Thank you, Madam Chair, and honourable committee members, for inviting us to appear as witnesses and share with you our unique stories and perspectives in regard to our experiences as commercial fishermen on the west coast.
I apologize in advance for my lack of organization and a well-prepared presentation. We three were given less than 72 hours' notice to organize ourselves in time to be here to appear in person. James and I had recently travelled to Prince Rupert and were given little choice but to appear here today wearing our gumboots. Because of this, the words I have prepared today are largely anecdotal and from my heart.
My name is Cailyn Siider. I'm a fifth-generation commercial fisherman from Sointula, British Columbia. I have actively fished for more than a half of my life, beginning with gillnetting for salmon and trawling for shrimp on my family's 38-foot boat, the Milly III. My family is currently actively engaged in the salmon, halibut, rockfish, herring, Dungeness crab, and shrimp fisheries. I've spent most of my adult life crewing on salmon seine boats, as well as prawning, and most recently salmon trolling off the north coast of B.C. I am fortunate to have grown up within and around many examples of multi-generational fishing families.
After I leave Ottawa this evening, I will return to the west coast to begin preparations to fish prawns on a multi-generational family boat from Campbell River. Following the prawn season, I will begin the northern salmon troll season on an independently owned boat from Pender Harbour. Unfortunately, these examples of independent, multi-generational family fishing operations have become the exception rather than the norm on the west coast.
I am currently in the process of completing my B.A. in peace and conflict studies, a program devoted to social justice, community-building, and grassroots social change. I chose this program because I believe that, coupled with my passion and intimate knowledge of the commercial fishing industry, I may have an opportunity to help turn the tide of the devastation that current fisheries policy on the west coast has inflicted upon my family, my friends, and the communities I belong to and cherish. Being invited here today helps to solidify this belief that there is hope for our communities and a future for young fishermen, like Chelsey, James, and me. We want to be the future of the commercial fishery on the west coast, but we need your help.
Now I'll explain a little more about who I am and where I come from.
As previously mentioned, I'm from Sointula, which is a tiny community on Malcolm Island, nestled between northern Vancouver Island and the mainland at the intersection of Queen Charlotte and Johnstone Strait. Malcolm Island sits just west of the Broughton Archipelago, and along the migration route for the majority of salmon that return every year to the Fraser River. This is in the heart of the traditional territory of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, who have lived off the riches of the ocean since time immemorial.
My family are settlers to the B.C. coast. On both sides of my family my ancestors immigrated to Canada from Finland at the turn of the 20th century. They moved west, eventually finding themselves in the newly established utopian community of Sointula. These settlers from Finland were farmers and poets and philosophers who were not prepared for the coastal climate of the Pacific Northwest. A theme in fishing that most fishermen will be able to attest to is that you need to be resilient, adaptable, resourceful, and creative. Five generations back, my family learned this the hard way. Some took to the forest; most took to the sea. Since then, Sointula has been well established and known up and down the coast as a coastal fishing community.
I represent the fifth generation of my family to be an active fish harvester involved with the commercial fishery in B.C. My first summer fishing I was two and a half years old. My parents and I travelled to Haida Gwaii to gillnet chum salmon in Cumshewa Inlet. The trip west across the open waters of Queen Charlotte Sound made me seasick. On the trip back, after we were finished fishing, I sat on my father's lap as he navigated us through the open ocean swell. I squealed, “Wee, Daddy, do it again”, every time we could ride down from a swell and green water would crash over the bow. I got over my seasickness and have been fishing ever since.
I spent summers as a teenager gillnetting salmon with my dad, exploring the B.C. coast and spending time in the communities that rely on the health and sustainability of our fisheries. My sisters and I would take turns going out on openings. We learned work ethics, community values, independence, how to live off the ocean, camaraderie, and respect and appreciation for the coast and all the gifts it gives us. As I grew older, graduated from high school, and began exploring the world on my own, I continued to return every year to the coast to fish and spend time in my home community of Sointula and the fishing community that extends up and down the B.C. coast. I'm a member of the B.C. Young Fishermen's Network and the UFAWU.
I have sat on industry advisory boards and have been engaged in grassroots movements around salmon fishing most of my life. The first letter I ever wrote and decided to send was an opinionated piece, written in crayon, to fisheries minister Fred Mifflin, when I was six years old.
Growing up in Sointula, we had two operational fish plants: McMillan's, in the heart of the breakwater, and Lions Gate, uptown. Sointula had a large gillnet, trawl, and seine fleet. If you lived in town and didn't fish, you worked at a plant. If you didn't work at a plant, you worked at the pub or the co-op store, somewhere that was sustained by the money made by fishermen or shore workers.
There is an urban myth in Sointula that it once boasted the highest per capita income tax bills anywhere in Canada. I didn't fact check this, but during Sointula's boom years, I don't doubt it.
Today, Sointula has a handful of gillnetters, no trawlers, and one seine boat that hasn't fished in years. The fish plants that I used to visit with my dad and grandpa, where the old fishermen would sneak me candies while they jawed politics over cups of coffee, are long gone. The co-op store runs at a fraction of the capacity it once did. The pub is open during tourist season, if you're lucky. People my age and young families have migrated out of Sointula. Rumours resurface every few years about whether the elementary school will close. Thankfully, it remains open.
This is not a story unique to Sointula. This narrative is repeated up and down the coast, from Ucluelet to Prince Rupert to Alert Bay. Our communities are suffering and have been suffering for a long time. This damage is a direct result of the increasing privatization and corporate control of our commercial fisheries. Due to federal policy and opportunistic corporations, we have been pushed out of our homes, our communities, and our livelihoods. The Canadian Fishing Company or a foreign investor doesn't care about the preservation of coastal communities. Jimmy Pattison does not care about Sointula or Bella Bella or Port Hardy. The investment of these companies in the sustainability of our fish and fisheries is just that, an investment. As coastal communities, we have a vested interest in the sustainability and stewardship of our fish and fisheries because it means that our children and grandchildren will be able to eat wild salmon, to see the sun rise over the open Pacific Ocean, and they will be able to live the same adventurous, fulfilling, and beautiful life we have, if they so choose.
Our legacy is the health of our coast, the succession of family ways of life, and the vitality of our communities. The Canadian Fishing Company has its bottom line to look out for. We have our families, communities. and coasts to look out for.
To have owner-operator policy entrenched within the Fisheries Act would help to empower us on the west coast with the agency to rebuild the commercial fishing industry in such a way that benefits active, independent fishermen and their families and communities, not just the highest bidder. Adjacency would help us breathe life back into our communities and allow them to hopefully return to the Sointula that exists in my memory.
We need preservation, protection, and promotion of not simply commercial licence holders, which would mean anyone with enough money to buy a licence, such as a corporation, but we need preservation, protection, and promotion of active, independent commercial fisherman.
Jim Pattison's tax writeoff of a commercial fishing fleet does not need protection. Independent commercial fisherman like us speaking in front of you today do. Otherwise, we are doomed to live our lives as tax writeoffs for Jim Pattison and other disconnected corporate investors.
Until we change this, my livelihood, my life, is just part of an investment or tax writeoff for a corporation. I deserve more than that. Our coastal communities and active independent fishermen deserve more than that. We deserve to be treated the same as our brothers and sisters on the east coast. It's outrageous that there is a west coast fisheries management model and an east coast model. Where is that line where fisheries policy in Canada changes? Does fisheries policy suddenly change in Ottawa? Does it change when the corporate lobby on the west coast decides it does?
Whatever this change process ends up looking like, I firmly believe it needs to come from the ground up rather than the top down. This change needs to be centred around and led by coastal communities and active, independent fisherman. Anything less would run the risk of perpetuating this harmful cycle of corporate control of our common resource.
These are the first steps in a long process, but we are representative of the young fishermen in B.C. who are ready for it, who are energetic and motivated and want to go for it. Being intentional and paying attention to this process is just as important as any goal we work toward.
Chelsey, James, and I are young fishermen. Just the three of us, being so young, represent 40-plus years of experience actively fishing on the water. Imagine the hundreds or even thousands of years a room full of fisher men and women, such as at the Fisheries for Communities Gathering, represent. The traditional and community knowledge within that room, within our fleets and communities, is invaluable. Change needs to come from that experience, from those voices, from our voices.
That's a little snapshot of who I am and why Bill C-68 and these proposed amendments to the Fisheries Act are important to me. I appear here to provide anecdotal evidence that speaks to my experience as a young fisherman from a long lineage of women and men who have made their lives on and beside the sea. To adopt into the Fisheries Act, actively though carefully, practised policies such as owner-operator will be to help us carry on these lifestyles and traditions that we love so much.
I believe strongly in the power of storytelling. Storytelling has the power to bring people together and change the world. There is a great divide between this room where we are now and the communities we all come from and represent. It should not and does not have to be this way. All of us here now have a responsibility and role to play in closing this divide.
I hope that at the end of the day, we all have the same vision for the west coast: healthy oceans and thriving communities. Community engagement is critical. Listening to, respecting, and acting upon traditional community knowledge is fundamental in realizing this vision.
I urge you to continue listening to our voices, to our stories. If there is one certainty of all fishermen, aside from our independence and stubbornness, it's that we all have stories to tell.
The time to act is now, because as any old fisherman might tell you, the tide waits for no man and very few women.
Thank you for having us here today to share our stories with you.