I'm very comfortable with DFO taking over and looking after the aquaculture industry. My father is a retired DFO biological technician. I grew up in a household where we lived and breathed DFO policy, and the pros and cons of it. It's going to be good that DFO is going to be taking over. They're definitely going to need an increase in their budget, as well as policy changes from Ottawa.
Back in 1990 to 1993, when I was the vice-president of Kwakiutl Territorial Fisheries Commission, we worked diligently with DFO to get the AFS together for the Kwakwaka’wakw nation. At that time, it was made up of 18 recognized bands. We wanted our guardians to get training to be certified and recognized as enforcement officers. They got their pistol training, but they weren't allowed to bear arms and they weren't allowed to carry them. Still to this day, native guardians in Canada are not allowed to be recognized custodians of the fish--protecting that resource. That's one of the biggest things holding us back, as far as first nations, as well as looking after this resource. That needs to be changed and addressed. I've been following AFS steadily--trust me.
I was asked as a commercial captain on the seine boat...and this really affected me when the salmon stocks went down. I asked them, in 1991, at that last commission, whether the Stó:lo, the Tsawwassen, the Musqueum, and the Yale do like other aboriginals, at least like the Kwakwaka’wakw, and go to the rivers we rely upon in our traditional territories to enhance those spawning grounds, the nurseries. Do those people from the mouth of the Fraser River look after the rivers, the spawning grounds on the Horsefly, Quesnel, the Adams? Someone from one of the bands got up and said no, we don't; it's not our traditional territory.
Yet you guys want to get access to commercial selling food fish, which is against federal law. We as Kwakwaka’wakw can't do it, but we have heavy investment in commercial fisheries, gill netting, seining, and trolling. We've spent millions to be participants in this industry, yet you guys want to go out with little aluminum duck punts with 300-foot nets and be commercial fishermen. If you want to be a commercial fisherman, invest in the industry as we have. AFS came, and we have to accept it.
Where are all the boats at the docks in Campbell River, Powell River, Prince Rupert, Bella Bella, Klemtu? I know all those ports by heart because of the downsizing in the industry. We downsized it: let's accept it. But we still have the majority of the fishers as aboriginals.
We hear stories about people in the oil patch--Fort McMurray and elsewhere--paying up to $60 for a sockeye sold out of the back of a truck. I flew over the Fraser River six years ago, and like the Indian on the commercial back in the 1970s who had a tear coming down his cheek, that's what I felt when I saw the number of gill nets in the Fraser River. And yet it was a day that wasn't open for food fishing.
The main thing is enforcement. The government has to give DFO a big budget so it can work properly. One of the best ways DFO can work properly is enforcement, and that's enforcement spinning down to the aboriginal guardians.