It was only two months from the end of the two-year moratorium imposed by the federal government on the northern cod fishery, and the paper’s content showed unrest, worry and concern.

The cod stocks had not recovered, communities felt threatened.

The province was at a crossroads.

Reg Butler, a 50-year-veteran fisherman from Bonavista, remembers those years well. The Butler family has a long history in the cod fishery in the town, a tradition being passed down from one generation to the next. Butler started going out fishing when he was nine. His father was a widow and had to take him out in the boat, along with his older brothers, because there was no one to take care of him.

“When the moratorium was announced, everything was up in the air. Cod was our main source of income,” Butler said.

“We had cod traps out. Who thought, when we took them in at the time, they’d never go in the water again? It was just like someone knocked the wind out of you. My father had fished up until he was in his 80s. The fish stocks were in decline, but it was still a shock to him, and us all, when it was shut down."

It was devastating, he adds.

“A lot of our buddies packed up and moved away, got into other trades or moved to the mainland. But it was no choice for us, really, because we wanted to stay at it," Butler says.

"There were a lot of ups and downs, but when it is something you love, that’s in your blood, like it was for your father and his father, you can’t walk away. My sons are the same, my brother Ben’s sons are the same.

Read more Recreational Northern Cod fishery to open on select days this summer and fall LETTER: Northern cod 30 years after the moratorium is Confederation’s greatest shame

Recreational Northern Cod fishery to open on select days this summer and fall

LETTER: Northern cod 30 years after the moratorium is Confederation’s greatest shame

The fishermen in Bonavista were facing the same tough decisions as fishermen all across the province.

Try to stick it out in the fishery — the snow crab and shrimp stocks held potential — or take part in retraining being offered as part of the federal aid programs — the Northern Cod Adjustment and Rehabilitation Program (NCARP) and later The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS) — or opt for retirement and licence buyouts out of the fishery as governments struggled to deal with overcapacity in the fishing industry.

For plant workers, the options available were bleak. The plants that would survive the moratorium would struggle to find enough raw material, and snow crab and shrimp landings were less labour intensive on the processing side, meaning fewer plants and workers were needed.

And there was doubt about the availability of jobs for those being retrained to work in other industries, or if the retraining had sufficiently prepared them for other types of work.

The moratorium on northern cod off the east and northeast coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador and east coast of the Atlantic provinces — followed a year later by a moratorium on cod on the province’s south and west coasts — put more than 30,000 people suddenly out of work in the middle of the fishing season.

An economic mainstay, a way of life, came to a dramatic halt.

The moratorium would mark a turning point in Donald Tremblett’s life. In the years following, he would leave the fishery for good and has never gone back on the water.

Some years before the moratorium, he made an attempt to leave the fishery by moving to Manitoba to work as a safety advisor, quickly moving up to a manager’s position. Then the company he worked for hit a downturn, and his job became redundant.

“I came right back to the fishing boat. And we did good at it until just before the moratorium,” Tremblett said.

“At that time, I could not see myself doing anything else but fishing.”

Over the years since he finished high school in 1980, Tremblett had fished on various boats with different crews. But in the years leading up to the moratorium, it was a family affair: the crew included his father Bob, brother Terry and himself.

“I remember we had a brand new cod trap out down at Cable John and there had been a bit of a storm, and we got the call that the moratorium was announced,” he said.

“We went down and hauled the trap out of the water and it was torn up. We burned it after.

“I’ll never forget it. The moratorium … it was like someone tore the guts out of me. There was an emptiness inside. We are done, what do we do now? That was all we knew was the fishery.”

"There was an emptiness inside. We are done, what do we do now? That was all we knew was the fishery.” — Don Tremblett

Even though fishermen saw the stocks declining, the thought of the cod fishery closing was difficult to imagine.

But it stared them directly in the face each day on the water.

“We saw it coming. I mean, you’d look down in the room of the boat, there’d be nothing but small fish,” Tremblett said.

“Fishermen were still landing quantity, but what you were bringing in was small. Where 10 fish filled a pan, now you wanted 20 or 25 or 30 to make up that pan. The number you were killing tripled."

"We knew something was going to happen, but when (former federal fisheries minister John Crosbie) made that announcement, it was still a shocker," he said.

"But we knew we weren’t able to make a living at it at that time anyhow. We’d been doing a lot of searching for cod. There was nothing on the traditional grounds anymore.”

Even before the moratorium, during the winter months, Tremblett had been teaching navigation courses for the Marine Institute. In the following years, he’d expand to teaching safety-related courses, such as first aid, navigational safety and non-marine related safety courses, such as confined spaces and fall protection.

Eventually, he developed his own courses and formed his own business, Vista Safety Training. He now teaches courses in Bonavista, around the province and in other parts of the country.

“I haven’t been out on the water since,” Tremblett said. “I stepped into a boat at the wharf one day to speak to a client, but that’s as far as I’ve gone.

“When I first agreed to teach a course, I was nervous and shy, and didn’t think I could do it. But as it went on I found I enjoyed it. So the moratorium was a turning point for me for sure.”

In the years since the 1990s, analysis of both NCARP and TAGS showed the programs met with limited success. While giving displaced fisheries people a small degree of financial security, goals of re-training large numbers of people for work in other industries, and reducing capacity both in the harvesting and production side of the fishing industry, weren’t met.

For 500 years, cod was the mainstay of the Newfoundland and Labrador fishing industry. After the moratorium, when people tired of the federal aid packages, fishermen had to adjust to a new look for the industry or leave it altogether, which probably meant leaving the province.

Butler said the decision of his family, and a number of other fishermen, was to invest.

“The first few years were hard. Then we got into the snow crab. We had a longliner and then we took the risk and invested in a bigger boat because we had a crab licence and quota. And crab became the breadwinner,” Butler said.

“Many times, we scratched our heads and wondered if we did the right thing. We put in a lot of hours and had to do without some things to be able to make the payments on the boat and insurance and all that goes with it.

“But it has worked out pretty good for us. Last year, we had our best year ever. Many fishermen had their best year because the price was good.”

Butler said he believes the crab fishery is managed well, and that’s why the stocks remain relatively healthy.

“They imposed measures… the females are tossed back, there are size restrictions. It allows the stock to grow,” he said. “That’s why I think the stock is in good shape.”

Butler still has the old cod traps of the long-ago cod fishery in his shed. Hauling a cod trap took a lot of physical strength, skill and determination.

The cod traps now represent a way of life lost — and feared gone forever.

“Some people, after the moratorium, took their cod traps to the dump and burned them. I don’t have the heart to take them out of the shed and get rid of them, not yet,” Butler said.

“You’ll never see it come back to that no more — to use cod traps to catch cod. And there’s only a few of us now who really knows how to use the cod traps.

“We can catch a small amount of cod these days. The price is not good, but it keeps you at the cod.

The cod stocks are not back, but it’s looking a little better each year, he adds.

"Just catching small amounts, that might be what it takes for the stocks to rebuild. It might be back to having a larger-scale fishery on cod at some point, but I likely won’t be around to see it.," Butler said.

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