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BCBUSINESS.CA SEPTEMBER 2017 BCBUSINESS 39 Joy Thorkelson, a tough-talking Prince Rupert city councillor and a longtime representative of the United Fisherman and Allied Workers' Union ( UFAWU), says ITQs have in•ated the cost of quota—discouraging new entrants into commercial ‚shing—and whittled away ‚shermen's bottom line. They've also led to the rise of armchair ‚shermen who make pro‚t from staying at home and leasing out their quota, she adds. Thorkelson gets furious thinking about how ‚shing rights and control, thanks to what she considers a concerted e…ort by the DFO to impose ITQs, have migrated up the food chain to the likes of Canadian Fishing Co. Part of the Jim Pattison Group, Can- Šisco is a vertically integrated company that owns licences, quota and ‚shing ves- sels in most Šisher- ies on the coast, plus processing facilities in B.C. and Alaska that together handle some 20,000 tonnes of salmon annually. (In late 2015, Can‚sco closed its Oceanside ‚sh cannery in Prince Rupert, the last in the province, elimi- nating several hundred seasonal jobs and roughly 20 high-paid trades posi- tions—and further angering the UFAWU.) Salmon is the last major West Coast ‚shery to resist full implementation of the ITQ system. The reasons are as com- plex as the ‚sh are to manage: ‚ve spe- cies, three •eets (gillnet, seine and troll) and Šishermen's independent streak, strong as a tidal rip. Thorkelson claims that more than 90 per cent of UFAWU members oppose ITQs. So far, the com- mercial salmon sector remains mostly a derby ‚shery, with catch limits attached to a stock and gear type during an open- ing that can last anywhere from a few hours to several days. The UFAWU is lobbying the DFO to make owner-operator and f leet sepa- ration provisions part of any further ‚shery management changes. It's some- thing that Thorkelson says Atlantic ‚sh- ermen fought hard for when they won concessions as the agency imposed ITQs on the East Coast. Owner-operator provi- sions require the individual who owns the quota to be on the water ‚shing it; •eet separation prevents ‚sh buyers and processors from dominating the ‚shing •eet, whether it's by directly purchasing quota and licences, or o…ering ‚nancing to ‚shermen in exchange for exclusive rights to their catch. "What we need is a system that works for working Šishermen on the water, and ITQs don't," Thorkelson says from the UFAWU oœce in Prince Rupert. "It's becoming more about the stock market and less about the game of ‚shing." Thorkelson has an ally in Evelyn Pinkerton, a maritime anthropologist at SFU's School of Resource and Envi- r o n m e n t a l M a n - agement, who has written extensively about communit y m a n agement a nd control of Šishery resources. Pinkerton argues that a neo- liberal attitude has infected the federal ‚sheries bureaucracy and is playing into the hands of corpo- rations while down- loading costs onto everyday working ‚shermen. Pinkerton co-authored a 2009 paper called "Elephant in the Room" that assailed the impact of ITQs on the B.C. halibut ‚shery. In the 1990s that ‚shery was one of the ‚rst to adopt them, fol- lowing a recommendation by economist Peter Pearse, now an emeritus professor of economics and forestry at UBC, who headed the 1982 Commission on Paci‚c Fisheries Policy for the DFO. The SFU academic tells BCBusiness that this led to an investor class "who make more money leasing quota than ‚shing it," as well as consolidation of ‚shery control in the hands of processors like Can‚sco. Although the value of the halibut ‚shery grew by 25 per cent between 1990 and 2007, the proportion that ended up in the pockets of boat crews plunged by 73 per cent, according to Pinkerton. Her paper sparked a rejoinder from Bruce Turris, a former DFO economist and currently executive manager of the Canadian Ground‚sh Research and Conservation Council, who cited a "lack "ITQs make sense because it spreads out the fishing effort over a longer period of time and enables us to get the best high- quality product to market in a timely manner" ekb.com Starting a business can be dicult. We're here to make it a little bit easier. BC'S EXPERTS IN BUSINESS LAW

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