Thanks, everybody. Thank you to the committee for allowing me to speak today. I'm not sure if I was the number one pick by Mr. Donnelly, but anyway we're going to get going. I hope everyone will appreciate the comments. I would have loved to be there today in person certainly.
My name is Keith Sullivan, and I'm the president of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union. We represent workers in more than 500 communities in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and most of those people work in the fisheries. About 10,000 of those are actually harvesters.
Many of the communities actually existed for centuries. The whole reason people live in these communities in these places in Newfoundland and Labrador is the fishery. I grew up in the small fishing community of Calvert. There were six generations of harvesters in that area before me, and that's not unlike an awful lot of stories of our members as well. I was lucky enough to be working in a fishing boat for many years of my life as well.
The inshore fishery has been the primary economic driver of coastal communities in Newfoundland and Labrador. It's the real backbone of the middle class in those rural communities. Without the inshore fishery, the rural communities in Newfoundland and Labrador wouldn't actually survive.
Our industry has gone through a significant transformation over the last number of years, particularly the last 20 years. Our ability to adjust, transform, and reinvent ourselves has been an amazing show of resilience and innovation in the inshore fishery. Now we're going through another transition and we're seeing a dramatic impact on our fishery once again. We're seeing warming water temperatures that have resulted in generally a decline of shellfish stocks, very valuable shellfish stocks, and we're seeing a resurgence in many groundfish species. While we see that there are new opportunities on the horizon, in the short term our members, whether they're in harvesting or in fish processing, are going to face significant challenges.
In order to rebuild a groundfish fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador and sustain those coastal communities, we have to have management that's based on the principles of ecological sustainability, of course, and social sustainability, but also economic sustainability is important as well.
The recently tabled amendments to the Fisheries Act provide much of that critical foundation required to achieve those objectives. Most of my comments today are going to focus on the fisheries management provisions in Bill C-68, specifically the preservation and promotion of the independent, owner-operator fishery.
In our province it is not an exaggeration to say that the owner-operator principle and fleet separation are the two most important economic development principles we have in our coastal communities, particularly rural Newfoundland and Labrador. These two policies have kept a viable inshore fleet in place and have injected significant wealth to all areas of the province. Again, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say those two policies combined are the most important economic development tools that our province has to offer, and I would say it would be similar in many areas of rural Atlantic Canada. It's because of the critical role that owner-operator and fleet separation play that the FFAW has been lobbying for 20 years to make sure that these policies are enshrined in law.
While inshore fish harvesters, their families, and their communities recognize the importance of these policies, there are some who do not see the value of safeguarding the independent owner-operator fishery. In the past, we've seen that corporate interests have influenced and interfered with the application and enforcement of the fleet separation and owner-operator policies. As a result, corporations have gained control of licences and are siphoning the wealth and the benefits not only from fisheries and fishery participants but really from our coastal communities and entire regions of our province.
The attack on the owner-operator principle, led primarily by large fish-processing companies, over the past 20 years has had serious economic repercussions for the fishery and our coastal regions. Of particular concern is the impact that trust agreements have had on the cost of fishing licences, which has made it extremely difficult for young people to enter the fishery. This is becoming more and more prevalent, and is really a key consideration for the next generation of harvesters. It's also important to note that harvesters who are actually in these trust agreements receive less for their catch. The same competition doesn't exist for these harvesters, so they're paid lower wages, in many instances.
The fleet separation and owner-operator policies have been remarkably easy to circumvent in recent years. They're extremely valuable, but at the same time they've been easy to get around. Legal teams for companies have developed trust or controlling agreements where the licence-holder must transfer the beneficial interest of a licence to another party that's not legally entitled to hold one—namely, most times a fish-processing company or a larger corporation. In such transactions, control over how the licence is used, sold, or managed is really granted to this third party as well. Again, for the licence-holder whose licence is owned or held in name only, the total control over that and the benefits are going to these outside corporations. That can be someone from outside of Canada, for that matter, just because we don't have the enforcement to back things up. Really, this is why the enforcement powers are so critical to ensuring that the owner-operator fleet is protected.
The independent owner-operator fishery is a strategic asset to Canada's economy. Amendments to section 43 of the act that give the minister authority to make regulations to enforce the owner-operator and fleet separation are key. With the force of law, these policies will become more robust, with legal consequences for corporations holding fish harvesters in controlling agreements.
Just the policy alone, as we saw, is insufficient to safeguard the social, economic, and cultural future of coastal communities. These policies deserve to be in legislation, and are the pillars, as I said before, of economic development for hundreds of thousands of people and their communities in Atlantic Canada. Over the years, there have been many discussions with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on how to better enforce these policies, but little progress has been made. The policy for preserving the independence of the inshore fleet in Canada's Atlantic fisheries—PIIFCAF, as many in the business would know it—is an important policy initiative that's been in place for almost a decade but that's had modest results. It's an important and well-intentioned policy, but again, they've had the ability to circumvent that policy without the force of law.
In the end, PIIFCAF and the enforcement of the owner-operator and fleet separation are undermined because the activity they're regulating is not illegal. Owner-operator and fleet separation are not law, and violating them does not result in any specified punishment.
The proposed amendments to section 9 of the act should address the current lack of punishment by clarifying the minister's authority to act when the law is violated. These provisions give new authority to suspend or cancel licences if the minister determines that the licence-holder has entered into an agreement that contravenes any provision of the act or regulations.
Protecting the inshore fishery is one of the best ways to build a strong middle class in hundreds of coastal communities—much like Calvert, the community I grew up in—and to create jobs and protect and strengthen the economy. We actually have a very highly sophisticated, independent owner-operator fleet that is capable of harvesting all species on our coasts. It's able to bring that fresh product to our communities, but we need to make sure we have a strong policy and legal framework to ensure that the benefits of the fishery come back to the people who fish and to the adjacent coastal communities.
We can no longer afford to make fisheries decisions in silos, nor can we afford to ignore the wealth of knowledge offered by people who spend their days and countless hours in fishing boats.