That was before the harvester even fuelled and put gear on his boat, found a crew, paid for insurance or got his boat moored. All of those costs were on top of the $110,000 it was costing him to get a prawn license to go out for a 34-day prawn fishery, and they didn't know how successful it was going to be.
This is driving away any young entrepreneurs who would love to take over their family's operation, or a neighbouring operation, and operate a fishery to sustain their family. It's $110,000 just for the permission to be able to get out there.
The worst of it is that nobody seemed to know, within the department, who owned that licence—well, they may have known who owned it; it may have been a company—or if there was any beneficial ownership to Canadians. That was the big piece that came out of the west coast studies, both the 2019 study and the 2021 study, when we found that so little had been done.
Nobody really knows who the beneficial owners are of all of those licences and that quota on the west coast. I want to thank my colleague, Mr. Hardie, for putting that study motion forward back in.... I'm not sure whether the motion came forward in 2018 or 2019. The report came out in 2019, so it was probably months in the making.
The recommendations go on in that report:
Recommendation 4
That an independent consultation and support office for fishers be established so that owner-operators have a forum where they can speak freely and consult, sheltered from pressures placed on them by markets and by foreign companies.
It's a simple call for an independent consultation and support office—not a DFO office but an independent office. The government's response, again, was that “[t]he Government acknowledges the recommendation and challenges the Committee faced when seeking input from witnesses whose livelihoods could be negatively impacted for speaking openly about their concerns.” I believe that was the study where we had to have witnesses testify in camera with their witness names completely kept out of the report because they were afraid of retaliation by other entities that could affect their ability to operate. That was one instance of that. We had another instance when we were doing the study on the elver fishery where witnesses, again, were to testify anonymously because they were absolutely concerned about their own personal safety, the safety of their families and the safety of their possessions back home.
Those concerns have only amplified over the last few months because recommendations were made. There were tools that the minister could have used to address the lawlessness that's taken place, the imposition of what apparently is organized crime into the operation; that was the elver fishery. We've heard allegations of the same thing happening in the lobster fishery. There are tools within the Fisheries Act that the minister could have used to address the recommendations made by committee members. The minister apparently disregarded the recommendations from the committee members and didn't use the tools that are provided in the act to do her job, as the previous five ministers under this government have failed to take the steps required to deter illegal activity or unregulated activity. We've almost completed a study on illegal, unreported, unregulated fisheries, and some of the testimony we heard in that study was alarming as well.
Canada has sent huge resources offshore and partnered with international agencies to counteract illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries elsewhere in international waters, but we heard from witnesses who were quite capable of undertaking work within Canadian waters who had not been contacted by the department or the minister about using those tools within Canadian waters.
Those recommendations will come out in the report. I hope that the department takes this intervention today seriously to heart so that the witnesses here today can go back to the minister and let the minister know how disappointed the members around this room are with her ministry's response to witness testimony and to strong advice from these committee members, which in most cases is unanimous. These are unanimous recommendations from all parties that the department and the minister take action. Without knowing if the department—