Fisheries Committee on May 14th, 2009

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Mr. McCurdy, you haven't been involved. The provincial government, I know, has always been very active in discussing and consulting with the FFAW on important fisheries matters. You have not been contacted by either the provincial or federal governments to sit down in a discussion on a community adjustment package on lobster in Newfoundland and Labrador, have you?

[Earle McCurdy]

No.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Ms. Inniss, representing fishermen from New Brunswick and from Nova Scotia, has the MFU been involved in those kinds of discussions?

[Ruth Inniss]

To date in New Brunswick the MFU has not been involved in those discussions. Even after there was a call for a meeting and a call for action and so on, the Province of New Brunswick had not—

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you, Ms. Inniss.

I sincerely hope that things happen in P.E.I. and happen soon. But I also hope that there is consistency across the Atlantic region and that the federal government engages in discussions with all stakeholders and with all provincial governments on a lobster industry adjustment and income package. That would be very important.

Earle, I want to touch on something that's a little closer to home for you and for me, a local industry. Fishers from the northeast coast....

Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Frenette.

[Ed Frenette]

In Prince Edward Island we've begun what we're calling our provincial lobster round table. This has been going on for six to eight months now. Issues are discussed there with industry, the province, and DFO, with outside assistance from the university and community organizations. We've been talking about the very issue we're talking about today, only we've been talking about it much longer.

As part of that process, industry and the provincial government have been approaching DFO to begin a lobster rationalization program, particularly in the Northumberland Strait. Rather than suggest that the minister is “one-offing” things, I think that perhaps the Province of P.E.I., in this instance at least, may be a little ahead of the pack. It's much easier to do that sort of thing in our smaller province than it is in the larger ones, I'm sure.

As for the community adjustment program, it's been conceived as a possible source of money, but there has never been anything definitive stated to our organization or to the industry in P.E.I.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Frenette.

Mr. Stoffer.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to acknowledge that Mr. John Sutcliffe, from the Professional Fish Harvesters, is here as well.

John, thank you for that.

Ed, Ruth, and Earle, thank you very much for coming. I'm sorry I had to step out earlier.

When we did our lobster tour, we were in southwest Nova Scotia and asked the question about buy-back or fleet rationalization. They were fairly unanimous there in saying they weren't interested in it. If you have the largest lobster fishing effort down there saying no to this one particular program of fleet rationalization, yet in Newfoundland, Gaspésie, New Brunswick, P.EI., and other parts of Nova Scotia they are saying it's something they would do, I can understand the government being a bit hesitant about trying to have a “one size fits all” type of arrangement for that particular issue.

Where there could be commonality, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is with the access to EI, as you mentioned before, as well as with the top-up—the $200 that Ruth talked about—and also, with trying to get the price up. If they had been getting six dollars a pound for their lobsters, a lot of these problems would have been dissipated. The problem, of course, is selling those lobsters. You said yourself, Earle, that people aren't buying. I asked a lot of people on the Hill and back home when the last time was that they had bought a lobster. They said, “Last year, when the guy in the truck came up in the parking lot and sold it off the back of it.”

Can you give examples of how many fishermen you know of who are selling lobsters off the backs of trucks now, basically for survival?

With southwest Nova Scotia not wanting to be part of a so-called buy-back or rationalization program, what advice would you give to the government or to us that we can then give to the minister along the lines that if you're going to do P.E.I., then do it here? How do we do that together and move it very quickly?

[Earle McCurdy]

I'm not quite sure whether this document has been presented to this committee or not, but the alliance that Ruth spoke about earlier was among several harvester organizations throughout the Atlantic, and the document is Renewal of the Atlantic fisheries: an action plan for fleet rationalization.

We propose in the document that there be a fund that could be accessible to those fleets, and within the fleets to those individuals who chose to avail themselves of it, for fleet rationalization purposes. It would be totally voluntary, but there would be a specific checklist that would have to be met in order to qualify. It would include detailed business plans—implementation plans, objectives, and so on—as well as cost-sharing by industry; additional investment commitment from provincial governments or other partners; and a well-developed conservation strategy, setting out some fairly hard targets as to what the long-term goals were.

If a particular area said they weren't interested in it, that would be absolutely their prerogative. The idea would be to have a fund—nothing to be imposed on anyone—to say that if you can meet those criteria, including bringing some money to the table, then we think it's in the long-term interest of the Atlantic fishery to get the right-sizing of the fleet in relation to the resource, and we have a structure and a fund here designed to help achieve that.

That's how we would see going at it.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

To clarify for the record, when you say fleet rationalization, you're not just talking about a licence buy-back, but talking about the whole enterprise—the boat, the gear, and everything else.

[Earle McCurdy]

Yes. There is an enterprise buy-back in some fisheries in Newfoundland, but it's entirely funded by industry, and the cost of buying out those enterprises is burdening those who buy them. As recently as a couple of days ago I was talking to someone who said he really wished he had never gotten into it, because he's only now realizing just how heavy the impact of that debt load is on his enterprise.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

In terms of the conservation plans, some areas like to V-notch, some areas have different sizes. In the Gaspé they talked about reducing the number of traps per boat. So there are different conservation plans for different regions.

Would you be talking to the minister, in terms of a conservation plan with not necessarily a patchwork quilt of conservation plans, depending on whether you're in Yarmouth, Neguac, in P.E.I., Newfoundland, Gaspésie, or northern Nova Scotia, or would you allow each region or each organization to come up with their own conservation plans in consultation with the province and DFO? Would it be one size fits all throughout the entire region?

[Ed Frenette]

Mr. Stoffer, it can't be one size fits all. The biology of the animal, for example, differs from place to place. In the warm waters of Prince Edward Island it matures a lot faster than it does in the colder waters of Newfoundland or Cape Breton. Those are the types of things that have to be taken into consideration.

Our approach, at least from the P.E.I. FA's position, is to go lobster fishing area by lobster fishing area. It cannot be one size fits all.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

I can see the difficulties the government would have in trying to put all that together in a hurry.

[Earle McCurdy]

I agree with Ed's comments in that regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Weston.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We have been hearing everywhere, and again in your comments today, that there is a very strong sense of individualism in the lobster industry. Even if we admire this independance, it seems to me this can also be a burden that hurts the ability of the industry to come up with a plan to sell more lobsters here in Canada, in the United States and in other markets.

Could you comment on the ability to develop a marketing plan that would have input from fishers and governments?

[Earle McCurdy]

From my point of view, as a general statement I think the way we market fish--certainly in our province, and I believe it's probably true for the country as a whole--is a weakness in the industry. Some sectors may be better than others, depending on how concentrated a particular sector is. But generally speaking there isn't much coordination. Our crab fishers in our province are not doing as well in terms of prices as they would be had we a more strategic and coordinated approach to markets. We've been working with our provincial government to try to resolve that.

The provincial government in Newfoundland offered to put roughly $5 million into a provincial marketing council, similar to entities that exist in places like Alaska, Norway, and other jurisdictions, to do generic promotions and develop strategies for marketing, and the Newfoundland processors turned it down, if you can believe that.

I think there is a need to have more of a strategy, to have a more coordinated effort in lobster, and generally in how we market our products. I don't think we have much of a strategy. I have to say it's totally disconcerting when you hear the chief executive officer of the single biggest lobster-selling company going to the public media talking about the lousy quality of our lobster. It's a bit like the president of General Motors saying on public television that the Impala is a bucket of bolts or something. But that happened as recently as yesterday, and for the life of me I can't understand what thought process gave rise to that particular utterance. I hope he doesn't let it happen again.

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

Thanks, Earle, for saying that.

Ed, do you have something?

[Ed Frenette]

Yes, just in terms of marketing, there is the regional lobster round table that's in process and has been now for a couple of years. They've established a subcommittee that will be submitting proposals to a new marketing fund that's become available for seafood products. We hope that will be the beginning of a long-term international approach to both marketing and sales.

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

Ruth, do you have anything to add?

[Ruth Inniss]

I just want to add that as far as marketing goes, one of our main problems, as I'm sure everybody knows, is that our market has been pretty much pigeonholed to the United States. So in any of the marketing schemes the marketing that goes on has to be worldwide. That has to be expanded.

[Ed Frenette]

It might be interesting for the committee to note that on Tuesday evening my board of directors had the opportunity to meet a recent immigrant from China, through the P.E.I. provincial nominee program, who says he's interested in buying every lobster in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Whether or not he can afford to do it and set up the system of marketing and the system to do it, I don't know, but at least there is some interest there. And in terms of China, that would certainly be a huge opportunity if even a portion of it were....

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

It's something that has my personal interest—and here I am probably about to run afoul of all the west coast fishermen I represent—since I lived in Asia for ten years and know the appetite in Taiwan and Hong Kong for this type of thing, and I've taken marketing from one of the world's top marketing professors, Ben Shapiro.

It seems to me you've got an opportunity out there that's not being exploited. We heard from one of the lobster fellows who testified. When we asked him how he was marketing, he said he just brings the lobsters back and hopes someone buys them. There was no sense at all of what his market was and how to reach it.

I'll be going to Taiwan and Hong Kong in July, and I would love to hear from somebody as to how I could help, as one MP. I'd welcome you to take that on as a challenge.

Do I have time, Mr. Chair, for one more question?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Not in this round. In the next round you can.

Mr. Andrews. And I'll leave it up to you, if you decide to share your time.