Community fishing project sinks as NWMB dithers

The Nattivak HTA’s struggle to build a community-based fishery suffered a big setback last week after the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board sat on the community’s request for permission to fish turbot just past the 12-mile limit near Qikiqtarjuaq, under a special exploratory licence.

“They are eerily silent,” Seemee Nookiguak of the Masiliit Corp., Nattivak HTA’s wholly-owned fishing company, said of the NWMB’s response to his community’s request.

The NWMB’s non-action threatens a community fisheries pilot project to which the Government of Nunavut contributed $30,000 earlier this year.

The special exploratory licence, granted in late summer, allows Nattivak to catch, for the first time, an extra 100 tonnes of turbot in area 0A near their community — and no farther than 12 miles from shore.

But a Masiliit Corp. vessel brought in to fish the extra quota, the 89-foot Baffin Sound, couldn’t find any commercial stocks of turbot in the allowable area.

So on Sept. 14, they sent a request to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans office in Iqaluit asking permission to fish about 10 to 15 miles past the 12-mile limit. DFO then forwarded the request to the NWMB, for a recommendation.

As of Nunatsiaq News press-time this week, the NWMB had not responded to that request for a recommendation. Nookiguaq said he put out at least five telephone calls and e-mails, but to no avail.

So after waiting for an answer that never came, the Baffin Sound on Sept. 16 steamed south to area OB, where she’s now fishing a regular turbot quota that Qikiqtarjuaq has held for many years.

The Baffin Sound needs to generate about $15,000 worth of revenue a day to cover its operating expenses, and can’t afford to lie idle for long.

This means that Qikiqtarjuaq can’t conduct an experiment aimed at using the Baffin Sound in tandem with a small 36-foot boat called the Gaski to help test the viability of a community-based fishery.

Under their plan, the Gaski would have acted as a feeder vessel, and the Baffin Sound would have acted as mother ship, collecting fish caught by the smaller boat, freezing it in her hold, and delivering the product to market.

The GN’s Department of the Environment gave Masiliit $30,000 to refit the Gaski for the project.

It’s the first time that Qikiqtarjuaq fishermen have been granted a licence to fish in area OA, a huge area that takes in northern Davis Strait and Baffin Bay and stretches from Cape Dyer to Ellesmere Island on the Canadian side of the boundary with Greenland.

Until now, the 10-member Baffin Fisheries Coalition has enjoyed a stranglehold on virtually all turbot quota in area OA, through allocations “recommended” by the NWMB.

Although the NWMB’s jurisdiction legally stops at the 12-mile limit, it’s DFO’s policy to accept the NWMB’s recommendations on quota allocations anywhere in Canadian waters adjacent to Nunavut.

Since the DFO almost always rubber-stamps the NWMB’s recommendations, it’s the wildife board that now wields effective decision-making power over quota allocations in Nunavut’s adjacent waters.

The 12-mile limit represents Canada’s boundary in international law, and the boundary of the Nunavut land claim settlement area. But all nations may claim an economic zone of up to 200 miles for the purpose of managing offshore natural resources, and the NWMB’s effective legal reach extends even there.

It’s within that offshore area that Qikiqtarjuaq wants to fish turbot, within a day’s sailing time from their community but in an area beyond the 12-mile limit.

The community now fears that unless they get permission to fish their OA quota there, the fish will be handed over to the BFC.

The Nattivak HTA did derive one benefit from Baffin Sound, however. On its way up from St. John’s, Nfld., the vessel carried a sealift for the HTA, which included low-cost supplies of coffee, sugar, CB radio antennas and engine parts.