Managing Canada's Fisheries: From Early Days to the Year 2000 (review)

Reviewed by: Managing Canada's Fisheries: From Early Days to the Year 2000 Jennifer Hubbard Managing Canada's Fisheries: From Early Days to the Year 2000. Joseph Gough. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. Pp. 512, $55.00 One of the hardest challenges in writing history is organizing one's material. Joseph Gough, a former editor of fisheries publications and director of communication in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, has opted to follow a chronological rather than a thematic approach in his Managing Canada's Fisheries. This gives his work both its greatest strength and most obvious weakness. It is a challenging read as there are no overarching themes beyond fish, fisheries, and management attempts. By following Canada's fisheries from before First Contact to the present, however, Gough gives the most comprehensive history since Harold Innis's seminal work, albeit in an format easier for extracting information. Gough documents Canada's many fisheries in a series of temporal cross-sections, relating their kind and nature, catch data, and the numbers of fishers, boats, and fisheries settlements; he also provides political, social, environmental, technological, and economic contexts influencing fishers' actions. Gough explains how actions by national governments, ministers and their deputies, senior administrators, fisheries officers, and scientists altered the destinies of fish populations and the people who depend upon them. Gough divides his book by era (in six sections) and region. Each era is introduced with an overview of Canada's fisheries, international [End Page 147] trade, disputes, international fishing conventions, and economic exclusion zones. Then come chapters sequentially dedicated to the Atlantic region, the Maritimes and Quebec, Newfoundland, and British Columbia (the Pacific). Freshwater fisheries get only one chapter, since they came under provincial control between 1898 and 1922. For the Atlantic region there is some repetition, but it is offset by the quantity of really valuable information within a well-described context. Not surprisingly, the distant past gets less attention. The pre-Confederation period takes eighty-four pages; the five later sections of roughly the same number of pages cover progressively shorter periods, divided by significant events such as the two world wars and creation of the 200-mile economic exclusion zones. Although Gough has a history ma, his scientific background and choice of publisher has resulted in textbook format, with two columns per page, many photographs, and some graphs. The photographs are wonderful, illustrating social conditions, people at work, fishing gear, and fisheries managers. Boxed-off sections reproduce historical documents or give anecdotes to illustrate points in the text. Surprisingly, Gough incorporates lists of catch data, incomes, vessel sizes, etc., in the text. One wonders why these data were not put into tables to improve narrative flow. Each chapter is subdivided by fishery, gear changes, and social and administrative changes. Disconcertingly, the subheadings read like newspaper headlines, announcing for the 1790s, 'Seal Fisheries Employs Thousands' (52), and so on. Gough is weak on inter-war science, stating incorrectly that the Biological Board of Canada's scientists played a minimal role in Department of Marine and Fisheries policies. However, he successfully addresses social issues, including the treatment of Native and Japanese fishers on the West Coast, giving personal experiences of those who suffered under discriminatory policies. His sympathetic narrative of First Nations fishers puts the effects of their recently won fishing rights into the overall scheme of Department of Fisheries and Oceans management. His strengths lie in his descriptions of postwar fisheries and the department's management decisions and choices, which until too recently have been reactive. Certain fishery ministers, like Romeo Leblanc and Brian Tobin, are the subjects of the most entertaining passages, but some important issues are dealt with in a cursory fashion. Gough shows how the department has worked hard to balance changing needs of different fishery participants with stock conservation; he knows many recent fishery scientists and managers – providing original quotes from personal communications – and his participation in [End Page 148] later events gives cogency to his explications. Gough also offers the intimidated layperson a simple and welcome explanation of basic fishing equations and scientific approaches to fisheries management. Although many of the photographs are archival, Gough did not use...

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