30 years after the moratorium, what have we really learned about cod and science?

The following is an essay by Jenn Thornhill Verma, author of the book Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland's Saltwater Cowboys. Now based in Ottawa, Verma examines the state of science on cod 30 years after the moratorium.

"Although the industry has many problems, a shortage of fish is not one of them," confidently pronounced the 1982 report of the Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries, which is commonly called the Kirby report.

But a shortage of fish, as we now know, would become an insurmountable problem a decade later —so much so that on July 2, 1992, the federal government shuttered the commercial Northern cod fishery, once Canada's largest fishery.

But in the early Eighties, it was the threat of a financial collapse, rather than a cod collapse, that preoccupied Ottawa. As the Kirby report noted, "in late 1981, it became clear that once again the industry would probably require a substantial infusion of public funds – as it had in 1968 and again in 1974-76 – if it was to avoid almost total collapse."

The federal government wanted to break this cycle of bailouts—all the while banking on a plentiful supply of cod. By 1987, as the report details, the groundfish harvest was expected to reach 1.1 million tonnes—an increase of about 370,000 tonnes over 1981.

Almost half of that increase was confined to one species: cod.

As well, about 70 per cent of the growth in the harvest was anticipated to take place off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

"Hopes were pinned almost entirely on Northern cod to save the fishery. The biological reality was not there, and the assumption of great growth was uncontested," said fisheries scientist George Rose, reflecting on the Kirby report today.

While many inshore fishermen of that time could tell you they were starting to experience declining catch rates, most scientists and managers never recognized a major problem.

The late fisheries scientist Jeff Hutchings contended that was because scientists and managers did not think the inshore fishery was a reliable source of information.

Besides, the scientific projections showed growth in Atlantic cod to be (in everyday terms) remarkably rosy.

"I think modelling was one of the things that led us down the garden path in the '80s, and I fear that overconfidence in model projections is doing the same thing now," Rose told me in an interview.

The growth projections for cod then, as they are now, were informed by modelling, as an essential part of stock assessments.

Stock is a group of fish usually of the same species in a geographical area.