Good morning, Monsieur Blais and committee members. Thank you very much for inviting us here.
I'm here for the B.C. Seafood Alliance. I have with me Mike Featherstone, who is the vice-president of the alliance. He's also the president of the Pacific Urchin Harvesters Association, and he's the co-owner of Ocean Master Foods, which is a value-added processing plant in the lower mainland.
I also have Chris Cue. Chris is the senior director of fishing operations for the Canadian Fishing Company, the largest seafood company in B.C., also a significant licence-holder. He's the elected seine representative for areas A and B salmon, and he's the elected seine representative for the Herring Industry Advisory Board. He's also involved in groundfish and halibut.
So between us, you have representatives of most of the fisheries on the west coast. I hope you'll give my colleagues a chance to speak very briefly to the issues in their fisheries.
The B.C. Seafood Alliance is an umbrella organization. Our 17 members represent 90% of commercially harvested seafood in B.C. That's about $750 million in sales annually.
We believe that sustainability and profitability can and should go hand in hand. We advocate for effective, efficient fisheries management that allows our products to be competitive in both the local and the global seafood marketplace. And I should tell you that this is a world where a chum salmon harvested in northern Japan, filleted in China, and sent to Vancouver sells for less than that of a fillet from one our own fish.
In order to be competitive in this world, capture fisheries, which by their nature are uncertain, need stable, ongoing access and we need a predictable, regulatory regime. Without this, harvesters and processors cannot invest to meet the needs of the marketplace and will be unable to attract new entrants to the fishery. In our view, this stability must be founded upon solid science and research, because these are fundamental to the future health, stability, and economic viability of the industry.
In January 2007 we wrote to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans expressing dismay over the lack of information from DFO on how it intended to deal with the implications of the Larocque and APPFA decisions, both in the short term and in the long term. We reminded the minister that we had a conference on co-management in 2002 and that one of the recommendations coming out of that, agreed to by DFO, was that DFO should clarify the governing policies and legalities of co-management funding mechanisms and provide clear direction to managers in the field about their use.
As a result of arbitrary practices on the east coast, we now have a situation on the west coast in which the formal policy of encouraging co-management of fisheries between representative commercial fishing organizations and DFO through various avenues, including using the proceeds from a specified allocation of fish to fund so-called “incremental” research and management activities, has been overturned.
I think you need to understand that this allocation is not free fish; it was agreed to by fishermen that it would be taken out of the commercial TAC. We wouldn't call it the perfect policy—that's why we made those comments in 2002—but it was based on a cooperative approach and it did work reasonably well for most of the last decade.
In our January letter we asked the minister to instruct the department to cover the costs of ensuring that fisheries could operate normally in 2007 while developing a new approach in conjunction with industry that would conform to the law of the land, would be fair to users of the resource, would be achievable over the long term, and would deliver the benefits that Canadians expect and deserve.
This hasn't happened. Instead, what we've had so far this year is a series of last-minute, ad hoc decisions that are patently inconsistent, unfair, and unsustainable. They are decisions that have pitted fishery against fishery, and they've strained everyone's working relationship with the department. This could hardly be otherwise. We understand that the Pacific region estimates the use-of-fish expenditures last year, 2006, at a minimum of $10 million, possibly as high as $15 million. This year they have $3.5 million to contribute to those activities.
The court decisions have put the west coast industry into turmoil. DFO hasn't been able to provide any indication of how it intends to cope or what mechanisms are available to us. We've been told that we might not hear about the new policy framework until July. Well, by then most of our fisheries are either complete or fully under way. Simply from the gap, we find it hard to believe that the policy could be anything but inconsistent and unfair.
Actually, we agree with DFO: DFO does not have the tools or the resources to manage fisheries effectively in the 21st century. I think we would disagree with DFO that Bill C-45 is an acceptable way to provide them, but that's another topic altogether.
I think it's really important that you understand that funding for science and research is already inadequate, even before the court decisions, but the demands on science are only going to grow. There's the Species at Risk Act; there's the trend in fisheries management to ecosystem-based management; and last of all, there's the market demand for independent third-party verification of sustainable management, which will require significant additional resources.
I want to take a quick look at four west coast fisheries. I'll start with roe herring. That fishery contributed in the past about $4 million a year to science and research through agreed-upon voluntary forfeit of catch and was used primarily for a roe quality testing program and for stock assessment. At the last minute—our fishery opened in March—DFO provided $900,000 in funding for both activities, though not all that $900,000 went directly to the two activities previously funded.
We need the roe testing program because it's the only way we can maintain our reputation as the top supplier of roe to Japan, and that's our only market. This year the roe testing program was barely adequate, and the stock assessment was inadequate. Next year we're told that DFO will be unable to fund the roe testing program, and stock assessment will only be partially funded.
Without these two activities, the multi-million-dollar investment funded jointly by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's CAFI program and industry to reposition Canadian roe in a dramatically changing marketplace will be jeopardized. The fishery in recent years has been worth somewhere between $50 million and $100 million, so it's a quite significant fishery that's at risk here. We have 1,550 licence-holders, and that makes DFO's suggestion that this should be funded through voluntary contributions impractical and legally unenforceable.
Since the chairman is telling me that I'm running out of time, I'll very quickly mention hook-and-line dogfish. This is a fishery that has been losing its market, its only market, in the European Union because of attempts by European conservation groups to protect European dogfish. It has to have Marine Stewardship Council certification. In order to do that, it needs a stock assessment, and that's $375,000, which DFO doesn't have, for the first year, and $70,000 after that.
On area A crab, I think Geoff Gould is going to speak to that later. Again we have a situation where the fishery is not able to deliver its full potential because of the shortfall in commitments to fund soft-shell crab sampling.
Very quickly, on salmon, we've had test fishing in place for decades. For the last 20 years or more, it has been paid for through use of fish. The Larocque decision means that cannot be done. We already saw curtailment in test fisheries and harvests last year. We don't know how it will work this year. And as one other example, we have $500,000 that was raised last year through use of fish, and for enhancement and remedial work on Cultus Lake sockeye. That work is essential to increasing the harvest level on late-run sockeye. That money is sitting in the bank. It cannot be used.