Thank you and good morning. I'm Earle McCurdy with the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union. I'll just touch on a few points. A lot of the points I wanted to talk about have been made and I'll just try to be brief.
It's not quite clear what exactly the focus was to be, other than the crab fishery, but I think the crab fishery, as one of the previous speakers said—it might have been Leo—is really all part and parcel of an overall fishery. Crab for the province as a whole is the single most important species in terms of total dollars in export value. In terms of the degree of dependence on it, crab is number one, although not everybody in all areas of the province has access to it.
I guess one of the principal issues of federal jurisdiction, because really we're dealing with a federal committee here, is the whole area of resource management, but there are some issues under that that I would just like to touch on. One has been raised already by Ray and Leo and perhaps others.
You hear a lot about ecosystem management. I really find myself wondering what that means when people say it, because if there was an ecosystem management, we could at least say what are our aims and objectives with respect to the management of the seal herd, with respect to the cod fishery, with respect to the crab fishery and the shrimp fishery. When you set a goal for one, that has a real impact on another.
For example, COSEWIC, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, recently came out with a pronouncement that cod was in danger, within the definition that's in their legislation. It's absolutely a ludicrous outcome, yet the implications are very serious in our province. They're twofold: first of all, the amount of crab people have access to, and the issue Ray just raised, the impact of cod on species like crab, of which it's a predator.
I don't think it's realized at all by either level of government, I have to say, the extent of the financial crisis that exists in the harvesting sector of our fishery. A lot of it is the unfinished business of the moratorium on cod stocks, not only the northern cod but the other cod stocks as well, back in the 1990s, when the number of people who remained in the industry was just insufficient for the amount of resource available. What Ray described for his area is absolutely true of other areas as well.
There is a solution. We do have an opportunity to have a future of some sort in this province for a fishery. It will not happen without the conscious effort and contribution of the two levels of government to really a rationalization and a rebirth. The number of people who are there now, there are too many for the amount of resources there. A public sector investment would allow for an orderly transition of the baby boomers—we have an aging population of licence-holders—and allow them to leave.
Policies that say the solution is self-rationalization, which was proclaimed by the two levels of government back in 2007, and the people buy out each other, have really proven to be kind of a poisoned chalice. What it does is it encumbers the person who does the combining with so much debt that it makes a bad situation worse. If there's a single problem that exceeds all others in our industry, it's the huge amount of debt that is there.
There are a number of provincial issues. I won't dwell on them, other than to say that there has been a process between the industry and the provincial government to try to deal with some of these things. The federal government has been noticeably absent from that table, which is unfortunate, particularly given the principal responsibility of the federal government in the management of the fishery and in really creating the crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s that we're still finding the effects of today and that are having such an impact on our industry.