Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity.
I want to talk about snow crab. When we got into the crab fishery, 15 or 16 years ago, it was after the moratorium when they took away our cod fishery, which was a deepwater fishery for us.
Over the years we've been successful in lobbying to get into the bays for small boats under 40 feet. Most of us are in the 27- or 28-foot range. When DFO allotted that portion of water to the small boats, they said, “You live and die within that”, with regard to crab. That's fine, but the problem with it is that there are too many of us in those bays to make a living off that amount of crab.
I'm not faulting DFO on their management of the resource. It's about the only species there is for which we have a relationship with DFO in which we basically sit down and between the two groups come up with a quota that doesn't devastate the bay. We try to stay within a sustainable quota, and I must say it's worked well. The problem we have in the bay is that there's not enough resource for the number of us harvesters there; that's problem number one. Number two is that there are so many regulations in place that we can't economize on what we have, such as by fishing with three or four in a boat, or changing the boat around, as you suggested. That's crippling us.
Take Green Bay, where I fish. We have 11,000 tonnes of crab and basically little or nothing else. It makes a lot of sense to us as harvesters if we can get the most dollars we can out of that by economizing and buddying up. Whatever we need to do, we should do it. We can't survive on that.
The question I ask here today is this. Everybody's talking about a fishery that “can” be good, but you gave us four minutes to talk, and I think that's more than we've got to fix this: there's nobody after me. I'm 57 years old. There's nobody after me. In my community, the one I fished out of, is dead. I had to move out of it two years ago, because nobody has an interest. Nobody wants to go into a fishery in which they can't survive. They don't have enough money for groceries on a regular basis; they can't make their payments. We haven't got a resource.
When we fished cod, we didn't have a limit. We worked hard and caught what we could get, but with crab we have a quota. You can't make the resource any bigger than what it is, but we have to fix it. Today, this thing called the independent owner-operator has been pushed by everybody...and I support it; you can't own a licence unless you're a fish harvester, and that's the way it should be. But I'll tell you something right now, and you mark my words: within the next five to ten years, you'll see people like me out on the street lobbying you and the provincial government to let us sell our licence to buyers.
When I'm ready to get out--and I have no choice, because my age and health tells me to--no one else is there to buy it. If we don't fix this now—and we don't have another 15 years, or another 10—there will be no fishery; there will be no little bays; there will be no little communities.
So what happens to all these licences and this quota? Someone has to catch it; it's going to come out of the water. What I'm saying is that we have to fix this fishery.
Leo spoke about seals. One guy killed a seal in Green Bay this year, one hooded seal, and he documented it. He took the pictures and he posted them on the Internet. It had 85 female crabs in its stomach. I've been fishing crab for 16 years, and—I think Lyndon can back me up—I haven't destroyed five female crabs. That one seal took 85. How long can that resource last?
When I fished cod in deep water, that's all we knew. We fished, 150 of us, out on the water with gillnets. If we cut its throat and slit the stomach, we used to ruin our knives on the crab. It was female crabs. We don't want the cod back to that state anymore, or we won't have a crab fishery. We need to get control of this and we need to put something in place so that there's a future beyond me.
I have seven or eight years left, but every little community in Newfoundland is going to be gone without that resource. It's like Leo said this morning, coming in: do you know the biggest employer in Newfoundland today? Alberta.
That's stupid. We have a fishery that can support three times what is there, if we had run it right in the first place.
I'd like to close by saying that right now, in my opinion, and I speak for a lot of small-boat fishermen, the problem in this fishery is that there's not enough fish in the industry and too much politics.