Canada: THE MARITIMES: Trouble on Quero

All summer, wind-bitten Nova Scotian schoonermen had put into Lunenburg and Halifax with fresh fish and frayed tempers. Now that the war was over, big (500 to 1,200-ton) Portuguese and Spanish trawlers were back in numbers on the Quero (from Banquereau) Bank. Bluenose skippers howled that they were trying to run Canadian schooners (80-90 tonners) off the grounds.

The trawlers, they charged, deliberately dragged their big nets across the buoyed trawls (long lines of baited hooks) set out by the schooner dorymen and ruined thousands of dollars worth of valuable Canadian equipment.

For Nova Scotian seamen this was serious business. The Quero Bank is the mainstay of their fresh fish industry. It is close enough to shore (just over 200 miles) for them to chug out, ice down a load of cod, haddock and halibut, and get back in five to six days. If foreign trawlers continued to shove them off Quero, Canadians would have to go twice as far, to the Grand Bank off Newfoundland, for less profitable salt cod.

For the Dominion Government it was a ticklish problem. Last week Fisheries Minister Hedley Francis Gregory Bridges pointed to the difficulty. Ten affidavits received from masters and mates of fisher men told of damage done but had not said what foreign trawlers had done it. Moreover, the Quero Bank was outside Canada’s three-mile limit.

One solution for Ottawa was: extend Canada’s fishing rights clear out through the continental shelf, and thus bring Quero under Canadian jurisdiction. A simpler solution: patrol the Bank to protect the rights of Canadian fishermen. Last week the R.C.M.P. “cruiser” French was out belatedly on just such an assignment.