Evidence of meeting #128 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was fishery.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
We don't track on an individual basis, no.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Okay.
With respect to the indigenous fishery, PICFI is a system in place. As government, we've been buying up quota as well as licences, have we not?
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Yes.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Can you provide us with a summary of what we have paid for the quota that we have purchased and when it was purchased?
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
I don't have the data in front of me today, but we do have it.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Okay. I'd like that data, please.
We did find one issue, and this was actually gathered in the course of another study on small craft harbours, when we had an opportunity to be on the docks and speaking with some of the indigenous fishers. PICFI, as I understand it, was set up to provide bands with licences and quotas that would allow their members to go out and fish. But we hear that in fact some bands are basically flogging their quotas on the open market, on the commercial market. This wasn't intended, was it?
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Initially, certainly when PICFI started up, the intent was to increase commercial economic development for first nations. Initially, certainly a fair percentage of that was leased back out to professional fish harvesters to fish that amount. Some were indigenous and some not. You could lease a PICFI-held quota out to non-indigenous fish harvesters.
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
No, but what we did intend to do was develop these commercial fishing enterprises in a way that would allow them to develop into profitable businesses. There is data that we've been compiling that shows that the numbers of participants in the CFEs who are of aboriginal descent and the amount of fishing that has actually taken place has significantly increased from 2010 to 2017. So while the practice started off that, unfortunately, an amount of the leasing took place external to the CFE, now that capacity development has gone on, much more of it is being fished internally to the CFE or through the indigenous organization.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Dr. Donkersloot, you painted a picture of Alaska going in quite a different direction, I think, from our Pacific region here in Canada. You talked about owner-on-board and community development quota programs and essentially less emphasis on individual transfer quotas or ITQs or a more corporatized model, if that's fair to say. Could you talk a little bit about why Alaska has gone in the direction that it's gone in?
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
So much of our rural coastal communities are based on a single resource economy, and that's access to fisheries. It is in the state's interests, and the state is well aware of the importance of ensuring that the benefits of our fisheries remain in state and ideally in rural Alaska, in our long-time fishing communities and cultures. That has been a goal since statehood.
That's not to say that we have not had glitches in our implementation of policies. They've been continually amended and refined when possible to ensure that the policy achieves its objective. But it was a clear objective.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Was that objective set politically, or was that more from the community, or where did that come from originally? You said it's been there a long time.
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
The development and management of our natural resources is written into the constitution of the state, so it's very much a central tenet of policy in the state.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
You've also invested heavily in what would be called ocean ranching or hatchery systems. You talked about your salmon runs declining in the last couple of years. Could you talk about your wild salmon returns versus the number from hatchery, or are you able to document that? Are you able to distinguish that the percentage of returning salmon is wild versus hatchery?
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
Yes, this is an increasingly important and divisive issue in the state. We're paying increasing attention to it.
I can't share with you statistics today, but I can provide the links to the most recent reports. Some regions of the state do not have hatcheries; other regions are very dependent on hatcheries.
It's been an ongoing issue particularly in recent years with lower returns in certain river systems. Hatchery fish may have a role to play in that.
I can follow up with the clerk with the most recent findings, if that's helpful.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
That would be helpful. But could you just give the committee a sense of whether Alaska tracks that? It sounds like you do, and you don't have the numbers at your fingertips, I appreciate that. Does the state track the difference? For instance, in a run would you know what percentage is wild versus hatchery?
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
Yes, it's closely monitored in terms of how much each hatchery releases per year and what the survival rate is.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
You referenced other Nordic or Scandinavian countries and you talked about Norway and a fjord-based fishery. Is that similar? Is that an ocean-based fishery or is that more of a terminal-based fishery or a river-based fishery?
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
That's a good question. When I am speaking about fjord fisheries I am speaking largely about rural, small-scale communities that have been cut off from the resource due to these larger, privatized management regimes.
They're still out in the ocean. There are many of them. I'm not sure how many of them might be terminal fisheries versus.... Actually, all those fisheries are groundfish, so in those cases those would be ocean fisheries or marine fisheries, and not terminal fisheries.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
You mentioned that it's in the statehood. It's ingrained in the Constitution to look at protecting the community and the community base in the rural communities that fish.
If you were to recommend to this committee a direction of efficiency, which we've looked at on the west coast for decades to try to become a more efficient and effective fishery, would you say that we really need to re-emphasize, in the Pacific region, a more community-based model that would benefit rural and coastal communities?
Director, Working Waterfronts Program, Alaska Marine Conservation Council
Here is the irony. The other central tenet of our management system is equality and equal access, but equality without equity isn't necessarily fair. It assumes that everybody is starting from a level playing field, and in the case of Alaska fisheries, we're not. Our small-scale, our low-income, our rural fishermen and future generations have been disadvantaged in this type of management system.
If you're looking for community-based access, I would caution against a system that individualizes and makes transferable the right to the local fishery resource. Those rights can be sold away, they can move away with people, etc.
What I am seeing happening now in Alaska as the state and communities and regions work to address the growing of the fleet and the loss of rural access is a very different suite of solutions that are working to address these types of problems.
Some of the young fishermen who were written into the record there mentioned this loss of knowledge. Loss of access comes with loss of knowledge. We have apprenticeship programs in place to recreate not only the knowledge transfer, but the access to the opportunity. We're recreating pathways to entry that have been closed off.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
By the way, thank you all for the input you've given so far. This is a complex matter. In some discussions with the past minister of fisheries, he likened this to trying to unscramble an egg. But we have to find a way forward.
One issue that I want to spend a moment or two on is concentration of ownership. Every paper we've seen from any jurisdiction warns against concentration of ownership as working against the interests particularly of the people out on the water and the people in the community, and yet this has happened.
We have no idea how much concentration of ownership there is on the quota side because we don't really know who owns it. In terms of the licences there was a report in, I think, 2016, that pointed out very clearly that the concentration of certain licences, etc., has landed with one processor. This wasn't supposed to happen, so why did it?
Regional Director, Fisheries Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Again, part of it, of course, is that it has largely been addressed as a free market, and people have been able to buy or sell a licence and quota. In terms of the concentration, we do know how much is owned by organizations, and we do track how many organizations and how many licences are held in categories, if you will. Those that hold more than 10 licences are a fairly small percentage of the fleet. The exact number escapes me, but even the largest licence-holder, the Canadian Fishing Company, holds around 234 of the 4,000 licences available in British Columbia. Yes, they are a large licence-holder, but they hold a fairly small number of licences in comparison. There are very few corporations, actually, that own more than 10 licences.