I'll try to keep it to 10 minutes.
First of all, welcome to the beautiful Province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I'll begin in this way: you're going to hear me speak in a different language—and I mean that sincerely—with passion.
I was born in Port de Grave, one of the largest fishing communities on the island of Newfoundland and in Labrador. I grew up into fishing with my own father. Actually, my son is in fishing today, so I've been very close to it.
What I'm amazed at.... I didn't plan any written words this morning. I wanted see what the feeling was around the table and talk to some different people. Ken gave me an opening with his recommendation, his proposal, to do a study in the fishery to see what the cod stocks are like and what the harvesting should be for the future or whatever.
Can you imagine? We closed the fishery. We were part of the closure of the fishery by the federal and provincial governments in 1992. Norway had a closure at the same time for three years, and their stocks were back and they were back fishing commercially, but in 1992 we closed the fishery, and now we're going to recommend to do some studying.
I'm not condemning this, Ken, because it's a good idea, if it wasn't done, but just to think that it's not done, in this day and age, gives me one question that I want to ask you people, as the representatives from Ottawa. What is the role of DFO in the harvesting sector if 25 years later we still don't have any solid scientific information on the cod stocks? That in itself leaves a major question unanswered.
I've said many times that we were blessed with the oil industry, but the oil industry bears no comparison to the fishing industry if it's managed right. It's a renewable resource; it will be there forever and ever if—again, the word “if”—we manage it right.
I look at what's happening, and I have meetings with ministers and meetings with individuals, and I walk away shaking my head. My God, where are we headed down the road? If any other country in the world or any other province in Canada had the resources that Newfoundland and Labrador has in its ocean, we would be floating on air all the time, and here we are today, arguing with each other over what to do next. We're making recommendations and we don't know what the outcome is.
The question has to be answered: what is the role of DFO?
If you go down to the DFO building right now, you're lucky if you get to see somebody for eons. The staff is not down there anymore in any numbers. From what I understand, most of the work being asked for or being done, which is nothing compared with what needs to be done, is done through the union. The union's job is not research. The union's job is to protect the fishermen, but that's not happening.
We have two frustrations going on in the one area: we don't know the science, and we don't know what the role of DFO is.
Here's the other thing that really concerns me. I always thought that people living on an island out in the north Atlantic, as we are, who have the resources around.... How could we would be left in this position of asking this question today? First of all, who is responsible for the fishery, but then who gets the right to catch it? Keep in mind that we know very well that in 1992 prior to the moratorium the small boats did not destroy the cod fishery. They did not cause the closure of the cod fishery, because they can only fish a certain number of months each year, and the type of boats and the type of gear they have restricts them from doing any major damage to such a large resource, when there's 800 million tonnes of cod or whatever the numbers are. So there goes that question.
Now we're back wanting to get into the fishery and the people on those small boats can't get the right to go fishing. They are restricted from catching cod because they don't know whether if the cod is out there to catch or not. We're restricted from fishing in our own area because we didn't have a history in any particular fishery, but I thought that everybody understood that the principle of adjacency should be working. If the principle of adjacency is working, then the first people to get the chance to go back into the fishing industry are those people who operate the small boats.
For example, I know of a fleet. In fact, as you go to Port de Grave tomorrow, which I understand you going to be, you're going to see boats that have been tied up to the wharf since the middle of July, with no fishing rights whatsoever. They have all the gear. They have all the trawls. They are not looking for or asking for money. They just want a quota of fish. Yet the factory freezer trawlers are steaming into the community of Bay Roberts with a million and a half pounds of turbot aboard, or a million and a half pounds of some other species of fish, and the small boats in Port de Grave—the 65-foot boats and so on—are tied up to the wharf and not moving whatsoever. I wonder why, and I wonder what's going to happen.
How do we get a start on the future? After 25 years, how do we possibly start over and begin now to do a complete scientific study to just tell us what happened? If we don't already know, then I wouldn't want to be the person who goes out onto the street and tells the people that we have to start over again. With the new gear, all we have to do is to go Iceland or Norway. We know what type of gear should be used: hook-and-line gear.
We opened up the fishery this year, after all these years, and the first thing we put into the water was gillnets. That's the worst darn thing you could possibly do. We have to get markets, and the only way we're going to get markets for our products is to have quality. You will never get quality in gillnets. With hook-and-line, auto trawls, and other ways of catching fish, why would you want to put gillnets back into the water after all these years? Every week when you turn on the radio or the TV they're talking about a marketplace. There's no market for our cod and no market for our groundfish. No wonder, if we're going to handle fish like that and expect people to pay top dollar.
They say there's no price for cod. I go down to Florida in the winter months. The cheapest cod I can buy in Florida is $11 per pound. The most a fisherman can get for a pound of cod here in Newfoundland is 50¢ or 60¢. It's absolutely ludicrous to have that happen.
There's a reason I told you about the passion. This morning, I didn't expect to hear this. I expected to hear some good news that we had some signs—probably not enough—that would give us a level of comfort to start fishing. No way. I expected that we would have a quality assurance program put in place federally and provincially. Not done. If it was done, we wouldn't allow the gillnets to go into the water. If you catch fish with open line, you're catching a top-quality product. We were out yesterday with my son. He took a cod pot. In the cod pot, the fish were swimming around. That's quality. That's the type of thing that needs to be done, and we don't need to go all over the world and study it again.
It's no good asking for half a dozen things this morning. I'd rather ask for one or two things and get something done. When you people go back to Ottawa, you need to get the message through to the Minister of Fisheries that he needs to take charge of the ship. He needs to be captain of that ship. He needs to listen to people, and he needs to make decisions on exactly what needs to be done, and it's not complicated. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to find out how to get a quality product or to find out how much fish is out in the ocean. As we used to say, you can't put a rubber bag over your head and get down and count it. You have to base it on science, and if we don't have the science now, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Mr. Chairman, we need to get attention paid to those couple of things. Also, we don't need to have the boats tied up. We need the boats out there doing the actual harvesting in a small way to give us an idea of how much is out there. We know. We know the quantity of stock—the quantity, but not the quality—that's out there in groundfish. We're not talking just about cod.
Please take the message back to Ottawa. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we don't have enough science done. We should be ashamed of ourselves if now, today, after all this time, we still have to use gillnets for the fishery of the future.