Jeffrey Hutchings, advocate for independent fisheries science, dies at age 63

Colleagues at Dalhousie University’s department of biology said the longtime professor died at his home during the weekend

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HALIFAX — A Canadian ecologist and fisheries scientist who criticized political interference in scientific advice on declining fish populations — particularly the northern cod — has died at the age of 63.

Colleagues at Dalhousie University’s department of biology said Jeffrey Hutchings, a longtime professor at the Halifax school, died at his home during the weekend. The cause of death was not released.

John Reynolds, chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, was a lifelong colleague and he described Hutchings as an intellectual soulmate who believed passionately in the value of ensuring public policy decisions could be guided by unbiased science.

Hutchings was the chair of the same committee from 2006-2010, leading a team of about 40 scientists in assessing which Canadian species were at risk of extinction.

Reynolds, a professor at Simon Fraser University, recalled Hutchings as a principled man who used his background in ecology and evolutionary science to understand the fisheries and to call for more independence from scientific advisers to federal decision makers.

“He went against the grain in terms of the way fisheries scientists were thinking about the stocks,” Reynolds said. “He’d look at the organism, the fish itself, and say, ‘Wait a minute, this fish species will take many years to reach maturity, so therefore it will take many, many years for the fish population to rebuild.’ “

“These kinds of things seem obvious but were nonetheless being lost,” he added.

Hutchings wasn’t shy to call out scientists and senior civil servants for mismanagement of the northern cod species in the 1990s. “He was fresh out of graduate school and he looked at the data at what had happened … and said, ‘It was overfishing that did it, pure and simple,'” Reynolds recalled.

He said that some in the federal Fisheries Department had attempted to spin the collapse as resulting from a mix of ecological factors rather than primarily overfishing.

In 1997, Hutchings and two co-authors wrote a bluntly worded paper for the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences questioning whether government-administered science could be trusted to provide independent advice to decision makers. The paper’s abstract noted how “non-science influences can interfere with the dissemination of scientific information and the conduct of sciences in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.”

The cod fishery off southeastern Labrador and northeastern Newfoundland, once the largest on the planet, was closed on July 2, 1992 after a massive drop in the cod population, resulting in the loss of an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 jobs.

Hutchings’ frank diagnosis several years later of the federal Fisheries Department’s failure to state plainly that overfishing was the cause, “led to a huge amount of attention and blowback against him by civil servants and some scientists,” Reynolds said.

An invective-laden government release to the media in 1997 referred to the journal article as “science fiction,” written by professors who were using innuendo and misrepresentation.

However, Hutchings didn’t back away from his position that science needed to be more independent, while also praising governments if they added to scientific staffing. During the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper, Hutchings continued to call for arm’s-length science to provide advice on the state of fish stocks. In 2016, he praised the federal Liberals for rebuilding the scientific staff at the federal Fisheries Department.

Aaron MacNeil, a former student who became a colleague at Dalhousie University, said his mentor will be remembered for advocacy of “the primacy of science in decision making,” as well as the obligation of scientists to speak the truth once they’ve discovered it.

“He knew that science can help make better decisions and this can have a major influence on peoples’ lives and livelihoods,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 1, 2022.

Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press