I'm going to be fairly quick here.
I'm with Jeff Thomas, who is with the same group, and he's going to speak to the handouts you have. Jeff is a councillor from Snuneymuxw First Nation, and I am the coordinator. I am working for the Vancouver Island first nations on this group.
Just to give you a little background on the group itself, access to food, social, and ceremonial fish is a huge issue in first nations in British Columbia. Certainly everybody from B.C. knows we have not had sockeye returning the way it used to. There's going to be a judicial inquiry, but we have been suffering greatly at the community level because of this in the last couple of years.
Salmon have a four-year cycle. They come home and spawn, and four years later they come back again. If you have a failure in one year, four years later you're going to have a continued failure. So three or four years in a row implies that this is going to be a long-term issue in first nations.
The first real failure was in the summer of 2007. In January 2008 the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans called together and asked first nations--everybody who used the Fraser River inbound fish--to get together to talk about how to share the very limited number of food fish they could see coming in subsequent years. Out of that working group has come the Fraser River and Approach Working Group, which does have DFO officials in it. We're the Vancouver Island portion of it. There are B.C. interior first nations, the lower Fraser, Vancouver Island, and the marine approach first nations involved in it.
To give you an idea of the scope, there are 203 first nations in British Columbia, some large and some small--more small than large. Of those, 97 are in the Fraser, from Musqueam at the mouth to Uchucklesaht at the headwaters, and between 50 and 60 of them are on Vancouver Island and in the marine approach area. This means that of the 203, something like 150 first nations are largely dependent on Fraser fish. So it's not a small issue. We're just the Vancouver Island portion of it.
I'll just make a couple of points. Our communities really were wealthy communities on the coast. There was commercial fishing available. People made good income from it. It allowed them to continue to live in their traditional locations and still have good income. It didn't used to be a situation where you had to pay any money in order to have the fish that you took home and ate. Fishing was done by community members, by family members. Fish was available and it didn't cost anything.
There's quite a bit of detail in the brief. Basically what we're looking at is that the few people who are left in our communities who are commercially fishing are people who have been able to weather the storm. They are entrepreneurs. They've been able to figure out how to fish five or six different types of fish and stay in the business.
With two or three years like this, their ability to continue to do this fishery is getting more and more limited. We're in the situation where, if you live on a reserve, you've put a good income into your home, but it has no value. You can't sell it to anybody other than to a band member, so you're in an uncomfortable situation where you have no capital that you can take out should you want to move. You have a comfortable house, but you're really kind of stuck with it.
We're now, through FRAWG, trying to find ways to coordinate the acquisition of food fish so that what fish there are can be acquired and distributed at the community level. And the big issue, of course, is that it now costs money and there is no source of money in the Indian Affairs budget or anything like that to provide for those costs.
I would just say that first nations administration have a very limited budget. Where first nations have spent money, it mostly comes out of the social assistance budget, and that in itself is problematic. Just to give you an example, in the community where I work, this year we paid $1,500 and we delivered about 300 food fish to the members of a community of 600 people. Five years ago we were delivering between 4,000 and 6,000 pieces of fish, and that would be normal. We would anticipate that an average household would be eating fish once a week. We are looking at 50 or 60 fish per household. That would have been a normal level of food intake.
That's not traditional. Traditionally, it would be much higher than that. But that's what we've been accommodating and that's what we're not getting now. We can't get that without some kind of level of income.
I would just leave it at that. I will leave it to Jeff to speak to the rest of it. We do have a brief and we have at least three specific questions for you. We're looking to see if we can get some assistance from the committee or some understanding that we need a source of funds, maybe from Health and Welfare or some other federal government agency or provincial government, so that communities can organize and manage and get their own fish when there's low abundance. Next year we might not need it, but definitely it's an issue now.
There are some issues in terms of fish management, where fish are being dumped because they're the wrong stock. We're doing food, social, and ceremonial fish on sockeye, and then if you happen to go on a pink salmon bycatch, we're not allowed to bring it in. It's just thrown away at sea. It's perfectly edible fish. In fact, our community got pinks this year, which was bycatch, because we went up and got it from a commercial fisherman who would otherwise have had to throw it away. So that's an issue.
Then we have an EI issue as well to do with the two kinds of seasonal EI and wage EI.
So I'll leave it at that.