Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee members, for giving me a chance to talk to you.
I'm a non-indigenous, third-generation fisherman living in the small coastal village of Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I spent 40 years trolling for salmon in B.C. out of this community. I spent 15 years as the chair of a salmon enhancement society.
I am the executive director of the Area A Crab Association, the largest crab fishery in B.C., which, thankfully, has seen record abundances in their fishery, although they are presently dealing with very depressed prices for their product, supposedly due to COVID, but due to the lack of transparency in the B.C. market. Who knows what the truth is on that front? I also own a groundfish longline vessel in partnership with my son and continue to be an active fisherman.
I was the executive director of an indigenous/non-indigenous non-profit board built on the principle of a double majority during the 1990s that helped to negotiate an aquatic management board for the west coast of Vancouver Island's Nuu-chah-nulth territory under an interim measures agreement under the mandate of the Oceans Act.
I went on a 59-day hunger strike to try to get help for B.C. fishing communities when the Fraser sockeye collapsed in 1999 and because Wayne Wouters, who was the deputy minister of Fisheries at the time, had suspended the negotiations to build the aquatic management board.
Out of the hunger strike, I got a commitment from Minister Dhaliwal to review the consultative process for salmon in B.C. The review was started by Stephen Owen. His dispute resolution group out of the University of Victoria came up with 49 recommendations to be implemented as a package; they were not to be cherry-picked.
Pacific region implemented four or five of those recommendations and twisted the recommendations so that the final framework for consultation was even worse than when I first got involved in the consultative process back in the 1980s. They completely cut out the community input, and the moment the aquatic management board was brought into reality under the mandate of the Oceans Act in 2001, a senior DFO official, who has since retired, told me that Pacific region senior management in downtown Vancouver stated internally that they now had to find a way to kill it, and they have done a very good job of doing just that. They refuse now to sit on the board as one of the governing parties.
I now live in a coastal community that has lost most of its infrastructure and its fishermen with respect to the salmon fishery. Without the vision of the aquatic management board, which is based on Nuu-chah-nulth principles of respect and that everything is connected, the implementation of the reconciliation agenda of the federal government is creating division and disunity.
As I work on my boat in Ucluelet harbour, first nations and non-first nations fishermen are being set up to fight each other right on the docks in our community over the remaining access to ocean chinook and coho, while the federal government gives the lion's share of the resource to the commercial/ recreational fishery with absolutely no transfer mechanism to deal with the disenfranchisement.
They have published an article in Sumatra that lays out how this a breaking of the human rights of the citizens, both indigenous and non-indigenous fishermen, who are treated this way by their own government.
My longline vessel is tied up this summer after fishing for years for 15% of the landed value of the fish I caught, because of the unregulated market created by ITQ management regimes, of which much is now owned and controlled offshore. I can no longer afford to untie the vessel to go fishing. My daughter did her Ph.D. thesis on the situation with the halibut fishery. We have explained this very clearly to the FOPO committee over the last couple of years, yet Pacific region continues to minimize the concerns we raised about the management regime that has been used in B.C. to kill off the small, independent owner-operator fleet.
I am extremely angry about this situation. It is a management tragedy. The definition of a tragedy is when you learn too late that you should have done things differently.
I did not want to participate in this call when I first got the invitation. I asked Kathy Scarfo to do it. I am too angry and frustrated to speak anymore about a situation that, for 30 years, has been ignored by Pacific region. My head is bloody from beating against that unaccountable, terrible bureaucracy. I am reminded of something that a DFO enforcement person told me when I was occupying a DFO office in Tofino in 1996. He said he woke up every morning ashamed that he worked for this organization.
My advice—which I am sure has never been listened to before, but I'm going to say it again—would be to dismantle the entire organization and start again with proper government and real consultation, not the sham that is presently being used by this government department.
Real governance is needed—there are a myriad of good examples of how this is done in respect of the management of natural resources—and real transparency. Who exactly owns the Canadian resource? This can be done simply by directives from the federal government, and real reconciliation that respects both parties, which is the directive given by the judge in the last Ahousaht et al. judgment.
Taking anyone’s livelihood and giving it to someone else without compensation, which is what the government did in respect to my salmon livelihood by giving it to the commercial recreational sports industry, is breaking my human rights. The federal government has stated it will not do the same with the reconciliation process, as it would simply be more of the same bad behaviour that got us into trouble in the first place.
I truly hope they stand by that commitment. They did it once; the door is now open. As Dr. Don Hall, speaking as a representative of the Nuu-chah-nulth, told the court In the Ahousaht et al case, they gave away the resource that was traditionally fished by the commercial troll fishermen to the sports fishermen. Why would they not do the same thing in respect of our court-appointed indigenous fishery?
Thank you, Mr. Chair, those are my opening comments.