INSHORE COUNCIL TAKES HARD STANCE AGAINST ALL ENVIRONMENTAL FISHERY CLOSURES

ST. JOHN’S, NL – The FFAW’s Inshore Council, convening this week in St. John’s to address key issues facing the province’s fishing industry, has unanimously passed a resolution condemning all baseless fishery closures. This motion includes all current and proposed Marine Protect Areas, Refuges, National Marine Conservation Areas, and related restrictions that unfairly limit the fishing industry.

“We demand that Prime Minister Mark Carney, Minister Joanne Thompson, and Minister Steven Guilbeault immediately dismantle these baseless closures and abandon all plans for new ones. These policies are a deliberate betrayal of our fish harvesters, wrecking livelihoods while masquerading as conservation,” says FFAW-Unifor Vice President Jason Sullivan. “The federal government’s obsession with these closures is a disgrace, prioritizing hollow environmental optics over the survival of our communities.”

“For years, our province’s fisheries have been unfairly targeted by meaningless conservation targets. Our fisheries are already managed sustainably in collaboration with harvesters and DFO. Alarmingly, these Marine Protected Areas and Refuges exclude fish harvesters while energy and industrial activities are allowed to persist. We’ve been given no evidence these mass closures are achieving conservation objectives. The only thing these restrictions seem to accomplish is the unfair exclusion of the owner-operator fishery,” explains FFAW-Unifor President Dwan Street.

Harvesters are increasingly frustrated by the lack of meaningful monitoring or measurement of conservation impacts within existing closures, and they will not accept the same failures for any future ones. The Funk Island Deep Closure, for example, was established to conserve benthic habitat and Atlantic cod. Yet, in the years since its enactment, it has had devastating unintended consequences, as the area has become overrun by predators of snow crab, further disrupting the ecosystem. Such outcomes clearly contradict the principles of sustainable management and marine conservation that these closures claim to uphold.

The blatant hypocrisy in federal marine closures has long called into question the efficacy of such restrictions. Professional fish harvesters have spearheaded and contributed to countless sustainability and conservation initiatives. However, they do not accept closures to fishing activity in the name of conservation while continuing to allow oil and gas exploration, including seismic activity, in that same area.

“Premier-Elect Tony Wakeham has committed to halt the proposed NMCA on our province’s south coast and we will hold our new provincial government to this promise. Premier Wakeham’s first action in government should be to quash this misguided endeavour from Parks Canada,” says FFAW-Unifor Secretary-Treasurer Jamie Baker.

“From DFO to Parks Canada to the Environmental NGOs that are angling to eliminate our fishing industry without scientific basis. The pervasiveness of these so-called conservation efforts are causing significant harm to our sustainable fishing industry. This is the industry that sustains rural Newfoundland and Labrador, and our federal government must take a hard look at what these closures have achieved and what harm they’ve caused,” Baker says.

“Our Inshore Council has drawn a line in the sand: we will fight tooth and nail against every single closure. We will not tolerate one more inch of our waters being stolen from us. Enough is enough,” Street concludes.