Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members. I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to express my views, and I look forward to your questions.
I've been involved in this industry since 1984, mostly as a harvester. I've had a couple of stints as a buyer, here in Alma and also on the west coast of Newfoundland for five years. Jim and I actually competed for a few years. I ran Butland's and he ran Collins.
Presently, I'm a fish harvester here in Alma. Over the last year or so, I've been actively involved with the Petitcodiac River Causeway project, and I have also been attending fisheries meetings, both federal and provincial, on behalf of our association. Today I'm not speaking on behalf of the association, because we didn't have timelines to have a meeting. So this is off the cuff; this is me.
If I understood correctly, you were looking for input on the current economic status of the industry as well as for solutions for achieving long-term sustainability. I was told that I had five minutes to speak, so I prepared a little brief, because I'm a woman, and I can't get my point across in five minutes. Hopefully you all have it and have read it.
I think we have to be realistic about what's achievable in the short term and about what will get us through this 2009 season.
I identified in my brief three priorities for 2009. First, somebody seriously has to look at the price structure. I don't know if it would be government or an independent panel or something. There's definitely a problem. I read the notes from the March 24 meeting. I saw what the assistant deputy minister said, which was that $3.80 a pound was break-even. Anybody who wants to come and see my books can come and see them: $3.80 a pound is not break-even in the Fundy fishery. I'm not sure where it would be break-even. Possibly it would be in a dory on the west coast of Newfoundland where you burn two 45-gallon barrels of fuel a week and that's it, and your buyers supply the bait and all your equipment for you to go fishing.
Second is enforcement. I think we all know that hard times call for desperate measures. I'm concerned. The Alma fishery has always been, basically, a lobster-based fishery. That's all we've ever had up here. We haven't had a cod fishery. We haven't had sea urchins. We do have a scallop fishery, somewhat, but even that's being pushed, because everybody in the bay has a scallop licence now, so there are a lot more people involved in it. Our scallop quota this year was done pretty near a month early, because there are that many more people involved because of a poor lobster season.
Enforcement to protect stocks, to protect what we've built, has to be in place. I don't think we have that. I don't know if budgets need to be increased or what needs to be done, but we have some serious enforcement issues.
Third is markets. There have been some problems with the markets of late. Some of it is economic, some of it is PSP, and some of it is MSC certification. There are a whole lot of things. The recent announcement that the government, the federal and all the provincial governments together, put in $500,000 to do some marketing is a good step, but whether that will get us where we want to go, I don't know.
Those are the three priorities I've identified for 2009 to somehow get us through this.
For long-term goals, we need more science, and we need to somehow come out with a cull management system that works. We need to have something in place so that decisions can be made. As Greg Thompson said this morning, it would be best if they came from the bottom up. If they come from the bottom up, you're going to get cooperation. You're going to get input.
We're the fishermen. We're out there. We know what's there. We know what science is saying. If you look at our science reports, they're good for the Bay of Fundy. Any conservation measures that come from the bottom up, we're going to go with. They would be easy to enforce across the board. If we, the fishermen, were taken seriously, we'd put more input into it.
I had some notes from some of the presentations this morning. Everybody who comes before you, I think, will have an agenda. I have one. You can tell from my brief. I'm fighting the Petitcodiac Causeway, and not because I'm not green. I am green. The causeway was put in 40 years ago. It wasn't a good idea at that time. Taking it out the way they intend to do it is not a good idea either.
I've been involved in the fishery for a number of years. I have a son who's 23. He's currently fishing in Newfoundland because he couldn't afford to buy a lobster licence here. When he started fishing, we were offered $1.1 million for our lobster licence, for which I paid $65,000 six years prior. A whole lot of economic things went down in the 1990s that just snowballed.
Some good points were made this morning about the buyers. Historically, a lot of the fall lobsters were new shells, but they weren't hard shells. They were held in pounds in Deer Island and different places around and they were fed. When those lobsters went to market, they weren't pretty, because they had moss and so forth on them. They weren't as pretty a lobster as they're putting out at the CO2 facilities, but they were a healthy lobster. You could ship them, and they were full of meat, and a whole lot of other things. Maybe we have to look at the buying practices and the holding practices we currently have. Maybe they're costing us too much and not giving us the end product we want.
I was a buyer for a number of years. I'm some glad I'm not a buyer right now—although my buyer's in Florida, and I can't afford to go! But the buyers have dropped the ball on this. They no longer have to compete; it's a controlled industry. Whatever costs they incur, they're downloading to us. They all get together and have a meeting and decide what the shore price is going to be. If my buyer happens to have a little niche whereby he can move lobsters and give me more money, then he can't wholesale, if he does so.
There are many issues in the industry around buying practices that somebody seriously has to look into, because if the harvesters aren't protected we will not have an industry. Or we may have an industry, but it won't be employing rural Canada; it will be owned by corporations.
There was a comment this morning, I think by Mike Allen, about a tax-deferred account. I never heard tell of it before. It's a really good idea. If you look at the capitalization in the fishing industry in Scotia-Fundy, for any fisherman who wasn't incorporated—if you get over $50,000, you pay 50¢ on the dollar—it was a good idea to invest in bigger boats and whatever: you got your tax credit and your depreciation, and you were farther ahead to do that than you were to pay your 50% to the government. And we don't know what you do with our money, but.... If something like that had been in place for the fisheries back in the early 1990s, we might be in a lot better shape.
That's enough trouble for now. Thank you very much.