Fisheries committee  Thank you, Jackey. Good afternoon, gentlemen. B.C. has 27,000 kilometres of coastline. As the little handout demonstrates, we have a total of 157 scheduled sites, of which 78 of those are harbours, core harbours. We have 54 harbour authorities who manage those 78 core sites. Ja

Fisheries committee  It was a long weekend in Ottawa, so it was good. Thank you.

Fisheries committee  Hopefully we're not. I think Indian Affairs in the treaty process should recognize that these harbours are valuable assets to the first nations community, and they should be part of the process, rather than their understanding or their hope that DFO will continue to maintain and

Fisheries committee  Some of them are run by first nations groups. Some of them are supported by the small craft harbours program. But when you get involved in a treaty process, it's our belief that they should be considered part of the whole asset that the natives are negotiating for or that the cro

Fisheries committee  They don't have any other way to support them. They're on the water, and there are no roads into them, so the harbour is an integral part of their community.

Fisheries committee  I would agree. There is another consideration, though. Climate change is changing the impact on the fisheries, so the fishing vessels are changing. In some cases they're getting much larger, so we need more space for them to be housed at the harbour. As the resources change on cl

Fisheries committee  I don't have an exact figure, but we do have strategies that the harbour authorities put in place. As the fishing fleet moves out for the summer and the recreational boat traffic comes in, they'll rent the same strip out. So they're getting double booking for the same slip to imp

Fisheries committee  I can get those for you. I don't have them with me today.

Fisheries committee  I can't tell you specifically what other regions do, but I know from a study we've just done on our own that they've raised close to $9.2 million. I think that's very significant. I don't know if it's 80%, but it might be in the neighbourhood of 50% or 55% of the national total.

Fisheries committee  My personal thought is that they're more entrepreneurial. As you know, Randy, the B.C. spirit is such that if the government isn't going to do it, we'll try to do it as much as we can ourselves. They have been very creative in developing other resource revenue operations--bui

Fisheries committee  We provide engineering expertise to help them with their buildings. We've done some environmental work on special parking lots so that those are environmentally sound. We do assist them in a variety of ways. That's what I meant in my earlier remarks, that we encourage entrepreneu

Fisheries committee  It's my understanding that it was looked at briefly when the coast guard was going through a similar process a number of years ago. I wasn't with the program at the time, but when you look at the rationale for SOAs, it seems to have a good application to small craft harbours.

Fisheries committee  I'll mention two things. The numbers reflected a point in time and they're evolutionary. No one expected we were going to have a better rate on the U.S. dollar when those numbers were being done two or three years ago. So things change economically. To me, it's like a number up i

Fisheries committee  It's always been a challenge to have a legitimate window to do the work, so planning is the key. We'd like better, more relaxed regulations within our own department to assist us in that regard. But we're stuck with the regulatory requirements from Treasury Board, so that's a lit

Fisheries committee  Divestiture, to me, means that if it's principally a recreational harbour, the mandate is to look after the commercial fishing industry, so we will divest. That's what's been happening in Ontario. The majority of those harbours have been recreational harbours. The second step i