The moratorium was a long time coming. North Atlantic cod stocks had been dwindling for at least three decades before the ban, as fishing technology led to unprecedented harvests that outpaced the cod’s ability to regenerate. And though there’s no recorded data, scientists say cod stocks likely started falling even earlier, at the turn of the century, when steam-and diesel-powered ships gave fleets the power to fish in any weather and to venture farther from shore than ever before. In the 1920s and ’30s, Newfoundland’s cod industry employed more than 65,000 people “catching and curing fish,” according to the map, and bringing in more than £2.5 million in 1928-29 (the equivalent of $265 million dollars in today’s terms).
Two decades later, the mammoth 60-metre factory-freezer trawlers of the 1950s and ’60s cast their sweeping nets and fished the very heart out of the stock (see page 30). By the end of the 1960s, cod stocks were on the decline. And though quotas were put in place starting in the 1970s, the hoped-for recovery never happened. In the early 1990s, nets were coming up shorter and shorter — northern cod were on the brink of extinction, and the federal government’s hand was finally forced. The cod moratorium was — and still is — Canada’s single largest industrial layoff, affecting more than 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador, from fishers to ship builders to cannery workers.
