The Friggin' Fish Flu

Dear ex-fish Minister Gail Shea:

Please do not visit our province again. Nothing personal - just a provincial health concern and alert.

We come down with a wicked case of "Fuck-the-NL Fishery" flu every time you pop by.

 

We end up with the shivers and shakes (our heads and our fists),

and chills (you leave us feeling so cold)

and uncontrollable nausea and cursing.

We gets the sweats (from our exasperation and anger)

and the dry scratchy throat (from condemning you on Open Line).

Then we gets the runs - some running away from your curse

and the rest running to clout you 'bout the head.

 

Its just ungodly how ill and weak we get when you hit our shores. You takes the good right out of us, I tell you cause you got everything arse foremost!

So, the good Doctor recommends that we stay very, very far away from the carrier of this wicked flu. The anti-frig-the-fish flu shot won't work, he says, because we've already been overdosed by your arrogance, patronizing ways, as well as contempt for us. Not to mention your slick misleading info and feigning compassion. You do not understand the fisheries and how it defines us. Cut your losses and skedaddle, missus.

It isn't much to ask you NOT to come here for your once-a-year visit, is it?  Just send those few piddly federal dollars for wharves and what-nots on the boat to China with our fish. It'll make it back to us at some point.

You see the "Frig-the-NL Fishery" flu is the hardest flu ever to hit our people 'cause we just loves our fishery. We take it seriously. We lives and breathes it and sometimes we adores it just like a god. It's been real good to us over the century and we like to keep it healthy and strong into the future. We got centuries ol' communities and young people counting on the fishery heartbeat to keep pumping. Sure, if truth be known we got babies lined in heaven just waiting to be born a NL fisher in a rural NL community - that's how precious and popular our culture is. Ottawa don't have those bragging rights, eh?

So, if you can't stop coming, we will retaliate. We got this new vicious flu bug growing that if unleashed could wipe out your entire central Canada government and I predict it will happen during Election 2015.  They don't call us fighting Nflders for nothing, girl.

In the meantime, we are symbolically striping you of your title as Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. In our books, you have never earned a day's pay yet.

And as for rationalizing the fishery - don't you get it by now? Us Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can't be rational when we're pissin' angry - especially about our fisheries. So if you going to insist on inflicting the LIFO damage and all the other fish mess, let the fish flu biological warfare begin! 

Cough, sniffle ... ahhh..coo! Look, we're even breaking out in hives. Jaysus, yes, stay away - we're even allergic to you too!  Oh me nerves!

Fishing for a Fair Food Fishery

Cod and Newfoundlander & Labrador are linked liked the moon and the stars.  It's hard not to think about one without the other.

Centuries ago, our waters teemed in these fish; and we treasured them, traded them and yes, we ate them.

 

Now, we are now down to a dictated fishery that permits our citizens only five fish a day for just 31 days of the year (July 19-August 10/September 20 -28^th). The feds call it the recreational fishery, but we shouldn’t let them - for our people, it's our chance to put our traditional food back on the table.

My uncle recently shared a story about how, as young boy coming home from school for lunch, my grandmother would ask him to take the flat boat and row off a little ways in the cove and jig a Cod or two for supper.

 

It would take just a few minutes and I would have a couple of good-sized fish and head back to school. But things were different then....

 

When it comes to Cod - it could have been different. We could have sustained our ability to fish for food every day of the year. Instead, the bungling Cod managers in Ottawa mismanaged it so gravely, we nearly lost the resource. Twenty three years later, we are lucky to have a food fishery.

 

Back a year ago, some 18 organizations convened a meeting in Clarenville and found a common ground in expressing massive dissatisfaction with the Atlantic Canada 2013 groundfish regulations.  In other Atlantic Provinces, up to 10 groundfish are permitted and the season runs much longer – up to 11 months in one part of Nova Scotia.

 

This coalition wrote the Prime Minister, but despite their poor track record on managing fish stocks Ottawa argued they know best.   Thus, these unfair regulations are still in place.  This ongoing and controversial policy is discriminatory. And it needs changing, especially given that our Cod is on the first step of the rebound ladder. 

 

What we really need is joint management of our fisheries – but in the meantime, we needed justice.   Our culture and our heritage have been built on the Cod fishery; and our bodies nourished by this world-famous fish.   Not something those without coastal genes far from the ocean would understand.

 

Not certain where this quote came from, but it sums it up nicely our love of a good meal of Cod…

 

The food fishery  "sure that's not a meal!  When you were fishing , fer sure you had fish once a day"
Sure, I wouldn't mind if we had it 3 times a day …

 

 

So despite the unfairness, Cod-bless the traditional fish that is on our tables on those regulated days. Keep Safe!


 

Rebuild It and They Will Come

The wound of the 1992 Cod Moratorium still festers after all these years.

It's been 22 years today that the near 550-year-old fishery narrative was forever altered in our province.

With the collapse of the Cod stocks and the declaration of the moratorium, we lost scores of jobs from 400 communities (the largest industrial closure in Canadian history), and people (80,000 left the province!); and our society and culture took a bad beating. 

Some say that the Moratorium milestone ranks up there in significance with the founding of this land in 1497... it was that huge - then, and still remains so today.  

For those with a connection to the fishery and our rural places, our hearts still aches for the mess-management that brought us to that point, all that has slipped away from us since and for the cavalier approach by both governments in restoring the resource over the past 2 decades.

In 2005 government produced a document called A Strategy for the Recovery and Management of Cod Stocks in Newfoundland and Labrador. Nearly a decade later, government #INACTION nailed it to a cross of gross negligence. Now, we are told that because Canada signed an international agreement committing them to using the Precautionary approach in managing fish stocks, they decided (in 2009) that rebuilding plans were needed (some smart they are). Two years later (in 2011) DFO took the next giant step and formed working groups to develop rebuilding plans in areas 2JKL, 3PS and 3Pn4RS.   There are no formal written terms of reference as yet - at the rate they going, that may take another few decades.  

If Canada is ever to move on properly rebuilding the Cod fishery, it will take international pressure from people concerned about world fish stocks.   Ottawa has shown time and time again, they could care less, nor do they understand, the fishery, its health and the socio-economic and cultural importance to our province.

It's been 22 years ... a long wait for our heart and soul to be returned to our province. 
And as one wise observer of the fishery has stated:

Until Ottawa is forced to accept its responsibility and restore the fishery, the future
of the Newfoundland and Labrador economy is in jeopardy. Unless we have a restored and viable renewable fishery, reliance on non- renewable resources (oil and
minerals) will lead to economic disaster.

Then there are those who say if the Cod comes back in full abundance, who will want to fish it?

Rebuild it Ottawa - because it's the right and moral thing to do and because you owe us big time.  

And we can assure you we will come to fish it.  It's in our centuries-old fishing genes.