Fisheries committee  I answered that in my statement. The answer is no and I'm going right from your testimony from the RDG. They refused to even acknowledge the majority of the problems we are identifying here, in their testimony to you and so did the east coast fellow. He didn't identify the owner-operators, who are a fundamental plank that we're actually supposed to be here talking about.

Fisheries committee  No, I don't think it's that so much; it's actually who went out into the market and bought it. They own it, essentially. I mean, nothing is really owned in the Canadian context. It's all still a Canadian resource, but it's basically de facto ownership as soon as it's able to be traded in the marketplace.

Fisheries committee  That's what we've been putting some recommendations on the table for, trying to develop a way to share that revenue fairly. We've put forward recommendations like that. There are other potential ways to do it over time. You can, over time, develop an owner-operator kind of framework here in B.C.

Fisheries committee  What we found in the last eight or nine months is a growing realization, and I think a lot of it came out of this committee. You listened to a lot of young fishermen from B.C. who were saying that they are not able to get into the fishery. A lot of the fishermen, even the quota holders, are recognizing that with the way it's going, there will be no crew, no skippers and nobody else on the water in the future, so we have to figure out a way.

Fisheries committee  They don't track ownership, no.

Fisheries committee  You have to have a licence, but the question is who owns the licence. Where's the money coming from? It could be a shell company, and there's no real tracking of that. You have to attach the licence to a quota, but that doesn't really tell you much. It doesn't tell you who actually owns it.

Fisheries committee  Well, you don't. You do it on a percentage basis. What's happening right now is that people are paying up front—$5 or $6 a pound—and the processor is going to get caught in a bind just as much as the fishermen can, because the market can fluctuate. They have no real knowledge of that.

Fisheries committee  It's the quota holder.

Fisheries committee  Yes, there's just been an analysis done on that. There are 435 halibut licences, just as an example; only 140-some-odd vessels fished last year. There are a lot of these empty licences. They only have about 0.01% of the quota on them. They're now being used as quota transfer licences, a lot of times by the corporations or the processors.

Fisheries committee  There is no transparent quota transfer mechanism available. There have been a number of attempts to try to build one privately. It hasn't worked. Quite often either people know somebody who knows somebody who has quota. That's how it works, or fishing processing companies would actively search it out and bid against each other to make sure they get enough quota for the year.

Fisheries committee  I've spent a lot of years in British Columbia dealing with interest-based negotiation frameworks with several fleets. Basically I would say that you would use a process like that, and that kind of process is based on interest-based negotiations and it has to be transparent. You have to know the cost of the vessel.

Fisheries committee  Thank you for allowing me to be a witness at the parliamentary fisheries committee on this critically important topic. I'm appearing before you as an independent small boat owner-operator from British Columbia. You are going to hear from a number of young harvesters in the next couple of days; I am not one of them.