I believe what Mr. Belliveau has said is correct, so I won't repeat any of that.
In my experience as a law enforcement officer for the last 32 years, I have met many obstacles when it comes to enforcing the FSC fishery in St. Marys Bay. There is a belief that this is a rights-based fishery, and it's not. There is no treaty right associated with the harvesting of lobsters. This is a policy that DFO created to give the Mi'kmaq people access to the lobster fishery. In doing so, the DFO failed miserably to provide officers with the resources to start an enforcement plan and to keep the fishery in check.
This fishery, because it was not a rights-based fishery, had quotas assigned to each band. My goal was to enforce those quotas. That never happened. We were not allowed to enforce them. That caused major issues with the indigenous fishers, because when we went to check them, they told us we had no right because their chiefs told them that they were allowed to do this. There was a lot of miscommunication there.
There was an absolute, total miscommunication between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and its own people. I experienced that for years, and it was very frustrating. It's one of the reasons I left. It was because I could not do my job effectively anymore.
I want to talk about St. Marys Bay really quickly, if I can.
At the end of the lobster season every May, a huge number of lobsters move into that shallow, warm bay. At any given time in the summer, you can get as many as 50 lobsters in a trap. Those lobsters are loaded with eggs. They're soft; they die. They smother and they cannibalize each other. Imagine 50 lobsters in a trap.
What happens is when they land those lobsters, a lot of them are dead. When they sell them to the buyers, they die shortly after that. We did an investigation in which we found thousands of pounds of discarded lobsters in the woods near Weymouth, Nova Scotia. It's either the buyers or the indigenous fishers dumping those. That is a blatant disregard for the stock, and that's unacceptable.
The problem is that we cannot sit down and have a conversation with Sipekne'katik, because they were the only band in the area that I couldn't develop a relationship with and they never wanted to talk to me. That was very unfortunate, because we did many things to open that dialogue and to start a meaningful friendship. Those were very disappointing times for me.
Right now there is a 50% decrease in the amount of lobsters that the commercial fishermen are catching from one year to the other. That's huge.