Thank you.
I'd like to thank the standing committee for starting to look at these serious issues. They are important to fishermen, coastal communities, first nations, shoreworkers, processors, and other fisheries workers along our coast. We need to make sure that they're all involved and have a voice in this inquiry.
Fisheries are arguably the most sustainable food source on this planet. We don't have to water or feed them, weed or till the soil, or add fertilizers or pesticides. We just have to harvest them sustainably. Fisheries are important to our food security, our families, and our communities, and to future generations.
In short order, there are two main points I want to get across here. One is a profile of the fishermen on our coast, and the second is a profile of the communities on our coast.
Last year, an expert witness giving testimony at the Ahousaht trial, the justification trial, identified three essential components for a fishing business: a vessel, a fisherman, and legal access to the resource. Those three are essential components to any kind of fisheries business. On our coast, what the department has done is separate that last one, that legal access to fisheries, from the fisherman and the vessel.
That paper goes on to argue that the other two are useless without that legal access, but it's hard to see, though, with that legal access to a fishery, how you would catch fish without having a fisherman or gear. Anyway, it raises a critical question: should fishing licences be held by parties other than those who fish? That's the point.
A study on the issue of corporate concentration that was put out this January by Haas et al. shows the trend in the last 25 years in British Columbia moving from a more equitable state in fisheries to a less equitable state in fisheries. It shows the corporate concentration in British Columbia fisheries going up, specifically in salmon and herring, and the distribution of benefits going down. There are studies that show conclusively that corporate concentration is going up.
There's a slide I wanted to show. It's about halibut and what has gone on with halibut over the last 25 years in moving from an open fishery to an ITQ fishery, and an ITQ fishery where the quota and licence are separated from the fisherman and fishery. Those fishermen who don't have a quota are fishing for up to 80% less of the landed value on the fishery.
Without the graphic, it's very hard to describe that, but basically, on a block of halibut worth $400,000, of that, $300,000 is going to lease fees that are paid to absentee licence-holders by the fisherman who don't hold the quota. Without that connection of the licence back to the fisherman and to the vessel, you're losing that value, so the cost to the independent fishermen is going down.... A labour market study—I think it was the one Christina referred to—put out in 2013 shows that the average income for fishermen on our coast is somewhere around $19,000, which is about the poverty level. Fishing in British Columbia is not a great opportunity. Most would look at that and say there is no future in fishing. Part of the reason is this access and the tie that the department has severed from fishermen.
On the grander scale of the coast, Christina has accurately described the value of the fishery on the coast. The landed value on the coast averages somewhere around $300 million per year. The area I'm calling from right now is Haida Gwaii. In the area around Haida Gwaii, about $80-million worth of landed value is harvested each year. Less than 5% of that is connected in any way to the communities around Haida Gwaii. This means that either the licence is owned here, or the fishermen are living here, or there's processing happening here with that fish.
There's virtually no connection to the communities for the majority of the fish that's caught around here. That's an adjacency issue, and this disconnect is happening up and down the coast. One of the studies—