Good morning, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to thank the committee very much for this opportunity to appear and speak on this pressing problem.
First, I'll give you a 10-second background. My name is Glenn Wadman. I'm an operations manager for D.B. Kenney Fisheries Ltd. We're located on Brier Island in the Bay of Fundy. We're a vertically integrated fish processor/harvester, importer/exporter, and we market primarily in the U.S., but we do $4 million or $5 million worth of business each year in Canada.
Anyway, enough with the pleasantries.
I'm going to speak to the grey seals over the last 20 years, because it's been 20 years now since I moved from my own country down to the Bay of Fundy. Twenty years ago, we basically did not have to candle fish from the Bay of Fundy. The existence of seal worm parasites in the flesh were basically non-existent. You might get one or two in a day's production and many days you'd get none. Now the fish from my local area are heavily infested, to the point where, with fish from some fishing areas, we have a 50% reduction in throughput as employees attempt to detect and remove parasites.
This has caused a significant competitive problem with our competing with low-labour countries. It's also caused a quality problem, as when you're cutting up, or stripping up, fillets to get the parasites out you're not putting nice firm whole fillets on the market. You're putting pieces of fillets that are winding up in fish bits or cod blocks or on the lower end of the spectrum. As I said, it's a 50% reduction in throughput, which is basically a doubling of cost. When we do miss a worm, believe me, we get some very significant phone calls from people wondering, what is this? Am I going to die? Is it going to live? Is it alive? Is it dead? What doctor do I see?
Because of the lack of harvesting of seals, we now see seals at our plant coming to the water effluent to look around for pieces of fish. They are everywhere. There are small herds of seals that have started living on the back of our island that we've never seen before. I've talked with fishermen on the island who are 70 or 80 years old who have never seen these things except in the last seven or eight years. The necessity for a hunt to reduce the numbers and to reduce the parasite load is tantamount. We have to get over the fear that some tourist will say, we can't go to Nova Scotia because they kill the seal. That same tourist would also say they can't eat Nova Scotia fish because they found a parasite.
I'm not going to harp on it very long, but one of the other problems we're seeing because of the abundance of seals is this. Traditionally, especially back in Newfoundland, we see seal worms as a problem in cod fish. Due to the abundance of seals and since, unlike the Newfoundland harp seals that visit Newfoundland for about three or four months a year and then move back north, our grey seals stay here 12 months a year, we're now seeing seal parasites occurring not only in our codfish stocks but in haddock, in some instances in ocean perch, in flounder, and also a few in pollock.
I would ask the committee to look very favourably at supporting a grey seal hunt in the Maritimes.
Thank you.