The Northern Cod Moratorium
For five centuries, the cod fishery was the lifeblood of Newfoundland. When John Cabot first reached the Grand Banks in 1497, he reported seas so thick with fish they could be caught in baskets. Generations of Newfoundlanders built their lives around the cod — from Ship Cove to Cape Race, Port aux Basques to Harbour Grace — fishing from small boats, salting and drying their catch on stages and flakes along the shore.
But by the late twentieth century, industrial trawler fleets had taken their toll. Foreign factory ships, and later Canadian ones, vacuumed up fish faster than stocks could replenish. Despite warnings from fishermen who saw the decline firsthand, quotas remained too high. On July 2, 1992, Canadian Fisheries Minister John Crosbie stood before a crowd of angry fishermen in St. John’s and announced a moratorium on the northern cod fishery. Nearly 40,000 people lost their livelihoods almost overnight in one of the largest industrial closures in Canadian history.
The moratorium was meant to last two years. More than three decades later, the cod have never fully recovered, and much of outport Newfoundland has been transformed forever. Canadian folklorist Shelley Posen wrote No More Fish, No Fishermen in 1996 as a lament for this devastation, capturing the emptiness of harbours where “boats stand dried up on the beach, ghost-like in the early dawn.”
