Fisheries Committee on Feb. 20th, 2019

[The Chair]

Yes.

We will now suspend for the vote.

[The Chair]

Welcome back, everybody. We'll continue now with our meeting, which we had to suspend while a vote took place.

I want to welcome our witnesses, appearing both by video conference and in person.

Here in person for the second half of the session we have Seth Macinko, Associate Professor in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island, and Cailyn Siider, Fisher, here as an individual.

By video conference, we have Evelyn Pinkerton, Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University.

[The Chair]

I don't think we have the connection for—

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Nancy Vohl]

She is there, but we lost the connection.

[The Chair]

She is there, and that's Helen von Buchholz. I may have beat that up saying it, and I apologize if I did. Helen von Buchholz is a student at the school of public health and social policy, University of Victoria.

We'll get started, and when we get that connection reconnected, we'll go back to that.

We'll start with Ms. Pinkerton for a statement of seven minutes or less, please.

[Evelyn Pinkerton, Professor, School of Resource & Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual]

I would like to talk about two things. One is the failure of the free market system in our fisheries. The free market system was intended to work under certain conditions, but these conditions do not exist in most Pacific fisheries today. Second, I'd like to talk about options for transitioning to an owner-operator/fleet separation system in the least disruptive way, based on ideas of B.C. fishermen and the world fisheries literature.

The free market system can work well when there is, number one, equal access to capital; number two, equal access to information; number three, a transparent auction-like situation. Instead, we have conditions in the ITQ system in which young fishermen cannot afford to buy either a licence or a quota because they don't have access to enough capital for either. We have lack of equal access to information, because ITQs do not go up for bid in an auction-like system, but instead are leased privately and increasingly through processors, with lessor or lessee not knowing what lease price is being charged.

Third and finally, ITQs are often held by shell companies and are gravitating offshore because fishermen are not required to reveal the ultimate beneficiary in their application for a licence. Corporate control of licences has enabled the export of fish to be processed abroad where labour is cheaper, causing the closure of fish-processing plants in Canada. The last major cannery in British Columbia was closed in 2016, and fish caught in B.C. waters are now canned in China, Vietnam, Thailand and Alaska.

If owner-operator/fleet separation is a viable alternative, how do we get there with the least amount of disruption? There are many good ideas from active fishermen who responded to an online survey of B.C. fishermen conducted in the summer of 2018 by the United Fishermen & Allied Workers' Union, UNIFOR.

There is a high level of agreement in this survey on three basic questions. Ninety-one per cent answered “Yes, in some fisheries” to these questions: “Would you support an owner-operator policy created to meet the needs of B.C. fishermen?” and “Would you support a fleet separation policy that prevented processors/buyers from controlling licences/quotas?” It's interesting that they say “in some fisheries”, so maybe not all fisheries. The third question was “Should DFO hold an inquiry to change west coast licensing policy to benefit active fishermen and rural coastal communities?” Eighty-one per cent answered “yes”, but they said that third party involvement would be crucial. They were a little hesitant about DFO controlling the whole thing.

Now, there are four major ideas that came out of this survey about how to do desirable change, and also from the fisheries literature. These ideas demonstrate that it's possible to design ways of moving to owner-operator without hugely disruptive consequences to corporate or fishermen ITQ owners.

I'll probably have time to talk only about one idea, which is licence and quota banks. In licence and quota banks, fishermen's organizations or communities have purchased ITQs, hold them in a quota bank and lease them out to qualifying community members at affordable prices that are much lower than the market rates charged by most quota owners. This gives us options for dealing with both fishermen and corporate ownership of ITQs, under an owner-operator scenario.

Fishermen in the survey responded, with 76% saying that they thought this was a really good idea, worth exploring. They're familiar with the Northern Native Fishing Corporation, which has existed since 1982 in northern B.C., out of Prince Rupert, whose purpose is to allow fishermen stable access to licences. There were about 200 licences in this quota bank when three tribal councils bought the B.C. Packers rental fleet. The purpose is to allow fishermen stable access to licences at a moderate lease fee, without licences being treated as a commodity to be traded for profit by either fishermen or processors.

This model has been taken up around the world in a number of places. I'll just mention the Cape Cod Fisheries Trust in Massachusetts, which does this. They manage to lease out quota to small-scale fisheries for 50% of the market lease fee. There's a dock fish quota bank in B.C. that does a similar thing. There's a marvellous one at a very small scale in one community in Denmark, Thorupstrand, which has become very famous.

The one I want to talk about the most is the CDQ program in Alaska. It has a somewhat different way of handling this issue, but I think it could be easily adapted to a quota bank. When the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands fisheries went to ITQs in 1992, 10% of the quota was reallocated to the communities, which were largely indigenous.

In the Alaska case, they didn't necessarily go to licences, although they could have. My point is that this is something that could be easily used in Canada as a way of repatriating fisheries to Canada. This was done, by the way, in Newfoundland and Labrador with a shrimp factory trawl fishery. When that fishery, which was within the 200-mile limit, was fished by other countries, Canada simply began to reallocate the fishery to onshore co-ops.

That kind of system could be used to reallocate percentages of fisheries, any percentage that people thought was fair, to quota banks, which would then release that amount of fish to owner-operators. This offers a very useful tool for thinking about how much—what percentage—of the fishery you want to reallocate, at what rate and at what time.

I'm not going to have time to talk about the other ideas, but I'll just tell you what they are. One idea is to talk about allowable quota ownership, how much quota ownership anyone could have. Another is allowable quota fees, if you're going to gradually phase out quotas, and—

[The Chair]

The time is up.

[Evelyn Pinkerton]

Okay.

The last idea was about the fact that we do now have a halibut fishery in Newfoundland and southern Labrador, in division 4R, that is managed in a way that is extremely beneficial for fishermen and would be worth looking at.

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you for your presentation. With hope, anything you didn't get to say will come out in questioning.

We'll now go to Mr. Macinko, for seven minutes or less, please.

[Seth Macinko, Associate Professor, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the committee. It's a real privilege to be here.

The chairman gave my present position at the University of Rhode Island. I had a slide show, but I guess that's been circulated to some of you. Hopefully I'll get around to explaining the title—it's inspired by a very famous paper by a very famous Canadian fishery biologist. I thought I'd start with seven slides. Math isn't my strong suit. I listened to all of the previous testimony, and a lot of people try to talk really fast, so I thought, if I just use seven slides, I think I can do it.

First, I'll talk about my background. Almost 40 years ago now, I dropped out of college to join a modern-day gold rush. The first picture is there in the upper left. I was with the crab boats out in Unalaska—or as some people know it, Dutch Harbor. At the top right, that's me. We're joking around, trying to signal to the skipper that it's a little too rough to fish. We didn't really wear a mask and a snorkel.

We wiped out the crab, and they closed the crab fishery for two years in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. At the bottom left is another picture. I switched to shrimp fishing around Kodiak. We wiped those out, so it was two for two. I decided I had to do penance to the universe, and I went back to school. I got my undergraduate degree in England, and ultimately my Ph.D at the University of California, Berkeley.

I ended up working back in Alaska for the State of Alaska, and in the fourth picture there, that's the Anchorage Hilton. I like to show that especially to students. All fisheries management is about conservation and/or allocation, and usually it's about the former disguised as the latter. That's the place where most fish in the United States is caught—the Anchorage Hilton—because that's where they do the allocation. For over 20 years, I was on the Scientific and Statistical Committee, which is the mandatory advisory body to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. I just ended that service last year.

One of the things that really motivated me throughout, certainly in my graduate studies but also the rest of my professional life, is on the next slide there. This was a question that was asked by the then mayor of Kodiak, Alaska, who was also a fisherman, when they were proposing the forerunner of what we now know as the ITQ program in halibut and sablefish. Not many people know it, but there was an attempt to talk about that even earlier, in the early 1980s. Here's the mayor asking what the effect would be on the coastal communities. That single idea has followed me for the rest of my professional life.

Thinking about that, the effect on these coastal communities.... On the next slide, at the top left is a little place called Craig on Prince of Wales Island. Dr. Pinkerton just mentioned the CDQ program. I was on the National Research Council committee that reviewed the CDQ program. There's a little map of the communities. At the top right, that's what it looks like to fly out to Little Diomede, which is on the dateline. You land on the sea ice, and that's open water at the end of the runway, which is scraped on the sea ice. In addition to this interesting concern about communities.... The bottom right is where I tug on your heartstrings: the next generation. I'll come to that in just one second.

My background, all of my thinking, all of my concerns about this have taken place where there's been one dominating idea that's ruling our management philosophies all around the world, and that's the push to privatize. On the last slide, you see a very well-known textbook by a Norwegian fisheries economist, and next to it you see a report by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Prince's Charities—that's Prince Charles. It's a rather interesting title that I think bears some relevance to our subject here today.

That's just a quick background on me. Let me go back to my slides.

The second slide that I would have shown you was my summary of listening to all that has transpired. I went on your marvellous website and either listened to the testimony or read the transcripts. Here's a little summary: stick boats, foreign investors, 80% lease rates, prohibitive entry cost to youth. What I didn't put on that slide, and should have, is what I heard at least one of you ask: How did we get here? The other thing that is just startling is this stark difference in the policy results between Atlantic Canada and British Columbia.

Number three follows from that. There's nothing new here. One of your witnesses said it's a worldwide problem, and it really is. Everything you're hearing in your hearings is being replicated around the world, where this push for privatization has occurred.

I'll just give you a quick story. Talk about stick boats.... Well, in Denmark, they have a famous case of an eight-foot dinghy that has over a million euros in quota shares stacked on it.

I put Tasmania in my speaking notes. I was in Tasmania about 10 years ago. They have an ITQ fishery there for abalone. At that time, approximately 60% of the quota was held by a single individual, an American. They invited me back five years ago. One of my first questions was, “Hey, does the American still own all the quota?” They laughed and said, “No, he sold it to the Chinese.”

This is what I mean. What you are seeing is not an accident. It's a worldwide pattern.

Number four, my fourth slide.... I've come to the conclusion now that you can sum up modern fishery management with the catchphrase, “Make feudalism great again.” I heard it in the testimony of previous witnesses. People we used call fishermen now refer to themselves as sharecroppers.

The other way of summarizing what you're dealing with is my other little phrase: “Stealing from the future”. I had my wife help me translate this into French. She's French. She originally came back with “stealing the future”. I said, “No, I want 'stealing from the future'”, because that's what I think is going on.

Number five is that this is not an accident. It's not an unintended consequence. It's the intended result. In the speaking notes, which I've circulated, there is a guide to a film by a Danish filmmaker called The “T” in Fish: Reform of the EU CFP. In that little film, they interview the architect of the Danish ITQ system. He summarizes the pattern we're talking about—concentration, high cost—and he says, looking straight into the camera, “This is a result of the regulation, and this is the intended result.” Then he's followed by the Danish minister of fisheries, and she says, “We don't want to interfere in the free market.” This is what I call market fundamentalism, and that supports what Dr. Pinkerton was talking about. These are intended consequences that we're witnessing. I commend that film to you.

I showed you the cover of the Prince Charles and EDF report. What's really interesting is the title of the first chapter in that report: “Introducing fisheries as investable propositions”. That's where we're going, worldwide, with this privatization logic. Bring in Wall Street. That's what you're hearing testimony about.

Number six is the slide that I put in to answer the question, “How did we get here?” We got here following an ideology masquerading as science, and what I call a failure to distinguish the tool from the ideology. This is all coming out of fishery economics. A large portion is coming out of the University of British Columbia. We've been going down this road for 65 years, ever since the famous paper by Scott Gordon.

My title is inspired by a 42-year-old paper by Peter Larkin, in which he said there are two extreme paths that could be followed for fisheries, which both rely on an underlying political philosophy. The extreme path we've been going down is the privatization path. The failure here is to distinguish the tool. The tool is just pre-assigned catch. That's all it is. You could do this through a public leasing model. All of this talk about rights-based fishing and property rights—that's the ideology.

[The Chair]

Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Macinko. We've gone way over the allotted time.

[Seth Macinko]

Okay. I'll stop.

[The Chair]

Hopefully, anything you didn't get out will come out in the line of questioning.

We'll now go to Ms. von Buchholz, by video conference.

You're up next, for seven minutes or less, please.

[Helen von Buchholz, Student, Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm here today as an individual, and my perspective is based on my experience both as a project manager for public health in Island Health and as a student in the master's program in public health and social policy at the University of Victoria.

My presentation here reviews the health impact assessment done as part of a course project to identify potential impacts of the current west coast fishing policy on the health of both individuals and communities. The three steps I will touch on very briefly are screening, scoping and appraisal.

I'm going to go through screening really quickly. It sounds as if this has been the topic in a number of conversations. The manner in which the ITQ system was implemented in B.C. back in the 1990s allowed a speculative market to drive up the cost of licences, making it difficult for most independent fishers to buy fishing licences. Today, most local fishers lease and, as the previous speaker said, the price can be as high as 70% to 80% of the catch. After operational costs, often very little is left over for the local fisher to live on. Along with this, along our west coast we've seen closures of companies, low wages and precarious work, and many young fishers have left their communities for alternative work. Subsequently, local businesses that once relied on the revenue from the local industry often close.

Now I'm going to zip into my second step, which is scoping. This is where I dug in a little to my background in public health.

Regarding the impact on health and hypothetical pathways, during this step of the HIA I did a literature review and identified that, as we all know, greater levels of poverty were associated with communities where there were industry closures, job loss and precarious employment. Perceived job insecurity reduces job satisfaction and impacts the physical and mental health of individuals, families and communities. A couple of hypothetical pathways worth noting came up in the evidence and the literature.

Precarious employment, job loss and long-distance commutes to work and school led to work-related and personal stress, strained family dynamics and less social and cultural connection with the community. This was found to lead to a couple of things. One was increased cardiac risk factors, such as higher blood pressure and high cholesterol, and there tended to be a decrease in physical activity. All this can lead to higher rates of fatal and non-fatal heart attacks, depression and anxiety, work-related injuries and higher rates of death overall. In a study of a small B.C. town following industry closures, Oncescu et al. found a fraying of the community's social support system. I really love that term. The aspects that are vital for a rural community to survive.... It made it more difficult to sustain a rural lifestyle.

Poverty disproportionately impacts certain groups, leading to disparities and inequities. The greatest impact is felt by some of our most vulnerable populations, such as our children, seniors and those with the lowest incomes. For example, I am going to touch a little on our children, and I hope it will come full circle and make sense. We know that poorer children have poorer health, and children from low-income homes often have less access to social and health services, poor housing conditions and a lack of healthy food. They often have highly stressed parents and higher rates of protective care. This can all lead to decreased connection to the community and a low sense of worth, leading to low performance in school and early substance and tobacco use. Among children from low-income homes, we see higher numbers of infant deaths, chronic illness like asthma, teen suicide, mental illness and lower education rates, which perpetuate the cycle of poverty. I know we all have heard about the social determinants of health.

In step three, the appraisal part, I went to the local health area data and looked to see if what I found in the literature and the evidence lined up in our local west coast fishing communities.

Before I start in on that, I want to acknowledge that there are multiple intersecting factors that impact health. I'm not making any claims of causation. However, the local data did highly align with the findings in the literature. Residents living in B.C. communities impacted by fishing industry closures and precarious employment experience greater negative social determinants and poorer health as compared to Island Health and B.C.

Just before I proceed, I want to acknowledge that, while I love data, some of the local data may actually be a little difficult or painful for some people to hear.

Here goes the data dive. When compared to Island Health and B.C., residents living in rural fishing communities.... Those I looked at most carefully were the communities along the west coast of Vancouver Island, also known as the Pacific Rim, the Mount Waddington and Port Hardy area, and Campbell River. The residents living in those communities and outlying areas had higher incidence of chronic diseases, including asthma, diabetes and ischemic heart disease, and a higher incidence of mood and anxiety disorders and depression. They had a higher prevalence of standardized all-cause mortality, death by suicide, and alcohol and illicit drug-related deaths.

We also found in the data—again comparing to Island Health and B.C.—higher levels of unemployment, families living in poverty and children and youth in care, and a higher number of residents living in homes in need of major repairs.

There were also higher rates of infant mortality. As we know, infant mortality is an important indicator of the overall wellness of a community and has a strong positive correlation with disability and adjusted life expectancy. This is something that is very close to my heart. In Campbell River, the infant mortality rate was 4.7 per 1,000 live births, which is considerably higher than the Island Health rate of 3.8 and the B.C. rate of 3.0.

It is important to note that on the west coast the rates are now quite low. However, this was following an extensive effort to improve infant mortality, including a baby bed program, of which I was one of the instigators. That was in response to an infant mortality rate of 5.7. Many of these infant deaths were actually sleep-related deaths, which are deaths in otherwise healthy infants.

I'm not sure how I'm doing here for time.

[The Chair]

Actually, you're a minute over time, so I have to end it there.

[Helen von Buchholz]

Okay.

[The Chair]

Maybe anything you didn't get out will come out in the line of questioning.

We'll go now to our last presenter.

Ms. Siider, you have seven minutes or less, please.

[Cailyn Siider, Fisher, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair]

Ms. Siider, we're going to have to stop it there. We've gone over time.

[Cailyn Siider]

Okay.

[The Chair]

Hopefully, as I mentioned to other witnesses, anything you did not get to present to us may come out in the questioning. If not, we have your brief, or if we don't, please send it to us.

[Cailyn Siider]

I will. Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

We'll now go to questioning, starting with our seven-minute round.

For the government side, we have Mr. Hardie, for seven minutes or less, please. I will be very strict on the time.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I'm sure you will.

When we're looking at the issue we have here.... If, for instance, we did a transition to the owner-operator/fleet separation policy, there are two options there. One is to blow up what we have now, and I don't sense there's much appetite for that. I don't think we want to severely damage the people who've bought into it in good conscience. We can certainly talk about transition, which is what Professor Pinkerton and Professor Macinko mentioned, or we can bring back free market conditions to the current regime.

I'm wondering, Professor Pinkerton, what you would think about the option of bringing back basically free market conditions to the current division of activities and wealth.

[Evelyn Pinkerton]

The free market system is so far from what we have that I wouldn't be hopeful that we would do it successfully even if we tried. I'm not enthusiastic about a valuable public resource such as a fishery being managed by the market.

I like the system of licensing they have in the Maine lobster fishery, where a fishing licence, a lobster licence, is not considered a commodity. It is leased out by the State of Maine to fishermen. When a fisherman retires, the licence goes back to the state. The state then either eliminates it, if it thinks there are too many licences, or it reallocates it to somebody in line for a licence. I think that's a much better way to handle licensing.