I guess it would be politic to begin with one of the things that I think is good about what's being proposed, which is legislation to address the Larocque judgment. This is going to make some small amount of money available for research through formulas that used to be used but no longer are.
On the other hand, as an industry, in Ontario we have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in primary research in recent years. As a tiny industry, that's a lot of money. We were levying our members a penny a pound on perch and pickerel for one set of projects and 1% of total landed value for another to pay for university researchers to do fundamental research. Frankly, we think that should have been done with government dollars, but it wasn't going to get done if we didn't pay for it.
What happens when you don't have stock assessments, when you don't have good ecological analysis is that managers become extremely risk averse. They don't allocate fish when they aren't sure. The more they know, the more risk they are prepared to shoulder, because the more certain they are about the numbers they're dealing with.
We've seen a spiral over the last few years where the perceived risk profile in management agencies everywhere, whether they be provincial or federal, has gone through the roof. Over and over and over again you hear, “We don't know, and we don't want the northern cod happening here.” Those are the words you hear all the time. If you ask what the northern cod has to do with this situation, the answer is, “Well, we don't know.” If you ask if they can actually explain what happened with the northern cod, they don't know that either. That's the reality of using a common property resource for economic activity. You are at the mercy of a risk management exercise that involves a whole lot of stuff that's beyond your control.
When public agencies aren't doing the work to underpin their decisions in a way that they are comfortable with their own decisions, it has fallen to us to go out and do a lot of that work ourselves, at a time when we really can't. The economic climate for us over the last few years has been absolutely brutal. The largest, oldest fish processor in the province was closed in bankruptcy in 2009. We've lost thousands of jobs in the last 15 years. On Lake Erie alone, since 2000, we've gone from over 70 tugs to under 50. It's rough out there. We're in a position where we've made the call that if we don't do this work, we're going to get shut down.
I'm really concerned about the idea of less science, and I don't like it.