FISH Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FISHERIES AND OCEANS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES PÊCHES ET DES OCÉANS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Monday, January 19, 1998

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. George S. Baker (Gander—Grand Falls, Lib.)): We now call to order the meeting of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans pursuant to Standing Order 108.(2), a study of west coast fisheries.

We have with us today, ladies and gentlemen, members of Parliament from each of the five political parties in the House of Commons. We have the chief spokesperson for each of the political parties in the House of Commons. I want to introduce the MPs to you so we can have it on the record before the meeting commences.

MP Peter Stoffer is the spokesperson for the New Democratic Party of Canada. He is from the province of Nova Scotia.

Yvan Bernier is the party spokesperson for fisheries for the Bloc.

The Honourable Bill Matthews is a former provincial fishery minister of the province of Newfoundland. He is the spokesperson for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Sophia Leung represents the Liberal Party of Canada. She is a Liberal member of Parliament from the province of British Columbia.

Charles Hubbard is from the Liberal Party of Canada. He represents the province of New Brunswick.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano is a lawyer. He helps us with some of the wording of some of our resolutions. He is from the province of Ontario, representing the Liberal Party of Canada.

Next to me is the parliamentary secretary, the junior minister, to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. He is on the Liberal side, of course, and he represents the province of Prince Edward Island.

Everybody knows who MP Mike Scott is. I don't have to introduce him or say which province he is from. He is from the province of British Columbia.

MP John Duncan is the official party spokesperson for the Reform Party of Canada. Of course he is from the province of British Columbia.

The vice-chairman of the fisheries committee, MP Gary Lunn, is also a lawyer, along with Mr. Provenzano. These people are experts as far as legal wording is concerned and they help the committee. Mr. Lunn is also from the Reform Party of Canada, representing the province of British Columbia.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the MPs. My name is George Baker, and I am the chairman of the committee. I have been in the House of Commons for some 24 years. My riding is also heavily fishing, on the east coast of Canada.

All the political parties are represented. We are here to go down the coastline of British Columbia, as much as we can, because we are allowed to spend only a week on the road. We've selected 10 locations to have public meetings. During these public meetings we do have a preliminary list of people who notified the committee they wanted to speak. Those speakers will run right throughout the day, so we will have a lot of people showing up right throughout the morning and the afternoon at various intervals so they don't have to wait for hours before they have a chance to speak.

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The other part of our meeting is that we welcome comments from the floor. In other words, you don't have to be on the list. We are here to listen to the fishermen of British Columbia and we will provide that opportunity for you to speak.

We have given everybody an initial 10 minutes to speak. We would appreciate it if you could stay within that period.

I want to call first on the spokesperson for the New Democratic Party of Canada, Peter Stoffer, who wanted me to mention that Svend Robinson would have been here except that he encountered an accident and therefore cannot be here today. Mr. Robinson sends his regrets that he cannot be here with Mr. Stoffer today.

I am going to call on MP Mike Scott to declare the meeting officially open and perhaps to say a few words.

Mr. Mike Scott (Skeena, Ref.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman; and thank you to all the people who have attended here today.

The chairman, George Baker, has very graciously given me the opportunity to say a few words, and I do appreciate that.

This is a great opportunity for people on the north coast to provide direct input to this committee and through this committee to the minister. Many times over the last four years as your member of Parliament I have been in the position of having to write letters to the minister and to various departmental officials on a whole range of issues. This is a perfect opportunity for the people who have contacted me and who have very serious concerns about the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' direction and policies to bring those directly to the attention of the committee today.

I know a lot of people here are unhappy with the way the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has operated. They are unhappy with policy and decisions that have been made. I can understand and I share that unhappiness, because I know a lot of the decisions that have been made have not been in the best interests of the north coast.

I would ask you, if you are angry, please do not direct that anger to this committee, because this committee is here genuinely attempting to try to gather information and hopefully to make some change that would be going in the right direction. I ask that you respect the members of the committee here today. Some of them have travelled a long way, a couple of the committee members from as far away from here as Newfoundland. I know you would all like to join me in welcoming them to Prince Rupert and to the north coast. When I am in Ottawa I keep telling these people this is the most beautiful part of Canada, and now we have an opportunity actually to prove it.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman; and I thank all of you. I look forward to getting the meeting under way and to the kinds of presentations we are going to be receiving from today.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Scott.

We will now ask the vice-chairman to call on the first witness before the committee today. Mr. Lunn.

Mr. Gary Lunn (Saanich—Gulf Islands, Ref.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just before we get started, I would like to make a couple of short announcements.

First I want to make sure everybody understands the mandate of this committee. We are here to listen, as Mr. Baker has said, to the people of British Columbia. We as a committee are not the Government of Canada. We do not report to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans but to the House of Commons. So you can rest assured that all your comments and everything said here today.... We will be writing a report, with all five political parties as authors, and submitting it to the House of Commons; and we will be making recommendations. We are not the government and we are not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but we are going to make sure your comments get to them, and we hope some action will follow.

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The second point is that we are here until 4 p.m. There may be a number of you here who are not on the speakers list. We do have a list that is not carved in stone. It's pretty much filled up for this morning, but if there are people here who can only be here this morning, I ask you to give your names to the gentleman over here in the corner, because we do want to hear from you and we will accommodate you. We will try to work you in this morning. Also, we will have open microphones, probably this afternoon, where anyone can walk up to the microphone and make their comments.

Having said that, I'd like to call on the mayor of Prince Rupert, Mr. Mussallem, to make a few comments.

Mr. Jack Mussallem (Mayor of Prince Rupert, British Columbia): Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for coming to Prince Rupert. Fishing is a large part of what we do here, and right now there is so much uncertainty with regard to west coast fishing and the industry itself.

The fisheries industry is a very large part of our local economy. I don't think you've had an opportunity to look around our community, but on our waterfront we have the largest salmon cannery in the world. If Prince Rupert is anything—although we talk about economic sustainability, we talk about economic development and we talk about economic diversification—first and foremost Prince Rupert is a fishing community, has been for many years, and we continue to play a dominant role in the fishing industry. Most importantly, we want to continue to play a dominant role here.

I have to tell you that some of the uncertainty has been created by the Mifflin plan. Some of the uncertainty has also been created by the problems with the Pacific Salmon Treaty—more specifically, the addendums to the principal document.

We need that Pacific Salmon Treaty settled very, very quickly. Here in Prince Rupert we process salmon from both sides of the border, and in any given year, anywhere from 40% to 60% of that production comes from fish out of Alaska. It means a lot to our local economy and it means a lot to the shore workers here.

I'm also asking you to please tell the decision-makers in the government to take a good look at the Mifflin plan. That Mifflin plan needs to be reviewed. The impact of it has been and will continue to be sudden and large, and it has very, very long-reaching implications for the coastal communities of British Columbia.

I can't say it any more plainly than this. People here are suffering as a result of what has happened to the west coast fisheries. People here have a real fear. We do not want to see a mirror of what happened on the east coast of Canada. We need a strategic plan to assist people over a number of years. People certainly recognize that there will not be as many people involved in the west coast fisheries as there were in the past. However, there is a variety of species off the west coast of Canada, and certainly new fisheries need to be explored.

We also need a long-term transition strategy for people who will no longer be able to be involved in the industry. We're talking about people who have done nothing else. We're talking about people whose families for generations have been involved in the west coast fishing industry. A long-term transition strategy will allow people to be retrained to work in other industries. People here are no longer thinking they'll work for the summer and live off some form of assistance in the winter. People here want to work—we're a very active community—but people need to know that they can make a transition from one industry to another.

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The Community Fisheries Development Centre here in Prince Rupert has assisted people over the last year. They have put on some good programs. The criteria for some of the programs have changed and that has created some problems this year in initiating programs. However, as the mayor of the community I have been working with the local office of Human Resources Development Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to provide employment for people who would normally work in the fishing industry during the summer. While those programs are good in the winter, they may not be the only consideration. People who are able to work in the off season in these various programs certainly have an interest in it. They care about fish, they care about fish habitat, and it's an opportunity for us to assist in bolstering, through soft enhancement and in other ways, fisheries habitat to enhance some of the runs.

In this community we make a very large distinction between commercial fishing and commercial sports fishermen. While commercial sports fishing is a consideration, we are principally a commercial fishing community. Many of the people behind me, like myself, are from pioneer families in this community. Many are from the villages in the outlying area. They have grown up with fish and have made their livelihoods from it. So it's not something we take lightly here.

Over the long term we need something for the people I represent—as I have said, not only for today but in the longer term. This will involve some planning and transitions, and it will involve some money. This community is very interested in going ahead. We are interested in improving the quality of life. I have had people come up to me many, many times and say “I've got a job. I'm not sure what's happening in the fishing industry. We also have concerns about the forestry industry, but where are my children going to work?”

We are here to talk about today, but we are also here to talk about tomorrow.

I want to leave a report with you. Other people here today will speak to this report. The report has been created by somebody who is very knowledgeable in the fishing industry. Behind it are some figures from a local accountant who, when he was younger, was a halibut fisherman. The report is entitled Report on the Effects on Prince Rupert of this Fishing Season, 1997. It's very current and will give you an idea of some of the challenges we're facing and certainly some of the challenges you're going to hear about, and the challenges that the decision-makers in government will have to try to resolve.

This community, more than anything else, needs a commitment from the federal government. We are interested in working with the federal government—with all levels of government. We are interested in finding the best possible solution for the problems the west coast fishing industry is experiencing. People here have recognized that there may be fewer people working in the industry, but it's still a good industry; it's still viable. There are other species that could be looked at in terms of harvesting and processing. Prince Rupert wants to be a big part of that.

Thank you for listening to me.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I would now like to call on the mayor of Masset, Mr. Dave Penna.

Mr. Dave Penna (Mayor of Masset, British Columbia): Good morning. My focus will be a bit different from Jack's. I've given most of you a handout—and I apologize to those who didn't get it—on how fisheries decisions in government and bureaucratic decisions affect communities.

I'm from Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands. We're one of the most resource-rich areas in the world and we have a higher unemployment rate than Newfoundland does, mainly due to government policy and changing times. We can't blame only government, and we certainly can't blame only the federal government.

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We had a downsizing of the Department of National Defence. No problem. We have our fishing industry. Petro-Canada, partially government owned, decided they will pull out. They have environmental problems and chose to shut the plant down and clean up the site as opposed to maintaining it. There goes our marine supply for our fishery.

Along comes Fred Mifflin. I don't have to make much more of a comment than that.

Along comes Manpower. Government does a 10% cutback. I'm sure my Reform buddies will agree they have to do that once in a while. Ten percent. The problem with that is we don't have any service on the Charlottes any more. When they did their 10%, they cut the two workers on the Charlottes out. Gone.

They came to Prince Rupert and tromped about 20% here in the area. John Taylor in Terrace met his quota of 10% by getting rid of all manpower services on the Charlottes and approximately 30% here in Rupert. I don't think that is serving the people who pay the taxes.

Along comes Fisheries, with its allocation to lodges. We have 13 lodges on the Charlottes. We have people standing on the street corner, unemployed, watching plane load after plane load of coho and spring going all over the country while they sit with their hands in their pockets. The government turns around and says we have to get stricter with these guys who don't work full time; we're going to make it harder to qualify for unemployment. At the same time they take away more and more of our resource, the fish the guys and women have made a living from traditionally for hundreds of years, and thousands if you want to call on our native brothers. You're not taking away only an opportunity to make a living. Most of them can't even draw UI any more because you haven't left enough fish for them to work long enough to collect UI.

Welfare is not very good. Most of you stand and laugh at us when we do collect welfare.

I'll briefly get into one other thing, the ARA report. I understand that's becoming more and more the bible of government and government bureaucrats. It has some key problems with it and I know it will be dealt with many times today.

As for tax benefits, the lodges are tax write-offs to many, many corporations. At least some of the lodges are owned by people who are in other businesses and use the lodges and the fish and our resource strictly as a tax write-off. That was not considered in the ARA at all. It's a gigantic government subsidization, something like 25%. When you look at the lodge business, and I forget the number, $20 million to $30 million a year, the government is subsidizing anywhere from $7 million to $10 million of that. There are not great economic benefits to the people on the Charlottes; maybe somewhere—maybe in Campbell River, I don't know, Johnny—but it's certainly not on the Charlottes.

We have water licences the government sees fit to give out. Bob Wright, with the Charlotte Princess, goes over with like something thirty to forty fourteen-foot or sixteen-foot boats. He has a crew out there fishing every day. The assessed value of his water licence is $66,000 a year. That's about half what a normal house here in Prince Rupert is assessed at. He certainly does not contribute to the tax base.

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One of the letters you have there deals with our wharf. This is where government policy is scary. Once again the government has decided to downsize. We haven't seen the fire marshall in Masset for 25 years. Shortly after the government decides to downsize and get rid of the wharf and lay it on our shoulders after depriving us of our main resource that operates it, we suddenly get their bureaucrats. They are going to look after us now. As reflected in the letter, they see no problem with us somehow spending $1 million or $1.5 million to upgrade our facility so that we can even fuel our boats there.

Somehow we need some rationalization. Somehow we need the government to sit back and when you do make policy look at what your policy does and what your policy has as an overall effect.

I will leave it at that, except to greet our friend from the Bloc Québécois. I did talk to him briefly last night. I will tell you that the Charlottes are looking at either Alaska or Quebec. Canada hasn't offered us much of an option lately, so we may go with you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Penna.

I would now like to call on Mr. Greene, please.

Mr. Paddy Greene (Individual Presentation): Thank you. Welcome to my neck of the woods. I know it is difficult to travel with your travelling road show and everything you have around.

Like the mayor of Masset, I am going to express some unhappiness with primarily the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I started out many years ago—longer ago than I like to think about—as an employee of the department. In my fourteenth and fifteenth summers I was chief cook and bottle washer and deck-hand on a charter patrol boat. When I turned sixteen I got into the big money and started working on shore. When I was eighteen I owned my first boat and had the pleasure of going over to Mr. Penna's neck of the woods to fish salmon at the top end of the Queen Charlottes and the rest of the coast.

I've fished most of my life. I've been involved in the processing side as chief executive officer and president of the deep sea fishermen's union. I have served on a variety of boards. I was challenged by Deputy Minister Needler many years ago, in Roméo LeBlanc's time, to get involved. I got involved.

It used to be a fact that when you talked to the department and senior folks in the department in a reasoned and reasonable way you were heard. At least they took it into consideration. I think then there were probably two big differences. One, the minister was more involved and certainly had a different type of manager at 200 Kent Street, the fisheries and oceans building.

The Governor General, when he left as minister and was serving in the Senate at the time.... I was chatting with him because he was an old friend. Any time Roméo came out to British Columbia he used to come to Rupert, because this was a centre of fishing activity, and I was quite a fan. I was complaining to him about the problem we were having with the bureaucracy. He said the worst thing that happened to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was during De Bané's reign, when he allowed the central agencies to get hold of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Fisheries was a free-standing ministry with all the folks in their careers, right from the bottom to the top, in fisheries and oceans and they cared about fish. Now quite often in senior bureaucratic positions we have not civil servants but revolving bureaucrats.

I think they take advantage of ministers. We have the good, the bad, and the ugly in ministers. I think the bureaucracy takes an opportunity on the change of ministers.

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I think right now we have a committed minister. It's good for us to have a minister with a bit of clout. I asked Mr. Anderson what the format was when there's a change of ministers. Did the minister ask what's going on, what went on before, where are we? He said it depends on the minister: some want to hear, some don't want to hear.

The problem I have.... Well, it's not my problem; it's the problem we have in British Columbia in the fisheries. When a commitment is made by a minister.... I'll go into one, a very specific one, which is extremely important, particularly in the north coast and the fishing industry. It was when the so-called Mifflin plan was being created and Brian Tobin, who I thought was a good minister, was involved.

It goes without saying that if you throw a bunch of fish on the floor and put knives out, fishermen will go after each other with extreme dedication, almost as much dedication as they have to conservation. I'm not being facetious there. Fishermen are conservatives, and have been doing a very good job on it.

In a roundtable session on this reconstructuring plan that became known as the Mifflin plan there came a very, very important point. It was traditional fishing patterns, by gear and location. And we started a fight. A huge fight broke out around the table, depending on whether you lived in Johnstone Strait or Prince Rupert or the west coast of the Charlottes or Vancouver. Tobin said “Stop it right now. I'm making a decision. Stop arguing about this. I will guarantee you your traditional access by gear and areas to these species. There may be some small reallocation on numbers or whatever, but as Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, I'm telling you right here and now, stop fighting about this, because I've made a decision. You can retain your traditional fishing patterns.”

So that was good. Everybody believed Tobin and we stopped arguing about that and went on with other things and came up with a very definitive list. I was quite proud of the industry, because I thought we needed to restructure. We had to downsize our fleet and there were a number of areas where we suggested it had to be done so it was done properly and didn't get screwed up.

What happened in reality is that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans took that list of items and they cherry-picked it. They took what they wanted and threw the rest out the bloody window.

In this particular issue I referred to where we got a guarantee from Minister Tobin, the example for us on the north coast here was access to Fraser River sockeye on the west coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Fraser River sockeye, as I'm sure you know, follow the coast down and return to the Fraser River. We have traditionally accessed Fraser River sockeye on the west coast of the Charlottes, both by our troll fleet and our seine fleet.

As a matter of fact, in terms of by-catch, the fishery for Fraser River sockeye on the west coast of the Queen Charlottes is the cleanest fishery that we have in terms of by-catch. If you want to target Fraser River sockeye and not catch others, the best place to take them is the west coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

We changed ministers. Mr. Mifflin came along, and bless his soul, I don't think he knew anything about it. He didn't ask. If you don't know the right question, you don't ask it. And the bureaucracy took an opportunity—this access was not one of the things they wanted—and they threw it off the table. It disappeared.

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I ask you gentlemen, where's the honour of the crown on these things? It used to be that if a minister of fisheries and oceans or a deputy minister gave you a commitment—here you are, here is what is going to happen to you guys—you could believe it. It happened. It's not so any more. I would suggest to you that the bureaucracy takes advantage every time we change ministers. I'm sure Minister Anderson didn't know anything about it. It's two watches ahead of him where it was changed.

We recently got a paper from the department on allocation. The instructions to the person doing it from the minister's office were to continue with this and never mind what was promised by Minister Tobin, we're going to go ahead and access local stocks for these fisheries. Of course it is much more important now because we have this area of licensing in salmon.

So here we are on the north coast and the basket case of the Queen Charlotte Islands. You cannot access Fraser River sockeye. We are left to the not very tender mercies of our cousins to the north in Alaska, who are fishing extremely aggressively on our stocks. They can catch Fraser River sockeye, but we cannot. That is a traditional fishery for us.

I say foul. This is a dirty, rotten, shameful thing that is going on. It is crippling our community. It is crippling all the coastal communities around here, and no one gives a red rat's gluteus maximus about it.

I am really miffed. In the 35 or 40 years that I have been involved in this industry, this is one of the most despicable things I have seen. They don't care about coastal communities.

When I took it up with senior bureaucrats in Vancouver, primarily Bud—and it was just before Louie left—Bud admitted that they had made a mistake and we didn't hear Tobin say that or whatever. I said to Bud, you fix it. Bud isn't going to fix it. Nobody is going to fix it because that's their plan and it is just too bad about us. We have lost 26% of our salmon jobs on the north coast.

Let me go on one more on Mifflin. The name is unfair; Mifflin is saddled with the name. But boats are a compromise. It doesn't matter if it is a speedboat, a naval vessel, or a fishing boat: you give up something to get something else, whether it is size, depth, stability, how much a boat will pack, how much it will carry. If you want it to do something, then you have to sacrifice something else.

The small boat fleet on the north coast was primarily combination vessels. There are combination vessels down south, but not nearly as many. Up here they are primarily combination vessels. If you went to Port Simpson or Masset or Queen Charlotte City or Hartley Bay or Kitkatla, or Port Simpson, Port Edward, Prince Rupert and down to the floats and you looked at the class of vessels and the vessels around there, you would see these combination boats.

They don't make good gillnetters. They are usually a bit too large for gillnetters. You could have a better troller. A better troller would be larger. But these vessels are a compromise for the type of fishing that we're doing on the north coast.

Local fishermen, traditionally mostly a small boat fleet, fished in the north and would change from gillnetting to trolling in August. They did not run down to Johnstone Strait to chase Fraser River sockeye. They fished locally, whether it was the Queen Charlotte Islands or the north coast.

As part of this plan that went in they immediately eliminated combination boats. So that put an extra burden on north coast fishermen. In order to do the same as you were doing before—never mind going from area to area—you had to have twice as many licences in the north.

The economic hardship on the northern fleet is absolutely enormous. People don't have $100,000 kicking around in their pocket to go out and buy another licence. The management strategy of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans locally has totally botched the second biggest sockeye run in Canada.

We have a disease problem. One of the causes, depending on whom you talk to, is overcrowding. We have lost two years of major output of fry. This year, 1998, the net fleet might fish four or five days for the season. Next year we'll probably fish none. And now we don't have the ability to run down south and fish somewhere else, unless you happen to be fortunate enough to have hundreds of thousands of dollars you can invest in more licences here.

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Coastal communities have been devastated here, and nobody in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans particularly cares. It has become a very callous organization.

It's interesting. There's a group called the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition. There are more fishermen in the fishing industry—and it's not just commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen are involved—involved in that group than in any other fishing group in British Columbia, but Fisheries does not want to talk to them. They are very controversial. They have been going head to head and toe to toe with the department, so the department says “We don't want to talk to you guys”. I'm sure no invitation is given out in the various processes. The last guys they want to talk to are someone in the Survival Coalition.

Recently, about a year and a half ago or two years ago, a review was done of the AFS. Most of my friends are very critical about the AFS, but I try to remind them from time to time that there are good policies within the AFS, the Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy. The portion in disrepute is in the sales area.

One of the things mandated under the AFS was a review of that policy. That policy review was written by those who ran it. They ran that policy review and the review process that was required past PaRC, the Pacific Regional Council. There was no letter or anything. All of a sudden they stopped meeting. It was very cleverly done, I would suggest again by the department. It was supposed to be the senior policy adviser to the minister and it no longer meets. It works very well in clearing the way for the bureaucrats, because they don't have anyone else plying that direct information to the minister.

Anyway, PaRC, which included aboriginal, commercial, recreational, and community people, reviewed the AFS program. They were extremely critical of their sales portion. They told the folks, you guys had better go rewrite your report; it's nice to have a job where you can write your own report card, but send it back. Of course they didn't; and I hear the guy running the AFS is now in charge of the Fraser River, which is the jewel of the crown of our sockeye fishery, or salmon fishery, in British Columbia.

Enough for me. On the positive side, I would say until about 1990 we in British Columbia enjoyed world-class fisheries management in British Columbia. I'll get some arguments, but by and large we've been rebuilding runs. From time to time we have very critical shortages in some areas. On the north coast right now it's coho. But we have enjoyed some good fisheries management here. The policy areas of managing the people in the fisheries have been abysmal, particularly in the 1990s.

I hope by speaking to you today perhaps you folks will be better armed to ask some of the important and pressing questions. If you want any more information, I would be delighted to tell you. I would also tell you I'm out of the industry now. I have no involvement with the industry except with my heart, because it has been my lifelong career.

Thank you for coming.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Greene.

Just for everyone's information, we're not asking questions. Some of the MPs may wish to ask questions right at the very end, but we are here to listen to you. That is why you're not seeing many questions from the floor. But at the very end of the day we may have a few questions for you.

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I would now like to call on Jack Rowbotham, please. He is not here? We will put a question mark beside his name and if he comes in late we can squeeze him in.

Is Des Nobles here?

Mr. Des Nobles (Individual Presentation): Good morning. I'm a commercial gillnet fisherman by trade and very proud of it.

Two years ago I stood before this very committee in Ottawa with 40 other fishermen and fisheries workers in an attempt to illuminate and educate as to the fallout that would come from Mifflin. I stand before you now saying “I told you so”. I'm not happy about that; neither is my community or the other people I represent at this point.

The so-called Mifflin plan needs to be revised. It needs to be revisited and it needs to be critically reviewed. Those goals that were initially set out in the Mifflin plan have not been attained and a political agenda in turn has been inserted. The death of my community and the people I live with is certain under this plan.

In conjunction with a review of Mifflin there needs to be a complete review of the department's policy formulations, the consultative process the department utilizes and how it goes about consulting, with whom, where, and when.

As has been pointed out by the court of Canada very recently, the department seems to find who it wants to fit the agenda it requires and in doing so attains the end results it wishes. Those of us who have stood in opposition to these plans and have in many cases put forward arguments that are valid have been ignored—if not ignored, at least sidelined and given no credence.

Within the department itself we have very low morale. As Paddy has pointed out, since 1990 and the restructuring within the department those people who have worked for us and have understood the fishery have been in many cases also sidelined. Their advice has been ignored while political expediencies have been gaining foothold.

In turn, those people who have worked for the department for years, who have worked honestly and openly and whom many of us believe are extremely good people, have been demoralized to the point where they don't even know what to do any more. They have been asked to do more with less, and in many cases their advice has been ignored as well.

Canada-U.S. In the north we have been ghettoized through Mifflin and area licensing. In doing so the fish that return to this region are even more important to us now than they were prior to Mifflin. The U.S., Alaska in particular, has seen fit to continue to harvest at a rate that is not sustainable. It has taken stocks from this region and has made it impossible for us to prosecute fisheries that we would normally prosecute—our sockeye fisheries. We have coho and chinook being taken in Alaska in unprecedented numbers. Those fish are being removed from the suite of fish that we pursue, and it means the department has taken conservation measures here against Canadian fishermen, which would basically put us in a state of bankruptcy. We are unable to access the stocks that are even returning here, not just those that are being harvested in Alaska.

The Canadian government has left us with no room to move. They have chosen, for whatever reasons—other political expediencies, many of us believe. We just don't know what to do.

Many of you, I'm sure, are aware of what took place in Prince Rupert last year. That came after years of frustration of waiting for government and bureaucracies to fulfil mandates and obligations that they had made before. After five years of sitting around, this community and the fishing people of this coast realized that they were being left to die and as such chose to stand up for themselves. We've waited too long and it has cost us too much.

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The present Minister of Fisheries, Mr. Anderson, in all honesty is an ass. The man does not understand fisheries and he does not understand the people of this coast. He comes from a region that is outside of the realities for the vast majority of us on this coast.

In turn, an appointed official, Ms. Velma McColl, has been instituted as his west coast adviser on fisheries issues. Ms. McColl comes from a long history within the recreational sector, a sector on this coast that has been trying for years to access stocks that we have traditionally harvested. As director of the Sport Fishing Institute of British Columbia she was instrumental in lobbying and attempting to garner sport fish, coho and chinook, primarily and solely for the recreational sector. In doing so she brought an immense amount of pressure to bear on the industry in which I work and live.

There is an extremely strong perception of a conflict of interest here. There is absolutely no support for nor any belief in the minister and his appointed officials. As such it has made it extremely hard for many of us to sit down and conscientiously deal with the issues on this coast, for we believe we have no voice.

I hope at this time that you people, who I must say are long overdue here, may be an opportunity for a voice to be re-established in Ottawa.

Many of us believe personally that Ottawa should butt out of the bloody fisheries. We have over the last year and a half pursued provincial involvement in fisheries. We believe the federal government has far too many other obligations and constraints when regarding fisheries issues. We become a pawn in a larger political game.

I hope that when you go back to Ottawa you will take the comments I have made here and the comments you will get from many others.

I have chosen not to submit a written brief, basically because I am so damned tired of writing. I have written more in the last three years than I wrote in the previous 45. I don't know what to do with my life any more. I wake up every morning trying to decide whether I should bother getting out of bed or just stay there. I have fished for 20 years, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to fish for another year. I was a viable fisherman until Mifflin came along to make me a more viable fisherman. I am less viable now than I was before.

Those who fell into the trap of purchasing other licences to travel this coast who were supposed to be even more viable than me are even less viable than I am. These people are now carrying debt loads that are almost insurmountable in light of the opportunity that they are garnering with that other licence.

The saddest part of this is that it has nothing to do with the numbers of fish. We have fish on this coast. It is not a lack of fish; it is a lack of commitment by a paternalistic government to the fish and to the people of this coast. The stocks that we have are sustainable and renewable on a two- to four-year basis. There is not another resource in this country that has the ability to renew itself in that short a span of time.

The department has been extremely negligent in maintaining those regimes and those stocks on this coast. It was their mandate to make sure that these fish returned, but they have negated that mandate. They have chosen, for whatever reason, not to rebuild these stocks on various parts of the coast.

Between Prince Rupert and Vancouver we have 500 miles of linear coastline and tens of thousands of miles of actual coastline. That region used to produce an immense amount of fish, in reality far more poundage than we produce within the Fraser and the Skeena itself on sockeye. But, for whatever reason, those streams have been allowed to die.

Other constraints have come in and allowed the work that should have been done to be sidelined and not carried forward. For years we have paid licence fees and a number of other fees to contribute to policing and enhancement of fish stocks on this coast. Those fees have disappeared into the black hole of general revenues, rather than going back into the fisheries coffer, where they should have gone, to facilitate and pay for the management and enhancement of fish stocks on this coast.

It has also come to my attention that this committee will not be spending any time in Nanaimo, B.C. I say shame on you. Nanaimo represents, as a central area, one of the largest groups of fishing people on this coast.

In turn, I understand you will be finding yourselves in Mr. Anderson's riding, or very close to it, in Victoria, viewing the Craigflower overpass. To what end? Are we looking at a goddamned photo opportunity for Mr. Anderson here? What are we up to? I have people from the central coast phoning me, asking “What's going on? Why on earth are we not being given the opportunity to speak to these people?” These are the people who are affected, not the people in Victoria. There may be half a dozen fishermen left in Victoria. The rest of them live up island. That is where you should be meeting.

• 1305

I thank you very much for coming and I'll take up no more of your time. I'm almost in tears. I'm unable to say much more than I have. Please listen to us and take what we say back with you. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Des, before you go, I'll use the chairman's prerogative and ask you a question. You explained that you had been going down, down, down as far as your ability to catch and so on is concerned. As a gillnetter, could you tell us what would be your average week's take in the numbers of fish this year? That would be for what, between a 15-, 20-week...? How many fish per week would you get?

Mr. Des Nobles: A 15-, 20-day...that's not even 20.

The Chairman: That's what I mean. How many fish per day would you catch on average and what would that represent? Would that represent just your expenses, or have you covered them this year?

Mr. Des Nobles: In the 15 years that I have fished salmon I have had an average annual income in the neighbourhood of $45,000 gross. Take out of that roughly $10,000 in expenses. The rest is mine to do what needs to be done; $5,000 of that is put aside for the next year's operating expenses for start-up costs and the rest I use to raise a family of three.

This year, which is the worst year I have ever had in my life, I earned just over $14,000. After expenses and buying a new net, which I have had to buy for the last five years—there is new gear every bloody year because of some policy restriction and some other new move by the department—I made not one single dime on salmon. That was the extent of my season. I was one of the lucky ones. I made my costs. The reality for most of the fishermen on this part of the coast, and actually better than half the coast, was $8,500 in essentially 19 days of fishing in an area where I used to fish anywhere from 35 to 45 days. I don't care how good a fisherman you are, you are unable to make that up. There is no possible way.

We talk about quality and a number of other issues whereby we may be able to garner some further income from the fish we do catch. The reality is that no matter how much quality you produce it is not going to make up for the loss of opportunity. We are not guaranteed fish. We are not guaranteed anything. I have no rights as a salmon fisherman. I have what is termed a privilege. I have a privilege to opportunity. I can live with that and I can live with a privilege to opportunity, but I can't live without the opportunity.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Mr. Duncan.

Mr. John Duncan (Vancouver Island North, Ref.): I have one further clarification, Des. When you were earning $45,000 a year.... A lot of this is subject to the price we're getting now, I'm assuming. Can you give the committee a feel for the price you were getting for salmon at that time, what you're getting in 1997, and where you think it's going in the future?

Mr. Des Nobles: Price definitely has a bearing on income. That's a given. The reality, though, is that in years past when prices have been low—mind you, we have had prices in the past as low as what we have had this year—we've had the opportunity, as others will point out to you, to move up and down the coast, into various other areas, and access other stocks so that we could make up that differential. As a northern fisherman, I have only gone south once. But in those intervening years a substantial portion of the fleet that came from down south to fish here left in that August period, and then in that August period, as our fleet reduced here, the opportunity for myself increased; the numbers of fish I caught increased.

• 1310

Under Mifflin and the ghettoizing of the fleet, the department, in its wisdom and in the prospectus it put forward to fishermen when selecting areas, was, shall I say, faulty, to say the least. As it did so, many people chose the north. We ended up with a fleet in the north of a thousand-plus gillnet vessels in an area that has perhaps the least amount of fish to garner to that fleet.

These people were sold a prospectus, a prospectus such that I believe had any reputable firm or brokerage house put it forward, it would be taken to court for fraud. These people were sold a bill of goods. So they moved here, and in turn the fish that was here was insufficient to garner a living for anyone, no matter what the price had been. Even had the price been double what I got for it, it still would have put us in a situation of tenuous income nonetheless.

Mr. John Duncan: In that prospectus, was there an expectation of being given access to Fraser River sockeye?

Mr. Des Nobles: No, there was no pretense about getting access to Fraser River stocks. But in the prospectus, those who were in the south were told there would be no opportunity in the Fraser. So economically they had no choice but to choose the north, even though they had no wish to come.

When we originally came before this panel two years ago, we submitted to the panel a 12-point proposal which would achieve the reductions “Mifflin” was attempting to achieve but in a far more humane fashion, and in a fashion that was realistic. We wished to have a major buy-out. As a matter of fact, we proposed borrowing the money ourselves and amortizing that over a number of years, paying it back. We would just have a complete large buy-out of the fleet over a number of years, without the restriction to area licensing. This would allow us to carry forward, as we had in previous years, with the traditional fishing patterns and access to traditional stocks. That was denied us. We were ghettoized once again, as I pointed out to you.

We had also requested that should we go to an area licensing regime, it should be made on a permanent basis, as opposed to being able to choose again in four years, because that would definitely alter the way in which people would choose the areas they were going to fish in. They would be looking at a longer-term period, as opposed to the short term, whereby they might be able to garner the best economic benefits and then return to the area where they lived. That was also dropped, for whatever reasons.

In the end most of us are left with the view that political expediencies drove that process, as opposed to the needs and requirements of fish and fishing communities. Conservation, which was of prime concern under Mifflin, I'm sorry, has not been addressed—not at all, not in the least. Capacity, which was one of the driving factors in fleet revitalization, has not been addressed. That 33% by which the fleet has been dropped doesn't equate to a 33% drop in capacity, because what was driven out of the industry was those who had the least impact on the stocks: those, like myself, who were making a living within the constraints and requirements and abilities of the resource to provide. In turn, what was left was those who required far more fish, far more of everything, to survive. So the over-capitalization increased, as opposed to decreased, which again was one of the main thrusts of Mifflin. In the end, nothing came from Mifflin other than disaster and heartbreak and sorrow.

We have an industry that can be rebuilt. We have a stock that can rebuild itself with very little effort on our part. It's amazing how little effort it takes. Fish return. Give them somewhere to come to and put a few fish in that system and they will be back here. That's a given. I have faith in Mother Nature. I have no faith in government.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Noble.

I would now like to call on Mr. Fred Hawkshaw.

Mr. Fred Hawkshaw (Individual Presentation): Thank you. I got lucky and sneaked in here this morning. I was on my way out fishing, but I got reminded about this meeting.

I didn't come with anything written or really much thought about. I really wasn't prepared for this thing.

I'm going to attack my concerns from a slightly different perspective; I don't know what kind of direction. First I would just like to read you something. I don't even know where exactly it comes from. It has to do with prices and things:

Alaska packers and Japan importers are selling sockeye below cost, and again the market is debating whether consumers gradually forget about sockeye and replace it with other salmon species.

I find this very offensive. It just makes me wonder why the big companies have such huge control on this coast. I think a lot of our problems boil down to control by the wrong people. They have been so blatantly bad about dealing with our fish and dealing properly with their fish, namely farm fish, that it's left us holding an empty bag. Yes, there are lots of fish out there, if the Americans don't catch them.

• 1315

I combination-fished for...I was going to say 20 years, but I guess I have to say 19 because I chose gillnetting as a style of life. I mainly trolled. My income for all the years I combination-fished was probably in the order of $56,000 a year. As of late, since I've gillnetted more, my income has probably dropped in half. I blame that partly on myself for not doing a better job of my own marketing. Marketing is such a huge concern for me. I see farm salmon everywhere being marketed in such a manner that the companies keep telling us they can't handle our fish like that.

My son works for a restaurant in Kelowna. They get 20 pounds of farm salmon three times a week. What's wrong with marketing wild fish like that? They won't do that. They want to market 20,000 kilos or whatever in container loads and can't be bothered with wild salmon any more. They've got their own farm salmon now.

Another issue that really concerns me is the up river native fishery. We've been told now for quite a few years that there are concerns about steelhead and coho, etc. We've been shut down in August. That's probably why my income is so small now.

That up river fishery has grown to numbers that I don't even want to quote here, to protect some people. In August there's a seine fishery that takes place, supposedly under the guise of quality fishing so that they can release these fish. Boy that's a fruitbar if I ever heard one. Where does that leave the gillnetter? I can't troll here any more. I've lived here for going on 20 years, between here and the Charlottes. A lot of my friends can't troll any more because they chose gillnetting under the belief that we could still make a living here.

I have a video at home done by Ian Hanomansing from the CBC show Asia Pacific, which says, yes, we paid a little bit more for some sockeye this year, provided they didn't have net marks on them. That's a scary concern for a gillnetter, but not insurmountable. We tried a test net this year that demonstrated we didn't need to have net marks on the fish, just by using a smaller net. It was also able to release by-catch species alive. I think we can address those concerns, but the up river fishery is gaining such power, along with the companies and their seiners, that I'm not sure where the gillnetters are going to fit any more, unless somebody does something about this.

I also saw another video yesterday on Country Canada concerning farm fish, these wonderful things that are going to replace our fish according to the big companies. They have a disease in Nova Scotia, ISA, and they're considering destroying completely the whole farm salmon industry there and starting all over again. It that what we're faced with here?

We've got the big companies marketing our wild salmon as canned salmon or whatever. You can't buy a number one quality fish export grade in Canada. It is not possible. Everywhere we sold fish this summer we did our own marketing. Everybody said the same thing. They cannot buy a wild number one salmon in Canada. It's poor marketing, and that's partly what's killing us.

In 1978 I got $3.25 for spring salmon, $2.10 for sockeye, $2.75 for coho, and $1 for pink salmon. That's when a dollar was worth a dollar. Today I'm getting nothing for my fish and the companies are doing nothing about it. That's more where my anger comes from, I guess. And that upriver fishery is just taking us over. I paid $1,500 a couple of weeks ago for my licence, for an A licence. I'm supposed to be out fishing. It says right on it “This licence is not valid for salmon”. That's my salmon licence—because it's too early for salmon. So why did I have to spend $1,500? For what?

• 1320

When I do get to go fishing, I'm told I might get seven days, maybe, if we're lucky, but the guys upriver aren't going to get seven days. They're going to get whatever it takes to cream off the surplus, supposedly, under ESSR.

I don't have a lot more to add, but certainly a lot can be done to help the gillnet fishermen. Certainly we need to help ourselves, but we're being attacked from all angles, and I don't think fairly.

I don't know whether this will address your concerns or not, but it's certainly a huge concern of mine. I've heard all the mayors of the towns speak and the concerns seem to be the same sort of thing. We don't have any income any more to keep the towns viable.

Perhaps we have to do our own job of marketing, whatever it takes, but for God's sake give us an opportunity to fish the fish we have a right to.

I don't think anybody upriver is going to pay $1,500 for a licence to go and kill fish. I know we all are, and if you've got two licences, you're probably paying $3,000 this year for a right to go fishing. But there's no guarantee of access any more.

Anyway, I'm going off fishing. My boat's running and I got lucky to get in here. Thank you very much. I'm certainly glad that you came and listened to our concerns. You're hearing a great variety of concerns and there are probably going to be a heck of a lot more. I hope you will pay attention.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Hawkshaw, if you don't mind answering, Mr. Duncan has one question.

Mr. John Duncan: You mentioned the seine fishery, I presume on the Skeena.

Mr. Fred Hawkshaw: Yes.

Mr. John Duncan: For the committee's benefit, I want you to explain what you're talking about. What's the rationale for the fishery when it occurs, and the scale?

Mr. Fred Hawkshaw: The rationale was originally that steelhead was a concern. We later found out that steelhead was more an allocation issue than a stock strength concern.

Be that as it may, everybody has a right to make a living at something, whatever they do, whether it's sport fishing or whatever. So the belief was that seiners could deal with that issue. They could release these things and all good things....

They've been given blanket figures of 50% salvation on coho, and all this sort of stuff.

We did test trolling, which is probably the least abominable towards the fish as you can get, other than a hook in its face, and we kept them alive on the boat for a day. Our best recovery, handled with kid gloves and care, was 60%.

I don't know if you've ever seen salmon in a seine net. Coho are notorious for lactic acid build-up in their system and as such suffer heart attacks, muscle seizures, etc. I don't see 50% survival.

I was told last year, by unnamed persons of good credibility, that if care is taken a gillnetter could outstrip a seiner in survival on weak stock or species that we should be releasing and so on.

We were not given one moment's notice. All that happened was that the seine fishery shut down to save any further embarrassment or whatever. I don't want to get into that.

Give us a chance. That's what I'm saying.

Mr. John Duncan: So if I had to sum up the logic that vehicle is using, it is that the seiners can get the sockeye more quickly in a window when there is the least mixing with coho and steelhead. Am I making a correct judgment of what the argument is?

Mr. Fred Hawkshaw: I suppose that boat by boat that could be said to be true. You could get the whole school of sockeye and perhaps intercept only a couple of coho or something else, whereas a gillnetter is subject to sitting there and waiting until the fish get into the net.

The argument was that the fish could be carefully taken. I talked to a seiner and he said he was one of the reasons why they closed it down. His son was in the skiff beside the net and instead of making a choice to physically brail or get the fish into a dip net and release it, he tried to carefully lean over the skiff, push the corks down and get hold of the fish and scoop it out of the net so he wouldn't get more scales off or distress it further. A fishery officer saw him and closed the fishery. Just like that. He said the rules were you had to brail. Regardless of whether that was right or wrong, or the best way to save the fish or not—this guy thought he was doing it the best way—he closed the fishery.

• 1325

So maybe none of us are getting a fair shake except the people upriver. I don't know what the scoop is, but certainly we're not getting a good shake at it.

Put observers in our boats, or whatever it takes. Give us a chance to make a living out there.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Hawkshaw.

Is Dave Prosser here?

Mr. David Prosser (President, Northern Trollers Association): Good morning. Welcome to Prince Rupert.

I don't envy you at all. I've looked at your agenda, and I've sat through enough meetings. I know you're going to hear a lot of stuff in the next few days, and I hope you can sort through the BS, because there's going to be lots of it.

I've chosen to deal with two aspects of the fishery today. We'll try not to get very technical, because I can appreciate that if I came and tried to do your job or understand your job in a very short time, that would be very difficult to do. I'll try to stay away from numbers and technical aspects and deal more with what I feel are becoming problems in our fishery.

I'm the president of the Northern Trollers Association. I have been for two years now. Before that I was dealing as a director in our organization.

I'm a relative newcomer. I've been in the process for probably five or six years now, but I think I have learned the process. I've attended an awful lot of meetings and I've sat through this latest batch of restructuring from the beginning, from the round table and through. I think I have developed a feeling for the process and the people I'm dealing with.

A very brief history. Coastal communities grew up around the fishing industry on this coast—we know that, everybody says that—and so developed an infrastructure in the towns and the communities up and down this coast. At that time the commercial fleet was pretty much the only user group. It was very simple. We had gillnetters, seiners, and trollers dealing with the salmon.

What we have now is a native fishery, which has grown. We have a recreational fishery, which has grown. We have Alaskan interception, which has also grown. This has greatly confused the issues.

I can't lay all the blame for mismanagement on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I feel a great empathy for them as they try to deal with the problems they are faced with. The problems appear almost insurmountable. But the bottom line is that we had to reduce our fleet. Whether you agree or disagree with the Mifflin plan, because of the new demands on the fishery, I do believe we were facing a crisis. We could not continue to fish the way we were fishing. Viability is the bottom line. A person has to be viable in what they do. They have to be able to support themselves and their communities to make a living. So we are dealing with fleet reduction. We have fleet reduction.

I don't wish to dwell on the Mifflin plan. It was not one of the favourite parts in my life. I hope to get past that. I was unhappy with the roundtable process mainly because of the speed with which it was implemented. It was absolutely bizarre. As you can appreciate, this mess we were in...it had taken us probably 100 years to reach this point, to get ourselves into this mess. Minister Tobin came along and said we have to fix this; if you guys don't fix it, I will. He set up the round table process, bailed out in the middle of it, and in the course of one winter we went from a type of fishery that had been evolving for 100 years and in the course of a few months we were forced to restructure this fishery. I consider this to be unrealistic and impractical.

So my first point is we have moved far too fast in the last while. Looking into the future, one thing I would like you gentlemen to take to the department is please, let's slow down. You've heard some very compelling arguments so far this morning, and I won't repeat them, but everything these people have said is absolutely true. I've heard very little BS this morning, although I've heard a lot of BS over the years.

I hope you gentlemen can appreciate, if you can take my word for it—I mean, I could be BSing you too—what you've heard this morning, the arguments these people have made. I won't go over them again. We are still in a mess. We have the Alaskans to deal with. We have aboriginal fisheries to deal with. I don't want to get too much into that issue. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

• 1330

My first point is the viability of the fleet. I'll repeat that. I have to have some assurances that if I remain in the industry, I can expect, all things considered, to be able to make at least a significant portion of my living catching salmon. I have other things to do; I don't have to do it all just catching salmon, but it is a major part of my personal viability.

So we have all these concerns. The first one I have is of the aboriginal fishery—the treaty process. We are settling the treaty with fish. Now this is a very realistic approach, and I have no problem with this approach. Fish were a larger part of the native history than of my history. It seems reasonable to me that we settle this with fish. So we set up the Nisga'a agreement. The figures are out. I won't repeat them today because I don't think it's really the point. They will get so many of this species, so many of that species, so many of another species. But they're dealing in numbers of fish. It is my impression they are not dealing in percentages. So we're dealing with rises and falls in run sizes and returns.

If there is a year that is a low return, they will be expecting a certain number of fish—not a percentage of that allocation, but a certain number of that fish. For conservation means, they have to put so many fish on a spawning ground. So if they're given a number of fish, that means I can't catch any of those fish. When you take their numbers and the conservation numbers, it cuts back on it. This also applies for the Alaskans and the recreational fishery. Everybody wants a piece of this pie.

I'm very worried that in the treaty process, as we go down the coast band by band.... I have been told by people in organizations that are paying attention to this process, much closer attention than I am, that if you add the numbers up, if the trend continues there won't be any fish for the commercial industry. So that is one factor: what is that going to do for my viability.

The second issue is the recreational fishery. Again, people have a right to go fishing. I don't deny this. The recreational fishery is here to stay. We can't expect it to go away. However, it has developed unfettered and with very little control over the last few years. When I started fishing at Langara Island in 1979 there were no charter operators there. The commercial fleet enjoyed exclusive access to that country. It was wonderful. However, things can't stay the same.

Somebody pulled a little lodge in there. It's a beautiful, magnificent place. You should all go there; it's a wonderful place to be. A small lodge was pulled in there and they started getting clients. Well it became very popular and this small lodge started making a lot of money. In the course of maybe ten years, there are now, out of one bay on Langara Island, approximately a hundred small skiffs operating daily out of four lodges there. These are big lodges; these are big-buck operations. These aren't mom and pop out there chartering. This is corporate enterprise; this is commercial fishing. Each of these skiffs has two people in it and up to four rods. When you get to expectations and viability, these people have been guaranteed two fish per day. They can go out there and expect to catch two fish per day—spring salmon.

They claim to have a very wonderful program called catch and release. When we release fish it's called a shaker problem; when they do it it's called catch and release, and this is touted as a wonderful thing to do.

You heard Fred talk about mortality. What is happening there is they are filtering fish; they are filtering through spring salmon. Because of geography and ocean currents and stuff, spring salmon come to this area. If you look at the charts, it's not a mystery. This is how it happens. Everybody wants the biggest fish, so they will fish all day and catch a lot of fish. They're allowed to keep two. So they catch these fish, and that one's not big enough, so they cut the leader. They are using two little stainless steel hooks and bait. When a fish takes bait it inhales it. We have often found fish with these hooks embedded in their bellies. These fish are not going to survive. They cut the hook. They claim they don't want to stress them. Fine, we won't get into details.

• 1335

They have an expectation of being able to catch two fish a day. If we have conservation problems, they say they have to have a guarantee of bookings: they have to take their bookings in the wintertime for the summertime. I agree with that. If you are going to run a business, you have to do that. However, the expectation has been given and is given to the clients that they will always be able to catch their two fish and their four possession limit. My point is they must cut back. If it looks like the stock is not as strong as it was, reduce the bag limit.

They have been allowed to take more and more and more fish. The industry has been allowed to grow without any controls at all. Therefore, if there are 100 or 200 people a day fishing at Langara, they are given the promise to be able to expect to catch two fish a day. If returns are down and stocks are weak and I come in there, then they say for conservation and to get the fish on the spawning beds we have to first.... The Alaskans have taken their share; that is out of our control.

A voice: More than their share.

Mr. David Prosser: The natives have been given a promise, which is coming out of our share. The commercial recreational sector, the corporate recreational sector, has been given a promise that they can catch so many fish. So how many fish are left for me? How will I be able to maintain my viability?

You have heard the mayor's comments, so we won't go through that again. We live here. We have to have some guarantee of viability. Granted, we have to reduce our fleet. We have to deal with all these issues. All these issues are here and happening and I can see that none of them are going to go away. If I am going to be made non-viable and not given any promises, what we really need to do in the future is sit down and determine what is a realistic size to the troll fleet. I am speaking as a troller here. What is a realistic size? We have cut 37% of our fleet in the last two years.

What I don't see in the department, and what I would like to see, is somebody conscientiously saying.... I refer to it as the death of a thousand cuts. One cut is not going to kill me. The native fishery is not going to kill me. The recreational fishery isn't going to kill me. The Alaska fishery isn't going to kill me. We have parties lobbying heavily on all of those fronts to get fish for themselves. If they are successful, there is not going to be enough fish left for me to be viable. So I would like to see some kind of conscientious effort made by the department to take on responsibility—if not by the department then by someone else—to say if we appreciate this guy and we really want him to stay a viable businessman, live in the community and support this community, he has to have so many spring salmon, so many sockeye, so many coho, and a bunch of humps and dogs. But there doesn't seem to be any process set up to monitor or give any assurances to the commercial fleet that they will be left with enough fish to be viable.

I have honestly come to the point where I believe.... There has been a theory for a while that there is a conspiracy to remove the commercial fleet. A member in DFO said that is not true, because there is nobody smart enough in that department to come up with a conspiracy like that.

My point is that if you want me to remain a viable fisherman and part of this community, pay attention to my needs. If my needs cannot be fulfilled and if I cannot make a living at it.... I'm not talking about living for a full year on a two months fishery. I'm not talking about becoming a wealthy man. I have a family. I fish with my family; it's family-run business. I want someone to say Dave Prosser is contributing in a significant way to his community.

• 1340

So if it looks like I'm going to die a slow death, then perhaps the recreational community in that year could be pulled back to one fish per day. Do they really need to take home two large spring salmon a day? Do they really need to filter through a huge number of spring salmon in the name of sport so that I can't make a living? You've got to have fun. Everybody's got to have fun. I don't have nearly enough fun these days, because I'm coming to meetings like this.

One of the things I would like you to take back to the department is accountability. If you call me to a meeting.... Everybody has brought up the roundtable process. There's this process today. We're going through the Sam Toy process right now, if you're aware of that, which is the allocation between commercial and sports. We're going through the Kelleher process, which is the allocation among troll, seine, and gillnetter.

I spend days and days and days and days every year going to meetings for no pay. I take time away from my business and I take time away from my family to go to these meetings. I get no remuneration for it. Yet my advice, as Paddy said, is cherry-picked. It is not being listened to. I would like to see accountability come back into this process.

I would like to dwell a little bit further as well on the point Des Nobles brought up. With all due respect to Ms. McColl here, this is not an attack on her, but on a perception of where the industry is going right now.

It is obvious from the statements of the minister that the recreational fishery is being given priority in this province. It is a growing industry. It is very much part of the economy of this province. I do not disagree with that. What I would like to see is a level playing field.

The perception I have is that Mr. Anderson is a supporter of the recreational fishery. I don't have a problem with this; it's a free country. One of his first acts was to appoint Velma as his personal assistant. Now, Velma has been in the industry for quite a few years, but in the recreational sector, and is a very hard-working woman. I appreciate her part in the industry. But the perception is that she has come from the Sport Fishing Institute. I won't bore you. I was going to bring a range of material, letters and stuff, that has been put out by the Sport Fishing Institute. It's basically a propaganda machine.

I've called Velma on this one, and she says this is how you do business. This was her previous job. Her job was to promote the interests of primarily the commercial recreational sector. When she left her job, one of Minister Anderson's campaign managers, Gerry Kristianson, then became a director of the Sport Fishing Institute. Recently, Mr. Tom Bird, who was the head, in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, of the sports fishing wing of DFO, has retired and become in charge of the Sport Fishing Institute. It appears to me that we have a very incestuous relationship going on here.

What I would like to see is a more balanced advisory process. Again, this is my perception. I hope I haven't been slanderous, but in taking care of my business, when I see this, it makes me kind of nervous.

What this has all been based on, the value of this, is a report—you've also heard about this today—the ARA report. It got into the economics of what's a fish worth. One of the main questions in the ARA report is if you don't have to go pay for a fish.... Because a lot of people just go fishing, get themselves a boat and a motor and go fishing. One of the main tenets of this report is if you had to pay for this privilege, how much would you be willing to pay for this experience? Now, this is a pretty esoteric question.

It also takes as a value for the commercial fish a fish landed at the dock. So say a spring salmon is worth $60 to me. That is the value that was put on that fish by the ARA report. I maintain my boat, I employ shore workers, truckers, stores, machine shops. But that was not figured into this report. So on the basis of this report, again, we are going full speed. My point again is we're moving very, very fast down this road on a report that appears to me to be seriously flawed.

• 1345

We are now in the process of having a gentleman by the name of Dr. Don Pepper refute this report and do a parallel report. He was a DFO economist and was raised in a fishing community. He is a teacher at BCIT and has done considerable work for the Northwest Territories department of fisheries. What he is looking at is more than an absolute dollar; he is studying social and economic impacts.

I would like you to take back to the department that we would like to have this valuation approach revisited before we go too much further down this road of reallocation. We would like to have a closer look at this report. We're unhappy with it.

We are independents and we don't have the resources. We are lagging behind here. This report is being worked on now, and I hope it will be presented within the next month. I would like the people in the department and in your group to look at this report and make some decisions before more fish are allocated away.

We also have a busy winter here. We're dealing with Dr. Toy and we're dealing with Mr. Kelleher. I'll read a brief paragraph from Dr. May's report, which I think sums it up. I am impressed with Dr. Toy and I am very impressed with the work Dr. May did. I hope I am impressed with Stephen Kelleher. Here is one of the main points Dr. May made:

In closing, I again emphasize that I was asked to provide advice whereby allocation decisions would be marked by impartiality and transparency, that they would be manageable without increasing costs to Government, that the fundamental difference in managing aboriginal, commercial and sport fisheries should be recognized and provided for and that security of allocation should be enhanced both at the sector level and the individual participant level.

The supposed conclusion of the process is often followed by lobbying at the political level both provincially and nationally. Important compromises, hammered out in charged atmospheres by committed people, may be adjusted after the fact through interventions in other places.

This is one of the main findings of Dr. Art May, who was asked by the government to do a report. Mr. Sam Toy is now dealing with the implementations report. I have some faith in Mr. Toy. I am very concerned that his findings will be given the transparency that Mr. May said is not in the process.

We could go on all day. I think we'll just leave it at that. Thank you very much.

I say again that I don't envy you your job. Keep your ears open.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Processor.

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Prosser. I'm having a hard time with the names today. If you have more to say, we'll be here this afternoon and there may be more time.

We are now about ten minutes behind schedule, but there are no breaks in the schedule. I'm going to suggest we stop for just a few minutes so that everyone can get a cup of coffee. I would ask you to go back to your seats as quickly as possible so that we can carry on while you have your coffee. We've got a long schedule to get through this morning.

• 1348

• 1400

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Order, please.

Your MP, Mike Scott, who has been instrumental in bringing the committee to Prince Rupert and has lobbied to make sure we made it on this trip, has asked to make a couple of quick points on the last few presenters, just to clarify something.

Mr. Mike Scott: Thanks, Gary.

I just want on the record the issue of the sport fishing lodges on the Queen Charlotte Islands so that everybody understands it. For the benefit of the committee, about 12 or 14 years ago there were no lodges and now there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of a dozen on the north coast of Graham Island. These sport fishing lodges are not regulated by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They pay no fees; they don't pay to participate, as a commercial fisherman does. They are taking a significant amount of chinook salmon. I think the mayor of Masset, who presented earlier today, made the point that they basically provide nothing for the local economy. All the food that is consumed by the sport fishing lodges is brought in from the lower mainland. All of the staff who work in these lodges are hired from outside. There's basically no spin-off to the local economy whatsoever, and there's no regulation by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

I want to make this point because most of us in this room, at some point in our lives, consider ourselves to be sports fishermen. I'm a sports fisherman. But this is a different kettle of fish. These are large, commercial sport fishing operations that are run on a big scale. They have nothing to do with local people taking advantage of a sport fishing opportunity. These are big businesses. I think it's really important for the committee to understand that and understand that as these sport fishing lodges have grown, they have, without any doubt whatsoever, had an impact on the stock levels and particularly on the troll fleet that has historically depended on that chinook fishery.

Thank you.

Mr. Peter Stoffer (Sackville—Eastern Shore, NDP): Are those lodges, as the gentleman indicated earlier, a tax write-off?

Mr. Mike Scott: They can be in the sense that there are many large companies in Canada, particularly in western Canada, who will take their clients and/or employees to those lodges as a promotion, as a recognition for achievements and so on. Of course, if you take your employee or a client as a promotion to those lodges, you get to write off the expense of that. So I would have to agree that these are not, for the most part, lodges that are contributing to the tax base in a significant manner.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mike.

Mr. Dave Penna: Can I just clarify one thing that Mike said? The reason the lodges get away with that is they do not call themselves fishing operations. They actually fall under the regulations of hotels, so they're not responsible to the Department of Fisheries. I know our local enforcement people have been quite frustrated at times because they have very little power over them. They're not the responsibility of the Department of Fisheries; they're actually hotels.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): That's an excellent point. We'll make note of that and look into it further.

We're now getting close to a half hour behind our schedule. I'm going to ask the remaining presenters if they can try to keep their comments to ten minutes. But we do have from two to four o'clock this afternoon set aside with no schedule, where people can come up to the microphone and make their points. So if you don't get it all in now, it's an excellent opportunity to come back this afternoon. Those who aren't on the list who want to speak, that's why we're here, to listen to you.

• 1405

I'm now going to call on Allan Sheppard, from the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Allan Sheppard (Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce): Thank you.

I noticed others did give a bit of a background, and I know there are often misconceptions amongst people when you mention “chamber of commerce”, so I would just like to indicate that Rupert is my home town. My father arrived in this community—from Newfoundland, actually—on this coast 90 years ago this year. He was obviously a fisherman when he arrived here, and he continued to be for the remainder of his life.

I had the opportunity to fish commercially in my youth. Then I worked for Nelson Brothers and B.C. Packers for 30 years before buying their service facilities in Port Edward and operating them for 10 or 12 years. Those were a boat shop, a marine fuel barge, and a marine supply store. I was very fortunate, in that I sold the boat shop and the property about three years ago. If I hadn't sold it then I would obviously have gone broke now.

At the peak in the late 1980s—this might be of interest to you—I did employ up to 35 people in season. I had gross revenues of $2.5 million. That business has totally disappeared. It's totally gone, and from the municipality as well, the village or district of Port Edward.

We incorporated that village in 1966. We had four operating salmon canneries in it. In 1966, the year we incorporated, we processed or canned one-third of the canned salmon in the province of British Columbia. That's totally gone now.

We do have two fishing operations on the waterfront now, two small firms, small at least in relation to B.C. Packers and the big ones. We do have—this is another major change in our industry, one that is a sore point, or definitely a concern to the area—quite a number of unloaders now. There's a government...formerly a small craft harbour facility there, and fish unloading is going on. Literally millions of pounds a year are going straight off the boat into the back of trucks and off to processing in other areas, mainly Vancouver but also across the border. Some of the fish, particularly the crab, is taken straight across the border into the United States for sale. In any case, we had very large processing operations in Port Edward, and as I say, they have disappeared.

That's not what I have written down here, or what I wanted to talk about.

The Prince Rupert Chamber certainly appreciates the opportunity to present our views on federal fisheries policies. As one of Canada's major fishing communities for the past 88 years, we suffered through two of the most tumultuous years of that entire period in 1996 and 1997.

I know you want to shorten this. I read through this last night and I think it took about 15 minutes, so I will try to cut back on it and hit some of the items that haven't been touched on by others this morning. For some of the items I would touch on, there are others in the room obviously far more knowledgeable.

On area licensing and the buy-back program, I would like to comment that the salmon fleet reduction plan put into effect in 1996 has had a very significant negative impact on our northern fishing communities. The salmon fleet reduction to date is approximately 30%. The minister, Fred Mifflin, indicated a desire to reduce the fleet by 50%. We would urge that this not be pursued until a review takes place and the economies of our coastal communities can adjust and recover from the impacts of the first round of the buy-backs and area licensing, which have obviously had a very significant impact.

About the fisheries minister's authority, it's my understanding that last year, before the call of the election, legislation was pending which would have given the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans authority to grant special privileges without the consent of Parliament. I think this has to be questioned and challenged and I don't believe it should be permitted to happen. The industry has worked very well as long as I can recall with the minister having to go before the House to have permission to make some of these major changes or be challenged. I think that should continue to occur.

It has also been suggested that there should be greater involvement by the provincial government in the fishery. Although I think there's room for increased participation for the provincial government and it may be desirable in some aspects, I feel the overall authority should remain with the federal minister.

• 1410

I don't know. Politics are much closer to home within the province. I'm sure that the Fraser River would have been dammed 40 years ago by W.A.C. Bennett had he had the authority or the ability to do it, but he didn't. To me, we're far better off with the federal minister having that final authority.

On allocation, we note and quote from Dr. May's report that economic efficiency is not the only criterion whereby to appraise policy. Although the chamber of commerce believes economic efficiency to be a primary concern, the geographical and population characteristics of the area must be considered when assessing the benefits to be derived from the natural resources of the province.

We also note in Dr. May's report that only two non-sectoral groups—communities and environmentalists—were asked for their input into his allocation study. We would like to point out that the chambers of commerce were not asked for input into Dr. May's earlier report, and we would comment that if environmental groups are being asked for input into resource-based activities, then chambers of commerce should also be asked.

Recently the French River chamber wrote to the local Department of Fisheries and Oceans requesting stakeholder status and input into local decisions affecting the Skeena River and local area fisheries resources, but we were denied status. The government and its agencies should be aware that most people living in the resource-rich northern two-thirds of this province and providing goods and services to those industries are sensitive to decisions affecting their livelihood and lifestyles being made by others with little or no concern for them.

This is another one that hasn't been brought up today. I'll just make a comment.

Community-based quotas have been suggested. Basically I'm not familiar with the concept, but I'm concerned about the bureaucracy that might be set up to administer such a quota. If it is necessary to be involved in fish pricing, wages, sales, etc., then we disagree with the concept.

However, having said that, we do support efforts to ease the transition currently taking place in the industry, but are concerned when government programs favour one area or sector over another.

As an example, the recent funding by the DFO of $5.5 million for licence stacking was contracted out to coastal Community Futures organizations. That money was allocated on a pro rata basis. Unfortunately for the northern area of the province, 10 of the 11 coastal Community Futures organizations receiving funding are located in the southern area, which would indicate a transfer of approximately 50 licences from the northern area to Vancouver Island and lower mainland communities.

As the Mifflin plan and area licensing have pointed out so dramatically to those of us living in the fish landing ports in the northern area, the loss of pre-season haul-outs, maintenance, gear repair, in-season service and processing has had a significant impact on local trade, services and retail providers.

Although the fleet reduction aim of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had been talked about for at least the last 15 years and was recognized by most in the industry as being necessary, unfortunately for the north coast communities it came about at the same time as the DFO put area licensing into the mix.

Combined with decisions to restrict trollers from traditional areas on the Charlottes, the elimination of the August gillnet fishery in the Skeena and the elimination of combination boat or gillnet trollers, which on the north coast had mainly benefited the coastal native villages, this part of the province has taken a very hard economic hit.

As an example, the gillnet effort in the Skeena River area declined from approximately 1,300 vessels in 1995 to slightly over 800 in 1996, a reduction of almost 40%, which had a very noticeable impact on the service sector in the Prince Rupert area.

The success of the Mifflin plan in reducing the coastal gillnet fleet by approximately 30% and the area licensing combined to reduce the area 4 fleet to a level where it could be argued there were not sufficient vessels to catch the above-average sockeye run in 1996.

The recent regular over-escapement of sockeye to the Skeena system appears to be an intentional effort by DFO to provide an upriver commercial fishery for aboriginal communities. The north coast non-native community has long acknowledged the food fishery, but are concerned, for several reasons, about the department's obvious attempt to create a commercial fishery on the upper reaches of the Skeena.

• 1415

The quality and therefore the price of the fish have declined significantly as the fish approach spawning. The independent small business fishermen with several hundred thousand dollars invested in vessels or licences are denied the opportunity to earn a reasonable income because of this unofficial strategy of closing the Skeena gillnet fishery on July 31 regardless of the size of the run or its timing.

The so-called “extra days” of fishing given by the DFO in early July to try to appease the gillnet fishermen are spurious or phony. To justify the closure each year of the Skeena sockeye fishery, the DFO have given extra days during the early stages of the run regardless of the size of the run or its timing. This has to be very frustrating. This past season I believe they were 48 hours on and 24 hours off. The guys hardly had a chance to get in and get their fish unloaded and get grub, fuel, and repairs in time to get back fishing the next night. It was early in the season. The run was just beginning to build.

They give them this time when really they would much rather have taken three or four or five of those days in the first week of August. I believe it would have made very little difference to the escapement of the coho and steelhead and other such things, but there would have been a tremendous difference in the earnings of those fishermen had they had that opportunity.

Others have commented and will continue to comment on that later, I'm sure.

On the endangered species bill, Bill C-65, the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce joins in the efforts of the B.C. Resource, Business, and Community Coalition in urging the government, before reintroduction of the bill, to provide a much broader consultation process. Protection of endangered species is something all Canadians can support, but the introduction of such legislation with consultation from only preservationist groups will lead to turmoil in resource-based communities if the legislation proceeds as introduced in the last session. We urge you to reconsider the bill, ensure a much broader consultation process, and ensure coastal and inland resource communities have the opportunity to express their concerns.

Moratoriums: Right now two local committees are pursuing the lifting of moratoriums affecting economic development in this region. The North Coast Oil and Gas Task Force objectives are to have the provincial government reassess the inland marine zone to allow for offshore oil and gas exploration of the Queen Charlotte Basin and to have the federal government lift the 1972 west coast moratorium to facilitate offshore oil and gas exploration. In 1995 the Geological Survey of Canada estimated there could be as much as three times the estimated reserves found in the Hibernia field off the east coast. Estimates range from 2.7 billion barrels of oil to 20 trillion cubic metres of gas. Letters seeking support have been sent to various involved federal ministers and to the Prime Minister, provincial ministers, and the premier, and to local municipal councils, band councils, and other interested groups.

In addition to this, we are seeking the lifting of a provincial moratorium restricting mariculture and salmon farming expansion on the west coast. Currently the salmon farming industry in place on the south coast is producing approximately 32,000 tonnes of salmon annually, with a sales value of approximately $175 million, and creating 2,400 jobs. In 1997 farmed salmon surpassed wild salmon production, and the forecast calls for continued growth in this industry. The north coast has the potential to double the current B.C. production and also provide much-needed employment opportunities for coastal native and non-native communities which have been hard hit by the current downturn in the wild salmon fishery. Mariculture opportunities in shellfish, finfish, and other marine products are being pursued by local fishermen and other organizations and your support for these endeavours is requested.

I would like to comment on habitat regulations. The Fisheries Act states that there shall be no net loss of habitat in the course of development on the foreshore. The act also states that socio-economic impacts must be taken into consideration in the assessment of a development proposal. In Prince Rupert harbour, with the exception of two municipal projects, no new development or construction has taken place in at least the last four years, although many have tried.

• 1420

The problem, as expressed by many applicants, is in the language of the act, which stresses the point of no net loss but makes no mention of co-operation or working with applicants for development of foreshore and does not define what trade-offs would be acceptable or place any time constraints on the processing of an application for development.

Many applicants for foreshore development have expressed the opinion that our community might as well be sitting in the middle of Manitoba for all the opportunity we have to develop the marine opportunities our geographical location makes available to us. It is quite a sore point around here, and it seems to me that not only the fisheries department but also other agencies of government should be assisting people in trying to create development and create jobs and opportunities in municipalities. But they get their own set of guidelines and they're just so bloody rigid with it. It's just not right, and there has to be a change. It's got to ease off.

The sport fishery: This sector has grown dramatically in recent years and is a major participant in the harvesting of the salmon resource in this province. A major concern to many in the traditional commercial sector of gillnetters, seiners, trollers and processors is that the commercial sport sector that has developed, encompassing daily charter operators, ranging from moonlighters who run on days off and take advantage of business tax benefits to daily or weekly charter operators, mobile floating lodges operating 15 to 20 skiffs, thus bypassing property taxes and charging in the neighbourhood of $500 a day for the privilege, including onshore lodges on the coast and in the river systems, and guides who hire out to show visitors where and how to catch salmon, is not required to play by the same rules as the traditional commercial sector.

A number of concerns have been raised. One is the public perception that the users of the resource described above are sports rather than commercial, which they are. It will be difficult to change the definition, but the local angler that spends his days off or vacations, like the many anglers who visit the coast, but do not use the services of those described above are truly the sports fishermen.

Because of the commercial growth of the non-traditional users in this sector, they should be required to play by the same rules, particularly as these relate to recording of catch, harvesting area of catch, etc. Also, as the traditional commercial sector has had licence limitations for many years, and now area restrictions, plus also experiencing further cutbacks through buy-back plans, licence stacking, etc., it is time for the commercial sports sector to face similar controls.

Licensing: As the industry moves towards individual and/or vessel quota systems, the emphasis must be that the privilege is restricted to those physically harvesting the resource. As is now the policy in the halibut fishery, the accumulation of quota should be set by regulation and a cap placed on it in order to allow as many fishermen as is economically viable to continue to participate.

I haven't heard any direct comment on it this morning from others, although I haven't sat through all of it. There is quite a reaction to some of the restrictions that came about, and to what has been quite common in the herring gillnet fishery in recent years, and also in the seine fishery, where many fishermen can sit ashore and just lease out their licences and get a year's income out of leasing the piece of paper that they basically got for nothing when the fishery was first developed.

It might be very difficult to change what's out there, but as new methods of developing some of our shellfish fisheries and dive fisheries and various things like that come about, a way should be found to restrict it to the harvester. The person who's catching the fish should have the licence, and if he's not going to use it, then maybe he should lose it. Maybe he shouldn't have the opportunity to get it. It's causing some real hardship and is something that should be looked at seriously.

As others have said, lots more could be said. But I'd just like to thank you for the opportunity to present these views to you today and hope that you'll visit us again in the near future as we proceed through these very challenging times in an industry that in the past has played a major role in the development of this part of Canada and has the opportunity to do so in the future.

• 1425

The industry is going through a very difficult period, but we don't have the serious and critical stock problems that they have on the east coast. Our problem is that we have so many users in it right now and we've just got to be able to sort out some of the problems we have. But I think our future is positive.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Sheppard.

I'd like to call Evelyn Mueller.

Ms. Evelyn Mueller (United Food and Commercial Workers Union): Good morning. I am a shore worker at J.S. McMillan Fisheries and I'm presenting this on behalf of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which is the bargaining agent at our plant. I stepped in at the last moment because the person who was originally supposed to speak to you couldn't be here. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to memorize this speech; I'll have to read it.

There are several letters attached at the back. I won't read them out now, but with your permission I'll pass out copies of this submission when I'm finished, and you can study it at your leisure.

It is our understanding that this is the first time the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans has held meetings on the west coast. Given the serious and fragile state of the fishing industry on the west coast, this is a most timely visit, and we appreciate the opportunity to present our views to the committee.

UFCW Local 2000 represents approximately 350 shore workers at the J.S. McMillan Fisheries Fairview plant in Prince Rupert. This plant is the only year-round groundfish operation on the west coast and until recently it has provided regular employment for families in Prince Rupert and the surrounding communities.

Unlike many other processors, J.S. McMillan Fisheries has traditionally relied on the profits of one fishing season to fund the next seasonal fishery. For example, the herring season will be used as a springboard for the salmon season later in the year. On the west coast the 1997 herring season was disastrous. When the salmon fishery in the north was destroyed, J.S. McMillan found itself with a serious cashflow crisis, which in turn caused the company to file for protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act on November 14, 1997. It is not our intention to address bankruptcy issues before this committee, but there is no doubt that it is an obvious example of the consequences that flow from the mismanagement of the west coast fishery and the failure of the federal government to enforce the Pacific Salmon Treaty.

During the last five years, more than $500 million of B.C. salmon stock have been taken by U.S. fleets in violation of the treaty, which is supposed to ensure equity and conservation. Each of the two nations have the right to harvest an amount of salmon approximately equal to the number of fish that are spawned within its boundaries. The treaty also places obligations and measures on each nation to make sure the conservation of stocks is maintained. Although the treaty is perpetual, the actual quotas must be negotiated each year. The last quota agreement in 1993 allowed the Alaskan fleet to catch a maximum of 160,000 fish during the first three weeks of the salmon season.

In the absence of negotiated annual quotas, the United States catch has sky-rocketed each year since 1993. In 1997 they caught approximately 573,000 salmon. It is estimated that more than 70% of Alaska's total catch is B.C.-spawned fish.

The failure to resolve this issue has been devastating to this community. Employers are going out of business, families are being torn apart, and in many cases those who process this commodity are themselves unable to put food on the table because the Americans are stealing our fish. Is it too late? We sincerely hope not, but time is of the essence.

As you are no doubt aware, the special representatives for the Pacific salmon stakeholders process have reached three important conclusions:

(1) the Canada-U.S. Pacific Salmon Treaty is important to both countries and it must be upheld;

(2) the U.S. fishers have been taking too many Canada-bound fish; and

(3) an agreement should be reached through direct government-to-government talks.

It is incumbent upon the federal government to negotiate an agreement that restores the Canadian quota well in advance of the 1998 season. There will be no second chance for this community.

• 1430

In the meantime, the federal government has an obligation to those who have not only lost work but also entitlement to employment insurance benefits as a result of the new regulations. This matter is detailed in the attached letter to the Hon. Paul Martin. We do not accept his explanation that the surplus should be retained by the government. As stated in our letter, the surplus exists in part because fishers and shore workers have been denied benefits that they would have received under the previous regulations, in spite of the lack of salmon. Instead, part of the surplus has now been used to reduce employer and employee EI contributions. With all due respect, that does nothing for those who are unemployed through the government's inability to resolve the quotas.

We urge this committee to support our demand for the reinstatement of employment insurance benefits that have been taken out of the pockets of workers in the west coast fishing industry.

The Hon. Paul Martin's response of November 28, 1997, to this letter is simply not good enough for this community. As you can see in the attached letters, our position is fully supported by B.C. Premier, the Hon. Glen Clark. The following quotation says it all:

I believe that the federal government should be held accountable for these policies and actions and that it should be held responsible for the mitigation of the resulting impacts.

Finally, at a recent meeting of the B.C. Federation of Labour the delegates unanimously adopted the attached emergency resolution, which not only demands an immediate resolution of the Pacific salmon dispute but also amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, which will protect and benefit workers to the same extent as creditors and employers. We urge you to support our position so that together we can protect and preserve our resource while at the same time creating the opportunity for workers to earn a living from the sea in 1998, the international year of the ocean.

Thank you for granting us the opportunity to present our views.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Ms. Mueller.

We now have representatives from the Community Fisheries Development Centre, Tasha Sutcliffe and Arnie Nagy.

Ms. Tasha Sutcliffe (Program Coordinator, Community Fisheries Development Centre): I could take up the whole day trying to impress upon you the magnitude of the crisis that the downsizing and restructuring of the fishing industry has caused for the north coast. Luckily I've written something out here, so I should be able to stay under ten minutes.

Since our start-up as the CFDC on August 1, 1997, we've had over 500 new applicants—actually closer to 600; I believe the number is about 560—and combined with our earlier applicants to what was called the north coast fishing industry jobs program, our contact list is over 900 names. From the information forms we've received back from HRDC regarding who qualified as EI reach-back, that is, who has gone on EI in the last three years, we can guesstimate that about 40% aren't qualifying and therefore aren't eligible for any sponsorship for HRDC programs, training, and work projects. We also know that many people are aware of this criteria and are not registering, thinking they can't get assistance. Because of this it's safe to say that 40% is a low estimate.

I have a copy of this contact list of names that I will give to you at the end of my presentation. I also have some general information regarding the season in the north and some stats showing examples of the low numbers of people qualifying for EI, in shore workers, for example. I'll give you that as well, but I won't spend too much time going into the numbers right now. I'll take more of a human angle today.

I want you to know that these people aren't registering with us for the fun of it. They're asking for help because they are displaced or they can no longer support themselves and their families with the work they do have. Some of them have been in the industry their whole lives, as past generations in their families may have been. They have worked hard. They were skilled at their jobs and could be proud of them. It's not easy for them to realize that their livelihood is disappearing and that they need to start all over, looking for alternate employment and acquiring new skills. Yet they come to us desperate to get any assistance program they can.

• 1435

The social and economic impacts this has on families and communities are immense. Individuals have written letters describing how they have been affected, and I have copies of these for you to read as well. I think they offer the best description of how people's lives have been turned upside down. They describe how people have lost not only their jobs but their self-esteem, in some cases their boats, houses, families.

I want to know how the government can implement a plan such as the Mifflin plan, which drastically reduces the size of the fishing fleet and in turn impacts on the employment of shore workers, and then question the number of people affected and the need for a transition program. I want to know what was expected. Was it that everyone who spent their lives working in the industry would jump into other jobs? What jobs? Was it expected that new skills needed in job creation would happen overnight and it wouldn't cost any money? Was it thought the problem would go away on its own and these people would just disappear?

We hear from HRDC over and over again that income assistance, people's mental health, resource renewal, etc., don't fall under the mandate, jobs do. Well, we all want everyone to get a job, but to create enough jobs for all those displaced and ensure their success in these jobs we have to recognize and address these other areas, whether they are within HRDC's mandate or not.

If you have worked in a plant or on a boat for 25 years, you will most likely need some general academic upgrading, some life skills or personal career counselling, specific training, or some work experience to get those jobs. This will not happen without a commitment from the people and from the government.

The people are coming to us. They are ready. I want to know where the commitment from the government is. We have to have a long-term transition program, and it can't come just through HRDC.

At one point last year we were the third-largest employer in Prince Rupert, with our job projects. People have been terrified of going to school where in classes they are doing really well and they are asking for more training.

In developing programs we have been working with many different groups, businesses, and agencies in Prince Rupert and outlying communities other than HRDC, or as well as HRDC, some of which are small business owners, fish plant companies, Community Futures, the college, the skills centre, the regional district, the brotherhood and various band councils, the UFAWU and other unions, MOEST, DFO, the north coast forest district, and many more. We have been working on projects in many areas. We have been working on getting people general upgrading, life skills, employability skills, stream stewardship, forestry work, small business development, marketing, research, value added, new park development.... I could go on and on.

With what we have had to work with, we have taken huge steps towards a successful transition. We can be successful in implementing training and work programs that provide new employment opportunities out of the industry or in the off season, but we need a much bigger program and much more flexibility. The criteria we have to work with now let too many people fall through the cracks—criteria such as the EI reach-back being a requirement to qualify for HRDC sponsorship. Too many get left out, and often they are the most in need. It's very difficult to tell someone who comes to apply for a program that they can't get on it because they haven't been on EI in the last three years. They think, well, doesn't that mean I'm just as much in need as someone who may have been on EI and who does have some income assistance, or more in need?

In a coastal community like Prince Rupert everyone is affected: businesses, the social service providers, the children of the fishing industry families. Why do we have to explain this over and over again and still receive no solid response?

We met with Bob Nault when he was here and I still have heard nothing from that visit, even though it seemed he was listening and we had a somewhat positive response at the time. We were told we could call him at any time and we would be kept in contact with. I haven't heard a single word since that visit. I hope that doesn't happen again here.

I want to know what possible reason anyone would have to make this up. I want to know if you think people enjoy being in this position.

As one of the three staff members of the CFDC in Prince Rupert, I see the fallout of the industry restructuring every day. Please don't try to tell me there is no crisis, no need on the west coast for a transition program. If you do believe that, then I suggest you not only read the letters I'll give you but spend more than one day in Prince Rupert with our fishing industry workers. Please don't go back to Ottawa and let our plight fall on deaf ears again.

The Chairman: Thank you, Ms. Sutcliffe.

We now have Arnie Nagy.

• 1440

Mr. Arnie Nagy (Board Member, Community Fisheries Development Centre): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am a shore worker here in Prince Rupert. I have been a shore worker for the past 18 years. I am 34 years of age, so that is over half of my life that I've spent in the fishing industry. My family's history dates back well over 100 years in the commercial industry here in the north.

Mr. Baker, it has been a long time since you and I had a chance to sit down here and have a discussion on the fisheries issues. I believe it was about nine or ten years ago that we were in Ottawa discussing the ramifications of free trade and the GATT ruling. Unfortunately, like Des, I have to say to you that we told you so. And here we are dealing with the crisis because it has been magnified to a point we never expected.

The plant where I work is the largest salmon cannery in the world. At full production it employs approximately 1,300 people. I am here today to add my voice on behalf of my fellow workers.

One of our concerns is the lack of action our Minister of Fisheries has taken in regard to the crisis we are facing on the west coast.

As you are aware, the fishing industry in the season we had last year was a very dismal one. It was one that resulted in very little work for our shore workers and tendermen and very few fishing opportunities for our fishermen. This shortage of work resulted in very large numbers of people being forced onto the welfare system who in the past would normally have qualified for employment insurance.

I must add that the claims of those that did quality for employment insurance are so bloody low, compared to what they used to get under this program, that they cannot even afford to pay their hydro or anything else.

As the sister explained earlier, the possible closure of the J.S. McMillan plant can only add to the crisis we face in Prince Rupert.

I would like to take my time to let the committee know that there is a crisis here in Prince Rupert, a very real crisis that is being denied by our Minister of Fisheries. It is being ignored by our Minister of Fisheries. I want to know why.

I want you to know we met with Mr. Anderson on numerous occasions here in Prince Rupert. I met Mr. Anderson last spring when he came here for a photo opportunity to present a cheque of $450,000 to the jobs project we had going. At that time we met for an hour. We presented Mr. Anderson with briefs that outlined the importance of the fishing industry to the local businesses. The trucking companies depend on it, 90% of their business coming from the transportation of fish products down south. The electronics shops depend on it for upwards of 75% of their business. The bars, hotels and cabs are all suffering. If you get an opportunity today to take a cab, ask the cab driver how he is making out. He is in the same boat as we are. He is going broke very quickly.

I would also like to let you know that we have met with many of Mr. Anderson's assistants. All we seem to have got were angry responses and empty promises.

It is time to end that type of b.s. We have to deal with the crisis here. Empty promises don't do anything for the people who have empty tummies.

We also met, as Tasha explained to you, with Mr. Bob Nault. I believe he is the parliamentary secretary to Mr. Pettigrew. It seemed like a very productive meeting. At times he got very angry with us too. But at the end of that meeting I felt positively that he was going to take our message back to Ottawa and let the ministers know there is a crisis here.

As Tasha said, it has been two months but we haven't heard a peep. Why? I would like to know the answer to that question. Why is nothing being said? Why is nothing being done?

He explained to us that there was $35 million for programs to assist people. It seems that every time we submit a proposal to employ people, the parameters close. It makes it tougher and tougher to get approval for a project.

It is an absolute crime that this is going on. We had proposals ready to go in August of last year. Well, it is five months later and we have maybe 100 people employed in these projects and another 900 waiting. Is that not a crisis? Is that not being ignored? I think it is.

• 1445

We sit here in the north and we fight and fight and fight to try to save an industry, the birthright of future generations...to be able to enter into it and make a decent living and support their families. When we try to raise things, it falls on deaf ears. They won't listen.

In a lot of our outlying communities and in Prince Rupert we are witnessing bankruptcies, the destruction of family households; people are losing everything they've worked their entire lives for and are proud of. It's being flushed down the toilet. Nobody wants to listen.

I'm going to give you a couple of figures here that I managed to receive the other day from the Ministry of Social Services. I'd like you to take these numbers back. Realize that these aren't just numbers, because I know the bureaucracy loves numbers. These numbers represent actual living human beings. When you magnify that, these are only the people who have applied. It does not count the kids and others in their household who depend on this money coming in.

In August 1997 the application rate for people applying for welfare in Prince Rupert was up by over 30% of what it was in 1996. These were people, because of the bad season, who were forced to apply for welfare, who otherwise, in the past, would never have applied. In other words, they are first-time users of this benefit program.

This increase was due to the fact that many of our shore workers and fishermen did not get the work or the fishing opportunities to make it through and qualify for employment insurance. The number of people who applied for welfare in 1997 was 1,560. I want you to realize that in the community of Prince Rupert we have a workforce of approximately 8,000 people. That's 20% of our workforce right there who are on welfare. You had those who were fortunate enough to qualify for UI. I would suggest to you that the unemployment rate in Prince Rupert is well over 30% to 35%, and I'm being conservative in my estimates, because Statistics Canada only counts people who are trying. Lots of people have just given up completely.

The increase for the month of December worked out to $1.3 million in welfare benefits paid out in Prince Rupert last year. That's an increase of over $150,000 from the year before. I'd suggest to this committee that forcing people onto welfare is not the solution to the problem we are experiencing. It was not these people who created this problem. It was the federal government and its policies. Why should they be punished for bad government decisions and policies that truly created these problems?

Last year, Prince Rupert, as I explained, had a jobs program that provided training and work experience for unemployed fishing industry people to make them more employable, both within and outside the industry. This was a great success. It raised the morale of people. It gave them the foundation of an education system where they can start to move forward and see some type of future. Many of these people are actually enrolled now, through some of the other programs, and are continuing their education. Anderson's office and Pettigrew's office have turned their backs on us, those sitting here trying to get something going. Many of these people are sitting in this room today.

It seems to me that if the policies of the federal government are creating this unemployment, they should provide transition funding to assist displaced fishing industry workers to remain in the industry and become more viable, have more work opportunities, or provide funding so that those who do choose to leave the industry have that option and are employable elsewhere.

I'd also like this committee to understand one thing. We do not perceive ourselves as a sunset industry. We perceive it as a sunrise industry and will fight to the bitter end to ensure that it is. We have a lot of underutilized species that can be used and developed for new products. We can do value-added that will increase work opportunities and enhancement programs in trouble spots that can facilitate longer openings—for example, the Skeena River.

For the entire month of August 1997 our fleet was tied up. There was no fishing, period, because of the endangered upper Skeena River stocks. What happens? We end up with another over-escapement statement, as happened in the previous two years over the steelhead issue, which it turned out, and is coming out now, was never a conservation issue; it was an allocation issue.

We in the industry do not argue if we have to pay a price to protect stock, but when it's political decisions and bad management.... If we have to pay that price, damn it, I believe the federal government, which created the problem, owes us some type of compensation. It is not our fault. We have done everything. Nobody ever complained when we tied up for those ten days.

• 1450

In B.C. here we have a functioning secondary products committee that has proved to be quite valuable. As a matter of fact, we've spent the last year developing the dogfish fishery. That's the future that's coming on—new products.

Do you know what? The company I work for, and I'm ashamed.... Well, I'm not ashamed of myself; I'm ashamed of the company for backing out in the middle of it. They backed out. And I'll tip my hat to Mr. Rowbotham, who'll be speaking later on this afternoon, who owns Omega Packing Company in Masset on Haida Gwaii, and to Lax Kw'Alaams Marine Industries Inc. in Port Simpson for stepping forward and taking that project on, because I believe it's going to be a viable one and I know we'll work side by side with them to make sure it is. I ask that Anderson and the federal government show that same type of commitment.

That project was developed by workers in those plants who came up with this. We are not sitting here asking for handouts. We are trying to take care of our future, and all we're asking is that there be a fair deal and a fair helping hand from Ottawa.

Many of the people I work with won't speak today because they feel very intimidated about this process and this type of meeting, and partially because some of their English skills are not the best. But they also feel they're being abandoned and forgotten about while they try to survive on welfare and not lose their homes, their boats, their families.

Many of these people are being forced out of an industry that has been passed down in their families for many generations, and it seems as if nobody cares. These are not just jobs to these people, they're identities. I don't look at my job in the fish plant, after my family has put in over 100 years, as a job; I look at it as part of my culture, part of my upbringing, which I want to pass on to future generations with pride.

They've asked me to put forward a couple of questions to you, that you may direct them to Mr. Anderson and Mr. Chrétien and try to get the answers that we have not been able to get.

First, can you explain to us how bankruptcy helps out our fishing communities when all our boats and livelihoods are taken away?

The example I'll use—and I don't want to step on anybody's toes, but I understand that in the village of Lax Kw'Alaams, in Port Simpson, they're losing upwards of 20% of their fleet through bankruptcies. When the Mifflin plan came in, a lot of those boats that fish out of Port Simpson used to go trolling to make up for things if they had a bad time and they couldn't make it down south because their boats were smaller. Mr. Mifflin took that right away from them. He took their livelihoods away from them and he says they should be happy with what they have left. To me, that's a crime. It's absolutely criminal to do that to a community whose unemployment is extremely high. That situation also develops on many of the reserves in Masset, where my mother comes from, and in Kitwanga, in the Gitksan fleet up country.

How does not admitting the problem exists and turning a blind eye help the situation in which families are being placed in this community and others? How does the disintegration of the family structure benefit anybody, especially the children who are being placed in violent situations where they ought not to be in the first place? It's not the fault of the people in that family, when they're losing everything. We all know what happens; we see it on a day-to-day basis. I think that is also a crime that has to be addressed, and hopefully you'll bring that forward in Ottawa.

Why will the minister not live up to the promise that Mr. Mifflin made of $30 million or whatever it takes? According to my calculations, it was $21 million. That wasn't even a boost. Look at the money being pumped into the east coast—and I agree that money has to be there. People have to eat. As somebody in the back said, what do you expect us to do, eat rocks? Well, maybe Mr. Anderson has been eating too many, because in my opinion, he has a hell of a lot of them inside his head right now.

Does the minister expect us to sell our houses and leave our families and our communities and go elsewhere? These are communities that we were born and raised in and that we've lived in for our entire lives. And if so, who's going to buy our houses when nobody can afford to buy them? Are we suppose to give them away? Where do you go in the north here? Or if you do manage to sell your house and are forced to go down south, the retail value of a house up here might be $100,000. Are you going to buy a house in the lower mainland at $100,000, with a $10-an-hour job, and expect to hang on to that house?

What we're being asked to do is forsake everything for the lack of care, for political expedience, and to save his ass, because he knows he's developing a very bad reputation here in British Columbia and people outside of British Columbia are starting to hear our call.

• 1455

Mr. Baker, I want to address one thing that was brought up here. This is something that really scares me. Yes, there is a problem here in the west coast fishing industry, and it seems there are many people willing to take advantage of that situation and promote economic growth along certain lines. The example that came up this morning was the issue of fish farming. Now, I'm not 100% opposed to fish farming, but let's realize—I saw it on TV last night—that on the east coast of New Brunswick over a quarter of a million salmon had to be slaughtered because of disease.

Recommendations are out today from one of the committees that deal with the fish farming issue. I suggest you take the message back from us to Ottawa that we don't want any fish farms here until all 50 recommendations of that report are adhered to.

We still have a very viable industry here in Prince Rupert. We're in tough times, but I think with commitment that can change. I would hate to see our wild stocks being placed in jeopardy, as happened in Norway. I was there for 18 days in 1988 on a fact-finding tour. They couldn't believe the lack of regulations we had in B.C. and what it could do to our potential salmon stocks.

One prime example, Mr. Baker and the committee, is that 200 miles up the river, in Kitwanga, they are catching Atlantic salmon. It seems to me they are about 3,000 miles out of their jurisdiction. There are no fish farms here in the north. We were told those fish wouldn't enter the rivers. We were told this. They are catching them off Port Simpson, I understand. They are jumping around.

What is happening? We raise that issue and we are never listened to.

In closing, I would like to thank you, and I apologize for my foul language on a couple of occasions. I'm not known to swear very often. I would like to thank you for being here, and I ask that you please take this issue back to Ottawa and let the federal government know you realize there is a crisis here on the west coast and now is the time to deal with it in a proper manner, one that respects the needs of the people here.

We are proud, hard-working people here in the fishing industry. We enjoy what we do, putting food on the tables of the people of the world. All we ask is that we be treated with fairness and respect and not be pushed aside in the game of politics.

We're committed to this industry. We would like to see it grow and be passed down to future generations, as it was passed down to us. I don't feel for a moment anybody has the right to sell the birthright of somebody else or to destroy the birthright of somebody else to try to make a living in this industry. My family has done it for thousands of years, and I want to see this thing go on for thousands of years more.

What we need is a commitment by Ottawa. Join us in partnership. Let's work together and make it happen. I honestly believe, from the bottom of my heart, if Ottawa and the Minister of Fisheries put the same type of commitment to developing and bringing back this industry as they have to beating the living bejesus out of the west coast fishing industry, we wouldn't be here today. You would probably be back in Ottawa and you would be doing what you do and we would be out there processing fish, catching them, and making a living. That's the reality, from my view.

I ask you, please take that message on behalf of the people. Please read those letters Tasha gave you. I didn't have the guts to put my name down on one of those pieces of paper because I didn't want the rest of the world to know what financial situation I'm in. My job is gone. As of last week, with the cutbacks at the plant, I'm facing the reality of having to find new employment. But I'm not willing to leave quietly.

I'll place this challenge with you, brothers and sisters. You can claim ignorance no longer. You are here. You are listening to the people. They are telling you there is a crisis. Please see it.

Mr. Baker, if you could deal with that issue of Nanaimo, please make sure your committee gets there. I understand rooms are already set for your committee. Everything has been taken care of. If you would like, we can get hold of you later, give you the name of the person, and we can set that up for you. That is the largest single group of licence holders here in British Columbia, and I think they have to be heard, instead of the political photo ops for Mr. Anderson to protect his tarnished image.

I wish you a safe journey to your future locations and I thank you for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Nagy.

We are now faced with a bit of a dilemma. We have now approached noon and we have six speakers to go. What we're hearing this morning is all very important information, and that's why we haven't cut anybody off or kept them to a very strict time. We're here to listen and we want to hear what you have to say. However, we now have this problem. We only have four speakers scheduled for this afternoon, so I'm going to suggest that the six who are scheduled to carry on right now, starting at 11:10 a.m., move to 1 p.m.

• 1500

Is there anybody who cannot be here this afternoon who would like to speak before we break? If you two would please come to the microphone and line up, we'll listen to you now and the six who are scheduled for this morning, if there's no strong objection, we'll move to 1 p.m. We're here from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m.

Sir, please go ahead.

Mr. Peter Haugan (President, British Columbia Deep Sea Fishermen's Guild): I have a combination boat of my own, which is a salmon gillnetter and a prawn boat.

We've heard lots of talk this morning. I represent a group of crewmen, which is the only small local union left in our country today. Time and again the big ones have tried to gobble us up. We're an independent group. We have a deal with our own vessel owners, so we don't have to deal with the big companies or whoever else. That's how my crew makes their living.

Through the policy of DFO, whether it be for halibut or whether it be black cod...when you start moving to quotas you are privatizing the fish to a vessel owner or a licence holder or a corporation that owns or buys up a bunch of quotas, and the crewmen are displaced. The crewmen have a right to that fish. Before licences even came into existence, that boat caught fish and they had a share agreement that allowed the crew to get their fair share of that catch. Anybody who has ever fished halibut in the Bering Sea will never ever say the crewmen did not deserve the money they earned.

Just like anything else, when you displace people there should be compensation. When our halibut fleet was displaced out of Alaska through the international talks with the Americans that finally removed Canadian fishermen from American waters and put them back into area 2B, which is B.C., our halibut fishermen were allowed three things: a halibut licence in 2B; a black cod licence in 2B; or cash. That cash buyout was given to the vessel owner. The crew was not given one cent, and some of the skippers we are negotiating with would not take the cash because they believed their crew owned 70% of that catch. One asked Iona Campagnolo flat out how come his crew was not in this equation. She said because they're just not. He said this wasn't very good for him because he had a crew that needed to make a living. He asked for a halibut licence in 2B; he would fish halibut in British Columbia.

DFO's policies in recent years have forced our small boat fleet into bankruptcy, as you've heard today.

Area licensing: We have a fish that moves down the coast, a salmon that moves from north to south. The first people on the list are the Alaskans. The second people on the list are northern B.C., and then southern B.C., Oregon, and Washington. If you look at this as the fish moves south, through area licensing the Alaskans take the northern fish. But the northern fisherman is not allowed to take the southern fish. So where does that leave the northern British Columbia fishermen?

• 1505

We have a Nisga'a agreement. The Nass River last year barely—I mean barely, that's with no commercial fishing in the mouth of the Nass River—achieved its sockeye escapement levels, because the Americans took them. So if the Americans took them and now the Nisga'a are going to get theirs, this river doesn't have enough fish. It's gone.

The commercial fishery for area 3 is gone. Now, there goes half of what we would catch here in the north. The Skeena is our biggest sockeye producer, but the Nass is the biggest producer of the pink and the chum. So if you combine their sockeye and then their pink and their chum, the Nass is just as valuable to this north coast as the Skeena River is.

Luckily, on the Nass right now we don't have a huge sport fishery taking place. If that takes place tomorrow, this will impact the Nishga agreement even more.

These are all policies. All it is is policy. I am a Canadian. I do not have the right to fish a fish coming back to the Skeena River. People stop me from fishing. They don't stop the West Germans from owning 56% of the rod hours on our Skeena River. They don't stop the Americans who want to come in or the lodges laying gear. They're not all Canadian owned. They have lodges laying gear that are American owned.

I would love to see if Bob Wright could put one of his ships in Alaskan waters. Not for a minute.

The amount we want to charge a non-resident person for coming in and targeting a species of fish that we are all supposedly trying to protect...and we don't want to up his licence by $10? If someone is going to come all the way from Germany or wherever to fish a fish, $10 is the least of their worries. That's just the tip for the bellboy to take his bags to the room. So I don't see how that has any bearing on how many people want to sportfish. It might have something to do with how many people want to commercially sportfish, but I doubt that too. There's too much money involved.

I've got a little 37-foot boat. Before there were licences, that fibreglass, nice little boat might have been worth $150,000. Well, my A licence on there for salmon is worth anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 if someone would buy it, but the prawn licence, just to go on a little 37-foot boat, is $400,000 for my right—what? To put a little trap in the water and come up with prawn if DFO allows me? They can shut me down in a minute.

You're expecting me to invest this kind of money with no guarantee.

On the Skeena here this year they said, let's do a new plan. They did a little bit of testing. They had a new net. The new net had a four-foot weed line. That was going to allow more steelhead and more coho through. So when August rolls around, we're going to be able to use this new net and allow through the fish that they want through. Well, I'd like to know when I got one minute of fishing time in the month of August. We had the sockeye, exactly what we wanted. They're the money fish. There they were. We couldn't catch them.

So we had a protest gillnet fishery here. Thirty-odd gillnetters went out and protest-fished for five hours, brought the fish back and gave it to the people in the town. Try close to 4,000 sockeye in five hours. This is in a time period when supposedly we're going to hurt coho or steelhead. This was the catch. We had 3,000 to 4,000 sockeye. We had 3,000 pinks. We had 2 coho, 1 steelhead.

Now, I'd like to know where DFO figured that is impacting on the coho and on the steelhead.

It cut out the profits of our small boat fleet. Everybody was getting up to where they were just starting to break even, and here was a 10-day period when they were going to make some money, actually put some money in the bank where they could live off that this winter. Then, for whatever reason, a policy that's set a year ahead of time, you aren't going to fish. How can we do that?

I don't know how many fish are coming back. We had a system that used to read it pretty well. The test knows what is happening. Bring Les Jantz from DFO into this room and he'll tell you what's happening. But Les Jantz doesn't call the shots. Les Jantz just gives them the figures.

• 1510

More and more all the time we are running fisheries with a computer. Computers are what happened to the east coast. Fishermen there were telling you for five years that the cod were disappearing. Nobody listened because biologists with their computers knew more than the guy on the ground with the fish-hooks in the water. Sorry, that doesn't wash with us. It didn't wash with them.

We have very, very healthy stocks on this coast. Our halibut stocks are unprecedented. They are going for another big increase in quota on the halibut. Our herring stocks have never been so big. We as commercial fishermen are cutting ourselves back on the herring. There are stocks of fish such as we've never seen, huge numbers. Yes, we have problems with certain salmon stocks, but we still have great sockeye runs. Why is the sockeye doing so well? Maybe because we are managing him. We are not managing the others. No one care what happens to a pink salmon. No one cares. He's worth only 75¢ or a dollar. We don't care what happens to him. We had better start caring what happens to him, because he might be the one that's worth the money down the road; we don't know.

If there's anything you can gather out of listening to the people from the northwest here, it's policy—policy itself.

As Mr. Sheppard from the chamber of commerce said, if someone wants to develop something in our harbour, we are not allowed to turn a rock over in Prince Rupert harbour. You asked me what happened in Comox, how they could mow flat the mouth of a river, dig up the clam and crab beds, put down big government breakwaters. Well, that's okay. That's not salmon habitat. What, in the mouth of the Puntledge River? You tell me why Campbell River has a big breakwater right down the middle where the sockeye runs are heading through Johnstone Strait for the Fraser River.

You look at every single waterfront on the coast of B.C., and the only one that's not allowed to be developed is Prince Rupert, British Columbia. It's the only one. You can't roll a rock over. It might change salmon habitat. Well, salmon spawn up in a creek. That's the habitat we should be looking at, not some rock in the ocean. If a landslide came down Mount Morris over there, it would cause more damage than the whole development of Prince Rupert has in a hundred years. That's just nature, though.

There's a commitment from the people here, you've heard, to improve our commercial fishing industry. It is a viable industry, no doubt. We have more poundage of clams on the north coast.... We haven't even touched them for probably 60 years. Why? Policy.

I'll let Bob come up here and let you have some more policy talk.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Peter.

Mr. Hill.

Mr. Robert H. Hill (President, Tsimshian Tribal Council): Thank you very much, Peter. I knew you had a lot more to say than that.

I would like to welcome the committee to Prince Rupert, first and foremost, but I would also like, for the record, to provide you with who I am and the people I represent.

My name is Bob Hill and I'm the president of the Tsimshian Nation. I represent seven communities throughout the northwest. I describe my territory as a third of the coast of British Columbia and a third of the watershed of the Skeena River.

Having said that, as the president of this nation I would like to welcome each and every one of you to my territory. Traditionally, this is the way we have conducted ourselves. If you look back at history, my nation, and indeed all the nations in the northwest, 130 years ago were doing what they do best even to this day, and that is the harvesting of salmon: a resource that we knew was renewable, that is still renewable, up to the point where we find it is at the expense of first nations people. We have shared this resource with all the community of the northwest, and indeed all the coast of British Columbia, and we will continue to share it.

Our communities are suffering. When we're talking about communities in crisis, indeed Prince Rupert is one of those communities. But I also must tell the committee members here that whenever the community of Prince Rupert suffers, the communities that I represent—and they are Kitasoo, Hartley Bay, Kitkatla, Metlakatla, Lax Kw'Alaams, Kitselas and Kitsumkalum. The most northern community is Lax Kw'Alaams, the most southern community is Klemtu. That name has been changed to Kitasoo. And the inland communities of course are around Terrace, Kitselas and Kitsumkalum. You need to know this simply because when communities such as Prince Rupert and Terrace and Kitimat.... The communities I represent are satellite communities of these cities; they suffer tenfold.

• 1515

Look at the unemployment within this region, anywhere from approximately 12% to 15%. I'm sure that the fishermen sitting here are unemployed as we speak and have not been displaced. Seasonally we can experience up to 35% or 40% unemployment at this time of the year. However, the communities I represent year round experience a 63% average unemployment. One of the largest communities, Lax Kw'Alaams, with approximately 1,400 people, is experiencing 96% unemployment.

Even when we have a structure that has been built by the New Democrat government years ago, a processing plant, we find that we have been restricted. That community have dug deep into their pockets to open up this cannery, to do their part in providing employment for their people at great cost. This is not to mention the fact that during the restructuring and revitalization program sponsored by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that we hear so much about, commonly and aptly known as the Mifflin plan, that community has further suffered a great deal.

I was a member of that revitalization program years back. I'm a past member of PARC, the Pacific Regional Advisory Council, which acts as a senior advisory body to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Like my friend Mr. Greene here, we use to sit on that. We have gone through a great many ministers, not to mention a great many governments, and we know of what we speak.

In PARC at the time we chose to look at the government policies of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans of the day. We decided to spearhead—and you can remember this, Paddy—once and for all. All our fishermen and our managers, our policy-makers and our governments, were going to know the state of the industry, better known as fish. We would have it up on a wall, and we would at least acquaint our fishermen in saying that we are at risk of losing a very valuable resource. The end of that of course is the Pacific round table.

It was a process that happened very quickly for a number of reasons, some of which I will not go into, but it was a process that worked.

Today we find that the restructuring of the fleet, overall average, has been approximately 26% in any one gear sector. The seiners, the gillnetters, the trollers—you name them—have reduced the size of their fleets.

Before we entered into the Pacific round table process, we decided we would have some specific guiding principles. Those guiding principles were these.

The first was that every one of us would assume the high road to conservation, the conservation efforts that we have and we're suffering by today.

The second principle was that of partnering, creating partnerships. Our government has changed the Fisheries Act to enable us to do that, so that we can partner with government agencies to say that we want a direct say and a direct participation in the viability or sustainability of this valuable resource.

Thirdly, for those that remain in the industry it must be economically viable. If I were to criticize the government today, I would say the last principle simply is not working.

• 1520

We are losing our licences. Communities I represent suffer tenfold what the community of Rupert has suffered. They are losing their licences ten times that of the participants in Rupert.

It simply is not economically viable for the harvesters to achieve sustainability, to achieve our conservation goals. When they decided to restructure this fleet and to reduce it to a degree where it could be economically viable, bearing in mind that it isn't any more, they opted to institute area licensing, single-gear licensing, some of which you've heard about today. The community of Lax Kw'Alaams is one of the communities that has suffered greatly, other than Alert Bay, which has lost all its fishermen.

Where we had a combination status of any one gillnet licence in the north coast, we went into single-gear licensing. It eliminated their ability to generate a reasonable income for their family, and that was cut by approximately 50%, simply through the stroke of a pen.

There are other areas that I have been involved with in speaking on behalf of my nation. Of course, the largest area is the British Columbia treaty process. My nation is approximately 10,000 strong. Through the figures of the Department of Indian Affairs, somewhere between 7,000 and 7,500 are registered, but we know who our people are and we use the figure of 10,000 as our general population simply because we represent another community in Alaska, known as Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island.

We are at our fourth stage in the treaty process, and most recently, gentlemen—and the lady present—Delgamuukw came down and provided a reasonable level playing field for first nations throughout B.C. We didn't recognize and we did not foresee or project that first nations will not have a level playing field, simply because government has an unending pocket; it has deep pockets for funding.

We are obligated to have to borrow those funds through the commission and repay them at the end of the implementation of the treaty. I think it is absolutely crucial that everyone knows. To date, we have borrowed approximately $4.5 million, which is repayable. It's in the form of a loan. We don't have access to the various research departments that the Government of British Columbia has. We don't have the battery of lawyers required to make sure that when we enter into any one specific agreement on the six stages, it would ensure that for future generations we're doing the right thing.

Therefore, it wasn't a level playing field, and even after Delgamuukw it certainly isn't a level playing field. We know it is going to be an uphill battle, but after Sparrow came down and after the three J cases came down—the Nikal case, the Smokehouse case, and the Gladstone case—we knew governments had an obligation to consult with first nations on any one specific fishing plan that may be implemented from year to year regarding our aquatic resources. But Delgamuukw went a step further and said that first nations throughout this country are going to be at the table to be part of the decision-making process and indeed in building a policy.

Simply put, if you heard my opening comments—and we've shared all our resources and we will continue to share, simply because we're not going to go away and neither are you.

I grew up with many of the participants you have before you in this building, I attended high school with a number of them, and yes, I am a licence holder in the commercial sector. But as a leader of my nation, I must also speak on behalf of those who don't have the ability to have a licence, to give them the right to fish or to fish for sale. My obligation is to protect our aboriginal rights under section 35(1), that we have a right to fish for food. A number of them have been tested in and around our area.

• 1525

But I am also obligated to state this. For those few of us in the Tsimshian Nation who happen to have a fishing licence, I must also provide the appropriate level of support. So I walk a very fine line.

As a nation, our doors are open for economic development. The communities I represent—and you've heard about the unemployment levels—are open for reasonably good economic development. But they must be consulted with. We know a great many different programs have been sponsored by governments to enable first nations' participation in all aspects.

The government's answer to Sparrow is the aboriginal fisheries strategy you hear so much about. It's a program that sunsets within about a year. A new program should be replacing it, and we're looking forward to that. It's called partnering agreements.

The aboriginal fisheries strategy did have problems. Again, we found that first nations are not on a level playing field. The aboriginal fisheries strategy created a communal licence, a licence such that we're obligated to provide a business plan and to redirect some profits we've derived out of that licence back into the resource. There isn't a commercial licence holder sitting in this room who is obliged to do that. We do that because we're interested in the sustainability of this resource and to try to employ people, the very few we have, within our respective communities, remote as they are.

We also entered into a co-management agreement with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans stating that we will train some of our individuals to look after this resource. At the end of the five-year contribution agreement we have with them we would in effect create individuals we started off knowing as “guardian techs”. At the end of the five-year program they would become fisheries officers and work side by side with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It was true co-management.

We've accomplished this goal. Indeed, we have six within our nation, one from each community, who would do the proper research. We recognized right from the start that the department can ill afford to have a fishery officer in each one of my communities on a full-time basis, so we created a program for that, and a very successful one, I might add, to the degree that we have two of those officers who are enforcers as well. For all intents and purposes they are working under the umbrella of the Tsimshian Nation in co-management with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, knowing that the process has to be present.

We were also interested in going a step further than that. During the crisis of the Pacific salmon overall we knew governments were expending up to $290 million in about an eight-month period on managing the salmon resource. That's a horrific amount of money. For every dollar that was generated by the harvesters themselves and that contributed to the tax base of the country, your government had to subsidize by a further $6. It was a resource all taxpayers of Canada were paying for. Governments took action.

Then they started cutting funding, chopping personnel, pulling back, in some sectors up to 30%. But clearly, when our industry needed the sciences—and even today it gravely needs the sciences—of aquatic resources, your government has cut them back by 40%. They have displaced all the knowledgeable people who can revive this industry.

• 1530

Another hat I do wear is that of president of the Northwest Maritime Institute. It's a mandate I have received from my nation that has said we must have the ability or the capacity to train our people, and also to guide our people, and also to employ those displaced scientists—built in the northwest.

So I think before we venture into any mariculture, aquaculture, fish farming—call it what you want.... These sciences are greatly needed in the northwest, first and foremost to make sure we are venturing into an arena that's going to be positive, that we're not damaging the environment, that we're going to employ people, and more importantly, that we're going to train our people so they can once again become sustainable as individuals.

My target today in my presentation to you is to tell you that our communities are no longer sustainable. The city of Prince Rupert is losing and we're probably going to lose this mill out here. The direction they're going to be taking is yet to be known, but we're at risk of losing the salmon industry within this city.

I'll put it one way. The communities I represent are satellite communities of a major centre, and without those satellite communities this city cannot exist. But at the same time, our satellite communities have a grave dependency on this city, and at least in my generation and a lot of generations we have attempted to work together. I think that's where the answer is, that we have to be transparent. We have to be able to trust one another. We have to venture into some very good economic development on a step-by-step basis to ensure that we will remain an economic community for the future.

I thank you very much, gentlemen, for this opportunity. I have only one criticism for you. Time and time again when we make presentations to a standing committee, this is the end result and we hear nothing from it, with the exception of the Hansard report. I think there should be some sort of follow-up. More importantly, it's unacceptable to be on a time line, and especially for the city of Prince Rupert and for the northwest, I think you should have had at least three or four days of hearings, because there are a number of different people out there who wish to talk to you.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Hill.

To ensure that everybody has an opportunity to speak, we're going to cut our lunch break down to just half an hour. We're going to adjourn now until 1 p.m. We have 12 speakers, and then we're going to go to an open floor.

We're adjourned until 1 p.m. Thank you.

• 1533

• 1626

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We're going to get started again. I know we've lost a few people. Somehow I knew that 1 p.m. was wishful thinking. We have a number of speakers to go through and we don't want to cut anybody off, so I think we should get started.

We'll start with Ms. Henderson.

Ms. Jennie Henderson (Individual Presentation): Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I've been involved in the fishing industry since 1979 and I've lived in the province of British Columbia my entire life.

I have some major concerns. When the Spanish were taking our fish on the east coast we had a guy called Brian Tobin, who showed a little bit of muscle and chased them away. Now we have the same problem with the United States of America on our west coast and we don't appear to have anybody sticking up for our guys. I am not suggesting that we go to war with the United States of America, but I am suggesting that we don't let them walk right over us.

I think directly related to this is another problem. We can't make there be more fish, but instead of letting gigantic international companies steal from us, we should be able to make a living with the fish we do have; instead of letting international companies such as Weston and what not decapitate our jobs and cause us grief. It ain't going to work this way.

Until we change government policy and not let capitalism walk right over us, we're going to continue to have problems in unemployment and welfare, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Thank you for your time, gentlemen, and for giving me this opportunity to speak.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Ms. Henderson, you made reference to international companies. Are there specific cases you are aware of around here?

Ms. Jennie Henderson: Yes. I believe B.C. Packers is owned by a company called Weston, which is definitely an international company.

We pay more for soup bones in the grocery store than we get for our fish.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Our next speaker is Mr. Bruce Hansen.

Mr. Bruce Hansen (B.C. Deep Sea Fishermen's Union): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Prince Rupert.

I was born and brought up in Prince Rupert. I've been a commercial fisherman all my life. I would just like to give you an overview of what has happened here in the last 10 years.

• 1630

I represent a small group of Prince Rupert fisherman. Crew members are basically what we are, on multi-crewed boats involved mainly in fishing salmon, herring and halibut.

I used to make a good living as a crew member on these boats, but over the last while, because of a major change in government policy—I guess you've heard that many times today and you'll be hearing it many more times—we've somehow got ourselves into a situation where there's been a horrendous job loss.

Just to make it a little bit simpler, we used to have basically five men on a halibut boat. The government went to a quota system. We had a derby fishery at that time. It was open for eight or ten days and basically every halibut boat had a five-man crew. All of a sudden we went to a quota system. The crews were all fired. The vessel owners teamed up, four vessel owners per boat. They went out and caught their own fish. They were given the entire stock of the fishery, and I and the rest of the crew members no longer had jobs.

The black cod was actually the first implementation of a quota system. At one time we had 46 boats that were licensed to fish black cod. We now, I believe, have 12. It could be less, but DFO really doesn't like to tell us the numbers.

Then along came the herring fishery. We used to put three men in a punt on the shaking of herring gillnetting. All of a sudden it came to a re-licensing, so half the crews were gone again. There were two licences for one area, so automatically half the crews were instantly without a job.

Then along comes the Mifflin plan, and all of a sudden we've got another problem. They want to stack licences. Ten years ago at one little fish plant down the road in Prince Rupert there were approximately 24 multi-crewed seine boats. Today if you went down there and had a look you might find four boats. These are my numbers, give or take. Some boats have gone south, but some have sold their licences because of the Mifflin plan and the stacking situation.

My basic point here is that the job opportunities for crew members are gone. In Prince Rupert we've been hit horrendously.

We were not ignorant of the fact that there basically needed to be some downsizing and some changes in the fishing industry, but as crew members we were not consulted. We were not even involved.

I don't know how many people think that these boats went fishing all these years.... It was mentioned this morning that at one time 70% of the money that was generated on a halibut trip went to the crew and 30% went to the vessel owner. All of a sudden now we are not even involved in the fishery. We're sitting on the docks.

In Alaska when this problem came about—they downsized and went to a quota fishery—the crew members were involved. We weren't given a chance. We didn't own a licence other than a personal licence. I threw it on the table many times when they said that they were going to buy back these licences, but nobody has bought a damn thing back from any of us crew members. So it's got to be quite frustrating.

I myself was a member for approximately ten years on CFIC, the Canadian Fishing Industry Council. We met probably once a month in Vancouver. Probably everybody was there. We had many meetings with DFO. The bureaucrats came out from Ottawa. Specifically, it was Louis Tousignant who came out and was given a job in Vancouver as director general to change this policy. He told me—and I asked him many times—that crew members would be compensated. “Oh, don't worry about it. We'll look after you”. Well, nothing. We haven't seen a damned thing.

• 1635

What happened to the retraining package? Well, nothing has come about. What about the pension plan? The federal government was going to put in $7 million. They asked the B.C. provincial government to donate $7 million, but the provincial government said, “Why should we? This is a federal policy. It's your baby; you guys do something about it.” And I can't really blame them for that.

We have had good years and bad years in all the fishing industry, but most of us always had jobs ashore. I myself am a qualified machinist. I worked in the machine shop here and in the pulp mill out at Port Edward. We always got by. But now, with the total downsizing of the fleet, there are no jobs in the machine shop here. The shipyards have gone. One small one is left, and for the first time in its history most of its staff have been laid off for the winter.

What I'm trying to get to is that this has all come about directly by a change in government policy. We were not included in the process. We had promises made and as yet we have received nothing. To me this was strictly DFO. It was their baby. They tried to push it on other people and different government agencies, but it was their policy and I think they should be held accountable for it.

In closing, I would just like to say it's about time something was done. We need our jobs. We need them back and we need them now.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I have one question for you, Mr. Hansen. This has come up before, but I am going to ask you, since you are at the mike.

I hear about all kinds of problems with policy and with what DFO has done in the management of the fishery, but I am specifically curious to know what impact there has been on this community from the inability of the government to solve the Pacific salmon dispute. I appreciate that is not the only issue, but if you had to put a percentage on it, how much of the problem here is a result of the Pacific salmon dispute? It has had so much media attention. Is it 10% of the problem or is it just a little problem among so many other problems? If they were able to solve that, would that go a long way towards helping the industry get back on its feet here?

Mr. Bruce Hansen: We're just talking specifically about salmon when talking about the U.S. treaty. We don't have any agreements with them on the herring or the halibut or black cod or groundfish. Last year it was probably 50% of the salmon...but there are more knowledgeable people here in that regard. That's just a small part of the overall picture here.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): In the area.

Mr. Bruce Hansen: Yes, because most of the salmon boats have been stacked now and are gone from here. But it's still relevant to the overall picture. I think it's stated here that 26% of the boats have been stacked now. That would be roughly a quarter of the fleet. Those job opportunities gone with that stacking. That's where I'm coming from. Nothing has been done to help out the displaced crew members.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Mr. Garfield Esmonde.

Mr. Garfield Esmonde (Board Member, Northcoast Shellfish and Mariculture Association): Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the time you have allotted me.

My occupation is as a fisherman. I represent the Northcoast Shellfish and Mariculture Association. We're a group of people in Prince Rupert who are concerned about the fishing industry and also the fact that Prince Rupert is hurting.

I would like to define for you first what mariculture is, because it's a relatively new happening in this world in the past 50 or 60 years. Really, it's not new. It's very old. It has been done in China for several thousand years.

Mariculture itself is the growing of organisms in the ocean. These are finfish, shellfish, crabs, shrimps, prawns. Whatever grows in the ocean can be grown.

• 1640

As I listen to the various and different delegates, they are telling you we have a problem. Yes, we do. Our problem is that we are in the back of beyond. That is where we live. We are 50 years behind the times and we have to catch up. If we don't catch up, it will be like living or working or playing a ball game. We are in the wrong ball field. We have to move to the proper ball field where we can start running viable businesses.

Viable businesses employ people. Mariculture is a very labour-intensive type of fishing, or, if you like, fish farming. This area around Prince Rupert, the Queen Charlotte Islands, can very easily produce 1,000 jobs. These are viable jobs. They are good jobs. They are jobs for technicians, fishermen, and various other people as support businesses.

People may say, and you very well could say this, where do you get your information? My information comes from Norway, Chile, Japan. These people are doing this business and they are doing it very successfully.

In this business there are going to be some people who are going to make a very great deal of money, but really we're not interested in a very great deal of money. We're interested in jobs. We're interested in seeing a town such as Prince Rupert survive. We're seeing outlying districts, the native populations here.

This is the type of business, gentlemen, that could provide those jobs, that could take the pressure off you. Most assuredly the pressure is there. What it takes now is a new mindset.

We have to turn our minds over. We have to look at mariculture very closely. I am not telling you that this is a quick fix operation. It's not; it's long term. But once mariculture operations are started, and started on this coast in a proper manner, we will have sustainable yields, we will have high-quality products, and we will get a much better price. The individual will be handling his farm or whatever the case. He will be shipping his product. We are no longer going into the multinationals. We are downsizing. If 100 individuals fail, we still have 900 who have viable businesses.

The Northcoast Shellfish and Mariculture Association, ladies and gentlemen, is open to your questions, to whatever is required to start operations on this coast and alleviate the problems we have now and the problems that are going to become much worse.

I won't take very much more of your time. I just want to bring one fact to you. World fish populations, the wild stocks, are in decline. Populations are on the rise. I will leave the conclusion to you.

Thank you very kindly for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Esmonde.

We now have Mr. Albert White.

Mr. Albert White (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, first of all I would like to thank the standing committee. I welcome you here.

There are three things that come to mind. First is the overfishing of the Alaskans. Then there is the result of that overfishing. We lost over a million sockeye this year, which were supposed to come to the Skeena and the Nass Rivers.

• 1645

The Mifflin plan was the other one. You've all heard about that. As a first nation, our people have been drastically impacted by it. I come from a village of 152 people in Metlakatla, B.C.

These are some of things that I have in mind, in a way to start repairing our industry.

The sharing of the different sectors: we all know the different sectors that we have here—recreation, sports, commercial. We all know we're not sharing them on the different costs. Today I have to pay a $60 fee just to go fishing; the sports sector has to pay a $10 fee. There was a $40 fee imposed earlier this year, but they've rejected that.

Local fisheries departments need to start listening to the more experienced fishermen on the way the fishing has to be done on this coast.

Last year I had 17 days of fishing. I had to pay $8,500 before I went fishing. In those 17 days I made $7,400; I went in the hole.

There should be an increase of programs in the enhancement of the sector here. We have hatcheries enhancement programs, but we need more money to sustain these different programs.

These are some of the things we need.

There should be an increase in all different sectors, especially the sports sector.

Last summer it took three days of protests to get you here, and we promised that we would not do that again. We need your help.

Last but not least, we brought it upon ourselves, the Lax Kw'Alaams and Metlakatla bands. Under section 35(1), one of our rights, we held a protest fishery. We caught some 5,000 fish. We brought it to Prince Rupert here. We gave it out to the local people. Also, we held a barbecue and fed some 12,000 people right here in Prince Rupert. This is what we're talking about sharing.

These are the issues that we are talking about.

There was a note in the daily news that Metlakatla people are driving four-by-fours. These are the people who are actually working; they're the ones who are doing well. But a lot of people in our villages don't have any income. That is what I'd like to bring across to you.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. White.

Mr. Ron McVeigh.

Mr. Ron McVeigh (Commercial Fisherman): I'm a commercial fisherman, a gillnetter. I used to have a combination boat. Just recently I've felt the need to start getting involved in all this palaver with politicians and what not.

• 1650

My view of what is happening is that we have a huge amount of duplicity on behalf of the politicians and upper DFO officials. They seem to shroud all these lies and half-truths. They seem on the surface to be real, genuine concerns, but they've managed to force them through and we all seem to slide off into another area.

If they reduce the number of boats catching the fish up here.... They keep on telling us, “Conservation, you can't fish”. Therefore the fish run up the rivers, they get harvested on the spawning beds. They've eradicated a whole section of commercial fishermen, just quietly and conservatively.

They've said there's a conservation problem, so we have to change the nature of our fleet—which we agree with, but we don't quite realize where this takes us. We end up in a different game altogether because all of a sudden, instead of having extra opportunities with the reduced number of boats, the opportunities seem to slide off into another sphere of influence.

It just seems that no matter what we do, no matter who we talk to, they have a private agenda that they can put forward all these high and mighty ideals and ideas and projections, knowing that when they falter and fall by the wayside other people that they actually want to pick up the slack are ready and willing, and they scoop it up. Quite quietly, we have just all slid off into bankruptcy and left town.

It's so frustrating and so annoying that we just don't seem to have any truth at all when it comes to the likes of yourselves.

Maybe I'm being exceptionally cynical, but politics is a game. You're in your own little world. You deal with all these things. People lobby you, convince you that, yes, this is a great idea. On the surface it seems that's what they want, but actually they have basically hidden agendas.

You get all the input from the companies with highly educated people whom you can take as industry representatives who can give you a good oversight of the industry. They give you this oversight and you think, yes, this sounds great—like this elective seine fishery.

It wasn't shut down for anything silly; it was shut down for non-compliance.

Finally, once the companies had reduced the number of seine boats, which meant reduced numbers of crews, reduced UI premiums, reduced insurance costs, they then had a free rein to run in there and scoop up all the fish, and the guys did. They didn't even stick to the simple rules of throwing the coho and steelhead overboard. They didn't give a shit; they just scooped them into their holds.

DFO went down to the plants. They are full of these fish that the guys weren't supposed to be catching. But the companies knew that if they could get the gillnetters out of the way because we aren't selective enough, they could implement their new selective seine fishery and have the fish at much reduced cost, because they pay the seiners nothing compared to gillnetters. Then when they get up to the spawning beds, they pay even less to the people who are harvesting up there.

So what they've done is cut out the most expensive harvester, which is the gillnetter.

On the surface it seemed like a wonderful idea. We have to reduce the fleet, we have to be more environmentally conscious. They put all these things forward and everybody says, yeah, yeah, yeah—they gobble it up. But they have a different idea of what the outcome is going to be.

• 1655

Once all the gillnetters are bankrupt, do you think that B.C. Packers and Ocean Fisheries are going to catch any less fish? No. They're going to have exactly the same number of fish running through their hands as they have right now, but they won't pay workers' compensation, they won't pay insurance costs, they don't have to provide docking space for crews, they don't have to provide laundry facilities. They won't have to provide anything, because they'll have a very compact number of boats going out catching the fish on the outside, and then they'll pick them off the spawning beds once they get up country. It's simple.

But we've all been led down this path by thinking we were taking the high and moral ground, being conservative, taking care of fish, doing our stewardship, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But by doing that we then become nonentities. We drift out of the industry and the companies are left to harvest the fish as cheaply as possible and maintain exactly the same business as they have right now.

It blows me away that we all just seem to focus on what's being thrown out to us directly. What I keep on looking at is how we seem to be the only ones who have been affected by it. Everybody else is carrying on business as usual; therefore it has to mean that people are contriving, they're inventing all this conservation stuff.

As they said, we get shut down for so long on steelhead. I went to an advisory meeting and some DFO biologist said we have to reduce the number by 50%. “What is the number?” “I don't know, but 50% is what you have to reduce it by”. Then all of a sudden a few years later, “Oh, conservation was never a concern. It's merely that we want these fish to go up to the lodges and the upriver sports fishermen”.

In 15 or 20 years' time, I'll be sitting in my rocking chair with my grandchild, and 60 Minutes will do an exposé on how the commercial fishermen were driven out because So-and-so and So-and-so decided that they wanted to make the money as opposed to.... It will just be another one of these situations where we get swept under the carpet. As I say, in 15 or 20 years there will be a 60 Minutes program outlining how we were all screwed. It will be too late; we'll all be gone and that will be it.

So I don't really hold any faith in this process at all. Why should I? Nothing has ever happened before. We talk to people.

Mr. Anderson comes out here, and for a man of Mr. Anderson's calibre to insinuate that he's going to try to maintain the high moral ground when he wouldn't know what it is if it jumped up and bit him in the ass.... It's as if you're talking to yourself. You watch him and he glazes over because he's looking for a Liberal supporter somewhere. He doesn't want to talk to you. You're a pain. “Just go away, roll over, die, and I'll reallocate whatever fish you used to catch to somebody else—the latest kid on the block”. Gone.

I don't know how you want to view it, but personally I think all this is just going to be lip-service and nothing is going to happen. You're going to have a Pacific Salmon Treaty where the Yanks get to catch all our fish and they'll pay the Canadian government a buck a fish for compensation, and where are we?

The Americans on the two-man panel who investigated whether we were getting robbed said, yes, you are, and there's a chance for a reconciliation and there's a chance for an agreement as long as you don't ask for your fish. Man, oh man!

What are we supposed to do? Be Canadian and just roll over and die and let the Americans take it all? I don't know.

• 1700

Thanks very much for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. McVeigh.

We now have Mr. John Disney.

Mr. John Disney (Commercial Fisherman): I'm a commercial fisherman from Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

This committee is holding this hearing to determine the state of the fishery on the Pacific coast. Well, a simple answer to that is the state of fishery is in chaos. Nobody knows the direction we're heading in. DFO policies seem to be formed by the greatest lobby and harassment pressure and not by any logical plan.

The Mifflin plan threw the whole coast into turmoil. Although we were told that this plan would be based on the Pacific round table talks, key aspects of the plan ignored these. We had the stacking fiasco, which, even though it was not approved by the Pacific round table, was supposed to be subject to an industry-wide vote.

Well, we finally have our vote, after stacking has taken place, after a third of the fleet is sold out to the buy-back and after it is away too late to change. What will DFO do if everyone votes no to stacking? You can't unscramble eggs.

It should be noted that the UFAWU did their own coast-wide vote of all fishers on the stacking issue before the Mifflin plan was implemented. The result was a ninety-plus vote against stacking. Stacking went ahead anyway.

We have area licensing, which to me, as a gillnetter in the north, seems to have locked in more boats to my area than ever before. So now, when we have no fish in the north, we're screwed. Does this make sense to someone?

For various vague reasons the DFO is desperately trying to stop our access to Fraser stocks in the north, even though these stocks have always been one of our main drivers. The central coast stocks, which were always a huge producer, have been dead for over twenty years. So far the DFO has sat on its hands when it comes to addressing this loss.

Since the early nineties the department's direction of centralization and diminishing funds have meant fewer and fewer people in the field and more and more in Vancouver and Ottawa, but without the field data how can they manage? We must maintain our field staff. We've been denied whole fisheries in years of overabundance on the Queen Charlotte Islands because the computer said there was no fish. This is insane.

Since the Mifflin plan, we have had Art May, Stephen Kelleher and Sam Toy come to try to unscramble the eggs—a daunting task, especially if they're directed to arrive at a certain answer no matter what the data suggest. This seems to be the only explanation with the first two.

Before we get into looking at these studies, I have to explain the one dominant and most destructive policy of the last two decades. That's the allocation decision to move fish from the commercial sector to the recreational sector.

Going back to 1985, the commercial and recreation users were allotted catch shares, and at that time there was peace on the north coast because the sports fishermen were given a share about twice what they were able to catch. Then, because of their being allowed to harvest more fish than the stocks could bear in the Gulf of Georgia, they moved north in search of new fish. So by the end of the eighties they were overharvesting their quota for the northern area. The friction began when the commercial fishermen were made to pay for the sporties' overcatch debt out of their own share.

Since that time they have enjoyed unfettered access to the salmon in northern waters, especially around the Queen Charlotte Islands and at Langara Island and Maiden Harbour in particular. Their catch there has increased by 5,800% in the last ten years, at our expense. It is the commercial sports lodges who have convinced the DFO to allow them to operate here without regard for the traditional commercial fleet and to harvest as much as 60% of the northern sports catch in these two small areas.

We, the commercial fishermen, and the communities like Prince Rupert, Masset and Haida have paid the price of this overharvesting, a price that is paid in lost income, an increase in social problems, a loss of spin-off employment and communities in decay.

The whole focus of the argument of the commercial sports lodges, headed by organizations like the Sport Fishing Institute, is that a sport-caught fish is of more value than a commercially caught one. I believe we would not be here today if this idea hadn't been sold so effectively to the DFO by the commercial sport operators, but I have yet to find any data that supports this claim. I have read studies done by both scientists and consultants from Canada, Massachusetts, Oregon and Alaska. They either show the opposite or are inconclusive.

• 1705

The only study that supports the Sport Fishing Institute's claim is the ARA Consulting Group study, The Economic Value of Salmon. This is being waved about by the DFO as if it were some holy grail. This report is the most flawed document I have ever read. The authors mixed coastal figures with regional figures. They had catch statistics from the Yukon intermingled with numbers from the waters of area 1, which are my local waters. Some catch numbers were wrong by a factor of 3,000%. Other numbers showed catches that didn't take place at all.

Because the whole report of value analysis is based on figures, you see my dismay at the importance the DFO has attached to it. The authors' logic was flawed. They compared apples to oranges. They repeatedly attempted to explore the value of the natural resource and then analysed flawed data that led them into a maze with no exit. They insisted on attaching value to an angler-caught fish, but how do you do this? For example, if a lodge guest pays $2,400 for a three-day fishing trip and takes home four chinook, are they worth $600 each? If he catches only two chinook, are they now worth $1,200? What happens if he catches no fish at all? Conversely, what is the chinook worth if he keeps four chinook, eight other salmon, ten halibut, fifteen rockfish and ten ling cod?

But let's say we do know the value of our sport...

[Editor's Note: Technical Difficulty]...their fantasy sport value to the average price paid to us, the commercial fishermen, or can we?

They claimed that a commercially caught chinook was worth $26 and a sport-caught one was worth $679. From my own fishing experience over a 15-year period, I would say my average 20-pound chinook ranged between $44 and $100-plus dollars per fish, excluding bonuses. But this is only the start of our fish's economic journey, whereas the sport fish doesn't have an economic journey.

To show what I mean, try this on for size. A couple of years ago I was in Toronto. In the local supermarket, they were selling B.C. chinook portions for $15 for a quarter of a pound or $60 per pound, so now my 20-pound chinook is worth $1,200. Next to this was some Scottish smoked salmon at $32 for a 114-gram packet, which is about a quarter of a pound. So this salmon was worth $128 a pound, or $2,560 for my 20-pound fish.

As chinook is one of the most prized smoked salmon of the world, you begin to see why I say that the ARA report is out to lunch when it says my chinook is only worth $26.

What happens if the price I am paid rises dramatically in the future? The whole analysis becomes outdated. This whole concept was ignored by the ARA report. We have been saying for years to deaf ears that sporties don't need huge quantities of fish to run their businesses. There are many ways to reduce their impact on the resource and still enjoy the experience.

There is a lot of meat fishing going on out there, but that's our job, not theirs. By giving them more and more fish from our allocation, you don't increase their customers' expenditures, but you do reduce our catch, our income, our taxes paid, etc.

So it hasn't been demonstrated that the people of Canada get more out of a sport-caught fish than a commercially caught one. Since this is the very cornerstone of their argument to be allotted more salmon, everything so far has been reallocated because of a very effective lobby pressure and not because of good science or good sense.

Several studies have shown, including Dr. Pearse's report, Conflict and Opportunity, that if you removed sport fishing altogether, the benefits would remain the same to the national income, because people would still come to B.C. to enjoy our rich and varied coastal life.

The whole sport fish “more value” argument is a lie. It is a figment of the Sport Fishing Institute's imagination. Sure, large amounts of money are being generated by the Bob Wrights, Dan Sewells and Rick Granges of this world, but too much of this is going into their pockets and not into the B.C. economy. Many of the jobs they provide are minimum wage jobs. When Mr. Siddon cut the bag and possession limits in half, the lodge owners cried that it would be the death of their businesses. In fact, their guest bookings kept increasing and they made more money with fewer fish.

By giving them large chunks of the commercial fleet's quotas, DFO is simply closing down one fishery and replacing it with another at the expense of coastal communities such as Masset. The reallocation of chinooks in the commercial sectors of the sport sector has had a major part in B.C. Packers pulling out of both Masset and Skidegate. It has also contributed to the closing of the bulk fuel station by PetroCan in Masset. This single fact has pushed Masset into a downward spiral that is proving almost impossible to stop.

• 1710

Now, turning to the Art May study, besides sitting down with him face to face and explaining the many flaws of the ARA document.... His study is full of sweeping statements that are drawn from it, such as:

...there is substantial evidence that the economic benefit to the sport sector of chinook and coho is greater than that to the commercial sector...

Only ARA says this. Next, it says:

Allocation policies within the last 10 years have implicitly favoured the recreation fishery...under the circumstances this implicit policy should be now made explicit.

There is no mention of why this should be so. The policy of the last ten years has been formed and shaped by lobby pressure alone.

All this nonsense is based on the ARA report. The great Mr. May seemed incapable of drawing an original conclusion. This former deputy minister of the DFO ignored all proof to the contrary and simply based his recreational recommendations on the ARA report and what the Sport Fishing Institute fed him. His whole report resolves very little, because he has researched very little and is seemingly following some sort of instructions from outside this whole farce. You can't convince me that the president of Newfoundland's most famous university was only capable of producing this simplistic, uni-directional report.

If Mr. Tousignant had really wanted a comprehensive, intersectoral allocation study done, he had several wise men here in B.C. who could have done an excellent job. This committee should ask itself why Mr. May was hired or, more importantly, why someone like Mr. Cruikshank wasn't hired. We have people here in B.C. who are smart and capable and who know our situation. They won't simply bow to what some Ottawa civil servant directs them to produce. A person like Mr. Cruikshank has already done a province-wide study of our problems, coming to our communities to see our situations first-hand. Mr. May, in contrast, summoned us to the palace on Hastings Street and then ignored what we had to say.

My recommendation is to throw out this report.

A final footnote on this is that we now have the Judge Toy show to try to sort out the Art May show. The jury is still out on Mr. Toy.

Finally, we have the Stephen Kelleher investigation. He has not come north to meet us and so far has answered one letter. I had one phone conversation with him in which he communicated his total lack of knowledge of the situation in the Charlottes, including his ignorance of the hydro involvement in the fishery. When I pointed out that his recommendations cancelled our access to Fraser stocks when there was a long tradition of this access, he was somewhat taken aback at my attitude. In the Haidas' case, their interception of these stocks goes back thousands of years.

As a footnote to this issue of access to Fraser fish, it must be remembered that fishermen in the north were promised these sockeye by the Minister of Fisheries himself, Bernard Valcourt. When the first big chinook reallocation to the sport sector took place on June 8, 1990, Mr. Valcourt announced that:

...the allocation of Fraser sockeye has been increased in response to decreased access to chinooks in northern B.C. waters...this allocation has been altered to reflect recent growth in the sport fishery in the north.

Has Mr. Kelleher forgotten this or has he been told to forget it?

Now Mr. Anderson is our leader. He has appointed the past chief executive officer of the Sport Fishing Institute, Ms. McColl, to be his special adviser to the Pacific. The head of the entire recreational division of DFO, Mr. Tom Bird, has now moved to take over Ms. McColl's job. And Mr. Anderson's campaign manager landed a plum job.

Does anyone see a pattern here? Are we simply going to carry on in the same direction we have for the last ten years?

Today you ask what state our fishery is in. We're on the slippery slope of the collapse of our domestic stocks because you have one group with a huge kill capacity that the DFO has allowed to expand in the name of business and big bucks.

There are two major flaws of going in this direction, and the first is that DFO hasn't licensed them or developed a method to accurately monitor their kill rate. This breaks the golden rule of fish management. You have to know what's being taken out of a stock before you can manage it. Yet the DFO continues to allow the sport sector to fish to their hail numbers when everybody knows that hail numbers are always very low. You don't know what the death rate was of 50,000 salmon that were shaken last year in area 1—if this number is even correct, which I doubt. That's only one fish per day per angler. They decimated the stocks in the Gulf of Georgia in the early 1980s with their freedom from management. They are about to do it again. It is interesting to note that the sporties in area 1 probably killed more salmon with their catch and release methods in 1997 than the commercial trawlers caught in their whole fishery.

• 1715

The second flaw is that with free trade, GATT, and MAI coming on line, if you manage a resource on a purely business level do you really think Canada will be running the show in 10 years' time? With a $40 million plus plum sitting at Langara Island, some foreign interest will move in and suddenly you won't even have a say.

We must restore some common sense to our fisheries, with more regional and local control. Don't just pay lip-service to the local advisory process but allow them to develop their own management strategies. The cost of continuing on our present course is too high. An excellent example of this process not being allowed to work is the fact that the roe herring fishery is going to be conducted on the Queen Charlotte Islands this year, against the advice of the local fishers, against the advice of the Haida, and against the advice of the local DFO manager and his staff. It sort of reminds a guy of the scenario leading up to the Atlantic cod collapse. Way to go, Mr. Anderson.

That is my written thing. I noticed at the beginning, when I first walked in, that Mr. Scott was telling you about some stuff going on at Langara Island that I hadn't noted down because I thought, coming all the way from Ottawa, you wouldn't even know what Langara Island was all about. If you are interested in some of the farces that are going on up there, I can tell you a few.

Langara Island offers the only all-weather anchorage in the whole northwest corner of the Charlottes, and yet Bob Wright, who is the major operator there, who is there illegally—he is not supposed to be there—has put so much harassment pressure on the small craft harbours branch that he has blocked half of the anchorage. We are not even allowed near him. He is on his own water lot, which he has taken. This is a public waterway, would you believe? It is the only all-weather anchorage and he has it half blocked off. So now if we have a storm in the area and there is a major fishery going on, we can't go into that bay, although that's the bay to tie up in.

We have U.S. boats operating, flying in guests to those boats, flying out planeloads of Canadian fish that is coming from the Canadian quota, and we get nothing from it—nothing.

We have a harassment campaign going on as we speak. When I say “harassment”, I mean sports lodges phoning major DFO officials day and night at home to get the net fleet pushed out of Langara, half a mile off the beach. I made 85% of my income last year in that boundary. As a gillnetter I don't even catch their species of fish. Last year I was catching 1.4 steelhead an opening and three-quarters of a chinook an opening. These fish were released. That's my average for the year. We don't target their fish. We're targeting sockeye. They want us out of there because we're an inconvenience. This is going on as we speak.

I mentioned Bob Wright. The three biggest operators in the area are Rick Grange, Bob Wright, and the Queen Charlotte Fishing Lodge. They are all there illegally. There is a moratorium in place. The two big ones are violating that moratorium. You're not allowed to use the foreshore on those waters for sport fishing purposes. You can't even walk along the foreshore because it is so blocked with sport fishing ramps, boats, equipment.

I know this is a provincial law and has nothing to do with you, but I've told everyone this since the moratorium came into place in about 1990. Nobody will do anything about it. I phoned the lands department right from the fishing ground and they won't do anything about it. This is what we're up against.

The one thing that has failed here with the DFO is the advisory process. We have some excellent people on this coast, and not just fishermen. I'm talking about the field staff from the DFO. I'm talking about community leaders who know how to solve these problems.

I've been on an advisory board for 20 years now. At the 18-year mark I was the only long-term member of that board and I couldn't take it any more so I resigned. A few days later I got a call at 11 p.m. from the northern manager, who said “You can't resign, we need you”. I challenged him. I said “If you can name one thing in the last 18 years that we have accomplished, I won't resign”. He couldn't. That's how bad it is. What's the point of this? That was 20 years of volunteer time. I never got paid a penny for it. We're not doing this for our health. We have the answers to these problems, but nobody will listen.

• 1720

It's interesting to note that eight years ago, almost to the day, right where you're sitting, Mr. Baker, and right where you're sitting, Gary Lunn, was Tom Siddon and Pat Chamut. They promised us that no group would get an increase in a share of their quota at the expense of other groups without all groups agreeing. We're talking about the sport fishermen here. This was just when it was beginning. “Don't worry, that'll never happen.” “If it does happen”, he said “we'll make damned sure that local or adjacent communities benefit.” Well, in Masset's and Langara's local and adjacent communities we haven't seen one buck yet, and they're generating upwards of $40 million a year. It's one of the many, many lies we've been told over the years.

Thank you for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much for your comments, Mr. Disney.

We'll now go to George Hayes.

Mr. George Hayes (Northwest Maritime Institute): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Northwest Maritime Institute.

I've put together a small brief on what the Northwest Maritime Institute is doing, what it has accomplished to date, and some of our problems and challenges.

What is the Northwest Maritime Institute? It is a non-profit society.

When was it instituted or established? It was established in May 1995.

Why was the institute formed? Employment in traditional fisheries and in forestry is in permanent decline and there are few urban service sector options. The institute was formed to support new job creation and to address the need for wealth creation.

Background: We had the grain terminal converted to a residual terminal, with all the implications this involved. We have the situation of the pulp mill. We have the various other bombs that seem to be dropping on us, such as the announcement in the last couple of days of Tumbler Ridge. The openings next year in this area are going to be very limited—you've probably heard about that—and the year after.

Who founded the institute? It's a common interest brought together by founding sectors of the institute: coastal communities, first nations, training and research interests, industry and education.

What does the institute focus on? There were three areas that we identified: fisheries, seafood sector; marine tourism; and transportation. I might note that in the case of the transportation issue it was a very high priority. We identified 13 major areas of concern because of the changes in the transport legislation, which had a very serious impact on the north. When we checked with the task force that was involved in leading up to that legislation, we discovered there was one person who had been on that group about 20 years before and had worked in Prince Rupert as a longshoreman. So there was not a lot of background, and there were a lot of implications.

We gave this issue a priority and we organized a From that conference, which was focused on action, we followed this. The Minister of Transport at the time, David Anderson, appointed a task force, which I co-chaired, to look at the various issues. You have the report of that task force in your package, Mr. Chairman.

• 1725

We organized a number of events on the fisheries issues, which I'll talk about as we go along. What are the examples of its objectives? To research and foster the development of added-value processing, fisheries and seafood diversification, new high-value fisheries, fisheries based on aquaculture cultivation, and other marine product development.

I might mention at this time that at one time in Prince Rupert there was a marine fisheries research centre. It was removed from Prince Rupert in 1942 because of the threat of Japanese invasion, if you wish. The fisheries research lab was moved south.

One of the interesting things about that research lab or centre is that they were leaders on fish oils, cod liver oil, halibut oils, and so on, which were quite critical during the war in the U.K. because of the diet situation. But the textbook still is work that was done here. It was not returned and it was not replaced and it has had a certain serious impact on the developments in the fisheries.

To date, what has the institute accomplished? Well, we got the L. Pacifica research platform here. You've seen a picture of it in the front from DFO. We did develop a school program, which I think was quite successful. We also developed a number of other programs and we have a number of things we could move on quickly if we had the resources to get on with it: the Northwest Corridor Transportation Conference, which I've mentioned; Coastal Communities Fisheries Conference, co-sponsored with coastal communities and Simon Fraser University; Northwest Maritime Institute Fisheries Forum, where we identified a number of issues and you've got a working document that came from that of the number of fishing opportunities; Coastwise newsletter—in collaboration with the Coastal Communities Network we've put out a newsletter, and you've got copies of that newsletter in your package.

This is a grassroots type of story. We are talking to each other about a number of issues. You'll see that in one of the issues we talked about a closure at Cowichan Bay due to environmental impacts of a pulp mill. When it came time to reopen that area, the local fishing community and the community suggested that they keep it as a nursery for their crab fishery.

These are the types of stories that are common to the community. This is a very important initiative on our part and I think a very important initiative for the coastal communities, because many of the issues are similar in different communities.

We've got a connection with the National Research Council IRAP program. We've done some work. At the moment we have a few problems in getting some of these issues moving forward.

A school marine biology program I think was very important. One of the outcomes was that the number of students registered for science programs doubled at the community college.

Agreement with UNBC engineering is an extremely important relationship. We want to maintain that relationship, because there are many changes that are going to require engineering, from fishing to processing. We do have access to all of their capabilities, whether it be in the computer applications or just simple engineering.

The Pike Island project: this little island on the other end of Digby that fortunately nobody put a bulldozer or a chain saw through has a rather interesting forest. There are some unique trees over there that are as unique to this area of the world as the golden spruce. We also have three villages that were abandoned 1,800 years ago with the canoe marks still there. All that has happened is four feet of needles have fallen on it.

• 1730

We have developed this as a tourist destination. It is important because it opens up the opportunity. At the end of the island there were two villages that were covered over when the missionary Duncan was encouraging gardening. These may very well serve as an extension to the tourist season from a three-month to a nine-month tourist season, because people can now do archaeological work. These are jobs both in Metlakatla and places like this hotel and so on. It is very important for job creation.

Canadian Ocean Frontiers Research Initiative Foundation—you are going to hear from them in Richmond. We have been working with them on a number of potential initiatives. Most important is a science, fisherman, coastal community partnership conference similar to the transportation one, where we hope we'll have focus and outcomes. We want to bring the science community from Kodiak to California here so that we can understand and transfer technology and develop those partnerships. The partnership development is extremely important. We hope to have this conference on April 21 and 22 here in Prince Rupert. This is an extremely important event.

We have just completed three fisheries projects. One of them is the arrowtooth flounder, with J.S. McMillan Fisheries. There are about 2,000 tonnes of arrowtooth flounder left behind. It is a turbot that has no commercial value, or almost none. There's no market. There is a project we are working on, and hopefully we can get it going in the next few weeks if the restructuring at McMillan is finalized. We have an Alfa Laval Separation, Inc. technology, and we can make powders from this arrowtooth flounder. This is a major development. This is just one. There is a potential $10 million fishery in the added shore value. This is something we have to get going.

We have just completed a workshop and a program on the north coast biotoxin monitoring. The report is in your package. On the north coast the shellfishery is effectively closed. Just think of France, with 22,000 people doing shellfish farming, an equal number of shore people, with nowhere near the coastline or quality of coastline that we have.

These are opportunities that we have to address. They are not easy. As was pointed out by an earlier speaker, there is no magic wand. We just have to work our way through it and work at it. But it is an opportunity.

We have a very interesting situation here, in that we can create jobs. We have some economic advantages. In the case of salmon farming from British Columbia, the salmon can be competitive by one-third lower cost by getting it into 80% of the world markets by flying north to Anchorage and east-west at that fuelling depot.

We have just completed a study on north coast kelp culture. Seven people were down at Bamfield last week, and we hope to set up three more kelp farms. There is one now in North America, and we hope to have four.

• 1735

Marine resource recovery: This is the Alfa Laval technology. They have proposed to give us in Prince Rupert a demonstration plant valued at somewhere between $3 million and $5 million. The idea here is that the demonstration plant would be used to process fish waste in the most effective way. Instead of cooking the devil out of the proteins and vitamins, it's a seconds' process rather than an hour reduction operation.

We plan on marrying this processed material with the residues from canola and soya for an aquafood for the world market. Particularly now with El Niño causing a severe drop in the anchovies in Peru and Chile, this is an opportunity.

However, I might mention that this technology also opens up a whole range of other things: the extraction of fish oils at human quality level; the processing, as I mentioned earlier, of the arrowtooth flounder; the chum salmon—now that we've caught the roe, the rest goes to the reduction plant. There's no reason why we can't get the oil and the meat for a salmon burger from McDonald's. There's no reason why we can't be processing a whole lot of other fish, the mud shark and so on. We're talking about a 50-year jump in the technology. We need your help.

Introduction of new technologies: I mentioned the Alfa Laval process. The Prince Rupert fisheries research labs have been given 12 trailers by DFO. It was an environmental lab that is at West Vancouver fisheries research centre that's now been privatized. It's known as PIAB. These have been made redundant. However, they would serve the interests and the needs of Prince Rupert and the north coast. What I want to note here is trying to get them. We need some money to get them up here, and you have in your package a proposal that we've put to the federal government for what I would consider a serious investment.

You will also note on the back of that that if we haven't got the analytical skills and so on, all we'll get is a production plant, which may or may not last. I want to remind you that most of the fish processing in the state of Oregon is carried out pretty much by one company. They are extremely interested. They can do in Portland what the Portland port did for our potash. We were asleep here in Prince Rupert and 500 jobs now exist for an export port in Portland, Oregon—not Vancouver, not Prince Rupert, but in Portland. They can bring their residues from canola or soya to Portland as cheap or cheaper, and they're waiting. There is interest in Alaska along similar lines. Some major moneys have been made available for research.

One only has to look at the various research stations of the University of Alaska, starting in Kodiak, down to Ketchikan, where you get people working with shellfish farmers for as long as ten years to set up an oyster farming operation. We had them here a couple of months ago in Prince Rupert talking about the work they're doing. These are important things in terms of job creation.

• 1740

UBC Fisheries Centre—we have a very strong partnership here. On the occasion when the ground fishery was closed here in Rupert a couple of years ago, we got together with Doug Marsh, who was at the time president of the deep sea trawlers. They had a little fund of $1 million or thereabouts from halibut that couldn't be sold but could be paid for and put in this fund. In your package I've put in the agreement that came about, and this was unique.

UBC Fisheries Centre, up to this time, had not had any dealings with our own DFO on any of these issues, yet they were the world leaders on stock assessment. They do stock assessments in Norway, Iceland, China, Australia, etc. This was a first breakthrough. There was a lot of reluctance to turn that over to the university, with peer review and all that good stuff. It was put in place. I mention this because—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Hayes, perhaps you could try to wrap up. We're quite a bit over time. I don't mean to interrupt you, but we have a lot of other speakers.

Mr. George Hayes: I'll wrap up by saying we are planning two events in April. There is the conference. The second part of this is a workshop. The conference is going to bring the fisheries science and the fishing world together to try to find opportunities.

The second one is a workshop with UBC Fisheries Centre entitled “Back to the Future”. With “Back to the Future” we're going to look at the ecosystems for the last 500 years. This is going to be privately, separately funded.

I also want you to look at a series of items that we identified, and it's in your file, where we think there's a potential for 7,500 jobs that could be created. I think with what you've been hearing it's worth looking at. I hope you will give careful consideration to a process where funds can be made available to get that centre of research and so on. We have to stop going through the revolving doors of HRD, Western Diversification, and so on.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We have Mr. Rusty Doane.

Mr. Rusty Doane (Individual Presentation): I'm from Terrace. I'll give you a little history of how long my family has been in this. My grandfather came over from Norway in 1911 and broke in on the halibut on this coast. My mother is from Lax Kw'Alaams Port Simpson reserve. They've been at it for thousands of years. That's my introduction.

There are things that I think are really important, such as the Mifflin plan. I'll just brush on it, the chaos. If there is any way to have a general buy-back and scrap this Mifflin plan, I think it's the only alternative we have. We have economic chaos up and down this coast, not to mention the economic chaos that's happening in my house right now.

The other thing is that with area licensing, we paid a licence fee here three years ago—one licence, one fee. I leased a second licence last year. Why is there a fee for every area now? Naturally you would think it would be one-third of the price since you only fish in one-third of the area.

There are other things I want to bring in. Maybe you asked that question earlier, what effect the treaty in Alaska had on me.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): That was me.

Mr. Rusty Doane: I'd like to address that. The whole month of August—I figure two years ago it probably cost me $20,000. There was a big cycle on that. I think I'm being conservative.

• 1745

The panhandle itself...the waters of the panhandle are in Canada. They are not in the U.S.A. When they are trading, saying, hey, we are intercepting so much of yours but you are getting so much of ours, that is so much of.... Theirs is also ours. These are things in the treaty. I haven't heard anybody bring this up.

The panhandle itself is a strip that runs right up to Cape St. Elias. I don't hear anybody saying, hey, we don't get these. There is a little bit of the native fishery in the Taku and the Stikine, but we don't get any of that fish.

These are the things, when the treaty process goes in, that should have been brought forward. A lot of that is Canadian fish. We are not intercepting American fish.

I think this might be a dirty word to you. I think Alaska state has Alaska state fisheries; Washington state has Washington state fisheries. They're not grinding so many axes in Ottawa and worrying. I think we have to start moving toward the provincial fisheries. It's our area. We understand it better. Even though Mr. Anderson is from here, he knows very little about fishing. I've met him. The man is a politician. The first thing he always says is “Conservation is number one”. That is the politically correct thing to say. I would say it myself. It sounds great.

I was on that blockade last summer. I waited five years for the Liberals to deal with something with this treaty. We finally got fed up. There were areas that the Americans.... You say conservation. We were troubled for three weeks in the Nass before he even came out here. He talked conservation. There were conservation problems prior to that.

I have a few other things.

I believe fleet reduction has to be an overall thing. This Mifflin plan has to be scrapped. Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, Alert Bay—all the different areas are definitely able to be better if the fleet can move.

I usually fish right until the end of the season. I had no way of salvaging my season this year. I had no place else to go. I could have fished until November 1 in the third area at Nitinat to salvage my season, but I didn't have that option given to me. Now we have area licensing.

We have always had our good and our bad. Every guy here has had bad years before, but being fishermen we're all optimistic. We always say, well, next year we'll get them. They have taken that away from us.

Education: I've been going to a college trying to get educated. I am 44 years old. I went to grade 8 in school. I have my B ticket from the college in Terrace and I took a class 1. It's not doing me much good being 44 years old when there are young guys coming out at 22 years old. In places like Alcan they're not going to take me for the good paying jobs. Guys after 55 like early retirement. It's a fact. Your better days are behind you. I don't know what you're going to do with guys like us.

The thing with the American interception is that the Americans are claiming now that because we don't take this fish they should take more. The problem is that they are the problem to begin with. We are a band-aid solution in front of the river. Here we try to conserve our cohos. We let a million and a half go one year, too many, to save these cohos that they have been fishing seven days a week prior to that. We let this much go up to save a handful of Bulkley cohos. What happens? The following year they overfish and say, well, we're not taking our stock so they are going to. It's kind of a revolving door. The problem is there.

Without a treaty we're never going to get a month-of-August fishery. This is it. Enhance these runs...that's a dirty word with the sports sector, but we have to enhance these interior coho runs or we'll never be able to harvest that fish, unless it is by trap or something else.

I don't know if everybody will agree with me on this one; the inland fishery. I am a status native. I'm not in favour.... As a commercial fisherman I'm going to look at it this way. How many times do I have to pay? That's something that belongs to the people of Canada, to sign agreements. The fish in the river, food fish, should always be, but taking inferior fish from the river gets the company cheap fish for their canned fish markets.

There are a lot of inland people from Kiwanga and Kispiox, places where they have good fishermen. They fish down here. If they had help buying boats—they've been involved with the companies and have been screwed so many times—if they had low interest loans, and a buy-out of existing A licences.... We can resolve this problem with the inland fishery. We don't need inland fisheries. The quality is not there.

I think that's all I can say. I could go on forever. Thanks.

• 1750

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

We now have Dana Doerksen.

Mr. Dana Doerksen (Individual Presentation): Thanks for coming to Prince Rupert.

Earlier I set out four pieces of paper in front of you. I'll try to skip through my brief and just give bits of it, in view of the time constraints.

I've been involved in the commercial fishery for.... I first started when I was a young kid, in 1966, as a deckhand for my brother on a little boat off Tofino. Since then I've invested quite a bit of money to be involved in various commercial fisheries. I'm going to focus today just on the salmon fishery. I've been asked to give up a lot as a commercial salmon fisherman, but as a sport salmon fisherman I've actually given up very little.

You've heard a lot about the Mifflin plan. It's really a misnomer. It should be called the Chamut-Tousignant plan. Poor Mr. Mifflin was barely Minister of Fisheries a week before that became to be known as the Mifflin plan. Unfortunately, when Brian Tobin left, Tousignant and Chamut had reign in implementing what they wanted out of the plan.

About area licensing—I was part of the troll panel; the 12 supposed “wise trollers” who put information into this round table process. We had five recommendations. First, it was supposed to be considered a management tool, not a reduction tool, by the troll panel. Second, there were supposed to be three areas, north, south, and gulf. There is for troll fishing. Third, there was supposed to be no permanent area licensing. The necessity of area licensing was to be reviewed annually. Fourth, there was supposed to be assured access to Fraser sockeye for all areas. Fifth, there was supposed to be access, if necessary, to other areas to meet allocation objectives.

The only one of all those recommendations we had put forward as a troll panel group was the three areas. All the other ones are out—all of them. It just made a mockery of the whole process.

In my brief I have just one instance of the frustrations we felt. Over the 1991-94 period—it was called the long-term allocation plan—what was supposed to happen was that 30% of the value within the commercial fishery was supposed to be caught by trollers, 30% of the value by gillnetters, and 40% by seine. The troll fleet was mismanaged over that period to the tune of 3.3 million sockeye equivalents.

In this backgrounder, on page 2, I have that in there for you. It's 3.3 million sockeye equivalents: ten times the value of the fish Alaska intercepted in their overharvest last year.

The following year we were supposed to get 30%. We were delivered 24%. The first year in the Mifflin plan we were again to get 30% of the value. We were delivered 12%. These are all DFO statistics, and they are in the document here, in the background information.

Some of the stuff John Disney brought up about the reallocation in 1990 is on page 1. In the back couple of pages of that it shows Minister Valcourt promised to us that because we were going to give up 17,000 spring salmon to keep these lodges in business. We would get a further allocation of Fraser River sockeye. After last year we've been denied that allocation. We were denied an assessment fishery. Unlike the net sectors, when we made our choice for the north in trolling, there was a document called “An Analysis of North Coast Areas to Assist in Area Choice Selection”. I've included that for you there.

It says the trend in 1998 for trollers in area 2W, which is the west coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, “would see a move to limit harvest of sockeye and pink and allow for a limited duration fishery to be utilized as a stock assessment tool”.

We had a private meeting: myself, Dave Prosser, one other fisherman and Paul Sprout. We had a meeting on December 18, 1996, and he reaffirmed that the northern trollers would get that assessment fishery. Paul Sprout is essentially the second in command for the Pacific region on salmon—Donna Petrachenko is the number one—and while he was on vacation this summer Bud Graham filled in for him. Bud Graham informed me on July 16 there would be no assessment fishery for the trollers, regardless of the documents. When we picked our area we were provided assurances by Paul Sprout that we would have it. It was denied us.

I want to touch on the spring salmon also. I did mention about that reallocation in 1990. There's no mechanism now for us to be paid that debt.

• 1755

On June 3 we had a meeting here in Prince Rupert of trollers to set up our plan for how we're going to fish our season. We were told that we'd get to fish up to 170,000 spring salmon. That's our bread-and-butter fish. We were pretty ecstatic, because it meant we'd be able to access the west coast of the Charlottes and Langara Island, or the traditional fish where we fished over 100 years trolling commercially. The Haida have been there for thousands of years.

Ten days later at a meeting we were told, “Oh, sorry, there's been a mistake. Alaska's going to take 277,000”. I hope you can follow me on the numbers. They said, “Alaska's going to overharvest, so you guys are going to have to be cut back to 85,000”. That meant we had to give up our traditional fishery on the west coast and the Charlottes' Langara fishery. But one of our members sits on the Canada treaty panel.

I'm telling you this, just giving you two examples. This is the frustration. This is what happens to us people who are involved in trying to set up our seasons for our fellow fishermen.

I'll go back to the 277,000. We were told that because of Alaska's intransigence that number would have to be cut back. Ron Fowler, who is one of our members, sits on the Canada treaty panel. He said Alaska tabled those figures a month earlier, on May 3, and there had to be more to it, that wasn't the reason. Well, on July 16 Bud Graham confirmed for me—and I've got all the stuff in the background there for you—that the real reason we gave up—it's 84,000 spring salmon in the end—was to provide 2,000 spring salmon into the recreational opportunities in Barkley Sound, which is the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a further 1,500 that one of the bands in the Barkley Sound area had asked for as food fish.

I phoned one of the councillors I know down there, Rick Nookemus. He denied they'd asked for any more spring salmon. I talked to head Don Hall; he denied they'd asked for any more spring salmon, but he told me that he'd heard that the recreational catch in Barkley was indeed going to go up to 14,500.

So we paid the full bill.

Of each 24 spring salmon we catch, one is of west coast Vancouver Island origin. I've given you documents in there that kind of explain it.

We paid the whole bill. We gave up 84,000 to provide 3,500 more into Barkley Sound.

We've got a year like last year. The Alaskans wouldn't sign the treaty. Washington State said they were going to pound away on the Fraser River sockeye.

After August 15, over 60% of the spring salmon the trollers catch there, and the commercial recreational fish, is Langara of U.S. origin.

What kind of message are we sending to the Americans? You can be guaranteed the 3,500 in Barkley Sound were Canadian fish.

I'll try to skip through.

We had one other thing at the end of the year. We were supposed to have a spring opening on September 5, and we were told that we would have access until that, right on the beach in that fishery, at Langara, to catch a number. But Paul Sprout informed us that the lodge owners—and these are his exact words, he talked to me on the phone—were ringing his phone off the hook. Three multimillionaire lodge owners denied 314 of us northern troller licence holders a rightful place where we'd been fishing for 100 years. They're the only group asking for exclusive access to that area.

We share that with the Haida people and their fishery. The trollers, the seiners, and the local charter operators pose no problem, but we have these three multimillionaires who have an unbelievable and inappropriate amount of influence within DFO—and not just with this government but with the previous Minister of Fisheries, Tom Siddon.

I have so much stuff I could give you, but I tried to limit it.

I'd just like to go through. If you take anything out of this.... I hope you will go through.

I had the privilege of presenting Brian Tobin with the history of our licence fees, how licence fees are implemented on the commercial fishermen on this coast. We had fees imposed upon us for licence retirement: in 1970 it was imposed, in 1971 it was doubled, in 1981 it was doubled again. Tom Siddon finally doubled for enhancement.

It added up to $65 million that hadn't been spent. I suggested they contact Price Waterhouse to verify exactly how much, but by their figures it was $65 million the commercial fleet had been putting in since 1970 that had not been spent.

One of the biggest fallacies going around now is that the Government of Canada retired those licences. It is not true. In actual fact, out of the $78 million that was spent, once the government would have recovered moneys from capital gains tax, very little was put in by the taxpayer.

So I hope you people will read that, and one of my recommendations is that we commercial fishermen get an acknowledgement that it was our money spent on retiring, not taxpayers' money.

There is one other thing. If you can take the time, there is a little cartoon in here from Raeside. It shows Minister Anderson divvying up the fish with fish farms and native fisheries, seiners, and the troller on the outside of the closed party. He recognized what happened to us this summer.

• 1800

You asked earlier about the impact of Alaska fisheries on our B.C. fisheries. It's on about page 10 of this document you have. In 1995 the Alaska troll and net caught 15,000 spring salmon. The north coast net and troll caught 2,400 west coast Vancouver Island fish.

They have a huge impact. In some years they are 44% of the total Vancouver Island spring take.

I could touch on one more issue, the aboriginal fisheries strategy that was set up. I gave you all copies of this document, which came from the Minister of Fisheries of the day, John Crosbie. It is to all licence holders on the British Columbia coast.

The Government of Canada created this fishery—it's a commercial fishery—they said, in response to the Sparrow decision. What Sparrow said was that they recognized the natives had a right to salmon for food, ceremonial, and other purposes besides the sale of the fish. It was misconstrued and the AFS has been the result of it.

Belatedly, the government retired 33 very non-productive salmon licences: 8 seine, 11 troll, and 14 gillnet. On page 2 they say it represented less than 1% of the catching capacity of the commercial fleet; but in 1995 and 1996 that fishery was the biggest user group for Fraser River sockeye—a creation of the Government of Canada. After the recent decisions of Van der Peet and NTC Smokehouse it's possibly even an illegal fishery.

I'm informed it is an illegal fishery.

The last page is an ad the Department of Fisheries and Oceans put out to answer any questions people have. You all have a copy of this. I really hope you take the time to read this. The important part is on the left-hand side. It's to answer all our questions about this new, at the time, aboriginal fisheries strategy. It states:

Any additional allocation of fish to Native groups in the future will be carried out through the voluntary sale of commercial licences.

Last year there were three experimental projects and no additional fish were allocated for these fisheries. Now there are over 50 AFS fisheries on the B.C. coast. No more licences have been retired. So you have the commercial fishermen who have invested in the salmon-selling privilege paying this bill year after year after year.

There's a document put out by the Coastal Communities Network. It's great reading. I have only one copy. It's called “Northern Plight: How DFO is Bankrupting North Coast Communities and Salmon Fishermen”. I hope you guys get a copy of that report.

In 1994 and 1995 this AFS fishery was the second-biggest user group in the DFO's budget. Number one was salmon enhancement, at $29 million. Number two was the AFS fishery, at over $24 million.

DFO is giving some of these bands over $1 million to manage their own supposed commercial fisheries. Two of the chiefs in these bands—Joe Becker is one; I can't remember the other one—pled guilty to poaching, and as of last year they were still heads of enforcement. I asked at one of our meetings whether they were still in charge and they are. They pled guilty in a court of Canada that they were guilty of poaching, and they are in charge of enforcement. When you hear down south about some of the problems in that fishery, this is what it has come to.

I must mention that up on the north coast our AFS fisheries are managed far more responsibly. I think they make the Fraser River one look a lot better.

I have a few recommendations at the back. I'm running out of time. I hope you people will be able to peruse the recommendations there. I do want to reiterate that if there are going to be these AFS fisheries, retire the appropriate amount of licences out of our commercial fisheries so the people who are left in this industry can make a bloody living. If you keep giving our livelihoods away for various political reasons, we are going bankrupt.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Just before you leave, Mr. Scott would like to make one quick point.

Mr. Mike Scott: Dana, one thing you touched on is really important, and I'm not sure it's clear with the committee. Back in 1969 the government started imposing a licence fee which was supposed to be earmarked only for a buy-back. Am I correct? I think I understand this correctly.

• 1805

Mr. Dana Doerksen: When they created it in 1969—it was actually 1970. Jack Davis' words to a meeting here in Prince Rupert were that:

We have, in effect, declared a moratorium on the issuance of new licences for fishing vessels. No longer can the total number of fish boats go up. It can only go down as retirements occur and the Government itself buys boats out of our commercial fishing fleet.

The very next year they imposed a licence fee program—and it's on that paper—for licence retirement, and all of them, until Tom Siddon's doubling, were for licence retirement.

Mr. Mike Scott: Just to be very plain with everybody here, the $65 million calculation was done by an independent accounting firm, and that is the calculation of the money that's been paid or collected.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: No, Mike. I actually did the calculations myself and I presented them to the round table. I suggested that a firm like Price Waterhouse could get the true number.

Mr. Mike Scott: I see.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: Also, the gillnet troll fleet have put in approximately $55 million and the seine fleet have put in $10 million of unspent moneys. There were documents that I presented from Tom Siddon, for instance, in 1986 acknowledging $26 million.

Mr. Mike Scott: That money has been collected by DFO over a period of—

Mr. Dana Doerksen: And it went into a black hole.

Mr. Mike Scott: —thirty-some years, specifically for the purpose of retiring fish licences.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: Yes.

Mr. Mike Scott: So the money that was put into the Mifflin plan essentially was the fishermen's own money.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: Exactly.

Mr. Mike Scott: Not only that, but you didn't get all of the buy-back money that was in the plan. You only got a portion of it, in essence.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: We would have recovered all of it, but there have been so many different government things trying to say it was a government-financed buy-back when it wasn't. It was our money, which we put in for licence retirement.

Mr. Mike Scott: Thanks, Dana. I just wanted to make the point with all the committee members that this was the fishermen's own money that you would use to buy back those licences, not taxpayers money.

Mr. Dana Doerksen: I appreciate that, Mike. Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We have three speakers left who have requested to speak and then we're going to go to the floor. Anybody else who wishes to speak can come to the microphone and will be given an opportunity to speak. We're going to watch you. We're down to the last hour, so please keep your presentations as brief as possible. I will interrupt you if I have to, to make sure we leave time for people to come to the microphones.

We now have Heber Clifton.

Mr. Heber Clifton (Secretary Treasurer, Prince Rupert Local, Native Brotherhood of British Columbia): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I've lost my voice sitting back there. I was supposed to be on this morning, but I've been talking to myself, waiting with this brief to the House standing committee on fisheries issues, submitted by the Prince Rupert Local, Native Brotherhood of B.C.

First, thank you for the privilege to come here and let you know our problems. We've been looking for this for a long time and we're glad to see you here.

Welcome to Prince Rupert, the rainy town. It always rains here.

I should read this first. We've got a brief here and it's a long one and I'm not going to go—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Clifton, if you have a copy of that, even one copy, we'll make copies. It would even be better, though, if you just put that down and tell us from your heart what the problems are with the fishery. We'll look at that afterwards. I promise you it will be read by all members of the committee.

Mr. Heber Clifton: Okay. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get.

I'll talk about the Mifflin plan. I was a member of the gillnet panel on the round table discussions on rationalization or reduction of the fleet size and everything else. During the discussions we agreed to a 25% reduction in the fleet size and no more. The representatives of DFO asked us if we would agree to an increase in the licence fee and we asked why. They said we'd have more say in the management of the fishery; user pay, user say. But that has never happened. We asked what they were going to do with the rest. It was a big fee increase. We were told it was going to be used for enhancement. I'll talk about enhancement later.

• 1810

There was a questionnaire sent out that was kind of a trick questionnaire. I don't know if it was the intention of the local DFO people, but the people who answered these questions didn't know what the questions were. They didn't know that this was going to happen to them. I'll tell you why.

Our recommendation at the round table, the gillnetters, was to leave the combination privilege in for ten years and gradually phase it out. So after each meeting we'd go back to our fishermen and tell them what our recommendations were. They thought as long as we have that for another ten years and gradually phase it out, that will be good enough for us. So none of our fishermen speculated before the Mifflin plan to buy cheap licences, $10,000 and $20,000.

I sold my licence because my boat had a halibut licence on it and it sank. So we had to transfer that. In order to hang on to my licence I had to put it on another boat, but it took us a year to look for a boat and we could not find a boat to put it on. So about three months before the Mifflin plan was put in place, the area licensing and stacking, I sold my licence, a 36-foot licence, for $20,000 to a person in Simpson. I had to get rid of it or I would have lost it. So you see the price that a licence was then before the Mifflin plan.

After the Mifflin plan, the size of a licence that I've got would be about $60,000, and then it goes up from there. So our people, thinking that they would continue with the privilege and combination, didn't buy any extra licences. We could all have bought cheap licences like everybody else, but we were left out. That's the big problem there.

The Mifflin plan is a hardship on our people on the coast. I'd like to read some of this, but you don't want me to, just to tell you how our people feel. We had meetings and input from all the fishermen here. You will read it, I know you will. I trust. You say you're here to hear our problems, and we're thankful for that. I hope you will report this to Parliament.

Now I would like to talk about the Alaska problem with interception. Last year, with this combination of the Mifflin plan and the Alaskan interception of our fish, I was listening to the radio one day, a talk show in Vancouver. I don't remember the name of the talk show host. He interviewed a skipper on a seine boat who was fishing and asked him why he was intercepting all the Skeena and Nass River sockeye. What he said was that for the last few years there's been over-escapement in the Skeena, one, two, three million fish. He said if they can't catch it, we'll catch it for them. Who was right there?

Now, the problem there.... We'll talk about enhancement now. The Skeena watershed committee was put in place about four years ago. I don't know if any of you have heard about the Skeena watershed committee we had here. Nobody knows? Anyway, we had the Skeena watershed committee and we had recreational fishermen, we had regional people, and we weren't on that committee at the start. So DFO asked us to be a member, but we told them first we had some concern, some issues we wanted to put on the table. We told them that if they were willing to deal with these issues, we would be a part of the Skeena watershed committee.

One of the issues was enhancement. I've pushed for enhancement all these years on the Skeena watershed committee. They agreed to deal with that. So we've had workshops in the Skeena watershed committee, several workshops, and the last one dealt with enhancement, conservation, enforcement. I was on the group that dealt with enhancement. Knowing that it was against the policy of the steelhead society, enhancement, we just said okay, let's just jump-start the weaker stocks. That was our recommendation.

After the recommendations were finished and reported, the president of the steelhead society got up again and he said no, that's just absolutely against our policy to enhance any fish. They say that the wild stocks are a lot stronger than enhanced fish, but they're wrong. Down south, they enhance steelheads, and there's no difference in wild stocks and enhanced. But down there, when they enhance the fish, they clip the fin. So they only kill the enhanced fish and they let the wild stocks go.

• 1815

There was $13 million put into our account, a budget for the Skeena watershed committee to get scientific information. The sport fishermen up country say there are no steelhead, but after a couple of years we found out there was no problem with steelhead. But cohos? Yes, there are problems with cohos.

I kept pushing for enhancement at the meetings, and they just ignored me. After a while they said “no way”. One time, I'll tell you.... Don't get me mad here now. I was talking at that meeting about how the fees had gone up and remember last year the sport fishermen, the recreational fishermen, said theirs were increased by a few dollars and they said that was too much and we were going to lose the fish and they were going to go up to Alaska. They're not going to go up to Alaska. How much more is it going to cost for them to go up there? What's a few dollars?

Anyway, I was talking about that fee at the meeting, and a friend of mine—I don't want to mention his name, but he was a lot bigger than me—got up and started talking and I got mad at him. I said “Wait a minute. Wait till I'm finished.” No, he kept on, and he's a big fellow with a strong voice. So I pointed at the chairman, and he said to this recreational fisherman, “Just wait your turn. Sit down.” So he sat down and not very long after he got out. I don't want to tell you what he said. Some of our gillnetters were sitting there. “Them _______ gillnetters!” I don't want to mention the word he used. I banged the table. I told him “Just wait your turn!” After I got down a fellow from behind me said “Here's your button from your shirt”. So it doesn't pay to lose your temper. Anyway, that's what happened there.

Now, we're talking about the problems that we have with cohos. There have been restrictions put on the net fishermen and all the commercial fishermen—there were restrictions put on the trollers too—with different size nets, different mesh nets, deep nets, four-foot weed line and all of that, and the blue box.

We have a blue box that's about that big and about that wide, and we have water running into it. When we catch steelhead and coho, we put them in that box and about an hour later they're as strong as they were before they came out of the water, so we just release them. Some of them, when you grab them, just jump right out into the water. So that's a good program for releasing the steelhead and the coho. It works. And we all have that. There's a penalty of $300 if you don't have water in your blue box while you're fishing. I know my nephew was caught.

We've talked about that with the sport fishermen, the recreational fishermen on the bars up on the river, to do the same. The reason for that is I went up twice last summer, and on every bar that was dry when the tide's out there were hundreds of seals on each one of them. I don't know how many. This year I'm going to go up with a camera and show you.

A voice: A .30-30 camera?

Mr. Heber Clifton: Yes, a .30-30.

Anyway, the biggest bar is at the mouth of the river. There are a thousand or more on that bar, and there are thousands and thousands all the way up—seals.

Now, on the catch and release with sport fishermen, the recreational fishermen, how long does it take before they land that fish and release that fish? It's severely stressed out, and they release that. The seal is right there waiting. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour for the steelhead to get their strength back, we're told. So the seals are there. There are thousands of them.

Down at Campbell River, the fellow who was here—he left already—told me about this down by Campbell River. They have problems with the seals at the little river there with chinook and cohos. The seals are right there all the year round, and there's no fish left in there. So DFO spent $100,000 there to see what they could do about the problem. They even had a barbed wire fence across there. It was the seals that were doing it. But they couldn't do a thing about it. They couldn't kill any seals. That's our problem up in the Skeena: we can't kill any of the seals.

• 1820

Years ago DFO had a bounty on the seal nose, $5 for a nose. That kept the population down to where it should be. But now there are thousands and thousands of them.

Without enhancement, in just a few more years there are going to be no cohos left in the river. Even if you cut the gillnets right out, or the sports fishermen up river, there are so many seals that they are going to just clean up on the weaker stock.

Over in the Queen Charlotte Islands when I was a boy I fished with my dad on a seine boat. We got a load of chum every day, coho, pink. Then I gillnetted and it was the same. We got 400, 500, 600 chum every day. There was overfishing and damage by the forest industry over there.

The only place where you get fish over in the Queen Charlotte Islands is called Cumshewa Inlet. That is the only area that is open to commercial fishermen every year, just that one little area. There is enhancement there on chum.

Bella Bella is another area where they have enhancement, just on chum, and that is open every year for commercial fishermen. Bella Bella was one of the biggest producers of chum and pink. There is nothing now at the village of Bella Bella, where they have enhancement.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Could I get you to wrap up in the next minute or two. We have about 15 minutes and there are still people wishing to present.

Mr. Heber Clifton: It is good that you come here to listen to us, but you have to give us more time to hear us out. There is no use in my just talking a little bit and then having you go. It is not right. I did thank you for coming here and you should hear us out.

There are a lot of people, yes.

The Chairman: Could you elaborate a little bit more on the seals before you go on to your next subject? Do you know what type of seals they are? Are these harbour seals, grey seals...?

Mr. Heber Clifton: They are harbour seals, and they are all the way up to Kitwanga, all the way up the Skeena River.

A voice: The populations are exploding.

Mr. Heber Clifton: There are thousands and thousands and we couldn't do a thing about them.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): They are protected.

Mr. Heber Clifton: They are protected, yes.

The Chairman: Did you say that years ago it was different?

Mr. Heber Clifton: No, I told you that they had a bounty on seals, $5 per nose.

I live in Hartley Bay, and we used to shoot seals and salt them and cut the nose off. We'd take the seal home and eat it.

The Chairman: That's what we do in Newfoundland.

Mr. Heber Clifton: We got $5 for the nose and that kept the population down. But in the last few years there has been nothing you can do with seals. It is not just in the Skeena River, but over the Charlottes there are thousands of them.

Years ago DFO had a machine-gun they used for sea lions. They would go to some sea lions and use the machine-gun just to cut the size of the population down a bit. They didn't want to wipe them all out, because they are there for a reason, and it is the same with the seals.

There are just too many of them and they are wiping out the salmon.

A voice: They are like DFO: they are multiplying.

Mr. Heber Clifton: But we have everything in this, and if you have any questions—

The Chairman: We will read every word of that, I guarantee you.

Mr. Heber Clifton: —you have our phone number on there.

Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you, Heber.

Mr. Heber Clifton: I'd better stop before I get mad.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Clifton, if you can get a copy of that—

The Chairman: Someone has gone to get it now.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We now have Mr. Jack Rowbotham.

Mr. Jack Rowbotham (Individual Presentation): Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I am from Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

After accepting the invitation to make a presentation to this group, I sat down with the intention of putting together the sad story of the demise of our fishery. I wanted to describe chronologically, beginning with the Davis plan, how the Ministry of Fisheries has led our industry to the brink of disaster. After reflecting on the subject for some time, I realized that I had done all this before. I, like many other people, have made presentations relative to our industry on issues like salmon enhancement, coastal communities, fisheries policies, fishing plans, commercial sport fishing, etc. I have yet to see any action taken by the Ministry of Fisheries indicating that our express concerns were considered.

• 1825

For example, I sat on the Queen Charlotte Islands advisory board along with John for 20 years and I can tell you that not one single recommendation made by that board was ever acted on by DFO. Maybe you could say we were a stupid board. I don't know. I don't think so. I think the board was there to pay lip-service to us. They say they listened to us and they didn't. They stumbled away doing whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place. I might add that I'm not sure they knew what that was either.

Quite frankly, I'm tired of having to travel this province and defend myself and my industry against endless negative ministry decisions. I think it's time the ministry was held accountable and I think it's time the ministry answered the questions.

While I must admit I do not know the precise function of this committee, and I ask your indulgence if I am mistaken, I will, for the purpose of this presentation, assume that you are the conscience of the ministry. The questions I want answered will deal with consequences of ministry decisions and actions as they relate to my fish processing business and my community. But before I continue, I'd like to tell you a bit about myself, my company, and my community.

Having been raised in fish canneries in the area of the Skeena River, I spent my whole life in or around the fishing industry. I joined B.C. Packers in 1972 as a northern area seine supervisor. In 1983 I moved to Masset to manage B.C. Packers' massive plant. For some years previous to 1983, and until 1993, the Masset plant processed some 2 million to 3 million pounds of salmon annually, mostly chinook. By 1995 production had plummeted to a half a million pounds, prompting B.C. Packers to close the Masset operations.

As the Masset plant was the second largest employer in the community and the only one to create spin-off jobs in the community, I accepted the opportunity to lease B.C. Packers' facilities, formed Omega Packing Company, and continued to operate as a custom processor.

In 1996 Omega employed 20 to 25 employees. Salmon production was a meagre one, 180,000 pounds, but good crab production provided a small profit. 1997 was something else. Although salmon production was up to 250,000 pounds—nowhere near enough—the slumping crab catches could not provide employment for more than 18 people, and Omega finished the year in the red.

The community has been hard hit in the last two years. CFS Masset was downsized to a skeleton crew, eliminating 60 civilian jobs along with a sizeable military payroll. The forest industry has been hit with reduced allowable cuts, processing delays caused by a forest practices code, and economic chaos in Asian markets. The hand-over of fish to the commercial sport sector has not created one job or one opportunity in our community.

In 1997 the original troll quota for areas 1 to 5 was something in the area of 60,000 chinook. This represents extremely low production for our plant in Masset and expenditures were budgeted accordingly. On June 3 we were notified that expectations were up considerably: 90,000 to maybe 120,000 chinook. This represented a dramatic increase in production and preparatory expenditures were committed. Two weeks later, notice from DFO said, oops, sorry, back to 60,000 pieces. Some time later we were informed that some 48,000 chinook had to be removed from the northern commercial troll quota to allow for a 2,000-piece chinook catch in a salmon derby in Port Alberni. The northern commercial sporters basically fished to no numbers and gave not one fish to the derby in the south. Even using ARA-skewered numbers, this does not make any economic sense.

The actions of DFO caused extreme hardship for my company, my employees, and my community. Can this committee ensure our community that the ministry does not accept this type of management and will no longer tolerate it?

• 1830

The commercial sport fishing interests have successfully lobbied the Department of Fisheries for large amounts of chinook salmon. These fish were removed from the commercial troll quota and transferred to the commercial sport quota. The central theme for their lobby was “expectation and opportunity”. A large part of their clientele is made up of wealthy people from other countries. How is it that non-residents who travel to this country for recreation are entitled to opportunity and expectation in the name of fun and we Canadians who rely on the resource for our livelihood are not?

The 1997 management plan included boundaries that found fishers having to fish chinook in unproductive water. Management's rationale was fishers would target other species, namely coho, therefore prolonging the season. Fishing was very poor and most fishers could not catch enough to pay expenses. This was very difficult for fishers who could look across the boundary and watch dozens of commercial sport boats loading up with an abundance of chinook.

When I called DFO officials and suggested the boundaries be moved to allow fishers better catches, I was informed that making the season longer was a far better business plan than maximizing the catch and minimizing the cost. Of course the stupidity of that statement is obvious, but this was a fisheries manager.

It's appalling what they will do to ensure the commercial sport fishery is uninterrupted. I want to know what gives the DFO the right to bankrupt my company, throw my employees out of work, and devastate my community.

Other witnesses will be and have been, since this is the end of the day, talking about a number of other issues, such as the ARA report, area licensing, licence stacking, the loss of traditional fishing grounds, and community management. These are all issues vital to my company and community. I hope that at the end of the day you will realize that fisheries policies have to be reviewed.

The department has managed to destroy almost every fishing community on both coasts of Canada. My community is dying. Please help stop the bleeding and give us our industry back. Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Doug Mavin.

Mr. Doug Mavin (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, I'm a commercial fisherman. I chose to be a fisherman. After one year of university, I decided that wasn't for me. Commercial fishing is something I always wanted to do. From the time I was 10 years old I used to comb the beaches on Vancouver Island.

I always admired fishing. I'm proud to be a fisherman. It's an honourable profession. But if you look around this room today, all you see is older fisherman—no disrespect. There is a real crisis. It's not attracting young participants into the fishery any more.

One of the reasons for that is DFO's licensing policy. Right now we have a policy in DFO of married licences. In other words, if you want to fish all year around and you want to participate in anything other than the salmon fishery, the moment you put another licence on that boat, it becomes married. If you want to fish prawns in the off-season in order to supplement your income, those two licences are now married and they can't be split apart.

That policy has led to the development of big corporate enterprises in the fishing industry. Now, in order to get into a fishing vessel, you have to have a sizeable investment to get started.

It has put a hardship on fishermen to retire out of the fishery, because now they need to sell these big, unwieldy enterprises they developed over the years of their career, and it has put a hardship on the younger fishermen to get into the fishery. I think this policy of married licences is something that has outlived its usefulness and it's definitely something that needs to be reviewed.

• 1835

The second issue I would like to raise this afternoon is the downloading of fees on the industry by the department. It's something that has been talked about a lot.

Three years ago when I was fishing I was paying roughly $3,000 to $4,000 a year in licence renewals. Last year I paid over $12,000 to renew my licences. That's besides paying a big chunk to income tax every year. I think I do my part, but it's getting out of control.

As everybody in this room has attested, our incomes are dropping. They are not increasing correspondingly. This is something that needs to be addressed. The other day I spent $1,500 to renew a salmon licence that I won't fish until July in order to keep the incidental ling cod I catch with my rockfish. I already have a rockfish licence I paid for this year. I'm out doing it. I'm fishing out there. But the other day I had to pay $1,500 to renew this licence so I can keep my ling cod. That's a salmon licence; and I won't fish salmon until July.

Some of these policies DFO is implementing are nothing more than a tax grab; and we're taxed to death. We have trollers out there trying to make a living and they have to carry these archipelago observers. That's a whole other bureaucracy that has sprung up surrounding the fishing industry. It's a whole other enterprise on the backs of the fishermen.

The crews on the trollers aren't making as much money as the one observer. Some of these guys are going out and doing trips. They are going into the hole, not making anything, because they have to pay for this unwieldy bureaucracy.

These are the things that are going on. These are the things we have to shoulder.

I appreciate the opportunity to raise these few issues with you guys.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Mavin.

We have one other name that was just given to me, Mr. Eidsvik.

Mr. Odd Eidsvik (Individual Presentation): It starts off like “Eisenhower”, but it's not as famous.

I'm a chartered accountant. I've been involved in the fishing industry since I was two years old.

I thank you for the opportunity to come here and address you. I have prepared a brief for you people and I believe you have copies of it. I don't intend to go through all the points, but I would like to go through about four major portions of it and highlight those particular matters.

In 1996 the fishing industry landed $259 million worth of fish here in Prince Rupert. That is one heck of a lot of money. As to its importance in Prince Rupert, that's the first thing I want to tell you about. I might say first of all that in pay to the northern residents, by the estimates given to me by the managers of the various companies, $156 million stayed here and in the villages and towns and so on. That stayed in the northern district, and that was here. The rest of the money went south, to Vancouver Island. The total wages paid by the seven other largest employers here in Prince Rupert were $105 million.

Tell me which is the most important industry here in Prince Rupert. What happens if the fishing industry goes to hell in Prince Rupert? There's no question that is the largest one.

I get a bit upset about the recreation sector and the fact that they got a report and I understand—somebody can correct me if I'm wrong—the report stated that the recreational sector was worth $1.5 billion to the province of British Columbia. I understand from talking to economists and so on that you usually use a multiplier of 2.2 or 2.5 with the base figures for the resource and the raw wages being paid. If you do that to the $259 million, the north coast has contributed to the economic value here in Prince Rupert and the rest of the province $714 million. That's almost half the total value of the recreational sector; and in the fishing industry this part of the province is not as big as the lower mainland.

• 1840

I believe—and this is a sure guess—that the economic value of the fishing industry in British Columbia is somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion. I've tried to talk the B.C. Fisheries Commission and other people into hiring someone to do an economic survey to offset the effects of that other survey, but nobody has done it.

I've now been doing this survey for 12 years on the amount of money that's been paid to the fishermen, and in Prince Rupert alone, when you use the multiplier used by most economists, the fishing industry is worth $714 million. I think that's a very important figure.

The 1996 fishing industry was a very good one in most respects; 1997 is a completely different story, and some figures are there to give you an idea of what's happened in 1997.

There are a couple of other things that I want to touch on.

One is the aboriginal fisheries strategy. It is flawed. Everybody admits it's flawed, except the aboriginals, because they are doing very well with it.

I want to point out that the aboriginal fisheries strategy was brought about, as Mr. Disney said, because of the Sparrow decision. Everybody had thought—and this was pushed down the throats of all the fishermen and everybody else—that the Sparrow decision allowed the aboriginals to sell fish.

Well, the Supreme Court of British Columbia decided in 1991 that that was not so. The Supreme Court of Canada has just established that same decision. The aboriginals do not have a right to commercial fishing unless they can prove that that fishing was done before the white people came to British Columbia. That's exactly what the nine justices said, with two exceptions: that there is no right for commercial sale of fish unless they can prove that this was so before the white persons came to British Columbia. Seven out of nine judges said that that program is illegal.

Now, when there is an illegality involved, somebody should help somebody pay for it.

I would recommend to you people that you should see that that fishing stops.

In Prince Rupert here, on the Skeena watershed, which Heber was talking about, 70% of the salmon fleet is owned by the aboriginals. If you take away the fish, the salmon, whom are you hurting the most? They are the very people who need that money, because that's their basic source of income.

I want to come back to this on the Nisga'a treaty, which is one more factor that I would like to talk about. For several years there was talk that only six straight percent of the fish was going to be given to the Nisga'a. Then it was raised to 11%, to 15%. I have a confirmation—and it's included in my brief—that the Minister of Fisheries, both Mifflin and our present minister, Anderson, have agreed that the amount of fish that is allocated to the Nisga'a under the Nisga'a treaty is 27.1%.

I said this several times. Everybody said I was not correct. Both ministers have agreed now with the 27.1%.

This does not include an allocation of the surplus fish. In the agreement, section 27—and a copy of it is in there for your information—says that the minister may permit the Nisga'a central government to harvest a quantity of surplus salmon.

The Nisga'a and the minister have said that the Nisga'a do not automatically receive a portion of that surplus salmon, but who is going to get the surplus salmon? It's not going to be the fisherman who fishes out in the water, because the surplus isn't decided until the fish go up the river. So how can these fishermen here get the surplus salmon?

There is only one group of people that is going to get the surplus salmon. It has to be the aboriginals.

I calculated, based on the average surplus that ran from 1974 to 1994, based on Department of Fisheries figures, that 23% of the surplus salmon would be going to the Nisga'a under the agreement that they have there. That means one half of the salmon going up the Nass River is going to go to the Nisga'a.

• 1845

Now we have another problem. There are two other bands, Lax Kw'Alaams and Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, that also have rights to this. They are going to get a very minimum of the food, ceremonial and social fish, which, as quoted to me by the two Ministers of Fisheries, is between 6% and 8%. If those bands get just 6%, let's say, then 62% of the fishing will be diverted to the Nisga'a to settle the land treaty that we have with the aboriginals. If 62% of the Nass River fish goes to the Nisga'a, goes up the river and so on, it does not come to Prince Rupert.

I'd make the statement that it is truly unfair and unjust to make the people in Prince Rupert who are dependent on this fishing industry pay with the fish that they have always caught in order to pay for a treaty settlement with the aboriginals. It is the federal government who should be paying for that, and it should not be taken out of the fish.

If the federal government wants to settle a treaty, it should give cash and it should not take fish away from the present fishers. If the natives or the aboriginals, the Nisga'a and the other tribes, wish to have fish as a part of their treaty, then they should be given cash and allowed to go out and buy the licences from these various fishermen on the coast. Then, for instance, it would be fair, because then they'd have been bought out and given fair value. But to ask the fishermen in Prince Rupert and on the coast and in Vancouver to pay for the Nisga'a treaty or any other native treaty is unfair.

Now I'm going to lay an analogy on you. I would like you people to go back to Ottawa and to recommend to the government that it fire 50% of the civil servants in Ottawa and give those jobs to the natives. It's a stupid idea, but this is what the federal government is asking the fishermen and all the businesses in British Columbia to do. They are asking us to pay for the native treaties, and I don't think that's fair.

Another part of this is that when I say “fishermen” I'm including the 70% of the salmon fishermen here in the Skeena watershed who are aboriginals. So actually the aboriginals are paying for their own treaty money, which is completely illogical.

I want to go to one more point on the recreation business, and then I'll go to the interception assignment, and then I'll leave you people be.

On the recreational business, when they started up these fish camps—and I agreed basically with their starting up the fish camps, but I never realized they'd grow so large—they were able to go and get salmon and get an allotment from the government and catch any salmon. Well, look at these fellows here. If they want to fish for salmon.... In 1996, if you wanted to buy a salmon licence and go fishing, you would have to pay $80,000 for a gillnet licence. I don't know how much it was for a troller, but in 1996 when the Mifflin plan was going on the price of that salmon licence was $467,000 for a seiner.

So the fishermen who have been commercial fishermen for all these times have to go and pay money to get an allocation of salmon. The fishing lodges have paid nothing. Is that fair? I don't think it is. I think they should have paid for an allocation.

I don't know if the government can do anything about it at this particular stage, because it is too late, but it is one of the points that really bears looking into on the whole matter.

On the interception of salmon, I agree with these poor fishermen who couldn't get their fish. It's a terrible thing.

If you've got a big brother and he eats all your candy and you go and tell your mom and she says, “Well, you talk to him. You negotiate with your big brother”, well, it's not possible. It really and truly isn't possible. It's very, very difficult, and I feel sorry for the federal fisheries department and our external affairs people who can't solve the problem—because they will not solve the problem.

• 1850

However, there is another tack. You people probably remember when the United States said they were going to extend the boundary line down into Hecate Strait. You people probably all remember that. It now gives the United States a claim halfway between Alaska and the Queen Charlotte Islands, and they are allowed to fish in that area until the claim is settled. I think that claim will go against the Americans and I think the A-B Line will stay in place. But tell me, if you were the United States, why would you ever go to court and settle that claim? I would postpone it for 100 years if I could, because my fishermen, American fishermen, would go down halfway between Alaska and the United States and take that salmon.

Well, I say let's turn the tables. Under the auspices of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce in 1980 and 1982, I held seminars on a proposition like that. The proposition was looked at by many groups of people. We had two seminars, as I said. It was that Canada should file a claim to allow all Canadian fishermen to fish off the panhandle of Alaska up as far as Haines.

Now, you say that's stupid. Well, it's not stupid. In Africa there used to be a nation called the Belgian Congo. The Belgian Congo was a very large territory. Then they split up into all kinds of places and Nigeria controlled the water. The inner country states, which had no water rights, went to the World Court in The Hague and said, we used to fish in those waters and we believe we're still entitled to fish in those waters. The World Court agreed with them. Those people in Chad and all those interior states in Africa are allowed to go off and fish off Nigeria and catch fish for their own use and sale as long as they follow the fishing management rules of Nigeria.

Now, how long have we Canadians fished off the coast of Alaska? We have a very fortunate situation, because the aboriginals used to go and fish off the coast of Alaska for years and years. There's a claim to be established there by Canadians if they want to hold a hammer to offset this business of the interception and all these things.

I'm going to give you two names. Erik Wang, who was the legal adviser and legal counsel to the Minister of External Affairs in 1982, said yes, it's very possible, but he didn't think any government would have the nerve to tackle such a thing. Erik Wang. He has a queer name too. It's Norwegian. I don't know if he's with External Affairs any more.

There's one more person, Don McRae. He works for the provincial government in the fisheries section. He also agrees with the concept, and he's also a lawyer.

Roméo LeBlanc, ex-fisheries minister, was at our seminar, and he said this was a most interesting concept, “But, Oddie, I would not like to push it before the whole bunch of Liberals who were in power at that time, because they would not do such a thing.” But now that the Americans are playing hardball with us with interception, maybe we should do that. How quick would they be to settle our interception problems? I think it would be a very good idea.

The last one I want to talk to you about is the aboriginal fisheries strategy and one more point. You people talk how bad the Mifflin plan is. Basically the idea was good, I thought, because it was going to reduce the amount of boats out there. But I want to read you a short transcript from a case that went on in the provincial court regarding John Cummins. I was absolutely astounded to see these people have more power over getting fishing boats, any types of boats, out on the fishing grounds...and it just fixes the Mifflin plan completely.

• 1855

I'm going to read it out to you:

One of the most interesting questions and answers came during Chris's cross-examination of a DFO's star fishery officer.

Chris: Were there other fisherpeople fishing vessels with an “A” licence engaged in the Musqueam-only?

A: Yes.

Chris: What was the difference between Mr. Cummins and these vessels?

A: These vessels were designated by the Musqueam Band and at least one fisherman on the vessel possessed a personal designation card from the Musqueam Band.

Chris: Could Mr. Cummins have been issued a designation card by the Musqueam Band?

A: Yes.

Chris: So the Musqueam Band can issue a designation card to anyone?

A: Yes.

Chris: Someone from Newfoundland?

A: Yes.

Chris: Someone from the United States?

A: Yes.

Chris: Someone from New Zealand or Australia?

A: Yes.

Chris: Is there any limit to the number of designations that can be issued by the Musqueam Band?

A: No.

Chris: Is there any limit to the number of vessels that can be designated?

A: No.

Chris: Is there any limit to the size of these vessels?

A: No.

Chris: Are you aware that the all-Canadian commercial fishery is a limited-entry fishery?

A: Yes, one would have to purchase a licence from a licensed fishing vessel to be eligible to participate in the fishery.

Chris: So the government does not issue any new vessel licences for the all-Canadian commercial salmon fishery?

A: No.

Chris: Are you aware of the Mifflin plan?

A: Certain aspects, yes.

Chris: Was one of the main purposes of the Mifflin plan to reduce the number of vessels engaged in the commercial fishery for salmon?

A: Yes, that was one of the aspects of the plan.

But if the Musqueam Band can issue as many licences as they wish, what good was the Mifflin plan? This is included in my documents here.

I want to thank you for coming to Prince Rupert. It's a long way to come, but it's just as far for us to go to Ottawa. If you would pay our airfare, I'm sure you would get a lot of volunteers from Prince Rupert and other places to go to Ottawa.

One last comment regarding the Nisga'a treaty and the aboriginal fishing strategy, and I'm going to quote Dennis Brown, who is a vice-president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union. He stated the position on giving away fish as part of a settlement very clearly:

There is no justice done in doing an injustice to another group or another bunch of people.

That should be remembered. Although I don't agree with Dennis Brown very often, I thought that was a very apropos statement.

I want to thank you for hearing my brief.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, sir.

Mr. Odd Eidsvik: One little thing. I was going to show you people a little bit of our...

[Editor's Note: Inaudible] This is part of the fishing fleet that was tied up at the docks in Prince Rupert.

A voice: When was that?

Mr. Odd Eidsvik: This was about three or four years ago. That's only a very small part of the fishing fleet that was in Prince Rupert at that time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Is there anyone else who would like to speak? Can I see a show of hands of all who would like to speak? We're going to have to keep this to five minutes, if we can, to give everybody an opportunity.

Mr. Bill Beldessi (Regional Board Director, Skeena Queen Charlotte Regional District): I live on Moresby Island.

I'd only make one suggestion. My old pal here, Mayor Penna, didn't give welcome to you all from the Charlottes, Haida Gwaii, so I will.

A voice: He did last night in the bar.

Mr. Bill Beldessi: The only thing is, the next time we would suggest you come on over to the Charlottes. It's just like what we've heard for the last day. Government and government policy has basically required that we replace our resource-based economies on tourism. So when you come, you can all drive up those numbers.

Every time I come to a place like this I think about a meeting. There was a health care bureaucrat who came to the Charlottes. He had a lot of bright ideas, and half an hour into the presentation he didn't seem to be getting anywhere. He was really frustrated and threw his hands up in the air and said “How can you be expected to understand, because we're flying with the eagles and you're waddling like the ducks?”

We all know the problems, and I suspect that along with some of you, these people here know the answers. So listen to them.

• 1900

One of the reasons why I decided to speak today is there's an issue on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Someone today talked about the good fishing and the chum on Cumshewa Head. That's there because the hatchery is there. It's called the Pallant Creek Hatchery. In May of last year we started hearing rumours that maybe this hatchery was going to just disappear.

This is kind of how we've got to know how the federal government operate when they make major decisions like that. The people of the communities, the community leaders, are the last to know.

At that time there were meetings with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans folks in Vancouver, meeting with the top employees of this hatchery. They were talking about how they were going to disassemble this place. They said, we have to do it quickly; we have to do it within two weeks, before those damn politicians find out.

He's not talking about you; he's talking about people like Dave Penna.

The reason they want to pull out—this is a good one, I'm sure the fishermen will really laugh—is that the hatchery was so darn good in kicking out 14 million chum that they didn't think they had to do it any more. Along with the 14 million chum they put out half a million coho.

I'm going to tell you this. On the Queen Charlotte Islands fish habitats aren't a problem. Fish are—or lack of. So I just don't understand how closing down a hatchery addresses that problem.

I went to the regional board with my good friend Mayor Penna, who was telling me to do lots of radical things. We put a motion together and sent a letter to Mr. Anderson. We basically said, look, don't close it down; we want to work with you; we want to get the stakeholders together—and that included people like me and Penna and people from Fisheries, the Haida folks, other fishermen, of whom we don't have many left in the Charlottes—and let's take a look at it. No one is saying, yes, I know the chum maybe don't cut the mustard dollar-wise. Well, let's look at some other options.

Their response to that—only four months later—was that I got a letter from Mr. Anderson. I'm not going to read it all, but he said:

Thank you for your letters...regarding the proposed closure and dismantling of the Pallant Creek Hatchery. I regret the delay in responding.

At the outset, let me assure you that the Pallant Creek Hatchery will not close this year.

I believed Mr. Anderson, and so did the people of my community. However, I did not believe that to Mr. Anderson a year was 1998. You see what I mean. New Year seemed to be the end of the deal, because on Christmas Eve a moving van rolled in and moved out one of the families. I think the other ones were ready to go. So that's why I'm here today.

It was a nice Christmas present, Mr. Anderson. Yes, there is no trust, but now you know why.

Where was the public consultation Mr. Anderson promised in this same letter that I'm not going to read? Nowhere, none. What is the future of the facility? Who knows? But I'll tell you who's affected by this decision: it's the fish stock, it's the displaced workers and their communities, and third, it's the options for future generations. That's what conservation is about.

What to do? Well, I'm not going to follow His Worship Dave Penna's advice and fell trees across the highway so the trucks and moving vans can't get out of there. However, I did think about it and I actually sincerely thought, have we got to this point? Is that how we protect our communities and jobs? Is that how we get a fair shake?

As my closing comments, I will say that I'm only 50 years old and there are some folks in this audience who have a lot more experience than I have. I have never seen resource industries in so much danger and threat of being torn apart as right now. Forestry, fisheries, mining—they're all in the tube. We need help. I believe the people with the answers are here. We're asking you to pay attention to what we've told you today. I'll bet you probably sit in these kinds of meetings 50 times a year. But these are real; we are in trouble. We need your help.

• 1905

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Ms. Joy Thorkelson (Individual Presentation): I'm the northern representative of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. I apologize for not being here during the day. Unfortunately, such is the state of the crisis in the industry that I am unable to spend a day listening to this kind of process. I have to deal with the types of crises that come across my desk, which today ranged from a single mother being evicted because she has fallen between the cracks between employment insurance and welfare—she's a shore worker with 25 years' experience and was not able to make enough this year to be on employment insurance—to dealing with some matters with the Canada-U.S. negotiations and what happened to some of our fishermen last summer. I was also trying to get myself prepared for the north coast advisory board meeting, which is going to be talking about the non-fishery we're going to have for the next two years.

First of all, I'd like to let you know that I am, or I was, the chairperson of the northern stakeholders group, which negotiated with Alaska. We have Dr. Strangway's and Mr. Ruckelshaus' report, which says that the stakeholders will not be doing any further negotiations and the process should be government to government. The stakeholders from the Canadian northern panel wholeheartedly agree with that point of view. We say it is a process that can only take place government to government, because American fishermen will not give fish to Canadian fishermen. It's money out of their pockets into our pockets, and they've got to be crazy to do that.

I do want to say that I hope Canada reacts quickly on this in creating a process. We want to strike while the iron is hot. Northern stakeholders believe that in fact...we don't want to crow about it, but we think we won this round. We said the Alaskans needed to give fish to Canada and that is exactly what was contained in Mr. Ruckelshaus' and Dr. Strangway's report.

I want to let you know that the northern stakeholders, and probably almost everybody on the Pacific salmon commission, on the Canadian side, would like Monsieur Fortier to resume his role as Canada's chief negotiator. We have nothing but the highest regard for him. We believe we need a senior level bureaucrat, both federal and provincial, to portray the government's interest, so there's a direct connection both on Canada's side and on the American side—we believe much more importantly on the American side—in any future negotiating process. We believe Dr. Strangway and Mr. Ruckelshaus should remain keepers of the process so that when the Alaskans fail to produce—as we believe in our cynical stakeholders' hearts they will—there will be some kind of overall American and Canadian watchdog process that will see who is walking away and who isn't, since we're always accused of walking away and in fact don't.

Finally, we hope we are going to have to make fishing arrangements for the next two years. We hope our government does not make status quo fishing arrangements that will actually put the Alaskans at likely 50% of the catch of whatever catch we have on the Skeena; 30% to 60% would be caught in Alaska if we sign status quo agreements. Stakeholders were able to move forward in some areas, and certainly one of the areas was protection of low years. We wish to ensure that the government's position is not a status quo position for the next two years but that they take advantage of some of the gains the stakeholders were able to make.

I'd like to speak very briefly on other issues that I'm sure people here have addressed very eloquently today. First of all, I'd like to say that I do not believe the federal government and the Department of Fisheries are only responsible for fish and the welfare of fish. I also believe they are responsible for fishing communities and their well-being and the socio-economic well-being.

• 1910

I know this is a debatable point because of what went on in the east coast. Many people think that in Newfoundland the cod stocks died off because the government was more interested in the socio-economics of the outport communities than in the fish.

On this coast we believe that the fish of course are of primary importance. If we don't have them, obviously we're not going to have a fishery. But you cannot ignore how a federal government policy affects communities, particularly isolated northern coastal communities. That is one of the assignments that the Department of Fisheries needs to take on. It cannot just walk away from us. We feel that we are being walked away from.

In my last half hour or hour here I've heard talk already about the reallocation of the resource away from the commercial sector. Every time you take some fish away from the commercial sector and give it, say, to the sport sector, all you are doing is making a poorer fisherman. A poorer fisherman does not bring more wealth to his community; he becomes a drag on his community.

You heard Jack Rowbotham say that on the Queen Charlottes there's nothing from this huge sport fishery that's going off. Not one cent of anything goes into his community. Nobody is employed in his community by that reallocation.

People probably have talked today about the allocation of fish to the sport community on the steelhead issue. There is in fact no conservation problem on steelhead. What $14 million and three years of reports on the Skeena River produced is what commercial fishermen said to everybody to begin with, that there was no steelhead conservation problem, that there was an allocation problem on the Skeena.

There is an allocation hearing that's going to produce a process with Samuel Toy that's going to divide fish among the three sectors. Unfortunately, this is being looked at as just a straight division process: how can we mathematically take fish from this sector and give it to that sector? Again I tell you that we need the socio-economics of that. Is there a minimum amount of fish that will be transferred, or are we going to allow a process that takes fish from one person because this person is willing to sell his or her fish and give it to another person over here, thereby taking it from the commercial sector and transferring it to the sport sector?

When that transfer takes place, there's no more fish for the future fisherperson. It's not a temporary reallocation; it's a permanent one. So if I sell my fish to somebody else, I've just sold away to somebody the right of somebody else to become a commercial fisherman behind me. That is what this reallocation process is going to be all about. Is there a minimum level? Are individuals going to be able to make a decision to reallocate away from themselves 100% of the industry and therefore have no more commercial industry, or is there a minimum level that we are going to maintain for employment in my community?

I'd like to talk briefly about the management of the Skeena River fishery. It's of grave concern. We've been having an ongoing battle in the management of the Skeena River fishery because of what we feel is reallocation from the commercial sector to the sport sectors.

This year we are going to have an extremely low run, and in that extremely low run we will need to be able to employ different technologies of selective harvesting in order to keep particularly the gillnet fleet in the industry. If we don't employ selective harvesting because we know we have a coho problem, then the gillnet fleet is going to be at great risk.

Last summer the gillnet fleet made a selective harvest experiment that saved 70% of the coho stocks that they caught during the daytime, which is a very small percentage of the coho stocks that we're running through.

Up to now the Department of Fisheries have said that they don't have the enforcement capability. So for the next two years gillnet fishermen may not be able to fish on the Skeena River because the government has not given enough money to the DFO to ensure there is enough enforcement capability.

We do have a problem on the Skeena River because we have put too many fish up on the spawning grounds—not because we didn't put enough fish up there, but because we put too many. A disease happened; it killed the spawners, the eggs, and the fry, and we didn't release enough smolts in that system, so we're not getting enough fish back. This is a problem of too many fish on the spawning grounds, not a problem of too few fish on the spawning grounds.

• 1915

Because we're having a low run, because we don't have an agreement with the Alaskans, we may be facing a season of 100,000 fish to be caught on the Skeena River. These 100,000 fish will have to be shared between 200-and-some-odd seine boats and 1,100 gillnet vessels. That's nothing.

What we do need to do, though, is allow those vessels, if there are going to be openings, to fish. This government must provide enough money and resources to the Department of Fisheries to make sure they have the enforcement capabilities to allow those gillnets to fish, and that's what I'm asking for today.

The other thing I'd like to briefly discuss, and I'm sure it's been discussed, is Mifflin. What Mifflin has done to the north coast and what Mifflin will do in the future is basically rid us of the north coast residents in the fishing sector, because north coast residents can't compete to raise the same capital south coast residents can.

So in the next two years there will be no fishing, people will go broke, and somebody has to buy the licences. It will be people who reside on the south coast who have access to money who will buy the licences. It will definitely not be native people because native people have nothing to mortgage if they live on reserve. They can't raise money. You can't mortgage a licence. You can't go to a bank and get a loan from a licence. You actually have to have a physical thing you can mortgage to get the $100,000 you need to go to the bank as a gillnetter. If you're a native person living in a village you can't do that, because you don't have anything that is going to be mortgageable, for $100,000 particularly. North coast residents don't have the same access to capital as south coast residents. North coast residents will lose because they don't have the same access to capital, not because the community doesn't need them for employment and not because they're not good fishermen.

The changes to employment insurance have put a burden on rural communities. I would like to challenge you to pass legislation or introduce legislation that says every fish plant that doesn't employ one-third of their workforce shall be fined. If they employ a third of their workforce year round, maybe they can get some kind of an EI premium holiday.

I understand there are millions and billions of dollars sitting in a surplus in the UI fund, and I understand some of the discussion is that we should give that money back to employers as a rebate. This is crazy. We have fish plants here who stand idle for eight months of the year, not because of a lack of product to process but because they are processing outside of Prince Rupert, in Vancouver. They're unloading here; they're processing outside of our communities.

Our shore workers work three months a year, two months a year, six weeks a year, and yet those companies exist with huge capital investments in our communities. Our shore workers and our fishermen are the ones on welfare in the wintertime. They're the ones who make the company productive, because they come back year after year—there are no other jobs—and they're the ones who are penalized. When I started, you could work year round in the industry once you had enough seniority. You can't do that any more.

In the next two years we're going to have a devastating time on the north coast. We need a licence holiday. Fishermen should not be required to pay for their licences for the next two years if they do not fish. We need to increase the employment insurance rates to maximum for people who wish to attend school or work on work projects. We need to have a TAGS-like program so that community programs can develop educational programs, so that people can get educated enough to go into training programs. We need to have training programs so that we can train people in habitat and enhancement works, stock status assessment. Then we need to have enough money to do proper stock status assessment and enhancement.

If you get a chance you should go up to the DFO office and get a copy of a thing called “Expectations”. It will show you how many of our streams have been walked in the last ten years. What is the accurate stock assessment taking place? What is the accurate habitat assessment taking place? In our north coast rivers it's negligible, because, again, the government has starved the department and the people who used to walk those streams don't do that any more.

• 1920

When we talk about caring about our stocks, the government has to put its money where its mouth is and start putting money into habitat assessment and stock status assessment and start paying people to do those things.

In the long term there have to be a number of changes.

We have to deal with Mifflin first. We have to stop the drain of licences away from the north coast to those in the south coast so over the next two years we will retain fishermen in our community.

We need to look at long-term fisheries policy and ensure that it includes a socio-economic part.

We need to relook at Mifflin and see if it is a good long-term policy to reduce the fleet by 50% and reallocate that fish to different sectors.

We need to ensure that there is continual money for enhancement, enforcement, and habitat work.

The last thing is that we need to help struggling companies who want to work on a year-round basis and who want to market products in competition and help them, as other countries do, in finding some methods of marketing and some support for marketing arrangements.

If we look at Norway and other European communities and Chile, we see major government involvement in the marketing of their fish. We see no major government involvement in the marketing of our fish in Canada, and we need some help to be able to take species that we fish now and change them into some types of products other than those we're doing so the values of those species increase, the value of the product increases, so we can pay our fishermen more and our industry will become healthy in the long run.

I'm sorry for having taken so much of your time, but I want to ensure that you understand that if in the next two years the department and the federal government do not take some action, when you come to this coast you won't see this many fishermen in the room because there won't be this many fishermen on the north coast.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Reschke.

Mr. Roman Reschke (Individual Presentation): I've been fishing out of Rupert for the last 33 years and I've fished in Masset for 3 years, so I've been in the fishing industry for the best part of my life.

I can only re-emphasize what some previous speakers already said, that this fishing industry is in serious trouble and we don't get any help from the federal government, the Minister of Fisheries.

I've been writing outspoken letters to every one of them, starting with Tom Siddon and the whole works—John Crosbie, Brian Tobin and everybody else—to no avail.

I came up with constructive suggestions to improve the situation.

Talking about interceptions, for example, I asked why we don't have two patrol boats running the A-B line in the summertime when the salmon are running instead of a sovereignty patrol in the wintertime when nothing is going on. “Oh, we can't go to extreme measures”. That's the answer I get. Well, if this is called an extreme measure, then what kind of guts does our government have? Do we have any sovereignty? This is what I'd like to ask.

I challenge the minister to answer this question I have here. If he wants the respect of the people who elected him to be minister, well, he'd better get off his butt and do something. This is what I have to say.

Not only that, but I'm very disappointed by what happened three years ago when six big American black-coloured vessels went right into the middle of Dixon Entrance escorted by the American coast guard, which is armed like a navy boat with all kinds of guns. They fished; they loaded up their boats. Our country knew that they were in there, but nothing was done. That makes me sick.

I like to be proud of my new country. I wasn't born in Canada, but I've lived here for 44 years. I like to see that we establish our sovereignty.

I told them in my letters that I don't think they'll throw nuclear bombs on us just because we're trying to protect our salmon runs. Therefore, this action is what we need and we have to put some pressure on them.

I would really appreciate it if this committee would do something along these lines.

This is probably most of what I have to say.

• 1925

One more thing I would like to emphasize is this. I had an opportunity in one of the previous advisory board meetings to say something to Mr. Einarson, who is head of DFO here in Rupert. I asked him how long he was going to let the proliferation of commercialized sport fishing lodges go on up north, since we have more than enough already. Oh, there is nothing we can do about it, this is provincial, he told me. I told him this was a plain lie. I said, it's not provincial at all, because you gave them 10,000 pieces of our spring salmon; you cut us off from trolling and they get the benefit from it, and now you're telling me this is provincial. That's just a line of BS. He didn't know what to say. He just got red in the face.

They know my letters. I always put them in the newspaper and I sign them with my full name. I'm not afraid to speak up. I'm glad to be in a country that has freedom of speech. I don't use swear words or foul language in my letters, but I come straight to the point.

For example, when the individual halibut quota was introduced we were told we would be getting our privilege back to retain 10% or 12% of the incidental black cod catch. When you fish halibut you can't help getting black cod, and most of them are half dead by the time you get them because they are in very deep water.

Oh yes, you will get that privilege. Oh sure, no problem. If you accept the individual quota system, fine.

What happened? The very next year, first thing on the fishing grounds, “Attention halibut fleet. This is the Fisheries vessel Tanu calling. Any incidental table fish has to be returned to the water immediately.”

So I wrote a letter to Brian Tobin. I said, what happened to the promise? Has it gone with the wind or what? Instead, I said, we hear all this rhetoric about how there will be boarding parties and all this. I said, the next thing I know, as an afterthought, maybe we should look into hiring some forcibly retired or fired ex-KGB agents. I said, I can just imagine the conversation on channel 78-A: “Hey, Comrade Kowalski, we have this guy here who has two black cod aboard. What do we do? Shoot him right away or torture him first?”

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Roman Reschke: Therefore people appreciate my letters. They tell me, well, Roman, when are you going to write another letter? I say, well, I would appreciate it if you guys would write some too. What's the matter with you? Do you have two left hands or what?

Anyway, thank you very much. I think I made my point.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Is there anyone else?

Mr. Leonard Reece (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, I'm Leonard Reece.

Since this morning I've been hearing how this and that was wrong. The speaker four speakers down the line spoke of firing in Ottawa—which was wrong. Fire them in Rupert, this office here, change the whole works. Then go down to the regional office in Vancouver and change that, because they are prejudiced against us fishermen and workers. We used to hear them on the phone, telling us, oh, you're making too much money. How much I make is up to me, because I have a family to feed.

If you don't recommend to the government to make these changes down there, we're going to be back here again and you guys are going to listen to the same thing.

We blame the Americans. I've been fishing a long time now. They caught all the time, but maybe this year a little more. What happened was self-created here by our fisheries, the local fisheries. They cut us off.

I got caught with my pants down. I was paying bills. I had them all paid and then I had nothing to buy grub with afterward. The fishing was just cut off.

• 1930

I have son who is having problems. He couldn't make a boat payment. These commercial sport fishermen, as they call them, have two jobs. They're working in the mill, and then they go out and charter boats, which is wrong. They shouldn't take a job away from a person who needs one, because there are not enough jobs in this country for that.

Retraining—that's all I hear. This is not the first meeting I've come to. Retraining for what? I can sign my name to get welfare without any retraining. I don't need training for that. I'm a proud person. I've worked all my life. We were all working at one time or another until somebody wanted more in this pocket than in this one. Then they started taking us apart. It's the same. Maybe not; it wasn't the same when the white man took it away from the Indians, and now when they're taking it away from the white man, it's the same.

You there, fellow. When you say the government is giving the Indian fish, you say he should give us money.

An hon. member: That's right, and then you could buy a licence.

Mr. Leonard Reece: They're not giving us fish. It's what they took from us that they're just returning.

Now, you heard the speaker earlier who said we'll share. There are two courts, one in Nova Scotia and one in British Columbia, that said we own the trees. Then there is another court that said we own the land. Now, doesn't that tell everybody that we're the ones who are going to be handing out fish and not the government? They don't own anything. They've squatted on our land for 400 years. But we're not that type of people. We like to share and we like to look after things. The only thing we don't share is a woman. You get your own!

As for the cutbacks on the boats that were sold—you heard that—the big companies didn't get half of theirs cut. It was the poor people who had to sell out, but they kept theirs. Companies should be processors only, not fishermen.

There is a lot of technology that should be got rid of in this fishing industry. Planes, for instance, should be done away with. Other machinery, shallow up nets, seines should be down to 3.5 strips, and gillnets should be back to 50 mesh. That's to help conserve and have a future for the younger ones who will be coming up. Look after it. Thirty 30 years ago we offered to do enhancement on coho. We know the streams in our area. They refused it. They turned us down. We said we'd do it for nothing, but they wouldn't go for it.

Now, they cut us off last summer on July 29; somebody said it was July 31, but it was July 29. No more fishing. And I had to travel 200 miles to get another two days of fishing in. That shouldn't happen. This is 1998, and 1997 last year. Everything was supposed to have been easier.

As one of the speakers before me said, they never tested the streams, they never walked the streams. They never did walk the streams. With all the training they have, they call themselves fishery officers, yet they never checked.

• 1935

There's a guy who was a river guardian. He's the one who did the walking. He had no training, but he did the walking.

It's a very tough situation. We have 200 workers in our little plant at home. Last year, on account of this, they didn't make very much, $2 million: $1 million for the workers and $1 million for the fishermen. If the government can give them that, they will be happy.

If they want to reduce the fleet and turn it over to the sport section, give me $80,000 and I'll throw the nets in my boat and I'll stay at home—$80,000 until I die. It's the same way with the rest. Then you can have it and you can do whatever you want with it.

But when they were conserving fish last summer when they said there was a drastic run of cohos, all along the Skeena River they were throwing lines out. They were allowed two a day out here. And they cut us off. They said, you go and eat hard bread for the rest of the winter. That's no good.

Remember what one speaker said. Do something about it this time when you get back up there. Otherwise we're going to move the Parliament Buildings away from Ottawa and we're going to put them on an island somewhere. You're on Indian land.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Krause.

Mr. Gary Krause (Individual Presentation): I'm an independent salmon seine owner, a troll vessel operator. I pretty well echo the total thoughts here on the Alaskan side of it and the sport fishing side of it. I don't want to repeat over and over again what has been repeated already today. I would like to take an aspect we missed on the Mifflin plan.

We've said we've reduced our fleets by 33%, and maybe in a total number that is true. But if we can just break this coast off into two areas, a south coast and a north coast, we have reduced our fleet far more than that. I think the salmon seine sector was supposed to have been reduced by 37%. On the north coast alone the salmon seine sector has been reduced by 73%; and the same with the gillnetters, and the same with the trollers and all these other people in this industry. These quotes and these figures have to be regionalized to show exactly what the true economic impact on this whole situation is.

I've been in this industry for 20 years. I remember when I was a kid going down to a co-op fish plant, there were probably 40 or 50 seiners down there, never mind B.C. Packers and never mind all these other little companies. I walk around town and I'm one of the last few guys around who actually operate a seine vessel on the north coast.

It's very disheartening, because I see the impact everywhere, from the shipyards to the fabricators to the shore workers, to everybody down the line, all the way to people who operate smaller spin-off businesses. What I would like to do is actually have the north coast communities and the north coast commercial fishermen put on the endangered species list so we do get looked at every once in a while and so people do know there is a problem up here. That's something I truly believe we must do, even though it's something that couldn't possibly be done. By the time we figure that out, we're all going to be extinct.

Anyway, I don't want to echo any more of what everybody else has said. I'm 100% behind them. Thanks for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

If there are no more speakers, at the very end I'm going to give the final word to Mike Scott, your MP for this area. Mike was instrumental in making sure Prince Rupert was on our list of communities to visit. I don't think either John Duncan or I would have got out of there alive unless we agreed to come to Prince Rupert. So you can thank Mike Scott for our being here, and I'm going to let him have the last say.

• 1940

I'm going to repeat what I said this morning just for about 50 seconds. Our mandate is to listen. We are not from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, we are not from the Government of Canada. We are a standing committee of all five political parties in the House of Commons and we report to the House of Commons.

I said to George Baker, “Can we actually make a difference? You've been an MP for 24 years. Am I just up there blowing smoke in the wind, wasting my time? Why am I going?” But this committee is a little bit different. We make every effort to leave the politics in Ottawa. We work very closely as a group, and we have been so far. Hopefully we'll continue to work together to try to deliver a report to the House of Commons. Our goal is to make a unanimous report and we work very hard at doing that. We may not be able to achieve that in all areas, but that's what we work towards. It will be very difficult for the government not to listen to us.

I want to thank you. You have a lot of excellent ideas. We have a lot of written material and it will not go unread; we will look at it. So I do appreciate all your comments and suggestions. I know you guys have been through this process before and sometimes it looks as though it's falling on deaf ears. I can't make you any promises, only that we will work together to deliver a report. The report will be a public report; it will be available to you through your MP. Once it's tabled in the House of Commons, it's a public report. If you want to see what's in there and our recommendations, you can probably get that through your MP's office.

Having said that, if there's the odd MP who just wants a minute, we can do that.

Ms. Leung.

Ms. Sophia Leung (Vancouver Kingsway, Lib.): As the MP for Vancouver Kingsway, I want to thank you all for your very thoughtful presentations. I think some of you have presented very eloquently, some with a lot of feeling mixed with anger. We understand. I just want to say that we share your concern and your pain and your suffering. It's not easy for me as a rookie to sit here and listen to all this. I just want to reassure you.

One of your speakers did say we may act as your conscience. We have a very capable committee, and with an able chair, we will have a report. The report will be presented to Parliament; that's what we will do.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Stoffer would like to comment before we go to Mr. Scott.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Yes, I'd like to echo my colleague Sophia Leung. It's a real treat and an honour and a privilege to be before you today, as public servants in the House of Commons, to listen to your views. I can assure you that one of the most frustrating things for me, having been elected for the first time on June 2 of last year.... I said to myself, why are these people suffering, not only here but in Newfoundland? We saw people's cheque books and their balances, what they had in their accounts. It's scandalous what happens to a town that has 300 students going to a school and in three years they go down to 100 students in that school. People are leaving their homes, just abandoning them.

I used to live in Watson Lake, Yukon, and I used to come down to Smile's restaurant in the 1980s. Prince Rupert was a very good, growing-concern town. Last night I went for a walk by some of the homes and I saw that it's starting to fall apart. It just shows the ruin of this community. I asked myself why it is that for all these years you people have been blowing into the wind and unfortunately not achieving your goals. Why is that? I'm bound and determined to find out. That's why—and the committee knows—I'm the only one publicly forcing the government into a judicial inquiry into the practices and policies of the DFO. I honestly believe—

Witnesses: Hear, hear!

Mr. Peter Stoffer: We've heard so much evidence here again, and it echoes those people of Newfoundland and New Brunswick and all those other areas as well, of what has happened to the people—the governments of the day have forgotten about the people—and what that means.

• 1945

I just wanted to thank you all very much. I have a lot of other questions to ask, but I'll do that privately afterwards.

Again, I thank you for coming out today and for bringing your views to all of us. I echo Mr. Lunn's sentiment that we do leave our politics in Ottawa. It's a real pleasure to work with this committee to come up with solutions to help you in the long run.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Peter.

Now I'll go to Mr. Scott for the last say of the day.

Mr. Mike Scott: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice-Chairman.

Thank you very much for coming out here today.

I sat as a member of this committee for four years. Just after the last election my duties changed. I now sit as an associate member of the committee, but I still have a very strong interest, of course, in what this committee does. I can tell you that I have a fair bit of faith in the non-partisan nature of this committee, particularly knowing some of the members, including the chairman. I've known the chairman now for four years. I know Mr. Baker is not afraid to even point out the deficiencies in his own government from time to time when he feels it's necessary, and I appreciate that about him. I appreciate the fact that there are other members of this committee who have taken that same point of view.

I do hope this hasn't been a waste of time. As your member of Parliament, I have been receiving letters and phone calls, having meetings with many of you over the last four years, and I'm as frustrated as you are over some of the failed policies of DFO and over the fact that there's general agreement.... We may not agree on everything, but I think what you heard today, what the committee heard today, is that there's general agreement, for example, on not cutting back funding for fish hatcheries, which has been done here in British Columbia over the last three years, but in fact putting that funding back into fish hatcheries. I think there's general agreement on that.

I think there's general agreement that when there's a million to two million sockeye over-escapement on the Skeena system, you don't tell the fishermen to tie their boats up at the dock and allow those fish to go up onto the spawning beds and actually destroy the run. You don't do things like that. I think there's general agreement on that.

There seem to be five or six fundamental things on which there's general agreement. It's beyond me why we just can't implement them. I'm hoping this committee is going to make those recommendations.

Jack Rowbotham did phone me on Saturday. He asked what the role of this committee is. I tried to explain it to him. He said in essence it's like the conscience of the minister, and I hope that's the role this committee is going to play. I'm going to be very interested in viewing the committee's report. I'm going to be very much interested in hearing what the committee has to say about the big commercial sport fishing operations on Langara Island. I'm going to be very interested to hear what the committee's going to recommend in terms of the sockeye over-escapement on the Skeena River, on fish hatcheries, and on some of the other issues, such as area licensing and the Mifflin plan and revisiting some of the aspects of the Mifflin plan that are really hurting northern and coastal communities.

With that, I thank the committee for coming here. I really do. It's unfortunate that you don't have more time to spend on the north coast, because it really is a beautiful area of Canada and an especially beautiful area of British Columbia. We wish you success in the rest of the meetings you're going to be holding further down the coast.

We suspect you're going to be hearing a lot of the same kinds of input and concern from other coastal communities. I do thank you for coming here, and I thank all of you for coming here and presenting the committee with your views today. Let's hope something positive comes out of this.

Thank you.

Mr. Arnie Nagy: Mr. Chairman, do you know how long it will be after your tour is finished before the report comes out, so we can make sure we get it as quickly as possible?

The Chairman: We're not certain of the exact timing. After we finish the ten public meetings—we're trying to stretch it into eleven public meetings—we then go back to Ottawa, read every brief that's been given to us, review them, have meetings concerning that, and then perhaps call the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as witnesses, perhaps subpoena some information. Who knows? So the process might run into a couple of months or three months, but you'll hear about it.

Thank you for coming. The meeting is adjourned.