Thank you for the invitation to be here today and for the opportunity to speak to you about west coast fisheries. Also, thank you to my co-panellists and the panellists earlier. It's really a delight to be speaking among so many fish harvesters.
I have been researching fisheries, aquaculture and coastal communities in British Columbia for 14 years, and I've been studying commercial fisheries licensing for the last two, specifically. This work informs the remarks I am going to make today. I have divided the remarks into three main points and then three takeaways for your study.
The first main point is that, as you've been hearing, the total number of licences and the total amount of quota for all major Canadian Pacific fisheries are limited. For all major fisheries, they can be exchanged among holders through market transaction.
What this means in practice is that fish harvesting operations can register and hold numerous licences. In turn, they can participate in a range of fisheries or earn revenue by leasing out some or all of their licences and quota. Conversely, there are those that hold a single licence, a small number of licences or none at all that are access constrained. Their choices are to fish part-time or to lease additional licences and/or quota.
Licences and quota are very expensive. Estimates produced for DFO suggest as of 2016 that licences sell for tens of thousands of dollars—for example, the AG licence for salmon is over $64,000—to hundreds of thousands of dollars—for example, the W licence for prawn is over $770,000. One type, the G licence for geoduck, is estimated to exchange at $6.1 million.
My current research has counted exactly how many licences and licence-holders there were in the 2017 calendar year. We have found that there were 6,563 Canadian Pacific commercial fishing licences and 2,377 unique licence-holders. There are more licences than holders, and as I bet you would guess at this stage, distribution is not even. Our research shows that there were 38 licence-holders who registered 20 or more commercial licences. Of these 38, there were six that registered more than 50 licences. Conversely, there were 1,357 licence-holders that registered only one licence and 499 that registered two.
Mine is the first study that I'm aware of to look at licence holdings across all fisheries. It builds on a couple of other studies that have looked into the distribution of licences in salmon and herring, specifically. This is a body of growing research that shows a large number of access-constrained harvesters in the west coast fisheries. You have heard first-hand today and in previous meetings about the conditions they face and about the economic constraints related to leasing from those with larger licence and quota portfolios.
The second main point is that in the global context, transnational firms and investors show interest in securing licences and quota and investing in or taking over fishing companies. A recent study by Swedish researchers found that 13 corporations control 11% to 16% of the global marine catch and 19% to 40% of the largest and most valuable stocks.
ln the Canadian context, anecdotal reports—some which we've heard today—and recent investigative journalism suggest that there have been instances of foreign investors buying or providing loans for licences, quota and/or vessels in B.C. In my research, I have been looking for evidence of foreign investment in west coast fisheries. I've been searching mainly publicly available information, media reports and the Transport Canada vessel registry. Being confined to publicly available information makes it very challenging to discern the extent to which this may be occurring in Canadian Pacific fisheries, and indeed, to predict what may happen in the future. Given that Canada's fish stocks are a public resource, I would argue that monitoring foreign and speculative investment is crucial to transparency and falls within the purview of fisheries management.
The third main point is that Pacific licence holdings, leasing arrangements and other types of economic arrangements related to licences and quota are not monitored or systematically reported and are not currently considered in fisheries evaluation.
This is noteworthy in the context of your west coast study. Policy in the Atlantic region regulates against leasing, loans and other economic relationships in some fisheries between inshore licence-holders and processors or other investors. Sometimes you will hear these referred to as controlling agreements; under some conditions, they are not permitted or they're tightly regulated.
You may also wish to note that the licence-holder identification data that I've used in my study to count west coast licences and licence holdings did come from a publicly available spreadsheet maintained by DFO Pacific. While it can be freely downloaded, this spreadsheet is hundreds of thousands of rows long. The process that we used to count licence-holders across types involved developing computer code that automatically extracted and matched identifying information. Put simply, the basic information is available but unless you have two years and are willing to learn computer code, it's not highly accessible in a general sense.
These points lead me to suggest that while DFO Pacific is making strides on fisheries science becoming more transparent and oriented toward ecosystem dimensions, comparable efforts are needed to make allocation and fisheries evaluation similarly transparent and oriented to human dimensions.
Now I'd like to offer three takeaways for your study. I have chosen these with special attention to your stated interest in "evaluating the distribution of economic benefits generated by the industry and the aspirations of fishers and their communities".
The first key takeaway is that the concern expressed by independent harvesters, new entrants and next generation harvesters about their future in Pacific fisheries is unquestionably tied to the limited availability and high cost of key licences and quota. To put this into perspective once again, consider estimates that put the aggregate market value of all licence holdings across fisheries in 2016 at just over $956 million and the aggregate market value of quota at just over $1.1 billion. The impressive nature of these figures and daunting questions about whether access rights to a public resource should be commoditized to such a degree and exchanged through market transactions that are largely unregulated at this point in time are, in my opinion, at the crux of your study.
The second key takeaway is that, given the lucrative value of licences and quota, the federal government should not ignore the potential for foreign and speculative investment in fisheries off of all three of our coasts. Questions about how and under what conditions, if it's going to be permitted at all, and the ways it should be reported and monitored are especially crucial. DFO should be tracking leasing, sales and other transactions because, as I mentioned earlier, this is a highly valuable public resource.
The third takeaway is that there are programs and policy options that could be tailored for the west coast, as we have been discussing. There are programs that have been pursued elsewhere, such as licence and quota banks and youth permits that could be developed to support and expand access for independent harvesters, new entrants and young harvesters. Moreover, there are policy options that have been pursued elsewhere, such as fleet separation requirements and mandatory reporting of leasing and controlling agreements that would improve transparency and could be monitored and evaluated in pursuit of social and local economic objectives in Pacific fisheries.
To conclude, I'd like to thank you again for the invitation to be here. I really want to congratulate you for this study. It is an important time in the west coast fisheries, and careful attention to licensing and quota can help to better balance objectives for what is a very important public resource.
