Thank you for this opportunity to speak today.
My name is James Lawson. I'm president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union-Unifor, a representative of the Prawn Industry Caucus and a prawn fisherman.
DFO's mandate includes maintaining the sustainability of fisheries and working with fishers to enable continued prosperity from fish and seafood. Prawn tubbing is not a sustainability issue, and it is in direct opposition to enabling our prosperity and the prosperity of others who purchase our prawns.
As a prawn fisherman, I adhere to regulations, including trap limit, minimum mesh size, daily single hauls, time and area closures and the spawner index, to maintain the sustainability of the stock. When a trap comes aboard, if a small prawn hasn't already escaped through the appropriately sized mesh, it goes onto a grading table, where we handle each individual prawn to ensure that it's not bearing eggs and is of appropriate size. We also sort out the other species, if present.
Measuring devices are always close at hand. We put in great time and effort to make sure that we provide a quality product and maintain the sustainability of our stocks. We don't want to keep undersized product. We certainly don't want to have it aboard for a week or more, risking penalties.
If conservation and protection wanted to exercise their right to board my vessel and check for undersized prawns, they would have ample opportunity. It could be done using a sample off the grading table, taking a sample out of the live tank, taking an unfrozen tub off the freezer plates, or thawing a frozen sample in little to no time using a deck hose, kettle or hot water from a tap. It's insulting that conservation and protection could look past all of this to reinterpret the general fisheries rule for just one fishery, and then say these penalties are at the discretion of officers for the season. It will be a great risk to process in this manner without DFO officially stating it will be legal to tub prawns this year.
I encourage industry-made solutions, but this issue has many small and simple solutions. It feels like we are being coerced in the making of binding decisions ourselves. I do not think enforcing a tub ban would stand in a court of law. I think it would be a big waste of everybody's time and money. The solution could be as simple as a reasonably sized transparent container.
Is there nothing to be said for precedence? This has been done for decades without problems. There was no recent spike in undersized prawn infractions that would be cause for reinterpretation. You'll do nothing but hurt the markets of prawn fishermen. Frozen tubs sold in my hometown were my most valuable product last year, beating my most valuable export prawns by four dollars a pound. Many fishermen, including me, were planning to tub a lot more this year to provide more prawns to our home communities. People are willing to pay a good price for superior product when they know who caught it and where it came from, and know that it's not an inferior product imported and found on a grocery store shelf.
Prawns have always been valuable in local markets. They were further explored as a viable option last year in response to the COVID pandemic creating export market uncertainty. I don't know the official figures, but local tub sales were said to grow tenfold compared with previous years. This is a great success story of local seafood being available to local markets. It is economic prosperity. It is food security. It humanizes us and makes us proud to be able to provide for people we know, giving a visible attachment to our labour.
If prawn-tubbing is taken away, it means British Columbians may only be able to access prawns in season, if they live close to a boat who's delivering live to the dock, or from a restaurant who is buying live prawns, or obtaining some sort of poorer-quality frozen product. People like to eat prawns year-round. The best way to preserve them is frozen in tubs of sea-water. That is the superior product that restaurant owners will purchase for their meals outside of May and June.
Taking tubs away leaves us only with the export market for vessels who freeze at sea. There are many examples of how that can hurt the bottom line of fishing businesses when the primary market is not favourable, as it now due to the pandemic. It is strange that DFO is presently considering a date change based on availability of local markets while simultaneously taking away another.
This proposed ban is not about sustainability. It is not working with fishermen to enable the continued prosperity of us or those who rely on or enjoy the product. It is of detriment to food security. It singles out one fishery in a long-standing regulation. Let us be a success story with a strong local market. What is happening is not right. It serves only to devalue catching prawns and make them unavailable to us.
I'd like to end this before it even begins.
Thank you.