About another minute and a half, I can do it in. With the highs, I go faster.
Fishermen shortsightedly bought too many expensive boats and licences. With DFO outfitting native groups, a licence in my district, 36, went from $25,000 to $400,000. A licence has now dropped back to $100,000, which is still too high, but it is now following a trend to make them affordable.
My congratulations to DFO for trying to turn us back into owner-operators.
Spring season changes. Around the first of May lobster fisheries open in Newfoundland, the Magdalen Islands, the eastern shore of Cape Breton, some in northern New Brunswick, part of P.E.I., and Gaspé Peninsula. Southwestern Nova Scotia lands 80% of the spring lobster in May. Grand Manan, mainland New Brunswick, and the Bay of Fundy are also open, and also this area around here. There's a huge amount of lobster landed, along with the New England fishery, at this time of year. We should be looking to spread the fishery out over May, June, and July. Our district voted 90% in favour last year of an April closure and fishing into July for the 2008 season. The surrounding districts, by political means, stopped us. What a help it would have been last year if this had been spread over the longer period.
I'll skip some.
Advertising. A month ago I stood in the fish aisle in a Costco in Montreal and watched shoppers for 20 minutes or so. Frozen salmon moved steadily, but frozen cooked lobster, a pound and a half each, never moved, not one. Not a big price difference either. I was telling a buyer when I got home. He said, “You don't see lobster on cooking shows very often.” We need to better educate consumers on all the ways to enjoy lobster, maybe on these cooking channels. DFO or the government could do some advertising or really help to build that up, just so people know there's more that we can do with lobster.
My wife works in a small office in Saint John, with I think 12 or 14 people. Those people would never buy a lobster in a store, but they buy 700 pounds from us in the course of a fall or spring. I don't know why that is; it just is a thing.
Trap limits-and I'll make this shorter here. Maine has cut back on the trap limit from 2,500 to 600 or 800 traps in the last five years, with no loss of catch. The catch was just as high then. Obviously their catch per trap has gone up, and their costs have to have gone down, if you commission that many fewer traps. My question: why are we still fishing 375 traps in some districts in this area? We should be looking to the bottom line of profit, not seeing how quickly we can land lobsters. All you're going to do in that case—in my opinion, what I have seen—is spread the catch out over a longer time, instead of getting that high spike at the first of the season. It would be a help there.
Pricing. As I said earlier, I have my own lobster car and hold some lobsters, but it's getting harder and harder to do, with so many rumours in Nova Scotia being such a big part of the whole thing. Is there any reason why fishermen and dealers in the Bay of Fundy, all sharing the same resource, all fishing a small season, all relying on the same market, can't trust each other enough to work out a price by October 1 that we could all live with and that would allow the dealers to go to the world and guarantee a stable selling price throughout the season? We need more trust among the whole thing.
I'll stop there.