For more than a decade, Maritimers have sailed north to harvest millions of Nunavut turbot. Now, despite choppy seas, Inuit are casting nets into their own Arctic waters, hoping to haul in a fortune. By Brent Reaney

Beached on the brown earth of Iqaluit’s causeway, it was more an old rowboat than any sort of serious fishing vessel. But last May, on an overcast day, Nunavut’s fishery leaders converged on it anyway, and spray-painted its neglected hull with the bright-orange words “DFO” – the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Then they set it on fire. As flames flapped and smoke billowed, they shook hands, posed for pictures and, for the benefit of the assembled local media, sprayed venomous words about Loyola Hearn, the federal fisheries minister at the time. Inuit leaders aren’t known to be confrontational, especially with the power-that-be in Ottawa, but everyone has their breaking point. In the previous four months Hearn had allowed two large Arctic turbot quotas to be transferred between Maritime fishing companies without giving Nunavut fishermen a chance to bid. One of the transfers – worth nearly $12-million – included enough fish to have put control of the southern Baffin turbot fishery into Northern hands.
Given the history of Nunavut’s commercial fishery, that would have been a milestone. Inuit have always been a sea-based people, and Canada’s Arctic, with the nation’s longest coastline, has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish in its waters. Yet so far, Nunavut’s fishery is worth just one-twentieth of Newfoundland’s, and lags well behind even the Greenland fishery, just across Davis Strait. Moreover, of the fish that are caught in Nunavut waters, Inuit get only a fraction of the profits. As recently as six years ago, the territory received just a 10th of the nearly $100-million earned from turbot and shrimp fishing in its seas.
Still, the situation is improving. Nunavut’s profits from the industry have at least doubled in recent years, more Inuit are being trained to work in the industry, and more Inuit-owned companies are looking to buy offshore fishing vessels and win a greater cut of the fish. But these victories have been hard fought, as will future ones, for reasons ranging from federal neglect to the territory’s far-flung isolation. But no matter: Nunavut’s turbot fishery has cast its nets, hoping for a monster catch.
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Here’s a primer on Nunavut’s turbot fishery: It’s made up of two zones, OA and OB. In OA – starting roughly a third of the way up Baffin Island and reaching all the way to Ellesmere Island – Nunavut holds all of the 6,500-tonne allocation. But it’s OB – encompassing the southern reaches of Baffin Island, and with a 5,500-tonne allocation – where controversy lies. Prior to 1990, the only Canadians harvesting turbot here were the Inuit, pulling a few fish through the ice on Cumberland Sound. Then, in the 1990s, Ottawa started a program to encourage offshore fishing in OB, aimed at East Coast outfits struggling with empty plants and idle boats following the collapse of the cod fishery. When it came time for quotas to be awarded, Inuit groups either didn’t have the boats to qualify or, depending on who you talk to, the territorial government was asleep at the wheel, and three-quarters of Nunavut’s turbot went to Maritime fishermen.
That situation hasn’t changed much. Today Nunavut has rights to just 27 per cent of the OB catch. “If you look at other jurisdictions throughout Canada, the adjacent landmass would have anywhere from 80 to 100 per cent of that resource,” says Jerry Ward, CEO of the Baffin Fisheries Coalition, Nunavut’s largest fishing organization. One of the ringleaders of the Iqaluit boat-burning, Ward calls Hearn’s turbot transfers a “fiasco.” “You look at crab, it’s 100 per cent (in Newfoundland). You look at PEI, lobster’s 100 per cent in PEI. The list goes on and on, and that’s the way it should be.”
While Ward may be worked up about the Nunavut fishery, few southerners are. Online archives show the boat-burning received little national coverage. And searching the words “Nunavut fishery” on The Globe and Mail’s website brings up stories on the seal hunt, but nothing about turbot. “How much fish news comes out of the North?” asks Peter Stoffer, a Nova Scotia MP and currently the longest-serving member of the House of Commons fisheries committee. “The housing concerns, education, sports and recreation, the mining, the Arctic waters melting and vessels transiting up and down the Arctic passage, the polar bear issue – all these things are important issues to the government and the people of Nunavut. But when you talk about fisheries, they go, ‘hmm.’”
That’s no surprise. Nunavummiut don’t eat turbot, and when they, and most other Canadians, think of Nunavut fish at all, they think of Arctic char. Common on fine-dining menus, maple-and-miso-cured char was served to American President Barack Obama during his first visit to Canada. But while wildly different, turbot, too, is incredibly tasty. Its meat is white and firm; its flavour is clean and decidedly unfishy, making it a fillet just about anyone could love. For $36, the white-tableclothed dining room of Iqaluit’s Frobisher Inn will serve you a succulent pan-fried turbot; various high-end restaurants in the south offer it as well. Indeed, turbot sells to a luxury market. In 2008 the landed worth of Nunavut’s turbot quota was $40-million – about 10 times the value of the territory’s char harvest.
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If Nunavut stands to cash in on turbot, at least some of the credit for that goes to Ward’s Baffin Fisheries Coalition. Created in 2000 largely to fish the OA zone, it holds over half the quota there. But in those far-northern waters, the season doesn’t start until late July and lasts only into November. “If you’re going to invest in a boat, you’ve got to be able to fish more than three and a half months,” Ward says. “If you look (farther south), you can normally start fishing in late April and be there until the end of December.”
That’s the big reason why it matters who gets to fish in the OB zone. If former DFO Minister Hearn’s transfer within the zone wasn’t entirely rotten, court documents show it certainly smelled. After all, back in 2002 a previous fisheries minister had vowed that no quota increases in Nunavut’s waters would be granted to outside interests until the territory had a major share. But Hearn’s department argued these weren’t increases – just transfers – and thus no promises had been broken. A federal judge allowed the transfer to stand, but called the minister’s consultations with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board “a sham” and gave DFO a slap on the wrist. “I think it’s politicking behind doors that makes a lot of decisions,” says Olayuk Akesuk, Nunavut’s environment minister at the time. “I think that’s something they should not get into, as we are trying to catch up with other jurisdictions in our fishery.”
Still, even with little access to the all-important fish in OB, Nunavut’s role in the industry is growing. The BFC has made enough money in the past several years to become the majority owner of two factory-freezer vessels, the key tools of the offshore turbot trade. The 70-metre-long ships can operate 24 hours a day, stay out at sea for two months at a time, and are capable of carrying up to 600 tonnes of fish before having to offload. As their name implies, they’re floating processing plants: Topside, turbot is either netted or hooked and hauled in; below deck, workers fillet the fish, freeze it and pack it into boxes as another shift of workers sleep in cramped quarters, waiting to provide relief. Of these ship-based workers, Ward says a few years ago he’d have been lucky to have a half-dozen Inuit. Today, he estimates, that number’s grown tenfold, largely thanks to a Nunavut-based fisheries training program.
Yet even with its two huge ships, the BFC isn’t able to fish its entire quota alone. To help out, it contracts southern vessels to fish on its behalf. In exchange, it gets roughly 10 per cent of the profits from their haul. Until about five years ago, nearly all fishing by Nunavut interests was conducted this way – selling fish in the water in exchange for royalties and a few crew jobs. Even last year, five of seven Nunavut fishing groups – with rights to about a third of Nunavut’s quota – harvested nothing but royalties.
That may change. This year, more Inuit organizations are hoping to get out on the water and fish their quota themselves. One of them is the Arctic Fishery Alliance, formed last year by Hunters and Trappers Associations in Qikiqtarjuaq, Arctic Bay, Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay. Recently awarded 1,260 tonnes of turbot in zones OA and OB, the Alliance wants to use the royalties they’ve saved – as well as the fish, and the income they represent – to buy at least one factory-freezer boat through government-sponsored loan programs. “We want our community to benefit from this quota,” says Lootie Toomasie of Qikiqtarjuaq, the organization’s chair. “We’re looking forward to creating more jobs for Inuit.”
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The Pangnirtung fish plant, a small, blue-roofed building just beside the community’s fiord-flanked waterfront, is unusual in Nunavut: It’s the territory’s sole bit of onshore fisheries infrastructure. Otherwise, the Nunavut turbot industry is next to invisible. Even factory-freezer vessels owned by Inuit companies sail out of Newfoundland ports, offload most of their catch in Greenland, and seldom come within view of Nunavut’s coast.
On this mid-winter morning, though, the Pang fish plant is bustling, as Don Cunningham, an old East Coast fisherman, orchestrates the processing of turbot. Wearing a hastily arranged hair-net over a champagne-coloured ballcap, he walks past two short rows of workers clad in dark blue suits, yellow aprons and white helmets. As the workers carefully remove the edges of turbot fillets, Cunningham explains that these trimmings will be sent to Japan for sushi. The fillets themselves, he says, will be frozen and flown via Iqaluit to southern restaurants. Cunningham then gestures towards a shiny new filleting machine: “It does a very, very good job,” he says. “As fast as you can put fish on this belt, it will cut them into two.” He goes on, quickly and excitedly, talking about doubling production to 200 tonnes this year, and perhaps to 300 tonnes after that.
Cunningham’s enthusiasm is encouraging, but his plant faces astronomical air-freight costs to fly the fish out. Although it’s finally started turning a profit, it’s been losing money for years. And no matter what, it could only handle about three per cent of the total turbot catch from Nunavut waters. Part of the problem is that Pangnirtung – like all of Nunavut’s communities – lacks a proper dock. Currently, smaller boats must be dragged ashore to offload fish in the community, while the cargo of larger ships must be ferried to shore, bit by bit, by smaller vessels. In 2006, a federal report recommended construction of a series of small-craft harbours in Nunavut, and this year Ottawa agreed to pony up $24-million for waterfront improvements in Pang. Still, the upgrades won’t permit the Pang plant to service large offshore vessels.
Things are different in Greenland. A 2004 report from the Senate Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans reported, “Nunavut’s fishing industry pales by comparison with that of Greenland; the major reason has been the Danish and Home Rule governments’ historic economic support of the fishery.” Both Danish and Greenlandic officials have long focused on the fishery there, investing in infrastructure (many communities have well-developed ports) as well as offering low-cost loans to fishermen. Due to that, fishing is Greenland’s biggest business, with a fleet of 300 vessels, some 6,500 employees, and a 94-per-cent-share of the island’s exports. When it comes to offshore turbot, Greenland and Nunavut have equal tonnages, but Greenland leaps ahead due to its massive “inshore” fishery, which each year pulls 20,000 tonnes of turbot from the country’s fiords. Nunavut’s equivalent inshore harvest is 40 times smaller. Still, some experts believe Nunavut, being ecologically similar to Greenland, could develop an inshore operation the same size.
To know for certain would require research – a final piece of the Nunavut fisheries puzzle. According to the Canadian Senate report, Greenland nurtured its fishery in part by focusing on science. That’s something the North needs more of, says Wayne Lynch, the Nunavut government’s director of fisheries and sealing. “The last 60 years, [Ottawa] has invested in science in Atlantic Canada, and that’s why they have the fisheries,” he says. To catch up, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board is proposing an industry-funded research program into inshore, offshore and emerging Nunavut fish stocks. And Lynch’s department, along with the DFO and other Nunavut groups, recently completed a multi-species offshore survey. While the results haven’t been analyzed, Lynch says they appear encouraging.
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Jerry Ward likes the sound of that. Despite his anger with the DFO, he’s optimistic about Nunavut’s turbot fishery. “If you look at prior to 2000 and 2001, we were pretty much non-existent in the fishery,” he says. Yet in less than five years, the territory’s turbot quota has increased fivefold, largely thanks to the development of the OA zone. And if quota-increases in OB are delivered to the territory as promised, that share will only grow – meaning Ward and other fisheries leaders won’t have to protest by burning any more old rowboats. “I think we got some reaction,” he says of last spring’s incident. “We’re not just going to sit back and take it anymore.”