Since the early 1980s, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) licensing policy for inshore and mid-shore fishing enterprises on Canada’s East Coast have been structured around the fleet separation and owner-operator policies. The former dictates that companies that process fish cannot own and operate fishing vessels in the most valuable nearshore fisheries (lobster, snow crab, most groundfish, etc.). The latter requires that the owner of a licence or quota in these fisheries has to be on deck operating the boat that fishes them. An enterprise owner can’t hire someone else to fish their licence and they can’t lease it out for profit. The expressed purpose of these policies, reaffirmed by successive DFO ministers over four decades, is to ensure that the ...
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