Fisheries committee  I lease everything.

Fisheries committee  It's the only way I could really do it. Duncan made a comment about this earlier, which I thought was a really good point. As lease prices go up and quota lease prices go up, people have to fish harder to be able to make enough money to make it work.

Fisheries committee  I mean more effort. We have to increase our fishing effort, and we have to increase our fishing effort in multiple fisheries to make enough money to make the business work. If all that extra percentage of the landed value were actually staying with the fishermen and not going somewhere else, we would be able to actually fish less and catch less because we'd be making enough money to keep our businesses going.

Fisheries committee  With tuna, it is quite democratic. There's a vote for boards of directors. Then, from the board of directors for the B.C. Tuna Fishermen's Association, we select members to go to our tuna advisory board, and they deal with the fisheries manager, so that is quite good. Tuna is unique because all you need is a schedule II permit to fish Canadian tuna.

Fisheries committee  I have some thoughts on that. Until about 2015, DFO had quite a well-laid-out page on the website where you could access this information. It was called the licence listing by fishery. There was a drop-down menu. This is what I used to lease licences. I looked at which bands had licences that would fit my boat and then I called and went there—

Fisheries committee  It's gone. As of about 2016, there's now this extremely convoluted 4,000 page long Excel file that is very hard to get through and very hard to find as well.

Fisheries committee  I have no idea. It's not very convenient.

Fisheries committee  I think it was brought in to limit the size of the fleet, and I think the size of the fleet has been limited. In the same way that length restrictions on a lot of licences are a little bit archaic, I think allowing the unmarrying of licences would probably not have many negative effects, but would allow more affordability.

Fisheries committee  I think your previous two guests made very good points. A fair sharing leasing agreement that actually had teeth, from the government, would really help solve that. I know that, for me, even if we had that type of a fair sharing agreement, with the extra money I could make I'd be able to—

Fisheries committee  I don't know enough about the procedure to totally comment, but I think something.... Basically, if we could put percentage-based leasing, actual numbers, fishery by fishery, into the integrated fisheries management plans, that would be a way to do it. I'm not an expert on that.

Fisheries committee  Yesterday, one of your witnesses actually used the terminology “find a better boss”. The last time I checked, they don't pay our CPP contributions; we do. Therefore, I was quite interested to see that. We're not their employees. Technically, we're supposed to be independent fishers who are part of a transaction: We're catching fish and selling it to them and they are buying it.

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  They could be, for sure. I think it depends on the operation. There are groups of boats in the foreign offshore fleets that specifically, as their job, try to—

Fisheries committee  Yes. Whether those are the same people who are investing money here, I'm not sure, but it could be.

Fisheries committee  The whole quota ownership is so opaque, with who holds it and who leases it, and a lot of it is done through buyers. Most of the time, I don't actually know whose licence or quota I'm fishing because it comes from a pool of stuff that different buyers control.