"The stress levels, the mental health, goes further than just somebody that's working offshore," Mercer said in a recent interview. "It goes to the wife, it goes to the children, because the parents are stressed out. There is separation, there is arguing, there's desperation."
The 1992 cod moratorium put nearly 40,000 people out of work. Almost 30 years later, about 1,200 people working directly in offshore oil and gas have been laid off. Another 5,200 jobs have been lost in the industry's service and supply sector. Counsellor Susan McConnell saw the emotional toll of the cod moratorium firsthand. The Canadian Mental Health Association hired her in 1994 to travel the province to teach people how to offer emotional support to their neighbours.
It was a horrible time, but it provided a blueprint, McConnell said, on how communities can get through major economic transitions. Fishers and their families, she explained, needed time and support to grieve and to work through their anger. And then they needed to see there was something else out there for them -- another job, another future, she said.
"One of them said, `Let them starve,' which was one that really cut," Holloway said in a recent interview. She said she wishes people understood that workers in the industry are often employed contract-to-contract and don't have job security.