Sunday Herald
"A Fisherman's View" — by Silver Donald Cameron
June 11, 2003 |
| “In one century, we did what once seemed impossible,” writes Eric Wickham. “We killed most of the salmon runs on every river in Canada” — 2000 dispersed rivers, with salmon runs that used to come at different times. It wasn’t easy. |
| The fishermen involved “did nothing unethical or illegal. They followed strict DFO rules and guidelines, and were usually convinced the guidelines were sound. So the salmon stocks have been massacred by ‘responsible’ Canadian government regulation.” |
| We’ve heard lots of comment about the moribund fishery from bureaucrats, academics, journalists and politicians — but not much from fishermen, whose opinions are customarily ignored. So we should listen to Wickham, who started fishing in BC with his father at eight, and had his own boat at 22. He’s past president of three fishermen’s associations and a former member of the Minister of Fisheries Advisory Council. |
| Now 61, Wickham has written a bright, breezy book about the destruction of Canada’s fisheries during his lifetime — Dead Fish and Fat Cats: A No-Nonsense Journey Through Our Dysfunctional Fishing Industry (Granville Island Publishing, $19.95). |
| Wickham is fair, and he concedes that the fisheries disaster had many causes — hydro-electric dams, pesticides and other pollution, silty run-off from clear-cut forests, and so on. But two factors tower over the others. The first is the unbelievable efficiency of modern fishing fleets. |
| “With all these sensors, rotating radar eyes and super-sharp sonar ears, and the GPS doing everything but writing the boat’s location in day-glo numbers in the water, fishermen grew outrageously efficient,” says Wickham. “If fish are out there, they will be found, and when they are found, they will be caught.” Propelled by large engines and pursued by large mortgages, these lethal vessels have the ability to exterminate stocks completely. |
| The second major factor is the mis-management of the fisheries by DFO, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But, asks Wickham, “How could people sitting at desks kill all those fish?” |
| Wickham identifies half-a-dozen failings — but they all boil down to a lack of realism (and humility), and a lack of courage. DFO’s employees, says Wickham, “are mainly conscientious and some are luminously bright, but the rules they work by — the system itself — has a history, a karma, a life force of its own.” |
| DFO managers, says Wickham, muzzle and ignore their own scientists, and “dodge tough decisions, usually out of political timidity.” Their scientists told them that the Atlantic cod stocks were collapsing, but DFO allowed fishing to continue, with ludicrously high “quotas,” because closing the fishery would create a political firestorm by putting thousands of people out of work. Result: all those people are out of work anyway — and the fishery is gone. |
| But nobody lost their jobs at DFO. The Department does not reward good fisheries management, nor does it punish even catastrophic failure. Furthermore, Wickham notes, DFO is organized in separate, jealously-guarded fiefdoms organized by species — a cod division, a salmon division, a herring division. But the fisheries are interlinked. You can’t “manage” cod while ignoring seals, herring and capelin. |
| And DFO managers change frequently, creating a management with no institutional memory. Wickham once asked a DFO manager about the impact of dragging on the now-barren Goose Island Bank, which once produced 7 million pounds of halibut annually. The DFO guy said, “I didn’t know anyone ever fished there.” |
| DFO now spends $100 million a year “regulating” a stunted salmon fishery which annually produces just $50 million worth of fish. Sheer lunacy, says Wickham. And the two BC fisheries which are thriving are the two not “managed” by DFO. |
| One is halibut, which has been governed since the 1880s by a joint US-Canadian commission which has never allowed any fishing technique but hook-and-line. The other is black cod, or “sablefish.” This fishery was developed by a few fishermen, including Wickham, who discovered that this locally-neglected species was highly prized in Japan. At first, DFO regulated it in the usual way — setting quotas (based on no scientific evidence at all) and eventually reducing the season to 14 frenzied, demented days during which “we were risking lives to catch fish that were there all year.” |
| In 1989, the black cod fishermen collectively demanded individual boat quotas, promising to fund the necessary science, hire a private security firm to prevent poaching, and manage the fishery sustainably. Surprisingly, DFO gave them what they wanted, and the fishermen now administer the resource themselves, paying all its management costs from their earnings. The fish are doing fine, and so are the fishermen. |
| Elsewhere, fish are swimming into history while DFO’s distant Soviet-style bureaucracy swells, relentlessly subtracting value from the industry. No wonder a frustrated Newfoundland thinks it could do better than 6000 Otta-crats in glass towers, thousands of miles from the sea. Who could possibly do worse? |
| Control of the fishery belongs with the people who rely on it. That’s Wickham’s message, and it’s both persuasive and timely. |
 |
|
Moncton Times & Transcript
"The Book Club" — Brent Mazerolle
April 2, 2003
|
| Dead Fish and Fat Cats: Easy Read, Complex Topic |
| Dead fish and fat cats? One can see where those two things might go together. In Dead Fish and Fat Cats: A No-Nonsense Journey Through our Dysfunctional Fishing Industry, recently retired fisher Eric Wickham looks at our disappearing fisheries and concludes much of the problem with our fish stocks is those trusted to protect them, the "fat cat" bureaucrats of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. |
| The book, with a foreword from David Suzuki, provides an insider's look at how fishing techniques have changed to give nature less chance to recover, how not only the fish but fishers are disappearing, and how a couple small fishing co-operatives are able to nevertheless control and run successful industries in our environmentally challenged times. |
| Don't let that last sentence scare you off. Despite its serious themes, Dead Fish and Fat Cats is rich in anecdote, colourful and funny. Wickham's a born storyteller. He's also a knowledgeable commentator on a complex industry and while his focus is on the west coast fishery, he says enough about the workings of the DFO bureaucracy to give you pause no matter which coast you live on. |
| He asks some withering questions about how the federal bureaucracy handles this precious resource and provides some of his own answers as well. Whether his analyses are right or wrong, his arguments are absolutely compelling. Among the more pointed questions he asks are why does the Department of Fisheries keep growing if the fish stocks are disappearing? Eric Wickham points to an ever-growing bureaucracy, perhaps nowhere more effectively when he mentions the Department of Fisheries and Ocean's 1999 budget for managing British Columbia's $50 million salmon industry was $100 million. |
| He makes another interesting claim after explaining how political timidity kept DFO officials from suggesting strict Atlantic cod quotas until it was too late and the industry was wiped out completely. He continues, saying "40,000 people lost their jobs because of the codfishing collapse. None of those lost jobs were in the DFO." |
| He challenges the idea that changing ocean conditions, increased fish-catching technology and foreign overfishing — so often forwarded by DFO — explain disappearing stocks, showing repeatedly that government mismanagement has been mostly to blame. It all seems a bit of a rant at times, but just when you're ready to dismiss him as a crank, he backs it all up with examples like the black cod and goeyduck clam industries, two hugely successful West Coast fisheries that are not controlled by DFO. |
| Perhaps of most interest to readers around here, Dead Fish and Fat Cats devotes a chapter to the salmon farm business, which Wickham once championed. Turns out, as we've been slowly realizing here, aquaculture is not going to solve all our problems and will in fact cause a number of new problems that are just now being recognized. Once again, DFO is a bad guy in his analysis. While its mandate is to protect our wild resources, DFO has funded research on fish farming even though it seems clear to many observers that aquaculture represents a threat to wild species. |
| Dead Fish and Fat Cats: A No-Nonsense Journey Through our Dysfunctional Fishing Industry (167 pages, paperback with B&W photos) is from Granville Island Publishing (www.granvilleislandpublishing.com) and sells for $19.95. |
|
|
|
Alaska Fisherman's Journal
"Book Reviews" — John van Amerongen
April 22, 2003 |
| Anyone who followed the Canadian longline fleet’s transition from derby openings to individual fishing quotas remembers Eric Wickham. Former president of British Columbia’s Pacific Blackcod Association and Halibut Fishermen’s Association, Wickham was a familiar face and a strong voice at the annual meetings of the International Pacific Halibut Commission through the ’80s and ’90s. His friendly demeanor and his sharp wit were a formidable combination for winning allies and embarrassing enemies as he championed IFQs, decried trawl bycatch, and fired stinging salvoes at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. |
| After reading Wickham’s new book, Dead Fish and Fat Cats it’s clear where all the passion came from. Born in the village of Bamfield on the remote west coast of Vancouver Island, Wickham was a child of the Pacific at a time when the ocean, its estuaries and its rivers teemed with wildlife, sustenance and opportunity for scores of similar communities that dotted its coastline. Life was poor in dollars, but rich in natural beauty and adventure for a young boy. Much of Wickham’s book is a nostalgic look at the Bamfield of the ’50s. Though the book contains but a handful of old photographs, Wickham displays his memories in a museum of descriptive murals and verbal snapshots of his youth. |
| “Most of the morning-bite boats are 15-foot clinkers — open boats with their wooden ribs showing inside, plank seats, a set of oars, and a small inboard engine that feeds on gasoline. |
|
| “There’s not much sound at this hour. No seagulls scream, the dogs haven’t begun communicating, and the boats haven’t started up. There’s only the lap of the water at The Creek edge and a muffled scatter of human voices. But then the first boat engine starts, penetrating and as impossible to ignore as a dentist’s drill ... |
|
| “A man helps me, because I’m too small to pull the starting rope. After the engine starts and settles in, I head out by myself.” |
|
| It was a poor life, but a rich life for Wickham and his family until the fisheries changed. The double edge of progress made fishing operations and processing companies so powerful and efficient that they turned the morning bite into the big bite for hundreds of one-man, one-boat, one-cylinder operations that resided in communities like Bamfield. Like the small farmers seduced into shiny new tractors and combines in the prairie, B.C. fishermen were lured by the sirens of horsepower, hydraulics, diesel and steel. |
| As the boats grew, so did the DFO and its bureaucratic rule from afar in Ottawa. And ultimately it is they who Wickham blames for the loss of B.C. salmon runs and the loss of the world of his youth. |
| “Here’s my hard judgment,” Wickham writes; “Ottawa has always hungered to turn fishing over to the big companies, because it simplifies their regulation of the industry. They only have to deal with a few fishing-company executives, who share a lot of their views about the world and have a certain style of life. No rough fishermen walk in, wearing torn clothes and smelling of fish. Even back in the 1880s Ottawa tried to limit the fishing licenses on the Fraser, supposedly because of worries about declining runs. (Notice the pattern: something’s gone wrong, so we’ll take over!) They gave up on that in 1892, but they didn’t stop Eastern banks from financing a monopoly takeover of the canneries ...” |
| Likely it was Wickham’s anger that drove him to succeed in his push for IFQs and management reform in the 1990s. But it’s not that battle that makes this book shine. It’s the vision of that boy standing next to a wooden box of codfish in Bamfield, 50 years ago. |
|
|
Tri-City News
"Tight Lines" — Jeff Weltz
January 22, 2003
|
| Back in Time |
|
Picture this: A package comes in the mail. I can tell from the shape of the package that it’s a book. I look at the return address to see who sent it. It reads Granville Island Publishing. I open the package and find a book titled Dead Fish and Fat Cats by Eric Wickham. In the flyleaf I find a letter from publicist David Litvak asking me to review the book. Flattered, I start reading the foreword by David Suzuki first and then the words of Eric himself.
|
| The book starts out as an informative and entertaining read, then leads me into a world that used to be — a world of oldtime fishermen and abundance, when rivers ran red with salmon and a commercial fisherman worked for months, not days. |
| Through his book, Eric has given me a different view of our salmon resource and both our federal and provincial fisheries departments that manage it. |
| Dead Fish and Fat Cats is a must-read for anyone who cares about the resource of our Pacific salmon. Look for my full book review coming up on www.fishingwithrod.com. |
|
|
The Kamloops Daily News
"Spotlight Books" — M. Wayne Cunningham
January 18, 2003 |
| Voice of Reason – Former Fishboat captain offers common sense approach for B.C.’s salmon-fishing industry |
| It’s no secret B.C.’s salmon fishing industry is in deep trouble. Over the years the stocks have disappeared at an alarming rate; wrangling about who is to blame has increased proportionately; and allegation of the government’s mismanagement of the industry have become commonplace. |
| Veteran fishboat captain Eric Wickham has experienced it all and succinctly logs his observations in his sometimes wry, always insightful and eminently readable lament, Dead Fish and Fat Cats. |
| Starting with his nostalgic reminiscences of his early childhood and initial years as a skipper, he goes fishing to find the answers to the questions, “Where did all the salmon go?” He snares a lot of contributors to the problem – fishers themselves, aboriginal, sport, and commercial, large and small and Canadian and foreign; canners and processors; scientists hired by public, private and special interest groups; fish farmers; and bureaucrats and politicians of every stripe and scale, especially with the federal DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans). |
| Technological improvements like the global positioning system (GPS) and video screen fishfinders have contributed adversely as well by pinpointing the fish more quickly and accurately, regardless of the species. And ever larger vessels – trollers, seiners, gillnetters, draggers and sea-gong canners – have scooped them away in tons, often scarring the ocean bed and destroying the breeding grounds. Despoiling the breeding areas has been going on since the early 1900’s when railway construction crews dislodged tons of rock into the Fraser River’s salmon spawning beds. |
The destruction continues today, from pulp mills sewage plants, mine tailings, agricultural runoff, and hydroelectric dams, each doing its damage in its own way. When regulations have been created to curb the overfishing or halt the pollution, the affected parties have creatively found ways to slow or bypass the restrictions and to blame the other guy.
|
| But not all marine stocks have taken as big a hit as the salmon have. The geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”) clam, the black cod (or sablefish) and halibut have survived. But, according to Wickham, with little thanks to the DFO. “Here’s a fact,” he says, “ Every major fishery the DFO ever managed has collapsed. But the two fisheries it hasn’t managed — black cod and halibut — both thrive.” |
At the core of these successes have been the primary management responsibilities undertaken by the fishers themselves and their associates; the money they have raised to finance the operations including subsidizing DFO assistance; their self-regulation procedures, including hiring their own monitoring and enforcement officers; their profit sharing approached in the individual boat quotas; and their aggressive lobbying of politicians and DFO senior managers to accept their recommendations on a variety of issues.
|
| Wickham’s critique of the DFO system centers on the fact it is a fat cat bureaucracy headquartered thousands of miles away from the B.C. coast and staffed largely by economists, academics and scientists with no practical experience of the dead fish problems. |
| As a member of the Ministry of Fisheries Advisory council, he witnessed the fiascos and foibles of inconsistent enforcement procedures, good ideas chewed up in the bureaucratic machinery, political interference for political agenda, and budget cuts that whittled away the number of field officers but allowed the administration budget to balloon. |
| He notes that, ironically, it takes $100 million of taxpayers money invested in DFO operations to return $50 million from the B.C. salmon fishing industry whereas the industry used to produce $400 million worth of fish. To redress the balance Wickham proposes that if the salmon industry were managed more like the cod and halibut fisheries are, the taxpayers investment would have a much better return. |
| As others have done, he suggests that giving the salmon fishers property rights to the fish would result in better management of the stocks, enhanced annual runs, better caretaking and greater profitability all around. His lament, however, is that it may be too late since there are only a few, mainly aging fishers left to handle an ever-decreasing number of boats and licenses. |
| Sadly, Eric Wickham has packed up and relocated to Australia, taking his common sense approach to the problem of B.C.’s salmon fishing industry with him. |
| Fortunately, he’s left a blueprint behind and hopefully others will build upon it. |
|
