EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, April 30, 1996

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[English]

The Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I call the meeting to order.

We have a major afternoon ahead of us with the number of people who want to speak and others arriving later. Maybe you could identify yourselves and who you represent, we'll take your testimony, and then we'll go to questions.

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Mr. John Radosevic (President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union): I'm not going to say anything myself other than try to coordinate things here. It is a large group, as you've indicated.

We have five main spokespeople for various areas. First is Teresa Ransome, representing the area of Mount Waddington as a councilperson. They call them directors, but it's an elected position representing that area. Greg Wadhams is from the village of Alert Bay, primarily a fishing village. He will get into more detail later under his own presentation. Also here is Ron Fowler, representing the Pacific Trollers Association, and Dennis Brown, first vice-president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union, who has been sitting on the round table and will speak for our organization on these matters to date.

One speaker, David Suzuki, I understand will not be here until a little later. He has flown in today for this committee meeting, so I hope the committee will indulge the lateness. When he arrives we will interrupt and allow him to say his piece and have his position read into the record.

I would like to have the main presenters lay out the positions of their respective areas. There are also other people in the room. Some may wish only to stand up and introduce themselves, the area they're from and what they do. Others may wish to make a very short comment to give you a sense of how diverse and broadly based the concern is about the plan we're here to discuss today.

You have heard that it's a union plan. We're here to say it's far broader than that. The concerns are basically the British Columbia community. Consider that we have Stuart Culbertson from the Government of British Columbia here to make a short presentation, and Hemi Mitic from the Canadian Auto Workers, an affiliate of ours interested from the national perspective in getting this story out across the country, and many others. To give the committee a sense of who is concerned about this, it would be good to allow people to stand up and introduce themselves with a very short comment and then get into questions. If that's all right with the chair, that's what we'll do.

The Chairman: Okay.

Mr. Radosevic: I'll start at the end of the table.

Mr. Dennis Brown (First Vice-President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union): Thank you, Mr. McGuire and committee members, for this opportunity to speak to you on this very, very crucial issue for us on the west coast.

I don't want to dwell excessively on the negative parts of the round-table process, but I think it's worth noting that the round table in essence failed to be a sufficiently representative or responsive process to deal with the changes and challenges that face the industry. There are a lot of missing elements in terms of getting a proper democratic consensus on the development of change.

I don't necessarily say that it's a catastrophe in itself that it failed. Clearly a 100-year-old industry that has had a long history of problems isn't going to get fixed up in six days of meetings, most of which were burnt up in procedural and I dare say a lot of bureaucratic-type "make work". But I think the committee members, and those who argue that what is happening on the west coast is a result of recommendations or advice from the round table and therefore it's all okay, at least need to know that there were structural deficiencies in the process and there need to be some other alternatives eventually developed, which I'll get to a little later.

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It's not a surprise to the members of the committee, obviously, that there is a serious political problem facing all of us in dealing with the west coast fishery. It is obvious from today's presentation and the people in this room that the level of opposition is coming from a broad spectrum.

As John has pointed out, we have native people here, we have gill-netters, seiners, trollers, environmentalists and community representatives. To put it in a nutshell, that's an unprecedented alliance given the history of past disputes between all of those groups.

I don't think anybody here takes a great deal of joy in this crisis or the impasse we're facing. I think everybody wishes we could very quickly solve the problems and move on to a better future. But I want to make it very clear that despite the fact that there is resistance and opposition, almost no one I've talked to believes change can be stopped. No one I've talked believes the status quo is an ongoing option.

I think it's important that we get the message across to this committee and to others here in Ottawa that the opposition is not necessarily a bad thing or a negative thing. This opposition is not based on ill will. I think it's based on informed experience. It's based on a tremendous amount of knowledge and also, I would dare say, a tremendous amount of resources you may draw on as a committee in terms of solutions. I would say it's also driven by a considerable degree of fear and uncertainty that's yet to be addressed by the department. It's driven by the fact that people care intensely about their lifestyle, their jobs, their communities and these fish. There's a long history of people working in this industry, of commitment to the resource, habitat and the like. We are not, I hope, seen any longer, as some in the media and others would portray us, as people who would just fish to the last fish, that type of thing.

There's an opportunity to make some very big changes in the fishery. You as a committee have some enormous forces aligning that have never lined up in such a way as they have now - and we relayed that to the minister this morning - but it's not going to come to fruition with the existing plan proposed by DFO.

What is wrong with the plan? In a nutshell, we would say it is a plan that tempts irreversible change without broad-based support. The round table has been cited, as recently as today, as being the basis for the DFO plan. I don't know if we have it with us, but I would like to circulate, if we could, at some point today a letter signed by the majority of the non-governmental participants to the round table, disassociating themselves from the plan articulated by DFO. I don't know if we can submit that into the record today, but I hope we can. It's valuable information for you to have. There are some who still insist the round table asked for this.

Support is not forthcoming primarily - and it's not the only reason - because of the question of the means by which the department has chosen to reduce the fleet through licence-stacking. In short, this means fishermen are going to be expected to cannibalize one another through the purchase of other licences. That causes a number of problems.

One, it puts those with greater capital resources - i.e., big companies, highliners, multi-licence-holders - in a position of advantage. People who have the resources to draw on, or at least have the equity to borrow money, will be in a favoured position when it comes to purchasing licences.

These licences, incidentally, could run anywhere from $100,000 for a gill-net licence up to $500,000 for a seine licence. We are talking about considerable lump sum capital. That's in contrast to the average fisherman in the industry and the people you see before you here today - small independent operators who don't have that kind of money.

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The second point we would counsel you to be aware of is that the licence-stacking approach, that methodology, will inevitably lead to concentration of licences in fewer hands, which cannot be good either economically or from a management point of view.

Third, licence concentration will devastate coastal communities and local economies. The past experience with limited-entry buy-back programs and other forms of rationalization has been that it's the rural coastal community fishermen who are inevitably the first to sell the licences, because of the desperate economic situation they're in. It tends to be a pattern that urbanized fishermen have more options to rely on and can hang on in the game, as it were, longer. Take the coastal community fishermen out of the local economy and you've taken one of the main generators of primary wealth in those communities.

Fourth, licence concentration in itself will not really solve the problem we all want to solve, which is finding a way to deal with the fleet's efficiency and its ability to catch fish, which currently can be argued to be in excess of what the resource can support. The caption we've always used - we used it with the minister this morning - and it's a phrase out on the west coast that may apply elsewhere, is that 20% of the fishermen catch 80% of the fish. With that kind of situation, reducing the fleet by half doesn't mean your harvest rate drops by half. It means the top-producing 20% are still in the game, and you've probably reduced or eliminated the lower producers. But what you most certainly have done with that kind of an approach is you've definitely doubled the capitalization in the industry.

It's argued by DFO - I don't know how quantifiable this is - that the industry on the west coast is currently capitalized to the tune of $1.2 billion. If you accept that at face value, a 50% buy-out or cannibalization would mean at least $600 million - a staggering sum of money - of new debt in an industry that surely cannot afford it. I argue once again very strongly for you to take note of the fact that with additional debt you have not reduced the ability of nets to be in the water or the harvest rate. Quite clearly you may have done the opposite. You've only induced the fishery to be that much more aggressive, because people have to fish to pay off the debt. We must not confuse reduction in people and vessels in the industry with the more important issue of how to control effort.

So what's our alternative? As we said to the minister this morning, we can't just oppose, we have to propose. We must work cooperatively with everyone, and we look to you for help on this. We must not work against people. We must rethink what we're doing.

Primary to all that is retaining the two fundamental objectives allegedly at the heart of what the DFO is doing, which are to put conservation first and to make the industry more viable. In our view, that's not what is going to occur. We want those two priorities to be out in a way that can be effective.

In order to achieve those goals, the fleet has to be reduced. We don't argue with that. And we don't expect the government to bear all the cost of that fleet reduction.

We need to define in advance what kind of a fleet we want. We need to decide who we want to see in that fleet. We must avoid, as I say, what we have right now, which is a marketplace, laissez-faire approach which is survival of the fittest only. As I said to the minister this morning, the marketplace might produce you, in a narrow way, the economically most efficient fleet, but it won't necessarily deliver you the best political solution. Hypothetically, I suppose five seine boats could take all the catch on the B.C. coast, but politically that's absurd. That clearly is not what we should be using this resource for. It won't work for the government. It won't work for this community, or us, or anybody else.

Our approach needs to be that we base our approach to fleet rationalization on the best supportable employment the resource can safely sustain, not the other way around. We need to create jobs, not destroy them. We need to keep fishermen in coastal communities. We need to create more fish, not just fewer fishermen, although we agree that there need to be fewer fishermen.

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How can we do that? I'll go through a very brief number of points, which others will expand on. They're not limited to these points.

We need to protect habitat. That's got to be the fundamental issue.

We need to have a revitalization of the salmon enhancement program in B.C. We in B.C. are blessed with a species of fish that, unlike northern cod, has proven to respond to enhancement, and relatively quickly, certainly as compared to northern cod, or to trees when you have reforestation. Salmon can return in as little as four years, and we need a partnership to do that with the federal government, the province, industry, communities, and the like.

We need a voluntary buy-back, one that is not connected to stacking and cannibalization of licences, which have tended to inflate the value of licences, having the government competing with fishermen to buy out a limited number of them.

We've talked, without being specific, about a sum of about $200 million. Although that sounds like a lot, that is not even 10% of what was given to the east coast for its problems. Also, we do not expect this to be an outright hand-out. We would envision that sum of money to be part grant, for the government share of the responsibility, and part loan. There are precedents for those kinds of things. I won't belabour that point.

That $200 million, in concert with programs that encourage people to retire voluntarily - tax shelters, exemption from capital gains, etc. - will actually produce a quite significant reduction in the fleet and can be paid for, with consensus with the industry, on a royalty base, catch landing system, whereby people who take out of the resource would pay a certain amount of money back over time.

It's very different for a fisherman to pay $1,000 or $2,000 or whatever amount it is per year into a fund like that than to have to find $100,000 or $200,000 in a lump sum.

We need to find a provision whereby we can avoid the concentration of licences. I think the best one is contained in a couple of reports that have been tabled before this committee in the past. They need to be reiterated. They are the Cruickshank reports of 1982 and 1990, by Mr. Don Cruickshank, who held hearings. He was commissioned in 1982 by the fleet rationalization committee of the federal government to look into these things. He's recommended an owner-operated provision, which would not necessarily take away the current corporate fleet but would make sure that corporations would not be able to capture more licences in the future but that they would remain in the hands of independent owner-operators.

We need to encourage coastal communities - they'll speak for themselves on this - to pick up many of the efforts and former roles that the DFO did prior to the massive budget cuts they've been faced with. These are things such as monitoring stocks, enumerating stocks, protecting habitat, and other on-the-field services that no longer are done because the field staff infrastructure of the DFO has been completely eliminated.

We need to look at things such as how we can produce new products out of the fishery; as I said before, we need to look at the ways in which we fish so we can fish perhaps more slowly and safely; and we need to come up with a program - about which others will speak - in the short term, to get us through this one bad year, which is 1996.

What I've given you, in essence, is an incredibly compressed view of a remarkably complicated, but tremendously exciting, challenge that's before us: an industry that has a great history behind it, enormous amounts of human capital and resources that we can draw on, potential that is hardly yet realized in terms of what we can do with salmon. So I think we need to have this committee, the minister, senior DFO people, and what not back out on the west coast, revitalizing and developing a process that is an alternative to the one we've had. The past round table did not do the job.

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I strongly advise you to consider inviting Mr. Don Cruickshank back here to Ottawa, or if you travel to the west coast, to hold special meetings with this man, because as I say, his reports are already on record here, but he represents probably one of the key missing links in our problem. He has many of the solutions. He doesn't have them all, but he has the trust of the industry. He has put in the years of experience. So I strongly recommend you develop contacts with him.

I would finish off by saying, hopefully not on a negative note, that if we don't do something along the lines of what I have just tried to outline generally and others will probably do a better job in detailing, I'm afraid the process of political deterioration that has already started in those communities, the polarization, the opposition, will go from one I believe is still an opportunity to a disaster. We do not come here bearing a message of resistance, as I said. But I am convinced if we do not stop and take a serious second look at this, rethink it, the consequences are going to be very ominous.

So I appeal to you as a committee for your help. I hope you will take some of our ideas under advisement. There are many other good speakers here who will complete the job. Hopefully we can come up with solutions that get us back on track.

Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Dennis, just a point of clarification. Are you endorsing the full Cruickshank report, or parts of it?

Mr. Brown: I personally am endorsing the Cruickshank report. I think others here are endorsing it as a framework. I personally am absolutely convinced it's a vital part of any solutions you're going to look for.

The Chairman: Ron.

Mr. Ron Fowler (Past President, Pacific Trollers Association): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Can you be a little shorter than Dennis?

Mr. Fowler: I will attempt to be. Dennis didn't leave me a whole lot of room here anyway. He covered it off pretty thoroughly.

I appreciate the opportunity to make a presentation before the standing committee. I think what I'll do is pass along some of the same comments to the standing committee as I passed along to the minister this morning. They're based on the concept of confusion.

We've heard out in the Pacific region that there's a lot of confusion amongst the fishing fleet about what the meaning of this revitalization plan would be. Let me say for the record there's no confusion in the commercial industry in British Columbia about the status of our salmon stocks or about the need to conserve them. There's no confusion out there either about the fact that the status quo is no longer acceptable. We have to reduce the size of our fleet. We can debate the numbers, but we do need fleet reduction.

This plan proposes that, as Dennis has pointed out, the stacking of licenses, the vehicle through which the minister has chosen to reduce the fleet, has the impact of downloading almost the total cost of this program onto the shoulders of commercial fishermen, at a time when they can least afford to participate. So there's no confusion that area licensing and making the area licence a stackable item is totally unacceptable to B.C. fishermen, and there's no confusion about the ramifications that program will have on the industry.

Further, there's no confusion that fishers who have paid off their debts over the years, who have built rainy day funds, who have laid aside moneys for their retirement years or for getting into other ventures, are going to be required to take those moneys and use them to buy licences to do what they've enjoyed doing over the last number of decades at no cost other than the cost of just buying your annual licence to fish.

So we have a severe problem here. The banks aren't going to loan any money against these licences, so the fishermen are going to be as resourceful as they can. They're going to mortgage their houses. They're going to do a lot of other things.

The thing that really makes it difficult for everybody is that there's no guaranteed access to the resource. What you're buying is a pig in a poke. If you buy another licence over here for this area, which you've always been able to fish anyway, and you buy a third one for this area over here, what do you really have? The minister hasn't made any commitment to allocation of the resource amongst the variety of user groups in the region. That's a fundamental point that was brought up at the round table. It's a fundamental point that the Pacific revitalization plan, as announced by the minister, has failed to address.

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There's no confusion about the fact that what this program is going to do is result in another round of overcapitalization, which we have seen before, under the Davis plan, overcapitalization the fishery will not and should not have to incur at this particular point in time. The fish aren't there. The value isn't there in the fishery at this time. I believe in the long term it will be, but at this time it simply can't be supported.

There's no confusion also - and this is a difficult one to get through to the public at large, so I hope I'm successful in getting it through to you - about the issue of capacity. It's said that we have too many fishermen chasing too few fish, that our vessels are too big, too powerful and too plentiful for the Pacific fishery to sustain. Okay. That's fine. So let's talk about capacity reduction.

The way this plan sets about doing that doesn't accomplish the proportionate amount of capacity reduction for the licences retired. In other words, as Dennis made reference to, those individuals that are going to be left in the industry are going to be those who are currently multi-licence-holders, those who are very wealthy individuals, the cream of the fleet. Those are going to be the ones who are left.

That will not bring about capacity reduction. In fact, that will cause a whole other round of lobbying, politicking and all the rest of it from the industry to the minister to provide them with more access to the fish at a time when we have conservation problems. So it doesn't seem as though the whole thing matches up very well.

It's clear to me that B.C. fishers will support a well-funded, longer-term fleet reduction plan without timelines or other Draconian measures that have been designed in this current plan to create a stampede in the fleet for licence acquisition. They support the idea of a buy-back on a longer-term basis, and they're prepared to see a royalty system based on catch, levied against their catches to pay back that fleet reduction plan. We want to be a partner with government on this fleet reduction plan.

The details of this plan are contained in a paper we've developed and is an option to the current plan. I believe we can make that available to the standing committee. It's a counterproposal. We call it "A Better Alternative". It's to help the minister.

As Dennis has said - and I'll say it again, because it's key to the presentation - we need a strong commitment to habitat restoration and preservation. Habitat destruction, as much as anything else, overfishing or any other factor, is to blame for the decline of our valuable salmon resource in B.C., and it needs to be reversed.

I'd like to make an observation. One of the things that was pointed out at a conference that took place at Simon Fraser University recently.... And I have a hard time understanding why this wasn't done. Before you would make an announcement like this you would think they would have done an impact analysis on what the biological, social and economic impacts of this plan would be. That has not been done. I always thought it was customary for people in the program planning and economics branches in the department to take a look and say we're going to go down a whole new road here, what is it going to do to these costal communities? What's it going to do the people in Prince Rupert? What's it going to do the people in the lower mainland? That hasn't been done, and that needs to be done.

I'll let it go at that. We need your help to bring these kinds of changes to this revitalization proposal. We want to return viability, sustainability and profitability - all those kinds of good things we used to have - to our fishery.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you. Greg.

Mr. Greg Wadhams (Fisherman, Namgis Nation): Thank you. I am Greg Wadhams, seine fisherman from area 12. I also am a a Native Brotherhood member, and I represent our town from the Namgis Nation.

There are a lot of issues I want bring up. One of them is the community risk and so on. There is absolutely no provision for protection of our coastal community with the Mifflin report.

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We're not totally against the Mifflin report. We can see some stuff in there that has to be done, such as reducing the fleet, conservation. But all this stuff was brought up at the round table level. It was brought up in the brotherhood proposal. Some of the stuff in the brotherhood proposal we would have liked to see happen, to keep our participation in the industry.

The government and DFO always like to practise and preach that they would like to see more native participation within the industry. With this Mifflin report what little percentage we have left in the industry is going to die. In the past two weeks three boats have been sold off our reserve. Two are on the block, ready to be sold. Because of this report five old wooden company boats our guys use on our reserve probably won't be used. That means fifty jobs already.

We have a goodly number of boats in there. I can see our town, five years down the road, losing about 80% of the fleet in there. That's the only thing we have around us. It's an isolated town. With the water around us, we're not like other nations, where they were given a land base. Our part of the land claims is the water around us. What you are taking away, and have been with all the other resources.... Literally, this is probably the last straw of destroying us.

Aboriginal people up in our coastal communities, such as Alert Bay, Cambell River, even inland, around our home town, Guildford, and Kingcome and Turnour Island and such places, before other plans were developed by government, economically could look after themselves sustainably. The Davis plan totally ruined our communities, our villages around us. You took all the gill-netters away, you took all the little boats away, and the bigger guys bought up the licences to make bigger boats. It's like what's going to happen on the Mifflin plan.

Our percentage was probably well over 50% in the industry at that time. It went down right to 5% or 6% of the fleet. Since that time we have worked ourselves back up, with some help from government, as with the Nisga'as, with the gill-netters. We're around 14% or 18% of the industry. Now with this Mifflin plan we're afraid we're going to go down to maybe 2% or 3% again. This is not really going to help us. This doesn't help us down the road as partners in negotiations.

I agree with one of the previous speakers: coastal communities have to start monitoring fish. They have to start monitoring gear and looking after conservation and habitat within their own local area. I believe that should be left up to the local....

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Finally, it's our understanding that DFO has legal obligations to consult with first nations when developing policies that impact on them, such as what they are doing to the coastal communities. We almost feel like aliens within our own traditional areas, in which we feel we have a hereditary right to make a living, economically as well as socially.

The Mifflin plan really screws everything up.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thanks, Greg.

Teresa.

Ms Teresa Ransome (Regional Director, Mount Waddington Regional District/Coastal Communities): I'm sitting here on behalf of communities of B.C.

The Mifflin plan has to go. No social impact studies have been done. You don't know what you're going to do to a small town.

I live in Sointula, which is very much a fishing community. We have 900 people who live in the town; 500 of them are fishermen. That's 250 jobs when you cut 50% of the fleet. That's going to happen to all the towns along the coast. Do you want us to come to Ottawa to live? Do you have a job for us?

I was asked to speak on behalf of the communities. I probably shouldn't have accepted. I'm not very well-spoken.

It's very hard. Before we came here, our community had a meeting, at which 250 people showed up. They raised $8,000 in a day and a half to send four people from our community here to represent us. They are very upset about this plan. They were not consulted. This minister has not even come to B.C. and talked to us about this plan.

Has a biological, social, and economic impact study been done? If there has been one, then I want to see it. Then you guys know what this is going to do to us. And you're going ahead with it anyway? Shame on you.

Dennis has said that the Cruickshank report is a good basis to start from. The people of the fishing industry respect Don Cruickshank. It would do you well to talk to him. This report has been in existence since 1991; at least that's the copy I have.

I listened to the minister talk on the radio the other day, and he said that there was no alternative plan. That was just before we came to Ottawa. He lied. The Cruickshank report has been out since 1991. He said this was a consensus of the round table. That is not true. How can you base a report on something that isn't true? It's wrong.

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The Chairman: Thank you.

John, how do you want to proceed?

Mr. Radosevic: I will introduce our next and final presenter, Dr. Suzuki.

Dr. David Suzuki (David Suzuki Foundation): Thank you very much for holding a space for me. I assume you weren't just waffling around to wait until I got here.

Mr. Radosevic: We other speakers went twice as long as we should have.

Dr. Suzuki: Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I guess I'm one of those people Louis Tousignant calls "professional muckrakers".

The delegation gathered here represents people whose lives are directly affected by decisions that are coming from far away, here in Ottawa, from politicians and government experts such asMr. Tousignant. There are also others, like me, who see the issue of Pacific salmon in a social, an ecological, and an economic context. I think in coming years you're going to see more and more people who have traditionally been identified as environmentalists will be closely allied with local communities that are profoundly affected by the direct impact of ecological degradation.

The delegation here comes at you from many perspectives: from first nations, from commercial fishers, from environmentalists, community activists, people from labour. There may even be a politician among them. We have many different opinions on the salmon fishery. I know that because I've been beat up by a few of the people here a number of times. But I believe it's that diversity which makes this delegation so important and credible. If we were all environmentalists, or if we were all commercial fishers, then it would be easy to dismiss the group as just another group lobbying for their own vested interests. But we're not.

We are nevertheless, I believe, of one mind. We are committed to protecting the salmon as the highest priority, and to the protection of communities of human beings that depend on them. We believe - and we're united in this - the government's proposed program will not achieve those priorities. We know the fish are in a perilous state. We know change must come. I think the people in this delegation are prepared to pay a price to protect that future. But not by the Mifflin plan.

I'd like to explain to you where I come from in this whole group. I am not a commercial fisher, but fishing is an integral part of my life, my history, and my culture.

My father's father, my grandfather, came to British Columbia early in this century. He was a fisherman and he was a boat-builder. I'm very proud to say Suzuki boats are so famous it's said at least one Suzuki-built boat is still in use today.

My father worked as a fish buyer for B.C. Packers. He was an avid fisherman until the day he died, two years ago.

My earliest memories are of fishing. If any of you have read my autobiography, Metamorphosis, then you'll have seen pictures of my grandfather with fish, my father many times with fish, me and my children with fish. In fact, a book reviewer for The Globe and Mail chastised me for caring more about fish than about my first wife. Well, maybe.... But no....

So I want to emphasize that while I have not been a professional fisher, fish have played a very central role in my life and my family in Canada.

I come here to talk to you first in my most important role, and that is as a father and a grandfather. I want my grandchildren to have opportunities to fish and experience wilderness as near as the kinds of experiences I had when I was a child. But for years now my children, and now my grandchildren, have stopped fishing for salmon, because we were concerned about the fact that they're disappearing.

I'm a biologist, and I fear for the future of wild organisms that are being shoe-horned into agendas being set by politics and economics, not biology.

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As wild creatures with very complex life cycles, salmon followed a plan that evolved over thousands of years. They don't pay attention to human borders or boundaries. But our institutions are inadequate to deal with them as a biological phenomenon. We think salmon are so stupid they don't know they belong to us, so they fall prey to nets that belong to other countries. When they do that we have to set up international commissions to try to figure out not what's right for the salmon, but what's right for those who want to exploit them.

Even when they finally arrive at Canadian shores, the federal government jumps in because of its interest in the commercial fishery through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. And the Department of Indian Affairs has an interest in the aboriginal fishery, and the province has a stake in the sport fishery, so the Ministry of Tourism has to be involved.

Activities coming under other ministries also impinge on the lives of the salmon. What goes on in forestry deeply affects the salmon. What goes on in terms of mining under Energy, Mines and Resources affects the salmon. What goes on in urban development, in science and technology - many areas that are distributed through other portfolios have activities that impinge on the lives of the salmon. What is a biological problem gets fractured into human bureaucratic subdivisions that ensure the fish will never be properly dealt with as a single entity, and therefore properly protected.

I also come to you as the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, where I've been concerned about finding and communicating sustainable solutions to ecological problems. We are now in the third phase of our fisheries project, which was the first major project the foundation embarked on, and we are now supporting a local community on Vancouver Island that is attempting to apply some of the ideas and concepts we brought up in our first two phases of the development.

I'd like to submit to this committee the second report in the series "Fisheries that Work", which is a compilation of examples around the world that indicate there are sustainable fisheries, there are examples we can learn from. There are examples from British Columbia that we have to begin to apply at local grassroots levels. I hope I can submit this and have it recorded.

We believe local communities will be the unit of survival into the future. Communities with a shared stake in the quality of the air, water, soil and biodiversity and communities with the power to protect their futures are our best hope for the planet.

The metaphor of the canary in the coal mine is a powerful and apt one. When we watched what was going on in Newfoundland with the northern cod, those cod were canaries. As we watch what's happening to the Pacific salmon, those fish are canaries. As we watch local communities now that are trembling in fear of the consequences of the next few years, those are canaries.

As a scientist, I am aware of the vastness of our ignorance. The Cal Tech Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, once said that trying to learn about nature through science is like trying to figure out how to play the game of chess but only being allowed to look at two squares at a time. Scientific research is absolutely crucial, and we have far too little of it in this country, but we don't know enough to scientifically manage wild creatures. I say that as a scientist, and I believe any scientist who would argue with me on that is either an ignorant person or is deliberately being duplicitous. We don't know enough to manage populations of wild creatures.

Do we throw our hands up and give up? Of course not. There is a huge repository of knowledge and commitment among those with the greatest stake in the future of the fish. Aboriginal communities have fished sustainably for thousands of years. Non-aboriginal fishers with years and generations of experience have knowledge that can not be duplicated by science.

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Fishing communities have a vested interest in the long-term sustainability of fish, and they have a key ingredient that too many of our government institutions don't have - accountability. Whatever they ultimately decide, they will have to live with the consequences.

Politicians come and go, thanks to a multiplicity of factors, and government experts and bureaucrats seem to be immune from long-term accountability for their decisions. Local communities aren't immune to the consequences of decisions, and I believe they must have an opportunity for their knowledge and advice to be heard and then acted on.

Unless the capacity for catching fish is addressed, reduction in number of boats simply will not affect conservation. The concentration of licences in corporate hands at the expense of small boat owners may maximize profitability and the ease of management, but it sure doesn't maximize jobs or viability of local communities. I'd like to know what the priorities of our government are.

Unless there is substantial input from the aboriginal and non-aboriginal fishing knowledge base, our so-called scientific management plans simply are a sham. I would urge the government to scrap the Mifflin plan. I believe it would gain many brownie points from the general public to see politicians willing to stand up and say they've heard the people and they're willing to change. Begin immediately and give us some time to work on a strategy with the community most profoundly affected and concerned. That will maximize conservation and protection of small boat owners and communities. This plan will not do that.

I would urge you, as the conscience of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to urge the minister to reconsider. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you.

John, do the people behind you want to introduce themselves quickly? We want to go to questions.

Mr. Radosevic: Everybody understands. I'd like to start with Stuart Culbertson and move around the room.

The Chairman: Could they say where they're from?

Mr. Radosevic: I think I know everybody's name and what they do, but I think they should introduce themselves.

Mr. Stuart Culbertson (Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Food, Provincial Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food): I would like to table with the clerk some correspondence between the premier, my minister, David Zirnhelt, and Minister Mifflin on the plan.

Mr. Nick Carr (Individual Presentation): My name is Nick Carr. I'm a fisherman from the west coast. I want to say that I've probably fished longer on the west coast than have most of the people on this earth.

Two years ago to a day, I saw Mr. Cummins, Mr. Bernier and some others. We came here on another issue of licensing. Hopefully this issue will be addressed a lot better than that issue was. That's all I have to say, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Brian Lande (Individual Presentation): I'm Brian Lande. I'm from the Bella Coola Valley. I represented the non-aboriginal people on the round table. I feel I was used by the DFO officials on the round table. They did not do what I and most people who sat at the round table felt they were going to do - as you've seen by the letters presented today. Thank you.

Mr. Mike Emes (Individual Presentation): I'm Mike Emes. I'm a combination gill-net thrower from Vancouver. We're the third generation of fishermen, and my son is the fourth generation. I could fish with one licence on my boat now. If this deal goes through, I would need $500,000 for the licences I need for my small 35-foot boat.

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Mr. Steve Sainas (Individual Presentation): I am Steve Sainas. I sit on the Central Coast Regional District and I'm also a director of the Coastal Communities Network. We have over 120 communities in our membership representing over 500,000 people along the coast. Every single one of them is extremely concerned with what is happening to their livelihood.

Mr. Bill Irving (Mayor of Ucluelet): I'm Bill Irving, the mayor of Ucluelet. I would just like to make one comment, and I think it's a principle that guides this country and must be cherished by all elected officials: we can either victimize by decree or we can protect a fair and open process. We would ask this committee to seriously consider the implications to those fundamental principles that are being applied here in the west coast. Thank you very much.

Mr. Ross Wetzel (Director, T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation): My name is Ross Wetzel and I'm the director of the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and a gill-net panel member. This Mifflin plan does not guarantee us any access to the resource. Not one more fish will reach the gravel. It does not reflect the panel recommendations. It does not reflect the coastwide vote that was taken by the union against the wishes of the DFO and without their help. They could have started with the buy-back and licence fee relief to allow fishers to sit on the beach on a down-cycle year, working habitat restoration. We need to rebuild the resource, not to destroy the resource in the end.

Mr. Dan Edwards (Director, West Coast Sustainability Association): My name is Dan Edwards. I'm a fisherman from Ucluelet, B.C., and I'm also director of the West Coast Sustainability Association, a native and non-native association in the Nuu-chah-nulth area of that region. We have received funding from the David Suzuki foundation; the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; and other organizations to try to find sustainable solutions to our fisheries over the last fifteen months. It has been a desperate search, with Mr. Mifflin's plan on March 29 being basically a bullet in the back of the head.

Our suggestion, which we've worked very hard on, is that there has to be a better consultative process started here. I've talked to Don Cruickshank this afternoon and he's more than willing to help you resource people for the committee that's already formed of various interests. He has also been approached by Dr. Peter Pearse to help out with that. Both of them would be more than willing to help in this procedure, to get a better process and to find proper sustainable solutions to our fisheries on the west coast.

Mr. Frank Cox (Georgia Strait Alliance): I'm Frank Cox. I'm here for the Georgia Strait Alliance and the Wild Salmon Coalition. We represent a number of environment and conservation groups. As David Suzuki said, we come here united with concern about the Mifflin plan, in opposition to it and fearful of its consequences, but also committed to working with people in the fishing industry and in the communities for positive solutions. We hope there has been a commitment to that, and there will be in the next week or so and over the next number of months and years.

Mr. Serge Cartier (Tendermen of British Columbia): I'm Serge Cartier, representing the tendermen of British Columbia. I would like to say that this is going to eliminate most of us, probably 90% of all tendermen across B.C. I'm against that.

Mr. Garth Mirau (Individual Presentation): My name is Garth Mirau and I'm a seine fisherman from Nanaimo. I was part of the seine panel at the round table and am a signatory to the letter that Dennis has tabled. I was suspicious of the process from the start and was very disappointed at the outcome. I have to say that I'm a comparative newcomer to the fishing industry; I've only fished for 25 years. My family has been raised in the fishing industry. All three of my sons are involved in the industry, and under this plan all four of us are going to disappear from that industry.

Mr. Stephen Nyce (Nisga'a Nation): I am Stephen Nyce, from the Nisga'a Nation. I come from the community of Gitwinksihlkw. Like the rest of the speakers here, I too am worried about the Mifflin plan because it does not address the native communities and their concerns.

Ms Shannon Solby (Shore Organizer, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union): I am Shannon Solby. I am shore organizer for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers. I too am from a small fishing community. I was born there. I'm third generation and my son is a fourth generation fisherman. It is not only fishermen; it is also small communities and shore workers. Everyone is affected by this plan - everyone.

Mr. Skip McCarthy (Individual Presentation): I am Skip McCarthy and I'm a consultant working with a number of groups here. I'm a former DFO economist and a former commercial fisher.

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I can say that I am shocked to find how little background study had been done before embarking on such a radical restructuring of the ownership of the fishery. There is no community impact study. There's no environmental impact study. There's no labour adjustment strategy, and the 1994 statistics aren't even out. So from a factual basis it's a remarkably bold policy initiative. When you combine that with one of the most manipulated consultation processes I've ever heard of, I think you wind up with a policy that is truly debased.

I strongly urge you to take advantage of the broad range of interests here. This is a policy development opportunity that rarely occurs for government. You have all principal interests groups at the table together, interested in conservation, in employment, in preservation of communities.

Mr. Don Sananin (Individual Presentation): My name is Don Sananin. I'm a seineboat fisherman. I've been fishing for 29 years on the west coast. If this plan is implemented, 50% of my fellow seineboat crewmen will lose their jobs.

Mr. Hemi Mitic (Assistant to the President, Canadian Auto Workers Union): My name is Hemi Mitic and I fish. I work out of Buzz Hargrove's office for CAW. Our union, along with the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union, is working on an arrangement to merge the two organizations. I'm here to lend whatever assistance I can to our brothers and sisters.

Thank you.

Mr. Rex Davey (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, committee, my name is Rex Davey. I'm from Gibson's.

I've watched Howe Sound disappear. As far as salmon is concerned, there are only a few left. The herring have gone because of extreme degradation. The fisheries department should be ashamed of itself. And with Mifflin's plan it's going to happen to far more areas on this coast.

Thank you.

Ms Rafaela McLean (Individual Presentation): I'm Rafaela McLean, representing Port Hardy.

The coastal towns were not consulted prior to the drafting of this Mifflin plan. I liken the Mifflin plan to this. These are the coastal towns, and the Mifflin plan will slowly erode the cultural as well as the economic part of the community. The community will slowly disappear because there will be nothing for them to live on. Fishing is the most important industry in Port Hardy. The mining has been closed, and next will be the fishing. If the fishing is eroded, we will all go to kingdom come.

Mr. Bruce Burrows (Individual Presentation): My name is Bruce Burrows. I'm a gill-netter from Sointula.

I'd like to make a quick comment about the credibility of DFO. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has perpetrated a disaster on the east coast. They're in the process of perpetrating a disaster on the west coast.

The policies that have caused the loss of salmon stocks on the west coast didn't come from Sointula. Those policies weren't formulated in Alert Bay. No one in Ucluelet had anything to say about those policies. Those policies came from DFO. No one consults coastal communities, and yet it's the coastal communities who are being punished by DFO for the loss of these salmon stocks.

I think Liberal members here have to take a message to Fred Mifflin. Tell Fred Mifflin that he's been captured by his own bureaucrats. He's been hung out to dry by his own bureaucrats. If he's going to survive as the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, he's going to have to separate himself from his bureaucrats and formulate a policy that comes from the wisdom of the people who work in the fishing industry on the west coast.

Thank you.

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Mr. David Hunt (Individual Presentation): My name is David Hunt. I'm the chairman of the Kwakiutl District Council, which is a political amalgamation of ten Kwakiutl-speaking bands from Comox to Port Hardy.

Mr. Dave Siider (Individual Presentation): My name is Dave Siider, from Sointula. I'm a fourth-generation fisherman, probably the last of us in Sointula.

Mr. Bob Carpenter (Individual Presentation): My name is Bob Carpenter, and I'm from Vancouver Island - Nanaimo. I'm representing the tendermen fleet. I'm involved in the commercial fishery in salmon, herring, and halibut. I was a member of the round table. I took my job very seriously. I consulted, met with people, telephoned, took my message to the round table. I've been deceived. It's not the message that we took there.

My father told me to quit fishing 45 years ago. Here I am. Of course his father told him 45 years before that. I'm still here. I'm not here out of self-interest. I'm concerned about the coastal communities, the people, the shore workers, the tendermen, the jobs. I'm one of these multiple licence holders, and you can keep your plan. Deliver that message for me.

I'd also like to pass out a speech I was going to give on behalf of something I talked about. I'd like to pass it out and have it recorded, please.

Thank you.

Mr. Leigh Bonar (Individual Presentation): My name is Leigh Bonar. I own a small marine store in Nanaimo, B.C.

The commercial fishing fleet is the backbone of our business, especially the small boat owners. This year has been a disaster for us so far, because of the announcements. I have talked to other people in the marine industry. They are all in the same situation. They are all talking lay-offs. Please listen to these people. They know what they are talking about.

Thank you.

Mr. Don Mollard (Individual Presentation): Good afternoon. My name is Don Mollard. I'm from Victoria.

I've owned and operated a small troller for fourteen years. In the fourteen years I've had the common goal to secure a place in the fishery and be an active participant in our Canadian society. The Mifflin plan does not welcome people like me or my goals. Today I'm a participant. On May 24 I'll be cast aside by the very people I've given my faith to over the past fourteen years.

Mr. Mike Norum (Individual Presentation): I'm Mike Norum, fourth-generation gill-netter. I'm here because the Mifflin plan leaves no room in the industry for me. I would like to try to get it stopped before I become an ex-gill-netter. That's why I'm here.

Thank you.

Mr. Robert Quannow (Individual Presentation): I'm Robert Quannow. I'm a gill-netter from Surrey, lower mainland. I'm a third-generation fisherman. I love fishing. I'm not as financially established in the industry as my fellow fishermen. When this plan comes through, I'll be the first one gone.

Mr. Richard Nomura (Individual Presentation): My name is Richard Nomura. I'm an independent fisherman from the Steveston-Richmond area. I'm here to address their concerns.

We all want change, but the change we want is to make this industry better. As we read the plan, this plan just doesn't work.

Mr. John Aleksich (Individual Presentation): My name is John Aleksich. I'm a seiner from Sointula.

I used to have pride in being a fisherman. I lost that pride with what you're doing to us on the west coast. There does not seem to be a line of communication. We can work with nature; we can work with the fisheries. We just can't seem to work with Ottawa.

Thank you.

Mr. Modestus Nobels (Individual Presentation): Good afternoon. My name is Modestus Nobels.

I have the esteemed pleasure of representing forty communities out of the north, in the Prince Rupert area. Half of those communities are native-based. I'm still a commercial fisherman. I'm one of the small boat fishermen who are slated for removal under this plan.

Most of the people I represent are in the same boat. We've watched our fleet in the north drift away from us, slowly, piece by piece, as changes to the management of the fishery have come about. Economic stresses have driven people out of the area, either to sell their licences or to move on to other opportunities. This plan, as it stands today, will essentially kill the community in which I live. We are a fishing community. The reality is that we have nothing else. This is what we want.

This is not a job. This is a life. It is a culture, one that is being systematically destroyed, destroyed in some proportion by greed and in others by pure stupidity. It's hard for the vast majority of people who are stressed by this move to understand the rationale used to formulate this plan. Beyond that, I don't know what to say. I speak for a group of people who are so demoralized at this point that they have a hard time even speaking for themselves.

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Thank you.

The Chairman: Thanks very much.

I want to compliment all the presenters for their excellent presentation, first of all.

We'd like to go to questions. We have five people here from your province - two on the government side, I think, and three on the opposition side. Also, we have members here from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and the Gaspé, Quebec, as well as the minister's parliamentary secretary.

I'd like to get in as many questions as possible. We'll start with Mr. Bernier from the Bloc Québécois.

[Translation]

Mr. Bernier (Gaspé): I shall have to speak in French.

[English]

My English is not good, so if you want to understand me....

[Translation]

First of all, I would like to congratulate the witnesses that appeared before the committee. I would also like to congratulate the large group of delegates from the West Coast. I am most impressed by the social movement in that region.

As I come myself from the other end of the country, from Gaspé, at the tip of Quebec, a small peninsula surrounded by water, it is easy for me to understand that fishing is the mainstay of our region.

What you are doing today is particularly moving. Many people have said that it was difficult to be heard in Ottawa and without being unduly political, I must to say that I share your opinion.

I do not understand why there was no meeting between the Minister's Office and the main representatives that are seated in front of me since they seem to represent various groups of the population. Could you explain it to me?

I know that some members come from those regions and I shall share with them some of the time allotted to me. I don't do it usually but I want to prove to you that I do not intend to indulge in any partisanship because I really want to understand what is going on. A member of the Bloc québécois does not usually share his time on the floor with a member of the Reform Party, but it can be done.

I notice that it only took you about two minutes to understand my joke. You see what happens when you have to wait for the translation, my dear John!

Members: Ah, ah!

Mr. Bernier: It can be fun, and it makes it more lively. It always possible to come to an understanding between people of good will. I hope that it will be the fate of the message that you want to convey to Ottawa through the standing committee. We firmly intend to contact Mr. Mifflin and his nasty officials who, apparently, have not conveyed the message.

I asked you whether you have had the opportunity to meet the Minister. I would also like to know if you have a short term plan. I did not have enough time to read the whole document mentioned by the previous witness, but I believe that Mr. Mifflin's decision will probably be effective before the end of the month or at any rate, at the beginning of May. So, have you any concrete propositions to make for the summer?

I would also like to know how you modified the work schedule. I find hard to believe that the Minister will not pay any heed to this coalition, although it is not impossible. At any rate, I would like to know if you have any short term plans.

This is the end of my preamble and I would like to know which one of you is going to answer my questions.

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[English]

Mr. Radosevic: I'd like to get each one of these a chance to make a short answer on that, starting with Dennis.

How do you want to do it?

Mr. Fowler: I'll answer the first part of the question.

The round table process began while Brian Tobin was the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. He made it out to the Pacific region to discuss with members of the round table last spring the intent of the round table process to bring about fleet rationalization in British Columbia. As you well know, Brian Tobin went elsewhere.

The plan was in limbo for a period of time in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It's our impression that it was handled largely by people in the program, planning and economics branch of DFO. I think somebody referred earlier to renegade elements within the department. I wouln't categorize them that way, but I would say they had an agenda that does not parallel that of the broad community in British Columbia. They have chosen a market-driven solution that is clearly abrasive and doesn't achieve the kinds of goals we want to achieve. Enough said on that.

No, we did not have a meeting with Mr. Mifflin from the time he assumed the position of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans until this afternoon. This afternoon we had a brief meeting with him, at which time he told us he was going to Vancouver tomorrow. It's not clear what the purpose of his visit is. Somebody said that he was going out to discuss a catch-and-release program with the recreational fishery.

He did say that he was prepared to meet with some individuals out there. It's not clear to me what's going to happen. He made no firm commitment to put a moratorium on the proposals he has made to date. In other words, licence acquisition and these kinds of things are going on as we speak. The fleet is responding. People are struggling to survive.

It's a kind of social Darwinism that's going on out there right now. The sharks are feeding. We would have liked to have seen a moratorium on this whole thing until some effective changes could be made to the plan. We're hoping that's the case, and we saw what may be a crack today, but it's not clear to me.

As far as the second and the short-term plan, Dennis has it.

Mr. Brown: I think we do have some suggestions for the short term. To build on Ron's point, the first one is that we must stop any further stampeding of people, voluntary or coerced, into the purchase of additional licences. We must get back those people who bought them in good faith subsequent to the announcement of the plan. They must not be penalized for having purchased those other licences, and they must be given an opportunity to be first up in the eventual buy-back so that we don't have that group pitted against the rest of the industry.

The Chairman: How many are sold?

Mr. Brown: It's impossible to quantify at this time. I wouldn't think the number is so great. I'm not referring, however, to those who may have had a number of licences prior to the announcement. That's a completely different problem, a completely different situation.

In terms of the short term, you would be surprised how many fishermen, sensitive to the conservation crisis that Dr. Suzuki and many others have talked about, would be prepared to stop fishing. That was expressed in some of our resolutions when we found out about the expected return of the Fraser River sockeye run this year. For example, all industry groups supported a motion saying no fishery on this year's run because the stock can't stand it.

To get back to my main point, how many people would be willing to sit out the fishery until a better day or until we realized the benefits of a new program? One area where you can help us would be to make it so that there is no penalty for sitting out the fishery, in the sense of the amount charged for an inactive licence for a one-year period, and considerations like that. We should look at a lay-up program that encourages these small fishermen that we have been talking about this afternoon, to sit it out and not end up subject to something that happened to them in the past.

My own father, who wanted to sit out a season, was recently told he'd lose his license unless he paid the $800 licence fee.

That's one thought. Another thing we could do with the money that's already been tendered by the government is to start working with HRD and other government agencies to get people to work in the restoration of habitat, watersheds and the like. Just recently we completed a program out on the west coast. It was sponsored by HRD, for which we are very grateful. I don't know the full numbers, but it employed hundreds of people in community projects in dozens of communities up and down the coast.

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Much of the infrastructure for implementing such a program is there now, but six months or a year from now it may not be. We have working people who have learned a whole new level of skill in terms of organizing other working people in the remote communities, and could get on immediately to the long-term view of rehabilitating and the like. Those are just some, but there are others. I think some really constructive things can be done.

Mr. Radosevic: We have some paperwork that we could hand in on that sort of thing.

Mr. Wadhams: One of the things I would like to see is first nations participation being kept up in our coastal communities. I think that's very important, and I know it's concluded in the package. If we go by the Cruickshank report, some of that's in there.

We either keep it up by government buy-back, to help us if we're going to go with some different plan on area fishing or whatever it is - to help keep our participation there.

Dr. Suzuki: The environmental community, as far as I know, has not been a part of the discussion. Sitting here and listening to the people who have come here and told you their stories, as someone who has been working in the environmental movement for over 30 years, I find it powerful and moving to hear what are really the true canaries of the prospect of environmental collapse.

The future of the fishing communities is going to inform us whether we're going to get off the incredibly destructive path we're on. I feel privileged to be here with you today, to be a part of this group, and while the environmental community hasn't been there in these issues, local communities - especially the fishing community - are going to be a major part of our priorities. We're going to be with you right until the end.

Mr. Radosevic: The communities weren't at the table either, and Dan and Teresa can tell you about that if you wish.

Mr. Irving: I'm a fisherman from a west coast fishing community. I am the director of a non-profit association and I was at the round table representing the community interest. I tried to get regional and elected representatives into that room. I also tried to get environmental movement people into that room, but they were all excluded.

The central region board, which is a native-non-native mandated interim measures board that requested in writing to be included at the September round table, was deliberately excluded, even though it has a mandate to look after and to inform on resource use in the Clayoquot region.

Other groups such the Coastal Communities Network, which represents 500,000 people on the west coast of British Columbia, asked for a seat at that table and were not allowed in there. The regional representative from Port Alberni, who was the only elected representative at the round table, never showed up, so there was a very big hole in that process from the coastal community perspective. She was not allowed to be replaced. It was an appointed position and there were no alternates.

The Chairman: Do you have a follow up?

[Translation]

Mr. Bernier: I will point out to you that I always try to be very brief because I think it is important that the witnesses have their say.

I shall repeat my first question and I will follow it up with a second one, hoping that I can get an answer. I shall then give the opportunity to my other colleagues to ask questions afterwards, I shall intervene again if there is any time left.

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My last question was aimed at finding out if you had a short term plan because I understand that it is the biological issues that are at stake. Everybody seems to agree with the fact that our resources must be protected. I personally don't know anything about fishing in the rivers of that region. In Gaspesia, we fish for cod when it is close to the shores, but I think it is different in your area.

I asked you earlier what short term activity you suggested in summer, because I imagine that this fishery takes place between now and fall. In the short term, what should be done in order to protect the stock?

Two proposals were put forward it. First of all, the people request some kind of moratorium. In other words, one should stop pressuring people to buy or sell licences. Secondly, I was told that many people were ready to suspend all fishing for the time being. I find that a little surprising, but that could probably solve the short term problems.

I am also concerned by the March press release of Mr. Mifflin and also by the fact thatMr. Dennis said that even if you buy a fishing licence, then is no guaranty that the stock will be in the right place.

When I worked in the fishing industry in Gaspesia, I took part in the setting up of an individual quota system, because, like you, we were fed up with having to deal with Ottawa. So, we thought of sharing the resource between the existing players. We thought that it would be a way to prevent over fishing.

Have you explored that possibility? Would it is impractical in your region? I can tell you that it would allow us to keep going. Someone who could not exceed a certain quota, tried to use his licence, to finance the balance of payment on his boat in order to be able to carry on the following years.

So I would like to know whether you have studied an individual quota system. I would also like to point out that in our individual quota system in the Maritimes, we have introduced the concept of a community quota that would allow every body to maintain a certain level of activity.

If you think that it could be a good starting point for the work of your committee, we could let you know what has already been done. I am looking forward to reading the document that has been referred to.

You may have found that it was a rather lengthy speech for someone who claimed to be so brief and to the point.

[English]

The Chairman: Perhaps Mr. Fowler wants to tackle that.

Mr. Fowler: Thank you. That's a big question. There are a lot of questions within questions there. You've opened up a whole can of worms, so it gets interesting from here.

To give you some idea of what we're doing in the short term in terms of the salmon fishery this year, I sit on the chinook work group of the Pacific Salmon Commission. I'm a chinook fishermen. I've made my living fishing chinook off the Queen Charlotte Islands for twenty years, and before that I fished for five to seven years off the west coast of Vancouver Island and other areas.

Chinook are near and dear to my heart. I won't get too emotional about them, but this year there aren't any. We've had an environmental disaster on the west coast of Vancouver Island that we had little control over. We had an El Nino event where a biomass of mackerel moved onto the west coast of Vancouver Island and into the Gulf of Georgia. The predation rate on those fish in the brood year was estimated to be as high as 95%, so we're moving as near as we can to extinction on those stocks.

We've recommended in no uncertain terms to the working group of the salmon commission that we have zero fishing this year on those stocks and the whole suite of stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island. That would be Nitinat, Conuma, Robertson and Somass - the whole suite of stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

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We're talking specifically about wild stocks. I don't want to get too technical here, but there's a significant amount of enhanced stock on Robertson Creek. Robertson Creek is the main driver of fisheries on the north coast of B.C. and in southeast Alaska. It contributes up to 50% of the chinook catch in southeast Alaska. In fact, the southeast Alaskans don't even have any of their own chinook to catch.

I'm digressing. We've recommended that there be zero fishing on those chinook stocks for this year. The commercial fleets said they won't fish chinook along either the north or south coasts. We have to turn that around, and we're prepared to do that again in 1997, because it looks like 1997 also will be a poor brood year, and for the same reasons - an El Nino event and a mac attack.

We have a problem with Fraser River sockeye. When we signed the Pacific Salmon Treaty, we described the Fraser River as the jewel in the crown of the B.C. fishery, and said we'd won this fishery back for Canadians. We had finally succeeded in putting a cap on the Americans, and that meant we could sacrifice further. We could cut back our commercial catches, because sockeye is primarily a commercially harvested fishery. We'll cut back on our fisheries and we'll enhance their management. We won't pour concrete, we just won't catch them. We'll return these fish to the rivers in numbers, because now that we have an agreement with the United States, we know that if we are successful in returning these fish to historic highs, we'll reap a proportionately higher share of the benefits. We did that. We turned them around and we've seen sockeye runs in recent years that are at almost all-time highs.

I won't get into the reasons we've had problems with sockeye in recent years, but this year the return of sockeye is expected to be quite low. It's an off-cycle year anyway. One out of every four years is a poor year, but this year is supposed to be especially poor. We've said we're not prepared to even entertain any commercial fishing until we're assured that we have in excess of three million escapement in the river, and that was higher than the escapement requirements of the Pacific Salmon Commission.

As commercial fishermen we said we don't trust those kinds of scientific.... David Suzuki said the science isn't there, and it's not. We would prefer to err on the side of the fish, and that's the kind of short-term pain we're taking now to turn this thing around. We're prepared to put our livelihoods on the line.

In terms of the IQs, that is a can of worms. A lot of people call IQ fisheries a privatization of the resource. Some people say it's a better way to manage. We have examples of IQ fisheries in British Columbia in black cod, halibut and abalone. It's been contentious. There are probably plans to IQ other fisheries, but right now we have such an array of problems with getting the salmon stocks back in shape that it's putting the cart before the horse to even begin discussing IQs for salmon. Right now the focus has to be on rebuilding the stocks, creating proper sharing arrangements, and proper management regimes for this thing.

Telling the fleet that they have to go out and acquire $200,000 worth of licences, which is a manager's dream but not a fisher's dream, isn't the way to go about it.

The Chairman: Did you have something to say, Teresa?

Ms Ransome: I'd like to say that salmon is a cyclical resource. Some years the salmon comes back really well, and other years it doesn't, so in my opinion a quota system would not work. I don't think that's something we should.... If you read the Cruickshank report you'll understand that.

The Chairman: Mr. Cummins.

Mr. Cummins (Delta): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's a bit of humour here today, but I don't know whether you caught Modestus's T-shirt - "Too many bureaucrats chasing too few fishermen". Did you catch that? I thought that was kind of cute.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Cummins: It's into the record now. There you go.

I'd like to go to the back of the room now. Some of these people have come a long way and made very brief presentations, but some people there have things to say that might put this on a human scale, because it's their story. But before I do that, Ross Wetzel made four points that I think were quite good.

.1715

Ross, one issue you mentioned was the vote. Would you care to comment on that and let the committee know what that vote was all about?

The Chairman: Introduce yourself again.

Mr. Wetzel: My name is Ross Wetzel. I was a gill-net panel member and I am a director of the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. At the end of the round table process the union, being a democratic organization, insisted on putting the round table's recommendations to a coast-wide vote. They asked the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to help them facilitate that so that all fishers would have an opportunity to accept or reject the recommendations. In their wisdom they refused to help, so we went out and set up community meetings and put up booths in trade shows and what not over a two- or three-week period, and got as many fishers as we could to vote on the stacking of licences versus the buy-back. That vote was 91% against stacking of licences and supporting an industry-funded and managed buy-back.

Mr. Cummins: Thanks, Ross.

Mike Norum is a young man from my constituency, probably a fourth-generation fisherman. Mike, would you mind telling the committee how this plan will affect you as an individual?

Mr. Norum: Basically, it forces me out of the industry because there is no way to survive in the industry with one licence. I know that because fish come in cycles, and you have down cycles in certain areas. I'm a gill-netter from Delta, by the way.

As I was saying, you can't make it on one area because there are down cycles in the various areas. Up until this point we've been allowed to roam the coast. If it's a poor year on the south coast we'll go north and hopefully do well there, and you still come south and have a little bit. You know you can make a season out of it because you have the whole coast to try to make your season.

In order to do the same thing now, to try to catch enough fish to pay the bills and pay off the boat - we all have mortgages - I have to buy two more licences, because there are three areas and already talk of a fourth area. In order to do that I'm looking at $60,000 per licence to fish that area one year out of a four-year cycle. Each licence is another $12,000 expense at the beginning of the season - if you can get financing, because banks won't lend money for licences.

The only other option is to go a fish company and try to get either the licence or the funding for the licence from the fish company, but that ties your into the company for guaranteed production at probably a lower price. You don't have the option of going to different companies to work out deals to get a little more for your fish.

At the same time, the companies might not back me, because they're going to have other people coming in, multiple licence holders that have halibut and herring quotas. They'll be coming in and the company will tell them that if they guarantee them their halibut or herring production, the company will give them another area to fish or back them for another licence.

.1720

I don't have any of those things, so it leaves me out in the cold. I don't have that option to go with. The way it looks right now, if this plan goes through, I'm out of the industry. Basically, that's all there is to it.

Thank you.

Mr. Cummins: Mr. Chairman, Greg would like a quick shot at that.

Mr. Wadhams: I wasn't quite finished when I was talking earlier. As you all know, you cannot get a mortgage on anything if you live on a reserve. Even if you own a fishing boat, you cannot get a mortgage on it right now. As the previous speaker said, the banks won't help fishermen at all.

So natives in the coastal communities are in bigger trouble. Everybody's in trouble, but I think we're in more trouble in terms of getting loans to participate in the game. We're virtually out of the game if we don't change this report.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Ms Ransome: I'd like to point out that banks have never lent money on a licence. They give you a loan on your boat, but you pay for your licence. In the case of stacking, somebody is going to sell their licence, but nobody wants to buy the boat too.

How will people get money to buy a licence, to stack on their boat, if this goes through? How many boats are going to be derelict out there? How many people will go broke just paying wharfage on a 40- or 50-foot boat that is no longer a commercial boat because the licence is gone? They pay phenomenal wharfage fees. I just want to point that out. The licences have never been....

The Chairman: On the east coast the licence is what has the value. Sometimes a fisherman will buy another licence and leave the boat in the guy's yard. All they want is the licence. Obviously it's different where you come from.

Ms Ransome: Yes, you don't get money for a licence from a bank.

Mr. Edwards: One of the suggestions we put forward at the round table - it was left out of the final policy paper - was the establishment of a federal-provincial banking arrangement to help fishermen, coupled with some kind of owner-operater provision. The idea is for some kind of framework where young fishermen and people can get into the industry. At the present, that can't happen. Those kinds of things are done in Alaska and other parts of the world. It's part of a long-term solution.

The Chairman: One more and then we'll go to Anna.

Mr. Cummins: I have about three or four more I'd like to do.

Leigh Bonar, you own a marine store in Nanaimo. Maybe you'd like to relate some of the difficulties that people such as yourself are going to feel. You might want to speak on behalf of people in some of the more remote communities. It's these store keepers who are going to suffer.

Mr. Bonar: That's right. We ship stuff to small communities up and down the coast. We also deal with the small boat operators, but we don't deal with the big companies at all. They buy directly from somewhere else, so it's going to hurt a lot of the little people. Right now I'm having problems paying my bills. I lost $50,000 in the first three months of this year because the fishermen aren't buying. It's a chain reaction that goes all the way down the line. It hurts the people making the rope, the nets, the blocks, anchors - everything, you name it.

Mr. Cummins: And you still have to pay rent.

Mr. Bonar: I still have to pay rent, still have to pay my bills.

.1725

What's wrong is that we buy our whole inventory in the fall of every year and have to buy a lot to get the best price, to compete with the other stores and companies. Right now it's really hurting us.

The Chairman: I'll come back to you, John, but we'll go for a second round.

Mrs. Terrana.

Mrs. Terrana (Vancouver East): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have met with many of these people in Vancouver and in Ottawa, and I would like to welcome all here.

I have large number of fishers in my riding. They approached me from the very start, when I was campaigning and knocking on doors. They were on their doorsteps asking me what I was going to do for them and for their industry. I think we have come to the point at which this is happening.

I would first like to thank you all for coming. The reason is that you are so much better in presenting the problem, and you're really helping someone like me to explain why British Columbia is not what we all think it is.

There is a perception that in British Columbia there are no problems, we're all rich, everybody has employment, and it's not true. And it's not true especially in these coastal areas where many of these people come from, because that's all they have. All they have is fishing in many cases, and this plan is going to be very, very difficult for British Columbia and very, very difficult especially for those people with businesses. They are the first people we have to think of.

I was very moved by some of the presentations. I understand what they are saying. I heard them before. I'm also very concerned about the conservation of the fish in our area.

That's all I wanted to say. I wanted to thank you for coming and for the better alternative revitalization plan you have presented. Thank you for coming and giving us a hand.

I would also like to have more information on the program you are talking about, the program that I think Dennis mentioned, which you did with HRD. We are working with various ministers to see what can be done to help.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Mr. McWhinney.

Mr. McWhinney (Vancouver Quadra): I'd like to thank the witnesses for coming. I have met with a number of you already. I have read the Cruickshank report, and it's been an educational experience. It's a different point of view and worth its weight in gold.

I have two quick questions. One, I'm puzzled by the round table. As you described it, it was Brian Tobin's idea. He perhaps more than anybody in Ottawa I've met had a keen feeling for producing consensus, getting to know opinion. Is it your impression that it worked until he left and then collapsed?

Mr. Radosevic: At the beginning of the process I was extremely enthusiastic about the idea of taking a holistic approach to all the problems in the industry, and not just zeroing in on a few key things. However, and I won't reiterate what's already been said, I soon became disillusioned. I must say that the pattern was already emerging before Mr. Tobin actually went on to his new career.

What started off with a lot of promise turned out very soon to be a process, I think, of very subtle and not-so-subtle manipulation and control over the agenda. When we first started out we were going to talk about all kinds of good things. Even in the final report, there's sort of residual evidence that those good things were at least referred to, but it's quite remarkable that the final product, which was actually recommended by DFO, bore an uncanny resemblance to years and years of repeated attempts to put certain things forward in the form in documents such as Vision 2000 and other papers we'd seen.

I think what started off as being a semi-process, notwithstanding the absence of coastal communities - I don't want to leave the impression that it was a good process as far as representatives were concerned - what looked like an attempt to deal with the whole problem ended up devolving into one that resembled the bureaucratic agenda of DFO.

.1730

Mr. McWhinney: Another plan is being floated purely for scientific review by John Fraser, but I think the significant difference is that it speaks of a group of about fifteen. If we were to try again - and this obviously doesn't solve the present problems - do you think it might be possible to work at a round table with a smaller number of people, with more communication?

Mr. Brown: I think other people wanted to speak to your first question.

Mr. Edwards: Mr. McWhinney, I'd like to speak to that.

I was at the first planning session for this round table. I've lived in the Clayoquot Sound area for the last ten years, or even longer than that. We've had a lot of trouble with land-use processes that have been flawed by having exclusionary principles built into them at the beginning. When I tried to help plan that process in March of last year, I stated very explicitly to Mr. Tousignant that you have to include those elements of society that are stakeholders, which included the environmental community and the coastal communities.

We suggested, in fact as a troll panel, that there be regional representatives from all the coastal regions because of the very distinct, different problems of the different areas in British Columbia. They each needed an accountable representative at the table, which is part of what a round table is.

The other major flaw was that the most powerful person in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in the Pacific region ran that table. As an association we asked Mr. Tousignant to please remove himself because he could not run it impartially, but he would not leave.

Those were the fundamental flaws in the process.

What we've asked for and what we've worked very hard for as an association is a look at a more transparent, inclusive process to get at the root of what's wrong with our fisheries and to find those proper solutions that would probably have been put forward if we had had an inclusive transparent process at the very beginning.

Mr. McWhinney: The Fraser plan envisages an arm's-length commission or committee, which presumably would solely consist of stakeholders, scientists or others, but not government people. Maybe that's the thing.

I have noted, by the way, a number of the detailed suggestions that Dennis Brown and others have made to me. In one you introduced, Dennis, you spoke of the no-penalty provision. You had a paper. I'd like to get it written in. The two areas you suggested seem eminently sensible and achievable without any difficulty. Obviously, I can't commit for the minister, but I think we could have them written into the record. That's to say, no penalty for sitting out the present year, when they're in effect down to $1 million, and, as I understood it, no penalty or exorbitant increase in licence fee if one reapplies. I myself can't see that there would be any problem with that. So if we could have it written, I think it would be helpful.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. McWhinney.

Round two, Mr. Scott.

Mr. Scott (Skeena): Mr. Carpenter, I believe when you were making your brief statement to the committee you said you were part of the round table process and as a member of that process you felt as though you had been deceived. I wonder whether you could elaborate for the committee on how you felt you had been deceived.

Mr. Carpenter: I felt I had been deceived because the consultation process of the round table, on which, as I said, we worked very hard - a lot of volunteer work, a lot of phone calls, a lot of meetings went into the round table recommendations, which are documented. To have DFO and the Mifflin plan come out and say that the whole process and the structure of the Mifflin plan were derived from the round table, that they were acting on the directions of the round table, and that it was what we recommended and what we're getting.... I'm saying here that is not what we're getting and that is not what we're recommending. That's what we did not recommend. I say I felt deceived.

I represented people and the people told me what they wanted. I took my concerns to that round table. I felt that the whole process was manipulated. There were too many economists running out of the room, running to other groups, coming back saying this group has done this, this group has done that. That wasn't a process.

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I stake my reputation, if the good Lord strike me dead here right now, on saying I felt deceived and I will feel deceived until I see something done about it.

Mr. Scott: Mr. Carpenter, would it then be your testimony before the committee that you feel that the deliberations of the round table and what was discussed there are not properly reflected in the Mifflin plan at this point?

Mr. Carpenter: Absolutely.

Mr. Radosevic: We all feel that way. It's unanimous.

Mr. Scott: You basically agreed on principles, and you discussed principles in those round table meetings. You had proposals, and you talked about ideas as to how the fishery could be restructured. You believed in good faith when you were participating in it that you were working towards one objective. Then when you saw the plan revealed, you felt that another set of principles and another objective entirely were on the table. Is that basically what you're saying?

Mr. Carpenter: Yes, that is basically what I'm saying. Bear in mind we all realize there's a problem. Conservation is a number one issue. That is what I'm saying, yes.

Mr. Scott: Thank you very much, Mr. Carpenter.

Mr. Radosevic: On behalf of Leigh Bonar, who is a businessman in Nanaimo, I'd like to submit this directory for the record. It's a directory of all the businesses that depend on the fishing industry for their livelihoods. We talked about spin-off effects and the negative effects on people other than fishing industry people. This would give you an idea of the kind of thing we're talking about. I don't know how many there are, but there are pages of businesses that depend on our industry and would be negatively affected by this plan.

Mr. Scott: Many people who were here, Mr. Chairman, represented either themselves or various sectors of communities. I know we don't have time for all of them, but I'd like to call on one more right now if I may.

Mr. Nomura, when you were making your presentation you talked about the effects this was going to have on you and your fishery, your business. I wonder whether you could give the committee some idea of how you see the plan as it sits right now affecting you and your ability to make a living in the industry.

Mr. Nomura: I am probably in the same situation as Mike is. I have one licence, and it's pretty clear what the future looks like for me, but there are other people in this industry who have tried to work with this plan. I've talked to people who had the money and speculated that a proposal like this might come about. Many of those people are also having a problem with it. They're seeing that there are no guaranteed allocations to areas. The coast has been divided into three areas, and there's no guarantee of allocations in any of the areas.

These fishermen are now feeling that even if they had three licences, it doesn't mean they would make three times more than the single licence holder would. When you look at the situation, you have three licences stacked on one boat. They will always be going from one area to another area, expecting to catch more in that area.

Regardless of whatever area they leave, they'll be leaving fish they're entitled to because they have a licence and a permit for that area. So they own three areas and buy three licences. I would say the market price is now about $75,000 per licence. That's a ballpark figure, and it's always changing.

They're feeling now that the fish they're leaving behind, which was their fish, is going to be taken by perhaps a single licence holder. They're saying that they're working at one-third efficiency, because they're fishing only one area at a time.

I personally see maybe a bit of a different picture happening here. A lot of people in this industry aren't young any more. They're middle-aged or even more so. I would expect that most of these people would be more or less comfortable in their lifestyles and maybe don't need a lot of money to make a good living. I'm afraid that this scheme, as it sits now, might develop into a fishery where someone in their golden years says I can get by with making $20,000 in an area, and if I don't make it, I guess I'll have to cut back on certain things.

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What will happen now is that people who tried to maximize their income are now going to be subsidizing part-time fishermen. As they see it, the more licences they own, the more the subsidy will go to a single licence holder. Even those people who have money and speculated on it are rethinking the plan. Some of the ones I talked to said they might even submit their extra licence to the buy-back, because they don't want the headache. There are no guarantees of allocation. It's all one of promise.

If this Mifflin plan were scrapped today, I know for a fact that those multiple licence holders would sell their second or third licence in a flash. They'd be happy to get rid of it. The government wouldn't have to pay an inflated price for these licences. With the Mifflin plan as it is today, the price of licences is climbing. I've talked to many people and asked what they are going to ask for their licence. Some of them have said $3,000 a foot, but before the plan the market price was around $1,300 a foot. If this plan were cancelled the guy with two licences wouldn't need two licences any more, because he's going to fish the whole coast. He'd be happy to get rid of it for the price he paid - probably around $1,300 or $1,400 a foot. That would eliminate the excess licences that people speculated on and are now afraid of.

If you threw a tax incentive into that plan, a retiring person would probably look to the buy-back rather than the open market to sell his licences, and a tax incentive would be a non-inflationary tool. A lot of the people I spoke to have tried to work with this plan, and as I said, some people thought they could seize the moment and go in and buy this industry when it is hurting, and they're having problems with it.

It boils down to the fact that the plan doesn't even work from an economic point of view. It's an unworkable plan. That's the way I see it.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Culbert (Carleton - Charlotte): Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming here and making your concerns known to us, because I think it's important that we are aware of those concerns as well.

Having said that, I'd like to go back to some of the opening comments, especially one from Dennis Brown. He said something like "the best supportable employment the industry can sustain", that they were looking for an alternative program. Before that he indicated that he believed in the overcapacity of the fishery, and that there had to be some methodology to reduce that capacity, and that he believed in conservation.

The next question was how to reach that. I guess what I'm looking at in your report - in the short term you're looking at something along the line of closing the industry for a season. Is that generally correct? What comes after that for the long term?

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I'm concerned about the statement that there's overcapacity in the industry. The stocks are declining. Coming from the Bay of Fundy area of New Brunswick.... The fishery is not dead in Atlantic Canada. I should straighten that out right now. Certain people take a quick trip down to Atlantic Canada and suddenly they become experts and the fishery is dead in Atlantic Canada. We are a very diversified fishery, and we've become diversified. For conservation reasons we have shortened our seasons and gone to other species.

What are your longer-term plans for the conservation aspect?

Mr. Brown: You've asked a very complex question, but Mr. Fowler alluded to the fact that the industry goes in cycles. As Mr. Fowler and others indicated, 1996 is a low-cycle year. I'm sure you'll want to know that 1997, for some runs of salmon, should be appreciably better. In 1993 on the Fraser River, which is the main source of salmon harvested in the commercial sector on the west coast - along with the Nass and Skeena Rivers - we had a record escapement of sockeye. I think we put over five million sockeye spawners on the ground. Ironically, that year we had the opposite problem. We were told there were too many fish and the companies even refused to buy them from our members. A few short years later the pendulum had gone full swing.

I say to point out that if all things go well, next year should be somewhat better. However, just because the Fraser River is going to come back stronger next year, I won't say we can all go back to sleep and everything will be fine. The hundreds of smaller streams that make up the totality that we're all vitally concerned about from the perspective of biodiversity continue to be under devastating onslaught.

So our long-term vision has to be to survive the low-cycle year and try to get to another time when things aren't quite as bad, but we need to blend that with the twofold vision that I presented earlier. The old saw that there are too many fishermen catching too few fish has to be analysed in a balanced way.

I submit to you that currently DFO answers that question by going after the fishermen and then turning around and saying to the public, aren't you pleased with what we've done? The answer must be the other way as well - to create more fish.

Mr. Fowler and others have indicated that it's not more fish through artificial propagation like hatcheries. When we say let's create more fish, we mean create it, as Mr. Fowler touched on, by putting more fish on the spawning grounds through risk-averse management and other kinds of programs like watershed renewal programs, habitat protection and spawning channels. Spawning channels are quite different from hatcheries, and they provide optimum spawning conditions for wild stocks. If we can blend those two things, over time we can do what we want to do.

Some have counselled the government of the day, don't blink now, this is your last chance; if they survive one more year, they'll all want to stay in again. I've heard that being said. That's pretty callous advice, and I think those who have said they're taking advantage of this low cycle have captured some of the political dynamic that's here.

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We have to take these things on multiple levels, but it's worth noting that the potential for restoring salmon in B.C. is enormous. We can and will do it, and I think those are the long-term views. I am suggesting to you voluntary reduction of the fleet, in tandem with developing stocks again.

I don't know whether it's being heard strongly enough, but even today the minister touched on it when he referred to the fact that people are asking for compensation. We're not asking for compensation. We're saying, let us pay you a royalty for a good portion of the initial investment cost and you can keep that royalty over time for the industry - see how we're doing, how the stocks are doing, and how the fleets match up, in some form or another - for ongoing development of the stocks. I think that's quite a different message from the message that we're just here for a hand-out.

Mr. Edwards: I'd like to say something along those lines. For twenty years I've been involved with the salmon hassle on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I am a chairman of a non-profit hatchery system. We do very small enhancement projects.

We do try to stop runs that have been impacted by habitat degradation from becoming extinct. I was told by the head of one of the branches in the department of SEP that on May 24, when our licences will finally be cut off because we haven't bought into this plan, there's going to be an announcement of what hatcheries are going to be cut from the $3 million that has to be cut from the budget of SEP. We've been told that probably 17 out of 28 will be the smaller community economic development hatcheries on the coast, those that are supported by the small coastal communities. They really help look after a lot of the smaller streams that are in very bad shape.

That is absolutely counter to what we asked for at the round table, and it's a very callous situation when you say that first we'll get rid of the fishermen and second we'll get rid of these enhancement programs. We're saying the long-term solution is in fact to bring the small fishermen into the community, get them involved with those projects we've been doing for years on the coast, and don't cut them off.

The Chairman: Anna.

Mrs. Terrana: When the union made a presentation, they discussed a project that has to do with fish processing. That's another problem they're having in the industry. It's a compounded problem.

I would like someone to expand on this idea. I know there is some interest on the part of CIDA, and it could be discussed a little further.

Mr. Radosevic: We have people here who represent that sector. Obviously, if there's going to be dislocation in the fishing part of it - if there's no fish, fishing communities will be hurt - more than just licence holders are going to be hurt.

Whole sections of the industry, such as shore workers, were completely left out of the round table. To a limited extent we had very narrow representation - one or two deck-hands for the same boat - even though some 1,500 to 2,000 jobs stand to be lost.

We were looking for transition services or other things that would help people who were displaced, who have no control over the fact that licences could be eaten up.

I think everybody is looking at this. It doesn't matter if it's the Mifflin plan or our plan, there's going to be a fleet reduction. There's going to be dislocation in the communities. What we've said all along is that there has to be some way for people to make a transition.

We haven't wanted to make this the main part of our lobby, only because we feel that the priority message has to be that we're here to save our jobs. We're here to save our industry. We're here to deliver a conservation message. We didn't want that to get confused. Some people, I believe, have deliberately tried to confuse it with a grab for money. We need to have some proper transition services, but that is secondary.

There are two or three deck-hands - there's Garth Mirau, there's Don Sananin. The people who can talk about shore workers are Rafaela and Shannon Solby. If you want to get a perspective from the other half of the industry that was almost totally left out of the round table discussions, you could call on them. They could give you a much better insight into those two sections. And there are two tendermen here, who are the people who pack the fish in.

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Incidentally, Bob Carpenter, whose boat is not eligible for a buy-back and who stands to lose his livelihood and his vessel - he is not eligible because he is not a fishing vessel, he's a tenderman - has no part to play in this, even though he was at the round table. Nothing in the Mifflin plan addesses his -

The Chairman: [Inaudible - Editor].

Mr. Radosevic: Tendermen? As the name might suggest, they are not made up of a lot of tender people. These guys might even be the opposite. Tender boats come from the old navy term for boats that look after or tend to the fish boats. They deliver supplies or they take the fish off and deliver them to town. So it's really transport vessels that we're talking about here. Packers is the other name for them.

If you have any questions, perhaps you could direct them to some of those people who are here.

The Chairman: John, you and I agreed that we will call it off in another 15 minutes. If everybody else agrees, we can do that.

How do you want to proceed, Anna?

Mrs. Terrana: It should not be a long presentation. It's another big concern. There are lots of people who are losing jobs. Some have already lost jobs.

The Chairman: Come to the table then.

Mr. Sananin: My name is Don Sananin. I'm an engineer on a seine boat. I've been fishing for 29 years.

In the case I'm involved in, I asked a vessel owner about two weeks ago if we were going to go fishing. They're not considering buying another licence because the cost will be $500,000. They are a south coast fishing boat. We will pick the south coast because once you pick it you're glued to it for five years - or permanently, because they might change it.

We won't be fishing the south coast because there are no stocks, so I am going to be home. Basically, I've lost my job. Of my fellow crew members, 50% will lose their jobs because of this double-licensing scheme.

The Chairman: Does anyone want to respond to that?

Ms Shannon Solby (Individual Presentation): My name is Shannon Solby. I'm a shore organizer for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union.

I was in to talk to Anna, and I'm not sure if Anna is talking about the pink salmon proposal. I believe the United States has a surplus of pink salmon and they're processing to keep the fish plant workers working. They're doing this pink salmon and they're sending it to institutions.

I believe Mr. McWhinney also has a copy of the pink salmon proposal. I have extra copies that I can hand around. Basically, it's to keep the fish plants going and the shore workers employed, because there will be very few shore workers working this year.

Mr. McWhinney: Could you briefly mention it so that we can get it noted in the record - Jim Sinclair's plan for the processing plant.

Ms Solby: Pardon me?

Mr. McWhinney: Please briefly mention the plan Mr. Sinclair developed so we can get it noted on the record.

Ms Solby: Yes, it was developed by Jim Sinclair, who is the second vice-president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. I do have extra copies, so I will hand them around.

The point is that our shore workers won't be working this summer, and that could be more than 5,000 people. Thank you.

Mr. Carpenter: I passed out a short form to everyone. I'll be quick here. On the tenderman function in the industry, we upgraded the tenderman fleet many years ago. I presented a brief to the Pearse report in 1982 on behalf of the tendermen. With the help of shipyard subsidies many years ago to encourage building these vessels to transport fish from the grounds to the plants, for economic viability, for quality, for quantity, and the main thing, conservation on the vessels that deliver on the grounds instantly, DFO has instant tallies of the weights, the measures. They are accurate. They don't survive on hails. It's real numbers.

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All the statistics in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans..... At the end of day, when they are packed in the plant, there's a big majority, and the could have a real good handle on conservation.

We've put elaborate refrigeration equipment on those vessels. We've competed in world markets with the upgrading of these vessels. They've transported fish to these plants up and down the coast. Their function is to service a lot of small communities with plants where trucking is involved, where jobs are involved. The function of the tenderman has been extremely important and extremely overlooked. I have just briefly laid it out.

So it's something that should not be ignored. It's a very important part of the industry. There are 400 or 500 men, with 70 or 80 vessels ranging in worth from $80,000 to $500,000 or $600,000. With this Mifflin plan, we're finished. That's the end of it. They're not going to be needed any longer.

I'll stop at that.

The Chairman: Thank you. Garth Mirau.

Mr. Mirau: Thanks for remembering.

My name is Garth Mirau, and I'm a seine skipper in Nanaimo. I'm a non-licence-holder. I have some investment in gear, and I was on the round table.

While I bought into fleet reduction - I hesitate to call it fleet rationalization, because I don't believe merely by reducing the number of licences it's going to rationalize the fleet - basically I was forced into it. We talked about a voluntary system of the people who were going to leave the industry through some form of industry and government-funded buy-back. The vote we had on the coast was referred to earlier, where about 92% of the people who voted were in favour of an industry-funded and government jointly funded buy-back.

Part of the conditions for buying into the buy-back proposal in the fleet reduction in the first place was that there was an assurance, or at least a discussion and some assurance, given by the former minister that people displaced from the industry through no fault of their own - the boats they worked on were sold or some such thing - would receive some sort of retraining plan, some sort of a meaningful transition period for them to go to work somewhere else.

In my case, the boat I fish on, I don't believe it's economically feasible to put another licence on it. If I don't leave the industry soon, within a year or two, I think I'm going to be starved out over a period of time. In the Mifflin plan, there was no mention of what happens to people who, through no fault of their own, are going to be forced out of this thing.

I mentioned that I had three sons. I'm 54 years old. I've worked my entire life, paid taxes, contributed to the communities I've lived in, raised a family, and now have eight grandchildren. All of those people are going to be impacted by this plan, because every one of us will be thrown on the trash heap.

When we ask Louis Tousignant about the people he's going to just literally cast aside, he said, first of all, there are provincial government programs in place already to take care of those people. I call that welfare. I don't think that's good enough. Then he told Dennis Brown and John Radosevic he'd go hand in hand with them to HRD to beg for some money for people who are displaced.

I don't think that is good enough for people who have worked and are willing to work and would like to continue to work in this industry. They're being thrown aside through no fault of their own.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Ms Burma Lockett (Individual Presentation): My name is Burma Lockett, shoreworker vice-president. I'm in one of the sectors that was left out of the round table. I've worked in the industry for 31 years. My company, B.C. Packers in Steveston, has informed my 600 members out there that they will not be working this summer due to the Mifflin plan.

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I'd like to give you a little history on our workforce. We have a lot of older Chinese and East Indian women who don't have English as a second language. So when people say, well, you can just train them and put them back into the workforce, that's not going to work. We're really concerned about this. I have never not been working, and I have definitely been told....

Other plants in the lower mainland have also been given the same notice. If the Mifflin plan goes ahead, the coastal communities, all those shore workers in those areas along with all the other fishing industry workers: those communities are not going to survive. In Steveston businesses are closing. Everybody's on side on this. Somebody has to listen. We have to stop this plan.

The Chairman: Thank you.

If you are all through, Mr. Byrne has a question.

Mr. Byrne (Humber - St. Barbe - Baie Verte): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have some questions.

If I do say so, for me personally probably some of the most striking testimony this afternoon came from Teresa. I am a Newfoundlander, from an area where there is a cod and groundfish moratorium. I lived in a community of 375 people, where I think the most amount of luxury we had there was a post office, a grocery store, and that's about it. We survived by logging and we survived by fishing.

For me personally, some of the most disturbing memories I can call upon were called up once again by Teresa. I know the pain, I know the suffering, and I know the despair of the community that is not certain of its future.

Teresa, my heart goes out to you and to the people you represent. I know the experiences you're now going through. Quite frankly, I don't envy you. It's not an easy job to be a community representative at this point in time, when there's so much suffering and so much uncertainty, as you now face.

I thank you for coming here this afternoon and sharing your opinions with us, sharing your experiences, because that makes us more informed and better capable, better able, to deal with your realities.

I'd just like to say that it's very important to stick together. That's one of the things I learned. I'm a biologist. I worked for a community economic development association for a number of years. I've worked in salmon enhancement. I've worked in resource enhancement and I've worked on fostering a spirit of cooperation among community groups and individuals and competing resource users to come together and to face the problems, problems I guess you face, but to face them together. I know the challenge that can bring.

All I can say to you, as someone coming from that experience already, is to stick together. It was very difficult for me, because I did promote the interests of my community, but I also knew I had to first promote the interests of the resource. That's one of the things, I guess, that while we look at and face the socio-economic problems of a dwindling resource base, what we must do first - and I think the testimony from Dr. Suzuki said it quite well - is face the requirements and the priorities of the resource itself. The decisions we take based on those needs have to be secondary even to the communities, because it's the resource that sustains the communities.

While that was the most painful experience I had to go through, first we had to nurture the resource, because it's the resource that's nurturing the community. In Newfoundland it took a long time to come to that conclusion.

It was equally difficult, I guess, because politicians from other parts of the region were telling me my community did not deserve compensation, did not deserve attention. That did not go over all that well with me, either. So I appreciate what it is you're asking for. You're asking for an opportunity for your communities to survive. I would say to you to be careful and to stick together.

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The question I would have is, given the fact that we're coming to a set of realizations here globally, both from the east coast and now from the west - and I hope some of the examples of the east coast can be used to help find solutions to the problems on the west coast - do you agree fundamentally that while the socio-economic needs of the community are very, very important, the resource does come first? I want to get your sense of that.

Ms Ransome: Absolutely the fish come first. I have no doubt that every single person in this room and every single person in our communities agrees with that statement - absolutely. Nobody is saying at all that they do not want to help the fish.

Mr. Byrne: If the experience from the east coast can help, it's probably that it was a little more difficult for people to generate that trust with each other. For example, on the west coast you do have a lot of competing fleet sectors. While you're very together today - and I encourage you to stay together, and I think you will - there are questions that have to be answered in terms of allocation. I think it's very easy to be divisive. I think it's very easy to be cynical. I would just encourage you to maintain your common front for the resource.

One of the common threads throughout the testimony was the Cruickshank report. Unfortunately, I haven't had an opportunity to examine that in much detail, but if I remember correctly, one of the things the Cruickshank report supported was one common type of gear sector.

Can you tell me what you support in the Cruickshank report versus what you don't support? Because we have to go beyond saying the Mifflin plan is not the best plan. What do you support?

Mr. Brown: We can present you with the abbreviated and highlighted summary of the main points of the Cruickshank report. I believe we have that with us.

Mr. Radosevic: We'll make them available for all members of the committee.

Mr. Brown: I would like to take a second just to say that Mr. Cruickshank supported - and I thought I'd made those points - a cost-recovery program through a royalty that aimed itself at fleet reduction through a buy-back; renewal of the resource with salmon enhancement; an owner-operator provision that resisted corporate concentration of licences; and a number of other points, which will be circulated to you. But every single point made in your question and speech has been reaffirmed and reasserted in the Cruickshank report.

Mr. Byrne: Do you feel that's what we should be moving to right now, that we should be revisiting the Cruickshank report and implementing its plans verbatim?

Mr. Brown: I think you would be well-served as a committee to ask Mr. Cruickshank to get back here as soon as possible and testify before you, I would say at your next meeting. As I said earlier, he may be the man who may help us all out of the trouble we're in. So not only do I suggest you support the report but also I think you should have the man back here to answer the questions first-hand.

Mr. Radosevic: There's just one more point in connection with this. I think the group here broadly accepts that for things such as fleet reduction and licensing, those matters that really directly affect the industry, the Cruickshank report is the basis from which to start. That's a unanimous opinion.

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There are things the Cruickshank report...and Cruickshank himself would agree with this, and has said so, that he didn't feel were in his mandate in terms of addressing a lot of detail around salmon enhancement, how communities could be part of that, and some of those other questions.

This group is also unanimous that a process has to be set up that allows the communities, the environmental organizations, the industry, to work around those enhancement-type issues. So it's a one-two punch, but definitely the Cruickshank report is the basis for this group's presentation with respect to licensing and fleet reduction.

The Chairman: Madame, you wanted to do something.

Ms Solby: Yes. Mr. McWhinney just wanted it on the record...now that I've handed the salmon proposals out. It was brought up by Mr. Jim Sinclair and drafted by him. It now has been handed out.

Mr. McWhinney: You mentioned the last page, particularly the recommendation that the federal government allocate $8 million -

Ms Solby: Is that on the last page?

Mr. McWhinney: Yes. Perhaps you could just read that into the record so that we can all identify it.

Ms Solby: Starting right from the very top, our recommendations are:

1) That the federal and provincial governments immediately set up a joint task force to implement a strategy to deal with the short- and long-term issues related to the crisis in the B.C. canning industry.

2) That the federal government allocate $8 million of its food aid budget for the purchase of canned pink salmon processed in 1996 by British Columbia canners, the price per case set by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans after consultation with industry regarding the costs of production. This amount is similar to the canned fish purchases on the east coast and represents a small portion of the overall budget. If granted, it would simply return the percentage of aid for fish purchases to the last year's level.

3) That the provincial and federal governments establish a joint fund totalling $8 million for the purchase of pink salmon for domestic and institutional use. This salmon would be purchased on the same terms as outlined in recommendation two and under the same conditions. This salmon would be used in consultation with the industry.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Shannon.

Mr. Wells probably would like to finish off with some questions.

There are no other questions?

Mr. Cummins: I would like to say that we have here Bill Irving, the mayor of Ucluelet. I think we're perhaps somewhat remiss by not having him make a more extended address. Perhaps it would be helpful if he were given the opportunity.

Mr. Irving: I've summarized.

The Chairman: Okay. We'll go to Derek and then back to you, John. Time is going on.

Mr. Wells (South Shore): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. How long do I have?

The Chairman: You have ten minutes.

Mr. Wells: Thank you for coming, all of you.

John, it's good to see you again. I talked to you in B.C. last year when I went out to study the B.C. industry. Do you remember that?

Mr. Radosevic: I remember it well.

Mr. Wells: You gave me five solutions that you thought were needed, and you've discussed some of those. The area I want to talk about a little - it has been raised by three or four people, and I think it bears repeating - is getting more information on the cleaning up and preservation of the habitat.

When I was in B.C. last year, we were talking about the fact that it's not strictly a federal responsibility; there is a lot of provincial and municipal responsibility there with regard to habitat destruction. Can you tell me if anything is happening at the provincial or municipal levels to deal with that problem? Second, what do you see as the federal role in habitat preservation?

Mr. Radosevic: I touched on this very briefly earlier on. I think what we need to do here is have a comprehensive approach. The round table recommended that Mr. Mifflin have a discussion with the municipalities, with the province, and do some impact studies so that we have an idea where we could go with some of these things. Certainly people who work in the fishing industry are well-suited to work in the communities restoring habitat and so on and so forth.

That work is going to be done by somebody, so why not by people from the fishing industry, who could use it to supplement incomes, to take some pressure off the resource, to take some pressure off incomes and so on and so forth? It's eminently sensible to look at it that way.

If you can help us get a meeting with Mr. Young, our proposal to the HRD people will be to do that impact study. It should have been done as part of the round table process. It's absolutely incredible to us that there were no impact studies on native communities, no impact studies on communities in general, no impact studies on conservation, no studies on the impact on people who do not hold licences; i.e., shore workers, tendermen and deck-hands.

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Nothing's been done along these lines, so we don't know precisely what we should be asking for - except we know that we will be asking HRD people, people from the province, people from municipalities, people from the industry, and people from the communities, including environmentalists, to sit down together and make a real commitment to salmon habitat renewal and so on.

That's the kind of approach that is needed. We will be talking to Mr. Young about setting up some kind of a comprehensive approach, rather than just going out and saying that we want$5 million or $10 million. That makes no sense to us at all. Whatever the dollar figure is, it's not sensible for us to be approaching it in that way.

Mr. Wells: Maybe it'd be appropriate to ask Mr. Culbertson, whom I also met when I was in B.C. last year, to comment on what the problems might be and how you might be able to get municipalities to pass the appropriate planning by-laws we talked about last year that need to be enforced in order to protect the habitat.

Mr. Stuart Culbertson (Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Food Division, British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food): Thank you. It is good to see you again, Mr. Wells.

British Columbia has a quite strong record over the last two or three years in what we as a government have done on habitat protection. We've introduced the forest practices code, which has infractions of up to $1 million for logging practices, with stream-side buffer zones in place to protect riparian zones and improved road and bridge standards to protect the fall-out from forestry into streams.

We've introduced forest renewal in British Columbia with a $15-million program for fish habitat and habitat inventorying. Within forest renewal we've introduced the watershed restoration program, with $88 million budgeted in this fiscal year for watershed restoration and renewal, to restore and maintain fish habitat damaged by logging practices.

Specifically on your point, last year we introduced an urban salmon habitat program, a $12.5-million program over five years, which supports community groups doing watershed stewardship work within the Georgia Basin of British Columbia, but it has some very important cooperative support with local governments in terms of working with local government planning officers and environmental officers to plan to protect fish habitat, which is under immense pressure in the lower mainland of the Georgia Basin of B.C.

In addition to that, last year there was a major investment in the upgrade of the Annacis Island and Lulu Island sewage treatment facilities. This is the largest engineering project now under way in western Canada, $194 million from the province to prevent pollution in the Fraser River, the major salmon-bearing stream.

I should just mention too that in the throne speech of the Province of British Columbia delivered last week was a major section on salmon and the work the government is doing with the groups represented here today on issues such as the salmon treaty and the renewal initiatives. There is an undertaking in there to introduce legislation in this session of the House, a fish habitat protection act, which will go further towards putting legislative tools behind the financial commitments the province has made.

I'll be happy to explore those things with you in any detail you wish.

Mr. McWhinney: Is the House not dissolved?

Mr. Culbertson: Yes, I believe that's the case. But I'm not certain whether or not that legislation had been introduced. I think there were some plans to introduce it before the House was dissolved.

Mr. Wells: I want to go to one other area. It might have been Mr. Fowler who raised this issue. We weren't talking about salmon at the time; we were talking about the IQs in the black cod and halibut. I'm not sure who spoke about that.

So it was you. I'm curious to know whether or not those individual quotas are transferable. Are we referring to IQs or ITQs?

Mr. Fowler: Those are transferable quotas. They're individual transferable quotas.

Mr. Wells: So they're ITQs.

Mr. Fowler: Yes, they're ITQs.

They're transferable in more ways than one. I can purchase a quota from another person, or I can lease that quota from that individual as well. So if I had 10,000 pounds of halibut quota and I chose to go out fishing and I wanted to extend my opportunities, I could go over and I could rent another 20,000 pounds from my wealthy friend Dennis here, and he would be even more wealthy, and I'd get a little piece of the action.

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That's the way the ITQ system works there. It is individual and it is transferable. One of the problems people had with it was the fact that it was transferable and could be rented. If there is a criticism of it out in the region - and correct me if I'm wrong - I believe there are some 700 halibut licences out there and I believe less than one-third of those actively fish. It has created a lot of armchair fishermen.

There's a lot of politics around ITQs in British Columbia. A lot of people support it and a lot of people don't. I'm one of the ones in the middle of the road on the thing. I think it's not a bad idea from some perspectives; however, I think it has to be dealt with in a way that keeps the fish in the hands of as many fishermen as possible. That's probably why I have a problem with the concept of transferability. If you have a quota you should have to fish it. The idea of leasing it out is contentious and political as hell. I'm not here to divide the delegation, so I won't -

Mr. Wells: No, I don't want to get into it. I raised it simply because I don't know how closely you follow east coast issues.

Mr. Fowler: Well, I do and I'm aware that the east coast fishery is approaching an all-time high in value. I've talked to a lot of people out there about the crab, the scallops and the lobsters. I've been to P.E.I., New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. I'm a neophyte when it comes to east coast issues, but I do have a brief familiarity with them.

Mr. Wells: I think we have a lot to learn from each other.

You may have heard of the recent disobedience or occupation of DFO offices. I'm not sure if that was reported out west.

Mr. Fowler: Yes, it was. We were made aware of it just recently in Montreal.

Mr. Wells: That originated in my riding, so you get a sense of what I was dealing with. One of the main issues - not the only one, because there were a number of issues - was the ITQ issue, especially whether or not it was going to be introduced in the inshore fishery.

Mr. Fowler: Well, you have the inshore and the offshore, the big-boat and the small-boat fleets.

Mr. Wells: It's a very divisive issue on the east coast. Is it as divisive on the west coast?

Mr. Fowler: In certain camps it is and in other camps it isn't. It just depends on where you are.

Mr. Wells: I don't want to discuss the pros and cons of it. This is not the issue.

Mr. Fowler: It is divisive. As soon as you start talking about privatizing what some people refer to as a common property resource, all of a sudden some people are going to become haves and some people have-nots. It's very political.

Mr. Wells: Have you pursued the discussion of community quotas on the west coast?

Mr. Fowler: Yes, and we've also looked at what you would call enterprise allocations, which are a form of a CTQ. I think you have problems with that. In British Columbia we have passing fish stocks, highly migratory fish stocks. If somebody says that they live in a geographical area and should therefore get a certain percentage of the run that comes by there, you can take that right back to the aboriginal groups living on the Fraser River. They could say that these things spawn on their fishing grounds, on their traditional grounds, so they should have them all. Those kinds of arguments are very difficult.

Mr. Wells: I would just make one comment, Mr. Chairman, to end. One of the difficulties of the committee is that some of us are from the east and some of us are from the west, and sometimes we don't study each other's fishery enough. We don't go to the west coast frequently enough to get to know the issues. That's why I went out last year on my own to study the issues. As a committee we need, those of us on the east coast.... Because we do have a lot of common issues. I think we can learn from each other and I would like to see us do that more.

Mr. Fowler: There is one thing that I recommend you look into. It's the way this so-called fleet rationalization plan as currently proposed is being operated.

On the one hand they've told us that they've provided $80 million to us for fleet purchase, for fleet buy-back. Then they've said they are going to divide the coast into three areas, and by the way, we cannot catch Fraser River sockeye in two of those three areas. If we want to be able to catch Fraser River sockeye, we have to go and buy a licence, and by the way, we have until May 24 to make that decision. We have to assign that licence to an area in British Columbia for the rest of time and then we have to go out and purchase another licence to guarantee that we have access to at least two of those areas.

We have $80 million over here held up by government, saying they're more than happy to buy out our licence and tear up the paper, reduce the fleet. We're saying great, we want that. On the other hand they're telling me that I have to go out and buy that licence. So what am I doing? I'm competing against $80 million of government money.

Everybody knows, and all the boat brokers in British Columbia, the guys who are the middlemen on these licence trades and all the rest of it, will all tell you it's a house of cards. We had a 150 million shortfall on the fleet last year because of the failure of Fraser River sockeye.

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In an average year in British Columbia we catch 80,000 tonnes aggregate in the salmon fishery. This year we're looking at something in the neighbourhood of 20,000 tonnes, and they're saying go out and spend all this money, and by the way, we're going to put this $80 million over here to compete with the private capital.

One of the fellows here made a comment earlier about the fact that licences have risen from $1,100 a foot prior to the announcement of the Mifflin plan to something in excess of $1,700 a foot on average now. Anybody who goes out there right now and buys that licence is competing against that $80 million.

That $80 million is scheduled to disappear if it isn't used in its entirety by the end of June. It won't be used, because private capital is outbidding the government in every instance. People are buying out of fear for existence of their thing. This is the nub of the problem.

And it's a house of cards, because when the $80 million goes away, so does the value of the licences. If I pay $1,700 a foot tomorrow, I might be lucky if I can get $1,000 a foot for it in September, after we've had this disaster of a year that we're expecting.

These are the kinds of things we want you people to be familiar with.

The Chairman: We'll have a final word from Greg.

Mr. Wadhams: Related to that price per foot, I think what Ron's relating it to is the gill-net or maybe the troll, but for the seine you're looking at a lot bigger value to compete with that $80 million.

Since that $80 million has come to the west coast from government for buy-back, the price of licences has gone to the ceiling. I've heard of individuals buying licences for $6,800 to $8,000 a foot in the seine department, and it's getting worse day by day.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Mike, are you referring to your motion now?

Mr. Scott: Yes, Mr. Chairman. I do have a motion before the committee and a couple of minor amendments I'd like to make to it.

The Chairman: Before we entertain the motion, I'd like to thank all these people for coming all this way.

Some hon. members: Hear, hear.

The Chairman: Dr. Suzuki has laid a heavy trip on us here. He says we are, or should be, the conscience of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Hopefully our first step is that we're not through with this issue now. We will continue.

I will recommend that Mr. Cruickshank, maybe our Speaker and Mr. Pearse should come in and fill in some blanks here that we all have. We're not experts here. You filled in a lot of blanks for us today, and I want to thank you for that. As Mr. Byrne says, we'll stick together and maybe we can do something.

We don't have a translation yet for the motion.

Mr. Scott: I've informed Mr. Bernier that we're doing our best to get that translation for him as soon as possible.

Mr. Culbert: Mr. Chairman, I don't know for certain what Mr. Scott was intending, but after listening to the presentations this afternoon, it certainly would be my wish to continue to pursue this particular area of problem and concern.

I would highly recommend or suggest that we try to have Mr. Cruickshank come before this committee at the earliest possible opportunity. Also, because of some associated problems, we may want to have Mr. Fraser come before this committee. A lot of extremely important things are coming together here.

While we were hearing the presenters, a notice of motion was circulated that would certainly circumvent that at this point in time. I must say it somewhat disturbed me. If this is intended to be dealt with by the chair, I would move that this notice of motion be tabled, if that is in order, until we continue to pursue this particular endeavour.

Mr. Scott: Mr. Chairman, when the minister came to British Columbia on March 29 and announced his plan, I recall very distinctly that he said the plan was not perfect and could change, particularly if people could point out the defects in it.

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I'm very concerned, based on the testimony we've heard from many of these witnesses, that the minister has relied very heavily on the advice of his departmental officials and he's insulated from the people we are hearing from today.

I'm also very concerned that there's a very short fuse on this issue right now. By May 24,24 days from now, people will have had to have registered for the buy-back or they'll be out.

There are four recommendations here. I want to make a couple of minor amendments to the wording on them. I think that this definitely represents the views of many of the witnesses we've heard.

I'd like to read the motion into the record, and I would like the committee to deal with it today.

Mr. Culbert: Mr. Chair, you have a motion to table on the floor.

Mr. Scott: We have not read it into the record.

The Chairman: Order, please.

The motion to table is not in order.

Mr. Byrne: One of the things that our presenters here today cautioned us against is political opportunism. All I can say is that, rather than divide - I don't want to insult anybody here this afternoon - the simple fact is that you've given us a recommendation and I think it's a very good one.

Let's talk to Cruickshank. To say as a committee that we are going to conclude or make a judgment immediately and then to go in advance of talking to a witness you have described as very credible and providing valuable input to the committee is putting the cart before the horse. It waters down any recommendations that we might make.

I ask everybody in the room not to read into any concern that we have not to dive immediately into Mr. Scott's motion to implement everything that he is suggesting right now. I think what we want to do, in terms of the credibility of the procedure and of the committee itself, is to askMr. Cruickshank to appear before us. Let's not be divided by that particular issue.

Mr. Scott: The thrust of this motion is not to make recommendations on how licensing should proceed in British Columbia; the thrust of it is to put a temporary stop to the process right now until some things are done.

The things that need to be done are described in here, such as establishing the allocations, conducting a proper, independent socio-economic impact analysis, and recommitting funds to the salmonid enhancement project.

That has nothing to do with what we might hear in testimony from Mr. Cruickshank on how the plan might be changed. This is geared towards stopping the plan as it is right now until these objectives can be met.

I suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, that it is in order. There's a very short timeframe on this. It's an opportunity for the committee to provide useful recommendations to the minister at this time that reflect the concerns we're hearing from British Columbia.

The Chairman: Your motion is in order.

Mr. Byrne: My concern is that it reaches conclusions. It says specifically that allocations must be established, and it goes on and makes very specific recommendations. It does reach a conclusion.

All I can say is that, from the point of view of a committee member, for me to start forwarding conclusions at this point in time in advance of receiving the input of all witnesses.... I thinkMr. Cruickshank is going to be a very credible witness, and I'd like to have his input before we start drawing conclusions on an ad hoc basis. That's all I ask.

Mr. Duncan (North Island - Powell River): We want to read in a motion. Everybody's debating a motion that hasn't yet been entered, and I would say that's totally out of order.

Mr. Scott: For the record, I will read the motion.

Mr. Duncan: We'd like to read this into the record.

The Chairman: Mr. Scott indicated he was going to make some changes.

Mr. Scott: Just a couple of minor wording changes.

The Chairman: We're waiting for these changes. Is the translation coming?

We could discuss the motion while we're waiting.

Mr. Duncan: Another point of order. Why do you need a translation in writing in order to make a motion in committee? You don't -

The Chairman: Mr. Scott and Mr. Bernier arranged that between themselves. I had nothing to do with that.

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Mr. Duncan: It can simply be read in, can it not?

Mr. Scott: I will read the motion. I will then read in two minor changes to the wording, which I'm proposing. Mr. Bernier will receive the French translation at the time I'm reading the motion into the record.

The Chairman: Mr. Scott, I think -

Mr. Scott: My assistant is working with Mr. Bernier as well. With your permission,Mr. Chairman, I will read the motion.

The Chairman: If you insist, everybody's read the motion. We can consider it tabled or consider it moved. If you want to take the time to read it, fine, but I think everybody's read it.

Mr. Culbert.

Mr. Culbert: The motion, as it read, indicated at the top that it was already deemed moved or we were asked to deem it moved. I'm told by the clerk that in committee a motion to table is not in fact in order whereas it is in every other parliamentary procedure. In any case, I will accept that. In that case, I would move to adjourn.

The Chairman: We have a motion to adjourn. That takes precedence over other motions, and it's not debatable.

Motion agreed to

The Chairman: This meeting is adjourned.

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