Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries
Issue 8 - Evidence - May 14, 1998
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 14, 1998
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries met this day at 8:30 a.m. to consider the questions of privatization and quota licensing in Canada's fisheries.
Senator Gerald J. Comeau (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Our first witness is Mr. Michael Belliveau, Executive Secretary, Maritime Fishermen's Union. The union's membership includes fishers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, mainly lobster fishers, and their equivalents in the Bay of Fundy and on the Scotian Shelf.
The MFU has about 1,700 dues-paying members, and there are six locals. Mr. Michael Belliveau has been the Executive Secretary since 1987. He has given this committee some very valuable and useful testimony in the past.
Thank you for agreeing to participate in our hearings. We are anxious to hear what you have to say on the subject of individual quotas and privatization.
Mr. Michael Belliveau, Executive Secretary, Maritime Fisherman's Union: The Maritime Fishermen's Union (MFU) is a broad-based inshore fishers' organization. We are based in as many as 150 different fishing harbours in three provinces. We are based in both the francophone and anglophone fisheries.
We are based in the Gulf and the Scotia-Fundy regions, and we have a base in virtually every commercial fishery in the Maritimes. We are in lobsters, herring, mackerel, smelts, gaspereaux, tuna, scallops, rock crabs, snow crabs, oysters, cod, pollock, haddock, plaice, and so on. Nevertheless, a fisher joins the MFU on the sole basis of being an inshore fisher. Within the inshore fishery, we are an inclusive organization, as distinct from a single-species, single-gear, single-wharf, or special-interest organization.
By our very nature, we are forced to consider the interests of the entire collectivity of inshore fishers. We must deal with the common good, as opposed to special interests. This broad-based character makes us vulnerable to the federal government's apparent drive towards privatizing the fisheries. It places us at loggerheads with the DFO, as it seems to abdicate its role as the manager of the fishery, working instead to broker partnership deals with special-interest or specialist fleets. It also places our organization under enormous stress, as it must inevitably shoulder the downloading of responsibilities for what I am calling "the common good."
For some time, we have been caught in the middle of a fisheries governing crisis. The crisis was dramatically precipitated by the groundfish management failure, but it is also an expression of a more generalized crisis of the state. It is a crisis that has brought forth many new visionaries, who are embracing unexamined ideas of self-management.
Unfortunately, the legitimate aspirations of fishers to have more say in the fishery has played into the hands of Treasury Board planners. In our view, these planners not only want to divest themselves of the fishery; they also want to make a profit as they go. A broad-based fisher's organization, such as the MFU, is caught in what I refer to as the ambiguities of co-management.
On the one hand, fishers are clearly attracted to the idea of having more control over their fisheries, and we have to work with this. On the other hand, however, the DFO and Treasury Board, under the fine-sounding terms of "co-management" or "partnering," are pursuing a questionable privatization agenda promoted by the corporate sector, which is represented by the Fisheries Council of Canada.
We are in a very ironic situation, where the overriding policy of the Government of Canada is working in favour of some very special interests, while the rest of us are left to agonize over the fate of the coastal working people and their communities.
I will try to be more specific by following up on one of the DFO's prize models for privatization, which is the so-called partnership with the New Brunswick snow-crab fleet. This is a group of 81 midshore licence holders, who have had quite a time of it over the last 15 years. One respected accountant told me that this group of 81 licence holders is estimated to be worth something like $500 million, which would mean that the average Area 12 snow-crab licence holder is worth approximately 60 times more than the average Canadian.
This is the group that the DFO planners have actively wooed as a model partner. The basics of the partnership can be boiled down to the DFO using the full powers of the federal state to grant private ownership of most, if not all, of the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence snow-crab resource to this group. In return, the group of crab licence holders picked up some of the annual costs of the science and management of this resource.
This appears fine, until you remember that there is another fleet in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. This inshore fleet is made up of some 4,000 owner-operator fishers who pursue a well developed and well regulated multi-species fishery, relying first on the productive and widely dispersed lobster resource, and then on a range of licences to make up a full fishing season. The inshore fleet has permanent access to 10 per cent of the snow-crab resource.
In New Brunswick, however, the inshore fleet will not have access in 1998. Under the latest agreement between the DFO and the New Brunswick crab fishers, our fleet of 1,400 is only allowed marginal and temporary access, and only when the average gross value of the crab licence holder's landing reaches $500,000. They are calling it a threshold. If they do not meet the average of $500,000, the deficit is carried over to the next year. It is likely, therefore, that the actual threshold will be something like $700,000 per licence holder in 1999.
It is an interesting arrangement, but it excludes the entire inshore fleet in New Brunswick. The snow crab is not something that is only in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is also on the inshore banks and in the inshore waters, and that is why we have been demanding access. We have to wonder what is driving the Government of Canada to so favour one group, while the common good of most of the productive and broad-based inshore fleets in the country is ignored.
Considerations for the collectivity of fishers go out the window when the overriding agenda is cost recovery, the downsizing of government, and the privatization of the fishery. You can imagine the force of the lobby from those individuals and groups who stand to gain from the privatization of the country's marine resources.
In New Brunswick, we have an organization called the APFA; the Acadian Professional Fishermen's Association. It is a 20-year-old organization, and it has been blown apart by the stress of the crabbers' drive toward private and exclusive ownership. Organizations may fragment into special interest groups, which would attempt to secure their own pieces of the pie, be it scallops or tuna, haddock or shrimp.
The DFO is apparently open to all manner of proposals. It is signing agreements that have enormous consequences for the common good of coastal communities, but those agreements are not scrutinized from the point of view of the common good.
Some members of our fleet are facing bankruptcy because of localized drops in lobster catch and the collapse of herring roe prices, not to mention the prolonged demise of the cod stock. We cannot accept the inevitability of these bankruptcies when we see what the DFO public policy is doing.
As a result of the DFO requirements for things such as licence fees, dockside monitoring, observers, science costs, and wharfage, our fishers estimate that they are paying between $5,000 and $9,000 in new costs. How can we accept the little guy's bankruptcy, especially when we see the arrangements that are made with other fleets?
We do not believe that the DFO has either the right or the moral authority to decide who stays and who goes. From our vantage point, however, that is precisely what it is doing in its privatization efforts. It is in this context that organizations such as ours are being asked to shoulder responsibility for resource management, or what the DFO calls co-management.
With respect to quota licensing, I would hope that your study will not lose sight of the forest for the trees. In this case, unfortunately, the forest is in ruins. The quota management system, as it has been implemented since 1977, is in tatters and ruins. At best, the entire East Coast groundfish resource is 10 per cent of what it was 15 years ago.
The Scotia-Fundy herring seiners went on individual quotas in 1982. In that region, the resource, if not in collapse, is not far from it. At the present time, the only real ITQ system in groundfish is based in southwest Nova Scotia. I know there are other ITQ systems, but that is the only one that seems to be functioning at the present time, because it is the only one where there are still some fish.
Even here, we now have some very troubling signs in the cod fishery, where most of the effort and resources have shifted to the very western end of 4X. As you know, there has been much focus over the past year on the DFO science's role in our groundfish demise.
The debate, which is mainly a media debate about the role of science in the groundfish collapse, is largely, in my judgment, phoney. It is phoney not because scientists within and outside the DFO do not have extremely important points to make about what caused the groundfish collapse, and not because there is not real validity to the charge that the DFO science bureaucracy has tried to cover their rear end. There is validity to these assertions, but they are of marginal interest to inshore fisherman who have been shouting to the rooftops since roughly 1980-82 that the resource cannot withstand the massive aggressive fishing, unleashed by the Canadianized dragger fishery, since the 200-mile limit was imposed.
The DFO science enterprise was, in effect, co-opted by this powerful build-up in Canadian fishing power since 1977, but it is absolutely phoney to go after the scientists. They did not have a chance in a climate driven by powerful monied interests. Political interests invariably followed and represented the powerful. Do not for a minute think that we are talking only of National Sea or FPI.
Let us face facts. The destruction of the cod fishery also came from the ranks of the midshore and even the inshore fishers. We know this story well in the MFU. The fish company or the individual fisher invests in a highly efficient fishing machine, usually with provincial subsidies. Then they find more fish. In fact, they need more fish. Their machines are bought and their catch history is built up. Catch history is something that we can maybe come back to.
The mobiles in the Acadian Peninsula in 1988 then made similar demands for ITQs, and then southwest Nova Scotia came on in 1989, and the under 45 foot mobiles in Chéticamp in 1991, and so on. The Canadian offshore companies built up their history through 1977-82, and then began their enterprise allocation request, and were successful.
The fishers who were involved with these demands for quotas broke with the traditional inshore organization, the MFU, and created their own special interest associations to lobby for quota and property rights. Because of these systems of enterprise allocations and individual transferable quotas, most of the future groundfish resource was claimed by the fleets, who finished it off by 1993. The official policy of the DFO to this day supports the status quo on groundfish allocation.
It seems to me rather extraordinary that such fleets could be directly instrumental in fishing down the resource that has cost the public purse billions of dollars. In some cases, they are moving their vessels to other fisheries while our fish numbers are down, and still, they have a claim on the future groundfish resource, if it is ever rehabilitated.
You can understand why an individual fisher or company holds on fiercely to their percentage share of the resource, even when there is no fishery. But we cannot understand why the DFO and the provinces have not demanded anything in return for having kept this mobile fleet on support programs. They have given them deferred interest payments, crab and shrimp allocations, and have set up high-priced experimental projects, and so on.
We recommended four years ago that the government buy out the quotas held by the companies and the ITQ holders, and dispense of any further obligations. Thus, when the resource returns, we will all be in a position to have a whole new resource-friendly approach to fishing cod, in this instance.
Committee members should know that we already have a very strong example of a quota allocation reversal in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, when in 1980, the herring resource had been fished down to virtual collapse. At that time, the large seiner fleet was reduced from 80 per cent of the quota to 20 per cent, and throughout the 1980s, it was returned back to an inshore fishery. I can tell you that the performance is a very interesting study between what is happening to the herring resources in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is predominantly an inshore gillnet fishery, as distinct from Scotia-Fundy, where it remains predominantly a larger mobile seiner fishery.
I am not sure that they are completely comparable, but it is a very interesting study. I do not want to be misinterpreted on the quota management issue, either. It seems that there has to be some form of quota management to keep a basic check on powerful mobile technologies. Some quota licensing systems, in specific contexts, can work in the interest of the common good. I stress that our practical, historical experience on the East Coast of Canada with individual quota systems surely cannot be considered successful from the point of view of the collectivity of fishers in their communities, or of the resource itself.
In general, I believe that it is indisputable that the EA and ITQ regimes gradually, and sometimes dramatically, alienate fishers from the resource. The actual entities holding the quotas are businesses that inevitably get vertically integrated with fish companies. I am not talking about one fish company; I am talking about all kinds of different fish companies. These systems generate layoffs, and they are inevitably capital intensive. More often than not, they tend to concentrate through partnership arrangements. They are even getting control of the science, or at least skewing the science.
These systems continue to redirect effort on to the resource, a fact that is often overlooked. The temporary vessel replacement policy, for example, has allowed smaller inshore, or midshore type of ITQ holders to fish offshore quota in inshore grounds, in grounds where the offshore vessels would not have fished, so you have a redirection of quota that way. There are many other kinds of examples of how you get redirection of effort under these kinds of systems.
I suppose you could not talk about ITQ systems without making some reference to the problem that is always experienced, wherever they are introduced, with high grading. We see this, in a curious kind of way, in the snow-crab fishery in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Only part of the system is on individual quota. This fact is often overlooked. If you hold an individual quota in one fishery, it very often gives you a real advantage in another fishery that is competitive. Maybe we could try to elaborate on that.
When it comes to the issue of capacity, I believe EAs and ITQs have been a bit of a ruse. I know I am sticking my neck out a bit by saying that, because one of the stated objectives of ITQs is that they are supposed to rationalize the fleet. I am not convinced of that. I remember when Gordon Cummings wanted to get into the enterprise allocation program. They wanted to get a factory freezer trawler that had the capacity of fishing something like 15,000 tonnes of fish a year. They tried to convince the industry that, in exchange for getting that new capacity, they would retire three vessels in the Canso area. We found out that the vessels, or licences, that they were retiring were attached to vessels that were on the shore and virtually non-functional. They put in a new vessel capable of fishing 15,000 tonnes to replace three that really were not functioning before.
That was in 1984. Three weeks ago, I received a press release from the DFO, in which Minister Anderson announced a change in the vessel rules for Scotia-Fundy. In this case, it meant that it applies only to the mobile gear groundfish fleet operating under permanent ITQs in Scotia-Fundy. Under these revised rules, a 42-foot vessel can increase up to 64 feet in length, and the volume restrictions that were previously in place are to be eliminated.
Then the minister is quoted as saying that they could do this because the ITQ program provides each licence holder with access to a specified share of the allocation granted to the fleet. These replacement rules will not affect capacities as they do not affect the amount of fish individual fishers can harvest.
I have a hard time with that. In the actual written text I see, "Pour l'amour du bon dieu; pour l'amour du ciel." What is going on here? You can take a 42-foot vessel, increase its capacity up to 64 feet and 11 inches, and it is not called a capacity increase because you have an ITQ system. But if somebody from the outside comes in from Mars or somewhere, what does he see? He sees more capacity.
The irony of this is that in the inshore fixed gear fishery, where vessel size really is not a factor in your fishing capacity in the same way at all, we have asked for years for some kind of flexibility where our lobster men, who were fishing in 33-foot boats, would be allowed to increase their size. Never, never, in 15 years have we had any change in those rules. But if you get an ITQ, you get an increased capacity, but it is not called that.
You may detect that I feel strongly about that particular aspect of the ITQ system. I think it is a ruse on that score. I think when you come to a collapse in the resource, as we have come to in the groundfish, you talk to a fellow who owns a 42-foot boat or a 64-foot boat, and I am not sure that they agree that they are equal anymore. The 64-foot boat owner will tend, I suspect, to catch considerably more than the one with the 42-foot boat.
Those are some initial comments, Mr. Chairman. It is a broad subject. I actually patched together a couple of things that I presented in other contexts before, but I hope it holds together with some kind of coherency. Maybe we can get into questions.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Belliveau. As usual, your presentation is both forceful and well researched. We appreciate your testimony.
Senator Stewart: Mr. Belliveau, the argument for restriction of any kind to a commons, whether it is on land or sea, is that it is necessary and desirable to prevent a frantic drive to harvest the yield. You have detailed what you see as the disadvantages of those restrictions. In your defence of access to the commons, are you opposing licensed access -- I am not talking about quota -- as imposed in the lobster fishery?
Mr. Belliveau: No, of course not.
Senator Stewart: To that extent, you approve of privatization.
Mr. Belliveau: Of course, yes. I think when we use the term "privatization," we are talking about a larger trend, where what used to be government is divested to the private sector. It is not just the simple issue of private property or common property rights. We have lots of those, we know that.
Senator Stewart: But there is an element of privatization in the licence and what happens to it when the older fisher passes on. As I understand the quota system, whether it is transferable or not, the purpose is to prevent this frantic drive, which is alleged to be very hard on the resource and very hard on the fishers.
Am I correct in assuming that you would accept that if everybody has access to the commons, there is likely to be that kind of unproductive frantic drive?
Mr. Belliveau: I know the theories you are talking about. I am not sure whether in practice it works out that way. I think we really almost need an anthropologist to testify to your committee, too, but I do not think in practice it happens that way. I have been in fisheries in West Africa, in South India and in Southeast Asia, and I can assure you that inshore fishers and artisinal fishers all around the world find ways to manage their fisheries and limit themselves in various kinds of forms. It is not just a wild and frantic race for the resource.
In fact, what you see in many, many cases is that the resource really starts to get into trouble where there are more advanced operations of modern capital, and so on.
Senator Stewart: I am just a little bit surprised at that answer, because it implies very much of a laissez-faire, leave it to the market, approach to the fishery.
Mr. Belliveau: That is not what was implied at all. I am trying to counter the image that fishers will frantically drive to the resource unless they are harnessed in. I am saying that there is an enormous amount of literature and fact that would suggest that fishers find ways of self-regulation and ways of managing resources, in very strict manners, actually.
You get into problems, in my judgment, when you set up these kinds of artificial trading arrangements, where all of a sudden you turn fish into quotas and on to paper. Then you get into problems. I am not saying you cannot do some of that, but that is what we are talking about here.
We are talking about a quota system that got fully involved in Eastern Canada after 1977. Any amount of theoretical study cannot do away with the fact that there is no resource left where the quota management was most sophisticatedly applied with all of these highly sophisticated theories of individual ownership and management.
Senator Stewart: Mr. Belliveau, I am not defending the quota, but I am trying to discover whether or not you have a workable alternative. Do you believe that, with unlimited access, there would be a viable fishery? You told us right at the beginning that you believe in licensing, for example, in the lobster fishery. That then seems to be inconsistent with what I call your laissez-faire approach to access, which you supported with anthropological evidence from various places around the world.
You are not being as helpful to me as you might be, because I detect an inconsistency, which so far you have not eliminated.
Mr. Belliveau: I think we should clarify a couple of things here. In the last part of this exchange, we were talking about quota management. The lobster fishery is not on quota management at all; it is on limited entry. There can be a limited number of operations, but it is not on a quota system.
Senator Stewart: Correct. Agreed.
Mr. Belliveau: It is a marvellous example of how you might manage a fishery without quota. I do not think you can holus bolus transfer of the lobster fishery on to a fin fishery, like the herring or cod fishery. But you might start looking at the successful management of the lobster fishery and figure out what components could be applied properly in a ground fishery, if it ever recovers. I guess that is the theme I am trying to get at. I am not a complete "either-or" person. I completely support limited fisheries, but they have to be limited in a way that takes into account the communities, particularly the coastal communities, that have depended on the fisheries for centuries.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: At the start of your presentation, one of the examples you used was the management of the snow crab fishery. In my opinion, this is not the best example around of co-management of a fishery. In fact, I think we should avoid following this example when it comes to other fisheries, for the simple reason that in this case, we have succeeded in concentrating wealth in the hands of only a few people. Those connected with the industry, namely deckhands and plant workers, barely manage to scratch out a living while some inshore fishermen, who should also have access to the fishery, fare even worse than that some years. This year, they are not even participating in this fishery. We must continue our efforts to ensure that inshore fishermen receive their fair share and have access to certain stocks. The situation with respect to the snow crab fishery is something to be avoided, not emulated.
As you know, the scallop and lobster fisheries are important to fishermen in our region. I know that these fishermen are focusing their attention on scallop enhancement. The minister is being pressured to change some of the restrictions applying to the lobster fishery, in particular as regards the size and number of traps.
If you were to make recommendations regarding lobster and scallops, what could you tell us concerning access to quotas or simply concerning limited access?
[English]
Mr. Belliveau: Thank you for your comments. With respect to the snow-crab fishery, we are indeed not there in 1998. I think one aspect of it is important to the committee, if they are studying privatization. The crab licence holders not only hold private property in the way of quota, they pay for most of the science. The science is still in the DFO, but is paid directly by the crab licence holders.
We do not have time today to get into the whole story, but since 1994, literally millions of dollars of snow crabs have been left in the waters because of an under-estimation of what the resource could handle. We are talking here about quite a different situation than cod. You fish on the males only after they have reached their final moult. You do not fish the female.
It is quite a limited type of fishery, that way. Their ultra-conservative quotas were set basically by the crab licence holders, and it would appear in order to keep others like ourselves out of it. As a result, millions of dollars of old crab was left in the water to rot and die, because once the crab hits terminal moult, it dies within five years.
That is a side story, but in terms of your study, I understand it is on privatization and quota licensing. Both are not necessarily synonymous, but that would be a very interesting story to follow up on.
With respect to a recommendation on lobster enhancement, I could make only two comments here. We thought that the fisheries minister made some progress this spring in trying to bring the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence into a more harmonized arrangement, with respect to the minimum size of the lobster. We have found over the last six years that every little area has its own minimal size, and that has caused a lot of tension between fishers. Over the next few years, they will come to a more harmonized arrangement. We support that, but we are still a little bit disappointed.
We estimate that two-thirds of the fishers in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence would have supported a stronger conservation regime than the one that was issued by the DFO.
We estimate that a minimum size of two-and-three-quarter inches in the southern Gulf would have been accepted by the vast majority of inshore fishers. But I understand that the fisheries minister could not introduce this because Prince Edward Island fishers thought that they were losing civilization as they knew it in the changes. I guess that is the best they could do, under the circumstances.
I have another comment about lobster, which I think is a very important and very complex one, and that is about the relationship of aboriginal communities to it. I know you are aware of it in much detail. In New Brunswick, we have two fairly large Indian communities right on the coast in the lobster fishery, and some other smaller ones.
We have worked over the years to come up with a progressive policy, where aboriginal peoples would enter the commercial fishery on the same basis as everybody else, and be provided with licences to do that. But for various complex reasons, the aboriginal peoples are fishing out of season, under what they call a food fishery, but which is a massive fishery in localized instances. It is really a commercial fishery. That remains a very, very, difficult problem for lobster fishers on the east coast of New Brunswick.
I know they have it in southwest Nova Scotia, but it is not the same type of problem. I think it is much more of a poaching type of problem than in New Brunswick.
You are talking about a lot more native peoples right on the coast. They should have access to the lobster fishery, but we think it has to be within the normal commercial fishery and they should be helped to be involved. Those are my two comments.
With respect to scallop enhancement, we are taking a bit of a leap here, but our organization has become implicated and involved in trying to re-seed the wild scallop beds. We are not getting into aquaculture. Our members are not at all interested in getting us into aquaculture, but there is a way in which you can capture the scallop spat and have it grow out in the ocean, and then you can re-seed the traditional fishing bank.
It holds out a lot of promise. So far, we have completed the experimental stages, and it looks very good. Our spat production rates, for example, are much higher than in New Zealand, for example, where it has been a successful program.
Senator Robichaud: But you are saying, in essence, that for scallops and lobster, there is no place for quota management applications, am I hearing you correctly?
Mr. Belliveau: We are absolutely opposed to a quota approach on lobster. For most of us, it sends a chill up our spine. For 25 years, we have had a progressively expanding lobster resource, or at least a stable one. People's equipment has improved immensely, as have their fishing capabilities, and yet the resources are still stable I think we have evolved a system of restrictions and regulations that have avoided the whole business of quota, which is a bit of an abstraction to begin with.
If you start getting quotas in the lobster fishery, I suspect you will take us down the same road that we have gone. I will not go that far. It is just that there is no interest in quotas in the lobster fishery and why, for heaven's name, would we even want to try it out when we finally have a reasonably successful management system?
People sometimes forget that the lobster fishery in the Maritime provinces alone involves something like 10,000 licence holders and maybe 25,000 fishers. It is a labour-intensive type of operation, and is spread all along the coast, so we want to be very careful.
The Chairman: Senator Perrault is vice-chair of the committee, and of course, he is very interested in what is happening on the East Coast to see if they want to apply it on the West Coast. I think you will have some interesting questions from him.
Senator Perrault: In your presentation today, you presented some very interesting and useful ideas. On both coasts, it is really a blame game, and I rather deplore that. It is one sector blaming the other, saying that we are not getting enough fish, or whatever we produce on the West Coast, because this other sector is getting too much.
Today, you have been highly critical of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, with the inference that they are not working for the public interest. You have suggested that a sort of corporate influence on the department is another reason for our problems.
Despite the blame game, should we not address more vigorously the main problem, which is a matter of supply and the need to restore an abundance of our marine harvest?We are going through a crisis on the West Coast: the coho return this year is practically zilch. We have different species, but similar problems out there.
We do not know why the harvest is going to be so bad. It is just an utter disaster. The scientists do not have full explanations. We know that perhaps there are too many fishers pursuing too few fish on the West Coast. Is it possibly the same problem with you here? Pollution is suspected. The depletion of the ozone layer and the massive kill-off of plankton in the world's oceans are being blamed for shortages of marine harvest.
You have told us of languishing fisheries on the East Coast. You have talked about your concern for the outlying communities, and it is very serious in our province, too. The communities that are kept alive through fishing do not have enough fish to eke out a living. Have we come to the point when we should consider relocation, under generous terms, of workers from one province to another, if there is no longer an economic base in some of these communities to use fisheries as a way to sustain families and the general population?
I know there are a lot of questions, but you can answer it in an omnibus form. The worldwide decline cannot be blamed on one sector, it seems to me. We have to work domestically and internationally to get more fish in the ocean. We have been told by those looking at the world scene that valuable fishery resources are disappearing all over the world. They do not have a proper explanation. I would invite your comments on that. Do you think we engage in the blame game too much?
I believe, for example, that the people who work for the Department of Fisheries are probably pretty darn good Canadians, who would just love to triumph over these problems, and would like to proclaim that there is going to be a massive increase in the numbers of lobster and all these other species.
I do not think they are working contrary to the public interest, and I do not think they are any less Canadian than any of us.
Mr. Belliveau: With respect to the last comment, we are not questioning their Canadian loyalties or whether they are any worse or better Canadians than the rest of us. As individuals, we know them. We have worked with them daily. We are talking about public policy here, and my comments throughout have to do with public policy. I can assure you that the East Coast has not been impressed with the public policies of the Government of Canada over the last few years. Anybody who has gone before the electorate -- and I know one person around the table who has recently -- knows that the public is furious with the way the East Coast is being handled, and a lot of that has to do with the fisheries.
We are talking from that basis here. Our organization and the people I work with are not prepared to accept that there is a natural cause to the problems of the groundfish. Of course, there are contributing natural problems, but they are not the cause of our problem.
We have to face facts. Heavy, heavy-duty overfishing went on. The problems of diminished stocks around the world have to do that. It is not a question of too many fishers. Just look at the technology that has been going into the groundfish structure since 1977, and that is going into the business, worldwide. It has nothing to do with the individual Canadian lot.
With respect to the blame game, I agree with you there. I do not think anybody really wants to hear too much more about who is blaming who. This week it is science, next week it is somebody else. Public policy goes all the way back to Treasury Board. Treasury Board has to find more money somewhere.
Treasury Board says that it no longer wants to pay what it used to pay in a fishery, so it has to recover costs. How does it go about that? How does it recover money? It did it partly through the crab fishery, and the crab fishery became the model for partnering in the fishery. They still use that as a model.
It is a way for Treasury Board to collect money, but it does not address the needs of the broader fishing community in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence in this case, and that is why we are raising it. We hate this idea of being in conflict with another fishing sector all the time.
It is no good for our spirits or anybody else's, but we are talking about public policy and how they treat the allocation of fish. It is an ongoing festering concern in the fishery, and it is not going to go away. ITQs are not taking it away, as much as some people in the policy divisions believe it will. That is my brief response to your comment.
With respect to relocation, I think I would defer to my colleague in Newfoundland, who likes to remind people of what happened when the HRD sponsored a few Cape Bretoners to go to London, Ontario, to look for jobs. I say no to relocation. We are looking for ways in which the East Coast can stay in the East Coast. Point final.
Senator Butts: First of all, your union has bona fide fishers as members. Who decides that they are such things? Is it the same as a professional fisher?
Mr. Belliveau: The bona fide membership came out of the licensing policy in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence back in 1981. It was a policy that was proposed by the Maritime Fishermen's Union and its members, and it evolved from them. You would establish who is in the fishery now, who depends on it for a full-time living. In a sense, yes, as far back as 1981, the bona fide inshore fisherman was really the professional fisherman.
He was the owner-operator, and was identified as such. Once they identified the 3,400 fishers, that became the absolute number. Since that time, we have always worked with 3,400 bona fide operators in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. People all across the country were very interested in this system, and it in fact became incorporated in the core licensing system that Canada now has in the late 1990s.
Senator Butts: You complained a lot about DFO management. In fact, you said at one point that they do not have a right to make some of the decisions that they make. In your scheme, who should make it, or should it be managed?
Mr. Belliveau: I apologize to the committee if I am projecting only negativity towards the DFO. The DFO people know that we support public management of the resource. We support the basic instrument of the DFO as being the manager of the resource in a relationship with the fishers.
The problem is not with the DFO itself, but with its privatization direction, especially with what is now referred to as the partnership arrangement.
Have you seen them try to make a partnership arrangement with the thousands of inshore fisherman in the Scotia-Fundy region or in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence? No, they are making them with small elite groups: scallops licence holders, crab licence holders, shrimp licence holders, scallop offshore licence holders on Georges Bank, and some mobile ITQ holders. Those are where they are making their partnerships.
Senator Butts: So a private licence is not privatization.
Mr. Belliveau: No, not in the context we are talking about. Of course, it is a quasi-property right; we do not deny that.
Senator Jessiman: Mr. Belliveau, your Maritime Fishermen's Union is a founding member of the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters. Does that council have a position on individual quota licences: ITQs, IQs, IVQs and EAs?
Mr. Belliveau: The council is a mixture of different organizations across the country with a lot of different views, so it cannot really have a final position on ITQs. We struggled a lot with that, and ended up agreeing -- and it is fundamental to the council's operation -- that the licence holder, the fisherman, should have to fish his licence, and that sometimes, under certain conditions, individual quota systems would be useful. But the overriding principle is that the owner-operator has to fish his licence. That is the key.
More and more often, the licence holders become the small- or medium-sized companies, and the fishers who are out there fishing are, in effect, crew members or employees in many cases. We have all reached a consensus on our concern about the independent owner-operator fisher. Once you establish that principle, sure, you can use individual quotas under certain conditions.
Senator Jessiman: What about the individual transferable quotas? Is your union the same as the council's? You talked about individual quotas. I have referred to the individual transferable quotas, the individual vessel quotas, and also the enterprise allocations. My understanding is that they have a different view to those things than your union does. Is that correct or not?
Mr. Belliveau: Our organization has been clear in terms of individual transferable quota systems. Our members have enormous troubles with that. They have a fundamental problem because they know that somebody who is holding the licences may be sitting in Toronto, Chicago, or wherever, and the guy out there fishing is not necessarily the guy holding the licence.
With respect to the council, I am not aware of anywhere where they have endorsed individual transferable quotas. They have left the issue open, under certain defined conditions. Maybe it would be workable if the fishers were in control.
Senator Jessiman: You believe that you should have individual quotas, but that they should not be transferable. Is that what you are saying?
Mr. Belliveau: They should not be transferable in the full sense of the market, the way they operate in New Zealand. You buy and trade quota virtually on a stock exchange. We are not for that kind of transferability, no. For example, in parts of Nova Scotia, inshore fishers have individual quotas for crab. They do not transfer the quota, but they do transfer licences, and with this goes the quota.
Senator Jessiman: Would you believe, though, that you should be able to transfer between fishers in the same community?
Mr. Belliveau: Yes, there is no ideology involved in that one. If you can work out a system that is acceptable in a local area, by all means do so.
The Chairman: Thank you for appearing before us. You have expressed a great deal of concern about a public policy, which is the raison d'être of what this committee is all about, and the current study that we are undertaking. Your contribution this morning adds a great deal to the public debate that needs to be done on this very important subject. Thank you for your contribution.
Senator Stewart: I think we are wasting time, in a way. Let me make this point. Mr. Belliveau seems to be arguing that it was a mistake to limit access to the commons, and he uses that argument against a quota system. He is quite prepared to allow licensing and transferring within the community, so I think we had better get away from the question of limited access to the commons and focus on the usefulness of the quota as the system of limiting access.
The Chairman: We will go on to our witness, but you have raised an important subject, Senator Stewart.
Our next witness is Mr. Jack Boone, Executive Director of the Fundy Weir Fishermen's Association. The association was formed in 1973, and its original purpose was to lobby governments to save the weir operations when stocks were declining and markets were poor. For a time, the association experimented with government assistance, and with a cash insurance scheme. It has also negotiated prices with a major buyer and processor, Connors Brothers, of New Brunswick.
Today the association represents 80 per cent of the Bay of Fundy weir fishers. Its 165 members are from both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In all, they take in about 25,000 tonnes of herring a year, which represents between $85 million and $90 million for the local economy.
Mr. Jack Boone, Executive Director, Fundy Weir Fishermen's Association: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak about a resource and a way of fishing that are very dear to my heart. I refer, of course, to the weir herring fishery in the Bay of Fundy, and along Nova Scotia's eastern shore -- the entire East Coast area excluding the gulf.
In St. Andrews, I fished the herring industry myself for 23 years. I had seven weirs and I made a precarious living, in a way unheard of in most fishing circles in the world. It is a 400 year old industry, and it is quickly eroding. The reasons for this include the dearth of aquaculture, the mobile fleet, and the methods of catching herring in the markets available to us.
When I first started fishing in 1960, small factories in Maine got their herring from the weirs in our area. We have 15 weirs in Nova Scotia which were built last year, 28 in Grand Manan Island, for which we are not accountable, and 88 between Saint John and St. Stephen.
As most of you know, one of the world's largest sardine canneries is Connors Brothers, in Blacks Harbour. That, of course, is where we now sell 99.9 per cent of our fish. The rest goes to other fishermen, who buy it as bait from time to time.
I feel very comfortable speaking about the weir fishery and the herring, because many of my friends have mobile seiners, and I also worked with those people when I started. Before they got their own methods of carrying, I would follow them in the winter months, and pump their fish for them.
In my experience, the herring industry has always fluctuated. A chart for a 50 year period would show a lot of highs, but there would also be a lot of lows.
After the war, we had new technology. Sonar was developed, and people could use it to chase fish. We also had bigger boats and bigger nets, and that trend has continued to the present day. Fishers that carried 50 tonnes of fish ten years ago carry 150 to 200 tonnes today, because of bigger new boats. Today we are looking at a massive piece of gear to catch herring.
The Fundy Weir Fishermen's Association came about in 1955. With the availability of the new technology, it had been noticed that the mobile fleet could come in next to the weir, where the herring congregate from time to time to feed on the plankton at high tide. As the tide goes out, the fish follow it to the fence, and swim along that fence into the weir, which is heart-shaped. The opening is in the "V" in the heart, and the fish swim in circles once they are inside, unable to find the opening again in the dark. Once it is light, the fishers go out and pull a net up over the opening, to hold the fish until it is time to take them to market.
I spend a great deal of time talking about the privatization of the fishery. I talk to everyone; members of my association, government people, press people, and others. In my opinion, privatization is doing a lot of damage to the fishery. I am not here to engage in DFO bashing. I am here to tell you that the management of the fishery should be left with the DFO. When we talk about privatization, we are talking about transferring the right to fish -- almost the ownership of the fish -- to the private industry.
I do not agree with privatization, nor does my association. In our area, most fishers are controlled in some way by the processors. This is true even of the Scotia-Fundy Management Committee, which is supposed to oversee the overall performance of the management team at DFO. Four years ago an industry person was appointed co-chair of that committee for one year. Five years later, that person is still part of the group.
My association is a full member of the Scotia-Fundy Herring Management Committee, and I made representations to two different ministers on two separate occasions, asking to attend those meetings. We were not there, however. Five years ago, you could already see the bigger players -- the mobile fleet and the processors -- taking over the privatization issue. In my opinion, the DFO is shirking its responsibility.
Let us return to the Scotia-Fundy Herring Management Committee. Fisheries people have nothing to gain from the position of chairman; they have nothing to fear, and they have no favour to gain. They can give an unbiased opinion. If I were co-chair of that committee, and had the influence that goes with that office, I would certainly be trying to favour the weir fishers, as I am paid by them. It is wrong for one sector to control the usage of a resource.
A little story came out of Nova Scotia not too long ago. Three or four years ago, our government offered people in a small village a certain amount of money to take over their wharves. They gave them the money, and they gave them the wharf. When the wharf blew down two years later, however, the village was back at the government's door, looking for money to rebuild it.
As long as everything is going well, privatization is fine. In fact, as the Kirby report showed us, government support is not always the way to go. With privatization, however, too much control is being put in the hands of too few. That control will be exercised by those with something to gain; the industry, the processors, and the big companies.
The fishers are being squeezed out. Four years ago there were 241 weir licenses in the Bay of Fundy. Today that number is 188 -- and its is dropping fast. Those who left are no longer in the system. Where did they go? What happened was that the big guys waved $50,000 in their faces, and purchased the licences. These fishers might not have caught a fish for years, and they might have been hurting, which is why they took the money. The license is gone; it is out of the system. One of our members, who was one of the staunchest opponents of the aquaculture expansion, sold his licence last week, and the licence is gone.
The weir business in the Bay of Fundy generates between $80 million and $100 million for the local economy. Those figures come from the DFO, the DFA, and the Chambers of Commerce.
This is a labour intensive industry. Women use scissors to cut the heads and tails off the fish, and they put them in cans. There are now automatic machines that will eventually take the place of those women. In Connors Brothers position statement, which was given to the provincial government recently, the company said that over 2,000 jobs in our area are associated with the herring industry.
In our fisheries, we have allowed science to become part of the management of the fisheries, as opposed to just advising management on issues. Over the years, we have spent a lot of money on stock assessment. Consequently, no one knows what is out there. A scientific community in Maine says that the area of Georges Bank to Jeffrey's Ledge probably has 3 million tonnes of herring. Another scientist says that that area is in a crisis situation, and there might be 500,000 tonnes. There is a big difference between those two figures.
The fish that we catch in New Brunswick supposedly come from the Gulf of Maine. The fish caught in our Nova Scotia weirs come from 4X, which is the area from Digby to Yarmouth. The weir business is in a very delicate situation.
Let me dwell on the herring for a moment. The only people who could afford to buy these licences, as was done in the mobile fleet to control the quotas, are not fishers. They actually had to use fraudulent means to buy the licences, because the vessel had to be put in a fisher's name to transfer the boat and get the quota. On fishery papers, fishers are shown as owners, when in actual fact they have not put a penny into the vessels.
Games are being played with the quotas. To make matters worse, in recent years the quotas have been so low that fishers in the mobile fleet have had to pay more than $40 a tonne after they have used their up quota, in order to go fishing.
Let us consider the figures. Fish landed at the wharf is worth $133 per tonne. The quota of 700 tonnes, then, is worth less than $100,000. Everyone knows that you cannot run a $2-million boat will less than $100,000, nor can you pay seven crew. This makes liars, cheats, and crooks of the fishermen, because they try to find ways to get around the quota.
For the first time, the weirs in Nova Scotia produce 3,000 tonnes of fish per year. This is an average of 10 years, and I am amazed by this. This year, for the first time, we have a quota. The quota is 3,200 tonnes. It is supposed to be a competitive quota, and represent 20 per cent of the TAC. The problem, though, is that it is spread with the gillnetters on a competitive basis. If the gillnetters catch all of the fish first, or if the weirs do, all of a sudden the other one is out of business.
When you talk about privatization, I would also like you to consider the roe fishery, which has turned into a legalized fish meal fishery. Fish meal got us into a lot of trouble before, as you recall. Areas were closed, and something was put into the Fisheries Act to stipulate that we could not have a directed fish meal fishery in the herring industry. We lobbied and got that taken out of the new act, however.
Herring which is not of the right quality is put in the fish meal. Some fishermen, if the fish are not of the right quality, roll them out of the nets. I do not care what the scientists say -- those fish are dead. They may swim away, but they will die shortly.
If we are sincere about wanting to protect the weir and herring industries, these people have to make a living. There also must be regulation and enforcement, which brings me to another point. As far as weirs are concerned, there has been no enforcement whatsoever of the herring and fishery regulations in our area for the last few years.
Last week we went to court in Digby. One of our members, Stanley Stanton, had to go through his own lawyer to have charges pressed. A seiner was coming in close to his weir, contrary to regulations, and he had to gather the evidence on that himself. The DFO could not do it, so one of my people had to. Stanley Stanton is not trained to enforce the law, and the DFO is not doing its job.
We privatized fish inspection services to a degree, and now the onus is on processors to ensure that the fish is of good quality. We have also done this with chickens, beef, potatoes, and everything else. With livestock and agriculture, however, you can control what happens in the field or on the vine. Fish are different, however, because we cannot control the environment in which they live. We can only control what happens after they are landed. Food inspection in fisheries has been adopted all over the world, but I do not know if this is they way to go.
We must consider why we are being reactionary to problems in the fishery, as opposed to "actionary." I am delighted to see that the government has given a group of former fishers funds to set up new research. At the same time, I must wonder how meaningful it will be to fly over the ocean and count the fish.
I have friends with many years of experience in the fishery. These people have earned a living by working the stocks every day for 30 years. I will take their word on the condition of the stock over anybody else's estimate.
On many occasions I have begged the politicians to listen to the fishers. When they do listen to them, however, they cannot put them in a room with the same processor who owns their homes and their boats, and who has absolute power over them.
Stocks have gone up, but the price of fish has not. Fishers may once have been in a strong position to negotiate price, but we no longer are. We do not have the strength, and to my way of thinking this business of operating with consensus is ridiculous. We cannot agree on simple things, and we are talking about a consensus on all fisheries issues. It does not work that way, which is why we need this undaunted person to head up the management team without fear or favour. That person cannot represent a single sector.
People come to this committee and tell you that they know all that there is to know about the fisheries. Nobody knows all that there is to know about the fisheries. In fact, in my opinion we know very little about the fisheries. I used to look down at the water when I was flying in my plane, and I would wonder how anyone could ever know what was down there. It is so massive, as you all know.
We have a thriving weir industry, but it is quickly eroding due to aquaculture, the mobile fleet, and, in my opinion, the stocks. The scientists are telling us that the stocks look better this year. The TAC has been increased to 95,000 tonnes from 50,000 tonnes. The scientists have a new method of going out to look for fish. Any professional fisher will tell you, however, that you might see a bunch of fish tonight, and estimate that there are 200,000 tonnes there. Tomorrow you might not find any fish in that place, but you might see 200,000 somewhere else. Are those different fish, or have the fish that you originally saw simply moved?
These new acoustic methods of assessment have not stood the test of time. Yesterday I was reading information on the Internet, on the science on herring in Japan, Norway, and Scotland. The same view is being voiced; it is very difficult to put a figure on what is out there in the water. It is even more difficult to control it, and unfortunately 99 per cent of that control has gone to the processors and the big companies, because they have deep pockets.
Those groups continue to buy up weirs. They just bought two last week. They are buying up the better weirs, and they are buying up the seiners for their quotas. I do not know how many they have purchased. The DFO was advised of this, but nothing has happened.
It is a shame to see the little fishermen and the Canadian people give up control of a resource. This would be true of any resource, but it is particularly true in the case of the fishery. I hope that you can see how we feel. It is hard for me to come here, because my salary is paid by Connors Brothers.
We get a royalty on the fish that we sell the company, and we split it with Grand Manan on a share basis, depending on who catches the fish. Last year we sold 25,000 tonnes, which is the best selling year that we have had since 1989. You might think that this means that there are lots of fish, but that is not what it means. Last year, the market for 25,000 tonnes of fish was there.It has not been there in other years. A few years ago the big fish hit Grand Manan, and the fishers were lucky enough to sell a lot of fish, but there is only so much market. We have quotas. I can tell you that the quota system is being manipulated, and is seriously flawed in the dockside monitoring system. The observers are causing anxiety for the fishers.
The Chairman: You have made a tremendous contribution with the information that you have presented to us this morning. You are quite a credit to the association which you represent.
The weir fishery is probably the oldest fishery in North America. We do not often think about the very passive way that fish are caught in the weir fishery.
Senator Stewart: From what you said, I understand that the weir fishery is a licensed fishery. Is that correct?
Mr. Boone: Yes.
Senator Stewart: You said that there was a reduction in the weirs from 241 to 188. Am I to understand that some of the owners sold out their licenses?
Mr. Boone: Yes, that is true.
Senator Stewart: In a sense, then, the licence was private property. It could be sold.
Mr. Boone: The ownership could be transferred or sold. It is not actually sold, but it is transferred for large amounts of money, in order to get that area for aquaculture.
Senator Stewart: Your areas are 4X and 5Y. How is the herring resource allocated among the various fleets or gear types in those areas? How much is assigned to the mobile gear fleet?
Mr. Boone: The Scotia-Fundy area does include 4X and 5Y. However, 5Y is actually the Gulf of Maine, so it does not include that. Our area goes as far as Chedabucto Bay. The whole area, including the Bay of Fundy, is on a TAC. Of the TAC, 80 per cent goes to the mobile fleet, which has now decrease to 26 or 27 active seiners. There were once 60 seiners, I might add. This year, for the fist time, gillnetters and the weirs have a competitive quota. It is not an ITQ; it is a competitive quota for the remaining 20 per cent.
Senator Stewart:Occasionally, I have read about Russian seiners operating in the area near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Is my recollection correct, and if so, how do they have access to the herring in that area?
Mr. Boone: I believe that you have been misinformed. To the best of my knowledge, Russians came over and bought herring off of Yarmouth for four or five consecutive years. This was done through a company in Dartmouth called Jaymer, which was the broker for this Russian crew.
Russia, as you know, ran out of money three years ago, and the overall TAC was decreased from 151 metric tonnes eight years ago, to 50 tonnes just two or three years ago. That effectively eliminated the Russians, because it was felt that all of the fish could be handled by the processors in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Senator Stewart: You made reference to a directed fish meal fishery. Does that mean that the fish were being caught for the explicit purpose of converting them into fish meal?
Mr. Boone: Yes.
Senator Butts: You are saying that the DFO wants to manage the fishery, and that it has a right to do so. The problem, as you see it, is how the DFO has managed the fishery. Is that correct?
Mr. Boone: To a degree, yes.
Senator Butts: Would you put a limit on the buyouts to which you referred? Would you like the DFO to do that, or would you rather that it eliminate the buyouts altogether?
Mr. Boone: When the fact that licences were haemorrhaging out of the system came to my attention, I immediately went to Connors Brothers. I asked how many licences were needed to sustain the fishery. The company had not realized that licences were leaving the system.
Having said that, I went to Neil Bellefontaine. I told him that we needed a moratorium on the takeover of quotas until we had had time to sit down and consider what was happening in the fishery. I said the same thing to other senior people in the fishery, but so far nothing has happened. Once again we are waiting for a catastrophe to which we can react, as opposed to acting first. It would be very responsible of us to impose a moratorium for a years or two, until such time as we can all sit down and discuss what we really need. Can we let the purse seiners come in and take the fish out of the little coves? Can we let them go to the spawning grounds and kill the mamas with their babies? Can we allow this, and still sustain a fishery? Those are the questions that we must answer if we do not want this haemorrhaging of licences to continue.
Senator Butts: You said that once there were 60 seiners, but now there are now 27. Do these 27 still get the same number of fish?
Mr. Boone: With the capability that they have today, they can land far more fish on any given day, week or month than we can process ashore, unless we develop a high volume fish meal fishery.
Senator Butts: Would you recommend an increase in the 20 per cent of the TAC that you are currently getting?
Mr. Boone: In my view, that is not the answer. I do not think that quotas are working. Last year, we set a quota of 58,000 metric tonnes. We had 26 boats, and they stocked anywhere from $400,000 to $900,000. Take $700,000 as an average, and multiply it by 26 boats; where did they get the money? It had to come out of the fish.
Our quota was for 58,000 tonnes. Between the gillnetters and the weirs, we landed 48,000 tonnes. Multiply that by $133, and you get $6,384,000 for our fishery. Now, take 26 boats, and multiply that by $500,000, which comes to $13,000,000. You tell me if the quota system is working.
Once the fisher has brought in his 700 or 800 tonne quota, or whatever he can get in without anybody knowing about it, he has to start buying extra quota from the company or from the he owner of the excess quota. To me the quota system is not working in this fishery.
The argument may be made that monitoring can be improved. This is just like trying to catch speeders, however; to catch one, you have to hire two people. It just could not be done, because it is too massive, and the fishers are going in all directions. We are talking big operations here; we are not just talking the corner store. Herring quotas are not working, and I am therefore opposed to them.
Senator Jessiman: According to my calculations, which are based on your figures, there are 53 fewer licences today than there were in 1988. You said that there were 241 in 1988, and that there are now 188. You also said that all or some of them had been taken and used for aquaculture. Is it all of them, or some of them?
Mr. Boone: Just some of them -- not all of them.
Senator Jessiman: How many people would be required for a weir licence, as opposed to for an aquaculture licence?
Mr. Boone: I think that there are more people in aquaculture. Let us multiply 188 weirs by four. That gives us roughly 800 direct fishermen, compared to the 1500 aquaculture is claiming, so they have 83 sites.
Senator Jessiman: Are some of the weir fishers giving up their licenses and getting into aquaculture?
Mr. Boone: Originally some did. The financial set-up has changed, however -- there is less government involvement, and less funding available -- so fewer weir fishers are able to do that now. I can count those who originally switched over on my hands, and still have fingers left over. Back then the fish were worth $7 a pound, but today they are worth $3.20.
Senator Jessiman: If all 188 weir licenses were given up for aquaculture, would more people be working in the area?
Mr. Boone: Aquaculture does not demand the same amount of person hours ashore that herring does. When you process a single salmon, you process 10 pounds of fish. When you can herring, you put in at least 2 fish, and up to 14. A lot of work with the scissors needs to be done first, to take the heads and tails off. Machines do the actual canning now, but the work with the heads and the scissors is labour intensive.
Senator Jessiman: There would be more people working directly in aquaculture, then, but more people would be working indirectly and directly in the weir fishery.
Mr. Boone: That would be a fair statement.
Senator Perrault: I am from the West Coast, and I had never heard of the weir fishery, but your testimony very helpful. You seem to be adamantly opposed to privatization. In the long run, you think that a well-run DFO is better than a privatization program. That is in contrast with some of the other testimony that we have heard.
Mr. Boone: As I said in my opening remarks, I am here without fear or favour. If I can do a little bit to help sustain the herring industry in the Bay of Fundy, I will go on to the next world with a lot of pride.
Senator Perrault: There is a great deal of dissension on both coasts, and there are conflicts between those who favour public and private investment. If you were the minister, what would your first action be?
Mr. Boone: My first task would be to sit down with Mr. Clinton and sort out the salmon thing.
My second action would be to look at privatization. I would call the fishers together, and I would follow up on statements such as the one that I have made here. I would not bring them in with the processors. I would bring them in one on one, so that they could speak freely and openly, as I have done this morning. My comments this morning will probably cost me dearly, but I am not here to lie to you. I am trying to make a small contribution.
If I were minister, I would bring the fishers in to speak with the senior officials. I would also speak with them, as Roméo LeBlanc used to do when he was minister. I would call them together, and I would sit down and talk with them, as we are doing today.
Senator Perrault: Connors Brothers products are very popular in British Columbia; people like their sardines and so on. I have noticed that American packers from New England are now putting products on the shelves in British Columbia, and I cannot understand how that can happen.
Mr. Boone: Free trade did a lot for privatization. Nova Scotians will tell you that, after free trade, fish are going from Nova Scotia directly to New England for processing. A conservative estimate would be that this is costing Nova Scotia 3,000 jobs.
As to sardines on the shelf, 30 per cent of all sardines packed by Connors Brothers are sold in the U.S., so it is a trade-off deal. If we are not right on top of our game, as far as shelf space is concerned, it is because we have not done enough promotion. I have always said that not enough herring promotion has been done, by either the processors or the fishers themselves. Personally, I promote herring and I promote Canada, and I will continue to do that as long as I am breathing, because I made my living through the herring.
New Brunswick should be recognized as an integral part of the fishery, just as B.C. and Newfoundland are. When I first became mayor of St. Andrews in 1974, the biological station employed 220 people, and that is now done to 71. That disturbs me, because the lobbying to maintain that station apparently has not been effective. In many areas, that station was a world leader in fishery science.
Senator Perrault: You are suggesting that the net benefit to the country has been diminished by this process.
Mr. Boone: It has been diminished by the process, and I think that the time has come to change that process. The time has come to start over with fresh stock, and a fresh, positive outlook.
As I said in my opening remarks, I did not come here to criticize anyone. I came here to offer suggestions, and to do something to sustain a fishery that has been very good to New Brunswick and to Canada.
Senator Stewart: Mr. Boone, do you believe that a directed herring roe fishery should be allowed in your area?
Mr. Boone: A few years ago, the TAC was 151,000 tonnes. This year's proposed TAC is 95,000. When the stocks are low, as they apparently are, I think that the roe fishery should be shut down for the three week spawning season.
Brian Tobin asked me that same question in Ottawa three or four years ago, and I told him that he should look at my suggestion. A year later, when the crisis hit, he acknowledged that he should have looked at it more carefully. It only makes common sense; if you kill the babies and the mothers, where are the rest going to come from? Unfortunately, under the proposed new legislation, people in the industry are gearing up to take more fish for roe or fish meal.
I have been in the area all my life; when fish are caught on Georges Bank, and hauled 18 or 20 hours into Yarmouth, you can image the shape that they will be in. It does not matter how cold you make them, or what you do to them. Last week in Maine, fish bellies were brought in. What are we doing that for? Why do we have to take these roe fish? Why not concentrate on food fish, which will create work ashore, and feed a lot of people? I cannot understand that, and if I were the minister, I would do something about it.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Boone, for your marvellous presentation. It has been extremely useful.
The committee adjourned.