The cod delusion – A moratorium on cod fishing that was supposed to last two years has now lasted 30.
Three decades on, the latest DFO science still puts Atlantic cod in the critical zone. “I hope politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa have learned something, because I’ve learned something: the moratorium was the biggest catastrophe ever heaped on the people in this province, ever. Nothing has been as bad as this,” says Captain Saunders, an 80-year-old Inuk. Seated in the wheelhouse of his longliner, docked in Pinsent’s Arm in late September 2021, Saunders speaks with the authority of someone with six decades of fishing experience, backed by centuries of hindsight. “Newfoundland and Labrador people fished for 500 years and didn’t damage the stocks. What Canada done was an atrocity in my opinion. It ruined a way of life. It ruined culture. All the stages, stage heads, they’re all falling apart, they’re all deteriorated — that’s the government did that.” >click to read< 17:40
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