SKIPPER'S BLOG: Fishermen Picking Up the Tab?

When it comes to political press releases, Random-Burin-St. George’s MP Judy Foote certainly must be among the leaders in number of releases sent. We get about two a day on average from her. That’s a lot for a single opposition (and not even official opposition) MP.

At any rate, an interesting one came in this morning (see our main page for the story) regarding the downloading of costs onto fishermen by the federal government.

She asserts that the Conservative government is making life difficult for fishermen by downloading the costs for all sorts of management and conservation items — things like at sea observers, gear tags, logbooks, etc. —right to the fishermen.

In the case of the gear tags, she quoted the federal minister, Keith Ashfield, as suggesting that paying for those is a simple cost of doing business for fishermen.

But when you look at the kind of money fishermen pay out every year to government, you have to ask when the cost of doing business is merely a catchphrase being used by a government that is raiding the pockets of its fishing industry with all the subtlety of a drunken bear in a meat market.

Sure, any business owner, large or small, will tell you that all levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal — have their hands in business pockets constantly.

But I would argue that few business owners are warming government’s greedy hands in their pockets more than fishermen. It’s actually almost ridiculous when you think about what some of them have to deal with.

What about things like licence fees? Every year fishermen have to pay fees attached to their licences just to renew them and go fishing. In some cases that might be a $100 renewal fee. In other cases, like in IQ fisheries in some areas, you might have to pay per tonne and it can get very pricey. There are fisheries where harvesters are paying exorbitant amounts of money JUST TO GO CATCH FISH.

And then you have to look at other things like the cost of vessel inspections and certification, which we recently highlighted in The Navigator, are about to cost fishermen more than ever before — we’re talking thousands of dollars here in some cases — thanks to some federal changes in how fees will be collected and how assessments will be carried out.

And then of course there are the conservation and management costs listed by Foote. Those are small potatoes compared to some others, but they are particularly galling.

See, government is making money from fishermen and the industry by acting as the owner of Canada’s fisheries resources. You have to pay to catch their fish.

And yet they appear less and less willing to spend any money tending to that resource to ensure its sustainability. Furthermore, not only are they less inclined to spend, but they are making their customers pay the bills instead!

Wow.

As my grandfather used to say, “That’s great work if you can get it.”

And that’s all before we even get anywhere near standard business costs like tax remittance, insurances, and HR costs.

And we didn’t even touch the escalating costs of essential fishing items like gear, replacement, fuel (which, by the way, government collects another hefty pile of money from), maintenance, repairs docking, and everything else that goes with a fishing enterprise.

Yes, all business owners have a beef with the money that comes out of their wallets and goes into government. But we’d have to agree that fishermen are among the most susceptible to government “hand in pocket” disease.