A tour boat passes the damaged Canadian Coast Guard vessel Alfred Needler in Charlottetown, P.E.I. on Sept. 2, 2003.ANDREW VAUGHAN/CP
A “perfect storm” of supply chain delays and the breakdown of a decrepit Coast Guard science vessel has led to the cancellation of a key commercial fish-stock survey that supports Newfoundland and Labrador’s $1-billion fishery.
After several mechanical breakdowns, the Canadian Coast Guard Alfred Needler was decommissioned in February. The ship was used for 40 years as a fisheries science vessel surveying northern cod and shrimp in waters off Newfoundland. It provided important data about the health of these fisheries, worth a combined $156-million in 2021.
“It’s very frustrating and it’s not good enough,” said Jason Spingle, secretary treasurer of the Fish, Food & Allied Workers union, adding that it leaves the industry “without the information that it needs to make the best decisions.”
The Coast Guard recently launched two new ships to replace its aging offshore science vessels. They were delivered in the middle of the pandemic which, due to supply-chain issues, compounded minor fixes for warranty parts, said Gary Ivany, a Coast Guard assistant commissioner responsible for Atlantic Canada. At the same time, the Needler was also breaking down, leading to a “perfect storm” that impacted the federal government’s ability to deliver surveys in 2021 and 2022.
“It was very unfortunate,” Mr. Ivany said. “I know that teams are looking at other innovative ways to collect that data.”
For 34 years, the federal government has collected data in a large section of ocean that spans from southern Labrador to the northern Grand Banks. Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) used the information to set quotas for fishermen but after the program was cancelled, quotas were rolled forward from previous years.
Brian Healey, DFO’s division manager of aquatic resources in Newfoundland and Labrador, said the government instead focused on collecting other scientific data and calibrating the new vessels to analyze differences between how the old and new ships gather information.
“We will resume that program in future years for sure,” said Mr. Healey about the northern cod and shrimp assessments. He said cod stocks have remained stable at a low level since the fishery’s collapse in the early 1990s.
“That’s not to diminish the concern,” said Mr. Healey, adding DFO resource managers will look at the best available science and socio-economic information and consult with stakeholders to make decisions about quotas until the survey is re-established.
The collapse of northern cod more than 30 years ago crushed the economy of Newfoundland and eliminated a traditional livelihood of 30,000 people. In 1992, the federal government announced a sweeping moratorium on fishing the species. There’s now a small commercial cod fishery, with catch limits set at a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes landed in the late 1980s.
Last year, more than 2,000 harvesters landed 13,000 metric tonnes of northern cod – an industry worth $17-million. Shrimp is a $139-million fishery.
Even a minuscule increase in quotas could keep people working for a few extra weeks and make a big economic impact in the small coastal fishing communities of Newfoundland, said Mr. Spingle.
Noel Cadigan, a quantitative fisheries scientist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, said cod would not have grown substantially enough over the last two years to lead to quota increases in the fishery, nor will rolled-over quotas seriously affect the recovery of stocks.
He added, though, that the survey monitors the ecosystem and how it impacts cod recovery, and if there was a die-off related to predation and starvation in the last two years, no one would know about it.
With a report from The Canadian Press