Thank you for allowing me to be a witness at the parliamentary fisheries committee on this critically important topic. I'm appearing before you as an independent small boat owner-operator from British Columbia.
You are going to hear from a number of young harvesters in the next couple of days; I am not one of them. I am 68 years old. I have been working on the decks of small-boat fishing vessels in B.C. since I was about seven years old, although my father, if he were still alive, would probably question how much work I actually did back in those days.
I have fished groundfish every year for the last 20 years with my son. In 2018 I spent two trips fishing halibut with my brother and 10 more trips on our family longline vessel that my son has skippered for the last 20 years, and for the last 10 years fishing under the integrated groundfish regime that we helped to develop in British Columbia, focusing primarily on halibut and sablefish.
We have cameras on our vessel that monitor all our catch. We have independent validation when we land our fish that is audited against our log books and our camera coverage. If we pass all those audits, we are clear to go fishing on the next trip. These systems were designed in collaboration with the management agency and industry in order to provide confidence to the people of Canada, whose resource it is, that we are harvesting. It is important that we be able to prove that we are harvesting in a sustainable and responsible manner, particularly because, with our fishing method, longline fishing with hooks, up to 10,000 a day, we will uncover species that have been identified as being of concern, have very low total allowable catch and are what we in the industry call pinch-point species. We have to manage our fishing plans around those species in order to continue our fishing operation.
In each of the last four years, we have landed on our vessel between 240,000 and 350,000 pounds of a mix of species. When we used to fish dogfish, it was not uncommon for us to land up to 1.6 million pounds of product in a year fishing on our 91-year-old wooden vessel. Not once in all those years have the fleets fishing more than 20 different species of fish gone beyond the total allowable catch for any of those species. In fact, we have the opposite problem. In many instances, we are leaving fish in the water, because we have to be so selective in the way we harvest.
You would think that, after this explanation, I would be here to tell you that everything is just fine in the Pacific region and that we have the best managed fishery in the world, but that's not what my message will be to you.
For the last few years I have been focusing on human rights in relation to the fishing industry and the rights of the individual to make a fair livelihood, a principle that Canada has signed onto as a nation. I have been working with the salmon troll fleet, which has had its livelihood given away by ministerial edict to another sector, the recreational sector, leaving the commercial trollers bankrupted on the beach, with no recognition that it was licensing policy by our own government that destroyed their livelihoods. The government was given advice by respected policy analysts that, if you reallocate from those who have spent their entire livelihoods and all their capital on boats, gear and licences to another user, then they must morally and ethically provide a fair transfer mechanism.
You heard the RDG from the Pacific region the other day say that they do not give compensation. You are the politicians. You must give direction to the department that they have it wrong, that they are obligated by the human rights principles that we as a nation have signed onto, and they must right that wrong.
I also work with the Dungeness crab fleet, and this fleet is also very well managed from a conservation perspective. It was one of the first fleets in the world to use camera technology to oversee its catch, but it is not without its problems. There are constant attempts to reallocate space away from this fishery to other users and uses, whether they be the recreational sector, other industries such as wind farms, to further reconciliation with first nations or to satisfy the pressure from environmental organizations for more marine protected areas. There is no recognition of how damaging the loss of fishing grounds is to economic viability.
There is an urgent need to embed social and economic principles into the management structure so that fishermen are not arbitrarily losing their livelihoods when other interests want to take them away. Whether they are fisheries that are healthy and productive or fisheries that are struggling, the common denominator across virtually all fisheries in B.C. is that the active fishermen are not prospering. On the track we are on, if we don't make a change, we won't have another generation of skilled fishermen to pass the torch to. Who would enter a fishery where they work so hard, and often in very difficult conditions, but make a pauper's wages with no hope for better? It's not because the fishery is not lucrative; it's because so much of the wealth is captured by somebody onshore holding a piece of paper. This management failure is a result of ignoring the socio-economic side of the policy equation over decades.
This is not only a Canadian problem; it is a worldwide problem. I was in Turin, Italy, a few years ago for a slow food conference, and I heard the same story from Brazil to South Africa to the Mediterranean. I was invited by the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance to tour several fishing towns in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island a few years ago, and I heard exactly the same story over and over again.
There is wealth here beside our communities and it's to be harvested, but it's leaving our communities. It is leaving our active fishermen in the communities adjacent to the resource under a failed ideology, one that says governments do not have to interfere or intervene in the market, that the market, left alone, will equitably distribute the wealth. We have seen how well that is working: 26 people in this world now have more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
I will go back to our fishing enterprise and why, despite working extremely hard on the water, bringing in any one year over $2 million in ex-vessel landed value and helping to design some of the best managed fisheries in the world, my son and I are not making enough money to re-capitalize our enterprise or pull out a living wage for either ourselves or our deckhands, and why we have over the last four years slid into debt to the point that, in one more year under this system, we will be forced to sell out of the industry. I did an analysis of the landed value of the fish that we land. We are paying 80% of the landed value to those who have either been granted the quota or have purchased those licences and quota over the last 25 years and are now renting it back to me—in other words, the exact opposite of owner-operator.
After all that work on the water, and at meetings over the last 20 years to design fisheries that truly do work from a conservation and sustainable harvesting perspective, we are being driven into bankruptcy because, despite repeated warnings, our government has not paid attention to the equitable distribution of the benefits, one of its core responsibilities.
lt was very maddening for me to hear my own Pacific region managers, and for that matter, the manager from the east coast as well, not once in their presentation to this committee last week identify this problem, even though they were told that this entire review was focused around the owner-operator policy and the reason this review was actually called. lt was only the week before their presentation that the Canadian Independent Fish Harvesters' Federation met with the RDG and the minister and I stated that in the halibut fishery, with a landed value of $66 million in 2017, most of that value was captured as rent by those who hold the paper, not participating in the fishery and simply holding an investment.
ln the last eight months, with the recognition of how important owner-operator has been to the health of the east coast fishing industry and the fabric of their communities in Atlantic Canada, many of the fleets in B.C. have recognized that this inequitable distribution of the benefits cannot be allowed to continue any longer. Active fishermen from the halibut, trawl, tuna, crab, salmon, sablefish, prawns, geoduck and sea urchin fisheries have all approached the department stating that this is a serious problem and it must be rectified. We have proposed to sit down with our fleets and those who control the quota and negotiate a fair sharing arrangement that would be embedded into the management structure through our advisory processes and through our IFMP framework and supported by the discretion of the minister.
We heard the RDG state clearly to you that it's within the mandate of the minister and the Fisheries Act to equitably distribute the benefits. Indeed, it is one of the fundamental responsibilities of government in respect to the use of the resources it manages, yet whose second-in-command, when asked directly by this committee if they are tracking leasing costs, said, no, they are not.
There are a number of mechanisms that could be used to return the benefits from the fishery back to those who are harvesting the resource and the people of Canada, everything from tax incentive changes to collective bargaining frameworks and specific owner-operator policies, as well as the fair sharing mechanism that we are proposing. lt is very obvious after listening to the department's presentation to you that they intend to ignore this problem. We therefore need you to give them political direction, to fulfill your role as elected representatives to ensure that government does what is needed to correct this outrageous market failure and support the development of a sustainable and productive fisheries sector in B.C.
Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to speak directly to you at this critical moment for our fishing industry.