For many communities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, commercial fishing has all but disappeared as an economic activity for the once robust and independent small-boat fleet. 

There are two contrasting realities in Canada on the matter of support for fishing communities and the small boat fleet that supports these communities: the reality of the Atlantic coast and its contrast on the Pacific coast. On Canada’s Atlantic coast the history of corporate control of fishers and their communities by processors has had a long and miserable history.

It was for this reason that in the late 1970s, Romeo LeBlanc, the then Canadian minister of fisheries, adopted two major policies in the Atlantic region to complement Canada’s extension of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) to 200 nautical miles and the coming into force of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). These two policies were: fleet separation and owner operation. Fleet separation was a policy to limit corporate fishing licences to vessels over 65 feet (20 metres) in length and prevent vertical integration of processing and fishing for what is known as the ‘inshore fishery’, that is, vessels of under 65 feet. Furthermore every vessel under 65 feet had to be owned and operated by an active fisher.