Fisheries Committee on April 2nd, 2009

[Dale Mitchell]

I hope not, but really, what can we do about it? There's nothing we can do, as fishermen. If we held off and didn't fish for a month, maybe the lobsters would migrate by us and we'd miss out. We're in a predicament. It's like a grain farmer who didn't plant his grain until July because the market was down. You know, you have to plant it when the time's right. It's the same with the lobster. We have to catch that lobster when it's there and when the quality is right for us to catch it, and work from there. That's the best we can do.

I think that with the government's support we could spread our catch out a little more in the spring, to make it a longer season and not have that big spike that comes the last weeks of May and the first two weeks in June.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Weston.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

My thanks to both of you and to the audience for coming and contributing your valuable time.

As somebody from the west, I've been listening intently to the comments about what is the best lobster, whether it's a Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or even a Quebec lobster. I want to suggest that the best lobster, regardless of where it's caught, is the one eaten after skiing at Whistler. I urge everyone to try one of those lobsters.

One of the most terrifying things for a client is to hear his lawyer call his case interesting. I'm listening to your intriguing testimonies and considering the ones we've heard before. As a politician, I hate to tell you this, but this is a very interesting case. I'm talking about the question of supply and demand and marketing. You have different segmented markets—markets for people who live here, markets for tourists, a U.S. market, an Asian market, and a European market. And all your markets have different appetites.

You have different intermediaries who affect your pricing and where your lobsters go. We're hearing that the supply is totally uncontrolled and that right now it's beyond your expectations. This affects your price and your profitability. There are regulations, but it seems to be a highly self-regulated market. Most people we've heard from like that approach, as opposed to having DFO come in. Quality control has been a large part of our testimony today, and it may affect whether people continue to consume lobsters in the future.

What if there was a marketing board based on voluntary participation? You either paid your dues, or you didn't benefit from it. What if this marketing board had some analysts who would help decide where the lobsters would get the best prices, or would recommend that you slack off your supply for reasons of conservation or profitability? How do you think that might work? It seems as if everybody is doing his own thing right now. There's no coherent approach to marketing, and no one fisherman can afford to invest in advertising. What do you think of this idea?

Mr. Thompson.

[Steven Thompson]

I honestly don't know where to start. I'm not up on the marketing situation. All I know is that there are too many lobsters coming to market at a certain time of year. If there was some way, through the adjustments of seasons, to spread this huge glut out instead of going from peak to peak, it would probably help in the pricing that the fisherman receives. But how to go about this is beyond me.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Mitchell.

[Dale Mitchell]

My wife sits on the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, for the Canadian Baptist Ministries. She spent some time out west, when they were marketing grain last fall in Winnipeg at the headquarters. One of the fellows there was marketing 5,000 acres of grain. She stayed at his farm for a week or two. The Wheat Board was struck down out west. They used to set a price for wheat, but farmers can now market their wheat when they want to. No?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

The Wheat Board is still going.

[Dale Mitchell]

Okay.

This guy I know was on his farm. He had 5,000 acres in Brownsville--or Brownsomething...north of Edmonton. He sold part of his wheat to the Wheat Board and he kept part of it, hoping the market would improve through the year.

I don't know if we could ever make it work. It's hard to get fishermen to join associations. The New Brunswick government set the legislation up such that you have to get all the fishermen in your area to vote for an association. Fishermen are very independent. Only about 20% of the fishermen in our area belong to an association. In northern New Brunswick they do more, but even up there someone is always coming to a war in buying the lobsters and breaking it....

I, for one, have always held my lobsters in lobster cars, and they're sold about twice a season. I wait for the price to go up. Now it doesn't seem to go up anymore. Through the years, except for two years, the price has increased every year between November and close to Christmas. Now it doesn't happen anymore; there are too many lobsters on the market.

I do wonder if we could ever sit down with the buyers, as they do in Newfoundland, in the shrimp and crab fishery, and set a price--a minimum price, and even a maximum price--in October that we could all live with. So Clearwater or Paturel or whoever can take those lobsters to Europe and say, we'll deliver our lobster in Spain on this date for a certain price. I think it's worth trying to look at this. When you have buyers paying $3.50 a pound and then $7 or $8 a pound within two weeks, it makes me wonder if the price was ever that low or if they just took us for a ride last fall. I'm suspicious at this point that the big guys really used all this pessimism we were hearing about the economy and took us for a ride. That cost me between $60,000 and $70,000 on my catch last fall--maybe $80,000.

I had two fellows with me last year, and I gave them 25% each. My son just got through high school, so I gave him a full share and I gave another fellow a full share. This year I'm giving my son a third share and just the two of us are going lobster fishing. That was the agreement, and the fellow that went with me before knew that. I pay all the expenses above that. My expenses run about 25% of my stock--a normal stock--a year. Last year they ran higher obviously because the price was down.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Clearly someone like the gentlemen we heard before you, who is concerned about costs and even entering the industry, will choose to continue based on his assessment of the certainties of return. Part of that is about the brand. The reason we pay more for our Nike shoes than another brand name shoe is because of the brand. The brand means something. If our Canadian brand of lobster is being damaged by unreliable quality, then we're not going to get standard pricing.

What if the Government of Canada set up an agency on a trial basis, for a year or two, and supported it on the basis that it would be taken over by the fishers and it would be voluntary after that? It would have to prove some results. Do you think something like that, if it gains some momentum, could get the support of the fishers to improve our quality, reliability, and get our product to market on a more cost-efficient basis? What do you think?

Mr. Thompson.

[Steven Thompson]

As I say, I'm not much up on the marketing end of things. I'm on the catching end. But there are possibilities out there that certainly could be explored, to be sure. Obviously something has to be done. Unfortunately, I guess I'm the wrong person to be asking that question to.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

But I think you speak for a large majority of the people in the industry who don't think about selling to a buyer in China but would love it if somebody was consolidating your product and getting it to market at the best price.

[Steven Thompson]

Sure, if there was some better way to get the lobsters to the market and, in doing so, get me a better price for them, I see nothing wrong with that, to be sure.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Do you have any thoughts on that, Mr. Mitchell?

[Dale Mitchell]

I always have thoughts.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dale Mitchell]

It would have to be a third party independent before I'd be even looking at it--independent to monitor what's going on. I really have no trust in Clearwater. I just think Clearwater is a crowd that beats everybody down they can. My opinion of Clearwater...I wouldn't buy stock in the company when they went to a trust fund. I wouldn't buy stock because they're so dishonest. I just wouldn't buy into them. I just feel they've forced the scallop fishery into one mould. Everything they've gone into, they want to take over and run it as a real industrial model.

My wife did her PhD. I met my wife when she was doing her PhD on the fishing industry. She interviewed me. That's how we met. So I can look at it from an academic viewpoint. Her thesis was “Making It Pay: A Study of the Deer Island Fishery”. It was a socio-economic study of the Deer Island fishery. That was 25 years ago.

But fishermen just don't trust the government. And we've also figured out ways—

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Mitchell, don't hold anything back, okay?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dale Mitchell]

I'll finish this question first before I make this statement.

But I think we need to look into something. We need an investigation into what happened so that we understand, as fisherman, that we can be better connected with what we should be landing, when it should be landed, to make it work better for the whole system, including the buyers—the top end, the wholesalers. Because we really don't trust them, the big guys; we just distrust it the whole way through. Everybody's getting rich but us.

Personally, I don't think they're getting rich myself. Look at Clearwater's stock; it's less than $1 a share right now. So somebody's not getting rich there somewhere. It's not doing great. Those companies are not doing great.

At the end of her thesis, my wife's main thought—once you get through it, and if she was here she'd probably kill me for saying it—was that fishermen are very good in the long range at using whatever policies the government sets or business sets and working them through to make it work to their benefit in the long term. And we are willing to change. She's from Fredericton. She thought when she came to Deer Island that fishing was the same always and it would always be the same. But she is just amazed at how, in 25 years, my fishery personally and the fishery on Deer Island have changed. It's just unbelievable how the fishery is different from then. But we've also found a way to manipulate the system, to work the system, to make it work for us so that we can make a living.

What happens if we set too fine a thing? I'd hate to tie this up in something so fine that we can't change the rules shortly. I use the example of squid. A few years ago, no one at home had a squid licence, never any squid around home. All of a sudden, one year a pile of squid came home—and this was 20-some years ago—and all of a sudden everyone got a squid licence and was squidding for a month. Quite a lot of money was made in a poor summer that summer. Today, with all the government regulations, things don't happen that quickly. The squid would be long gone back to Newfoundland before we ever had a chance to fish them at home.

So I hate to see too many regulations set down too firmly that we cannot adjust the change in market situations, because the markets do change every week or two and every month and every year.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

One more thing?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Actually, I'm sorry, we're out of time pretty much.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

We've already learned that it's better to ask for forgiveness than—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

If you're very quick.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Yes, it's quick. Mr. Stoffer was very interested in this as well.

Given that there's a natural tension between the roles of protecting resources for future use and current consumption, have you seen aquaculture affecting your fishery in any way, positive or negative?

[Steven Thompson]

Well, I've only seen negative effects from the aquaculture industry in my area.

During Mr. Weston's term as provincial minister, permission was granted to establish three salmon farm sites in my area. Now, these sites take away lobster fishing ground. We lose so many acres of ground to these sites. It's their site and you're not allowed on it, and it would be dangerous to put traps there. You would lose the traps anyhow, and you lose a considerable number of traps due to the boats servicing these sites and towing cages from one site to another. That's kind of a nasty habit that they have of towing these huge circular cages from one site to another. It tends to foul the lobster traps or else rip them off--trap gone, with the trap's $100 value or thereabouts, plus the loss of fishing for the season with the trap. Then the ghost fishing that takes place from that lost trap.

I only see the negativity of it in my area. I don't know what Dale sees.

Go ahead, Dale.