The future always looks fabulous!... from a distance

There’s a story on view at CBC today about the brand-spankin’-new Innuit-owned fishing vessel, the Inuksuk II. She’s a beauty. Largest Canadian vessel in our fishing fleet, a factory freezer trawler that clocks in at 80 metres long with a beam of 18 metres, and a hold capacity of 1,300 tonnes. The Inuksuk II will be plying the eastern Arctic for turbot and shrimp. The Nunavut government is optimistic. The new boat will provide employment opportunities not only for the crew, but for hundreds of Inuit on-shore fish plant workers as well. The future is bright with possibilities! Sixty years ago the National Film Board released a 20 minute doc called Trawler fishermen. It followed the crew of a state-of-the-art factory freezer trawler called the Cape Nova, at the time, the biggest boat in our fishing fleet. She was the first stern-trawler in Canada. Quadrupled the hold capacity of the side-trawlers! The future was bright with possibilities! The Cape Nova was such a success that Canada ordered another half dozen freezer-trawlers. Alas, there are only so many fish in the sea, and by the time the new fleet was fully deployed, it was landing at least 200% of a sustainable catch every year. Theoretically, that’s not sustainable. And it wasn’t. By 1976, a mere ten years after the first stern-trawler, the Cape Nova, was launched, the East coast fishery was showing signs of severe over-fishing. It wobbled along for another couple of decades, until it was shut down altogether in 1992. Between boat crews and plant-workers, almost 40,000 Newfoundlanders were thrown out of work. That led to the precipitous collapse of the population of Newfoundland, a collapse that, to this day, it has yet to fully recover from. Let’s hope the aspirations of the Inuit, and their hopes for the Inuksuk II and their Arctic fishery, fare better than their comrades in Newfoundland.