Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members.
As a researcher with the Institut de recherche en économie contemporaine, the IREC, I have been interested for over three years in the commercial fisheries and aquaculture sector in maritime Quebec from a regional development perspective.
This sector is facing many issues, and I would like to thank you for inviting me to appear this morning as an expert to give my opinion on the matter of foreign ownership and corporate concentration of fishing licences and quotas.
In Quebec, the presence of foreign firms and funds in aquatic product processing is very real but poorly documented. This is a topic we would also like to study in greater depth at IREC. However, this is an issue that falls under provincial jurisdiction, and I do not think the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or DFO, should be involved in this segment of the industry.
That being said, I think DFO's efforts in recent years to enshrine the Owner-Operator and Fleet Separation Policies in regulations are commendable, even if, based on the testimonies heard in recent sessions, it seems that there is still a lot of work to be done to enforce these regulations fully.
In fact, it is the concentration of fishing companies, a phenomenon that has been observable in Quebec for some years now, that I would like to focus on today.
I have looked at the official DFO data and, for a period of about 10 years, between 2012 and 2021, there have been 465 fewer fishing licences in Quebec, representing a decrease of 8%, while the number of fishers has increased by 34, or 3%. In other words, there are now more fishers sharing fewer licences, which means that we are seeing a significant concentration of fishing licences.
At the same time, landed values have increased sharply in recent years, primarily as a result of higher prices for the main crustaceans on global markets. The result is that each fisher today earns, on average, almost two and a half times what a fisher earned 10 years ago, and that is in constant dollars, which account for inflation. These data are certainly very general and mask an infinitely more complex reality.
Recently, I had the opportunity to produce a fisheries portrait for the regional county municipalities, or RCMs, of the Gaspé Peninsula. In the course of this research, we toured the Gaspé region to gather qualitative data, namely through interviews with fisheries stakeholders. These interviews complement the statistical data and provide a better understanding of the dynamics at work in the Gaspé Peninsula, and possibly elsewhere in maritime Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
The concentration of fishing licences, which has been under way for a number of years, is creating two major challenges for coastal communities with regard to the redistribution of wealth and the establishment of the new generation of fishers. To put it another way, the concentration of fishing licences and quotas in recent years has resulted in a concentration of wealth and an increase in socio-economic inequalities among fishers from different fleets, especially between snow crab and American lobster fishers and other fishers.
This concentration of fishing licences and quotas has also had the effect of accentuating barriers to establishing a new generation of fishers, because it is now more difficult to acquire a first fishing business than it used to be, which in turn reinforces the socio-economic inequalities.
To conclude, I would like to note that in addition to protecting and conserving marine ecosystems, the aim of DFO's regulations and policies is to promote the economic prosperity of fishers and their communities. However, it appears that the department is failing to fulfill that role adequately. That is why it is necessary to consider other regulatory mechanisms to prevent too great a concentration of fishing licences, especially for the main species, and to facilitate access to these licences for the next generation.