RATIONALIZING THE SALMON AND ROE-HERRING FISHERIES 105 



Success in regulating the catcii has been mixed at best. 

 Harvesting targets have been exceeded in many cases, 

 and in others the fishery officers have been reluctant to 

 declare openings because the fishing power of the fleet is 

 so great it would threaten to decimate the stocks. And the 

 Department's attempt to divide the catch between the 

 seine and gjllnet sectors in prescribed proportions, 

 described below, has failed to even approximate the tar- 

 gets. 



In attempting to make the fleet more manageable, vari- 

 ous restrictions have been tried. In 1980, the permitted 

 net length for the gillnet fleet, where excess capacity is 

 most extreme, was halved. Last year, a system of area 

 licensing was introduced. The coast was divided into 

 three areas, corresponding to the north, south and west 

 zones I proposed in the preceding chapter, and each roe- 

 herring licensee was required to choose one area in which 

 his licence would apply. This has the effect of spreading 

 the fishing power of the fleet and limiting the number of 

 vessels that can converge on a particular opening. After 

 two seasons" experience, opinions about the advantages 

 of area licensing vary, but the Department and a majority 

 of fishermen agree that this made the fishery more man- 

 ageable, enabled improvements in stock utilization and 

 lowered the fleet's operating costs. It has done nothing to 

 reduce the fleet's overall excess capacity, however. 



This year, a number of seine vesselowners acquired 

 licences from other fishermen to fish in a second area. 

 This had the beneficial efllect of reducing the roe-herring 

 fleet by one vessel whenever two licences were combined, 

 and the policy of facilitating this process was consistent 

 with recommendations in my Preliminary Report. How- 

 ever, opposition to fleet reduction at a time of economic 

 recession and high unemployment led to a temporary 

 suspension of further licence combinations after some 23 

 licensees had acquired more than one licence. 



The roe-herring fishery has had a significant impact on 

 the development of the salmon fleet. Seine vessels that 

 fish roe-herring typically fish salmon as well, and high 

 earnings in roe-herring during the 1970s fueled invest- 

 ment in vessels used in both fisheries. In the herring 

 fishery, hold capacity is a much more important con- 

 straint on the fishing capacity of a vessel, and this has 

 stimulated the introduction of larger vessels into the 

 salmon fishery as well. 



LICENSING POLICY AND PROPOSALS 



To come to grips with the structural problems of these 

 fisheries and to design policies that will enable the indus- 

 try to perform more efficiently, as my terms of reference 

 direct, has been this Commission's most formidable chal- 

 lenge. The importance of this task is hard to overesti- 

 mate. My public hearings have revealed that present cir- 



cumstances and trends are unsatisfactory to everyone in 

 the industry: fishermen, vesselowners and processors, as 

 well as the regulatory authorities. Tliey are a threat to 

 resource conservation and management and to recre- 

 ational and Indian fishing interests. And they are a frus- 

 tration to other Canadians, who watch the wealth in these 

 exceptionally valuable resources being squandered in 

 wasteful and destructive fishing effort. 



Yet the size and complexity of these two fisheries 

 leaves them very intractable. In the next chapter I recom- 

 mend certain straightforward changes involving catch 

 quotas for certain smaller fisheries that will enable them 

 to be rationalized fairiy simply, but those solutions are 

 not practical for the salmon and roe-herring fisheries. 



At the present time, any system of individual catch 

 quotas would, in my judgement, be difficult for these 

 fleets to adjust to and probably beyond the capability of 

 the Department to administer. The stocks and available 

 catch of these species are notorious for their wide and 

 unpredictable year-to-year fluctuations, making it impos- 

 sible to allocate individual quotas in advance with any 

 degree of certainty. 



This sets the salmon and roe-herring fisheries apart 

 from the other commercial fisheries in this report. 

 Because they cannot now be reorganized under a more 

 advanced form of licensing. I propose special measures to 

 improve the limited-entry licences and to reduce the 

 fleets. The solutions are therefore more complicated than 

 tho.se I recommend for the other fisheries. But on the 

 basis of all the information and advice I have received, 

 they seem to me to aflTord the most eflfective and equitable 

 means of redirecting the development of these two most 

 important fisheries. 



The kind of policy changes required to reverse the 

 adverse trends in the salmon and roe-herring fisheries will 

 inevitably be difficult, controversial and costly. My 

 detailed proposals in this chapter constitute a package of 

 several related components for restructuring licensing 

 and fleet-development policy for the salmon and roe- 

 herring fisheries. They include — 



i) Changes in the form of licences to harmonize the 

 salmon and roe-herring licensing systems along the 

 lines set out in the preceding chapter. These changes 

 will bring more order to the licensing arrangements, 

 improve the security of licensees and provide better 

 means of controUing fleet development. 



ii) A fleet-reduction program to reduce the salmon and 

 roe-herring fleets to half their present size over a 10- 

 year period. This is aimed at improving the eco- 

 nomic performance of the industry and alleviating 

 pressures on the natural resources by facilitating 

 adequate provisions for escapements. 



