Decolonizing Nunavut’s fishery

Since the late 1990s, Nunavut leaders have expended a lot of energy complaining about how badly Nunavut gets ripped off through the federal government’s allocation of fishing quotas in Davis Strait and other adjacent offshore waters.

And with good reason. Turbot and shrimp harvested from Nunavut’s offshore every year is worth, according to the last estimate, at least $98.5 million.

Of that, Nunavut gets a measly $9 million in wages produced by a few token jobs, and royalty money earned by selling Nunavut fishing rights to southern companies. By any standard, it’s a rip-off that the people of no other province or territory would stand for.

But to bring this rip-off to an end, Nunavut must do more than simply complain to Ottawa about unfair quota allocations, important though that may be. Nunavut must also get its act together, and reinvest more of its royalty sales in Nunavut. The fledlging Baffin Fisheries Coalition, which is threatened by internal dissension and outside interests who resent the large amount of turbot quota it controls, is a reasonable start.

But Nunavut needs a long-term strategy that will one day end the practice of selling Nunavut’s fishing rights to outside interests.

In the shrimp fishery, for example, Inuit birthright development corporations like Qikiqtaaluk and Makivik have been scooping up easy money for years by letting southern companies harvest their shrimp quotas. In exchange, they get a few token jobs for Inuit and royalty payments. But there’s no clear accounting of where those royalty payments go.

Are they reinvested in the development of a northern fishery? Or are they simply used to cover deficits and losses incurred in other parts of their business operations?

No one knows. But the Nunavut shrimp catch is worth about $75 million a year, and Nunavut is not getting even a fraction of the economic activity that it should be getting from this valuable resource.

At the same time, the Government of Nunavut and the Nunavut legislative assembly must set clear policies on what kind of fishery Nunavut should aim for. Should Nunavut develop a capital-intensive, industrial fishery based on the purchase of a modern factory-freezer trawler? Should Nunavut develop a community-based, small-boat inshore fishery? Or some combination of the two?

There’s no evidence that the GN knows what it wants. And there’s no evidence that most MLAs even know what the issues are. But without clear political direction, Nunavut risks will see its opportunities go to waste.

As for the great Nunavut turbot rip-off, it began, probably, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans began to hand out fishing rights in the southern part of Davis Strait, in waters adjacent to south-east Baffin Island.

They labelled the area Division “0B,” and used its healthy turbot stocks to compensate fishermen in the Atlantic provinces for the collapse of the northern cod fishery – an environmental catastrophe that is at least partially attributable to DFO incompetence over many years.

Through the “Northern Turbot Development Program,” the policy was aimed at pouring thousands of tonnes of Nunavut fish into idle fish plants in the Atlantic provinces, creating seasonal work for people left jobless by the northern cod fiasco. In the early 1990s, foreign vessels were hoovering 9,000 and 12,000 tonnes of Nunavut turbot out of Davis Strait every year and shipping it south.

After realizing the area was being over-fished, DFO reduced the total allowable catch in division 0B to 5,500 tonnes of turbot a year. Of that, Nunavut gets 27.3 per cent of the total catch. And even most of that is sold to southern interests, creating cash-flow for southern fishing companies and processing jobs for southern plant workers.

Then, in 2000, the DFO opened a brand-new area to turbot fishing — Division 0A, which starts north of 0B and stretches all the way to Ellesmere Island.

This time, the federal government did it differently. They assigned 100 per cent of the quota in 0A to Nunavut. The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board then gave it all to a new entity called the Baffin Fisheries Coalition, an 11-member organization set up as a not-for-profit corporation.

To no one’s surprise, a variety of southern fishing interests are already complaining about the BFC’s total control of 0A turbot quota. In its report on the Nunavut fishery, issued last week, the Senate standing committee on fisheries and oceans regurgitated many of those complaints — which resulted in a distorted set of policy recommendations that are less useful than they could have been.

At the same time, various community HTOs have been threatening to pull out of the BFC, because they believe the organization isn’t serving local needs. This is why the GN should take the lead in developing clear policies for Nunavut’s fishery, and making sure that communities get a strong say in developing them.

If the BFC falls apart, their are any number of predators waiting to seize Nunavut’s quota, and the economic colonialism will continue. JB