In the summer of 1992, with a mob calling for his head on the other side of a barricaded entrance,
a tired looking Canadian government official sat down before the media of the world
and stated what he came to say.
He was there to bring a five hundred year industry to its knees.
He was there to put nearly forty thousand people out of work and cripple a multi-billion dollar industry.
He was there to destroy a province’s economy, in a way that it would never return from.
And the biggest mistake that he made,
is that he didn’t do it sooner.
They call cod the fish that launched a thousand ships.
Which is presumably a nod to Helen of Troy, implying that their slimy little bodies are
the most desirable thing on the planet.
Which I'm hoping is metaphorical, because I've seen a bunch of them them while filming this,
and to be honest with you...
I’d swipe left.
Yet, statuesque beauties or not, calling them the fish that launched a thousand ships…
is kind of an insult.
These fish launched tens of thousands of ships.
More, probably.
Their annual harvest has been a part of the European economy for thirteen hundred years at minimum.
It drew the Norse from Norway to Vinland.
At one point or another, almost every single major colonial power has found themselves in these waters,
including those as far flung as Russia.
These fish convinced England to colonize Canada and fed the soldiers of that massive Empire
as they first traversed the planet.
They were, without exaggeration, one of the most important food sources in all human history.
And if the government hadn’t put an end to their industry twenty-five years ago,
they’d be completely gone today.
If you polled Canadians my age and asked them to tell you what they knew about cod,
I suspect almost every single one of them would come up with an old heritage minute
where explorer John Cabot dunks a bucket into the water and pulls up a bunch of fish.
Oh, and for those of you that aren’t Canadian, heritage minutes are like these government sponsored history commercials
that they used to run between shows to try to slow the American cultural influence on our impressionable young minds.
But chances are if you grew up watching TV here in the 90’s,
you have a memory of an actor with a bad Italian accent saying “codfish” burned into the back of your brain.
[codfish]
That episode was put out to remind Canadians of just how many fish there were in these waters
when we first started fishing.
There were so many fish here when Cabot arrived that it slowed his boat as he moved through the ocean.
And just as much as that, that episode was there to remind Canadians of how important
this resource was to populating this country.
The cod fisheries of Newfoundland, which had once been home to indigenous inhabitants for thousands of years,
started playing seasonal home to European fishermen in the late 1400's.
Originally they’d come hunting whale, but they’d soon depleted those stocks and turned their eye to the incredible bounty of cod.
Every spring, thousands of men and women from Europe’s Western shores would pack into ships
and head across to Newfoundland for the fishing season.
They’d build a little shack, a dock for their boats, and a bit of staging for drying the cod.
But not much more.
While a number of those early few would ask to be buried on its shores,
to most it was an office, not home.
That all changed with the treaty of Utrecht.
With France no longer a looming threat, the population spiked.
Starting in the early 1700’s, a flood of settlers arrived, preparing to spend the rest of their lives,
and winters, in the now blossoming colony of Newfoundland.
Upon arriving, they split themselves into three groups, Inshore, Offshore, and Labrador.
I’d explain what each of those are, but their names are fairly self-explanatory.
Each had its own particular set of risks and rewards, and as they were all working the same batch of cod,
they were naturally interwoven.
Due to the ease of market entry, the inshore fishery was by far the oldest,
and employed the largest number of people.
And by the 1800’s, in every cove, in every harbor, off every shoreline,
was a cod fisherman eeking out a living for his family.
But also by the 1800’s, the first major problems had started to take hold.
On the land, the indigenous Beothuk had been driven to extinction, and a number of important animal species
were either already lost to time or beginning to suffer a steep decline in numbers.
Overcrowding on the water started to become a serious economic issue.
Too many men, not enough fish.
But from another perspective, the economy was booming, and Newfoundland had more people than ever before.
It would have been hard for anyone in those times to imagine changing course.
In the eyes of a culture built on the back of tapping a resource, the more the merrier.
But of course, the more people that piled into those boats and headed for the coves,
the sooner the bust was coming.
First, it came in the form of industry.
Too many men spread over too small an area with too many expensive loans.
The fish were still there, granted, but with the way things had been going there was simply
no longer enough to go around per person.
In the late 1900’s, after a few bad seasons in a row, the entirety of the Newfoundland banking system collapsed
and took the country alongside it.
The Great Depression brought this fledgling nation to its knees and just as things looked their worst,
the World War raised the price of cod enough to bring life back to the island.
With peace on their doorstep, it was time for prosperity.
But just as it was in the early 1700’s, that prosperity of peace brought a different type of destruction.
With the new international order, countries began to rapidly industrialize.
Naval technology left over from the war was reflected into the fishing fleets.
And by the 1950’s, the ocean was industrial.
It meant one of the greatest economic blooms this island had seen in generators
and for twenty plus years, they pretended that things were stable.
Bigger harvests, more fish, a larger hall, a greater economy.
And before long, international crews got in on it too.
They came in from as far away as Russia, all across the North Atlantic to take part in the bonanza.
In 1860, the fishermen of the Newfoundland caught 100,000 tons of fish a year.
In 1968, they caught 800,000 tons.
By the late 1970's, the cod were clearly dying.
Every fisherman knew it.
The inshore, where the bulk of individuals made their living, was seeing virtually nothing from the season.
Smaller fish, lower catches, longer hours, further trips.
Fear was boiling over across the province.
The government of Canada had its scientists declare that everything was fine,
that the cod were just staying away because the water was cold, or something like that,
but everybody knew it was a lie.
The real reason the cod were gone was the super trawlers.
They took the fish before they ever had a chance to come to shore.
By the late 1970’s, nations from around the globe had sent boats with nets that reached hundreds of feet deep,
catching everything the ocean had to offer indiscriminately,
and scraping the bottom to destroy anything else it happened to come across.
What they couldn’t catch legally, they dumped back in the ocean dead,
destroying the entire food chain the cod needed for their survival.
In ten years, they caught nearly as many fish as were caught in the last fifty of the 1800’s.
Clearly it was going to collapse.
So who was going to stop it?
It wasn’t just big business, this was the entire economy.
This was the culture.
I mean it's people’s heritage, this is what they take pride in.
This is for most people here the only skill they had.
Who was going to stop it?
The local government that they voted in?
The merchants who rely on them?
Who?
Well, eventually, the cod took it away.
By the 1990’s, the stocks of cod were at less than 1% their historic numbers.
There’s nobody to blame, it's everybody’s fault.
The consumers, the producers, the ministry of fisheries, the voting public, everyone.
It's all of our faults.
So twenty five years ago, the federal government stepped in and forcibly shut down the cod industry.
Thirty five thousand plus people lost their jobs in an instant, with hundreds of thousands more trickling down the lines.
Mining and oil tried to make up for the loss, but the reality was
there wasn’t enough left in Newfoundland to go around.
A population decline began that continues to this day, draining out an entire generation of people,
who will only return in their retirement to settle back in the land that couldn’t support them.
But this story isn’t over.
Few things die without a fight.
When the government shut down the fisheries, there was an expectation that the cod would return.
They never imagined it would remain as bad as it has for as long as it has.
Or at least they didn't admit it.
I have no proof, but I suspect that there was always the belief that if they just waited it out just a couple years,
things would go back to how they were before.
Like a smoker taking a week off and imagining their lungs are clean now,
they could trawl to their heart’s content just as long as they took these little breaks.
New government scientists and new fishery ministers started to keep watching.
They claimed that this time things would be different.
But within a few decades they declared things were ok, started increasing their quotas,
and realized this pattern all over again.
But the death of the cod didn’t kill the industry.
It just pushed it elsewhere.
Crab, lobster, shrimp, and anything else the trawlers can still legally sell,
is being harvested at an unsustainable rate.
Those are the areas we need to be watching now.
When I first arrived in Newfoundland, the second conversation we had was with a lobster fisherman.
He spoke about how far he had to now go to get his catch.
How much harder it was becoming.
They’re still here, he says, the lobster I mean.
But the trip to get them is further and further every year.
The guy with the crab traps said the same thing.
Too many men, not enough fish.
We the resource nations need to remind ourselves that not every resource is a gold mine.
You don’t just dig into the cod until there’s nothing left.
If we had treated this resource properly, if we'd managed it, if we'd viewed it as something
that we would need for years to come, it would be raining cod to this day.
But the moment that we sent out those trawlers,
the moment we decided that a resource industry was too big to fail, we doomed ourselves.
When they put that cod moratorium out in 1992, it destroyed this province.
It put tens of thousands of people out of work.
And the biggest mistake they made, was not doing it sooner.
This is Rare Earth.
Bruce! Hello? Hello! Hello!