I'm Roxy Lancaster. My partner is Albert Vancott. We fish commercially out of Point Traverse Harbour. I must say, right off the bat, I've got to commiserate with the gentleman from Belleville; you do not want your harbour or your docks to fall into the wrong hands. Ours has. It's fallen to Environment Canada, whose purpose in life is basically to exclude all people from the CWS--Canadian Wildlife Service--properties at Long Point. Currently, they're encouraging the birders, but ultimately they would like it as a reserve area, where no man treads. This seems to be Environment Canada's mandate.
When Environment Canada took over the property from private hands, we had to struggle, but we made a deal with them to retain properties along the harbour side and the docks we had currently, to continue the commercial fishery in this area.
Now, I go back at least four generations, to the United Empire Loyalists, all of whom were fishermen in my past. My father's side of the family came into the fishery sort of sideways; his father had been a farmer.
Environment Canada basically has no budget. Probably because of their political games a couple of years ago, most of the staff in Ottawa has been fired. I worked for Environment Canada part-time as a contract worker, doing small repairs and such. Basically our harbour has been let go to total rack and ruin, to the point where the harbour actually was closed clear across. The beach just simply moved in and covered the entrance.
Over the past few years, most of the maintenance has been done out of pocket by the commercial fishermen and other interested user groups. The anglers and the commercial fishery get along very well here. Everybody is more than willing to throw into the pot when it comes time to dredge. For the guy who operates the dredging equipment, basically a lot of his work is unpaid. But the harbour channel now needs work, and it needs armour stone on the outside of it to prevent further closures. The problem is that in the thirties and the fifties we had high water, before the Seaway was built. It eroded away the protective entrance at the outer harbour, and this is why we're getting these problems now. If it were armour stoned one time, dredged back to a depth of nine feet, and the silt cleaned out of the harbour properly, we'd be good to go for years to come.
Long Point Harbour is a safe haven harbour. At least it was. Quite frankly, I don't like to detract from Mr. Finnegan's presentation, but if you're in trouble on Lake Ontario and you try to go into Wellington Harbour on a bad day, you're going to get yourself real dead. The Canadian Coast Guard—I think it was Canadian, it may have been American—lost a vessel in the bay outside Wellington. It was a coast guard vessel. The man on board perished. It's not a nice place to come in a bad storm. Lake Ontario needs safe haven harbours. Ours is basically the only harbour between Cobourg and, for the sake of argument, Waupoos, where there's a safe haven to get in off that open lake.
The fishery rescues sailboats and recreational boaters really often. Twice last spring, two days in a row, we pulled vessels off the end of Waupoos and the end of False Ducks, vessels that had gone on the shoals unknowingly and would probably have been broken up in very short order if we hadn't gone in and got them, at risk to our own vessel.
We need to get that harbour back into somebody's hands, whether it be the county or whoever. Basically we need to get that harbour back into the hands of somebody who cares. Right now they don't care. They would just as soon see it closed.
We are operating about six boats out of the harbour at this time, the biggest being 60 feet, mine being 35.
It's an active fishery, so far. I know the fishery is dying, but we're still trying. Off and on we have to work out, but most of our lives we've worked the commercial fishery.
