Fisheries Committee on Nov. 7th, 2006

[Ted Watkins]

I think there will be stress on it unless something is done. Both levels of government in Newfoundland and Labrador today are in confrontation with harvesters, and these are some of the things that are coming out. Our provincial government abandoned our loan policy, and that throws you at the mercy of the banks; and of course, you eventually end up at the mercy of the processors.

I think it has been suggested many times in meetings I've been in that the feds or provincial governments should get back into some kind of loan policy and set up funding. If you're going to allow a combination, set up the funding, not grants. What we are asking for are loans that we would have to repay.

I think the other suggestion to that is that they would have to take a percentage of the fish to pay off that vessel. In other words, if they give me a million pounds of fish to catch and lend me $2 million, and then next year DFO mismanages the fishery and I have only $500,000, then they only get half the money. If they're going to put the money there, they have to put their money where their mouth is.

The two things have to go together: the amount of fish that you can catch and the value you're going to get for it, and the cost of your loan. You can't go and borrow a couple of million dollars, and next year they pull the rug out from under you and give you no income. No business is going to operate like that. You're going tits up.

So yes, there will be stress unless two levels of government get involved financially and put a plan in place that will make it work.

[Hedley Butler]

I bought a new boat and I had to go to the bank to get a loan, but they wanted to know my income before they gave me the loan. They want their money back. They're going to get it back, right.

If you don't have enough to fish to put a piece on your boat or build a new boat or whatever, they're not going to give you the loan. But that's what I did.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Are there any other questions, gentlemen?

Thank you very much to our presenters. I think some very useful information was exchanged here today.

Maybe in wrapping up I'll take a second to see if I can summarize some of the points that have been made here. DFO officials will tell us that if you build larger boats they will demand more effort and put more pressure on the fish stocks. More pressure on the fish stocks will put stocks in decline that are already under pressure.

In some fisheries that may be true, and I certainly have that in my own riding of southwest Nova Scotia, where there's a big lobster fishery, but it's still not an ITQ system. If you have 375 pots, you can set 375 pots. You can catch 50,000, 100,000, or 15,000 pounds of lobster according to the type of fisherman and the type of bottom you're fishing on.

Is it safe to say that the rules that were brought in 30 years ago to limit the amount of groundfish caught are no longer applicable when you have individual quotas for all fishermen? I fail to understand what difference the length of your boat makes if you're allowed 50,000 pounds of fish or 10,000 pounds of crab--I'm just picking numbers out of the air. Where is the correlation to the length of your boat?

In recent years we've seen boats being built, and because they have a licence for a 44-foot 11-inch boat they have to make it as profitable as possible. So they've made the boat wider with more beam, deeper, and in some cases less seaworthy.

Is that an oversimplification of the facts, or is that close to what has happened?

[Hedley Butler]

Yes, that is close.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.