Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting our federation to testify on what is, to our members, a very important topic.
Our federation is a national organization of associations that represent men and women who fish for a living, own and operate their own boats, and live in fishing communities. In Atlantic Canada our owner-operator fleets generate roughly $2 billion a year in landed value. That's $2 billion going directly into the pockets of fishermen and spent in small fishing communities. This money drives fishing communities on our coasts, communities that often have no other resources or industries to support them other than tourism.
I would like to address the first part of your mandate, which is to review the scope and application of the Fisheries Act. My colleague Mr. Gawn will address our concerns about habitat protection.
As was suggested by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans when he appeared before you recently, we would like you to take a holistic and sustainable development approach to the changes to the act that are needed to restore our lost protections. Forty years ago, when we created the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, we took a holistic and sustainable development approach to our fisheries as a country. Our first Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, the Honourable Roméo LeBlanc, understood that we have fisheries for a purpose, and that this purpose should be to generate social and economic benefits to the fishing communities and the people who fish.
Mr. LeBlanc protected fishermen and fishing communities. He understood that sustainability is a three-legged stool with ecological, social, and economic legs. Mr. LeBlanc did two very important things: he put limits on corporate concentration in the fishery, and he made sure that a fishing licence was a licence to fish, that the people who received fishing licences for our coastal fisheries had to be owner-operators. Mr. LeBlanc was a man of vision, and his vision worked, especially in Atlantic Canada. His policies freed fishermen from company control and lifted them out of poverty and into the middle class.
Since then, independent fishermen and fishing communities have lost ground. The department has moved away from a holistic, sustainable development approach to our fisheries and become narrowly focused on only one aspect of sustainability, the conservation and protection of fish.
The Fisheries Act has become a one-legged stool. It tells us a lot about conservation, but virtually nothing about our social and economic objectives for the fishery. You may be surprised to learn that the Fisheries Act does not have a statement of purpose. The purposes section, section 2, was repealed in 1985. We now have a section 2 that says “Purposes”, and the rest is blank.
This is something that needs to be fixed. Our Fisheries Act needs a clear statement of purpose. The Fisheries Act should say why we conserve and protect fish and fish habitat. We have some specific recommendations on how that might be done. I believe you received this, but I'd like to table the letter we sent to the Minister of Fisheries two weeks ago outlining the details of our proposal.
In summary, we believe it's critical that the “Purposes” section of the act clearly establish the authority of the minister to manage the fishery in pursuit of cultural, social, and economic objectives in addition to the conservation and protection of fish. The absence of such a clear statement in the act creates an ambiguity regarding the scope of the minister's authority. This is very, very important. The government can correct this by drawing on rulings of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Federal Court of Appeal, as the courts have been very clear and very consistent on the broad scope of the minister's authority to manage for social and economic objectives.
In our letter, you'll see that we propose changes in other sections of the act and the fisheries regulations to make the relevance and legitimacy of social and economic objectives for fisheries management very clear.
We would also like to see the owner-operator and fleet separation policies in regulatory form to give them the force of law. We've been asking for this for 20 years. We were promised it in 2004 by the Honourable Geoff Regan—you know where he is now—when he was Minister of Fisheries. When he announced a policy framework for Canada's Atlantic fisheries, it was in black and white: regulatory form for owner-operator and fleet separation. We're still waiting.
There is a broad consensus among fishermen, fishing communities, and the provinces that fishermen's independence needs to be protected. In 2012 the legislative assemblies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Quebec all adopted unanimous resolutions calling on the federal government to maintain the owner-operator and fleet separation policies. A few weeks later, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities adopted a similar emergency resolution.
I want to end with a comment on the urgency of the situation.
We have just come through a very long period of neglect of our social and economic objectives for the fishery and for fishing communities, and much damage has been done. In British Columbia, a federal fishing licence is no longer a licence to fish; it has become a licence to tax fishermen. The situation is bankrupting independent fishermen and destroying the fishing economy of B.C.'s coastal communities.
The problem is not restricted to B.C., despite the owner-operator and fleet separation policies. The same thing is happening in Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland.
There are ways to fix this, and we hope we will see our concerns and proposals reflected in the committee's report to Parliament.