As the sun rose above Canso behind the 11.5-metre Knot-T Buoys, they hauled, dumped, rebaited and reset 100 traps without speaking a word.
They didn’t have to.
Horne and his crewman have fished these fine-meshed shrimp traps seven days a week since October.
"In February, you get a few icicles in your beard," said Horne. "Sometimes it gets a bit windy."
As he steamed between trap sets, the 50-year-old skipper recounted his 35 years in the fishery. "Worked eight months on land when I was 16 — never again," said Horne.
The future of how Canada’s oceans are fished, how fishermen and communities benefit from the resource and how stocks are kept healthy is the topic of a document that rested a few kilometres astern of the Knot-T Buoy Friday, on the desk of Ginny Boudreau.
The document has consumed and disgusted the manager of the Guysborough County Inshore Fishermen’s Association.
The associations and unions representing Atlantic Canada’s small-boat fishermen have protested and fired off outraged news releases for the past two months in response to the discussion document titled The Future of Canada’s Commercial Fisheries, issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Why would 30 pages of broad language making general recommendations to do things largely already done and suggesting no firm timetables cause such outrage?
The document rehashes well-known stresses on the commercial fishing industry and speaks to the need for a "long-term, stable approach" to fisheries management decision-making. It recommends streamlining and simplifying the complex web of rules governing the industry and certifying more fisheries as sustainable.
They are common-sense recommendations that draw broad support but are light on particulars.
It states that integrated fisheries management plans should be put in place for individual species, using a precautionary approach to protect stock health — something that is already done for the species fished from Canso.
It’s a combination of what the document doesn’t say and a deep-seated suspicion among Atlantic Canada’s inshore fishermen that brewed the storm of outrage.
"Almost every policy discussed in the document we already have in the industry," said Boudreau. "But the document doesn’t say anything about fleet separation or owner/operator policy, which is the basis for our fishery."
At the heart of Boudreau’s fury is the suspicion that processors want to control inshore licences and that a Conservative fisheries minister is taking their side.
For his part, federal Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield has never suggested this. In the House of Commons and through his spokespeople, the minister has said the document and the recently completed consultation process were about getting a grasp on what the industry wants.
But suspicions remain.
Since the 1970s, there’s been a strict separation of fleets and quotas on the East Coast enforced by two policies — commonly called the fleet separation and owner/operator policies.
Fleet separation essentially means processors and owners of offshore quotas that require large capital-intensive fishing vessels aren’t allowed to own quotas reserved for inshore vessels under 20 metres.
The policies are the basis for management of the East Coast fishery and are vehemently defended by inshore associations every time Fisheries and Oceans Canada consults on the industry’s future. They also don’t exist anywhere else in Canada.
"The legislation originated (when) you had really high unemployment in coastal communities in Atlantic Canada," said Patrick McGuinness, president of the Fisheries Council of Canada.
"Basically the issue then was to try to get as many fishermen as possible . . . a licence to fish and to establish as many fish plants throughout the communities."
But, adds McGuinness, whose organization mainly represents processors, conditions have changed since the 1970s.
Few communities would serve as a more drastic example than Canso. There, offshore and inshore boats landed cod at a plant employing hundreds.
But cod stocks collapsed and the Canso fish plant, along with others around the province, closed.
Horne’s generation, who grew up handlining cod into small wooden boats and hauling lobster traps without mechanical aid, responded by fishing harder, longer seasons.
Some of Canso’s 30 inshore boats fish scallops throughout the winter; others, like Horne’s, fish shrimp traps. During the summer, each enterprise fishes a mixture of lobster, tuna and crab.
The small plants remaining in rural areas survive on short seasons during which they process a variety of species. Many of those plants, said McGuinness, now depend on migrant labour because low-wage, seasonal work isn’t attractive to young rural Nova Scotians.
"Those plants that want to consolidate, work longer seasons and be more attractive employers — to do that, they have to be very involved in the harvesting side because it’s a continuum," said McGuinness, who considers the existing policies an impediment to modernizing the fishery.
"If you’re going to be a viable processor for 10 to 12 months, you have to be extremely linked in to the raw resources to keep that plant going and keep those people working."
It’s called vertical integration and, in every other industry in Canada, including the Great Lakes and West Coast fisheries, government doesn’t get in its way.
McGuinness argues that processors need control over the resource.
"The bottom line now is that no significant retail operations have much confidence if all you are is a processor in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have control of the quantity or quality of resources," said McGuinness.
"This is a unique impediment to industry and it’s only in Atlantic Canada."
However, Boudreau warns that, over the long term, licences would end up in the hands of investors, who have the upfront capital to buy licences and then lease the right to fish to fishermen.
She said fishermen would essentially end up as indentured servants to licence owners, with less revenue going into communities adjacent to the resource.
"We’d end up with a corporate fishery just like in British Columbia," said Boudreau.
Such a change would take massive political will by the fisheries minister, but the department is saying little about the document.
"The minister has met with hundreds of groups and individuals and is in the process now of reviewing the feedback we received," said Erin Filliter, spokeswoman for Ashfield.
"The end result is the minister is not advocating a position or a plan and this is all very preliminary."
Asked what the odds are we’ll see changes to the owner/operator policy or fleet separation over the coming years, McGuinness replied he’s not a betting man.
As for Horne, while steaming back into Canso on Friday, he said he doesn’t want the next generation to grow into a fishery where fishermen don’t own their own boats and licences.
"As long as the lobster and crab stay around, there’ll still be people here to catch them," said Horne. "When there’s salt water in your veins, there’s nothing else for it."
Original Article
Source: the chronicle herald
Author: AARON BESWICK
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