Wayne’s world, along with that of the cod that he fished for years, collapsed with the moratorium more than a decade ago. Yet he is still fighting the same battle to stop the destructive fishing practices that he blames for the cod’s crash. Most recently he stood under a Greenpeace banner protesting the fishery minister’s refusal to support a UN moratorium on bottom trawling on the high seas, something he has been demanding for more than 20 years.

Wayne Eddy is a fisherman who for most of his working life ran his lines in the Eastern Passage of Nova Scotia, captain of his own fishing vessel, the Ruth Marie, named after his mother-in-law. There used to be about 30 other long liners like him working the Eastern Passage when he first started: now there are only 18. But back in 1979, the fish were plentiful. Still, each year the fishermen had to go farther and farther out to sea, even venturing into unsafe waters to catch anything. Nothing was coming in shore because all the fish were being caught by the big draggers, huge ships that drag nets mounted on massive rollers across the seabed, scooping up everything in their paths. What they don’t want - the sea sponges, fragile corals and non-commercial species of fish – they throw away.

“They tear up the bottom and kill everything. We would run across slime holes or dead bottom holes and get nothing on our hooks but rubble because the draggers had torn the bottom to pieces. That’s the way the local people looked at it,” says Wayne. “Since I started fishing we have seen the problem. We knew how destructive the draggers were even back then and we told the Department of Fisheries.”

The locals recognized the threat these draggers posed not only to the environment but to their own livelihoods. When the community fish plant started buying from the huge bottom trawlers, the in shore fishermen threatened to boycott the plant. Wayne, during good times, caught 14,000 to 20,000 pounds, not a bad haul for four or five days at sea but only a fraction of what the dragger take: 40-50,000 pounds in a single tow. Moreover, these draggers are extremely wasteful, dumping tonnes of fish because it wasn’t profitable to sort them, says Wayne.  Based only on what he has seen first hand, he figures that if a dragger takes 100,000 pounds, three-quarter of a million pounds had been tossed overboard.

Wayne never considered himself environmentalist: “that kind of came later with age.” However, he is a conservationist and when the cod collapsed and he had to sell his boat and switch to catching herring and lobster, he started speaking out. He hasn’t stopped since and he doesn’t mince his words. Last year, in a protest organized by the Ecology Action Centre, he helped set up a huge drag net on the lawn of the Parliament Building in Ottawa to illustrate the magnitude of these destructive bottom trawlers.  

“I’d tell the politicians, ‘imagine if you hooked that net up to a big truck and dragged it across the lawn.’  If they can’t see how damaging that would be, then we need new MPs because these guys can’t be very smart,” says Wayne. But it is not just the politicians whom Wayne blames for ongoing destruction. He also blames the officials who manage, or in his eyes, mismanage the fishery.  “The bureaucrats that are in there now are the same ones who were there when the fishery collapsed, and are still giving the same bad advice as they did back then. Why weren’t they fired?” he wants to know.

Despite the long battle, Wayne thinks he knows what it will take to change the government’s position. “Hit him where it hurts - in the polls. You have to embarrass the minister to get things done,” he is convinced.

That was the aim of the latest Greenpeace protest in which Wayne participated in downtown Toronto in October. However, perhaps to avoid being embarrassed, the minister didn’t show up at the annual meeting of the Canadian Fishery Council, an industry lobby, at which he was to give a keynote address.

But despite the no show of both the minister and, consequently, much of the media, Wayne was still buoyed by the demonstration. The way he see it, “This kind of action keeps the issue on the burner.” And he takes heart at the number of people who actually accepted and read the pamphlet the protesters were handing out.  “I was watching the people this morning and well, maybe 50 per cent just walked by and maybe 25 per cent took the pamphlet just to be polite, but the other 25 per cent actually read it. It is important to educate the people about what is going on. If we had done this sort of thing 15 years ago, we would have the voting population convinced by now.”