Good afternoon. I'd like to thank all honourable members of the standing committee for the opportunity to be here today.
My name is Michael Barron. I'm a middle-class entrepreneur from Ingonish Beach, Nova Scotia. My business is operating an independent fishing enterprise. I am a young, independent owner-operator and the director of the Cape Breton Fish Harvesters Association. I am also a member of the Canadian Independent Fish Harvesters' Federation.
The reason for my presence here today is to inform or educate you on the difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, primarily with regard to being the recipient of the benefits and privileges of working on our oceans and reaping the rewards from doing so. The reason my story is so imperative is that I control the efforts, I control the costs, which can be very high, and I control the return to my crew and the small, rural coastal community of Ingonish Beach, where I live and work. I raise the idea of my contribution to the rural community of Ingonish because the population of my town is approximately 1,100 people. I sell my fish to the Victoria Co-op. During peak season, we employ approximately 166 people in that plant. My income helps support the local groceries, the garages and the hardware stores, all mom-and-pop stores.
The benefits of my independent fishing enterprise are shared by the whole community, building both spirit and fellowship throughout. It is a great place to live with a sense of peace. It's a place where people know your name; when you drive down the road, they wave to you. When they see you, they stop to talk to you. Sadly, the picture is much different in British Columbia.
I've recently had a chance to meet others who work in the B.C. fisheries, doing similar work to what I work do on the east coast. Visiting the Minister of Fisheries in January and here in Ottawa on World Fisheries Day in November, I met the fishers from B.C. We fish the same species, halibut, but in B.C., they don't have any access to fish. They have the privilege to fish, but the access is held by others. These harvesters in B.C. don't enjoy the ability to maintain or invest in new equipment or vessels because the margin of the return on their catch is minimal. It's pennies on the dollars and this needs to be stopped.
The fabric of rural communities in B.C. is not at all like home. They no longer have a local fish processor. The canneries have moved to Alaska. The fees involved in fishing—wharfage, quota and licensing—reduce the margin for efforts to a ridiculous amount. The amount that pays crews also pays taxes and pays for safety, which is a significant concern. You can't improve your vessel if you can hardly pay your crew.
Let's take a very simplistic view of a business model in B.C. versus Atlantic Canada. Say, in Atlantic Canada, that $1,000 worth of fish is harvested. You pay your vessel expenses and maintenance—we call this a boat share—leaving approximately $500 to split between captain and crew, say $200 for the captain and $300 for crew. The licence holders, by possessing the licence, have the level of fish to harvest and receive the residual benefits for the efforts and the risk taken to do so.
In British Columbia, if you take the same $1,000 worth of harvested fish and you take off the fee you would have paid the owner of the quota, it leaves approximately $200. That means as much as 80% of the harvest is going to potential foreign interests. How do you keep a vessel in good repair? The wages paid to crew are disrespectful, and this represents sharecropping to an extreme. The effort is significant and the returns on the wages and well-being are minimal. Licence-holders must successfully bid on a level of fish held by other interests, nationally and internationally. That's just wrong.
As a side point, this owner of the quota may not even be Canadian. It's a real shame when we have to think about something like that. The residual benefits of the B.C. model go to an investor seeking to reap the return on investment based on reducing expenses such as salaries, wages, taxes and anything that takes away from the profit. Also, it's a burden on Canadians since there's no control on who owns the quota. This is a Canadian resource—a wild protein sought throughout the world, a resource that taxpayer dollars are spent on to manage it, and a resource that's kept sustainable and viable via the science and management of DFO policies and programs—but with no viability and no reinvestment in Canada.
Our dollars are going into a large entity with no appetite for the benevolence of Canada. I am here today to provide you with this little information as a witness and ask you, the honourable members of the standing committee, to assist the harvesters of British Columbia to fix the situation and force a formal review and investigation into the licensing policy ownership in the Pacific.
Basically, the idea is simple: follow the money.
Thank you.