Doing Business : Canada Makes Waves With Fishing Restrictions : Faced with falling catches, officials seize foreign vessels in international waters and lobby for quotas to preserve turbot and other species.

This has been a busy year for Canada’s fish police.

Led by a youthful, pugnacious fisheries minister named Brian Tobin, Canada has fashioned a sort of gunboat diplomacy in pursuit of protecting its dwindling fish stocks.

The policy has pushed Canada into a worldwide leadership position on the conservation issue, but it has also brought the country into conflict with the United States on two coasts.

Canadian Coast Guard and Fisheries Department ships and planes now patrol the Atlantic beyond the country’s 200-mile limit. Occasionally they seize foreign-flag boats--including U.S.-based vessels--they believe are poaching on Canadian fish, even when the vessels are in international waters.

In the Pacific Northwest, Ottawa and Washington failed to reach agreement on revised salmon quotas this summer, and Canada responded by levying steep new fees on American salmon fishermen passing through Canadian waters. When Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) complained, Tobin dismissed him as “a gnat.”

But if Tobin, 39, sometimes seems to wave a privateer’s cutlass in one hand, he carries the diplomat’s briefcase in the other. He lobbies hard at the United Nations and other international forums for tougher restrictions on taking depleted fishing stocks--and not without success.

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In September, the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization, which sets regional fishing quotas for Canada, Europe and other North Atlantic nations, bowed to Canada’s urgings and for the first time limited turbot catches.

There were suggestions that, behind the scenes, Tobin implied that Canada would take unilateral action if the international group did nothing.

“We’ve been compelled to be assertive, some would say aggressive, because the alternative is to, with our eyes wide open, preside over the destruction of the (fishing) resource,” Tobin said in a recent interview.

His apocalyptic rhetoric and damn-the-torpedoes diplomatic style is founded in the near-collapse of Canada’s Atlantic fishery, which has wrenched the soul out of his native province of Newfoundland and fissured the economy throughout Canada’s East Coast.

In Canada’s deteriorating fishing industry, and the country’s thrashing attempts to save it, are lessons for the rest of the world. For, from the Bay of Biscay off France to the disputed Kuril Islands near Japan, fishermen are in conflict. In the United States, salmon fisheries in Washington and cod fisheries in New England have been closed.

Many conditions underlie the spiraling problem--environmental degradation, enhanced fishing technology, climatic changes, even an increase in the seal population. But it is perhaps most succinctly summed up by fisherman Lawrence (Laurie) Sullivan, speaking in the lilt typical of this part of Newfoundland: “There’s too many boats and too few fish. That’s the way I look at it.”

According to a July report by the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit, international environmental research group based in Washington, the catch in every fishery in the world outside the Indian Ocean is in decline.

In three areas of the Atlantic and one in the Pacific, the harvest is down more than 30% since its peak year. Worldwide, the marine catch has dropped 5% since 1989.

The continued decline not only portends further conflicts among fishermen and governments, but increased unemployment in marine communities, higher prices for consumers, a disappearing source of low-cost protein in the Third World and the destruction of traditional fishing cultures, according to the report.

Many of these problems have already taken hold in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, particularly in Newfoundland at the continent’s eastern edge.

When Italian-born explorer John Cabot entered the waters near St. John’s under the English flag in 1497, the cod schools were so thick his men had trouble rowing their longboats through them. By 1992, the fish were so few that Canada, in a desperate effort to preserve the species, declared a moratorium on cod fishing off Newfoundland’s Grand Bank.

The province fell into an economic depression from which it has never recovered.

Estimates of unemployed fishermen and related workers run as high as 50,000 in Newfoundland and neighboring provinces. One in four Newfoundlanders is on welfare or unemployment.

The government has spent more than $1 billion in Canadian funds (about $730 million U.S.) on relief and compensation and promised $1.9 billion ($1.39 billion U.S.) more over the next five years.

If the fishery ever comes back here, it is estimated that there will only be enough work for half as many people as were employed in fishing, processing and related trades when the 1992 moratorium went into effect.

“You’d have to be overly optimistic to say the future of the overall industry is anything but bleak,” said Earle McCurdy, president of the Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers Union here. “In the long haul, I can’t see the amount of fish we had available in the late ‘80s again in my lifetime.”

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The decline has not hit everyone in the Atlantic region equally.

Lobster fishermen, for example, enjoyed years of record catches before there was a dip this year. The crab season this summer was also strong here. The result is a certain capriciousness of prosperity, depending on what kind of fishing license and equipment an individual had when the fishery went into decline.

Sullivan--with a 45-foot oceangoing boat, a variety of licenses and a working wife--has survived nicely, he acknowledged. He will fish crab and scallops this year. Last year, it was tuna and flounder. At age 36, he has been fishing for 20 years, and, as is typical here, his family has fished “as far back as I know.”

He acknowledged a certain sense of guilt that his business has survived when so many others have not, but then, turning toward the sea, noted: “You don’t get nothing out of that ocean easy.”

Bill Williams, baseball cap pushed back on his head, weather-worn clothes stretched over his barrel chest, chain-smokes cigarettes down to the filter in the kitchen of his small home in Allendale, Nova Scotia.

With the lobster season over, he will tie up his 40-foot boat in nearby Little Harbor for the rest of the year. There is, he said, little point and no profit in going out after cod and other bottom-dwelling species placed under greatly reduced quotas in Nova Scotia.

“I haven’t even bothered this year. I can’t see myself spending $300 to gear up to make $50,” he said.

He reluctantly acknowledged that with only a six-month lobster season and no ground fishing, he probably could not make it without the assistance he gets from the government. “I don’t think any of us likes it,” he added.

Williams is bitter and angry at a government that he believes misread the early signs of a declining fishery, at big companies that are buying up licenses from small independent fishermen unable to make it, at fishermen who drag big nets across the ocean floor, scooping up fish indiscriminately.

“The last four years I’ve aged more than I ever have before, trying to beat down the ocean,” he said. “But when you’ve only got six months to get a year’s work in. . . .”

Williams’ family has lived in the area “since 1700-something,” and despite his tribulations in 32 years of fishing, he can’t imagine leaving.

“There’s nothing else here, and I wouldn’t want to do anything else, to tell you the truth. . . . It’s hard to explain. . . . I’m here to the end, regardless of how it turns out. What am I gonna do? I’m 51 years old next month. What am I going to retrain for? And how many unemployed people are there in Canada?”

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was outraged. Two American scallop boats out of New Bedford were tied up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being boarded in international waters by armed Canadian Coast Guard officers.

Canada was claiming those scallops, even though they were outside the 200-mile limit. The boats and crews were eventually released, but Frank had a message for Fisheries Minister Tobin, who ordered the seizure.

“You do not resolve international disputes with the use of force,” Frank fumed in a telephone interview. “You resolve them with negotiations. If Canada is going to resort to force, so can we.”

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When Alaska’s Sen. Murkowski came to the phone for an interview, he had cooled off a bit since being dismissed by Tobin as “a gnat” for complaining about Canada’s negotiating tactics on Pacific Northwest salmon quotas. The steep fee levied by Canada on U.S. fishing boats had been lifted, although the money had not been returned.

“He (Tobin) is attempting to establish himself as a hard driver and as one who’s had to deal with Canada’s situation on the Atlantic Coast, he’s determined not to allow it to happen on the West Coast,” Murkowski said. “But he’s not very diplomatic . . . and clearly in violation of international law.”

Tobin’s response is that at least he’s now got everyone’s attention. He suggested that a year ago there probably were few people in Washington who could speak with much expertise on the international fishing crisis.

A career politician who grew up on a U.S. Air Force base in Newfoundland where his father worked as a contract firefighter, Tobin became minister of fisheries and oceans a year ago after the election of the Liberal Party as Canada’s national government.

He had already gained fame in Parliament as an acid-tongued critic of the Conservative government of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Tobin and a handful of other Liberal members of Parliament became known as the “Rat Pack” for their verbal gnawing on Mulroney.

Some of those stung by Tobin’s aggressive enforcement tactics these days might appreciate the nickname.

“In an emergency situation--and that’s what we’re talking about when some of the (fish) stocks are disappearing from the face of the planet forever--we can’t agree when someone says, ‘Let’s talk about this for another year and meanwhile we’ll keep fishing,’ ” Tobin said. “If that’s the case, I know the kind of solution they’re talking about. It’s called no more fish.

“We’ve proven we can talk ourselves down to the last fish. . . . So, should we be talking? Absolutely. Should we be cooperating? Absolutely. Could Canada and the U.S. be a model (of cooperation) for the world, as we have been on other issues? Absolutely. But I won’t apologize for protecting resources near the Canada coast.”

Tobin’s tough posture toward foreign fishermen stems in part from domestic politics. It makes the harsh quotas placed on Canadian fishermen more palatable, although Tobin’s take is that he is not asking fishermen from other countries to do anything he does not demand of Canadian fishermen.

“We have brought a new ethic, a new standard to our enforcement issues,” he said. “It’s put us on the moral high ground.”

Biography

Name: Brian Tobin

Title: Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans

Age: 39

Personal: Spent childhood living on a U.S. Air Force base in Stephanville, where his father was a contract firefighter. Attended Memorial University of Newfoundland and was a broadcast journalist before entering politics. Married to Jodean Smith of Happy Valley, Newfoundland. Daughter and two sons.

Quote: “I am the voice of the fish.”