Good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to be here. I'm Danny Arsenault, representing PEIFA, and Kenneth will be taking over for the last part of this.
The overpopulation of seals in Atlantic Canada is a grave concern of ours. It's something that membership and both Ken and I are very passionate about addressing. We have 1,275 independent core fish harvesters who fish a variety of species, namely lobster, crab, pelagic fish and groundfish, on P.E.I.
This will be my 50th year on the water fishing. I bought my fleet when I was 18 years old. At the time, we fished from ice out until we couldn't fish any longer, later in the fall. We didn't stop fishing. We had something to fish, all different stocks.
Today, I'm a lobster fisherman. Everything else is gone; there are no more fisheries for us, not even our bait fishery. We always caught our own bait. Today we buy our bait. In a two-month season this year, it cost me $40,000 to buy bait. I never had to buy bait before; I could always catch my own.
We have some photos—I don't know if they're being distributed—showing you the destruction that seals have caused to our fisheries. Some of these photos were shared in 2012 when I appeared before the Senate committee in Halifax as a representative of the PEIFA.
The fish are directly impacted by the overpopulation of grey and harp seals in the southern Gulf. Back 11 years ago, we thought that we were at the eleventh hour, and everybody around the table said the same: “It has to be now. We have to control this population.” I can't help but wonder what our groundfish, pelagic stocks and stuff would look like right now, had that happened.
Our government has been scared, bullied—whatever you want to call it—to not take any action on seal populations, because of pressure and misinformation from certain NGO groups and the implications of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which could impact exports to the U.S.
I recently read an article that came out of Texas. The American government currently has a bounty on wild hogs. They're causing havoc down there in the agriculture business. What they have been doing is they have a bounty on them to get as many out of the way as they can, and I see that they have also introduced a bait made with warfarin to control them. They are bringing them under control because of what's happening.
It's same scenario as we have with seals. I don't understand how one country can penalize another for doing what they are also doing themselves. This is unjust.
We're here today, showing the impacts of seals through pictures and experiences on the water. We need the story reflected to others in the public and to the groups and countries trying to downplay what is really happening to our fish stocks. In the past, we've been told that it's the fishers' fault. The government can't keep falling back on that response. We haven't had a fishery for 31 years.
We can't keep hiding the seals any longer, and that includes talking about them. We desperately need to bring the seal herd down to a manageable level—this needs to be step one—and then work on a realistic and effective hunt so that we can maintain and control the seal populations as we go forward.
We did not see attacks on halibut, for example, until about 10 years ago. As our other stocks disappeared, they turned to something else, and they were attacking halibut, taking them off our hooks, tearing them off. Some fish are worth up to $1,500, and when you haul it up and it's destroyed, it's not very encouraging. These vacuum cleaners of the sea eat 40 to 50 pounds of fish a day, and there are millions of them. Do the math and see where our stocks are.
What bothers and worries me more about all this is that they're not done yet. We have two stocks left in the Gulf, crab and lobster, and we already have information and proof of what they're starting to do there. You can see lobster claws from big lobsters lying on the shore. They knock the claws off them and eat the lobsters. As for crab, they have as many as 150 in their stomachs. This is happening. While we're talking, this is happening, and, if someone doesn't step up to do something, our coastal communities are gone. They're done. We won't have anything left.
It's very important that something gets done now, before everything is destroyed.
I guess that ends it, and I'll pass it on to Kenneth. If you have more time at the end, I would really love you to be able to go down, just to give you an example of what I've seen happen in the last 50 years.
Thank you.