Thank you, Mr. Chair and members.
The BC Seafood Alliance is an umbrella organization, the 17 members of which represent about 90% of wild harvested seafood from Canada's west coast, worth about $850 million annually. Our members are mostly associations representing all or most of the licence-holders in virtually every major commercial fishery in B.C. Those include salmon and herring, once the backbone of the industry, but now dwarfed by the success of prawns, sablefish, halibut, geoduck, and other groundfish and dive fisheries. We are by far the most representative fishing organization on the west coast, and our ultimate constituents are independent fishermen.
A recently updated study from 2014 by Gordon Gislason demonstrates that wild seafood contributes more in sales value, wages, benefits, employment, and, ultimately, GDP than does either aquaculture or tidal recreational fishing in B.C. How did we get to this point?
For the last 25 years, DFO has implemented management measures that have led to progressive changes fundamentally aligning conservation and the marketplace. As a result, the relationship between industry and DFO is generally collaborative and pragmatic, based on shared stewardship of the fisheries resource with a range of small and medium market-driven enterprises guided by market-driven policies that allow us to compete in global seafood markets and provide safe, top-quality food to Canada and the world.
Wild fisheries on the Pacific coast are export-driven, selling about 80% of production into a global seafood market. We are made up mainly of independent small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which are family-owned and which operate coast-wide. We're also a small high-cost player immediately next door to Alaska, which harvests the same species, produces the same products, and sells to customers in the same markets, but which operates on a scale at least tenfold greater. When a chum salmon fillet from Hokkaido, Japan, processed in China, sells in Vancouver for less than a B.C. chum fillet, we must make ours worth more by producing a superior product.
For many years, the industry has been one of the largest employers of first nations in B.C. Aboriginal participation declined in the late 1900s and early 2000s, but so too did non-aboriginal participation, following the introduction of weak stock salmon management and subsequent DFO voluntary licence retirement programs. PICFI has had substantial achievements in reversing that trend with the following results: 42% of salmon licences, communal and reduced-fee, are now held by first nations and status Indians, and 37% of gillnet roe herring licences, 25% of all roe herring seine licences, 22% of prawn licences, and 21% of halibut licences are now communal commercial licences. Overall, 29.8% of all regular commercial fishing licences are now in first nation hands.
Your committee has given itself the task of studying “the relevance of the principle of adjacency and owner-operator and fleet separation policies in the Pacific region”. Let me be clear: those policies are not relevant here. They run counter to our export and domestic success, our ability to provide food for Canadians and the world, the conservation requirements of DFO, and, indeed, the future of the resource itself, which belongs to all Canadians. The people those policies would hurt the most are independent fishermen.
I'll tell you a bit about myself. I've worked with various fishing organizations for almost 30 years in both marketing and policy. In addition, I'm the chair of the international Association of Sustainable Fisheries. It provides advice to the Marine Stewardship Council, which is the gold standard for fisheries certification in developing international standards to measure the sustainability of wild seafood. Indeed, next week, I am invited, as a global leader in seafood sustainability and the only Canadian, to join His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, to assess progress towards seafood sustainability.
Conservation has driven our sector over the last 20 years, shaping the way it has developed and encouraging a pragmatic approach to stewardship. More than half our fisheries by volume are in the MSC program. Most of the rest are recognized by Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch or the Vancouver Aquarium's Ocean Wise.
Integrated groundfish management, as you've heard from Mr. Turris, integrates the management of 30 different groundfish species across three gear types, making every vessel accountable for every fish it catches, whether retained or not, through a monitoring program that the MSC recognizes as “one of the most rigorous in the world”. It includes 100% at-sea observer or electronic monitoring and 100% dockside monitoring.
We continue to pioneer new approaches, instituting, with the collaboration of conservation groups, the world's first and only individual transferable quota for corals and sponges, sharply reducing the impact of the trawl fleet on benthic habitat. None of this would have happened with the policies you are studying.
In the 1990s, the decision to move to weak stock management in salmon profoundly changed the industry. Indeed, for conservation reasons, many fisheries adopted ITQs.
In 1980, under a derby-style fishery, it took 65 days to catch just under six million pounds of halibut. In 1990, it took six days to catch eight million pounds. In 1990, halibut processing was entirely dominated by the large processors, the only ones that could freeze that kind of volume in a week or so. One year later, the halibut fleet went to ITQs. Halibut is now an eight-month fishery, selling virtually every pound fresh through various small B.C. processors, with little involvement by the large ones, into the U.S. west coast at landed prices of about $8 a pound or more.
That trend is common to most other B.C. fisheries. Structural change to meet conservation needs, whether for salmon, groundfish, or specialty dive products, has meshed with increasing market demand around the Pacific Rim for live and fresh, which return far higher value than did canned or frozen two decades ago.
For another couple of examples, look at the last three big production years for sockeye: 2006, 2010, and 2014. In 2006 we produced almost 200,000 cases of canned sockeye worth about $40 million. It was the dominant product form, with more than the volume of fresh and frozen sockeye combined. By 2014 most sockeye was sold fresh, with the fishery generating more than $90 million in exports. New management measures mean production can be scheduled to meet the needs of the fresh market. That trend, for which B.C. is ideally placed, is not going away. It's what consumers demand and we can supply.
For geoduck, a dive fishery, the production before ITQs went into clam chowder on B.C. ferries or went frozen to Japan at rock-bottom prices. Now, virtually all geoduck, no matter where it is caught on the coast, comes to processors in Vancouver who ship it live 365 days a year to China, Hong Kong, and other markets for a value of more than $50 million annually. As a live product, geoduck is highly perishable. It requires extensive sampling for PSP and other toxins. The only lab facilities for this are in Vancouver, as is the CFIA office issuing health certificates. Market demands, lab facilities, ease of transportation, and cost of catch validation inevitably give the Lower Mainland a competitive advantage over the north.
Here are a couple of other points. First, wild fisheries in B.C. fund science because the management incentivizes proper stewardship of the resource. Geoduck, for instance, pays about $1.4 million annually for stock assessment, monitoring, and other science. Halibut contributes over $1 million, and groundfish about $3.5 million. Second, the management system for groundfish, for example, operates virtually year-round and provides capital investment and infrastructure on Vancouver Island and in the north for other fisheries that operate more seasonally.
Adjacency in Atlantic Canada operates in the context of DFO quota allocations to fleets that are adjacent to fish stocks. It does not dictate where in a province fish should be processed. Minimum processing requirements in Newfoundland will disappear under CETA. Requiring domestic processing in B.C. would be counter to international trade rules. The U.S. has won every trade challenge against such requirements under GATT and NAFTA.
The last export restrictions on herring roe were removed in 2012. As a result, we've developed a new market in Japan for small-sized roe from small fish that had been previously left in the water. All this has benefited independent fishermen and enterprises nimble enough to take advantage of new opportunities and increased demand for top-quality wild fish, both here in Canada and abroad.
To sum up, adjacency, owner-operator, and fleet separation are not relevant in B.C. Over the last two decades, conservation of the resource and market demands have created a flexible market-responsive industry that has developed new products and new markets, seeking always the highest value from a sustainably managed resource. Our market advantage is proximity to Pacific Rim markets in the U.S., in Japan, in China, and anywhere else where we can sell live or fresh. Good transportation links mean longer shelf life, satisfied customers, and top prices.
The structure of the industry developed over the last two decades, whether through ITQs or other means, makes fishermen responsible and accountable and good stewards of the resource for the long term. It means a diverse fishery where small and larger vessels can succeed as small business enterprises, increasingly operating year-round rather than seasonally, with little dependence on EI. It means that we pay for science, for monitoring, and for management, because we see the value and the need for it. It means we pay for MSC certification and the other third-party endorsements that markets at home and abroad require. The principles that apply to the inshore fleet in Atlantic Canada applied on the west coast would destroy the value of the fishery and all that success.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
