Ulaakut, Chair and honourable members.

Toddiuvunga. My name is Todd Russell. I'm a proud Inuk and the president of the NunatuKavut Community Council, or NCC, representing approximately 7,000 Inuit from south and central Labrador.

NunatuKavut means “our ancient land” and refers to our ancestral territory. Our ancestors have had a close and intimate relationship with the land, ice and waters of NunatuKavut since time immemorial, certainly long before European contact. NunatuKavut Inuit are the beneficiaries of the British-Inuit Peace Treaty of 1765. This treaty is well documented. As a people, we uphold and celebrate it today.

My people in NunatuKavut have relied on marine resources tracing back to antiquity, with northern cod subsistence and commercial harvesting deeply embedded in our history and culture. It is also well documented that our ancestors stopped to fish cod on the way to the treaty event itself. The survival of NCC's fishery and our future prosperity hinge on access to and allocation of northern cod and other marine resources adjacent to NunatuKavut.

Communities like Black Tickle, Mary's Harbour, the historic site of Battle Harbour and the many fishing places along our coast—Chateau Bay, Seal Islands, Indian Tickle, Grady, Cartwright and on to Fish Cove Point—contain irrefutable evidence of our Inuit forebears and the places where they pursued and we today continue to pursue our livelihoods. Our attachment with, dependence on and adjacency to the northern cod resource are indisputable.

The NunatuKavut Community Council has never accepted the contemporary history of the allocation approach for northern cod. That approach, in our opinion, ensured the decline of our communities, marginalization and lost opportunities. It was an embarrassment that defies what is expected under the norms of equitable fisheries management. The minister's decision of June 26, 2024, was an important step in recognizing and redressing very long-standing issues for NunatuKavut, Inuit and other peoples residing on the Labrador coast.

I would like to take a brief minute to provide some historical context.

The post-1900 era in the Atlantic Canadian fisheries, particularly off NunatuKavut, was marked by the arrival of rapacious industrialized fishing that interrupted hundreds of years of fisheries in NunatuKavut. Foreign factory fleets descended on the Hamilton Bank after World War II, through to the late 1960s, pillaging the great cod resource off our shores. Canada's offshore fleet followed in the late 1970s. This later effort was coincident with a confluence of public policy and other decisions that resulted in the repeated financial collapse of the offshore sector, underperforming inshore fisheries, attendant fishery restructuring and the declaration of the 200-mile limit, to name a few.

However, none of this restructuring or allocation of vast quantities of fish in NAFO division 2J was to lift up the historically disadvantaged communities in NunatuKavut.

The state or health of the northern cod stock has always been under debate, and so it is today. There is never absolute certainty, but the NCC is comfortable with the minister's conservative TAC level for 2024, and in the science and management process we engaged in this past year. Over the past five years, the catch has gone up annually while the snow crab and shrimp fisheries have declined. Bringing back the cod fishery has already been extremely meaningful for our communities. Hundreds of our people are engaged in the fishery again along the coast of Labrador—in harvesting and processing, and in managing and administrating the fishery. This has brought hope and optimism back to our communities. The fishery itself has even given rise to housing starts in our little fishing communities. It really is a historical time.

When it comes to codfish, let's look at history again and today. The historical catch and scientific records confirm one thing: The preponderance of the northern cod resource has an affinity with the NunatuKavut coast. From the seventies to the eighties, it has averaged over 40% of the northern cod biomass observed in NAFO division 2J. Almost 35 years later, it is back to 50% of the biomass and 60% of the abundance observed off NunatuKavut.

The mere fact that the resource occurs predominantly off NunatuKavut—we are adjacent—is a sufficient premise within accepted resource management practices to allocate a substantial percentage of the resource to the NunatuKavut Community Council and our fishers.

The resource base currently available to the NCC and to our fleet, which is composed predominantly of NCC member harvesters, is now limited to small quantities of snow crab, northern shrimp and northern cod, with the latter becoming of greater significance over the past five years as shellfish quotas have been severely reduced. Other pelagic species and lobster are not found in much abundance off the coast of Labrador. It is cod and other groundfish adjacent to NunatuKavut that will matter to NCC harvesters and processors for the foreseeable future.

The NCC does not take away the rightful access of other interests to northern cod, but as you can appreciate from this retrospective, we are unwilling to concede our position on adjacency, priority access and allocations of this resource.

Despite much resistance, litigation and persistence, indigenous groups, including ours, are now being included in these allocation decisions—