Thank you. Good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to present to you all today.
This striped bass explosion has had a massive impact on my community for the past number of years. When Mr. Taylor was speaking about a six-and-a-half mile stretch where these fish land every spring, it's right in front of my community.
I have to give you a little background so you understand how this impacts our community economically.
Natoaganeg is a community of 600 people. They depend on the programming that we provide, and opportunities. Our median after-tax household income is $25,000. You go a few miles down the road to Miramichi, and that doubles to $51,000. Our unemployment rate is 21%, and that's of those who are still looking for work and haven't given up entirely.
We participated in the “First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study” two years ago with the University of Ottawa. It shows that the lack of access to nutritional foods is causing great health issues for our first nations people.
The volume of food that we're able to access for them is the equivalent to one tablespoon per day when we look at all the moose and fish we're able to access as a community. That's what it works out to: one tablespoon a day. We have diabetes, heart disease, and so many other things that I'm not going to be able to cover in seven minutes.
The Miramichi has a great history and reputation for a sport fishery. Our community has been excluded from much of that, and continues to be. When the striped bass populations dropped, the department asked us to voluntarily halt our salmon food fishery until the striped bass spawning could happen. For three of the most productive weeks, for a number of years, we did not put our traps in to feed our communities.
The drop in the bass population also put a complete halt on millions of dollars of investment that was occurring through the Marshall decision agreements. The community built a lodge that was meant to be sustained by infrastructure scheduled to be built for a recreational fishery. We were to build a wharf. All of that stopped when that bass was listed.
You have heard about the explosion of striped bass from DFO's perspective, from Mr. Taylor. You will hear it from the MSA and the watershed committee. We used to be able to count on salmon as a food source for our community. Over the past couple of years, there have been very few salmon. The few that we get, we share with our elders, because the numbers are barely a hundred.
We have agreements that allow us to catch up to 2,000 salmon. There aren't 2,000 to catch. Our fishers voluntarily removed their gillnets from the Miramichi last year because the numbers were so poor.
We have been telling DFO for years that they need a better process. They need to consult with the people on the river. This impacts our lives. We've been asking for funding for an indigenous knowledge study. That needs to be part of this process.
They need to relook at the way they do this. They make these decisions in isolation. They are not consulting with us when they decide how this process is going to work. There may be meetings once a year, but the season is gone, and it's another year with less opportunity for food.
We've been asking for a diversified food and commercial fishery for our people to help us combat these economic ills that the Marshall decision was supposed to help us with: a moderate livelihood, commercial access. If you go back to the 2012 census, five of the poorest postal codes in Canada are Mi'kmaq first nations in northern New Brunswick. Why this did not factor into the decision-making process is beyond me.
The bass were allowed to explode. The numbers were massive, and still we were denied commercial access that could have helped our community. It has only been over the past three years that we've actually been allowed 2,000 fish to retain for food. Up to that point, it was 200 fish a year in bycatch, even when there were hundreds of thousands of bass in the river. What type of process is that?
We've made these presentations to minister after minister, government after government. They fall off the table and we find ourselves right back where we were.
I had the opportunity to present to the Senate in December. We shared these exact concerns with them as well. Also, at MP Finnigan's request, we presented at the standing committee on salmon. There were some recommendations there. Good recommendations haven't been implemented. Why not?
We met with the Premier of New Brunswick last week. We had the opportunity to meet with him and we told him that we want to be part of the recovery of salmon on the Miramichi. The people on the Miramichi need to be part of that. Going forward, that has to be the way. We told him, “Listen, we are rights holders; you need to consult us.” The consultation has been sketchy, very sketchy. We've been trying for a number of years.
In New Brunswick, we have a trilateral treaty implementation table. That process has been ongoing for 12 years, and DFO has just come to the table within the last couple of years. We're very frustrated with the approach. It seems to be, “Let's drag this out; let's delay it; let's not really deal with the concerns of the people whose livelihood is that river.”
We have 40% food insecurity in my community. When you see the anecdotal and the scientific evidence of what the bass are doing to the salmon, which have been our cultural connection to that river and our food for so long, it angers me, but anger is not going to solve this. At some point, common sense has to step in and say, “Come on!”