Fisheries Committee on May 27th, 2008

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll probably be splitting my time with Mr. Calkins as well.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. We appreciated the opportunity to see your facilities and to get a good idea of what you're doing here. I was certainly impressed with what we saw.

As we've crossed the country—certainly on both coasts, and we're heading to do some work in central Canada as well—I'm trying to get a sense of what the various governance models are. Now we're sort of into the harbour authority era, and largely we've heard it seems to be working well. There are some challenges, certainly, some of which we've heard here.

I might have missed it, but I think in your case, Lorraine, the Lions Club must be the lease holder, I suppose, of the water lot. I'm just wondering how that came to be, how it works, how the club itself plays a role in the management of the harbour, and so on.

[Lorraine Williams]

Originally there was a very proactive Lions Club group that negotiated the lease. Even the additional rock side to the breakwater, that part happened in the beginning, and it's carried on over the years with a committee. There is a harbour committee in the Lions Club of five to seven people, and they sit down and discuss, have meetings with us, or come by, or whatever. Everything sort of ends up being a consensus. There are four fishermen and I think two other people on the committee. When the small craft harbours program people have visited, they have met with the committee and the employees.

But most of the day-to-day talking and stuff goes through me, until there is a major project or something.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

So to be on your harbour authority board you have to be a Lions Club member and then sit on the subcommittee that is managing this.

[Lorraine Williams]

Yes.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Okay, that's interesting.

Would there be other options in your community if it wasn't the Lions Club? I guess you don't have a local government, as such, so it can't be the Port Hardy or the Port McNeill model, so perhaps this is your best opportunity.

[Lorraine Williams]

Yes, and actually the Lions Club took over the Transport Canada dock as well. The divestiture issue was talked about earlier. I didn't mention this, but it has been a successful venture so far.

There have been two extensions so far. It was five, then seven, then nine years now, with the money they hand over with the dock. So far it has worked really well. Most of the improvements are done, and there's still some money there.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Good for you.

[Lorraine Williams]

There is no other organization that's incorporated on the island that could probably handle this.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Secondly, and this can be to others of you, when we had the Pacific region representatives in Ottawa talking to us about some of their issues with respect to small craft harbours—and that's what we're really trying to focus on in this trip and in this study—they made the point that the Pacific region harbour authorities have developed an ability to generate revenue outside berthage, moorage fees, and so on. I wonder whether you have any examples of that.

In fact, they were making the case that perhaps 50% of all the additional revenue generated by harbour authorities was generated here in British Columbia., and obviously we don't have 50% of the harbour authorities across the country. In fact, it's a considerably smaller percentage.

I have two questions on that. Are there are any other activities that you do to generate revenue for the harbour, in addition to fees?

With respect to fees, what is your process in deciding what to charge? What process do you go through to come up with the number? I'd appreciate knowing that.

Perhaps, Lorraine, you could start.

[Lorraine Williams]

Probably 10% of our revenue is from other sources. The Lions Club put in a laundromat-washhouse facility to complement the harbour to attract visitors. Last year they put in an addition, with more machines and showers and things, because it was getting too busy in the summer. We have a little take-out restaurant, which is on the lease, that we get rent from. We have a fee that we charge—it's now the Malcolm Island Lions, and it's going to a community wharf—an administration and office use fee.

I'm sorry, what was the other thing you asked?

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

It was about charging for the actual mooring.

[Lorraine Williams]

Oh, the actual moorage.

We get together with the other harbour authorities in the area to discuss our fee schedules, usually yearly, and we go by that, from where it was set originally. We basically have just raised it.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Mr. Wainwright.

[Phil Wainwright]

Our authority and our community are so small that our harbour authority actually runs the waste disposal for the community. We do that in conjunction with the small craft harbour so that we can both survive by doing it. In other words, in the summer we have an influx of a tremendous amount of garbage. We provide a garbage trailer, and we charge for the service.

Our goal as a harbour authority, with the few people we have, is to break even at the end of the year. We have some funds from when fishing was big on the west coast and there were lots of fishers. We still have some funds in our bank account from times when we leased substantial portions of our wharf to fish buyers. They have long gone, so now we rely upon the daily rates, in conjunction with some rates we charge the community to bring their debris to our garbage trailer. We haul it away.

As I said, we're so small—a lot of it's volunteer—but our goal is to break even. I don't know whether the inference was that we collect money and make lots of money from our harbours, so that we could maybe sustain them. That's not the case.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

No, I wasn't making that point, but are there any other revenue-generating ideas or things you've done that you could share with us?

[Pat McPhee]

I don't know. We have a parking lot. It's paid parking at our place. There's the boat launch. There's extra revenue there. We have loading and offloading areas that generate revenue.

That's about it, I think.

We have a black water pump-out. There's a nominal fee of $20 to get your boat pumped out. But that by no means generates enough money to pay for that pump-out system that was originally put in there, because it's not used that many times in a year.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Is there anything from Port McNeill?

[Gerry Furney]

We operate similarly to Port Hardy. There are some parking revenues and some charges for pump-out. We don't charge for fresh water.

Wireless Internet would be one of the smaller items.

We try to keep it as economical as possible, but as Lorraine mentioned, we do discuss it among ourselves and we fix the prices.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Yes, there's collusion there.

[Gerry Furney]

Absolutely.

We have some users who don't want to pay anything; they'd like to have it for free. There are other users for whom the money doesn't make a lot of difference. So some place in between we've had to come up with a reasonable way of handling it, differentiating between the commercial fishermen, giving them the big breaks, and then having the other people pay the bulk of the shot.

[Albert Sweet]

The only exception in our rates is on the commercial side. We structure those to break even, as per the mandate of the small craft harbours. On the municipal side we set them with the other authorities.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

Thank you.

I realize some of you may have some more questions, but we have to be out of here at 4:30. To do a fair round for everybody, time doesn't allow. If there are any questions that you want to ask after we clue up, if you want to talk to any of the witnesses, feel free to do so.

I'm sorry, but if we allow one group to have a couple of minutes then we have to allow everybody to have a couple of minutes, and time is not going to allow us to do that. I'm sorry about that.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

No, I understand that.

Mr. Chair, I just thought that three minutes would suffice, wouldn't it? There are only 12 minutes, so if we divide--

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

That round of 12 minutes was 16 minutes, so we'd have a job to do that, right? And we have to be out of here at 4:30.