A federal court case in Canada will decide whether inshore fishermen in Nova Scotia have the right to enter controlling agreements with third parties or whether those agreements violate owner-operator and fleet separation policies established in the 1970s.
Labrador snow crab fisherman Kirby Elson lost his fishing license, valued at or near CAD 1 million (USD 747,000, EUR 716,000), when he refused to sever his third-party controlling agreement, arguing that he couldn’t afford to fish without it, the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald reported.
Graeme Gawn, president of the local fishermen’s union and a representative of the Canadian Independent Fish Harvester Federation, said third-party agreements such as Elson’s enable corporate interests to gain a disproportionate share of fishing profits.
“Corporate interests have influenced officials to bend, alter and ignore the critical fleet separation and owner-operator policies to allow them to gain control over our licenses, effectively siphoning the earnings of our inshore fisheries from those coastal communities and into distant corporate treasuries,” Gawn testified to Canada’s Standing Committee on Fisheries. “In Nova Scotia, where I fish, thousands of inshore seasonal owner-operators have effectively been dis-enfranchised from their traditional fisheries in the ‘drive to privatize’ as the government looked the other way.”
Ads appearing earlier this year in local newspapers seemed to back Gawn’s claim, as they claimed to represent foreign buyers looking to buy lobster fishing licenses from fishermen looking to retire.
Gawn pointed to the halibut fishery in British Columbia as an example of how third-party agreements benefit corporations and investors rather than local fishermen.
“People will still get fishing jobs but 90 percent of profit from it is extracted to be invested elsewhere, and the companies get to control prices and labor costs,” Gawn told the Chronicle Herald.
