 We've got some guests on the line already we want to welcome everybody back to the second day of our meeting of the committee on the assessment of equity in the distribution of fisheries management benefits. We welcome both those in the room and also those online. I don't think there's in fact I know there's nobody in the room that wasn't here yesterday so I'll go ahead and skip our safety moment. But I will cover a few housekeeping items for those that are on the line as well. Throughout the day today throughout our open session we will be using the raise hand feature to call on individuals that would like to ask any questions. And we ask that folks do keep themselves muted if they're not actively speaking, we'll try to monitor this also but we appreciate your efforts and helping keep the meeting interruption free. I think those are the two main things I wanted to mention and I can turn it over to our chair Tom Miller and then we'll do some quick introductions. Thank you Stacey and welcome to day two. We had a really full day yesterday with discussion and some really important and rich exchanges with people from each of the regions, talking about how they're approaching assessing equity in the benefits from fisheries management. We have a full day as a committee today, but the only part of our day today that is open is the presentation we're about to receive from Dr. Jennifer Silver. We'll start today by going around the committee for brief introductions. And then we will turn the presentation over to Jennifer. So, my name is Tom Miller, I'm chair of this committee I'm also a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences Chesapeake biological lab, about 60 miles south of east of Washington, DC. I'm a member of the Ocean Studies Board, and I'm also a member of the Mid-Atlantic Council's SSC. So we'll go to my left. So Kaylan, next please. Thank you, Tom. I'm an assistant professor of environmental and resource economics at Arizona State University and in the school sustainability. I'm also on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, Scientific and Statistical Committee. I'm Rashi Smila, professor at the University of British Columbia. And in addition to this committee, I also served on the one on US contribution to plastic, ocean plastic pollution. Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Steven Seifers. I'm an associate professor at the University of South Alabama in the School of Marine and Environmental Sciences and sociology, and I'm appointed to the golf councils SSC. Good morning. I'm Rachel Donkersloat and my background is in anthropology and I do most of my work in Alaska fisheries focusing especially on the social, cultural and community dimensions of our fisheries. Good morning. I'm Lisa Campbell. I'm a social scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab, and I'm also a member of the Ocean Studies Board. Good morning. Grant Murray, also a marine social scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab. Good morning. I'm Matt Reimer, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Resource Economics at UC Davis, and I also serve on the SSC for the Pacific Council. And I'm going to ask one more committee member to introduce himself. Jim. Hi, Jim Sankirico, professor at the University of California Davis in the Department of Environmental Science Policy. Thank you, Jim. Now to the staff who are supporting us, Stacey. Thank you, Stacey Karris. I'm a senior program officer with the Ocean Studies Board at the National Academies and the study director for this committee. Hi, Leanne Martin, an associate program officer on the Ocean Studies Board and working on this committee. Eric. Eric UNESCO program assistant on the Ocean Studies Board. Thank you all. So we, we've shared a lot of ideas and thoughts as a committee. But all of that experience has been US based experience and today's presenter is going to give us the benefit of her work in Canadian fisheries where they're dealing with many of the same issues. So, Jennifer, with that as an introduction. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Just to check everyone can hear okay. We can you're coming through loud and clear. Okay, very good. And I'll share slides here in a second. So hopefully that will work equally well on the first try. So thanks a lot for the invite. I'm really interested in the work that you're doing. I'll look forward to reading any reports that come out. I've skinned through some of the videos of past meetings of yours. So I'm very happy to be here today. I'm joining from Guelph, Ontario, which sits on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples in the treaty territory of the And I'm going to speak about research that is indeed focused on the Canadian context and that I've collaborated on with a colleague who I think you'll be hearing from in August perhaps from the University of Maine named Dr. And of course this work is part of a larger body of published work. And I know several people in the room today. And I'm used to going to them for questions on these sorts of topics and reading their work and so I want to acknowledge you know work of people like Rashid but also others in the Canadian context like Lynn Pinkerton and Daniel Edwards, and others who have who have studied access and benefits and fisheries for a long time. Okay, so I'm going to try to share my screen now with a short presentation. Just bear with me for one second. What can you are able to see on your end. At the moment, just you just me. Okay, let's give this a try. How's that. Here we go. Absolutely perfect. Great. Okay. You think after three years it would be smooth as butter but from time to time it's not. Okay, so moving along. I want to just, you know, this is a group of people who know the issues well but just so you have a sense for where I'm coming from. Of course, foreign financing and ownership shape industrial fisheries and seafood value chains and you may be familiar with this sort of global meta study that Auster Blominal put out in around 2015 estimating that in 2012 a group of 13 trans nationals controlled about 11 to 16% of all marine catch and 19 to 40% of catch the largest and most valuable stocks. And so of course these are large trans nationals operating with numerous subsidiaries. And I think one quote that helps to set up what I want to talk about today and the work. Their business activities usually encompass numerous nodes of the seafood value chains, and they frequently pursue quote from the paper strategic mergers with major market or quota holders via direct acquisition. So as a fisheries policy and social science researcher I'm interested in the ways that consolidation within the fisheries sector, and along seafood value chains and this includes associated patterns to do with concentration of fisheries licenses and quota impacts coastal communities and I think to this question of equity. I'll put that under the umbrella and thinking about how statewide fisheries management, elects to monitor and respond, and they do that differently or more comprehensively in the future. Okay, so moving into some of my work. And again you'll hear from Josh I think about some of this and some of the methodological details in August, but what it is involved for me. I may not show up so well on your screen but what this is is part of a very large publicly available spreadsheet that the Federal Fisheries Agency Department of Fisheries and Ocean so can we talk about them as DFO does make publicly available about license holders. So the two boxes here I've just highlighted the smaller one, there's each, each license has a unique ID, which then, then they associate with information about the holders and the vessels that use, or lease that license depending on the fishery. And so, several years ago now probably five or six, I kind of, I knew that this spreadsheet existed and thought oh wouldn't it be interesting if we could do something with this and Josh had been doing similar things although it was slightly different and probably more a bigger breadth of data available to him in Maine and so that was really the genesis of us starting to work together on this particular topic through the lens of looking at license holdings and looking at not just within single fisheries but across fisheries in the Pacific region of Canada so in one of one of our fisheries jurisdictions in Canada, where there had been lots of concerns repeatedly raised about questions to do with other licenses, a license holdings were concentrating into smaller numbers of hands. So, we published a couple pieces about this in this in scholarly literature. As I mentioned, this is an issue, the issue of concentration and also sort of just transparency in access to fisheries and license holder holding thing that's been addressed twice now in the last three or four years by parliamentary standing on fisheries and oceans so kind of one of our highest level fact finding committees and so it's, it's, yeah, this is one of the reasons why I was really excited to hear about your work and so I've been invited to speak there about this work. One of the ways that I, and this is getting towards how I often think about, you know the assessment work and monitoring work that fisheries agencies do and that scientists and social scientists right about you know we obviously have indicators that you could put under these sorts of different categories that I have labeled out here and when I present this say to fisheries and fisheries and oceans or and sort of interdisciplinary settings I often say you know like, we pay great careful attention to different indicators or criteria related to stocks to ecosystems, even arguably to the agency you know it needs to operate within its legal and budgetary frameworks. In Canada, certainly I suspect this is true in Canada. There's certain obligations and rights that need to be met with respect to indigenous nations. The harvest looking at the sort of bottom right quadrant there it has it been compliant. Is it profitable is it well timed and of high quality. But the work that I'm that Josh and I have published and then I'm going to talk a tiny little bit more about today, looking at licenses and quota help could help us understand and sort of assess fisheries management such around issues or criteria to do with transparency. So, you know, thinking about the allocation and use and transfers of licenses and quota. And under harvest sort of is it is it reflecting legislation legislative and policy prescriptions and public expectations with respect to equity. So licenses and quota I would argue are one certainly not the only way and really are a certain lens on to access and equity and fisheries but to the point I think I read and sort of part of the mandate that you have as a committee. Ideally data would be a such that it's already being collected by the agency and by virtue of having to keep track of license allocations and registrations year after year. So information that is being kept internally and some in the case of Canada some of it's being made publicly available though they're working perhaps to make more of it available but it is information that is collected and I would argue it's useful to some of these questions that that you've been asked to look into. Okay, so just a little bit of a whirlwind, although I know at least a couple of you in the room know Pacific region fisheries pretty well. But by by way of background as to how we've kind of written up these couple of papers and maybe just help to help you give, give you a sense of the detail that I can answer with respect to how management operates in this in this jurisdiction. I just wanted to point out that, of course there are many periods of use and human interaction with and management of fisheries. The ones that are really important to this work have been a period of license limitation and the introduction of it queues so it's similar to many other places in the world. And it's during this period of time where you know, certainly there are fewer and fewer vessels active in the fishery, and there are questions and coastal communities about if and in which fisheries licenses that are concentrating. I won't spend too much time on this slide but just to say, during the periods in that red box, the number of licenses first increase and then it has decreased subsequently but it kind of hit a peak in the 1990s. The number of vessels has decreased fishing power, the sort of average capacity of vessels to harvest has increased, and the number of processing entities has decreased. I won't already talked about this so this is essentially the source of data through which we look at license and a license holdings quota holdings have not been made publicly available so what I'm going to show you next are simply license holdings and we're looking across fisheries asking the question, essentially, what licenses does a holding entity have, and how does that position be active in one or more than one fishery. Okay, so this, perhaps this is helpful in the sense of like different ways that we've represented and visualize the data so these are just sort of descriptive statistics across the bottom there is license type so it gives you a sense for all the different fisheries in the Pacific region there are some fisheries for which there are very small number of licenses and the very small number of entities therefore can access the fishery through to a few fisheries where there are many more licenses which gives you more opportunity to access those fisheries. What I hope Josh will I know Josh is going to watch that watch this presentation today what I hope he'll speak to more is social network analysis for which he has the methodological expertise but essentially allows us as an as a method to ask questions about the relationship between licenses and license holders and then visualize I think in very interesting ways the relationships between licenses and holders and some of his works he's looked at the relationship between licenses and vessels. So essentially what you see here are the thicker lines or anytime there's a line that's it's an instance where an entity held that combination of licenses. And so the very thick lines are very common combinations of licenses and holding entity portfolios and then the thin lines it's maybe there's only one or two entities that hold that combination. So for anyone who has a figure like this in front of them and knows their region well you could start to make some guesses about why those combinations may be popular less popular common less common. So this is one of the most useful figure that we develop which is essentially looking at the let the portfolio license holdings by diversity of license and number of licenses so by diversity of licenses we mean the number of different fishery license types in a portfolio, and then the number of licenses is just the count of licenses in that portfolio. So I think you can probably see my pointer here right we have some very large and very diverse portfolios, and we, and this is just for one year in 2017 and then we have many more that are, you know, only have one or two license licenses and of course, to the question of how this positions license holding entities differently, you would speculate that if you had lots of licenses and lots of licenses and different types of fisheries and you have more opportunity and more yeah ability to kind of maneuver and in different fisheries or perhaps lease out licenses. I won't go through all the statistics statistics statistics here if we want to come back to these we can but essentially we talked about portfolios as being access rich or access constrained. And what we found is that there's a very small number of portfolios that account for about 26% of all licenses in that year and that that pattern is would hold pretty consistently. That period. And it was a it is a large processing entity that that holds so large on very very large like sets of licenses. Final figure here is just we also in a second paper looked at the value so in in the Pacific region licenses and quota can be transacted in market exchanges and so we're just looking at licenses again what are the market estimates if you count up all the licenses and then use market estimates of their of their value in a year. How much is that portfolio were so there's some pretty big numbers there again these two entities are actually under the same corporate umbrella so 20 over 20 million over 20 million and so this is just sort of for many people in sort of communities and in government kind of interested in like the market value and how this can present a barrier to entry for those who might want to get into fisheries if the licenses and quota are very expensive that that's can be a challenge to secure financing. So with that, again, I just sort of a breeze through some of the figures some of the ways we use this data, and I'll end there with again thanks for the invitation and happy to take any questions. Thank you very much Jennifer. I found it very interesting. I will open the floor to questions from the committee Kailin. I have a question related to your earlier sides and you don't need to pull them up or anything. I was just thinking about some of the things that you measured in your work and some of the trends that you're identifying, and you were talking about decreased number of permit holders and that that. Oh, sorry, I can't hear. Oh wait, now can you hear me. No, Jennifer, could you hear Kailin. It can wait a minute. But mine is working yours I think is working I think it's a problem with Jennifer. I think she's just back. Apologies for that. Yeah, apologies. Yeah, so back to the earlier sides, you were talking about access and you said specifically that decreased number of permit holders are active permits. Your takeaway there was that access to the fishery and the fishery resources decreased and I'm, I'm wondering if you've thought about or have work related to the sort of different dimensions of access and so I'm thinking about maybe the difference between a full and a part time job or position and just livelihoods more generally and I guess that some of your work here just made me think about within the context of this committee the different maybe dimensions of access so if you have thoughts on that I'd be very interested to hear. Yes. So overall, yes, access, by which I suppose I'm referring in this work in this work specifically is sort of like one license license access to a fishery but of course, a couple things. The license holding entity let's assume it's an owner operator who also owns and operates and runs the vessel. Access could be said to include another ways of describing access referred to the crew on the vessel right so it's not just the single license holding entity that has access to then participates in the fishery so I think that there's something for the community to think about there and and to and it's an important caveat to this work right as it is one slice at it and it doesn't fully capture without something like looking at the multiplier effect or the sort of an average a number of crew per vessel wouldn't fully capture the sort of dynamics of access. And the other thing. Well, this is very, this is very true in the Pacific region, and I suspect in other jurisdictions to where with with more. There's no regulation on slipper skippers or armchair license and quota holding entities and so access could also to the structure of access could be said to have changed a great deal where it may be that the person who owns and operates the vessel doesn't hold a license to that fishery but leases leases it from someone who does so there's also that dynamic of access which unless there's more information about how leasing works and records of that that it's very difficult to capture in the way that I've presented it quite quickly here this morning but it's certainly and also another caveat to to our work. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify because I guess we're thinking about different types of data and whether it's available or could be collected in the future. So the, the point about the sort of armchair quota or permit holders. You have that data, but it's confidential, or someone has that I don't have it and you don't have it, but I don't have that. Yeah, so the government. I would, I would assume internally there. There are records of at least at the start of the season if a license has a license holding entity has assigned that license to another vessel or or fisherman. But that's not information that I have consistently or clearly so we just kind of say we don't, we don't touch that. You would think there has to be internal records and I don't exactly know how it works in no one and in the different regions but but yeah that is a challenge it is a challenge, especially if then there's another reassignment happening midseason or something like that so it does get very tricky. Thank you. Matt, Matt Reimer. Thank you for your presentation and, in fact, you kind of got at some of the question in your answer to Kalin but I guess the first thing that struck me with your presentation was the fact that you were able to actually show a database of license holders with a name and an address and one of the themes that has kind of been part of this meeting, especially with our conversations discussions we had yesterday was just the challenge of getting personal identifying information, and thus not having information on demographics to actually think about what the distribution of equity actually is or the distribution of benefits across different stakeholders is. I was wondering, is the data set that you have a one off or is it generally the case that in Canada permits and who holds those permits and information with those permit holders is available to the public. And how does that compare to the quotas, which sounds like are confidential. Yes, so it is not a one off by which I take you didn't mean like that I've worked out an arrangement with them to work with the data. It's, it's the opposite which is that buried about three or four layers down into the DFO Pacific website, there is this spreadsheet that they do keep and it does get regularly updated and so I was what I showed you all today was a screen capture of what any Canadian could download if they had the right link and if anyone wants the link I'm happy to send it on just so you could look at it it's quite a challenging database to work with, or spreadsheet to work with. And you have to know the ins and outs of how different license rules like it, for example is in a certain fishery is a license assigned to an individual or vessel you have to know that pretty well to be able to do some of the stuff that we did so that took some time. It's interesting in the Atlantic region. I don't know that it's made it so read there's quite a bit of autonomy within the regions I think to kind of decide how and in what ways such data such as this would be made available it's not quite present for made available in the same way in the Atlantic as far as I can tell. At least into this point quotas have been are seen to be sort of closer to like business proprietary information I know. Some colleagues at UBC have pursued some records through freedom of information requests and been successful that way that's not a route that I've gone at this point. It's quite a mishmash, and it's only because I knew that the spreadsheet was there that worked with it others, I think I've worked with it in slightly different ways. There is pressure from the parliamentary committee that I mentioned on DFO to make more of a publicly searchable registry. It's something akin to like land, land registry. So it may change in the future which would be as a researcher I think oh well cool stuff we could do but from a transparency standpoint I think is also important. All right. Next up Lisa. Yeah. Yeah, hi Jen. Hi. I have a couple of questions I mean I've seen a longer version of this talk so I think one of the really interesting things in the spreadsheet is the type of license as distinguished by commercial owner or corporate owner operator Aboriginal. And with our interest in some of the equity issues I wonder if you have any sort of high level findings on what's happened at Aboriginal licenses over time that's part one. And then the other question is sort of in your work with with Parliament and speaking to the committee. And you mentioned there's like a concern about concentration and one of the things we've talked a lot about over the last day is how we have new goals for equity but but there's also a lot of different ways of thinking about equity. And if we don't define those it's sort of hard to decide if something's been equitable and I just wonder about what the concern about concentration is. In the Canadian context is that expressed as a question of equity is that a, you know, public goods commitment where is what's driving the interest in concentration in the Canadian case. Yeah, that's a great question I'll start with the first one just to say that. So in the Pacific region, the way that the federal government and DFO have been trying to pursue reconciliation indigenous reconciliation and the fisheries is to in the circle diagram network diagram that were many labeled with an F. Those are called the sort of technical umbrella term for those as a communal commercial license, which are eligible to be allocated only to First Nation business or tribal council some sort of entity. And so it can't be held by an individual and they those entities like the First Nation can decide to lease the license or quote out. But it can't it's it's essentially they can't permanently sell it so it's a it's a communally held by the nation I mean I don't know the community development quota and I'll ask us super well but maybe they're I'm sure there are some comparisons to be made there. And there are communal quota allocations as well. Yeah, it's a much longer answer to get into different ways that different nations are using those those licenses and quota. So I'll just stop there. And the concerns around concentration I think it's interesting I mean the number of the MPs so like the political players who are putting pressure on DFO around this I think that there's a certain amount of concern around sovereignty. Within Canadian waters but around food sovereignty as well and concerns about perhaps the interests whether there's interests. If foreign entities or foreign finances in Canadian fisheries how what are the, those entities and those interests wanting for Canadian fish and fisheries over time, and what's good for Canadians so the public the politicians see it some that way I believe. But then you know the committees here testimony from owner operator harvesters from coastal First Nations and community members who where the concentration piece is very much tied to retaining benefits in communities and all those concerns around that. And just the last thing I would say I suppose there's also concerns around sort of the next that everybody expresses around the next generation of fish harvesters fishermen fishermen women like if there's a barrier to access or a barrier to entry into fisheries, or it's very difficult the financial side of even transferring licenses and quota on to a family younger family member. If that doesn't see if it's so lucrative to sell, then there are challenges around that so it's that next generation piece that I think that everybody expresses concern about. Thank you, Grant. Yeah, hi Jen and thanks for the presentation. My question is about under what we call here or Noah calls underserved communities and this is a term used to sort of operationalize or think about conceptualize equity. And it's often a population with shared characteristics racial ethnic disabilities gender sexual preferences quite is quite broad. We're interested as a committee and into how to track that how benefits flow to different populations with shared characteristics. Is it possible with the databases that you have access to to do any of that work whether you've done it or not is it theoretically possible to get any of that additional demographic information to link it to these concentration processes that you've outlined. I haven't done it in mine and I bet Rashid knows Daniel Edward and Lynn Pinkerton's work. And they have one thing that they've done with this starting with the same Excel spreadsheet and like information about license holders is based on expert knowledge of the fishery and different groups of people within it. They have not labeled a subset as owner operator licenses like they saw the name and they know that that individual is owner so there are ways that other pieces of work that have started in a similar place as what I showed you today, have added in that element but that's basically doing the real hard work of sort of gleaning expert knowledge of the fishery and the participants in the fishery itself. Which I imagine which I'm sure you've all talked about of course is that information of about one's group or identity would have to be self like volunteered I suppose or like time to the census but I'm sure that there are real tight restrictions around that so that that is one that that expert knowledge of the fishery is is one way that other people have had to address that and have some published work. So I think that's one of the things that we need you next. I'm having a hard time. Yeah, yeah, you know, I always forget the mic. Also online so I was saying good to see you. Yeah, likewise. Since COVID I mean virtually. That's good. Two quick points. I think that transparency and tied it to what we're trying to do, because it's crucial and I don't think that has come up much since we started to be able to achieve what we do want to do, there has to be more transparency. In terms of data and all the things you talk about so that's good. I think it's good for our committee. And you also mentioned that the committee fisheries, the parliamentary committee is some of them are pushing for this. And I think part of the pressure is also coming from NGOs, you know, Oceana, Canada. That's one of their goals increase transparency they are on the neck of the effort all the time and that has really helped. There's a lot more data on the web that Canadians can get to access. The interesting thing is that Oceana, Oceana is actually US NGO, Ocean NGO. So who knows there might be a role in terms of trying to to push and get a small transparency in the US. So thank you for that. I think the thing you mentioned diversity or was it licenses. I found that interesting also, could you take a bit of time to explain to me and I'm sure my colleagues here a little bit more because I thought it might be a nice concept to apply here. Yes, thank you for the opportunity to elaborate on that. So we use that term in a very simple sense in the paper which is essentially within the portfolio of license holdings and an entity and I use the word entity it could be company individual nation is simply the number of different fisheries that that portfolio has licenses for. And the reason we were interested in that in the paper is that the sort of the principle starting point for our work and the argument as to why we wanted to look across all of the fisheries in the Pacific region is that it used to be the case that a fisherman, Fisher woman would have participated in numerous different fisheries. And that gave them opportunity at different times of year of course, and if one, you know one fishery one you know stock of salmon wasn't as prolific one season then it perhaps could rely on on something else a little more heavily, and so on. So, of course, with the introduction of licenses and then license limitation. And there's a lot of really great literature on on this in Alaska as well as like fishing operations become more and more constrained, unless they add more license types into their portfolio, which gives them opportunity. I don't know all those things that I was just talking about but of course there's expense associated with that because licenses in the Pacific region anyway licenses are and quota have a market value tied to them you probably need different types of gear and so on. Diversity of license holdings points to a whole bunch of different things that are probably of interest to the committee also raises questions about who at this stage of the game has the financial wherewithal to have a quite diverse portfolio. This is really cool. For example, we could use that concept grants just read virtually the underserved groups. So you could look at this diversity of license in terms of those groups and we'll be able to say something really useful of the current situation and also what is the potential future we could see yeah go ahead. Yeah, no just to follow up and say that with this ties together your points and then Lisa's question about the indigenous license holdings is that we can see in the holdings of First Nations that they're trying to build that diverse portfolio as they work through reconciliation negotiations and processes with the federal government. Most of them are well aware of this principle and are trying to build portfolios that are diverse. And so, if there is, you know, I don't, I think there are challenges and limitations to this approach to reconciliation that the government is taking but if there's a silver lining to it, one big one I can see is it's creating opportunity for nations to build diverse portfolios. Rachel please. Thanks. Thanks Jennifer for such a interesting talk. I had a question about the database that you are able to work with because one of the challenges we've heard in some of the regions is a lot of the papers I've read around BC fisheries have to do with corporate ownership and some of the challenges you're talking Is there a way within the database to document like owner operator family fishing opportunities or operations that have been set up as say an LLC that might be might be listed, you know as a corporation but it's still like an owner operator active participant in the fishery. Are you able to tease that apart or would those be corporate as well or Yeah, we wouldn't be able I wouldn't and haven't been able to and to clarify like we I haven't put categories. It's other work that was did the work of like interviewing people in the fishery who know the owner operators who would have been able to say Not even though that's an LLC I know the vessel, the person who owns that vessel like that was the work that Daniel Edwards and other people did to kind of of the spreadsheet I showed you hone in on the ones that they believed and their expert advisors believe to be all the owner operators but that's the only way that I know of anyhow that it's that. Everything out has been done on the spreadsheet that I showed yeah. Okay, I mean the flip side is that you can see. You can see entities that are clearly like investment firms to in the names. Okay, and then with the data you have access to with that registry, you can see who's active or latent was that one of the columns or. So like for fisheries where the license can be assigned to a different vessel, you can see that. But it doesn't tell me the nature of the relation like you can put you can assume it's a leasing relationship, but I, we didn't go so far as to report on that. Okay, gotcha. Thanks. Yes. Before we go back to second questions is there anyone on the committee who's not asked a question who wants to. Well, while the two peoples about that let me ask mine. So, Jennifer, the figure with the five, sorry, six different circles with the different companies that have multiple licenses. How long did that take to evolve so if you went back a decade would that figure look broadly the same or has this been a recent sort of rapid expansion of license ownership. Great question. Another limitation to the data set is that I, because of course, as you wanted to look I wanted we wanted to look over time, we wanted to be able to show these sort of change over time figures. And so we kind of to do triangulation or just make sure we could be confident in doing that, we kind of like went back into the spreadsheet and then went to reported numbers and licenses that are in other reports of different fisheries and we started to notice discrepancies. And so the, we were only comfortable using the current year because what I think what happens, this is going to get real technical and maybe some people's eyes will glaze over but the way that that spreadsheet is populated is that each year when the person who holds the license that registers it for the year, then it populates a row in that spreadsheet. So I don't think there's an actual human. Keeping that up to date and so it, for whatever reason like that I don't I've never been able to get a good answer on all the numbers we were very confident in the given year in which we were working, because that was the year that all the licenses had been registered and they were showing up in the spreadsheet. I'm not able to go back in a confident way in time. So that's the caveat I mean what what we know from other published literature and just from it from what communities say what from what First Nations say that this concentration. The license limitation started in the late 60s early 70s it started somewhat then, but really it was like the 90s. When, when it seems to have started to change rapidly. And so each fishery would have a slightly different story, which would, I could, you know, if any of us ever have coffee or beer sometime I'm happy to tell you more about but I think the 90s is really when it starts to escalate. Great. Thank you. Second round, given time, relatively quick questions I hope, Caitlin. Yeah I'm thinking back to the first slide that you put up Jennifer which was, I believe it's a global figure related to consolidations from across global seafood supply chains. What you're doing within the context of this group is thinking beyond just the harvesting sector. And so I'm thinking about that early slide that you put up but then the later presentation that I think if I'm characterizing things right is exclusively focused on the harvesting sector. And so I'm wondering if in Canada you or others or if there's work that you're aware of that is looking at some of the same sort of consolidation issues that you're raising in the harvesting sector. Like getting into processing and distribution. I think, yeah, so definitely processing distribution. And I think we're thinking about community level outcomes as well. And one thing we've been asking other folks is if there are potential beneficiaries, official management actions beyond just those harvesters and we're trying to think about what that group would look like or what a figure of that would look like. Yeah, well a feature of the Pacific region fisheries in Canada is that there's significant consolidation in the processing sector such that there's really one large one that's, I mean there are other, you know, there are other processing facilities but mostly held by smaller companies. And there was a period of time in the, well, even from the period at which BC entered into Canada, you know, so like in the 18 late mid late 1800s, lots of small processing facilities and then they've consolidated and consolidated. So, yeah, so in, I think that would be the feature the way that that looks in jurisdiction to jurisdiction is different, although I mean that what the Austroblom et al paper reminds us is that the pressure is always there. Any kind of processing like transnational that's involved in the seafood value chain that's large and powerful to expand its reach and to expand its capacities like that the sort of buying up the competitors are buying up capacity as part of the game I think is that that's what the Austroblom et al piece reminds me. So that pressure is there and it's a matter in our region how it's regulated or not or how like resistance among fishing communities plays out or not so that's what I would say about that I think it's. Yeah. And then how to kind of represent beyond the capture within communities I mean I think it's like the multiplier effect type calculation so I don't have advice. I haven't done that type of work before so I don't have good advice for you there. And last question to Lisa. Yeah, I just trying to think about the quota issue and if we can think at all about licenses as a proxy for quota or is that just too dangerous, or have you tried to you know estimate. I mean you're trying to estimate the value of the license itself but do we have to just completely separate that from quota. Yeah, so I appreciated Rashid raising the work of NGOs in this ocean as really important another one Eco Trust Canada. Very important partner to me in this work and colleagues in that organization and another one called T bucks is okay remind me all the time like whenever you present this work whenever you write it up make sure that it's clear that quota are not part of what you're presenting and that really what you're presenting is a tip of an iceberg because quota in some fisheries can be even more quota holdings and entities quota holdings are more valuable than the license holdings, and they are transacted, like the ground specific region. That's how they, they have transfer quota to take care of things like bycatch and so on like there's a very complicated system such that transaction leasing and transacting quota is happening all the time in season and so it's a whole other ballgame so I would be very hesitant to suggest that licenses could be taken as a proxy for quota. Well, Jennifer on behalf of the committee thank you for your time thank you for a great presentation and a really rich and helpful discussion. I would just like to finish by congratulating you and your colleagues on the clarity of the figures and the graphics I think this is a case of art in science in some some way I think they came across as well a very powerful mess message the way they've been presented so thank you very much for your time this morning. Yeah, thank you for those kind words and for all the great questions and your hard work I will look forward to reading the outcomes from your, your findings. Take care everyone. That ends our open session for today, and we will go into closed session for the rest of the day thank you all very much for those who are on the zoom call. I could just make a quick point before we, where we close the zoom I just want to remind folks, we do have another open session meeting scheduled for August 14th or 16th. Folks are welcome to join that as well. That does not preclude anybody from submitting any additional input to the committee and writing through me. And note I'll make as we do have to make available to the public upon request any information we receive. But with that said, we really appreciate everybody's attention to this project and we welcome any additional feedback they would like to provide.