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[Trout Slayer]

Heard tonight through a very reliable source who deals with alot of commercial fisherman. This past season commercial fisherman went to buy their licenses and once the quotas were revealed some of them chose to get rid of them as they thought the amounts were not satisfying. What happened was the "Government" if I even want to call them that anymore bought them back then passed them onto First Nations to use at no charge. So this entitled First Nations to fish during the commercial only openings and their own for profit. Some commercial fisherman are now furious about this.

Anyone else hear this?

[leadbelly]

heard nothing from buddy at work who fishes    with his dad on the Fraser on a commercial boat and his uncle does the test fishery ect.

[The Gilly]

Rumor, but wouldn't suprise me a bit.

[Sam Salmon]

Heard tonight through a very reliable source who deals with alot of commercial fisherman. This past season commercial fisherman went to buy their licenses and once the quotas were revealed some of them chose to get rid of them as they thought the amounts were not satisfying. What happened was the "Government" if I even want to call them that anymore bought them back then passed them onto First Nations to use at no charge. So this entitled First Nations to fish during the commercial only openings and their own for profit. Some commercial fisherman are now furious about this.

Anyone else hear this?

It's all bull.
Whoever told you that has no idea how the quota system works.
No one who owns a quota or portion thereof "gets rid of it" because he thinks the quota is too low-he either sits and waits for things to change/leases it out to someone who uses it himself or combines it with other quotas-this is SOP throughout the business.
As to FN holding Commercial License latest figures show around 40% of the Saltwater Commercial fleet being FN owned-nothing new there either.

[reach]

Salmon are not on a quota system.  It is still a derby style fishery where the total catch for the whole fleet is determined in advance, then when an opening is announced the whole fleet fishes until the total is caught.

Probably what Trout Slayer is talking about is a program that has happened in past years (I don't know about 2004).  Sometimes when DFO wanted to provide some financial relief to fishermen when the opportunities weren't expected to be good, they would allow the fisherman to declare "I'm not fishing this year" and waive the annual license fee.  That license would then be idle.  It could not be leased or otherwise fished during that year.

Whether DFO subsequently made allocation decisions based on the number of licenses fishing is another question.  Clearly they shouldn't - the allocation for the commercial fleet should be the same whether there is one boat fishing or 1,000.  But that doesn't prove that they didn't.  They have been known to make some irrational decisions over the years, such as perpetuating the race-based commercial fisheries in the face of the Van der Peet decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which clearly states there is no aboriginal right to fish commercially (at least for the Sto:lo band).

[Trout Slayer]

Thanks for the clarifications, will get back to you guys once I talk to the individual again.

[The Gilly]

Good info Sam & Reach.  If 40% of the commercial boats/licences are FN, then what are the FN complaining about.  That's a much higher percentage than their population in general.  Nothing wrong with FN owning licences, but it makes me angry when I hear Ernie Cray spouting off that FN can't afford the licences or "big" boats.  Obviously some of the FN choose to be industrious and get along just fine.  I can't help but think that there are a lot of FN that wish so called leaders like Ernie would go away for a while because all he does is create bad blood between FN and the rest of us.  Not that our so called leaders are any better.

[reach]

Some more background.  I thought the number was more like 30% coastwide, but regardless, it's a significant percentage.  It is that high for two reasons.  First, historically, commercial fishing was and is a large part of the economy of coastal communities.  Many of those communities have a large proportion of native people.  So when license limitation was first introduced, there was already a fairly high percentage of native fishers.  Second, there were a few programs way back when in which the government did buy licenses on the open market and transfer them to natives as a form of subsidy.  That also increased the proportion of natives in the commercial fishery.  Everybody was just fine with that - natives and non-natives were fishing in the same fisheries with little or no bad blood.

Then came the AFS, which has created plenty-o-bad blood both between natives and non-natives, and also within the native community.  The 30 (or 40 or whatever) percent of the commercial fleet who are natives were screaming just as loudly as the non-natives as they saw their allocation being given away.  And native bands who live upriver, or not on the major salmon rivers, get nothing.  As an example of the inequity, the native allocation of Johnstone Strait sockeye this year was 150,000, and the Comox band got 120,000 of that for some reason.  Alert Bay was not impressed.

As I understand it, most of the upriver bands are a bit pissed off at the Musqueam/Tsawwassen/Burrard-Sto:lo since they get first crack at the nice bright fish.  By the time they get up river, most of them have been caught, leaving mostly scrawny net marked ones, and the quality of the remaining fish declines quite a bit.

Anyway, there's no easy solution, but I believe the current race-based segregation of the commercial fleet is NOT the way to solve the problems.  Buying licenses and boats on the open market and handing them over to the natives is a much better solution.  There's still a big problem of which native individuals and/or bands get to fish the licenses, and how any profits are split up, but at least there's no racial tension when everybody fishes in the same fleet.