I didn't prepare anything so I guess I'm just going to talk from the heart.
I'm the white elephant in the room. There aren't many of us left. I'm under 35 and I'm a fisherman; I'm 33. After spending roughly $2 million to get into the fishery, my brother and I are doing quite well. We work hard and we do what we have to do.
Our shellfish stocks are in decline now—for me, it's mostly crab—so the return of northern cod is very important to me. It's my future and that of a lot of people like me. The trouble is when you make those decisions in Ottawa and you haven't had any input into it. It's disgusting what happened this year with the FFAW not consulting its members. I travelled across the province and we asked everyone, thousands of fishermen, if they had seen this proposal, and they hadn't. We still haven't seen it.
We don't know if this fishery.... We're told it's 15 weeks or so many weeks. We don't know. Now there are rumours on the wharf that it's closing in two weeks and that the total allowable catch is nearly caught. We don't know. We still haven't seen it and it's not right. We want to get it fixed.
I could talk to you today about lots of different things such as the price of fish and stuff like that. But the bottom line is that the price of fish is not your responsibility. The provincial government has us regulated so that we're getting pennies from what we should be getting, so you don't have to worry about that. That's a fight we're going to take up with the provincial government. They have to let us have free markets so that the market dictates the price, not a half-dozen merchants who pay us what they feel like paying us.
I'm going to focus more today on what we do and what you can control, and so on. We're going to form this new union. We really are. After Christmas, we're going to have this straightened away, so I encourage you not to make any major long-term decisions before this is done. We don't want three- or four-year agreements signed before we have input into what's actually going in there. We need to be a part of this process. We can't be left out again. It happened this year, and it can't happen again. This is forcing us back into small boats by taking our individual quotas, which our fathers and grandfathers fought for before my time. It was a monumental slap in the face.
If we had 30,000 pounds of fish, that's roughly $18,000 in today's market in Newfoundland. If we catch that in one week, it's $18,000, but if you stretch it out over 20 weeks, it's still $18,000. We're trying to make a living here. We don't want some sort of social program. To me, a fishery is a business. We like to be able to plan ahead. Maybe we can do something differently, but you can't do everything at once. We want our individual quotas put back. That's something we'll be fighting for.
I heard a lot of talk about Iceland today and everything they do over there, gillnets, and so on. I encourage you to do some more homework on it before you make any decisions about it. I've attended conferences and seminars with people from Iceland, and the gillnet fishery is still the most dominant fishery in Iceland. It still produces good quality fish. It's just that hook and line is obviously better. There's no doubt.
In Iceland, the reason they receive such good money for their fish is that they have a free market. They can market themselves. If I wanted to market myself, for example, take out a TV ad or who knows, in Iceland you have the opportunity to do that. But here in Newfoundland we don't, because we're regulated by archaic provincial legislation. We're going to fix that, too.
The only reason Iceland is successful is that there's no one else taking their fish. I have some papers here. I think you have them. It's a NAFO fisheries management schedule for 2016. When you get a chance, you can take a look at that. It lists the different species such as cod, redfish, and Greenland halibut, which is turbot.
You can see what percentages we get compared with every other country that's in NAFO. The percentage of cod in 3M, which is the Flemish Cap, is a disgrace. Canada is getting 0.8% of fish that are adjacent to us. Come on, boys.
Let's go over to turbot, Greenland halibut; it's probably the most lucrative fish that we have in terms of finfish and here we are with 15% of the quota. Every other country can come here. The EU has 6,400 tonnes. It's not good enough.
We often hear from the union that we can't invent quotas and we can't make fish for people to catch, but the fish are there. It's just everyone else is catching them.
What I noticed just last week on the Georges Bank, where the cod quota is shared between Canada and the U.S., Canada has the lion's share of that quota and we're sharing that bank. We're not sharing the Grand Banks with anyone adjacent and we get nothing.
It's time for people to look at it. I don't know what's going on, if it's with foreign trade or why we're getting sold out, but Newfoundland is getting sold out. The fishermen have been sold out.
Mr. Simms, you've been in opposition and you now have a chance because you're in power.
Mr. McDonald, it's your first term. Why don't you leave a legacy? Why don't you fight for us and make sure you fix this? This is wrong. What happened is wrong. I know you're good people and I know you're going to try. That's all I have to say.