Hi, I'm Ross Antilla. I'm from Pender Harbour, and I'm a fourth-generation fish harvester.
I'd like to bring your attention to licence marriages and the negative impact they have on all fish harvesters.
Licence marriages make licences more difficult to buy and sell, because you have to buy or sell them as a block of licences. It is difficult to try to purchase a single licence, and most times you have to buy the licence you want with a separate unwanted licence attached to it. This pushes the cost of the licence you are trying to purchase out of reach for most young fish harvesters, which forces them to lease from someone else. Even if you own a licence and you want to expand and grow your business and buy another, most likely the other licence will marry to your existing licence and it will be irreversible.
I truly hope the committee will review the policy on licence marriages and allow them to be divorced to make it easier for fish harvesters to be able to afford to buy the licence they want, without others attached as a block, and to help us avoid leasing a licence from someone else.
Leasing is the second point I would like to bring to the committee's attention, and how it has changed to the state it is currently in.
Leasing started out as a way for people to cover their own catches that they had gone over on and borrow from someone else who still had remaining quota to catch, and it was cheap and affordable. Leasing nowadays exploits a fish harvester's primary source of income to benefit the licence-holder's investment portfolio.
Using the halibut fishery as an example, licence-holders make 80% of the profits of fishing while the fish harvester has to use 20% to pay all expenses, including licence fees, camera fees and crew, and somehow after all that, make a living.
Most of the time the company holds the quota, which means you are forced to sell to them at their prices, deliver to their specific ports and fish the areas they want you to fish, which is effectively taking away your freedom as a fisher. If you don't fish their quota, you might not get to fish at all next year.
Most members on the fishery advisory boards to DFO are licence-holders, and as such have made decisions in the best interests of licence-holders. This has created a slave-like environment for young fish harvesters in the industry.
I would advise the committee to review the licensing policy of the west coast fisheries and alter leasing for the benefit of our endangered coastal fishing communities.
Thank you.