Fisheries committee  Yes, it's a really important thing to be considering. I'll put my answer in the context of a global situation where basically global fish catch has flatlined. It's not going to get much higher, so we're going to have companies and countries looking to secure supply. As we've heard, we have great resource on the west coast.

Fisheries committee  I would say for me it's the monitoring, like a licence and quota registry. For some of the reasons I talked about, I think it will make understanding these markets easier, and if the desire is to regulate them in one way or another, then that will make it easier. I think from a transparency standpoint, again with a public resource and the capacity within DFO and within the research community to be helping to ask questions about social and economic objectives in coastal communities, that would have the double value of helping our understanding of the issues.

Fisheries committee  You heard last week from Alaska. I think there are some interesting initiatives going on there that were discussed. Personally, most of my research has been in B.C. I'm happy to try and pull some papers that I can provide to the committee.

Fisheries committee  I think that the history of first licence implementation goes back to the late 1960s with TAC and quota. In some fisheries, it's a really important one, although it's much longer than we can go into here. When we consider that there were lots of people in vessels involved in fisheries before licence limitation happened, vessels just don't go away.

Fisheries committee  The social scientist in me thinks about that longer history and that people, harvesters and vessels don't just go away.

Fisheries committee  Yes, and this speaks to the issue of the separation from licence ownership, and in many cases the separation of that from actual harvesting. The costs of harvesting aren't necessarily being borne by those who own the licence.

Fisheries committee  This is one of the challenges I've encountered in my research on trying to understand who are the investors. When you run into numbered companies, for example, in licence registries, it becomes very difficult for a researcher like me who is relying on publicly available information to determine who exactly those numbered companies are and then understand their motives and motivations, where the money they have to invest is coming from and those sorts of things.

Fisheries committee  I think a first-off would be a publicly accessible registry of licences and quotas. As I mentioned, there is this very large spreadsheet which DFO Pacific does make available. It has taken us a couple of years to understand it, and then to use it. I'm not a computer coder. I had to find a very specialized colleague who was able to help me with this to match identification across licences.

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the invitation to be here today and for the opportunity to speak to you about west coast fisheries. Also, thank you to my co-panellists and the panellists earlier. It's really a delight to be speaking among so many fish harvesters. I have been researching fisheries, aquaculture and coastal communities in British Columbia for 14 years, and I've been studying commercial fisheries licensing for the last two, specifically.