Alberto Wareham, president and CEO of Icewater Seafood Inc., looks over the company's processing facility in Arnold's Cove, Nfld.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
In 2018, Alberto Wareham bet $14-million on a northern cod recovery.
Mr. Wareham is the chief executive officer of Icewater Seafoods Inc. His processing plant is on the shores of Arnold’s Cove, a 1,000-person community an hour and a half from St. John’s. A moratorium on commercial cod fishing had existed since 1992, but that didn’t deter Mr. Wareham, who poured millions over three years into turning a 40-year-old plant into a high-tech facility capable of keeping up with competitors in Norway and Iceland.
“This is our life,” he said. “We’ve been at it for generations, and we believed that cod would recover and would return at some point in the future.”
On June 26, Mr. Wareham felt vindicated: The federal government ended the moratorium in one region off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The 2024 season would boost the total allowable catch from 12,999 to 18,000 tonnes, effectively resurrecting a commercial fishery.
Fishing boats are docked at the government wharf in Arnold's Cove, Nfld.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
To Mr. Wareham and others in the industry, this is a big moment.
“This is just the beginning of a commercial cod fishery,” said Jeff Loder, executive director of the Association of Seafood Producers. “There is not a Newfoundlander or Labradorean who is not happy.”
But others say the move is too bold. The fish stock needs more time to return to its historic levels, researchers say. And the new federal plan begs the question of whether an increased quota will lead to a repetition of the past.
In the mid-1980s, cod was worth about $700-million a year, making Canada the largest exporter of seafood in the world. The industry employed 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador alone, as fishermen and related workers.
But overfishing led to the collapse of the fishery, the economic ruin of entire communities and the exodus of thousands of Newfoundlanders.
In 2003, High Liner Foods Inc. announced plans to close its cod processing plant in Arnold’s Cove. The mortarium made it unviable for the global processor and retailer of frozen seafood.
Equipment sits ready to use on the production line inside the Icewater Seafood processing plant.
Large stainless steel freezers inside the Icewater Seafood processing plant.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
But Mr. Wareham’s father, an executive at High Liner and the sixth generation in his family to work in the cod industry, couldn’t afford to let the plant close. It had employed about 450 people at its height, almost half the town’s population.
Bruce Wareham bought the plant and switched from processing locally caught cod to importing frozen catch from the seas off Norway and Iceland. The returns on frozen imports were smaller, so Icewater Seafoods focused on efficiency – 99.8 per cent of the fish is processed and sold, including the head, which is ground up for pet food, and the skin, which is sold to the nutraceutical industry.
“It wasn’t easy then, it’s not easy now,” his son said.
For the past two decades, the Warehams have kept the plant running, albeit at 50-per-cent capacity. It currently employs about 200 people.
Brenda Hickey started working at Icewater Seafoods in June, 1980.
“My whole 66 years of life, I’ve never known anything else but cod,” she said, adding that her father was a cod fisherman. “The fishery has always been the biggest part of my life.”
She remembers the moratorium and the toll it took on her community. She was lucky to have her job at the plant; many of her friends lost their livelihoods. She hopes the future will be bright, both for the cod and for her community.
Due to the increased quota, Icewater Seafoods will be hiring 30 more people and extending the processing season, with a goal to get back to 10 months of production entirely based on local fish.
Anthony Charles was on the front lines of the 1992 moratorium. He sat on the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, a federally funded program mandated to provide recommendations on conservation strategies for the Atlantic fisheries. It was disbanded by Stephen Harper’s government in 2011.
Now an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University’s Marine Affairs Program, Prof. Charles understands why fishing communities across Newfoundland and Labrador are enthusiastic about the return of a commercial fishery.
“The fishery is like the engine of the costal economy,” he said. “It keeps the economy going, but it’s also the heart of the social fabric.”
However, he worries that lifting the moratorium is short-term thinking. While northern cod has shown some signs of recovery, it’s not a healthy population. The stock is barely 10 per cent above what it used to be, he said – far from what’s needed to sustain a commercial fishery.
“It’s like going from being really terribly sick to being just terribly sick,” he said, noting Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFO) change in the stock’s status from critical to cautious. “You’re still not quite in the condition to go out and run a marathon.”
Brenda Hickey, who has been working for Icewater Seafood Inc. for over 40 years, stands inside the company's processing facility.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
A more prudent move would have been to keep the fishery under the stewardship model. This keeps the catch small, able to sustain small-scale fishermen and provide enough fish for Indigenous culture and ceremony. It does not open the door to large-scale offshore trawlers, which drag weighted nets along the ocean floor. It was these intensive operations that caused the collapse of the cod fishery in the 20th century, Prof. Charles said.
Currently, the federal plan allocates 84 per cent of the total allowable catch to the inshore fleet, with 6 per cent for the Canadian offshore fleet.
A 2019 report from Oceana Canada found that a healthy, rebuilt northern cod fishery could provide 16 times more jobs and have a net value five times more than today’s industry, supporting $233-million of economic activity.
However, getting to that level depends on low fishing pressure, said Rebecca Schijns, a fishery scientist at Oceana Canada, an independent charity focused on restoring Canadian ocean health. The report said a healthy recovery would only happen if the annual maximum catch was limited to 13,000 tonnes.
“We’ve had decades to plan for this,” she said. “And the decision this year is once again short-sighted and short-changing coastal communities in Canada.”
When asked about concerns that increasing the quota would hurt cod stocks, the DFO said the transition to a commercial fishery aligned with other groundfish stocks at the same level and was in keeping with the precautionary approach framework.
“We are taking the first steps toward a sustainable and economically viable year-round northern cod commercial fishery,” the department said in a statement.