Today marks the anniversary of a significant turning point in the long history of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Former federal Fisheries Minister John Crosbie announced the largest single layoff in Canadian history with the official closure of the commercial cod fishery on July 2nd, 1992.

The moratorium was only meant to last two years to allow severely depleted cod stocks to recover, but 30 years later and the stocks remain deep in the critical zone.

Gus Etchegary spent his working life in the fishery and has been an outspoken advocate for the industry. He believes a big contributing factor keeping stocks low is seal predation, which wasn’t a problem when stocks were healthy.

He says when the resource was huge there was little impact because replacement levels overcame any pressure put on the stocks by seal predation.

Provincial Fisheries Minister Derrick Bragg acknowledges that in the last three decades, the province’s fishing industry underwent a profound shift from groundfish to shellfish. He says today, there are approximately 17,000 seafood workers in 400 communities who rely on the fishery for their livelihood, and last year’s fishing season was the most successful in history, with a value of more than $1 billion.