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38 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER 2017 C lassic rock blares from the wheel- house radio. Skipper Quincy Sample layers on ‚breglass in a waist-deep cockpit at the stern of his boat, making repairs to the 42-foot vessel in anticipation of a commercial salmon ‚shery opening in June. Gulls squawk as the guy lines of sailboats moored nearby sing in the breeze. Sample, 43, was born in Saskatoon but raised within spitting distance of the ocean in Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast. He's been ‚shing since his early teens. His language is as salty as the air on this spring afternoon at Comox Harbour, where he ties up the Esther Sample (christened after his wife) when not chasing halibut, herring, cod or salmon. When it comes to making a living, commercial ‚shing is all Sample has ever known. "I can't imagine doing anything else," he says as he climbs out of the cockpit, looking slightly intoxicated from the epoxy fumes. "I'll always be a ‚sherman." The commercial salmon ‚shing game can be seductive, but the rules keep changing. Young Šisherman face ris- ing entry costs, and striking a balance between commerce and sustainability remains as elusive as it was early last century, when boats netted a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Fraser River sockeye. Since 1990 the province's wild salmon harvest has declined from nearly 100,000 tonnes to about 20,000, with a wholesale value of between $150 million and $170 million, according to the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture. As for indepen- dent Šishermen like Quincy Sample, they're watching the increasing corpora- tization of their industry and the concen- tration of ‚shing rights in fewer hands. Many critics point to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (the DFO) and its individ- ual transferable quotas, or ITQs. When it emerged in the 1970s, this made-in-B.C. ‚sheries management concept aimed to address what was considered an unten- able situation: ‚shermen racing to catch as much they could of the quota assigned to a particular stock. The DFO disliked the so-called derby ‚shery for several rea- sons. Besides leading to more ‚sh being caught than were allocated, it threatened crew safety because of its competitive- ness and made conservation-based man- agement tough. ITQs gave Šishermen a designated amount of quota, which became a trad- able good, like a share on the stock mar- ket. Quota can be bought or leased: in the B.C. halibut ‚shery, fully covered by an ITQ system since 1991, the quota pur- chase price is more than $100 a pound, according to Ecotrust Canada and the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Founda- tion. Although quota began as a number on a piece of paper with modest value, it now looks like a lottery win for ‚sher- men lucky enough to get in early. ITQs removed the race to ‚sh, but they also spawned a clash of ideologies around how commercial ‚shing is managed. 20,000 15,000 10,000 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 Reflecting a decline in employment, the number of personal commercial fishing licences issued each year in B.C. keeps falling SOURCE: T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and Ecotrust Canada, "Assessing Alternatives for Sustainable Fisheries in B.C."