On the same morning
The IMCS Network is about its people, and the best thing about people is their stories.
This is one of them.
Canadians Randy Jenkins and Judy Dwyer began their careers on the same morning, in the same room, almost thirty-five years ago. This year they retire within weeks of each other. Randy as Compliance Manager of SPRFMO and Judy as Compliance Manager of NPFC. Both are Newfoundlanders. Both are returning home. I sat down with Randy and Judy to explore their story, the lessons they learned along the way and what gives them hope.
In July 1991, thirty fishery officer trainees gathered in Ottawa. Sixteen of them were from Newfoundland. Three of the thirty were women. Most had not met before. Judy arrived carrying a stack of pay cheques to hand out to colleagues she didn’t yet know. Randy had been married a fortnight earlier and had left his new wife behind to attend. “Randy, do you remember me giving you your check?” Judy asked, thirty-five years later.
He didn’t.
It doesn’t matter. The cohort that formed in those barracks, that learned to watch each other’s back through the practical training in Regina, that walked into the cod moratorium with a year of experience between them, has held together ever since.
Randy has promised to organise the reunion when he gets home.
What the work asks of you
Randy and Judy came of age professionally during one of the most volatile periods in Atlantic Canadian fisheries history. The cod moratorium fell in 1992. Communities collapsed. The St Pierre and Miquelon dispute brought French vessels deliberately into Canadian waters to be arrested. American scallop boats tested the limits of the continental shelf. In 1995, the Turbot War saw a Canadian patrol vessel fire warning shots across the bow of a Spanish trawler. That period taught them what the work asks of you. It also taught them what the work, on its own, cannot give you.
Judy still names the Turbot War as her proudest moment. Not because of what happened on the water but because of what happened after.
“In the early 90s we were boarding vessels in the NAFO area, issuing citations for egregious fishing behaviour. The captain would take the citation, ball it up, and just throw it on the deck. There was this real sense that we were defeated.”
After the Turbot War, something shifted.
“When you went on board, you didn’t get that same sort of callous disregard. People started to take it more seriously, as they should have.”
Randy describes the same years differently. For him, they were where the appetite for international work was formed. “Where we were based in St John’s and offshore, we got exposed to a lot of things that normally you wouldn’t be exposed to at all.” Different reflections on the same period. Different lessons drawn. The work shaped them in different directions. What stayed the same was each other.
The journey continues
Their paths separated and converged through the next two decades. Randy went to national headquarters in Ottawa. Judy went offshore, then to Labrador, then to St John’s, then to Ottawa where, for a time, Randy was her boss. When he stepped sideways into setting up the National Fisheries Intelligence Service, she stepped into the directorship he had vacated. I asked Randy what the friendship had meant. He answered before I had finished the question.
“Everything. Judy has been a good friend of mine even though there were a lot of years where we didn’t have a lot of interaction. We formed a good bond right from the get go.”
Judy described Randy and his wife Michelle as family. When she moved to Tokyo, what gave her comfort was that Randy had already made a similar move. A long way from home. Difficult to get back from. They have spent Christmases together with traditional Newfoundland dishes and a glass of rum. A Christmas in Brisbane two years ago. A cruise last year with their friend Kevin, also from the original training cohort. When Randy came back to St John’s for contract work after his first retirement, he stayed at Judy’s house.
“We probably won’t hear from each other for months and months. “But then I’m going to go visit him.”
Randy puts the same thing differently.
“Judy grounds me. She’ll say, you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. She’s said it to me a thousand times.”
This is the part of a career that doesn’t make it into the CV. It’s also the part that makes the rest of it possible.
The Pacific
Randy retired from DFO and, as COVID closed the world’s borders, flew to New Zealand to take up a role with SPRFMO. Two weeks of mandatory isolation in an Auckland hotel in October 2020 before starting in November.
Judy retired in 2020 and told everyone not to call her. NPFC called her. She moved to Tokyo in 2022.
For the first time in their careers, they were doing the same job in parallel, on opposite sides of the same ocean. And for the first time, the work was different from anything they had done before. Both were navigating the rhythms of an RFMO secretariat after careers built inside a national agency. The pace was different. The relationships were different. So was what the role asked of them.
This is where the IMCS Network came in. Not as an institution. As a lifeline.
Finding your tribe
Randy chaired the PPFCN for several years. Judy serves on the Network’s Executive Committee. Neither speaks of these roles as obligations. They speak of them as belonging. On the morning of the conversation, a question had landed in Randy's inbox about port inspection and high seas boarding templates. Randy answered it before he’d finished his coffee.
“If we didn’t have this Network you just had to send a blanket email to people you don’t know and hope they’d respond with some kind of intelligent answer.”
Judy says it more plainly.
“Within RFMOs, it’s much more challenging to find that community. To find your tribe. The IMCS Network has certainly been that.”
Asked what advice she would give the next generation, Judy returns to the lesson she has carried from the very beginning.
“You aren’t as good as you think you are. You’re not as effective in isolation. You just can’t possibly know everything. You really need to work together with other people. Seek help when you need it. Seek advice. Having opportunities to do so makes all the difference in the world.”
Randy says it through one of his images.
“Everybody contributes bricks. The wall only gets built by everybody contributing bricks. No person has all the bricks. You’ve got to rely on others to come in and lay the right brick at the right time. And if the wall starts going squishy, you’ve got to tear down the pieces that aren’t working and start again.”
Two ways of saying the same thing.
Two people. Two voices. One lesson, learned together.
The rear-view mirror
Both are clear eyed about what they hope they leave behind. Judy points to a generational shift in how the ocean is understood.
“Many people of my generation believed the ocean was just inexhaustible. I remember being on a dragger and hauling up a washing machine on the Grand Banks. Somebody had just thrown it over because, you know, it was just a dump.” People understand differently now. That, she says, is what gives her hope."
Randy points to tools, and to recognition.
“Young people starting out have a lot more oomph behind them. They’re not preaching into the darkness. People are on the same page. If you look back to where we were in the 1990s, where Judy was talking about dumping fish, to where we are today in 2026, you’d see a mushroom cloud. The pressure has just been phenomenal.”
There is still work to do. He is honest about that.
“Young people should hold the torch high.”
On the morning of the conversation, Randy was packing a sea container bound for Canada. Judy was counting socks for an insurance manifest. Both will be home by mid-year. Both have promised the other that the friendship that began in a barracks in Regina will not end with the careers it carried. Randy had the last word.
“It’s easy to reflect on the things that don’t work quite as well as they should. But when you look in the rear-view mirror, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been fixed over the years and improved. So look in your rear view. That’s what you’ve got to do.”
This is what we mean when we say the IMCS Network is about its people. The way we hold each other up, across decades, across oceans, across entire careers. The way one morning in Ottawa becomes thirty-five years of showing up. The way colleagues become friends, and friends become family.
