Commercial spot prawn reg changes

[Howzer]

Just to put a different spin on it though... (bear with me).
Some of you older folks might remember when there used to thousands of 'mom and pop' salmon trollers out fishing. Their individual catch was relatively small, but they all made a living and everyone of those boats required a shipyard, fuel, etc. Since they couldn't run too far with their catch, there were more canneries, fish packers, etc. The economic spin-off was huge.
Along came factory boats, Jimmy Pattison bought most of the canneries and licenses. Suddenly a relative few were doing all the salmon fishing.

The prawn fishery is still made up of a lot of small boats. Many of them don't do more than 7 knots. If they can't freeze their catch they wont be able to get a fresh product to port...
So guess what will happen?
DFO is once again going to enable more corporatization of the fishing industry... IMO
At least that's what I see playing out

 

[agentaqua]

I think you hit the nail on the head, Howzer. It's a bunch of BS. They are trying to keep the prawns for the big companies that want to sell prawns to Asia for top dollar. Because the size isn't a management issue in prawn fisheries - they use mesh size to keep from harvesting too many small prawns but it was at the request of industry that didn't want undersized prawns for market reasons. And prawns are not managed by harvest volumes, size or anything else neither - but the Spawner index. In theory according to DFO - the Spawner index levels should keep us at MSY for all fisheries so all this other stuff is BS - just DFO using C&P for protection of big seafood processing companies that want to protect their access at the expense of fishers. The big processors don't want to lose access to a product they make a lot of money on - they don't want the fishermen to sell them to you and me in BC and make more than than they do selling them to companies. They don't wish to loose control of the market by competition.

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[terrin]

I think you hit the nail on the head, Howzer. It's a bunch of BS. They are trying to keep the prawns for the big companies that want to sell prawns to Asia for top dollar. Because the size isn't a management issue in prawn fisheries - they use mesh size to keep from harvesting too many small prawns but it was at the request of industry that didn't want undersized prawns for market reasons. And prawns are not managed by harvest volumes, size or anything else neither - but the Spawner index. In theory according to DFO - the Spawner index levels should keep us at MSY for all fisheries so all this other stuff is BS - just DFO using C&P for protection of big seafood processing companies that want to protect their access at the expense of fishers. The big processors don't want to lose access to a product they make a lot of money on - they don't want the fishermen to sell them to you and me in BC and make more than than they do selling them to companies. They don't wish to loose control of the market by competition.

Can they not keep them on ice and get them fresh to the Fish Mongers?

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[wildmanyeah]

Can they not keep them on ice and get them fresh to the Fish Mongers?

They sell them still alive locally most of the time (T&T in season), Ive also bought frozen tails that were not packed in a block of ice but packaged frozen in a bag. I also bought them in tubs.

The advantage to the tubs is they can freeze them and they last up to 2 years easily.

 

[agentaqua]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/df0-backtracks-spot-prawn-regulation-1.5951953

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[ziggy]

I think you hit the nail on the head, Howzer. It's a bunch of BS. They are trying to keep the prawns for the big companies that want to sell prawns to Asia for top dollar. Because the size isn't a management issue in prawn fisheries - they use mesh size to keep from harvesting too many small prawns but it was at the request of industry that didn't want undersized prawns for market reasons. And prawns are not managed by harvest volumes, size or anything else neither - but the Spawner index. In theory according to DFO - the Spawner index levels should keep us at MSY for all fisheries so all this other stuff is BS - just DFO using C&P for protection of big seafood processing companies that want to protect their access at the expense of fishers. The big processors don't want to lose access to a product they make a lot of money on - they don't want the fishermen to sell them to you and me in BC and make more than than they do selling them to companies. They don't wish to loose control of the market by competition.

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I suggest this may be more a case of Revenue Canada trying to close the tax loophole . As you say prawns are not managed by harvest volumes so CRA has a heck of a time tracking sales, in essence no one knows how much is landed and by who.

 

[agentaqua]

Interesting comment Ziggy. I know Revenue Canada has recently been doing a crack-down on commercial fishermen....

 

[spring time]

I suggest this may be more a case of Revenue Canada trying to close the tax loophole . As you say prawns are not managed by harvest volumes so CRA has a heck of a time tracking sales, in essence no one knows how much is landed and by who.

Just go on Facebook market place and see and see all the people sell tubs all cash. There needs to be some way to tell where they come from [ ie commercial fn or even sporty) dfo doesn’t have the resources inspect it all

 

[the butcher]

I guess Jimmy must have knocked on dfo doors and ***** slapped dfo guys... dfo hs backed down and ran and hid in a hole with their tales betwen their feet.