Fisheries Committee on May 27th, 2010

[Greg Roach]

One thing I didn't talk much about today is area 4X. You can see on your chart that's in southwest Nova Scotia, which is pretty much the southern range. There are a few pockets of snow crab in the Gulf of Maine, but there's no commercial industry as such. Lobster is our challenge with the U.S., not snow crab. They're our market but not our competitors for harvest.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Okay.

You mentioned marketing a moment ago. Is your government involved in any initiatives along that line?

[Greg Roach]

We promote snow crab at various events and in various circumstances. We had a snow crab promotion in Europe a couple of years ago at the European seafood show. This usually has theme years, and one year we had a snow crab theme.

To be perfectly honest, again, it comes to resources. In the last two years lobster has hit the wall so hard that it has been a bit of a focus.

We have focused on snow crab. We still do. As I mentioned, we're working a lot on China now with lobster, and at every opportunity we like to tag snow crab along.

The thing about snow crab is that there are opportunities for live crab, but for the most part we sell frozen sections. You don't have all the logistical issues in China or other Asian countries that you have with live lobster, for example. Frozen lobster products or frozen snow crab are a lot easier to deal with when you get into some of these new markets.

We certainly will be looking, and we have looked, at opportunities for snow crab.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Thank you.

I have a final question, and I think it might be an underlying question we've been encountering with this study.

If you have any advice for us based on your background, it's along the lines of how you control access and manage a cyclical fishery that doesn't have just highs and lows but actual cycles of highs and lows. Obviously it can support a number of entrants in the high years, but when you get to the low years what do you do about those? Do you have just enough so they can survive when it's low and then they make a lot of money when it's high? Or do you have enough so they can survive when it's high and then they starve when it's low?

Do you have any advice on how you manage that kind of a fishery?

[Greg Roach]

That's really a tough question, and I'm not saying that because I don't want to give an answer.

There are pros and cons to different approaches. I'm sure you're going to hear about the last-in, first-out approach with the shrimp fishery in Newfoundland. Brace yourselves; it's going to be interesting.

The pros about that is you can have new players enter the fishery during the highs. Some of those are even based on more than resource, also on resource and price. As I tried to state earlier, the price can have a bigger impact than the resource.

The problem with that is investing. If someone wanted to invest in equipment, in gear, or even in predicting their business enterprise from year to year, it's very difficult if you don't know if you're in or not. I think that was a lot of what was behind the idea of putting everybody in and ending it once and for all. Every year you would have the temporaries saying they're not getting a fair enough shake and you'd have the permanents saying we shouldn't have temporaries in. Sometimes the TAC arguments would be based on it should be high for those who wanted in, and it should be low for those who want to keep people out. It wasn't based on good resource management.

The idea of putting everybody in was to avoid those kinds of issues. Then when you have everybody in--permanent, predictable--you run into trouble during the downtimes in price and resource...or a combination of both is worse.

It's a real difficult one. Somewhere in the middle, where you can have everyone in and have some kind of a combination of enterprises, doesn't work either, but that's something that will help it a little bit.

There is no real easy answer for that one.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

You're right. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Roach, on behalf of the committee I'd like to thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule today to meet with us. We really do appreciate your input, your comments, and taking the time to answer our questions.

Thank you once again.

[Greg Roach]

Thank you all very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

This meeting stands adjourned.