Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank all committee members for having me here today.
I am a professor and Canada Research Chair in Fisheries Ecology at the Institut des sciences de la mer of the Université du Québec à Rimouski. Since 2018, my research team has been working in collaboration with Fisheries and Oceans Canada researchers to study the ecology of the redfish resurgence in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The aim of this research is to understand the environmental factors that control redfish recruitment, diet composition, growth, and movements in the gulf. I therefore consider that I am familiar with the redfish file.
I was first asked to comment on the scales used to allocate the redfish quota in relation to the critical situation faced by shrimp harvesters. The 10% share of the 25,000 tonne overall quota allocated to shrimp harvesters was considered very disappointing by them. I can well understand their disappointment, given that once this 2,500-tonne allocation is divided among the 80 existing shrimp fishing licences, it only represents about 70,000 pounds per licence, a quantity that would not enable a captain to make a profit from this fishery.
Many observers decried the fact that, as it happened in the past, the offshore sector got the lion's share of the fishery, with 58.69% of the total allowable catch. However, it would have been difficult for the minister to ignore historical shares in the redfish fishery when setting allocations. One criterion consistently used by the department to establish shares when reopening a fishery, or when moving from a competitive fishery to a fleet sharing system, is the consideration of historical shares.
I have been working for a long time on Atlantic halibut in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This is a species for which the fishery went from marginal during the period from 1970 to 2000 to very lucrative starting in the 2010s. At the time of the rapid resurgence of the stock, it was also necessary to settle on a formula for sharing the quota among eight fleets, and such a formula, based on historical shares in the fishery, was established in 2007. In 2011, Ernst & Young was commissioned to evaluate this sharing scheme. The firm based its analysis on the management of several other stocks and concluded that the consideration of historical shares was appropriate. It was therefore expected that historical shares would be considered for the redfish fishery, like they have been for other stocks.
With respect to the critical situation faced by shrimp harvesters, I think that even a substantial increase in their share of the redfish fishery could not easily compensate for the disappearance of shrimp. Over the 2000-2020 period, shrimp harvesters landed an annual average of around 25,000 tonnes of shrimp. However, the value per unit weight of shrimp is far greater than that of redfish. For example, in 2021, harvesters received $1.75 per pound for shrimp compared with just $0.50 per pound for redfish. This factor of 3.5 implies that a lucrative situation would require annual landings of 87,500 tonnes of redfish. Such landings are probably not viable in the short term, because of the lack of markets for the resource, or sustainable in the long term, given the high natural mortality that is causing a rapid decline in the redfish stock.
Rapid changes in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including rising temperatures and falling oxygen levels, will certainly lead to other difficult situations. The Greenland halibut stock can be expected to keep decreasing rapidly or collapse in the short term, and some snow crab stocks will likely follow this trend in the medium term, as the system continues to warm. The current shrimp fishery crisis could quickly spread to other fisheries, a situation that could further damage the economies of coastal communities in five provinces.
For these reasons, I recommend that the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans extend the scope of the present study beyond redfish quota allocations to identify a range of solutions to, first, support shrimp harvesters in the short term and, second, increase the resilience of the fisheries sector in the longer term by establishing strategies to prevent the future crises emerging in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.