Fisheries committee  I would say not from the standpoint of a generation ago, but just within the last five years the fishery has grown in value significantly. We see large processors looking to control costs and buy licences and we see more leasing-out from processors.

Fisheries committee  The crab fishery probably has more young harvesters than a lot of other fisheries do, because of the growing value, but in the fishing industry as a whole, I would say no.

Fisheries committee  It's a bit of a unique situation. In the area where I fish, which is northern British Columbia, I am the only non-Vietnamese-Canadian captain in the fleet. The Vietnamese-Canadian population makes up a very big part of the crab fleet. Many of them own the licence themselves, or the family owns it—maybe a mom, a dad or a wife—so they may not technically be owner-operators, but theirs is a family-run business.

Fisheries committee  It's a bit of a speculative thing for me to say, but I know that as fishermen we certainly coordinate with one another as to what prices are. I imagine buyers do something similar, but I can't provide evidence of that.

Fisheries committee  To be quite frank, it doesn't seem as though the Pacific region has much interest in moving many of those recommendations ahead.

Fisheries committee  I catch crab for a living. I don't know how to herd bureaucrats, unfortunately. How can we get them to do it faster? I'm sorry, but I don't have an answer for you.

Fisheries committee  I can't very much, really. We just have no people in the department who are working on it. We had one person for a year and a half. That person moved onto a different file in December. From what I understand, they've been replaced, but there's just basically no staff capacity put towards potential changes to licensing or towards realizing socio-economic protections that were put into the recent changes to the Fisheries Act.

Fisheries committee  I think we've been pretty lucky up until this point, until recently. The crab fishery has really started growing significantly in value in the last five to 10 years. Before then, there was not a lot of interest in buying licences, other than among fishermen. It was a very independent fishery up until recently, and it still is, in most areas.

Fisheries committee  Sure. It certainly happens. The crab fishery is a little different, because in most places it's almost a year-round fishery. In other fisheries maybe there are only 30 days or 60 days, a very short term, so you can make that debt mistake multiple times in one year and really get yourself in a spot.

Fisheries committee  I guess I probably worded it a little poorly. We do use licensing policy in a sense to set conservation. We have a limited number of licences, but the idea of who owns those licences is not the same as the idea of transferring quota. It's not used in the same sense. There's not really much effort at all given to achieving socio-economic goals in our fishery.

Fisheries committee  Yes. Area E Tofino harvesters lost 50% of their access to their business. That sounds like losing 50%, but it really means losing 100% of their profitability. In a very short time frame, the profitability of the business they've been doing for a long time went away. Then those harvesters moved elsewhere and diluted access in other parts of the coast, so it's become a coast-wide issue.

Fisheries committee  It's not an area that I fish specifically, but when it happened.... I think it's really clear to say that naturally there are tensions. Those tensions are downloaded onto us and projected by poor policy. You can imagine what it might bring when you're losing your entire livelihood and the community of people you work with are losing their livelihood, and it's sort of being heralded as reconciliation.

Fisheries committee  To be honest, I don't think it's our place to speak to how they exercise those rights. We certainly feel for harvesters who want to be on the water, but we're not in a place at this time to determine self-determination for different nations. You can speak more to independent harvesters on that.

Fisheries committee  You'd want at least the best price when you're selling, yes.

Fisheries committee  I would say the demand is so strong that you almost would not have to worry about it. This government has given hundreds of millions of dollars to CFN specifically. There's a lot of capital that would make that process fairly seamless. I imagine prices will drop a little bit, potentially, but I don't think there's going to be this big cliff.