Good morning. I'm Leo Seymour.
I want to speak a little bit about what John just said about dollar parity. I can understand a little bit about the exchange rate. I'm no expert on it, but Nova Scotia is a part of Canada, with the same dollar; in New Brunswick, it's the same thing. How is it that crab right now is $2.40 in New Brunswick to the fishermen, and to me it's only $1.35?
The list goes on, with cod and everything else. I got 50¢ a pound for cod last year, and in Nova Scotia it was $1.70 a pound. Does the exchange rate have anything to do with that? I don't think so. I just can't get my head around it. All I can do is say it in plain English: it's nothing but a goddamn rip-off, as simple as that.
I could go on. I've been fishing now for, let me see, 36 years. I got into the fishery with a loan of $300 from a fellow when I bought a power saw when I was 17 years old. I went into the woods and I built a skiff and I went fishing. Now it is all gone; we've been on a so-called moratorium since 1992, which doesn't even exist. It's just the likes of me who's not allowed to catch a fish, but everybody else—the foreigners and whatever—can do what they like. It's going on now, as we're sitting here. They're out there now, and our own factory freezer trawlers are out there catching shrimp. They caught 600 tonnes of shrimp in 21 days. What did they do? They destroyed 1,800 tonnes of capelin, the most precious fish in the water. Everything else has to depend on it.
Now we have another problem. I know you all see this. Even the scientists now will agree that there are around nine million seals. We know, we fishermen and sealers, that there are more than that. Where's it all going to end up?
This is the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The fishery is our mother, and she's on life support, and nobody cares. That's the way it seems to be. You can talk all you like, you can do what you like, and nobody cares.
If something isn't done about the seal population.... If we think we're in a mess now, then boy, listen here; wait and see what's ahead. Like buddy said, the perfect storm is yet to come.
I don't see any way out of it. This is total destruction. The only thing I know to do when I leave here is to pack my bag and head west, after 35 years of investing in boats and wharves and fishing gear and one thing or another. Now, if I go out in the summer and get a few capelin, while my buddy is there having bad luck, I'm not even allowed to give them to him. I have to dump them. Then they talk about conservation. Sure, they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
I'll go on a little bit more. I'm not going to stick to the crab fishery, because as far as I'm concerned, the fishery is the fish.
One of these days there will be a food fishery open. You're allowed five fish a day. If you get a tomcod only so long, you have to keep it. You're not allowed to throw it away to try to get a better one; you have to keep it. I asked DFO the question why. He said that catch and release could harm the fishery.
I can haul a fish out of thirty fathoms of water in probably less than a minute and unhook to let it go. But at the same time, you have a regulation up on the rivers. There's a salmon up there to spawn, eight months pregnant. I can heave out the hook and I can battle it for a full half-hour, maybe an hour, trying to get myself a salmon of 14 or 15 pounds. Does that make sense to you? And right now, this summer coming, I'm not even allowed to carry a dead salmon. If I get a salmon tangled in my gear and he's dead, I'm not even allowed to carry him in. I have to throw him away.
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, with their ten-mile corridor that extends out beyond the 200-mile limit, are catching away at our salmon all summer long.
I could go on and on. I could write a jaysus book, but what's the good of it?
Anyway, thank you.