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Gut DFO Like a Cod by Silver Donald Cameron What are we going to do about the Department of Fisheries and Oceans(DFO)? John MacKnight, the community development guru from Chicago, has borrowed a term from medicine to describe certain social and governmental programs. Health problems caused by physicians are "iatrogenic." You undergo surgery for an inflamed appendix; the surgeon leaves a towel inside you. The festering towel is an iatrogenic problem: the doctor created it. By the same token, says MacKnight, social programs may have unintended side effects that cancel out their actual benefits. As with social programs, so with DFO. Is the harm caused by that department not greater than the benefits it produces? Its mandate was to manage the fishery for the long-term benefit of the people of Canada. Its "management" has made the East Coast groundfishery a memory, and the West Coast salmon fishery a basket case. En route to its utter failure, DFO distorted the findings of its own scientists, whose warnings of impending stock collapses, said an internal DFO report, were "gruesomely mangled and corrupted to meet political ends." Then it closed down its Maritime research stations. It has supported Individual Transferable Quotas, which serve corporate interests rather than the voters and fish harvesters whose interests it is supposed to represent. It has cut back its offices on the coasts, where the fisheries are, but maintains a bloated bureaucracy in Ottawa, where fish live mainly in aquariums. "DFO has not been able to give the fishermen any useful advice on the recovery of the cod stocks," Dr. Ransom Myers told me in 1998. A former DFO scientist, Myers holds the Killam Chair of Ocean Studies at Dalhousie and is widely considered one of Canada's leading fish scientists. "DFO Ottawa initially claimed that the cod would recover completely in two years," he said. "I think we are looking at at least a decade and perhaps two decades. If DFO, with 800 bureaucrats in Ottawa, cannot tell fishermen anything about this issue, then why are they being paid?" Why indeed? DFO is directly responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs in the fishery and for untold human misery in coastal communities, including the steady depopulation of rural Newfoundland. The Department has been rebuked by the fisheries committees of both the House and the Senate. None of this seems to matter. It just keeps rolling along. And the pattern continues. In late November, Arthur Bull, Chair of the Coastal Communities Network, described for the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans the grassroots discussions that led to a landmark agreement between Native and non-Native fish harvesters in his area. DFO, he said, had been "conspicuous by its absence." Bull exempted "area-level DFO staff" from his sweeping condemnation, but "for many fishermen," he said, "DFO's actions seemed to fit a familiar pattern: first allow a situation to unravel, then declare disaster, then determine that there is no consensus, and finally, impose a solution that fits DFO's corporate agenda. It is hard to believe that such a Machiavellian approach could be taken in the face of such a serious human emergency, but it is a measure of the low level of trust in DFO that many fishermen believed it to be true." The signs of the fisheries collapse were evident to many observers long before it happened. Zoe Landale, a young West Coast fisher, recorded in Harvest of Salmon (1977) that "fishing was going downhill in Hecate Straits" in 1974, that "starting with the first reliable records in about 1920, salmon have declined to half their previous numbers," and that "the Gulf of Georgia is nearly finished for commercial fishermen." Meanwhile, Farley Mowat was writing in A Whale for the Killing (1972) that "the appalling destruction of herring in Newfoundland waters is already seriously affecting the inshore fishery for cod and related species. Taken in conjunction with the gross overkill of all the larger species of food fishes on the offshore banks by the burgeoning fleets of trawlers and draggers belonging to a score of desperately competing nations, the loss of the bait fishes (mainly herring and capelin) will mean an early end to any significant continuing catch of large edible fishes. It will also mean an end to fisheries as a way of life for many thousands of men." And so it did. If the writers could see it, how could DFO have missed it? Today we are getting used to fishing communities without fishermen, but we should not let this issue rest. The groundfish collapse is not merely the worst environmental disaster in Canadian history. It is a planetary catastrophe. These were among the great fisheries of the world. DFO is an iatrogenic organization. If it were a doctor, we could sue it for malpractice. We wouldn't accept a festering towel in our abdomen. We shouldn't accept what DFO has done to our communities. We should already have had a Royal Commission, some high-level firings, a savage trimming of the headquarters staff. Instead, nothing. Let us maintain a relentless drumbeat of outrage until that department is razed to the ground and wholly rebuilt. Reprinted from the December 12, 1999 edition of the Sunday Herald, with the permission of the author. Silver Donald Cameron lives in D'Escousse. His book The Living Beach won the 1999 Evelyn Richardson Award. back to top North Queens Pride and Preservation in "Pine Country" by Scott Milsom In the early part of the nineteenth century, the British Admiralty sent search parties into the uncut forests of southwestern Nova Scotia to single out tall, stout, and straight trees to serve as masts for the British Navy. It was a sort of "strategic defence initiative" of the day, because England was embroiled at the time in war with Napoleonic France, and these strong spars were to serve as masts for its fleet of warships. The wilds of what is now northern Queens County were a particularly good place to look, for here the Eastern White Pine grew tall and straight, and the tallest and straightest of them were cut and used to carry British sail into battle. Inevitably though, the supply was exhausted, and the Lords in London had to look elsewhere. Nova Scotians have not seen such trees since. Today, the little village of Caledonia, with a population of about 300 souls, serves as the hub of northern Queens County. "We don't think just of Caledonia as our community," says local resident Sandra Rowter, "we think of the whole area of North Queens, which has a population of about 3,000 people spread among about fifteen small villages, as our community." The people of North Queens earn their living in various ways. Some grow blueberries or Christmas trees, others raise livestock, work in Caledonia's 44-bed nursing home, or in one of its two schools. But for most of the people of North Queens, it is to the rich forests around them that they look for a livelihood. Like the British Admirals of two centuries ago, many of them rely most heavily on the area's Eastern White Pine. Indeed, North Queens has well earned the nickname of "Pine Country." And none look so much to pine as the families of the 45 people who work at the N. F. Douglas lumber mill in Caledonia. "Over the years, Douglas has bought a fair bit of woodland in the area," says mill Office Manager Mary Keirstead, "and on every woodlot we own, there's a mix of species. Now though, Eastern White Pine is our bread and butter. It's beautiful wood, but it's very tricky to dry. We have two kilns specially designed to do that." The finished product from the Douglas mill is marketed as "Caledonia Pine" and much of it is shipped to high-end markets in Britain and central Canada. As I can see by looking at the beautiful panelling that makes up the walls of the mill office, Mary's assessment of the wood's beauty is right on the mark. Of course, harvesting of our