I'd just like to point out that both Conrad and Arnie hold seniority in the plant. Arnie is a millwright who was just displaced. He's working now as first aid. Conrad was what we call a warehouse checker, whose job was to trace the cans as they come off the lines and before they are shipped out to the market, so he keeps track of them like a shipper-receiver. I'm a union representative. I'm on staff and I also hold seniority at the Canadian Fishing Corporation, but I'm think I'm getting too old to go exercise it.
The union proposes that a public, accountable, and transparent process be set up by the department. The objective would be to enable fishermen to become economically viable once again, to return control over fishing to active fishermen, to eliminate corporate control of our commercial fisheries, and to assist communities to retain fisheries income and processing jobs.
We would suggest that an independent panel be formed to travel throughout our B.C. coastal communities to talk with our communities, commercial fishers, and plant workers.
The work of the committee would be to evaluate the status quo in B.C.; to develop made-in-B.C. owner-operator fleet-separation policies that reflect the differing and presently existing fisheries licensing quota arrangements on the B.C. coast; to determine ways to assist active fishermen to acquire ownership of quota, and retired and non-fishing quota owners to divest themselves of quota in a practical and positive way; to recommend a plan and time frame for processing companies to divest themselves of quota licences, co-adventure agreements, partnership arrangements, and the like; to develop an adjacency policy for fisheries in B.C. that puts communities, local fishermen, and shoreworkers first and returns processing to rural coastal communities; and, last but not least, to investigate and make recommendations on other approaches, such as having further support for first nations, licence banks, fishermen's loan boards, and policies such as having community licence banks, and, most importantly, allowing youth access to licenses, affordable quotas for generational transfers of fishing opportunities, and access to commercial fishing opportunities.
The recommendations from this committee would form a basis for change.
This is what we ask of this committee. I'm never quite sure how committee structures work, but if you make recommendations to the government or to the minister, that's what we're asking for.