Thanks to all.
A big thank you for calling this emergency meeting. Thank you also to Mr. Serge Cormier for inviting the Fédération régionale acadienne des pêcheurs professionnels to appear before you today.
First of all, a short flashback where as soon as the small redfish appeared in the summer of 2011, we immediately sounded the alarm to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and told them that we were going to have significant issues in our fishery and the shrimp industry if we did not act immediately. DFO's only action was to pull out of the drawers a closure protocol for small fish, and for the years 2012 to 2015, our shrimp fishers were forced to concentrate their fishing efforts in areas where there were few or no small redfish. It was not important to protect the shrimp.
As you can see, in the table attached to my presentation here, as early as the spring of 2016, DFO's science team commented on the negative effect that redfish were having on gulf shrimp stocks. Even though we have insisted in each of those years that we allow a redfish fishery in an attempt to reduce shrimp predation, it has always gone unanswered.
On another note, I would like to take you back to 2019 when Bill C-68 was supposed to modernize the Fisheries Act in order to achieve new objectives and thus ensure the sustainability of our fisheries. Let me quote one of the points sought in this legislation: "For our communities, it will keep the benefits of the fishery in the hands of independent fishers and their region."
Not only has this done nothing to protect our shrimp stocks, but the same is true of the recent allocation of redfish quotas, where it is clear that DFO has ignored its own legislation.
Also, I would like to draw your attention to the Gulf Licensing Policy, a copy of which you will find here in the appendix to my presentation. Let's take a look at sections 6 and 7.
Section 6 states very clearly that there is no ownership right for anyone who holds a fishing licence. It is very clear that the Minister has full discretion to issue a fishing licence without regard to history. The same is true for the allowances attached to these permits.
The announcement that Ms. Lebouthillier made on January 26 that she was relying on the history of the past 30 years does not hold water. It is also necessary to pay attention to section 7 of the licensing policy, which states the guiding principles for awarding these permits. Reading the nine points in the subsection, it is even more difficult to understand how the Minister did not take all of these elements into account in the redfish quota allocations that she has just made. You may also recall the Anglehart Jr. et al. court case before Justice Gagné, which clearly established this issue of ownership and distribution of allowances.
Now let's discuss the reality of the situation.
Yesterday we received the administrative list of allocations for the gulf shrimp quotas based on the total authorized catch, or TAC, of 3,060 mt announced by the minister. The highest allocation for us here is 48 mt. The second part of the Minister's announcement allocates a 10% quota of redfish reserved for shrimpers.
Let's see what this can do. Let's be a bit positive and go for a redfish TAC of 100,000 mt. Without going into details, let's consider the case of a fisherman with the highest shrimp allowance. At a price of $1.25 per pound for shrimp and $0.40 per pound for redfish, he would have an income potential of $220,000. However, the fixed operating costs of a shrimp boat are on average $175,000. It is impossible to operate under such conditions. The solution is to turn to the processing plants, to whom the minister has given the vast majority of redfish allocations in order to obtain a quota in sufficient quantity to make ends meet.
For fishing enterprises of less than 65', in our opinion, this contravenes the law of the owner-operator; for those of more than 65' it is a return to the last century when American and European processors controlled fleets, factories and markets. The story tells us that Messrs. Leblanc, father and son, both worked very hard when they were fisheries ministers to put an end to this practice. Today it's "Back to the future".
How can you, as a minister, as a department, as a government, force our fishing companies to break the law or, even worse, submit to the control of companies that will decide who, when, where and at what price the fisherman will be able to go fishing? Soon, these fishermen will have no choice but to sell their fishing enterprises to these companies or be entirely under their control. These companies will immediately open their arms wide to them because they need their fishing effort, but that is throwing the independent fish harvesters into the wolf's mouth.
In our view, this is a case for litigation against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It makes no sense to put in place conditions such as the current situation that force our fishing enterprises to commit illegal acts in an attempt to survive, especially when it is a law of this same department.
Over the past few years, our coalition of shrimpers from New Brunswick, Quebec and the west coast of Newfoundland has asked all successive ministers, LeBlanc, Wilkinson, Jordan, Murray and Lebouthillier, to have priority access to the opening of this redfish fishery with a minimum TAC of 25,000 mt.
We have also asked to be the only ones to fish this resource for the first two years in order to allow producers to develop a market for this redfish, which is in competition with Norway and Iceland in particular, and thus allow a gradual entry. In 2018, Minister Leblanc made public commitments to this effect.
We have also indicated many, many times to departmental staff that we need 2 million pounds per fishing operation to ensure profitability, the 25,000 mt being a starting quota. Our requests have been repeated multiple times, always without response.
Thanks for hearing me, we're out of breath.
