B.C. fishing industry can't hook young
By Carla Wilson, timescolonist.com June 8, 2011
Young people are shunning the commercial fishing industry, seeing it as a high-cost, dead-end career full of perplexing and vexing rules.
Industry veterans are worried that no one is stepping in to take over.
So, with help from the provincial government, the industry is commissioning a study on how to fix things.
A request for proposals for the project says the goal is to "help the B.C. commercial fisheries industry quantify, understand and work towards solutions to the labour market challenges in the fish harvesting industry."
"There are very few young people anymore. The average age is in the high fifties," said John Stevens, a lifelong fisherman and son of the renowned and controversial Homer Stevens, who led the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union for three decades.
John Stevens, 61, said his own daughters have left the industry. "They are both out of it because they see no future."
It costs too much to enter the fishery, he said. For example, a gillnetter boat with licences for salmon in two areas of the coast would probably cost close to $100,000.
"You couldn't make the money to repay that with the way the fishery is being managed."
Fishing is being overly restricted by the Fisheries and Oceans Canada, he said.
"I have to find other things to do in winter to make a living."
Stevens hopes to go after sockeye salmon within a week, taking his Ladner-based leased gillnetter to Barkley Sound off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It will be his first time fishing this year.
Kathy Scarfo, president of the Area G West Coast Trollers, said fishermen used to join the industry as teenagers.
The lack of newcomers for the salmon fishery is due to "ongoing decreases in catch and uncertainty about the future."
A West Coast troller with a licence could cost just under $200,000, with some types of boats and licences going higher. Someone with a seine boat in last year's huge sockeye run of 30 million salmon on the Fraser River would have done well financially, but that can't be counted on. Low returns closed that run to commercial fishing for three years.
Commercial fishing contributed $135 million to B.C.'s gross domestic product in 2007, but there's a public perception that this is a waning industry, says the tender document seeking the fishing industry study.
Young people avoid commercial fishing because of factors such as the high costs to buy licences or quotas, inconsistent earnings, and difficult to understand and changing training and crew requirements, the document says.
B.C.'s Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation put out the tender on behalf of the commercial fisheries human resource steering committee, part of a labour market partnership with government set up in January. The study will be used as the baseline for subsequent work.
The request for proposals, published this week, closes June 24.
