FFAW wrong ones to manage the fishery

I don’t know how much fish is in the ocean.
The FFAW’s Dawn Street was happy with the increase in quota of cod. She also went on to say, ‘Nobody outside the fishery should have any say, especially groups like Oceana.’
If Oceana and other groups outside the fishery had been involved, we wouldn’t have had a moratorium in 1992.
I can remember the FFAW did very little to stop the slaughter. They represented inshore harvesters, offshore draggers, and plant workers who had to keep their jobs, but they didn’t. In 1992, 30,000 people lost their way of life, one they had had for 500 years.
One person who was not involved in the fishery was the late Cabot Martin who put more into trying to save the fishery than all the fisher people.
I can remember Jake Rice, a scientist with DFO talking about the big year ‘87 class of juvenile cod that was going to provide us more fish than we could catch. All that cod disappeared somewhere. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans was good at trying to convince us we were wrong.
If we are to bring the cod back to its full potential, we have to deal with the caplin and the seals and take the decisions out of the hands of the politicians who have done a terrible job managing our oceans.
It should be put into the hands of a committee made up of responsible people, scientists, fisher people and others, not involved, but concerned about the ocean. We have to start managing the ocean for how much it can produce. Instead, we are managing it for how much we can catch.
(Ret.) Captain Wilfred Bartlett, CBS
wilfbartlett@hotmail.com