Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue 9 - Evidence, October 24, 2005 - Morning meeting
VANCOUVER, Monday, October 24, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 8:31 a.m. to examine and report on issues relating to the federal government's new and evolving policy framework for managing Canada's fisheries and oceans.
Senator Gerald J. Comeau (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I would like to welcome our first witnesses this morning. From EcoTrust Canada we have Eric Enno Tamm, the communications manager, and Danielle Edwards, who is the manager. The committee is currently looking at the impact of the plans and policies that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans plans are trying to implement. The committee is looking at the impact of those plans on coastal communities, vessel crews, deck crews, and so on — those people that for some reason seem to be neglected whenever decisions are made in that the department tends to look strictly at the licence holders. I imagine that EcoTrust has been looking at this area, judging from what I have read of your work in the past. I have seen some of your work, it has some interesting statistics. You approached the subject in a way that is interest to us as a committee, so that is why we look forward to your presentation and possibly questions and answers. I believe you have an opening statement.
Eric Enno Tamm, Communications Manager, EcoTrust Canada: To give you a little background, EcoTrust Canada is a non-profit organization based here in Vancouver. Our purpose is to build a conservation economy, that is, an economy in which economic development improves rather than degrades social and economic conditions. We talk about the triple bottom line — social, economic and ecological values — and we try to bring that perspective to all our work.
About a year ago, we published with our sister organization in the United States called EcoTrust, Catch-22: Conversation, Communities and the Privatization of B.C. Fisheries, which I know the senate committee is well aware of. Since we published that report, there has been a lot of interest in it. It was really a seminal study.
A lot of our research is still ongoing, and Ms. Edwards can talk more about that. There has been interest across Canada, and actually even in the United States. On October 12, I was in Washington D.C. giving a presentation to a congressional ocean caucus because they are looking at putting national standards in their fisheries for how they manage quotas. They are looking at the experiences abroad and the experiences in Canada. I think what is unique about the research that we have done is that we have been one of the only organizations to try to quantify the social and economic impacts of a lot of these changes in the fisheries and how they impact communities.
I would like now to pass over the presentation to Danielle Edwards, who is an independent consultant and marine biologist, and a wizard with data and statistics. She will run through briefly some of our findings but also some of the recommendations in the report.
Danielle Edwards, Independent Fisheries Consultant, EcoTrust Canada: I will talk to you today about a project that was begun three years ago to quantify the effects of licensing policy in British Columbia. We focused on changes in the number and distribution of licences. We found that licences are being lost from rural communities and are being concentrated into urban areas. That is a quick message from that study. Over the period of 1994 to 2000 all rural fishing communities in B.C. lost licences, and many of those communities lost over half their licences. As an example, Ucluelet, which is my hometown — I am from a fishing family there — had 80 licences in 1994 and 32 licences in 2002. Ten of those licences were salmon troll licences, and since then, we have lost three more. We are down to seven. It is a continuous one-way movement of licences out of these small communities and into the urban centres, and into fewer and fewer hands.
Licensing policy that requires additional investments by fishermen to continue fishing results in concentration and movement to urban centres. This movement is a direct function of who has access to capital, and urban-based companies are favoured by this. People in rural coastal communities have lower average incomes, higher unemployment, and housing values that are substantially less, so they do not have the collateral to borrow against to buy more licences. There are few other options for employment when fishing opportunities are cut.
Quotas are not alone in causing this problem. Many problems began with more accretion and more and more specialized licences. They were made worse still by the Pacific Salmon Revitalization Plan that became infamously known as the Mifflin Plan, which cut access and required fishermen to buy additional licences if they wanted to continue fishing. The concentration of licences in the hands of the few in urban centres was allowed to happen because there are almost no rules governing ownership, no caps on concentration and no owner-operator provision.
I believe we must identify what we want from our fisheries and then evaluate policy for how well those objectives will be met. We do not have a clear direction or a clear management goal for the Canada-specific fisheries. What is it being managed for? This question is fair, but not one that is readily answered because we hear very different ideas from the department, but no unified message. We hear about economic efficiency, per capita earnings, ease of management and vague conservation goals. We do not hear about the health of coastal communities. We do not hear about what it means to fishing-dependent communities when they lose access. We do not hear about adjacency and the idea that communities that are next to these resources need to have access and a connection to those resources. We do not hear that when those adjacent communities are disconnected and suffering, we will never be able to claim success in fishing management. Yet every policy to date seems to favour this urban concentration.
Further quota implementation will only continue this trend towards corporate concentration and absentee ownership, giving away Canada's public resources to a few individuals so they can become wealthy. That is what quota does, at least as it has been implemented thus far in Canada. We do not have clearly articulated management objectives governing policy, and we have no regional or national standards to ensure that those objectives will be met, whatever they are.
More than 80 per cent of the halibut is taken from the North Coast region of B.C., and yet less than 9 per cent of quota is owned there. Three-quarters of the halibut quota is leased annually, and up to 70 per cent of the landed value goes to the quota owner. New entrants into the fishery are saddled with enormous debt loads because of the cost to purchase licences and quota, to the point that there are almost no new entrants into the fishery. Recent work by the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters put the average age of skippers at 55. This is not a healthy industry. This is not the sign of a strong future for this industry.
We need clear management objectives, and ones that value the roles of communities in sustainable fisheries, and we need policies that implement these objectives. We need owner-operator, corporate concentration limits, and limits on leasing. In the short term, we need programs that mitigate the damage that has already been done to help bring back fishing opportunities to these communities that so desperately need them and to a generation of disenfranchised youth in these communities.
We need this process to be transparent, because an alarming development in recent years has been the privatization of catch data. Citing the need to protect businesses, DFO refuses to release any detailed catch data for the quota fisheries, and we cannot even find out where fish are being caught and when. This is part of a dangerous move to hide information from the Canadian public, to prevent independent researchers from evaluating fisheries activity and fish stock health. This practice further entrenches the position that the fish under the jurisdiction of Canada can be given away and owned by individuals and companies, and that all information about those fish belongs to those individuals and not to Canadians.
One of the great benefits of quotas is this idea is that is great for promoting conservation and responsibility. The idea that ownership necessarily promotes stewardship is spurious. We have seen it in other places around the world, such as New Zealand, with long-live species that reproduce at low rates, such as many of our groundfish and rockfish species. It makes more financial sense to fish the stock out to extinction in the short term than to sustain it over a long term at low levels of harvest. For a company to get a large amount of money in the short term and reinvest it in another business, that is the way to go.
We cannot expect that an economic system such as quotas will satisfy all our management objectives, unless those objectives are simply about maximizing short-term financial gain. Quotas will never replace the need for fishery science and management. We will never have long-term sustainability in our fishing industry if we have quotas implemented without clearly articulated conservation and social objectives, and policies in place to ensure that those objectives are met.
Other jurisdictions have recognized this need to balance economic goals with social objectives. Alaska has a strong quota fishery in sablefish and halibut, and they also have owner-operators. They take it seriously. They enforce it, and there are big fines if you disobey that policy. They also have a monopoly on competition laws that have real teeth as well, and again are enforced.
In the Pacific Region, social objectives have not only taken a back seat, but they have fallen off the table. We need to make fisheries work, and we need to make them work for the people of Canada and for the people who rely on fisheries. If quota works for a fishery it may be an option, but it certainly will not work for all fisheries. Quotas lead to corporate concentration and disconnection between ownership and stewardship, and to the loss of adjacency. Communities need to be heard and listened to. I want to be clear that when I talk about communities, I mean communities of place. I am not talking about interest groups or stakeholder groups. Communities of place must be empowered to do work. A good example is the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board. It must be given the opportunity to work. It has been hobbled from the beginning and every effort has been made by DFO to marginalize and ultimately destroy it. That cannot be allowed to happen because we need that organization and we need more along the coast.
We need policies that promote healthy fisheries and healthy coastal communities. That can mean owner-operator and corporate concentration limits, transparency in fisheries management, publicly available data on licence ownership and catch data. Independent research must be encouraged, not stifled. I see a bright future for our communities and our fisheries, and I know we have a long way to go to get there, but I think we can get there if the policies are implemented that I talked about today.
Senator Hubley: Going well back into the presentation I heard, ``national standards in fishery policy,'' and close to the end of your presentation you listed some. How do you see those standards coming about? Who do we have to convince first, who do we have to change and what has to change before we can put those values into a fisheries policy?
Ms. Edwards: First, you want to look at owner-operators as a policy. Many of the active fishermen in B.C. right now strongly support that. It has a lot of movement with the people who are not listened to by DFO: people who fish licences, crew people, people who fish other people's quota and boats. A beginning would be to broaden the consultation framework to include those people. Right now if you own the licence you have a voice, and if you do not, you do not exist. That is one of the first steps towards having the discussion around what kind of standards need to be in place, and giving those people the voice to actually tell you, DFO and the government what they really need.
Mr. Tamm: There has been vigorous debate in the United States about national standards, but it has been virtually silence in a vacuum here in Canada. Social objectives are not part of fisheries management. There is no discussion of trying to integrate all these values at all. I understand that the department is looking at revising the Fisheries Act, and there are possibilities of implementing some types of national standards or basic objectives. What are the objectives of Canadian fisheries? This is what the United States is currently doing. It is renewing what is effectively its fisheries act, called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Congressman Tom Allen from Maine has put forward some amendments to bring in national standards. In the U.S. it seems a cross-partisan issue. The Democrats in New England are pushing for national standards. As Ms. Edwards said about Alaska, a lot of Republicans have been pushing for things such as community quotas and owner-operators, because they see it as about small business, the individualistic approach.
Politicians in Canada could help kick start the debate. It is up to Parliament. People elect parliamentarians to set out national standards and guide how we use our public resources. I would like perhaps to see both the Senate and the House of Commons take up this issue.
Senator Hubley: One important segment that I did not hear too clearly in your presentation has to do with processing. Is there any way that having a designated quota to a community will then support the processing facilities that in our part of the country we see declining and closing, losing many jobs within that community? The fishermen are impacted, but many women and young people work in those plants. It is seasonal employment, which we are all about in our part of the world. Do you have any thoughts on bringing to communities that designated quota, and the impact it might have on revitalizing these fishing communities?
Ms. Edwards: A good example of how that has impacted us is, again, my hometown of Ucluelet where we have three hake processing plants and all but one shut down two years ago. For a community of about 1,600 people, this was about 300 jobs. It was not that there were no fish, and it was not that people were not fishing them. DFO allowed that fish to be landed in a joint venture with offshore processors. It was really about some fishermen who owned quota saying, ``We can make more money if we can send it there, because they have lower costs and lower employment standards. They can do it cheaper and we get more money.'' An important part of that was left out, and that was the community.
The Chairman: Where were the fish going to be landed or processed?
Ms. Edwards: They were landed in Ucluelet.
The Chairman: Where are they diverted to now?
Ms. Edwards: To offshore fishing boats: yes, actual boats.
Mr. Tamm: The vessels were foreign vessels. They were not Canadian vessels. I will add that in the ground fishery we are seeing a new development, and that is super trawlers, factory processors, that are owned in Canada. This year, I think it is called the Osprey I, which is formerly a Danish trawler, has been brought to British Columbia and is now fishing and processing at sea. It is five times larger than the next largest trawler in the B.C. fishing fleet, and they are processing offshore. A lot of women, a lot of Aboriginal people and a lot of people in their forties and fifties work in on-shore processing. A 55-year-old Aboriginal woman cannot go onto the high seas onto a factory ship. It is not realistic. You are seeing this development of these massive trawlers and there is no public discussion. The vessel is so large that it is not even clear how they got a licence. Obviously, DFO tinkered with some of the regulations perhaps, or they got some sort of an exception, because I do not think there is a groundfish trawl licence that big. Maybe Ms. Edwards knows.
Ms. Edwards: They have the ability to put things on, such as an increase up to 25 per cent. I think they had to find the biggest licence in B.C. and then with that extra allowance it was able to operate, but it is unclear. Again the issue of transparency — it is hard for us to know exactly what happened because it is hidden from us.
Senator Hubley: Let us go back to that for a moment. If they received that licensing, does that mean that other communities would have lost licensing? You mentioned that licences have been lost in your community. Did they go somewhere else? Was it convenient for your people to sell those licences? Did they get any gain from the sale of the licence when you say you lose a licence? Let us know what happens in that situation?
Ms. Edwards: We have had dismal salmon run for the last number of years, and a low income for people, so when people rely on that each year they are faced with the option of losing everything to the bank or selling a licence for $100,000 and trying to do something else, oftentimes at 50 years old. It is not a nice choice. It is lose everything or have something. When we lose licences people are forced to sell, and it is not by choice. I know many of these people, and people within my own family who have had this hard decision to make. My father had to sell his salmon licence last year. That was hard for all of us: for me and my brother who still fishes, because for generations now we have done salmon fishing. We sell, we get some money back but it is not because we want to. It is because we have no choice.
The Chairman: I have one clarification on the at-sea factory processing. Are those people doing the processing on the vessel Canadians or are they following the kind of New Zealand model where they use people from offshore, such as foreigners?
Mr. Tamm: To my knowledge, the vessels are crewed by Canadians and there are no migrant workers. I should also add one small clarification. To my understanding there are restrictions on processing at sea. You cannot fillet a fish at sea. However, you can head and gut: Cut the head off, gut it, even package it and freeze it on board. Then, the only thing left when you get to shore is putting it in a container and shipping it off, so effectively all the processing is done at sea. I am worried now that some of these big factory ships will lobby to do filleting on board, and even more processing. Perhaps there should be processing at sea, but there needs to be a public discussion about this. Maybe there are economic reasons, maybe there are not. There is no public discussion. This stuff happens and nobody even knows about it.
Senator Adams: That sounds familiar. In Nunavut, we settled the land claim in 1993. I have been on this Senate fisheries committee for about 20 years. Somehow, at the beginning before we settled the land claim, policies were set up at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for Nunavut and the Arctic. We have the same difficulty as the Arctic right now. The foreigners have taken all that is supposed to go to the economy and the benefit of the community. Your non- profit organization is concerned about the people, the fishermen, the economy and the community. That is why I say the same thing is happening in the communities in Nunavut. Coast to coast, we have 26 communities, with only one community on the mainland. The rest of the communities are all on the coast, along the Hudson Bay and on Baffin Island, on the west side. The Inuit do not like living on the mainland because we are concerned about the mammals we eat, seals, fish and caribou. Sometimes the caribou come close to the communities. DFO has set up two areas called OA and OB. We have a quota set up by Ottawa and the minister in area OA of 4,000 metric tonnes in area OB, about 1,500 metric tonnes, and 2,500 metric tonnes of cold water shrimps. I think in the beginning, in 2002 only three communities had the quotas that were arrived at somehow between the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, DFO and Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, NTI. The NTI looks after the $500 million trust fund from the land claim agreement between Ottawa and Nunavut. Sometimes we have difficulty. Ottawa's bureaucrats do not even know how the land claims agreement works and they are the people supposed to be administering it.
At the beginning, an organization was set up called the Baffin Fisheries Coalition, BFC. The BFC has 11 Inuit directors selected by the community hunter and trapper associations. Somehow, after the land claim settlement, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board got the licence from DFO for 4,000 metric tonnes in area OA and between 1,500 and 2,500 metric tonnes in area OB, and they gave the licence to the BFC. The BFC, with 11 Inuit directors, hired somebody outside the community to operate the fishery. The guy BFC hired was operating the fishery from Newfoundland. Now, they are bringing in foreigners from Iceland, Denmark and other European countries people to catch their quotas. Every time the minister says these quotas are Nunavut quotas. If there are plans for the Nunavut quotas, these plans should be discussed with the communities. Those organizations are the only ones making profit and the quotas are doing nothing for the economies of the communities. Is your organization able to help those people in the communities to stop foreigners from coming in to take away the fish? How are we going to stop those people in the meantime? The communities do not have a licence. DFO gives the licences to the BFC, and BFC hires foreigners to get the quotas of turbot. The turbot is a nice cold water fish. Is a very difficult to watch this practice. We have the same troubles in Nunavut as those in British Columbia. How do we benefit more people in the community and not the foreigners? We settled the land claim to make sure we could control our economy and the fisheries. We cannot control them now because the foreigners have taken over. How do you feel about that? Is it the same in B.C.?
Mr. Tamm: I think you have identified a dangerous trend in the fisheries. About three weeks ago I got a briefing from the department on some of their ideas around mending the Fisheries Act. It seems to me the department wants to delegate responsibility or provide licences to industry groups, which sometimes could be First Nations, who would then delegate them. To me, there are no standards about what the objectives of the allocation policies or the management policies, et cetera, should be. I think we also have to remind ourselves that this is not about communities, such as rural communities versus urban communities. This is about creating economic viability for communities. That does not mean communities will get all the fish, but there needs to be some way for them to participate in the harvesting, ownership and management.
On the West Coast of Vancouver Island, DFO along with the First Nations, the local government and the province set up the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board, which has never been able to meet its mandate partly because it has been hampered by the department. However, there are mechanisms in a whole variety of ways to increase responsibility and ownership by communities. These mechanisms need to be articulated clearly by Parliament. It seems to me the bureaucrats are operating without any compass. They do what meets their objectives, but there needs to be oversight by the Parliament of Canada giving clear objectives of who needs to benefit from fisheries. Is it a national priority, a national standard, that working crews get paid fairly for going out and catching fish? Is that something that the Canadian Parliament should support and put into legislation? Maybe it should be. You need a basic objective, and there is a whole variety of ways of meeting that. Ms. Edwards mentioned owner-operator principal, limits on corporate concentration and community quotas. There are so many options to design the system so that it works for communities, companies and even people in the urban communities.
Senator Cowan: From what I have heard and read, we have to go back to what is the mandate of DFO? To put it simply, it seems to me that DFO takes a narrow view of its mandate, which seems to exclude the communities and the economic viability of coastal communities, smaller communities not only on this coast but on the East Coast as well. They are looking at conservation and not at employment and the viability of these communities. When you talk about the lack of consultation, does that not get back to the mandate? If DFO, rightly or wrongly, views its mandate as being as narrow as I have oversimplified it to be, then that is the reason why they are not consulting more broadly in terms of their narrow mandate as they see it. They would see, and you spoke a moment ago about delegation, that it is probably easier to deal with a single group and say, you manage your members and we will hold you accountable for the system. If you do not include these broader bases, because it seems to me if the Department of Fisheries and Oceans excludes considerations of community viability from its mandate and from its work, then some other arm of government, and all of us as taxpayers, have to step in and be responsible through some other agency of government for those who are disadvantaged when communities fail, plants close or whatever. Am I correct that at the root of your concern is the narrow mandate either as it in fact exists or as it is interpreted to be by DFO? If that mandate were widened, or if DFO were to accept a wider interpretation of its mandate, then some of the partners and parties who are undoubtedly affected by their decisions would be involved in the discussion; is that true?
Ms. Edwards: I think that covers a large part of it. A lot of the mandate is very narrow. I do not think you oversimplified the department's interpretation of the mandate. They have a simple interpretation, and I think that is a large part of the problem. Some things are not covered in the mandate, such as entrenching the fisheries as a public resource. A big concern lately has been this locking down of data and hiding what is happening on the oceans from the Canadian public. There is no clear mandate on the data issue. So far as I have been able to find out, there is not even a policy on it. Part of the problem is their narrow interpretation of a mandate, and part of it is that the mandate does not exist in some respects. I think it is a combination.
Mr. Tamm: I think that the fisheries are working as far as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the officials in the department are concerned. Since the early 1990s the department's budget has been cut severely. They merged and downsized the Canadian Coast Guard and fisheries fleets. They have fewer staff. We all know about enforcement problems that were in the headlines this summer. As a result, the department tried to run a more efficient fishery, reduce the cost of enforcement and reduce the cost of administration.
How do you do that? Rationalize the fishing fleet. Consolidate it into small groups and small players. Get rid of all the small boats. You do not need fisheries vessels out chasing them around. Consolidate, and not only that, boost the economic viability of the remaining ones. In fact, give them a windfall profit and then claw back some of that revenue through new management fees and through a full cost recovery on science and monitoring. The department not only reduces its cost of managing the fishery, but has clawed back a whole bunch of money. I am sure the Treasury Board of Canada thinks of the department as one of its favoured sons in Ottawa because of how much they are shifting the burden on cost recovery and stuff.
The one thing that is rarely discussed is, what are the objectives and motives of the bureaucrats in the departments? In some respects, the department is just meeting objectives set by Treasury Board and the Parliament of Canada. There has been a lot of concern, and I think some of the other conservation groups today might talk about science and budgets, and that sort of thing.
Senator Cowan: I have one other question on an unrelated matter. You talked about the difficulty of access to capital and how it leads to corporate concentration and urbanization. I can understand why larger firms have easier access to capital and it is difficult for single owner-operators probably, but I am not sure why the connection to the urbanization. What is the connection there? Is it just that larger concerns tend to be located in urban centres?
Ms. Edwards: No, it is actually twofold. One is employment opportunities. If you have a bad fishing season, and if you are in a city there are a lot more jobs there. In a lot of small towns in October, there is no chance of getting a job in any industry doing anything. There is that reality in a city, the ability to move into other industries when times are tough. The other big issue is housing values. We have seen two things happen. One is that people living in Vancouver, for instance, have, on average, a $400,000 house.
Mr. Tamm: It is $500,000 now.
Senator Cowan: That was last week.
Ms. Edwards: They can take a loan out on that house and use it as collateral to reinvest in the industry and get more profitable, whereas in many small towns the average house is worth $80,000, so you do not have the collateral. For First Nations living on reserve it is a much worse situation because they do not even have fee simple house ownership there so there is nothing they can borrow against. These issues have favoured urban versus rural ownership.
Senator Cowan: At one point, somebody suggested that it was as simple as being under the British Columbia company system — that is where the companies are registered — and that did not make any sense to me.
Ms. Edwards: No, it is not.
Senator Cowan: It is not just registration — the company head office formal registration — but where they are located.
The Chairman: I have a couple of points and then a couple of questions. Number one, to the question of standards, we made the statement our 1998 report, Privatization and Quota Licensing in Canada's Fisheries:
Property rights-based fisheries would appear to be the federal government's preferred management option; yet there is no national policy (or set of guidelines) on their design or implementation, nor has there ever been a public or parliamentary debate on the matter.
So you were dead on when you mentioned this.
In May, 2005, a second recommendation of this committee was as follows:
The committee recommends that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans take into consideration the socio- economic impact of its major decision.
Our own comments back in 1998 and May 2005 echo very well what you brought up this morning.
I have a couple of questions. They may not all be related. During the so-called consultation process of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which has been undertaken recently and I think is still ongoing, has your group been consulted? Has your group been approached?
Mr. Tamm: I participated in an information session about, for instance, the potential changes in the Fisheries Act. As well, EcoTrust Canada is a member of the Marine Conservation Caucus, which receives funding from the department to hold consultations for the environmental and conservation community, similar to the Sports Fishery Advisory Board, which I believe also gets funding from the department.
The Chairman: I am looking specifically at the question of the policy as proposed by the Pearse-McRae report, which basically says privatize the darned thing and get it over with. Have you been consulted on that particular aspect of the direction of the department, the impact on communities?
Mr. Tamm: I would say not. For instance, Peter Pearse and Don McRae did not talk to the conservation community to my knowledge. I went to the press conference when the department made its response to the Pearse-McRae report. Prior to that, my organization had not been consulted.
The Chairman: The second question is on the department's preferred option, which appears to be privatization and individual transferable quotas, ITQs. Has your group looked at an alternative, and I am not saying specifically just the aquatic management board here, but other alternative models to ITQs for a fishery?
Ms. Edwards: We have done a lot of work. I do not actually work for EcoTrust, I work with them. I also work with other industry groups. As I have said, my family is in fishing, so we have worked with EcoTrust over the last two years on trying to set up models around licence banks and more collaborative industry and environmental connections. Also, I have been involved in some of the groundfish. I work with the British Columbia Dogfish Association. We have been active in exploring how different policies can be implemented and how they can work.
The Chairman: Alternatives to ITQs?
Ms. Edwards: Alternatives and even processes that might include quotas and maybe different parameters around them.
The Chairman: This committee might want to talk to you more about it, because we are particularly interested in targeting alternative models. It is easy to articulate an ITQ, it does not need ten sentences. Even the National Post picks it up quickly and they seem to thrive on it, but alternative models to ITQs are much harder to articulate and therefore much harder for people to grasp the concepts. We might want to do more work with you, if we could, on that particular part. I know we probably do not have the time this morning.
Mr. Tamm: In terms of alternative models, I think we also have to realize that 60 per cent of B.C. fisheries by volume are managed under a quota system. There will be a few more ground fisheries in the New Year going into the integrated quota model. Once you have a quota model in place, it is hard to reverse because people start to invest heavily in the quota, et cetera. Some of the alternatives include, how do we make the quota models more sensitive to community viability and more sensitive to the economic welfare of crews, et cetera? There are a whole suite of options: community development quotas, community quota entities and owner-operator principal.
The Chairman: I agree, and I probably did not explain myself very well on that part. You are absolutely right that once a management plan is in place, and the quota management is in place, you cannot simply go out there and start reversing it. It is not practical. I understand that very well. However, we want to look at what could be a different model to integrate both what is already in place and what could be in place.
Another question I have is co-management. I have heard this expression used more and more, and I am not sure whether your interpretation of co-management is the same as mine. Co-management sounds warm and fuzzy, and it seems to imply that the DFO says, we are here with you as your partners and let us walk hand in hand into the future. Is this what is proposed by co-management or is it a way for DFO to say, we would like to get away from managing the fishery and pass it onto you, as in the New Zealand model?
Ms. Edwards: I think there is a lot of confusion about what co-management means. So often these terms are thrown out and never defined by the department, and I think co-management is one of them. The department talks about it, and we might have one idea of what that could mean or should mean and they are actually talking about something else. As it has been implemented, it seems to lean towards the New Zealand model where industry is given the reins to make these decisions. It is less about moving forward together with clear objectives in mind, which is what we are managing towards. I think it is important that industry is part of the management, but the other part of co- management is that it so often seems to be industry and DFO. A big portion is left out there, namely, communities and the other interests that have stakes in this.
Mr. Tamm: I think it is even narrower than industry. It is quota holders. Those who hold quota get to vote on licensing policy rules, et cetera. There is no talk about crews, skippers, conservation groups or others, so the department has an incredibly narrow definition of what co-management is.
The Chairman: The quota holder may live thousands of miles away as I understand it.
Ms. Edwards: They may live in Australia. Who knows? There is nothing to stop them from leaving the country and living elsewhere while still holding onto their quota and leasing it out at exorbitant lease fees.
The Chairman: Thank you both. I would like to get back to you on this model you have been working on, if we could. I am quite sure our clerk, Jessica Richardson, has it, so we will be in touch with you in the future. This committee has wanted to articulate a model for some time, and we want to do it very much.
Our next group of witnesses are from the David Suzuki Foundation: Otto Langer, Bill Wareham, Jay Ritchlin and David Peterson. Good morning.
Bill Wareham, Acting Director, Marine Conservation Program, David Suzuki Foundation: We appreciate the opportunity to speak to you, and we are glad you made it here. It is timely I think. There have been a series of issues with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the actual fisheries themselves. In our view, over the last two to three years the problems are escalating. Our view is that we need an escalated level of discussion to find solutions to these problems.
We would like to present to you today a summary of a report that we commissioned, An Assessment of Fisheries and Oceans Canada Pacific Region's Effectiveness in Meeting its Conservation Mandate. We commissioned this study for two or three primary reasons. One is that we view our fisheries from several angles, but three primary ones. It is an obvious economic resource and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, as a fisheries management structure, reflects that over the years. The community benefits, as we have heard from EcoTrust already this morning, but the fishery, fish, and all they mean to the ecosystem are important elements to coastal British Columbia. The environmental values that fish hold inherently in maintaining the ecosystem are diverse. One problem right now as we know is with climate change. Regardless of the reason for that change we know it is happening. We are getting significant changes in ocean temperatures, which are leading to changes in current patterns. We are getting changes in wind patterns, which are changing wave conditions and reducing the nutrient flow in the ocean. We are getting big changes in productivity, which is shifting fisheries productivity. If we keep fishing, assuming things are generally stable out there, we have a big problem.
We believe there is a much more acute level response needed to managing fisheries. We believe we have a serious obligation to manage these fisheries for all the reasons I have mentioned. If Canada is going to stand up and say to the world we do things in a sustainable way, then we have to change a lot of what we are doing, because as you may have seen last week the David Suzuki Foundation released a report comparing Canada to the other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, on several sustainability indicators. We came in 28th out of 30. We are not doing well on performance. That same message was echoed by the Auditor General in her report last year. This year, the report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, was challenging to the government saying that we say a lot, we write a lot of plans, but our performance is very, very poor.
I would like to read a couple of statements by Commissioner Johanne Gelinas in a report released in September in Ottawa:
In fact, the theme that runs throughout my Report is there is a chronic inability on the part of the federal government to see its initiatives through to completion.... That's why, in 1996, Canada's federal, provincial and territorial governments endorsed the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy. But since then, there has been no action and the biodiversity strategy has stalled. The situation is no better when it comes to oceans. Almost a decade after fisheries and oceans succeeded in developing an Oceans Act, our oceans are not being managed in a sustainable way. No oceans management plans have been finalized in ten years, and the progress that has been made in establishing marine protected areas is very low. Canada's oceans are at risk. We are seeing ongoing declines in fish stocks, continuing introduction of pollutants and invasive species and a general decline in biodiversity and productivity.
She concludes saying that: ``This year's audit highlights a chronic problem, the federal government has an inability to sustain initiatives to completion.'' And she says: ``The announcements made around these programs seem to be forgotten as soon as the confetti hits the floor.''
Those are strong words I think from the auditor's office, but ones that we share. Otto Langer, who is with us today, has worked with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for 32 years prior to joining the David Suzuki Foundation. He witnessed a lot of these program launches, failures and lack of meeting their objectives. We consider that failure an economic loss to Canada — the investment in things that do not produce results — and a real loss for the environment because these issues need to be addressed and are failing.
We decided to commission this report, and we used what was called a Delphi process in which David Peterson and other consultants from Dovetail Consulting pulled in a series of experts. First, the panel defined the Department of Fisheries and Oceans mandate. That included looking at the elements of the Fisheries Act, the Oceans Act, the Species at Risk Act and international conventions such as the conventions on biodiversity, and they described the department's mandate for conservation. They articulated that very well.
They went to the experts and said, let us look at 12 case studies that represent each of the various mandates within the department. Within those they analyzed what happened, and there were failures across the board. The iterations of this draft went back and forth to the expert panel. There were interviews with other individuals, and a review of current literature on the subjects that were being studied.
At the end of the day, they distilled out of those case study analyses some of the major problems that seemed to repeat themselves consistently. I will quickly read those. They are in your briefing package there.
Inadequate information: We look at managing a lot of fish stocks where all we know is how many fish we caught last year and the year before, and if we caught that many we assume that we will catch that many again, but we know very little about the life history, the ecological history, of many of these species. We know general trends in stock abundance, but we know nothing about absolute numbers of stocks. As I mentioned earlier, we have little science around the impacts of these changes in ocean productivity and large ocean temperature shifts that are occurring off the West Coast.
There is a lack of transparency and accountability: constant and repeated reports of difficulty in getting information out of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Some of our colleagues were trying to do work on the impacts of trawling on corrals and sponges on the B.C. coast. It took years and years trying to get that information out of DFO. It was only through a slip of hand by someone who gave them another data set that happened to have the reporter data attached on corals, sponges and the catch in the fishery that they got that information. Again, our view is that if we are going to solve these problems, the department cannot withhold this information from the public.
Budget issues came up in many, many cases. The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development repeated that. She said: ``The plans that the government is trying to implement now were developed on assumptions of grossly larger budgets than are currently in place for those initiatives.'' That includes species at risk, and it includes Canada's Oceans Strategy. An estimate of what we thought was needed for the Oceans Strategy was $500 million over five years. A group of non-governmental organizations have a group called the Green Budget Coalition. We present to the finance committee every year. We said if you want to run the Oceans Strategy you need $500 million. The government allocated $28 million over two years in this last budget, so funding is grossly inadequate. As the auditor said, it is impossible to run the plan as it is outlined.
Political influence: That theme repeats itself in almost all cases. Fish farming is a good example, and Jay Ritchlin is going to speak to you about that specific case.
Bureaucratic complexity: There are conflicting and changing mandates and direction within the department, and its programs. One thing we would like to highlight is that we accept that we may be in a declining budget realm, and one that may not change, but there are efficiencies, increases in productivity and results that we could get from redefining how the department runs and manages its programs. One example is having an accountability mechanism in place so that we can ensure that initiatives such as the Oceans Strategy actually realize results. Wild salmon policy is another example. There is a failure in that document to identify specific objectives and to set up the accountability mechanism that would have us check and monitor those over time. Unfortunately, the history is that we do not get results in the end on many cases with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
A weakness of enforcement: On many aspects again we have seen enforcement staff reduced over the years. More recently, we have seen government departments move to results-based policies, as Eric Tamm spoke about earlier this morning, looking for partnerships and agreements where industry is measured against some results, but the ongoing enforcement and review of project development leads to a lot of bad cases.
We recently tested our assumptions by going to the North Coast Kalum Forest District and doing surveys of cut blocks. We found numerous violations to the Fisheries Act: creeks overflowing roads, culverts plugged and blockage of fish passage. We reported it to the department there. Three months later we checked again and there was no action on almost all the items. They have relinquished this to the province to manage under the Forest and Range Practices Act, and the Ministry of Forests in British Columbia cedes that responsibility to the companies to monitor themselves. At the end of the day, the issues do not get addressed. We see it as passing the buck so far down the line that no one is accountable, and we think a significant correction is needed in the system and how it is designed.
I would like to pass the mike over to Jay Ritchlin now, who would like to highlight how the fish farming situation exemplifies some of the problems that we have experienced in this report.
Jay Ritchlin, Campaigner, Marine Conservation Program, David Suzuki Foundation: A couple of key results of the core challenges that we noted are well illustrated by the fish farming example: in particular, inadequate information, political influence, conflicting and changing mandates and weakness of enforcement. It seems to us to be an extreme conflict in mandate for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to adopt a policy of promoting open net cage aquaculture at the same time that scientific evidence on the negative effects of that system of aquaculture on wild fish, particularly salmon and their habitat, is mounting and is clear from the other jurisdictions where this has taken place. We have a conflict of interest within the department that is difficult even for people within the department who are trying to do their jobs.
We also have a lack of adequate information. In the issue of parasitic sea lice, which has garnered perhaps the most public information and exposure, we do not even know how many lice are on the farms in the critical periods of juvenile salmonid migration. The department itself claims not to know, and has let the Province of British Columbia take charge of that aspect, which has then, as Mr. Wareham pointed out, delegated that responsibility to the companies. The only people who appear to know how many sea lice are on the farms at any given time are the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association.
The ability for independent researchers to gather that information, do research to try to quantify the problem and make independent recommendations is practically nil. When we attempt to make recommendations with the data that we have, we are accused of not knowing what we are talking about because our research is inadequate. It is a catch-22, to steal a phrase from some of our friends.
A department that is suffering severe resource constraints is acting as an active promoter of industry. I have seen the minister give what I can only call cheerleading speeches for the aquaculture industry at major conferences. A 100- person delegation went to Norway recently for an industry trade show, yet we cannot get basic data about habitat impacts and sea lice infection pressure on the wild resource that the department is charged with preserving.
Finally, we have a department that is not doing the science that needs to be done to answer these critical questions. The department is researching around the edges of the issue, presenting data as answering the questions, and actively discrediting or attempting to discredit researchers who are in the field working to help inform good decision making.
We have here a microcosm of the issues that we found throughout the 12 case studies. The case is of particular concern because the industry wants to grow, is actively pressuring both the federal and provincial government to allow it to expand, and we do not have in many cases the data through our public officials to make good recommendations.
The Chairman: I imagine you were pleased with Bill Shatner's beam-me-up-Scotty speech the other day?
Mr. Ritchlin: It was an entertaining bit of television, and I think his catch-and-release with the 12-gauge needs a little work. We are about to repeat these mistakes again. As the industry looks at new species such as sablefish/black cod, halibut and cod, all these species are carnivorous, which are waiting to come online. The industry has enough licence to produce more sablefish on the British Columbia coast than the salmon it already produces, yet none of the background research to tell us how this will affect our ecosystems and our existing fisheries. That is from both a scientific biological point of view and from an economic point of view for the people currently fishing sablefish.
The Chairman: I am surprised that you did not bring up the Klingon.
Mr. Ritchlin: I did caution some of my colleagues on using a slapstick sitcom to validate our science, but it was enjoyable. Thanks.
The Chairman: Sorry.
Mr. Ritchlin: No problem.
David L. Peterson, Devon Knight Events, David Suzuki Foundation: One footnote on the sablefish point: It should be noted that sablefish aquaculture is being introduced in the face of an established and fairly sizeable quota fishery, and that is one of the case studies in our report.
The Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Wareham: In the end, we are not only about criticizing the department and wishing the world looked different, but we have come up with solutions and recommendations. We are also part of the Marine Conservation Caucus that Eric Tamm mentioned this morning. As part of this group, we are involved in consultations where DFO is reaching out to the public, and we have had some specific meetings with them. We are looking for solutions. Many of the people in the department share our views on these solutions, but for the province, as we have mentioned, there seems to be a gap between what people in the department can do and what Ottawa thinks they want to do with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Here are a few quick recommendations. One, they need to set transparent, publicly understandable goals and performance measures on an annual basis for all of their programs.
We need to make accountable in some way all those that are affected or involved, or that use the fisheries and the marine resources, to pay for, mitigate, monitor or help with the research of the ongoing impacts to those resources.
We need to adopt a more cooperative approach with the provincial government. There has been a challenging relationship between the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the provincial government on many, many issues. If we do not find a way to co-operate around these objectives and share the workload to monitor, enforce and realize them, we are having a hard time seeing how we go forward. A good example is an integrated management plan for the Pacific Coast Region under the Oceans Act. The implementation of this plan is dependent on a memorandum of understanding being signed between the provincial government and the Department of Fisheries. They have been working on this memorandum for about a year and a half. It has six sub-agreements around integrated management planning, conservation areas and a whole bunch of things. We do not get past the base of signing those agreements. As a result, the money that came from the federal budget to implement the Oceans Strategy integrated management plan this year will not be spent on that, because we do not have an agreement in place to move forward. A lot more resources are required to fix that relationship.
We want to see additional funding, and ideally an independent accountability process to monitor and report on the conservation and management objectives specifically for fish habitat and fisheries. We have a policy of no net loss of productive capacity for fish habitat, but our analysis shows that there is ongoing loss of fish habitat. Finally, we would like to see the establishment and maintenance of a coherent and consistent fisheries habitat and water enforcement program. The enforcement staff have been in decline and the budgets have been decline. You probably all heard about the Fraser salmon, but that is just the tip of the iceberg when you look across the province at all of the development issues that would benefit from additional enforcement and monitoring.
I would like to throw it over to David Peterson or Otto Langer to add any final comments on anything I missed and they would like to raise in closing.
Mr. Otto Langer, Director on Leave, Marine Conservation Program, David Suzuki Foundation: To highlight how the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has become so politicized in the last decade to 12 years ago, you just have to look at the Klingon incident in the Boston Legal television show the other day. Canadian Tourism wanted to take out full page ads in The New York Times to get people to travel to British Columbia and see the beautiful coast — great advertising. An opposition fisheries critic, and, we are told, the minister's office stepped in and vetoed it. The advertisements were dropped because it made B.C. farm salmon and the coast look bad. You can see how politics interferes with almost anyone trying to do anything to build transparency on this coast, even a simple tourist ad in an American newspaper.
Senator Hubley: One theme that resonated with me was the inability to get information and to share information that is critical not only to the work you are doing, but certainly to the work that DFO is doing. You mentioned in your recommendations an independent accountable process. That sounds good to me, but do you have a vision of how that will unfold? What would you like to see in place to ensure that your concerns are heard and taken into account in developing fisheries policy?
Mr. Wareham: One thing I would like to see is this report on Fisheries and Oceans Canada by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. That is the kind of report we need on an annual basis. The report should be developed through a standard set of consultations with defined sector groups and interest groups. I believe it is fair as they give the department a chance to respond to the analysis and identify the work they are doing to meet those objectives. We need that higher level kind of frame on an annual basis. The department has to know that they are under public scrutiny and their objectives and stated plans will be monitored with a fine tooth comb. At present, this report might come out once every three or four years. We had two reports back to back last year because the Auditor General also looked at DFO, but over the ten-year horizon it is a sporadic review. We need an annual review.
Mr. Langer: When a federal department has lost all public confidence, and the mandate or fishery resource they look after is not faring well, the Auditor General should put an auditor on that department. The auditor should begin with annual performance reports with the staff to investigate what DFO is doing and not doing, and why there continues to be a problem there. They should trail that department until it improves its performance. As Mr. Wareham said, every now and again we have a hit-and-miss report. It is easy for working government to respond to all this criticism and say the information is out of date and we are doing all these things, but that is a typical DFO response.
Senator Hubley: Those are good suggestions. Does Mr. Ritchlin or Mr. Peterson have anything they would like to add to that?
Mr. Ritchlin: The publication of clear and measurable goals for the department is important. We get many wonderful sounding proposals. As Mr. Langer mentioned, every five years they have a revitalization plan or a renewal plan, but that stuff will happen in five years or ten years. In the short term, one-year intervals, what is the department trying to achieve? Then can we look back and see if they have achieved it. If not, why not, and what will help them do so.
Mr. Wareham: This report should be linked in a timing sense to the budget process, so that in a report at this time of year, October, something like an Auditor General review, you have recommendations on failures. Those recommendations should also include a recommendation back to government about budget considerations and financial requirements to meet the obligations. Without that, I am afraid we will see this year again, as with our National Marine Conservation Areas Program or Canada's Oceans Strategy, that there is no money to do the work. When the department defines a cost of $25 million to $35 million to do one integrated management planning process, and they do not have the money, it will not happen. Without some link back into government at the senior political level and the Department of Finance, this problem persists.
Mr. Peterson: DFO knows how to do this. If you look at some of the fisheries management plans, specifically in the salmon area, you will see fine-tuned short-term information planning documents, month by month through the season. It is not as though they are unfamiliar with the concept. They apply it in some areas, but not in many other areas where they should apply it. We are suggesting that kind of short-term precise thinking across the board driven down from the top to everybody in the field.
The Chairman: Before I go to Senator Adams, I wanted to note that we were on the right track back in May when we made some recommendations. The committee's first recommendation at that time was that the Government of Canada provide the Department of Fisheries and Oceans with adequate funding to fulfill its fisheries mandate. We were probably on the right track then, because we identified adequate funding as being a problem. However, the keyword here is mandate.
Mr. Langer: I left federal fisheries about four years ago, but at that time adequate funding was one thing, but organization was another thing, and it is a continuing problem I am told by staff. If adequate funding does come, often the program plans are not put together and the funding is not there in time. Departments are supposed to get their funding, April 1. They have to know what they get in January or February so they can plan the year out. Often the funding is not there in July, August and September, and by October there is a freeze on gasoline. A year ago, they could not investigate fish farms before they approved them because they had no fuel for their boats or their vehicles so they approved the fish farms on paper. This solution is grossly irresponsible. You cannot plan a program even with adequate funding if the organization is not there to determine what you will do. When you plan to do it, you need the funding well before the year starts. It is almost anarchy.
The Chairman: That is a good point. I am glad you raised that.
Mr. Peterson: Yes, we agree with the recommendation on adequate funding, but even if adequate funding cannot be provided, intense scrutiny is needed on how the department uses the funding they do have.
Senator Adams: I once met David Suzuki; I am familiar with him. I have been in the Senate 28 years, 29 years in April. I have seen a lot of things: government policies, especially ones that affect us with wildlife and so on. A lot of time, I do not agree with everything the government tries to do, but a lot of time people make policies that do not come from the community. We live up there and sometimes it is difficult for policy-makers and people with the organizations that are concerned with mammals. We have had climate change in the last few years. We have commercial fishing up there in the Arctic, up there around Baffin Strait, in between Greenland and Baffin Island. In some way, it is difficult because we settled the land claim.
Our concern is the future. Commercial fishing in the Arctic is mainly turbot and cold water shrimp right now. We have been hunting all our life and we do not want to destroy our future. Right now, some of the draggers are coming up there in the Arctic and the high Arctic and dragging around the area. I have seen some of the reports. You are concerned about how much damage has been done so far to the East Coast and B.C. area coast, how the fish migrate. Up there, we are looking at the temperature change and the difference it makes to how long the fish grow. The DFO cannot tell us — especially about the turbot. Maybe salmon grow a little faster. We also have Arctic char, and we had information from DFO a few years ago that char grow only about one inch every year. I do not know how much difference there is between Arctic char in Nunavut and salmon in B.C. Arctic char up there have a quota, because they come back up there in the lakes and rivers to spawn every year and only a few survive, and because they grow only one inch every year. If we fish out so many tonnes in one area of the river, the fish could be gone in one summer.
How do you feel about the policy for the future? Should we have some policy now with the dragging and the fishing. We do not want to destroy our future and the fish economy. The way they do commercial fishing is not right. A lot of them have been caught dragging some of the small fish. I talked to some of the local people up there working some of the ships, the draggers, and if the fish are not big enough they just throw them away. That is no good. The only way right now to fish should be as our communities recommend — only gillnet and hooking, no dragging. I do not know what policy will do that. I hope DFO does not say they cannot change the policy on dragging because that is what the commercial fishermen do. The commercial fisherman will say they cannot work because they will not make money. They cannot catch enough fish with hooks and gillnets. Some of the smaller ships that do it with gillnet and hooking make enough catch a day. That is what some of the community organizations are looking at right now: how to stop the draggers from coming up to the Arctic.
Mr. Wareham: It is an important issue. It is one that we are working on both in an international context and in Canada. The Prime Minister and Minister Geoff Regan made some bold statements in St. John's this year about what has to happen on the high seas, in that we have to stop the rape and pillage of the fisheries on the high seas. I think at the UN General Assembly meeting this week the first round is looking at the resolution about a moratorium on trawling on seamounts. We made a presentation to the Prime Minister asking for Canada to take a strong position and lead on the recommendation to adopt that resolution, but we have the same issue inside our own economic zone. It is appalling to us to hear the Minister of Fisheries say that trawl gear has no more inherent impact than any other fishing gear and that this practice can continue when the science and analysis is clear that the impact is extreme on catch of fish — juvenile fish, non-target fish, corals and sponges — on the East Coast and West Coast. Now, as you have mentioned, with the melting ice the opportunity to fish heavily in the Arctic is there, and I would hate for us to make that same mistake. It is one of those macro-level policy issues where you say, what is really driving this? We know what that escalation of trawling did in the cod fishery to a large degree on the East Coast. The question is, how many more fisheries do we have to impact in that way? We would like to see a rigorous formal review of that trawl policy in Canada.
Mr. Langer: The dragger is probably one of our most efficient but crudest fishing gears available and it is highly destructive. In a sustainable fishery, I do not think there is room for it, to put it bluntly. When you relate it to the problem of the Arctic char, we have about 30 species of similarly slow growing fish on this coast called the rockfish or the rock cod. They take up to 20 years before they can reproduce and they can grow to 70 or 80 years of age. We have almost totally devastated them in the Gulf of Georgia, adjacent to Vancouver, by overfishing. What is really key, and this is one of the points made earlier, you have to know how quickly the fish grow and how many there are. You need good science, and DFO does not have that for many species. When I was with DFO there was always a big push to get after under-exploited species. Where there is no fishery, let us get a fishery going. Create more jobs and catch more fish. As we desecrate one area, we move to new areas such as the Arctic or the Antarctic. This practice has to stop. Whether it comes to rockfish or the fish in the Arctic, you have to know how quickly they grow and how many are out there. Then you determine your exploitation rate. Probably for rockfish it should have been 1 per cent. For Arctic fish it probably should be as low as 1 per cent, and that probably rules out a commercial fishery. It should only be hook and line, food, and maybe a bit of a recreational fishery. That is all those fish can support. As soon as the draggers move in, it is almost game over.
Senator Cowan: One disadvantage in coming last is your questions are asked before they get to you. I had two questions, one having to do with the funding that Senator Hubley mentioned, and the other with whether changing or outlawing certain types of gear would solve the problem, and Senator Adams looked after that.
Mr. Peterson: Senator, I have a response to Senator Adams. Your question and your comments about the changes in the Arctic I think underline the need for current information and solutions that are responsive to today's problems in the short term. Climate change is creating a new set of issues and pressures where you live that need to be dealt with in a way that people maybe were not thinking about three or four years ago. We have those same kinds of ramping up of pressures, for example, when Japanese buyers choose to like one of our species that they had not been buying before. Whether it is climate change or international buyers changing their preferences, things change rapidly and need to be responded to rapidly.
The Chairman: My question goes away from the assessment of fisheries and oceans, and Canada's specific effectiveness and reasons for meeting its conservation mandate. However, I am sure the David Suzuki Foundation has some ideas on this. It comes back to the question of allocations, licences and so on for the benefit of communities or licence holders. Recently, the U.S. revised its position on the question of licensing and the privatization of the fishery. The U.K. has been after privatization now for the past two or three years, and New Zealand is fairly well all privatized at the present time. Every one of these countries has recognized that there has to be some kind of mitigation, or a means to assess the impact, of this privatization on communities. Even the George Bush administration has recognized this, George Bush being passed off sometimes as the ultimate right-wing privatizer. As well, Canada is the signatory to one of the U.N. conventions that says if a country is going to make any changes in its fisheries, it has to study the impact of those changes on coastal communities. Has your foundation undertaken any kind of work on the impact of privatization on coastal communities?
Mr. Ritchlin: We have had a concern about this issue for some time. In our view, the conservation arguments that are put forward for quotas are unproven at best. They are mixed depending on stock type, location and implementation. Clearly, the social impacts of quotas are significant. We have supported various members within the conservation community and within the fishing resource users community in opposing the outright implementation of individual transferable quotas, ITQs. The Senate fisheries committee should be commended for the work it has done on quotas and the publishing of its report. Our sense is that the move to individual transferable quotas will exacerbate some of the problems in terms of coastal community survival, and also in terms of conservation issues and the privatization of data.
Co-management has been discussed here several times this morning. We were just briefed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada on their proposed fisheries renewal plan and some of the proposed changes to the Fisheries Act. They gave us what they admitted was a 30,000-foot view. Unfortunately, they did not provide a parachute, but the language is still being drafted so certain confidentiality applies to that, I understand.
The Chairman: Was it an anvil that they gave you?
Mr. Ritchlin: Yes, sort of. In terms of the privatization of that data, when they talk about co-management, you hear references only to the quota holders as being involved in that management. We have had on the West Coast of Vancouver Island an aquatic management board that was set up with the best of intentions. As we move forward under things such as the Oceans Act and Canada's Oceans Strategy, we have commitments to integrated ecosystem-based co- management. Of extreme concern to us is how you achieve that while at the same time entering into specific agreements that have confidentiality issues around them with resource extractors, particularly quota-holder associations that consider the data and the research that they do to be private and confidential business information. Add to that the emerging evidence from some countries such as Iceland and New Zealand where quotas lead the conservation concerns around high-grading of the fish that you catch, and underreporting of bycatch species, and you develop a picture of a system that will decrease the ability of stakeholders outside the quota holders themselves to have input. Couple that with the potential for extreme economic duress on coastal communities. Also, we have grave concerns for the recommendations coming out of the Pearse-McRae report, which say, essentially, as the Senate has noted, privatize it all and get on with it. We are not sure how you can have a fully functioning ecosystem-based fishery management with those recommendations in place.
The Chairman: That was my second question. The Oceans Act and the DFO itself talk about ecosystem-based management as the preferred option. I think the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board has done work on this. To me, they are mutually exclusive systems where ecosystem-based management cannot work with species-specific quotas. They are two separate systems. Either you have ecosystem-based management or you have species-specific management, which seems to be the department's preferred option now. Has your foundation looked at this kind of contradiction? For example, if I am given a quota for flounder or black cod, my interest is not with the other species of fish, my interest is very, very narrow. In an ecosystem-based fishery I would have an interest in all the species from the start of the food chain to the harvest of the various species. Have you looked at this at all?
Mr. Ritchlin: If the senator is looking for a new position as the Minister of Fisheries I would be supportive.
The Chairman: I do not think I belong to the right party.
Mr. Ritchlin: Fair enough.
Yes, the quick answer is that ecosystem-based management has to drive the species-specific decisions on total allowable catch, not the other way around. From the various procedures set up to deal with the ecosystem-based management, integrated management approach, there is not a clear way to integrate those two disparate elements right now. When you query DFO officials on this issue directly the answer has been, we will try to make those two things work together. Mr. Wareham may have something to say about the EBM work. He has been quite involved.
The Chairman: Whistling past the graveyard.
Mr. Wareham: Yes, if you go to the quota fishery, it is absolutely essential to have a rigorous enforcement, monitoring and adaptive management framework in place, and to have the science work in place to consistently track and monitor the status of the stocks. The status of the stocks is the ultimate test of whether you are on a sustainable track or not in the total annual catch that you give out through quotas. This conclusion has been reported in other countries, and the U.S. Ocean Commission on Policy in their reports has come to the same conclusion. The problem, which is demonstrated around the world, is that countries have failed to put those safety net conditions in place before they go ahead with the quota fishery. As Mr. Ritchlin said, they say they will do their best to do all those things, but they do not. Our view is that we are moving into a high-risk Russian roulette scenario with our fisheries if we go that way.
Mr. Langer: In a lot of these shifts in the way fish are managed or the way fish habitat are protected, we see some significant changes taking place. Ten years ago, some of us saw those changes taking place and some of the staff members of the DFO said we wished the damn minister would tell us where in the hell he is taking us, because it looks like fish are no longer a priority in Ottawa. To some degree I do not think that ever happened, so that vision is missing from the public and from many DFO employees. They do not think they have the support of Ottawa anymore. I am getting this from staff over the last week or two. They do not want us to do certain things anymore.
There has to be dialogue in Parliament as well as in the public sector. A lot of this is not taking place. Maybe dialogue is taking place on quotas, but not when it comes to the modernization of the habitat program. A year ago, DFO signed a working agreement with Canada's seven largest industrial lobby groups. This agreement was all kept secret from the public. Environmental groups, well-known groups such as ourselves, EcoTrust Canada and Sierra Club, none of these were ever consulted. Why would DFO have a working partnership with the seven largest lobby groups that destroy most of the habitat, and not have similar discussion with environmental groups that in theory should be on side with DFO? There is something really rotten in the way DFO does business. The minister wants to keep everyone happy, especially when it comes to creating another job or doing things more cheaply. That is the real agenda in Ottawa and that is not how to manage a living resource. It will not work. Over the last 25 years, every time the fishery goes downhill DFO comes up with a new program every five years, a renewal program, a revitalization program, a new directions program. Before the five years are up these programs are forgotten and they are on to another five-year program. This is not the way to have a fish resource 25 years from now. It continues to go downhill and it is a shameful record on the government's behalf.
Mr. Peterson: I want to underline Bill Wareham's point about the importance of the mechanics of how you implement quota systems. I refer you to Appendix 8 of our report where we suggest guidelines for just that.
The Chairman: Very good: Are there any last comments in passing before we wrap up for a short coffee break?
Mr. Wareham: I would like to say thanks and I hope you will join us in our objective to make Canada's fisheries truly sustainable on a world scale.
Mr. Ritchlin: We have talked a lot about fisheries and fisheries management, but I want to emphasize how important the habitat side is, in our report and in much of the work that we are doing. Clearly, that is especially true with salmon in terms of fresh water habitat. There is a real strain there between the provincial and the federal government. The federal government is obviously loath to tread on provincial toes, but the management, preservation and protection of that habitat, and the systems for doing that, are as important as the management of the fishery itself in terms of sustaining the resource over the long term.
The Chairman: We are fortunate to have Garth Mirau before us again and Irvin Figg. I understand you have a presentation. Then we will go on to questions and answers.
Garth Mirau, Vice-President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union: Thank you for coming to Vancouver. A great many people who work in the industry appreciate the work that the Senate committee is doing, and on behalf of them I want to thank you for that.
I wrote a brief many times in my head leading up to this today, and I wondered where I should go with it. We have written a number of briefs around the fisheries in the last few years, and particularly in the last three years, including a brief to McRae and Pearse, a brief to the commons standing committee, a couple of briefs to the minister, and one that we presented to the Senate committee last year. I have to admit that we are not sure exactly what else we can add to what we have done and what we have said, except to underline that we agree with the two previous presentations that you heard. Our position is clear. We need changes in the Pacific Region if we expect another generation of fishermen. If we continue down the road to privatization such as the Pearse-McRae report recommends, and it seems as though the minister has accepted, or at least the bureaucracy in Pacific Region has, certainly we are now witnessing the last generation of fishermen.
We co-authored a paper with the Native Brotherhood of B.C. entitled, A Rich Fishery or A Fishery for the Rich?, and I think you have copies of it. That is clearly the situation we are faced with now. We are seeing the demise of the small- boat owner-operator fisherman in British Columbia. I think the situation that the union finds itself in speaks about where the fishery is in British Columbia, where the communities are and where people who fish for a living are.
At an internal meeting the other day, and I do not know the numbers for sure, but I was told by our office administrator that our membership is down 1,000 this year. Those people live in the communities we are talking about, the coastal communities that depend on fish for a living. They are not all fishermen. A large number are shore workers, wage earners, but they are part of this industry as much as everybody else and their voices are not being heard.
The way that fisheries is being managed, only the licence holders, the quota holders, have any input. While DFO will tell you that they are doing a round of consultations now in communities, the truth of the matter is that the real decisions are made somewhere else. You talked about co-management and what that means. All co-management really means is that the only people that have an opportunity to have any input into that co-management are people that own licences. In large part, those licences are being held more and more not by the people that do the fishing, but by investors and processors.
I have the minutes, or the evidence, from the meeting that you had with Paul Sprout and Kevin Stringer of the DFO the other day. I wonder if the committee knows what communities mean. I am sure that if I ask any of you on the committee what a community is, you would say it is a place that people live, a place that people expect to be able to earn a living, and that really that is what it is — people together. Mr. Sprout's answer to the community question was that it could be a community of interest, a community of investors or a community of this or that. I think that speaks in a large part to the way the Pacific Region is operated in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans now. It seems as though they are a law unto themselves, if you will, with no accountability anywhere. I have a letter from the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans dated last February, and he clearly understands what communities are, but I am not so sure that the minister is receiving the kind of input or the advice he needs to maintain fisheries. The response to many of the issues that are facing fisheries in British Columbia today, and the throw-away lines from the director-general's office of the Pacific Region is, I believe, a shame.
Paul Sprout talked about the salmon fishery to you, and he said most of what you will hear at your hearings are about salmon fisheries. That is probably true. He said that 95 per cent of DFO's time in the Pacific Region is taken up with salmon issues. That probably is true. He said that salmon are an icon in Pacific Region. Absolutely, I agree with that. However, let us have a look at what is going on in the other fisheries, because this is not just about salmon. This is about a whole range of fisheries that are still available in Pacific Region. Pacific Region has some healthy stocks although, I believe as we move more and more to quotas we will see, or we do see, more and more pressures on those stocks. When you have the quota systems that are in place now — the reporting done by the people that own the licences, and they are the only people that are consulted — we certainly are putting all our stocks in danger. When you have a quota, we know there is more pressure on species than if you have open fisheries.
Can we go back to the way that fisheries were in the past? We probably cannot, but certainly we have to be aware, as Canadians, what is going on in the fisheries in the Pacific Region. When the Department of Fisheries and Oceans holds up the quotas that are in place in the Pacific Region as an example of good fisheries management, where they talk about the halibut fishery that has 535 licences, only a hundred boats are fishing those licences. I fished on a halibut boat. I was a crew man on a halibut boat and I made decent money when I was fishing in that industry. The deckhands no longer earn a living. All the money flows to the licence holders. Up to 70 per cent of the value of the fish goes to someone else that is not on the boat, and that is a shame. Those licence holders have a licence to harvest fish, not to rent out the licence to somebody else to do the work.
The black cod fishery that they hold up as an example of good management has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 licences. Less than 20 boats are fishing those licences now. It is all traded. The value is gone out of the fish before it leaves the dock.
I see that the committee is travelling to Tofino and Ahouset. I am sure you will have your eyes opened there. Both those communities used to be reliant on fish. The fish are still there. There are some stocks of course that we are concerned about. The fish are still there generally, but the fishing community, and I am aware of the context that I am using community in, is gone.
On the face of it, Tofino looks like an upbeat sustainable kind of economically viable community, and it was. However, the people that depend on the jobs in those communities now around aquaculture and around the tourism industry cannot afford to live in town any more. The properties are being bought up by people from away from the community, forcing people from the community out.
Down the road 25 miles on the other end of the peninsula is a town called Ucluelet. Three or four years ago it had the highest landings of fish in Canada. Two fish plants have closed, and another one is operating at half time. Four or five smaller plants do not operate at all anymore, and will not operate again. Why is that? It is directly tied to the quota system around the groundfish. There is no question about that. Foreign ownership has been an issue there although the major plant operating now has been taken over by Canadians again.
At Ahouset, you will see a community on its knees, a First Nations community that is dependent on fish for a living, for its very existence. When I started fishing in 1972, I spent some time in Ahouset. It was a vibrant community that was sustainable and dependent on fish, and there are no licences there anymore. You will see that all over this coast. Every community on this coast is faced with the same thing. The licences have flown to the city to those with the deepest pockets. The Pearse-McRae report, if it is accepted, will speed up that process.
DFO has said it is looking for other options. We presented two other options to them. They have not taken them seriously. Our Place at the Table, written by First Nations, takes an opposite view of McRae and Pearse, but DFO and Pacific Region are trying to paint this as somehow agreeing with, and being in the same place as, McRae and Pearse. This is absolutely an untruth.
I distributed, and this is a summary, believe it or not, a sector study that has just been completed. It was prepared for the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters. If you have an opportunity to look at it, this study is probably the most comprehensive one that has ever been done on the fishing industry on both coasts, as far as human resources go. I would like to read you half a paragraph on page 61. I think it speaks to what is wrong in Pacific Region and how we got to where we are. It starts:
There has been a substantial consultation associated with Pearse-McRae and the restructuring of salmon management, but still a demonstrable lack of trust and mutual understanding. Some of the major harvester groups are convinced that DFO has an agenda it is determined to push through regardless of industry views and interests. DFO managers who were interviewed expressed the view that they simply cannot work with some of the established harvester organizations and that new structures for consultation and co-management are needed.
They are talking about us there. They are talking about the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union, the Canadian Auto Workers Union, and some other allies that we have in the industry. Certainly, we have never agreed with the direction that Department of Fisheries and Oceans is heading in Pacific Region, so they have simply gone out and organized other area groups to bid their wishes, if you will.
Finally, we have your own report that speaks about the same thing that we are concerned about. We have a report that we wrote formulating fisheries policy within the context of land claims that dealt with what we thought Pearse and McRae would talk about. We have the Fisheries and Oceans Canada discussion paper on fisheries, fisheries reform or whatever it is they will call what finally happens here, and a whole range of reports. I have a briefcase full of them, and in fact last time I was before the committee the chair had me table them all, and I appreciate that.
I should probably wrap up though by pointing out that we would like to make further recommendations and I would like to read them into the record. They are as follows: The minister should direct DFO to set out a national fisheries management policy framework, including vision and principles, to apply consistently across all DFO regions. This process should be linked to consultations and decision-making should be transparent and multi-stakeholder with regard to the development of a new fisheries act.
The minister should establish an interdepartmental working group to oversee the integration of policy and program elements within the national strategy, with participation of the ministers responsible for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, the EI system, Canada Revenue Agency and the Rural Secretariat of Agriculture and Agri- foods Canada. I had the opportunity to go to Twillingate, Newfoundland last week to the Rural Communities and Agri-foods Conference that was on there, and I am struck by the parallels between small farmers and small fishermen in this country.
Environment Canada, the federal regional development agencies — Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency,ACOA, Economic Development for the Quebec Region, FORDQ, and Western Economic Diversification Canada — Transport Canada and the minister should establish a federal-provincial working group to promote and oversee co- ordination of federal and provincial policy and program initiatives arising from the national strategy.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans should empanel a task force of independent experts with credibility in all sectors of the industry and the provincial government to conduct a comprehensive review of the social and economic impacts of current fisheries management policies and practices in Pacific Region. The task force should provide the minister with advice on the following matters: first, a policy framework for more effective consultation and decision- making mechanisms to rebuild relationships of trust and co-operation between DFO fisheries managers and major industry groups, and among industry groups; second, an assessment of the socio-economic and resource management impacts of licence and quota leasing and stacking; third, an assessment of the socio-economic and resource management impacts if introducing ITQs to the salmon fishery; and finally, elaboration of a short, medium and long- term strategy to strengthen community-based owner-operator fisheries in Pacific Region.
We need a fisheries policy for Canada. We do not have one. That is a shame. When I look at the mess that fisheries is in right across this country, but specific to Pacific Region, I wonder how the minister can continue to take advice from the people who got us into such a shape today.
Irvin Figg, President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union: My colleague, Mr. Mirau, handles the harvesting side of our union. I am here and I have not had to kick him under the table even once so far. There is a steep learning curve in this.
I come from the processing side myself. As Mr. Mirau touched on, a lot of people seem to think that people who work in fish plants do not have anything invested in this particular argument, aside from their relationship with their sisters and brothers that harvest, but we do not believe that that is true. We believe that the concentration that will happen with all the capital in this, and the amount that is made right now in quota leasing tends to make the harvest side top-heavy.
Where those who own licences, should they be concentrated in individual companies to a large degree, we are fearful that it will not be long before there will be more money in trading shares of stock, which will be quotas, than there will be in processing fish in British Columbia. Indeed, we know we are in for another round of restructuring companies on the coast in the coastal communities. We have been through this since I have been involved, for 25 years now, and we expect part of it is just plain business. We do not want to see quotas rear their ugly heads and become concentrated to the degree that we wipe out any semblance of processing outside the major urban centres.
Senator Hubley: We are dealing now with privatization of a resource that is a Canadian resource. It belongs to the people. I could not agree with that any more. I would like to see not only the people involved in it, but if there is wealth to be generated, I think it should come back to the Canadian people. When I say Canadian people, we are looking at the coastal communities, not because they are scenic and not because they add a lot to tourism, but because the people in those communities historically have earned a living in a certain manner. They have the right to continue to do that. In ensuring their right to be part of this fishery, and if we are looking at a quota system, and the ITQ has certainly been a term that we have seen, do you see the possibility of community quotas ensuring that fishers within these communities will again have an opportunity to make a living from the fishery or have we gone past that? Is there any way of turning the clock back even a little?
Mr. Mirau: Governments can do whatever they want, and I believe they can. I do not believe we can turn the clock back to where we were 20 years ago, but I think we can turn the clock back. Community quotas are one of the tools that government could use to get some of the resources back into those communities. Senator, we have moved a long way on that. Not many years ago, I thought communities had no business talking about whether there should be harvesting opportunities in their communities and whether those fish should be processed in their communities. We have moved a long ways away from that now.
We have pushed for a discussion about the socio-economic impacts of the ITQs, but also for socio-economic impacts of community quotas and retaining licences in communities and how they might work. I have not done a lot of work on that. We do work somewhat with the coastal communities network who have done a lot of work on that, and I believe it could be done.
Senator Hubley: There is a whole discussion yet to take place on community quotas, and dealing with the system at hand. We are dealing with ITQs, but if we can come up with innovative ideas on how to implement the quota system we may be able to assist communities. I guess we are picking your brains today. Can we tie the quota system to the processing capabilities of a community, or to ensuring that government will improve infrastructure, because I am sure the infrastructure over the years has not been maintained perhaps. The owner-operated system of fishing seems to be all good things that would support a community. Would you comment on them: if you have anything you would like to add to that or other ways that we might look at?
Mr. Mirau: First, I do not think that the quota system is inherently bad in and of itself, although there are dangers. The transferable part of the quotas is the bad part. That part removes fishing opportunities and processing from communities. Communities should reap the benefits of the resources that are extracted from those communities, whether they be logging, fish or something else. That is the only way rural Canada can survive. Even with grain farmers, the communities have to reap some benefit.
I am not sure I am answering the question you asked me. I think it is important to remember what Pat Shermoot, who was the Assistant Deputy Minister of Fisheries, said in 1988 about fishing in communities in British Columbia. I am paraphrasing, but he said fishing was an important employer in the communities, and the fisheries were an important economic driver, not just to those communities, but to British Columbia. The people that worked in those fisheries earned on average 20 per cent higher than the average wage earner in British Columbia. He said that in 1988. That is not true any longer. There are no jobs in communities any longer, and the income from people that work on the boats has dropped dramatically. In fact, United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union and the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia are starting a campaign now to look for compensation for lost opportunity for this year.
The federal government is saying no to that. The provincial government is left to pick up the pieces from the absolute mismanagement of the fisheries this summer just on salmon. All the other people that have disappeared from the fishery — some of them are living in Ucluelet, some in Ahouset, some in Tofino and some in other coastal communities — they are still there, but they no longer contribute to the benefit of all Canadians. They are now users because they do not have any other options.
Senator Adams: I live in a community that has the same problem, but at the time the land claim was settled, we asked to control the fishery, and we still have a problem today. Since 1993 we have had an agreement, and a fishery was set up in Nunavut in 2002. At the beginning of this year, the three-year program expired at Nunavut, and we had to hire somebody who understands commercial fishing. We do not have native ships, vessels and so on in the community. Somehow, organizations were set up and took some of the quotas from the community. The main part of the community is where I live. Most of the population lives on the coast, and most are concerned with fishing, too. We have studied it since we settled land claims between Nunavut and Hudson Bay and between Baffin Island and the high Arctic, between the islands, and the coast where the Inuit live. We have 60 per cent water, coast to coast, in Nunavut. Between B.C. and the East Coast, you have 40 per cent, and in the meantime people have nothing to say.
I will explain to you a little bit about how those quotas are set up. The three communities were Pond Inlet, Clyde River and Baffin Island. Pond Inlet and Clyde River had a quota of 45 tonnes each of turbot. Baffin Island had a quota of 330 tonnes. Those communities were getting royalties from those companies fishing up there such as Clearwater Seafoods. We found out later after three years straight of work that one community had a contract for 45 tonnes, and the other one had a contract for 330 tonnes. The contract for 45 tonnes was $20,000 a year. Those hunters and trappers thought they were getting royalties from the government and found out it was a contract. The contract for the community on Baffin Island with a quota of 330 tonnes was between $110,000 and $120,000 a year. Now, one community on Baffin Island says we are not renewing the contract. Clearwater said, we are going to sue you. That is the kind of stuff the company threatened to do to the community. At one time the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans came to Nunavut and I asked him, is there any future for Nunavut in commercial fishing? The minister said the department is buying gillnets, hooks and boats and making them available to people to get into the fishing business. He said, Senator Adams, we pay you 20 per cent royalties in the community. I asked the treasury minister, what is the 20 per cent and where did it go? He did not know either. Maybe it went to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. That money or royalty had been collected from the department or the company.
Right now, we decided to do with fishing the same thing we did with the hunters and trappers but some guy in the company, and the guy from Newfoundland, said you will be members of the Baffin Fishery Coalition, BFC and they gave us one share each. They never told us they were giving one share to each of those 11 communities in the Baffin Island. They have no voting shares. We have one fish plant on Baffin Island, and every community has shares in it and they have a little bit of control. For all the OA area, we have a quota of 4,000 metric tonnes for Nunavut. That should be good for the community. Every year since I have been on the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, the board applies to the minister for quotas. They send the request to Ottawa, confidential to the minister from Nunavut. However, each year the department goes back to the same quotas. They give it to the Baffin Fisheries Coalition. In the meantime, BFC does not have a licence to fish those fish. BFC hired a guy from Newfoundland who hires people from Europe to bring ships and foreigners to get those fish.
In the future, the quotas should be divided up among every community in the organization, and from there fishermen for the organization can buy from the local guy, instead of getting it from the organization. That is why we have so many problems right now. We are losing $60 million worth of fish in Nunavut that we had before the land claim. Somehow, after we settled the land claim, the minister said you will get fish between turbot and cold water shrimps, up 65 per cent and 45 per cent from the other company from Newfoundland. Like my friend from Halifax, Nova Scotia, people there got 45 per cent. I have one community who finally got a partnership with the people from Newfoundland. They have three vessels now for the community, and cannot get the licence, cannot get the quotas belonging to Nunavut. Foreigners are getting the quotas. I have real difficulty with how the system works and how DFO has set it up. We have lived up there for so many years and want to develop the fishing. Now we cannot be in control of what are supposed to be our fish. That is the same thing exactly that you have right now. We heard a lot about the B.C. coast. Paul Sprout from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans told this committee last week that it is nice to do the work with the community. I did not agree with much of what he said, how he worked with the native people in the community. I do not know how you feel about it.
Mr. Mirau: One thing that we have in common in coastal communities around the country on both coasts, whether they are First Nations communities or non-native communities, is that DFO decisions now and in the past are affecting those communities badly. I had an opportunity over the previous two weeks to tour the eastern coast of Nova Scotia and up to Canso — there is a community that was surrounded once by a rich fishery that is now turning into a ghost town — and the communities all around Newfoundland. It seems on the face of it that community quotas and owner- operator provisions do not go together, but I think they do. I think they can work together and put some jobs back into the communities.
One thing that I never talked about was conservation, but I believe that conservation is also key. People connected to the fishery are more likely to be concerned about the conservation of that fishery than somebody in Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver who has only an investment in it and whose only interest is bottom line and never mind anything else.
Senator Cowan: As I explained to one of our guests earlier I am the new boy on the committee, so I am learning a good deal as we go along here. I think everybody agrees that the impacts on fisheries workers, whether they are processors or fishers aboard vessels have been adversely affected by developments in the industry over the last little while and that local communities, coastal communities on all coasts, are adversely affected by these developments. I wonder whether the changing technology in the fishery, the requirement to get more and more expensive equipment, if that is the case, whether that drives some of it. Can an argument be made that without the ability to pool licences, to trade licences, to concentrate capacity in the hands of a few larger concerns, the industry cannot survive on a global basis. Is there anything in that? If that were not the case, then it seems to me that everybody would agree that we need to get back to the kinds of things you talked about in the beginning. We need to focus more on the employment aspect of the fishery, on community development and on community enhancement aspects of the coastal communities. I wonder whether technology, if that is the right term, has evolved to the point where the fishery cannot survive any other way.
Mr. Mirau: As I said in the beginning, you cannot turn the clock back altogether but you can turn in back part way. The technology that has evolved around fishing has contributed to larger vessels and the ability to catch fish that perhaps would not have been caught before. I am not sure that is a good thing for the fish. To put it into context, there is an old saying amongst farmers — I am a Saskatchewan boy — the bigger the pig the more you have to feed it. You do not necessarily get more meat but you get a lot more stuff out of the back end. I think that is what is going on here. The bigger boats and more technology are not contributing to anything except an inability of DFO to manage the fishery in a rational way because things can happen so quickly; a loss of opportunity; and a gain for the investor. We are faced now with ever larger vessels. In British Columbia and the Pacific Region this year we have two processing ships that are catcher-processing ships. I want to ask the minister what the hell is going on here. Does he not have any interest in the communities? Does he not care about anybody? Are investors the only people he is listening to?
The senator said she thinks we should manage fisheries for the good of all Canadians: It is a common property resource and all Canadians should benefit from it, and that is how fisheries should be managed.
Senator Cowan: Would it be desirable to limit the size of vessels? We have heard about the impact of draggers as an example. What if you simply said, all right, you are not allowed to fish using the draggers?
Mr. Mirau: As they download the responsibility for fishing more and more, the inevitable result is a consolidation of ownership, a consolidation of licences under fewer and fewer vessels, and the vessels will get bigger. Do I think it is feasible to go back to the old way of fishing with smaller vessels? I think that is the question you are asking. Frankly, I do not know what we would do with those vessels that we have now. We are now at a situation where those vessels that have now consolidated the licences on them, there is more and more access to more and more poundage, but there is more trading in licences. These vessels are now finding themselves paying less to the crew in terms of percentages, and sailing shorthanded because there is not enough money to go around.
We had three accidents in British Columbia in the last year that resulted in the loss of life in the drag fleet, and they all had three people on the boats. This is a huge issue that I believe that we need another committee on, a task force to look at. We need somebody that is not biased towards co-management, owner-operators or quotas, but people that can look at this from the outside and say, this part is working, this part is not and this part has to go. I really believe that.
What do we do with those vessels now that people have invested in? Maybe we give these people five years, seven years or something to divest themselves of their investments but I believe the federal government has a responsibility to take action now. I know that in the East Coast they are looking now at, and I speak to it in the short brief. John Hanlon, Director General of the DFO for the East Coast, did a tour of the East Coast communities and talked to people that are involved in the fisheries, and I think they are prepared to recommend owner-operator policies and fleet separation. Those people who invested in quotas and trust agreements will be given three years, five years or whatever to divest themselves of those investments. I think that is fair. They have done well over the last while because of the gifted quotas — and it is a gift, there is no question about it. It is time to put some of these fisheries back in the hands of small boat operators.
Senator Cowan: My previous life had something to do with the motor carrier industry. In those days there was a lot of regulation. People got licences to operate freight vehicles and passenger vehicles. Of course, the licences belonged to the board and not to the individuals. They were bought and sold. Government came along and deregulated, so those licences that many firms paid a lot of money for suddenly had no value. You could not buy them, you did not need them. It is not impossible to change an industry where licences have been issued and then have been relied on as an asset to be sold, traded, leased and passed on from generation to generation. That industry clearly does not have the same economic import as the fishing industry does, but suddenly with the stroke of the pen, literally those licences had no value and so an industry changed overnight essentially. I suppose there is no reason why the same thing could not happen in an industry such as fishing.
Mr. Mirau: I am sure the chair is intimately familiar with, and Senator Hubley too, the issue of the lobster fishermen in area 34. Their licences have reached a value, or they did a year or so ago, up to, I understand, $2 million. Part of the reason for that was trust agreements and trading licences that probably should not have been traded. Those people recognize that changes need to be made to get rid of those trust agreements and go back to owner-operators. Some people who would have been beneficiaries of a huge windfall, like winning the lottery, have said clearly to DFO that it is time to move away from what we are doing. It is time to go back to owner-operator provisions. It is time to support the communities. They have clearly said that, and we are hearing that in British Columbia.
Ron Kadowaki, who is the one-man commissioner looking at implementing the Pearse-McRae report, which is now called fisheries renewal or fisheries whatever it is called today, cannot find support anywhere for what they are doing. They have gone around to all the communities. The only place they can find support is where you would expect it, which is in the investor community and those who are already major owners of quotas. The industry itself and the people that work in the industry are clearly saying to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Pacific Region, that you are going down the wrong road here. We want you to back up. We want you to have another look at this. Tell us what the socio-economic impacts of these decisions are. Then, once we have all the information perhaps we will look at this differently. Perhaps we will agree that this is the way to go — instead of the 140 or 150 draggers that there were a few years ago, we are now down to 70, probably we are going to be down to 50 next year, and God knows how many in two years. If you look at what has happened to the halibut fishery, perhaps we will agree that that is the way to go, but I think we need the information, and that information is not available now.
The Chairman: I have a brief couple of questions.
You mentioned the word co-management, and I raised this issue this morning. Often in government publications you see the question of co-management. Co-management is a nice, fuzzy sounding word, and everybody feels good inside when they hear it. However, co-management, like many other words, has to be defined, and the closest definition we could find to date was in the East Coast policy framework for Atlantic fisheries. This document defines co- management as the sharing of responsibility and accountability for results between Fisheries and Oceans Canada and resource users, meaning the licence holders. Later on, the policy framework for Atlantic fisheries talks about resource users and others with an interest in the fishery. In other words, co-management according to DFO to the best of our knowledge is between licence holders and the DFO, which therefore by definition excludes Mr. Figg's groups, the fish plant workers, the processors, communities and people who have invested in the communities. I always like to bring up the fact that yes, resource users have a stake in the fishery. They have paid for the licence, they have paid for a vessel, and so on. However, people who live within the community have also invested in the fishery by setting up ice plants sometimes, investing in restaurants, investing in taxies to move people around, investing in hospitals and so on. A community is much, much more than just a licence holder. By definition, the word co-management is in fact from my perception almost negative if that is the way to go. Would you agree with that sentiment or am I all wrong on this?
Mr. Mirau: I agree. The deck-hand on a boat that comes aboard with his gum boots has as much invested, if you will, in the industry as the person that owns the boat.
The Chairman: Per capita-wise maybe even more because he has less money and he has invested in a home, children, local schools and so on.
Mr. Mirau: That is right. I feel the same as the people that work in fish plants, on oil docks, in net lofts and in the grocery stores in those communities.
The Chairman: It is a percentage of their home income.
Mr. Mirau: Yes, and you talk about co-management, Daniel Pauly, chair of the fisheries department at UBC, in a visit to New Zealand and talked to the fisheries minister about co-management, and he said, ``So what problems do you have in the fishery?'' The answer was, ``We have no problems. It is all quota fisheries, and they take care of the problems.'' We know many fish stocks in New Zealand now are at risk, and that is how it is taken care of. That is what I think of co-management.
I believe, contrary to the impression I may have given today that there needs to be one manager for fisheries, and that should be the Minister of Fisheries. Frankly, I cannot understand, although I do not know what the language will be about the move to change wording in the Fisheries Act, why the minister would ever want to give away the right to be in charge of fisheries.
The Chairman: I am not going to speculate on that one either. I have my thoughts. Pearse of the Pearse-McRae report some years ago, I think back in the 1990s, indicated that salmon was simply not a fishery that was compatible with ITQs. It could not be done because of a number of reasons. If I recall, salmon fish tend to swim together, and some species of salmon just cannot be targeted because of the swimming together. Another reason was because you need to be able to do mid-season adjustments, and there were a whole bunch of reasons. He swallowed himself whole on this one, hook, line and sinker, and he has turned around and said yes, now it can be done. I imagine once you are sold on something you might as well sell yourself all the way, with no disrespect to Pearse because he believes deeply and sincerely in privatization. As a long time fisherman, Mr. Mirau, is salmon compatible with ITQs?
Mr. Mirau: I do not believe it is. There was a so-called demonstration fishery on a troll fleet in northern British Columbia this year that could be classed as successful, depending on how you measure it. However, it is clear that even in that fishery DFO moved outside conservation goals and rules that they had put in place for the open fishery to make it work. With the diverse amount of fish and fish habitat and the big coast that we have here, I do not believe that you could make a quota system work in salmon. In fact, Paul Sprout wrote a letter to the Nuchalnuth Tribal Council in July saying the same thing — that they do not see how they can make it work — and yet the Pacific Region that he is in charge of is moving ahead with quotas.
The Chairman: Within specific species of salmon such as sockeye, for example, there may be hundreds of diverse or distinct biological populations of every one of these species. If you try to target or save a certain number of them because the numbers are going down, you almost cannot. It is practically impossible so you need to come up with something else. The department is looking at ITQs, of course. Are you aware of whether the department is looking at other ways of managing and protecting some of these more at-risk populations?
Mr. Mirau: From the commercial perspective, yes, they are looking at other things, but they amount to quotas by another name: small-bite fisheries, pool fisheries and all these kind of things. The vision that Pearse has, and let us face it, Pearse wrote the report. He self-described grandfather quotes. He did write the report. His vision of being able to go out and catch this fish whenever the marketplace might allow it, and you might get a better price, and you might do all kinds of things, but it does not allow for the fact that the fish, the salmon is not in the system long. It is not like a halibut. It is like not a black cod. It is not like any other fish. It is here and gone. If you look at the salmon fishery this year, what would have happened if DFO was right, and I am not willing to give them that they were right on the management of the salmon fishery this year. I think huge mistakes were made. Many times there could have been a salmon fishery on Fraser River sockeye stocks. We are on record many times as saying that. When we finally fished, the crazy part of it is we fished on the stocks that DFO said were of concern in a fishery they pretended was a pink salmon fishery at the end of the season, and we fished on the fish, the lake run, that the DFO said was a concern. However, if there had been a quota fishery, and if they were right about the stocks of concern, and if I had gone out and bought his quota, how is anybody going to keep me away from that fish? I am not willing to say DFO were right about their fish management in South Coast this year, but if they were right how would they control it? They absolutely could not do it. It is an impossibility.
The Chairman: I will wrap up this part of the session this morning. Are there any closing comments before we wrap up?
Mr. Mirau: Thank you for your concern about fisheries and about rural Canada in general.
The Chairman: Before you go, I cannot resist the last point in passing. Last week, I asked the DFO officials why they chose Mr. Pearse as the lead researcher for them. With no disrespect at all to Mr. Pearse — he has a long and distinguished career as a researcher and I am not questioning his credentials whatsoever, he does fine work — but he has been known to have a certain view of things on the issue of privatization. In jest I asked them why they did not choose somebody such as Parzival Copes and call it the Parzival Copes-McRae study, and obviously that did not go all that well. However, depending on who you choose you send out a message, and the DFO sent out a message by choosing Pearse. Of course they blame the province for having chosen Pearse.
Senator Cowan: I thought they said they put forward one and the province put forward another.
The Chairman: Had the DFO wanted to send a different message I think the DFO could have said to the province no, we need somebody who has less of an inclination towards privatization. I think the province would have been receptive to that request from DFO. However, it did send a message and therefore it provides ammunition to people such as myself to question the direction of DFO and where it is heading with the West Coast fishery, because the message was loud and clear.
Mr. Mirau: I think so. When they made the decision it would be as if you needed a mechanic to fix your engine and you went out and got someone that paints bodies in a body shop.
The Chairman: You have got it.
Mr. Mirau: They got a privatization guy, and no disrespect to Pearse.
The Chairman: No disrespect.
Mr. Mirau: He is a well-respected economist. He is a fisheries economist, or I mean, a forestry economist. If you look at the trouble the forest industry is in, in this country, Peter Pearse has written a number of reports around that. I think they got the report that they were looking for. It is important for the committee to keep in mind that supposedly, even the title of the report was Treaties and Transitions, and we do not hear much talk about treaties or transitions to First Nations around the Pearse-McRae report. The only debate is about how we finally get down to the lowest common denominator and let the investors take over.
The Chairman: Incidentally, we will check with First Nations whether Mr. Sprout was right in saying that there was general support from the native community towards the Pearse-McRae report. We will check that.
Mr. Mirau: Thank you.
The Chairman: I would like to call our next witness, Kathy Scarfo, from the West Coast Trollers Association.
Kathy Scarfo, President, West Coast Trollers Association: First I have to apologize, I am not feeling well, so if I go off on a tangent and you lose track of where I am just wave at me and bring me back to reality.
The Chairman: We will pull you back.
Ms. Scarfo: The first thing I would like to do is say thank you for the questions that you have raised over the last few years about fisheries policies. In some ways I was going to say thank you for coming here, but then another part of me got a bit of fear down my neck because whenever a politician, bureaucrat or anyone in charge of fisheries crosses the Rockies they seem to lose some of the things they have on the East Coast, which is principles about what fisheries are supposed to be, so I hope you do not stay here so long that you lose those principles.
The Chairman: We are from Parliament and we are here to help.
Ms. Scarfo: As you know, I represent the West Coast troll fleet, which is a small independent owner-operator fleet. I do not represent the bulk of the fish harvest in British Columbia, but I do represent a group of fishermen that work hard, and that I am proud to represent because not only are they working families, but they represent more than fishermen out working for a livelihood. I have a bit of a problem because we have these meetings on a regular basis. We have open meetings with the fleet every two months, and we go to these meetings and we tell them about what DFO is sending. We have meetings with DFO, and here I have a group of independent business people that should be there defending their own interests as business individuals and as vested interest groups. Instead of the federal government representing public interest and the public good, I have a bunch of fishermen who are struggling to survive talking about public interests. That scares me and I find that incredibly unfair, but it makes me proud of the people that I have the honour of representing.
At this point, I would like to talk about the problems in fisheries: where we are, and what the future will look like, because if you do not know what the future you are hoping to achieve is, how are you going to get there. When I listened to the Suzuki Foundation earlier talking about looking through the mandate of DFO and it being unclear, much as I get a lot of hope from the recommendations you give out, I think industry also gets a lot of hope from some of the documents and the fuzzy warm wording that comes out of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The Oceans Act was a clear indication that in 1996 when we were going through fisheries school, which we were doing there — reform, renewal and revitalization — the West Coast troll fleet went into that decade as a fairly economically viable self-sustaining independent fleet with some of the best incomes on the coast. That is not the situation we are in today, but we stayed in these processes under an illusion given by the federal government of a direction we are going. Every time we turn around, we have something that sounds good on paper, presented at international conferences, in glossy brochures that talk about it, but when the rubber hits the road and we sit in those meetings and we put out fishing regimes, allocation and fishing plans every year, those principles are completely lost and never to be seen. There is an incredible disconnect between the bureaucracy in the Pacific Region and what the minister hopes to achieve. I do not blame the minister when I talk about DFO. I hope he does not take it personally. I do not know the man. I am sure he has good intentions, but I will talk about what I know, which is the Pacific Region and the incredible disconnect between what we are supposed to be see happen and what we actually see happen.
In 1996, when we went through restructuring we had a good operating fleet on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. We had one of the most active fishing harbours on the West Coast, which was Ucluelet. Since then we have seen a continual erosion in the fishing community there, and in the fishing fleet. I had 1,800 trollers that used to be able to fish the West Coast of Vancouver Island. We now have a complete licensed fleet of 232 licences in the West Coast troll fleet of which only 125 are actively fishing at any given time right now.
We used to target coho and chinook as our predominant fishery. You will probably hear from others that it is their important fishery now, the sports industry. That was our fishery. That was our traditional fishery and that fishery has basically been expropriated from us.
We used to fish the summer months when the days are long and the weather is fairly decent. We now fish from the beginning of October through the end of May, and we tend to fish further offshore in worse conditions than we used to. Some of the things we have done I am proud of. A little while ago you had a presentation from the Pacific Seafood Alliance and a Gulf Troll representative, who actually presented on the West Coast chinook fishery, which surprised me. I would not present on his fishery, but I will try to clarify some things in our fisheries. We were going through some substantial Canada-U.S. discussions at the time and we knew that we had to restructure the way our fisheries were operating.
In 1996, decrease your fleet by 50 per cent, you will catch the same amount of fish, so therefore you will be economically viable. We spent a fair amount of taxpayers' dollars at that point to see that the industry was economically viable. We already were, but we came out of this somehow not. Part of the reason is because although we decreased our fleets by over 50 per cent, since then the federal government has decreased the commercial catch by over 85 per cent. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if you do not have fish, you will not be economically viable.
We have gone through all these processes now. We were in the process of developing a fishery, which we did in a comprehensive manner, as was outlined in the Oceans Act. We worked closely with First Nations communities of place, which are the adjacent communities, the Nuchalnuth Tribal Council and their fisheries committees, and a substantial number of NGOs. We tried to design a fishery that was a model fishery that we could stand up internationally and say in the salmon industry, this is how you can have a really good fishery that meets all those objectives; social, conservation and economic.
We tried to move into a 12-months-of-the-year fishery. That was part of the strategy under the selective fishing policy of the federal government that we followed through on: If you can find new selective ways of catching your fish you will have additional opportunities. We developed a winter fishery. It was five years of commitment by the fleet to go out there and get samples every week in different regions offshore, regardless of weather, at their own expense. We invested millions of dollars so we could stand up and handle the peer review internationally and move into this fishery. The goal was to provide wild fresh salmon to the marketplace year-round, because we had our markets kicked out from under us by the farmed industry. Unfortunately, when we developed that fishery instead of getting additional opportunity we had every other opportunity removed from us. The only fishery that our fleet now has is that winter chinook fishery. Probably part of the only reason we have it is because it is a Canada-U.S. fishery and not purely under the control of the federal government in B.C.
I think we did some good things. It seems as if we were going along doing all the warm and fuzzy things we were supposed to do. One area where we failed was in not generating enough income to enter into cost sharing arrangements with the federal government. I am not going to call them co-management because I am not into warm and fuzzy today. The fleet put up their time, energy and expenses to go out there and get those samples and do that work to build the fishery, but we are not generating enough from that fishery to put back into it some of the things that we are being asked. We are not being asked. We are basically being blackmailed into trying to put them back. For example, you cannot go fishing unless you can pay for the observers. You have to come up with this money. This is a large concern so we are not achieving that.
However, we have achieved some things that quota fisheries are supposed to do for us. The market, the landed value of our fish, is double what was achieved this year in the pilot troll fishery on quotas. We are told we need to go to quotas because of markets. We have already proven that we can beat that with a lower quality, smaller fish that is of a lower value. We are already double the landed value per pound of the quota fishery, so that argument is not really working.
A quota fishery: I am supposed to represent my fleet and most of the fleet is over 50. We have no tax benefits for intergenerational transfers, so who am I going to sell my licence to? I have less fish attached to that licence, so who in their right mind will buy that licence right now? There is not a big market out there other than the speculation of possibly ITQs or First Nations treaty settlements.
In the best interest of my fleet, should we look at quotas because it artificially escalates the value of our licence and then sell out? Yet at the biggest meeting of licensed fishermen that we have ever had last March, the fleet said no. They brought up the fact that they want to see another generation of fishermen living on this coast fishing those licences. They would like that intergenerational transfer to happen. They would like to see the beneficial interests of this fishery remain in those communities.
How will we make that happen? How will we be self-reliant? I have to make money to be self-reliant. If I have no fish and no access to fish, it does not matter if I am fishing under a quota, an amendment-style fishery or just a derby fishery, I will not make a living. Access to fish and not reallocation without compensation has to take place. You cannot reduce my catch and then tell me to go into a quota fishery. Those of us that stay in will now lease from somebody else and increase our costs even further without a guarantee that we have a stable amount of fish.
We asked that question at some of the DFO consultation meetings last week. Can you guarantee me a stable amount of fish in my fishery, and the answer was categorically, no. In fact, we will continue to see a decrease. We have species at risk legislation coming at us still. We have First Nations settlements and some uncertainty in those fisheries. Most importantly in our fleet, we have sports priority. While we have decreased our catch by 83 per cent or more, the sports have doubled their catch. They continue to fish on the stocks of concern at the time of year that they are most prevalent. As we continue to see more species at risk and more stocks becoming of concern, the commercial industry pays the price for that, so we built a new industry at the expense of a lot of people without any compensation.
How will I be reformed? We asked a lot of questions and I gave you a document where I have written down some of the questions the fleet has asked. Before we move into reform, you would think it would be fairly reasonable to expect some answers. I do not expect those answers. We have not seen those answers.
In your recommendations, you said that DFO should consult. I went to some of those consultations, and I am sorry, but I am tired of meaningless consultation. We have been through a series of meetings where issues are raised and they seem to disappear off the table as soon as the meeting is over and they are never addressed. Consultation has to be meaningful.
The commercial salmon industry, thanks to an individual who spent 60 days on a hunger strike a number of years ago, had a new advisory system put in place. Those were the recommendations for the Institute for Dispute Resolution, of which Stephen Owen was a member at that time and stepped down. The institute put forward a whole booklet of recommendations, and the first recommendation was you cannot cherry-pick. This is a package and you cannot take just one of these recommendations and run with it. DFO picked one recommendation and ran with it.
We had an election. We now had an elected advisory process. Of those members, 50 per cent have no mandate any more. After the election, when it came time for a re-election, somehow a decision was made that democracy is great, but things are running along smoothly so we will have an election sometime down the road after we have done all these massive changes. At this point, we have an advisory process that is no longer even elected, and yet DFO continues to use these advisers. That elective process has never come back to its fleet in our area, although we host meetings every two months and we ask the advisers to come to those meetings. Only two out of the nine have ever come back to meet with the fleet, and yet they are putting forward recommendations on significant changes.
Where do we go from here? We put forward suggestions of other styles of fisheries other than individual transferable quotas. I will agree with Mr. Mirau, quotas are not the problem. The problem is the transferability and who is the broker of those quotas. If you allow corporate or investment interests to be the broker of resource and resource access, then you cannot put social benefits in that package. If the Canadian government remains the broker of fish stocks in Canada, then we can add those principles in. I think the Canadian government has the responsibility and the ability to do that job well if they decide to take it on.
We put forward a fairly lengthy number of suggestions to the reform committees on different styles of fisheries, some of them monthly quotas amendment style fisheries, that have never made it past putting them in. Yet, every quota fishery demonstration has gone forward. Our confidence in anything other than a quota fishery being implemented is marginal at this point. We do not have any reason to trust in the processes that we have seen. I think we are all looking with great fear at the fact that quotas will be implemented, not just in salmon but in other fisheries such as groundfish, and we will be excluded. Active fishermen are extremely concerned that their historical catches are not being taken into consideration as they have been in other fisheries. We are looking at equal splits, which will disenfranchise the remaining active fishermen and increase their cost.
You will hear from other people that fisheries are doing fine and everything is just great — go to quota and everything will turn around. If you take the black cod and halibut model, they have not been hit with farm fish, and the impact to their market that farm fish had on the salmon fishery. Maybe in ten years we should come back and re- examine how well those fisheries are doing in the marketplace before we go head long into implementation.
Another concern that was raised was about the confidentiality of information and access to information. That is an extremely large concern that I have. Co-management agreements are entered into, and there is no record of who or how or where these co-management agreements are entered into. There is no individual spot where you can go and audit them. Yet, millions of dollars worth of fish and fish revenues are funnelled into the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and never seem to show up at Treasury Board. The information that is gathered that is absolutely critical to proper management of fisheries is not disclosed unless that body with the information wants to disclose it. Whether or not groups today are disclosing and sharing information is irrelevant to the fact that the Canadian public has to own that information. The Canadian public does not have to be at the mercy of an individual legal body that does not have the same open, transparent and inclusive mandate that the federal government has. That is not going to happen with the form of management agreements that we see right now.
The approach of DFO to consolidate industry is a direct result of looking first and foremost at budgets and job security. My manager in my fishery has been on three-month contracts for the last two years. If I was him and I was looking at the situation, I would encourage this fleet to go into quotas with co-management agreements so that I could have a good job into the future. I am sure you will hear from people who have done that. It works well for them, but I do not think it works well for the general public of British Columbia, for Canadians as a whole or for the resource in the long run.
I think I will close there and let you ask questions.
Senator Hubley: Is your organization one of many or one of few, a trolling organization or an organization of trollers?
Ms. Scarfo: There are three troll areas in British Columbia right now. Each area has its own lobby organization. We were formed in 1996 to respond to area licensing. We do not represent trollers coast-wide.
Senator Hubley: If we ask questions that are somewhat pointed, it is to educate ourselves. As Senator Cowan has mentioned, we are not all as experienced as our chair and Senator Adams. I was surprised to hear that the sports fishery, in order of importance, is up fairly high to what I would have expected from a sports fishery. I thought it would have been little lower on the totem pole, only because I am looking at who is most deserving of access to that resource. We have a sports fishery in the East Coast as well, and certainly in the north. Does that come about through successful lobbying or how?
Ms. Scarfo: It is successful lobbying without a doubt. You will probably hear about best use of fish and lots of facts and figures about what the sports industry contributes to British Columbia. I am not going to argue those numbers because we can go round in circles on numbers. The fact is, the sports fishery has expanded. There are two sports fisheries really in British Columbia and in Canada. There is you and I who might decide to take our grandkids out and catch a fish. I have been a sports fisherman and I have had a sports fishing licence for many years. I would not want to take that right away from anyone anywhere. However, there is an industrial group of fishermen that is the sports fishing industry, and that industry is unlimited. There is no limited entry and no licensing. They do not have the type of criteria that the rest of industries do. It is growing and it now has the same level of priority basically as section 35 of the Constitution on First Nations fisheries, above and beyond the commercial First Nations fishery. In a lot of cases, priority access to sports in our situation has slowed down treaty negotiations. For many years we heard in British Columbia you will never have stability in British Columbian fisheries until treaties are settled. You will have to talk to First Nations about this. It is difficult for a First Nations community to be told at the treaty table, we are offering you X amount of money to go out and buy commercial fishing licences, then have your economic access in the commercial fishery — if you have a commercial fishery right now such as the Nuchalnuth in our area — sit with a commercial licence tied to the dock while commercial sports operators are fishing. It is kind of meaningless. To be offered X amount of money to go out and buy commercial fishing licences that do not provide you economic opportunity is kind of ridiculous. Why would you trade your First Nations priority access for something that is further down the totem pole than expanding industry? I would not do it, and I do not think most natives are stupid enough to jump into that.
Senator Hubley: We have not looked at other models. The ITQ system is being tested and there has been an experimental fishery or limited fishery in that area and there are other models that should be looked at. Certainly all the information you have given us today gives us a feeling of how policy has impacted negatively on your association. Is there another model that you could give us input on that we could take forward from here?
Ms. Scarfo: We can send some of the submissions that we have made already to DFO and Ron Kadowaki. More importantly, I think the first step when you look at models is, what do you want to achieve and what are the obstacles that you face right now in your fishery. Our fishery actually worked fairly well even though it was a derby style fishery. We have not gone over our catches, we are not in environmental crises where we are out raping and pillaging because our catches are so low. We have gone to monthly catches. The allowable catch for this month is 2,000 fish. We are micromanaging this fishery into small increment numbers and we are holding to those numbers closely even though those numbers are not critical each month. We can go over or under but we are setting these numbers for marketing purposes, within some guidelines for environmental concerns. We could probably go up to 10,000 this month. It would be difficult with the weather to catch 10,000 fish this month so we are better off to put those fish into a better time period. The things we are doing are working. We do not have enough fish to support the fleet, in which case it begs the question, will we get more fish or do we have to reduce the fleet? I expect a buyback from the federal government. Considering the concerns and the public outcry over what happens every summer on the Fraser River, I think we will see a massive buyback. I do not expect fishermen to be compensated adequately for that reallocation. I think we will look at implementation of quotas by species, so that we will buy back a portion of the value of licences and fishermen will be left standing on the dock with a huge capital investment and an increasingly small access to provide the opportunity to make a living. I think a lot of the drivers of quotas are to move into that kind of process so we can start the stock trading not of salmon, but of individual species. In groundfish, the bycatch of stocks is actually a hotter commodity than the actual directed stock.
Senator Adams: Is your organization mostly for sports fishing or commercial?
Ms. Scarfo: No, we are commercial.
Senator Adams: Not sports?
Ms. Scarfo: No.
Senator Adams: I would like to see how much power you have. Like me, we should stop the foreigners coming into our area for commercial fishing in the future. I am not a politician; I am appointed by the Prime Minister. Sometimes it is difficult but I would like to make a regulation to ban, not really a ban, foreigners coming into our area. To me, it should be policy. Maybe you are a little different because we need it, but we settled the land claim to protect our wildlife and make sure we do the right thing — not just catch it, sell it and make money on it. We are looking to it for the future of the economy and the community. We are a little different than South Canada, because we live in a community, the high cost of living and everything, and it is really difficult. Right now, our organization is run by somebody who does not come from the community. They are making policies that should work. It is difficult for me to tell my own people, you do not understand, you better get somebody out of the organization and get somebody to understand. Get on the board that makes the decision.
How is your organization set up? Are you elected? Would you want to protect your community, or is that how the system or organization works?
Ms. Scarfo: We are a lobby group. We represent commercial fishermen. When we wrote up our terms of reference, we recognized that we are part of a community of place. I do not live in Ucluelet. I do not live on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. I live on a small island somewhere else, closer to Victoria. However, my community and the communities that depend on me, and that I depend on in the long term, have to be interconnected. That is why when we work on projects we always include community representation, local First Nations representations, and usually some of the local environment groups in any of our major groups.
In response to the minister's fisheries reform announcement where he said we will have this process, we formed a regional fisheries reform committee that included all these groups at the table because we impact one another and we recognize that at this point. If we turn into quota holders and I become just a licence-holder broker of fish, then my interest in the local community is diminished. I will not be there. I will not be sitting on the dock.
Senator Adams: We are starting to have similar commercial fishermen. Where we live up in the Arctic, we cannot use a 16-footer, or even 65-footers some places up there because they are too small. We are just like the Pacific Coast in some places in the Arctic. With your organization, do you have control of the fisherman: who is going to catch fish and whose company? I do not know whether the federal government or provincial government is the more powerful organization of elected members for this issue. Are you able in some way to control quotas and how the community benefits, instead of somebody else, such as big corporations?
Ms. Scarfo: At this point, our fleet is an independent fleet. It is a vessel-based licence, so if your boat does not fish you do not fish. You have the privilege of fishing. If you want to go out and catch some fish and make a living this month, you have the licence, you have the option. If you do not fish, you do not receive a beneficial interest. We do not sell to large companies, so when you hear from the larger companies about fisheries they do not represent our fishery at all. We have small independent buyers. We are a model of an independent fleet. We are family operations for the most part. We are mostly community-based within the regions that we fish. We sell to independent, small operator-buyers, not the large processing companies: not the five large companies in British Columbia.
Out of interest, though, about controlling who has beneficial interest from the fish and who fishes, there was a pilot quota this summer in the northern troll fishery. The preseason forecast for income for that region was the highest in British Columbia. From the get-go, before you left the door you knew that the quota fishery would do well, because that fishery would do well. One concern we had and that was demonstrated in this fishery, which is to me a negative, is for the first time ever it was not the guy in the gum boots on the boat who decided who was going to fish, when and where. In many cases, additional access to fish was bought, the privilege was bought, the transferability of quota was bought by the company and held by the company, by the buyer. Then, the buyer decided whether or not you could go out and fish. For the first time ever in the troll fishery that occurred, and that was in this year's pilot. To me that is a negative effect of a massive change that you could see happening because of the transferability of quota.
Senator Adams: This matter of the 12-mile limit, I think it should work the same in Nunavut. We tried to do a 12- mile limit. It was supposed to be controlled by the Nunavut land claim, up to a 200-mile limit after the 12-mile limit. DFO made the decision of who is able to control it because the fish belong to everybody in Canada after 12-mile limit. Typical for us, the minister gave quotas to Nunavut up to 200-mile limit, and in meantime somebody in the company wants to fight. After the 12-mile limit, you have no power. The next thing, this other organization comes along and gives it to foreigners to catch Nunavut quotas. How much power do you have in your organization?
Ms. Scarfo: If we had any power, we would probably go bankrupt the way that we are.
Senator Cowan: I would like to follow up on Senator Hubley's comments on her surprise at the sports impact on your particular fishery. Like her, I would not have thought that it would have such an impact. Is the sports fishery not allowed to fish in the same time periods that you do, or do they use different gear? I think you said there is no quota and no limit on the number of people who can get into that fishery, is that correct?
Ms. Scarfo: In fact, because they now have priority access to coho and chinook, which is our bread and butter, we were knocked off the water in our traditional month. Those months are priority access to the sports fishery at this point. We cannot put a hook in the water in the month of July or August because the sports fishery has the priority of access to the bycatch of the stocks that are absolutely critical to maintain a fishery during those periods. It is not just priority access to the aggregate but to the actual bycatch. Even though DFO says they do not allocate bycatch, they allocate bycatch, and they allocate it on a priority basis. Until the sports industry is at full open fisheries with maximum retention year round forever, we cannot fish during those time periods. We are allowed to fish once the sports fishing season is over, which is basically the winter months when the fish are smaller, the weather is not as good, the quality of the fish is not as good and our expenses are considerably higher. We do it because it is the only option we have. I do not know if that answers your question.
Senator Cowan: No, I understand. I did not understand the sort of set up and the interrelationship between the two. Thank you.
The Chairman: Last month we had a presentation from the British Columbia Seafood Alliance, and you referred to the witness that appeared along with this group, Tom Kasmer. I think he mentioned your troll fleet specifically, and proceeded to use your troll fleet as an example of why the West Coast of Vancouver Island, your area, should go to an individual investment quota, IVQ. Without getting into the specifics right now, because we would like to get into the specifics, would you mind going over that testimony when you next get the opportunity and get back to the committee with your thoughts on what Mr. Kasmer said. He used it for a specific reason and I think you should have a chance to reflect on what he said so that we could reflect on your response, given that he used your fleet as an example. He might have used some of the problems that you laid out for us today, and used it to the advantage of promoting privatization of a fishery. Would you do that for us?
Ms. Scarfo: I will go through that.
The Chairman: Number two, you pointed out during your testimony that you made a number of recommendations to the DFO over time and these were not taken into consideration. In response to Senator Hubley, you said that you had given some thought to community quotas. Would you as well get those to us, if you could, your recommendations to DFO and any thoughts that you have on community quotas because we are looking specifically at those?
Ms. Scarfo: Yes, we can provide those for you.
The Chairman: I had not really thought about it up to now, but the question of co-management concerns you because of the confidentiality that this could create once a co-management agreement is entered into between DFO and a particular group. This agreement would then remove the accountability aspect away from public scrutiny. Any time you mention nowadays the question of removing public scrutiny and accountability from the public eye it raises parliamentarians' hackles a little bit, especially opposition parliamentarians, because we have seen the problems that can arise when Canadian's resources are removed from Canadian's view and placed in a secret agreement somewhere. Would you expand a little bit more on this question of co-management because is this what the proposed changes to the Fisheries Act are all about, removing scrutiny from the public eye?
Ms. Scarfo: I cannot say what the proposed changes to the Fisheries Act are all about because I have not seen the proposed changes.
The Chairman: We have not either.
Ms. Scarfo: We asked at the public consultation meetings that a white paper be released on those changes rather than waiting for it to be debated in the house. That way, we could have some public scrutiny because all the questions we had went into this void. Some indications of what the Fisheries Act could contain from DFO's point of view included things such as writing into the Fisheries Act a sports priority as a direction, which absolutely blew me away.
The concern that I have about co-management agreements actually arose from listening to Dr. Daniel Pauly at the fisheries forum last year when he talked about the New Zealand fishery. Upon further reflection, DFO was unable to answer a lot of our questions about the existing co-management agreements the department has. They are asking us to go into co-management agreements, so one of the questions I had was, what type of co-management agreements do you already have so we can see a model? They gave us a quasi answer in general terms. I said, can we see any of these co-management agreements because there are different kinds. Some of them are use-of-fish and others are royalties. There does not seem to be one resting place where you can go and pull out a binder that says, this is what these agreements are and this is what is included. When I started to investigate further, I found out things such as one of the organizations was proud of the fact that through their co-management agreement and the funds they raised, they pay for the DFO wages for the biological staff that oversees their fishery. I am sorry, but that scared me. It could be viewed as a good thing economically by the department, but as a Canadian citizen who would like to make sure that fisheries are well managed into the future it tells me that the gatekeeper does not have control of the gate anymore.
Where did that money go? A million dollars collected in one fishery went into co-management agreements. Where does it ever show up? Where do you see this? If you look at other legal entities that the federal government has set up, and not just in fisheries but airport authorities or others, if they are not an actual board of advisers appointed by the federal government, my understanding is that they do not have the responsibility back to the general public that the government does. If I set up the West Coast Trollers Management Group, and we harvest X amount of fish, we can put into a co-management agreement that we will fund projects and maybe even pay for biological staff, and the data that we collect then belongs to us, not DFO.
The Chairman: That is what is happening in New Zealand, right?
Ms. Scarfo: That is my understanding.
The Chairman: I have heard the same thing. Given that information is paid for by the industry, obviously the industry does not want to have that information become available to its competitors, and therefore, is the information being used to protect the stocks or to protect the industry? Some questions there need to be answered.
Ms. Scarfo: I cannot really answer them. I cannot say the information is being misused or abused. The fact that you do not have public scrutiny is the concern.
The Chairman: One last question: You mentioned that you were worried if your fleet goes to an IVQ, it may be determined not on historical catch but rather on a division basis. I do not want to rain on your parade, but when historical catches have been used as a means to distribute, the second the rumour goes out, such as the numbers of allocations are going down for Pacific fleet, for example, there is pressure to go to an ITQ system because everybody makes less money to continue. This situation, in itself, places pressure on the stock because the rumours immediately start abounding that the fishery will be turned over to an ITQ fishery. This situation places pressure on the stocks by all the participants to get the numbers up on their catch histories, which in effect then creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. As everybody places increasing pressure on the stocks, DFO has little choice at that point but to go to an ITQ fishery. The participants welcome it with open arms, because by this point all hell has broken lose. What happens in a case like this is that once the quotas are allocated based on history, the quotas are allocated to those that place the most pressure on the fishery. Quotas go to those that had the least amount of interest in the long-term sustainability of the fishery, in other words, the high-liners, the ones whose main interest were increasing their numbers rather than the long term viability of the stocks. What is your response to a comment like that? Let us say I am being the devil's advocate at this point.
Ms. Scarfo: When you move into a quota fishery, how you set that baseline is incredibly critical. You need to be fair, you need to be considerate, and you need to be aware of some of the drivers that lead into some of the problems. This race for increasing total allowable catch, TAC, in our case we have 150,000 chinook this year to catch. It is not as if we can go over that number. It is a set number and we are carefully managed to that number. It is not as if we will create a conservation problem in this fishery. You will have more participation if you start talking about going to an ITQ system but that has already happened. As soon as Pearse put out a report recommending quotas, that discussion already took place, and more boats were fishing last month and this month because there is a concern that will be part of it. You need to take that into consideration, as part of the problem of moving into a quota fishery. It is also part of the problem if you do not have enough fish to start with for the whole fleet. How are you going to divvy those fish up fairly? Will you make the people who are active fishermen bear a higher burden and a higher cost that is far above and beyond what they can actually bear at this point. The system does not work.
Senator Cowan: There has got to be a way around this business of information being available but being considered to be the private property of the collectors, with no requirement to share it with DFO. There has to be a way that the information could be used first, by DFO for legitimate purposes, and be available to people who were affected by it in a way that would protect the legitimate concerns of individual fishers, individual participants in the industry. You mentioned that happens in airport authorities. I know something about those. Information is gathered by Transport Canada by airport authorities and used for their purposes, hopefully legitimate purposes, but yet not shared with the airlines: one airline's information is not shared with other airlines. I am sure that happens in the trucking industry and many other industries: information is gathered, used for purposes that are required and not disclosed to those who have no legitimate need to have it. I do not suggest it is your fault, but surely that problem could be fixed.
Ms. Scarfo: It is a problem that could be fixed as long as you identify the problem and you have to write it into your co-management agreement that there is disclosure to certain levels intellectual property. We did a project on traditional ecological knowledge with EcoTrust, and it took us two months to write the agreement because intellectual property is important. It is a matter of writing that contract properly, and in this case the government needs to make sure that those contracts include that clause.
The Chairman: Thank you all very much. We will now adjourn.
The committee adjourned.