My name is Modestus Nobels. I'm a retired commercial fisherman. I retired in 2007 from fishing actively.
I live in the small community of Dodge Cove just outside of Prince Rupert, which was a fishing community. We built the northern fleet out of that community. Over 1,000 vessels were launched from that community for the fishery.
I fished for almost three decades and have worked with and for commercial fishermen in a number of advisory processes, and in some of the planning structures that have taken place on the Pacific coast.
I'm also an elected official with the North Coast Regional District. I sit on the Groundfish Development Authority, and I chair the Coastal Community Network.
I would like to thank the committee for providing us this opportunity to provide you with some testimony and some of our feelings around regulatory issues and licensing on the west coast. I'm extremely grateful to the committee for finally coming to take a look at this. We've been asking for a number of years that this be reviewed. It's had significant impacts on our communities and those that are fishing in the industry at present.
The present regulatory structure that we're working under here, the ITQ, individual transferable quota structure, has in my mind been extremely detrimental to both those that are actively fishing in the region and to those communities that have been involved over the years in the fishery itself. We've seen an immense downturn in our communities' infrastructures and a lot of the people that were once fishing are no longer fishing from our communities. Yet, we have an immense resource on our doorsteps that we are not able to partake in.
Quotas in and of themselves are not a problem. They are another tool with which to manage the fishery. It's the transferability of those quotas that creates much of the issue that we're dealing with here. In that transferability piece, we've created a commodity out of the licensing itself. In many cases, it's been driven it out of the hands of working fishermen into the hands of investors and corporate interests. In the end, it doesn't benefit our communities to a great degree. In many cases, those entities are coalescing and collecting their enterprises in single centres.
Our small communities, which have always relied on these fisheries as part of their economic base, have seen significant downturns in their ability to maintain their infrastructures and populations. We've seen fishermen leaving our communities over the last few decades and not seen them return. We have young people that would like to enter the fishery, but under the present structure that exists, they are unable to do that. The cost is so prohibitive that many of them would be looking at indentureship for the rest of their lives to actually enter many of the fisheries that we presently have. That is an extreme concern for me and many people who live in the communities that I work with.
There are ways of addressing this.
[Technical difficulty—Editor]