Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Phil Young. I'm vice-president of fisheries and corporate affairs for Canadian Fishing Company, which is the largest processor of wild salmon in B.C.
I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to address you once again and to meet some of the new members, unfortunately not in person, because of the restrictions, but I look forward to the opportunity to see everyone again.
I've been in the B.C. seafood business for 35 years, the last five years with Canadian Fishing. Nearly every other company I worked for is gone. Two of these disappearances were due strictly to consolidation as the salmon and herring resources constricted because of nature and government policies.
Over the years, I've watched the implementation of policies that didn’t seem to value an industry that put food on Canadians’ tables in a sustainable and renewable manner. It really wasn't until COVID hit us in February that the government seemed to finally wake up and designate us as an essential industry.
I'm sure you're going to hear from many more qualified witnesses on the biological effects of salmon, so I want to focus my comments more on the impacts upon the people who depend on the resource.
This current decline in salmon abundance is not the first one that has happened, but this time there's a real fear it isn’t just a cyclical downturn that will rebound in a few years. Climatic changes and impacts of human activities may be more profound this time. Also, changes in government policies regarding weak stock management, indigenous reconciliation and SARA listings are going to result in a completely different salmon fishery in the future.
Salmon has been the backbone of the B.C. fishing industry, and even as the harvest levels decline it's still an important pillar for our commercial sector. Fishermen, plant workers and companies all depend upon the salmon season to round out their incomes, but it's getting harder for all involved to rely on the contribution from salmon. There has only been one year in the past six that the commercial sector would consider even remotely good.
For several years during this stretch, some of the vessels that performed the best were ones that never incurred any of the upfront cost of getting ready to fish and instead stayed tied to the dock. They still had to do minor maintenance and pay their licence fees, but at least they didn’t have the cost of getting the boat ready to fish, wasting fuel and then not catching any salmon, or sometimes not even getting an opportunity to put their nets into the water.
Indigenous reconciliation is here to stay. What it will look like and how we get to a better place is still uncertain, but from the commercial sector’s view, what we need is clarity. Our industry has partnered with indigenous individuals and bands, but even they are asking for clarity. How can they plan for the future without understanding where an indigenous commercial harvester is going to fit within the greater plan of treaties, rights and local management?
Greater use of traditional knowledge is now in the Fisheries Act, but many in the industry and in the scientific community don’t know exactly what it is nor how it will be integrated into our current salmon science programs. Local indigenous management is great conceptually, but how will it deal with conflicts among the more than 100 individual bands from Haida Gwaii to Yale and the myriad migratory stocks that are affected?
Science is the underpinning of this whole discussion, and it's not being done to a level that it should be. Without good stock assessments, how can good harvest decisions be made? We lost our marine stewardship certification for B.C. salmon because of gaps in science. This lowered our prices this year in the market, when really we needed every penny we could get.
Science itself needs to be more adaptable. While scientists focus their limited efforts on salmon outmigrations and returns, they're really not doing much out on the high seas, where the salmon spend most of their lives.
There was a program during the last few years whereby independent scientists from the U.S., Russia and Canada put together programs to conduct this science, with funding from NGOs and the salmon industry in Canada and the U.S., because we see a value and we didn’t see governments from all countries stepping forward.
Management is going to have to change as well. When there are opportunities to harvest due to unexpected higher returns, reaction has to be quicker. The salmon will be heading into the streams in short order and DFO has to be in a position to see what's happening on the water and make informed decisions in a timely way to allow the economic benefits to be realized.
Licensing is going to be the biggest issue in the short term. We pay very high fees for our salmon licences, with very little opportunity to actually fish. This year the seine sector paid over $1 million in licence fees to the government and landed 6.3 million pounds of salmon worth roughly $3.3 million. That means 30% of the total gross value of the catch, not what they took home, went straight to fees.
At the current harvest rates the entire salmon fleet is really in a precarious financial position.