Honourable Chair and members, thank you for having me here today to speak.
My apologies for not being here earlier in the month with the other young fish harvesters—and older fish harvesters—but I'm grateful for this opportunity today.
Thank you, as well, to the other folks on this panel for sharing your time with me.
Most of you have heard me speak before, though that was some time ago, so please allow me a moment to reintroduce myself.
I'm Cailyn Siider, a fifth-generation commercial fisherman from Sointula, B.C., a small fishing community situated in Kwakwaka'wakw territory between northern Vancouver Island and the mainland.
Since speaking to this committee last April, I've been fishing prawns in area A, or Hecate Strait, catching Dungeness crab, longlining for halibut, and trolling for salmon. That was all within my four-month window between fall and winter semesters at university, where I'm finishing a degree in peace and conflict studies, with a focus on conflict transformation and transformational justice.
Last April, when I travelled here to speak, it was in support of Bill C-68. This time it is to speak to the study on the regulation of west coast fisheries, although, as with my last visit, I come here to speak about my experiences of, and reflections on, west coast fisheries policy.
As we speak, my dad, sister, and cousins are building nets and tending to our family punt in preparation for the herring season. My mom and her partner just finished two back-to-back live cod longline trips. My stepbrother and my partner are both preparing for the start of the area B crab fishery on March 1, albeit on different boats.
To describe my family as one of active fish harvesters may be an understatement. Despite commercial fishing being our livelihoods, our involvement is not purely economic. We are fishermen. It is our identity, our culture, and the backbone of the communities to which we belong. I also think it's important to note that my family are not just active fish harvesters—they are also independent licence and quota owners of salmon, halibut, raw fish, shrimp, crab, and herring. As both active fishermen and licence owners, they recognize the fundamental feelings and inequity inherent within the current licensing system. It is a privilege to own fishing licences and quota, and I believe it is a responsibility to recognize that privilege and address inequity where it exists.
My fishing experience, and that of my family, is not academic; it is lived. It is my mom teaching my sister how to hang nets. It's my dad fishing my great-grandpa's sockeye sets in the straits. It's teaching my nieces how to peel crab or dig clams, and it's me spending my last school summer trolling out of Masset, setting gear in the same deep waters and swells my grandpa did, waiting for a smiley to jerk on a line. This intergenerational knowledge and our shared livelihoods are what our communities have been built on, and it's what we're in danger of losing.
By now you're all familiar with the collection and complexity of problems that we face in west coast fisheries. I do not believe that I have much to add that has not already been well articulated by many others, so I'll try to keep my conceptualization of these issues brief.
The problems that many of us brought forward to you through the past year centre on the corporate privatization of fishing resources on the west coast. This has been the result of public fisheries policy that has systematically removed access and benefits of the fishing economy from indigenous and coastal communities and placed them in the hands of a few.
The problems that have been continually presented to this committee do not exist in isolation from one another. Prohibitive lease prices, the issue of marine licences, vessel length restrictions, problematic advisory processes, lack of a framework for succession plans, decreased community access to fish, socio-economic and cultural losses due to this access—all these are intended, or unintended, symptoms of larger systemic problems at play. A system built upon privatization that has the principle of privatization institutionalized within its structure is not designed to benefit the majority of independent fish harvesters or their communities. This institutionalized privatization targets our communities, not just by eliminating our access to a livelihood but also by disrupting our social fabric. Our lives and livelihoods have become externalities of the system.
I'll be the first to admit that fishermen sometimes disagree—one fisherman may assert that the tide has changed to an ebb, and the next may counter that it's still flooding. It's in our nature to differ. It's this independence and inclination for dissent that make us fishermen, even if it's frustratingly so sometimes. We are so stuck within the current system that any hope of consensus right now is out of reach. We've been forced to play this game and to exist within this system of increasingly limited access for survival.
Fishermen have had to adapt to maintain what little sovereignty we have over our livelihoods, and people are worried to lose that little bit they have. Fish harvesters in our communities have well-founded historical reasons to be skeptical of policy change in Canada. Too often these processes have been top-down approaches that have proven to be disastrous for coastal communities, furthering our marginalization and erasure.
Some folks and entities have adapted well to the current system, but while they recognize their success as an indication of a meritocratic system that works, many others have worked their entire lives to fight over what scraps are left. That being said, it is by no means an us-versus-them scenario, which I hope to demonstrate in explaining my family's involvement as both harvesters and licence and quota owners. Any potential change needs to happen responsibly with mitigated or little harm to those who are entrenched within the existing system.
The well-being of our coastal communities is inextricably tied to access and adjacency to the ocean. Privatization and corporate ownership of fishing is an act of dispossession and displacement and fundamentally disrupts this connection.
If the committee has recognized any consistent themes regarding west coast fisheries policy, it's likely that it's a complex issue. Rather than focusing solely on the complexities of these issues, which can be overwhelming, it may be useful to work backwards and understand core sets of patterns and dynamics that build this complexity.
Foremost in locating the roots of this complex issue is understanding it as a systemic problem that requires systemic and institutional change. This change needs to be truly constructive in that we need to shift relationships, whether at the federal level, within DFO Pacific region or just on the dock, from those fear-based and destructive relational patterns to ones of mutual respect and proactive engagement. This isn't a specific recommendation for this committee but rather something for everyone listening in to think on.
As for some more tangible recommendations for the committee to consider, policy change, and the institutional change that it will foster, is essential to increasing and protecting the well-being of active fish harvesters in the communities to which they belong. Fisheries policy must focus on ensuring that the benefits of fishing resources remain in the communities and in the hands of harvesters who work and depend on the water. Owner-operator and fleet separation policies are a direct and tried means to this end.
Any policy changes must centre active fish harvesters within their respective fisheries. Every fishery is different, and though this adds to the complexity, it is integral that any change processes be bottom-up approaches designed by active harvesters within those fisheries.