STATEMENT BY THE MARITIME FISHERMEN'S UNION REGARDING THE SITUATION IN THE MIRAMICHI BAY - Sept. 5 / 2000
We will make a statement regarding the situation in the Miramichi Bay and then take questions.
The Maritime Fishermen's Union is recognized as the representative of inshore fishermen under the Inshore Fisheries Representation Act of the Province of New Brunswick. Our fishermen rely on a number of ocean species to make their fishing year but lobster represents 75% of their annual earnings. Approximately 20 years ago our fishermen supported a licensing regime called the Bonafide policy. In effect the policy professionalized the inshore by requiring a person to chose between fishing as their principal occupation or another line of work. In other words, what we have now is a remarkable complement of dedicated full time fishermen who are the economic engine for over a hundred coastal villages along the Gulf coast of New Brunswick. I say remarkable because you will find very few places in the industrial world that has such a large and productive inshore fleet. In the immediate area of the Miramichi you have 200 inshore vessels supporting 600 fishermen who fish from Burnt Church, Néguac, Tabusintac, Val-Comeau, Tracadie, Baie-Sainte-Anne, and Pointe-Sapin. These communities are fishing dependent, there is really no other significant economic opportunity.
This is the social reality of the area and we have said and will continue to say that Burnt Church leaders will have to come to terms with this. Over the past winter and spring we had several contacts and meetings with Native leaders in Burnt Church. We went over how their members could get into our professionalized fishery and make a long term living out of it. We also tried to reconcile after the trap cutting incident of last October and had offered to replace any lost traps as part of reaching a basic agreement.
These kinds of exchanges came to an abrupt halt just prior to the spring lobster season when the promoters of the Burnt Church fishing plan effectively took over and rejected any discussions with the MFU. Among other things, this group proclaimed its own Burnt Church Fishery Act and some sort of sovereignty over its fishing plan. They also promised to fish come August in the closed season. Our position was that this was a regulatory matter for DFO, we expected basic enforcement as we expect everywhere in the lobster fishery.
We now find the issue has been elevated to the level of grand farce, partially as a result of a media hunger for simplistic confrontation and because the regulatory body DFO cannot find the will to close down the lobster fishery in the Bay. We have never been briefed on the unfortunate incident last Tuesday in the Bay that has been repeatedly flashed on television screens around the world and that has paralyzed our National Government.
Further, we will be engaging advisors to help us review the role of the media over the past month. It is our belief that there are media persons assigned to this story who have over identified with one group in this dispute and have mis-characterized the nature of the dispute; we will be particularly examining the work of the CBC in this regard.
In the meantime, we must find a very speedy resolution to the fishing aspect of this dispute. It is imperative that the Government of Canada call a complete halt to all lobster fishing in the waters of the Miramichi Bay.
We are asked what will our fishermen do. We can only answer this: the Maritime Fishermen's Union will not support, organize or encourage any direct actions in the water that takes enforcement into our own hands but we will use all the peaceable means at our disposal to ensure basic enforcement of our members and their communities livelihoods is done.
We will also say this. Everything about the history of the MFU tells you that we were formed to organize the underdog, the inshore fishermen who were years ago scheduled by the planners to disappear. We are organized on principles of fairness and without prejudice on the basis of language, creed, race, and colour. We are absolutely in solidarity with Native peoples efforts to break years of poverty and injustice but solidarity is not a one sided proposition and we refuse to give credence to a dead end declaration of sovereignty that will inevitably isolate small bands of people and mislead them into thinking that they are not interdependent with the rest of us. Further, those who propose to be leaders in the community surely cannot ask the tiny band at Burnt Church to carry the burden of what is clearly an unresolved National issue of the relations between our first peoples and the broader society.
And, no one should ask ordinary hard working inshore fishermen to pay the price for decades of National ineptitude towards one of our founding peoples. The fishing itself in the Bay simply has to stop. There has to be a moratorium and there cannot be boats on the water fishing while the larger issues are being sorted out.
There is so much more that could be said but with respect to specific strategies of the MFU we cannot get into them here.
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