Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue 4 - Evidence, November 9, 2006 - Morning meeting
ST. JOHN'S, Thursday, November 9, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 8:05 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 Bill Rompkey (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: For those of you who do not know already, we are the Senate Fisheries Committee. My name is Bill Rompkey, I am the chairman, and the other members of the committee, I think, all have their names in front of them, and they are identified, but for the purposes of everybody; Senator Willie Adams from Nunavut; Senator Gill from the Lac St. Jean region of Quebec; Senator Hubley from P.E.I; Senator Baker from Gander; Senator Johnson from Lake Winnipeg; Senator Cowan from Halifax; Senator Cambell from British Columbia.
Hon. Tom Rideout, M.H.A., Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador: Thank you, senator. On behalf of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, I would like to welcome you to our province. I want to thank you as well for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about the fishery, which is of vital importance to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The resources of the sea, particularly the fishery, have been a key economic driver for Newfoundland and Labrador for more than 500 years and as a result, developments in international law relating to the rights of coastal states have been followed with keen interest in this province. Of all the fish stocks that have contributed to the economic viability of this province's fishery, the fish stocks on the Grand Banks have been of particular importance. Unfortunately, the Canadian 200-mile exclusive economic zone does not encompass the entire bank. As we know, the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks are in international waters and several key stocks that are vitally important to our province straddle the 200-mile line. These stocks have been subject to massive overfishing by other nations and our government will continue to stand firm against such activity.
Historically, the most noteworthy of these overfished stocks have been northern cod. Prior to the establishment of the Canadian zone, this stock felt the impact of foreign overfishing. In 1968, for example, foreign vessels landed approximately 800,000 metric tonnes of northern cod. This stock has never fully recovered from this unsustainable level of fishing. Besides northern cod, there are currently other stocks that straddle the 200-mile line that are of key importance to the economic viability of our province. One such species is yellowtail flounder, of which FPI, a major Newfoundland and Labrador company, currently holds 90 per cent of the Canadian share, and Canada holds 97.5 per cent of the global stock.
These examples alone indicate the vital importance of these fisheries to our province and the need for coastal states to have more control over the management of adjacent fish stocks. It is the position of our government that we simply cannot afford to let foreign overfishing continue to destroy our precious fish resources. Our government will continue to support any measure aimed at deterring foreign overfishing on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks and this includes NAFO reform.
When the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization was established in 1977, it was meant to alleviate many of the problems associated with foreign overfishing. It was established as a multilateral organization responsible for managing fish stocks in the northwest Atlantic. The mandate of NAFO was to contribute through consultation and cooperation to the optimum utilization, rational management and conservation of fish resources throughout its convention. This includes the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks that are of vital importance to our province. Indeed, NAFO has failed to live up to its mandate in this area. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans and the report on the advisory panel on straddling stocks reached the same conclusion after examining NAFO's performance. The problems through the 1980s and 1990s are well documented. NAFO's objection procedure allowed vessels to overfish stocks when they were not happy with the quotas assigned to them. Furthermore, NAFO could do nothing to prevent the misreporting of catch. The Government of Canada has responded by increasing its patrols and surveillance in the NAFO regulatory area. This has certainly been a deterrent to foreign vessels operating on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks, and we are certainly pleased with the progress achieved at the 2006 NAFO meeting. The province sees the new monitoring, control and surveillance measures and dispute settlement procedures as improvements to NAFO. Indeed, recalling vessels to port for serious infringements will act as a deterrent to foreign overfishing. As well, having a dispute settlement process in place will allow NAFO members who are engaged in a dispute over quotas to have the conflict resolved within a prescribed time frame. This will lessen the extent to which objecting members can overfish stocks simply because they are not satisfied with their assigned quotas.
The province is concerned that NAFO members have the option to reduce observer coverage to 25 per cent when they are using increased electronic surveillance. Electronic surveillance has not been tested in traditional groundfish fisheries. We believe observers should remain in place until there is proof that this is an improved monitoring tool. That is why our province insisted at the recent NAFO meeting that this program be evaluated over a three year period.
While the accomplishments of the NAFO meeting are significant, the implementation of these measures has yet to be tested. We need to see these new policies in action, and until we are confident that they will effectively address non- compliance, we do not see this as a substitution for Canadian custodial management. Indeed, Newfoundland and Labrador continues to support custodial management to protect weakened fish stocks. By applying custodial management out to the edge of the continental shelf, Canada would manage the stocks that currently straddle the 200- mile limit. This would ensure consistent application of resource conservation measures while respecting the established shares of other nations. It will also ensure the application of the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement. As a coastal state, Canada would assume responsibility for ensuring that conservation and scientifically based management is applied. Canada would be responsible for surveillance and enforcement. This would be the start of a solution that can work in a multilateral context. NAFO, as the regional fisheries organization, would continue to be responsible for access and allocation decisions, scientific recommendations and the management of discreet stocks.
Our province believes that this is a resource stewardship concept that would seek international support as consistent management measures would strengthened compliance and provide more deterrence for fisheries violations outside the 200-mile limit.
This is not just a solution for Canada and for Newfoundland and Labrador, but for all countries that fish in the northwest Atlantic. However, if this cannot be implemented with NAFO, we will continue to urge the Government of Canada to pursue this option through other means, such as creating an alternative regional fisheries management organization, as suggested by the advisory panel chaired by Dr. Art May.
Custodial management is a multilateral and collective opportunity to restore, protect and share resources for the future. Our government's support for this policy option speaks to Newfoundland and Labrador's awareness that the current system is not working. It is indeed time for something different. Our stocks need to be protected.
I would also like to take the opportunity to reiterate our government's support of the Government of Canada in not agreeing to an outright ban on bottom trawling on the high seas. We support the position that a ban on bottom trawling outside of 200 miles would result in tremendous pressure on our country to implement the same ban within 200 miles. From our province's point of view, a ban on bottom trawling in Canadian waters would be to the detriment of many very important fisheries in this province. In fact, it could eliminate fisheries for shrimp, flat fish, clams and scallops, and have a significant impact on fisheries for pelagics and red fish. Furthermore, bottom trawling is an instrumental component in harvesting yellowtail flounder and a major component of the FPI operation in Marystown.
These fisheries play a critical role in providing a livelihood for many Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. We cannot jeopardize the communities, which depend on these fisheries, and therefore, we encourage the federal government to continue to stand firm on this issue. Our government supports sound environmental practises, and there are indeed legitimate issues associated with bottom trawling, however, rather than completely ban bottom trawling, our government is in favour of finding ways to address these concerns. Indeed, alternative measures of protecting the ocean habitat should be explored rather than wide sweeping measures that would devastate fishing communities. Such measures include the development of smart fishing technologies and techniques that minimize gear contact with the ocean floor, and the development of marine protected areas. Our government will continue to work with the federal government to identify and implement possible solutions. To that end, our government firmly believes that a greater level of funding for science is required and we encourage the federal government to increase funding in this area. If we are to develop solutions, we need to understand the impacts and the best way to address them.
Before closing, I would like to take the opportunity to discuss some other issues that are of significant importance to Newfoundland and Labrador. First and foremost are the EU tariffs that are applied to Canadian seafood products. These tariffs have adverse effects on many products, mostly significantly shrimp, but they also have profound impacts on many groundfish species and pelagics. This has been a long-standing deterrent and our province has been actively fighting these tariffs for 10 years with modest results. Most recently, I led a delegation to the EU where we met with the Director General of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs of the European Commission in Brussels, as well as senior trade officials from the Directorate General for Trade. These meetings were very productive and there is reason to believe that short-term relief is coming on shrimp. However, we need to continue to press this issue and we need the Government of Canada to join with us in making this issue a significant priority.
Our government continues to combat the misinformation regarding the eastern Canadian seal harvest. This harvest contributes significantly to the economic well-being of our province, and we must continue to be diligent in communicating to the world that our seal harvest is highly humane and sustainable. Our efforts appear to be productive in the United States, where there is a clear indication that our seafood markets have not been adversely affected by various protests and other activities aimed at condemning our seal harvest.
With a vote looming in the EU on whether to completely ban the import of all Canadian seal products, the merits of the seal harvest must be emphasized. Of course, the Government of Canada has a big role to play and we encourage the government to double its efforts in this regard. I am hosting a delegation from the European Union Fisheries Committee at the end of November and the seal issue is a central focus of our meetings. I would like to remind you all of the fisheries renewal exercise that our province is engaged in with the federal government. It represents a new approach to addressing the challenges facing the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador. We continue to be hopeful that this process will generate meaningful solutions.
In closing, I would like to reiterate the importance of the fishery to our rural communities. We can no longer tolerate the overfishing of our crucial stocks by foreign vessels. We will continue to support all measures aimed at deterring this activity, and we will continue to work diligently to ensure the economic sustainability of this province's most critical industry. Again I thank the honourable senators for the invitation to speak to you this morning. I look forward to your questions and to further discuss any issues that you may wish to raise. Thank you for the opportunity to present.
Senator Johnson: Please elaborate a bit further on whether the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is doing what is necessary in terms of surveillance to protect the stocks that straddle the 200-mile limit.
Mr. Rideout: In terms of surveillance, there has been a significant increase in the last three or four years. I suppose, we could always say it is never enough and we could use more, but there has been an increase in surveillance and in resources dedicated to surveillance over the last number of years, and in that context, we are pleased with the trend.
Senator Johnson: We have enough resources dealing with it now.
Mr. Rideout: I cannot say without doing an analysis that we do not need more, but I know that we have more than we had four or five years ago. Under Minister Regan, in the previous administration, there was a significant increase in resources and surveillance and that has continued and improved with the new government. We believe those trends are moving in the right direction. Certainly, we do not want to see any cutbacks, but whether we need more, we would have to do some kind of analysis on that question.
Senator Johnson: We heard a lot yesterday about enforcement and I am curious to know if the province is happy with the results of the extra money that has gone into the enforcement. I am impressed with what is happening. What do you think?
Mr. Rideout: We are pleased with the extra money and funding that has gone into resources and the dedication of resources, vessels and aircraft. If there were one concern that comes out of the recent NAFO meetings, it would be the move to electronic surveillance. Our concerns have been taken into account and there will be a three-year monitoring situation before that is cut back to 25 per cent. We have to make sure that they generally work. We are up on the technology, but we would have to make sure that we are not cutting off our nose to spite our face in depending more on electronic surveillance than we would on human observer coverage. Other than that, we are generally pleased with the dedication of resources to enforcement inside and within the zone.
Senator Johnson: I wonder if you could help us a bit on the research side in terms of bottom trawling. I agree with you, we have to do more research on this subject. Do you have any focus that we could pursue in terms the federal side of things?
Mr. Rideout: There is always a need for more research on bottom trawling and the effects on the bottom. I think that is pretty conclusive. This type of fishery can be very destructive; there is no question about that. You can mitigate the impact on the bottom by avoiding ecosystem areas that are very delicate and open to more stress than other areas. There is technology available that allows the trawl to fish, but not be in constant contact with the bottom and thereby disturb the seabed habitat. Marine protected areas are another avenue to protect sensitive areas and we have Eastport Peninsula and Gilbert Bay in Labrador. We would be prepared to consider other designated areas.
We have to continue to explore possible solutions that do not cut off bottom trawling. That solution would negatively affect many communities and hundreds, probably thousands of people in this province, certainly in Atlantic Canada. As I understand, the UN vote is not for a complete ban; it is for a partial ban in sensitive areas. Surely, we can all understand and accommodate that type of ban. However, to twist that into a scenario that allows the public to believe that we are talking about a total ban on the high seas and therefore a total ban within the Canadian zone is just not the reality. I think we have an obligation to point that out and point out the negative impacts of a total ban, were it to come.
We control the area within the 200-mile limit. However, there will be pressure put on us if we support one thing outside of the 200-mile limit and do not support the same thing when calls come for inside the 200-mile limit. For example, if we were to support a moratorium on cod outside of 200 and did not enforce the same kind of policy within our own zone, how would we look in the eyes of the international community? We would be hypocrites, frankly, and we have to be careful of our standing in the international community.
Senator Cowan: Mr. Minister, I am interested in your comments on custodial management. You gave a bit of an outline as to your definition of custodial management, and I would like you to elaborate on that subject. We have heard a number of witnesses use that phase with different meanings. The phrase seems to mean different things to different people.
We have heard from witnesses that this is simply a concept that is dead because it will not fly internationally because of concerns about state sovereignty. We have heard that it is unachievable because of concerns about sovereignty issues.
I wonder if you would address precisely what you believe that term means or should mean and why you think it is an objective worth pursuing.
Mr. Rideout: Perhaps I could start with your latter comments first, senator. The concept is far from dead; it will be dead if it deserves to be dead. If the NAFO reforms work and NAFO becomes an instrument of implementing conservation policies that we all support, that we can be seen to be supporting, then maybe the concept of custodial management will go away. If that does not happen, I think and I hope that the concept of custodial management would stay very much in front of us. If we do not have a will within the international community to protect and conserve straddling stocks and spend a fair amount of time outside of the 200-mile limit, and are open to piracies of the sea, then everybody suffers. Not only Canadians suffer, but also people who depend and have historically fished off the Grand Banks, whether Spain, Portugal or the Faroe Islands. There is an onus on all of us to protect, preserve and conserve the resources of the sea.
In terms of the concept, and you are right, it is not well defined, it is not a concept that is accepted in international law. However, there are all kinds of concepts not recognized in international law for the longest period of time. It took gunboat diplomacy in Iceland to start recognizing that we go to 50 miles, 150 miles or 200 miles. Those things evolve over time, and the concept of custodial management is simple, Canada as the coastal state takes responsibility for the management of the stock. The international community — that is, NAFO — maintains its responsibilities for science, for distribution of the stock as it grows, to its partners, including us. This is not a grab. This is a Canadian concept of sharing and protecting with the objective of sharing the resource with the world, with people who have always had access to it. It is a grand Canadian scheme, and I think that if NAFO does not work, it is a concept that can generate and engender international support done the right way.
We have to sell the story that this is not a jurisdictional grab. This is a management of resource position so that we can all share in more. If there is more cod, more yellowtail, more American plaice, then there is more to share. That is the whole idea of custodial management and we may not need to get there if NAFO can do the job. If NAFO cannot do the job, and God knows NAFO has been around long enough to prove it can do the job, then another organization has to replace it.
Senator Cowan: I appreciate that, Mr. Minister, and I think all of us would share the concern and the wish that all states felt as you do, and as we do. We agree that we have this responsibility, and if we do not all cooperate then it is to everyone's detriment. However, there was some concern that because of the difficulty of defining precisely the meaning of the term, that it might be one of those things that might not be achieved.
Yesterday, DFO discussed the term that is offered to foreign vessels; they have an option of allowing for increased electronic surveillance as a trade off if they do not want to have observers on board. We also heard that Canadian observers could give evidence in court as to what they observe, but for some reason, which I am not sure I understand, foreign observers are not compellable witnesses. Therefore, it is difficult for me to understand the point of having an observer if that observer cannot be called into court to say what he or she saw.
You expressed some concern about the unproven nature of electronic surveillance. Could you give us a little more along those lines about this issue of observers? I intuitively think you are right that it is better to have somebody on board observing rather than relying on electronic surveillance entirely, but I would like to hear your views on that subject.
Mr. Rideout: We are not against technological advances in this or any other area. We have a concern and we are saying let us go slowly in reducing surveillance to 25 per cent if there is electronic coverage. We are not sure of the reliability of this technology particularly that relates to the groundfish fishery. We have had electronic identification on offshore vessels for decades. It goes back to when I was Minister of Fisheries in this province back in the 1980s. There is no trouble to identify the vessel, the mark is on it and it will send out the signals. You know where the vessel is but what is in the hold of the boat is another matter. What has been fished is another matter. Technology, no doubt, is improving and will soon be able to identify the catch rates and the type of fish that is coming aboard. However, we believe it would be prudent to continue observer coverage for at least a three-year monitoring period to ensure that gives us some level of comfort that this new technology is working.
In terms of witnesses and evidence in foreign courts and so on, the observer coverage is useful as a type of deterrent, you would hope. I know they have to sleep, they are not on watch 24 hours a day, but you would hope that their very presence would be some kind of a deterrent to the operator and to the company involved. They would know what is happening and they can report to Canada, and Canada under the NAFO convention can take certain actions like has happened in the last few days with a Spanish vessel. In that case, the hopeful result is that the vessel is removed, its license is cancelled, and hopefully the appropriate legal procedures take place. There is an inherent advantage to having a human body as an observer rather than a microchip, but we are not saying that we should not progress as technology progresses. What we are saying is be careful.
Senator Baker: Let me begin by saying our witness today is a former Premier of Newfoundland, a lawyer, and one of the best constituency politicians the province has ever had. Let me point out that the dean of the Law School of Mr. Cowan and the dean of the Law School where the minister received his law degree, both gave testimony before this committee that custodial management has no basis in law. Each dean is an advisor to the Canadian government. The dean also said that this logic of banning dragging on the high seas and drawing the conclusion that it would affect banning dragging inside 200 miles has no basis in law, no basis in reality, in that France and Norway agree to stop dragging on the high seas. If they agree to a ban on the high seas, then by your logic, they would have to stop dragging on our continental shelf; they would have to stop dragging inside their own zone.
We received a private briefing yesterday from DFO and the surveillance people. Minister, it went on for two and a half hours. Certain things came out in that briefing that really shocked me as a Newfoundlander. As you point out, we have draggers that keep fish plants going with groundfish. I thought just the 65-footer shrimp dragger existed, and I was shocked to learn we have fish plants that are actually dragging. Furthermore, verified at this meeting, was that offshore companies hold quotas like 4Vn, 4R, and 4S, and they give the inshore fishermen the right to fish it. This is happening right now, at this very moment. It has to do with the whole logic of big companies, big dragger companies, owning quotas, right up to the high-water mark because all those NAFO quotas managed by 17 foreign nations, right up to our high water mark in those NAFO areas.
Minister, you put your finger on something a minute ago. In the new rules just announced by NAFO, you said that you are opposed to this reduction of observers down to 25 per cent. Although they are increasing the VMS, the vessel monitoring system, we found out yesterday that if a foreign vessel's VMS is not working, that foreign vessel does not have to return to a port to get it fixed. If it is a Canadian vessel, a Newfoundland vessel, it has to return to port or it will be charged.
You are absolutely right, and I would like you to comment. The observer coverage is down, as you say, as of now, the VMS coverage is up, but they can shut off their VMS and they do not have to get it fixed because that is not one of the specified serious offences that could force them into port, and that is what we were told yesterday. Senators that is exactly what we were told.
Mr. Rideout: That is a very glaring glitch in what has come out of this whole process in terms of the observer coverage reduction in favour of VMS. We will adamantly support a position that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If a Canadian vessel, when its electronic system goes down, has to quit fishing and come to port and have the repairs made, then that ought to and must apply to every other vessel operating on the sea. That will be the position that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador will take strongly, adamantly and fight with the Government of Canada and with NAFO, and whoever else.
There is a whole bunch of other things, senator, that I would like to comment on, not because the dean of a law school was my teacher where I received my law degree, I agree with every view that he or she expresses. I had a couple of deans at Ottawa, by the way. One was a lady and one was the gentleman you referred to. I do not always agree with their interpretation of the law or with their position, but it would seem to me that custodial management is a concept that is not dead, and has the possibility of evolving over time to mean something if we have to go that route. Maybe we do not. Maybe the NAFO reforms will be satisfactory. Maybe they will not. Time will tell, but we are certainly not going to say that custodial management does not have a role to play in the future management of Canada's fisheries outside of the 200-mile limit.
Senator Campbell: I am relatively new to the committee, but I come from the sovereign state of British Columbia where salmon are salmon.
My first question involves funding for science, which we have heard time and time again. Is there a fund that involves the province, the federal government and NAFO?
Mr. Rideout: I do not think NAFO is in a fund, and I stand to be corrected on that, but from time to time on a one- off situation, the province participates with the Government of Canada in certain levels of scientific research. For example, Dr. Rose, who I think will be before the committee some time later today, participated in the funding of that chair at Memorial University, as did the Government of Canada, the private sector, and so on. There are other areas in terms of cod recovery where the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, despite the fact that constitutionally we do not have a responsibility in terms of fisheries management has put financial resources into a cod recovery strategy with the Government of Canada. There are instances where we participate in providing financial resources and scientific resources, and collaborate with DFO, in particular, in science. I know that the private sector does the same in this province. I do not think that NAFO does, but there may be indirect methods that I am not aware of where, in fact, there is some NAFO participation.
Senator Campbell: It just seems that we are hearing the same themes from everybody, we need more science, but there is no money. I agree with you on the trawling. We say we need to move into better fishing gear, better fishing techniques. Who is going to develop that unless there is some push on the part of, for instance, you and the federal government? I just do not want to see us in the position again where we find that we have come close to losing another species. We keep talking about all this stuff, but nobody seems to want to pick it up and run with it. It is obviously an important component.
Lastly, NAFO should have been able to get it right by now. This is not just a young organization. It has been in force for years. It seems like Canada is always the one that is pushing these guys because it is our resource. They can call it what they want, 200 miles or not. In fact, it is our resource; it crosses back and forth on that line. At what point does the Newfoundland government say we have had enough of this and move into a different forum, or can the Newfoundland government do that because of Canada being in there as a signatory? Mr. Hearn says the last was a break through and everything is great and wonderful, we are moving forward, and yet we come and we hear from other people and they say, well, maybe it is, maybe it is not. When do we say enough?
Mr. Rideout: Within recent months, there has been a significant infusion of new scientific research from the Government of Canada and DFO. Minister Hearn was here in this province and made some fairly significant announcements in scientific enhancements at our White Hills Complex here in Newfoundland and Labrador a number of months ago. There had been movement in that regard.
In terms of developing new fishing technologies, our Marine Institute, which is recognized worldwide as a leader in marine resource harvesting developments, processing and so on, is engaged in this kind of activity all the time, along with the private sector and governments. There have been advances in trying to mitigate the negative effects of bottom trawling and the negative effects of gill netting, for example. There are some people in this province who believe that the only method of fishing that should be allowed on cod and groundfish would be long lines and the old fashioned cod trap. These are the least intrusive of fisheries in that particular fishery, and many of us support the banning of gill nets, but this has to happen as new technology and new methods are developing. That is happening in places in our Marine Institute right here in Newfoundland and Labrador.
When is the Newfoundland government going to say, "enough is enough'', well, we have been saying "enough is enough'' for decades. Every administration of the Government of Canada, whatever the political stripe, has been saying that NAFO is a toothless tiger. For decades, the government has been saying that NAFO has not delivered what it was meant to deliver. Canada as the coastal state and Newfoundland and Labrador in particular, have so much historical dependency on the resources of the continental shelf and Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks. That resource has fed and sustained our communities for more than 500 years, and we in this province have more to lose than anybody else anywhere in Atlantic Canada and that is not to minimize what other Canadians have to lose. We have more to lose than a Spanish vessel that comes over here looking for fish to bring back home and sell in salted form on the European market. You have a historic right to be there, you have been there for centuries, but if you are not going to join with us in managing the resource in a sustainable way, then, sorry, you have to move over and we will move in. We have said that consistently to government after government in Ottawa and we are prepared, as reasonable people, to acknowledge that the potential of the recent NAFO reforms are real. Let us hope they do work, but we are not ready to throw down the fight right now and say we are convinced they are going to work and we are not going to keep a very diligent eye on whether this works or not.
The Chairman: I might just remind all of us that the text for the NAFO reforms will be out in March. Mr. Minister, we have asked for a copy of the text with the amendments because the testimony that we have had is that, obviously, the devil is in the details, and we all have a lot of unanswered questions about what is the text, what does it mean, what are the implications. We do not know that, but we have asked for the text and hopefully we will get it in March, and perhaps at that time we could continue our discussion with you to reflect on what you think about the text and that will be helpful for us.
Mr. Rideout: I would be happy to be available.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: Minister, I listened carefully to the testimony of the witnesses who preceded you. I get the feeling that we are on the defensive when it comes to our country's economy and in particular to fishery products. Given the length of our coastline, fishery products are part of our country's culture and economy, to my way of thinking. When fishery related industries are threatened, I feel that we become defensive and react to goings on elsewhere and to the fishing activities of foreign countries.
For example, you mentioned the seal hunt and the boycotts by certain European nations. I recall taking part in a public information campaign spearheaded by the Inuit and First Nations and targeting Europe. However, this campaign was short-lived. In my opinion, not enough information is made available. We wait until problems surface before taking any action. The seal hunt is a good example. There have been boycotts in Europe. We have not been able to change public opinion, whereas Ms. Bardot and others have waged a successful campaign. Their efforts have had an enormous impact on the economy and on fishery products.
I do not know how you feel about this, but I think we tend to wait until problems surface before reacting. I would like to hear your opinion on the subject.
[English]
Mr. Rideout: Maybe it is part of the unique Canadian way of turning the other cheek and letting the world go on; we do that quite a bit. I cannot disagree with your observations in that regard. We tend to be reactive rather than proactive. There are those among us who think that we cannot win in this kind of a fight, we would break perhaps the Government of Canada and there would not be enough money in Fort Knox to mount a public relations campaign against some of those well-funded, very proactive people that know how to use the media to their advantage. I am not one of those people. I happen to believe that we have a responsibility to engage. I spoke to the Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament when I was in Brussels four or five weeks ago, and I did not shy away from the seal issue. I thought that I might be flung out, but there was not a tremendous negative reaction. In fact, many people wanted to hear the Canadian view, and I am not so sure that we are proactive enough in ensuring our point. The people in decision making authorities are probably never going to win the battle in Trafalgar Square with the nice looking white coats, but the misconceptions that are out there, we do not kill baby seals any more. The seal hunt has been judged by world authorities to be a humane hunt. There is nobody can argue that it is not sustainable, that there are more seals being born than we take in a harvest. The same goes for other species in the ocean. So your premise and your theory certainly weigh with me, and I share the view.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: We respond in a timely manner, much as you did recently, but we do not have on an ongoing campaign in place to explain who we are, what our economic situation is and what our culture is all about. Other politicians travel around Europe.
Should we not be waging a public information campaign to explain who we are and to what extent our economy is dependant on these resources?
[English]
Mr. Rideout: Yes, senator, I agree. It has to be a coordinated approach, a coordinated campaign, led by the Government of Canada and the participating provinces. The provinces that are affected and want to participate should be participants in the process.
In the Aboriginal community of Nunavut and Nunatsiavut, our new territory in Labrador, the very culture, economy, and existence are dependent on the resources of the sea, just as it is in the rest of Newfoundland and Labrador. Those communities have been dependent on the sea from time immemorial, and we have not consistently and with coordination told that story. I believe we have a story to tell, and I believe it is incumbent upon us, as a country and as provinces, as sovereign governments, whether it is Nunatsiavut or Nunavut, to begin that process. I certainly share your views in that regard.
Senator Hubley: One of your comments from your presentation stated, "the need for coastal states to have more control over the management of adjacent fish stocks.'' I would like to substitute the word "community'' with the word "states.''
We had a wonderful presentation from the fisherman's co-op and they have a formula for success, working together as communities, with great respect for the shrimp fishery in which they are engaged.
I am wondering what the provincial government can do to help cooperatives or to help communities come together in a like fashion.
Mr. Rideout: As a province, we have been supportive of cooperatives for quite some time. As the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, we have certainly been supportive of cooperatives engaged in the fishery. For example, we stand financially behind Torngat Fish Producers Cooperative Society, which operates on the north coast of Labrador in what is now principally the territory of Nunatsiavut. We stand behind the Fogo Island Co-op, and have stood behind the Fogo Island Co-op for decades, as far as I know, in supporting them through financial guarantees and so on. We stand behind and have stood behind the Petty Harbour Fishermen's Producer's, just up the bay a bit from the St. John's area. We like the cooperative movement. We have credit unions which are cooperatives, a lot of them, all over Newfoundland and Labrador. So we are supportive as a jurisdiction and as a government of cooperatives and we have been extremely supportive of cooperatives that are involved in the fishing industry.
Senator Hubley: There were questions of the shrimp fishermen on the availability of scientific information and that may have varied, but generally, it was my impression that they felt there was not enough information available to them specific to the species that they were harvesting. Certainly, yesterday when we were at DFO, we know that they have scientific information. I am wondering is there some way that you can see that the communities receive the information that is critical to the fishery and the sustainability of the fishery. Can we get them that scientific information to make their decisions on how their fishery will be run?
Mr. Rideout: I should mention the largest cooperative engaged in the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador is the Labrador Fisherman's Union Shrimp Company. Harvesters own that company; they are fishers, and that large, significant cooperative that has been around for quite some time. In terms of sharing scientific information on a timely basis in terms of their species, yes, we certainly want to ensure that those who depend on the resource for their livelihood know and understand the resource parameters and know and understand what the conservation harvest ought to be. We support those groups and those community groups in any way we can. We ensure that they have that information in plenty of time to be able to make presentations and submissions to DFO as they are seeking input as to what quotas ought to be for the following season.
Senator Hubley: The one item that they wanted to underline is that scientific information has to include information that is brought forward by the fishermen themselves. The fishermen are a crucial part of any scientific information that should be out there, and I think they certainly would be willing to do that. I think that perhaps they depend on that solely, but I think that the answer will come from not only the scientific community, but also from the people who are in the fishery themselves.
I just want you to comment briefly on an article that was in the Canadian papers about a week ago. The article stated that the fisheries face collapse by about 2050, based on study on the Atlantic Ocean. The study cites overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction and admits that the damage began hundreds of years ago. The study also indicated that natural climate warming is going to have a major impact on the fishery as well. It also suggested global food security would be jeopardized, and I think that statement catches everyone's attention. I guess if there was a collapse of the fishery, some of us would and some of us would not be too worried, but when we are talking on a global scale, I think it is time to reflect on that. What is your impression of that article?
Mr. Rideout: On your first point in terms of recognizing the important contribution that harvesters can make to the scientific assessment of stocks, I have been a strong proponent of that position going back decades now when I was in this department in the 1980s. I think we ignore at our peril the tremendous wisdom and knowledge that our harvesters have of conditions, fishing methods, and the state of the stock. I think all this information has to be part of the mix, part of the science mix, and part of what goes into making the decisions. I strongly support and have historically supported that position.
The report that came out last week is certainly an eye opener. I might be long in the tooth, but when I think that given a bit of luck and the grace of God that I may well be around here when the last fish is taken out of the water, that really, really wakes you up. Whoever thought that any of us around this table, or our people who are younger God forbid, might live to see that day. So if there is nothing else in this report, it is the shock of the reality that might become a reality shortly. They are talking about 2046, just 40 years away.
We have to be cognizant of that warning. If I take any comfort out of the study, it is the fact that it is not too late to do something about it. I think that is where we have to dedicate our efforts, our thoughts, our energy and our resources. Let us not say, look, this is a bunch of foolishness, science dreaming in technicolour and forget about it. I think there is an eye opener here and we will rue the day if we are not vigilant in taking it into serious consideration.
Senator Adams: I have a couple of questions especially since we have seen a commercial fishery up in the Arctic for the last three or four years. After our land claim was settled with the Government of Canada, we figured that we could do whatever we wanted, but at this point in time we are not even able to control ourselves. Now, we can do nothing.
Right now, we have mostly foreigners catching our stock in two fishing areas called 0A and 0B. At the time the land claim was settled, we received quotas from the minister in Ottawa to fish 8,000 metric tonnes of Greenland turbot and 2,500 tonnes of cold water shrimp. When we settled the land claim, we though those quotas belonged to the community. In the last three or four years, we have seen some of the local people getting into the commercial fishery. It is difficult for our people to get into that business because they need fishing vessels. Finally, just last year we saw one of our communities partner with people here in Newfoundland, and now it is becoming acceptable to fish commercially. However, they cannot even fish the entire quota. This community I mentioned only received 1,000 metric tonnes from the 8,000-metric-tonne quota. In the meantime, foreigners come here, put up their flags and catch the rest of our fish.
We have already had meetings with DFO to discuss port policies and why fishermen in Nunavut do not partner with fishermen in Newfoundland. It appears that as long as you can get the flag — it does not matter which country you come from — you can go up there and catch lots of fish.
We are also concerned about dragging. The Inuit do not want to damage the future of our fish stocks in the North. We do not know how many fish are up there. In addition, how long will the commercial fishery in 0A and 0B be viable? With the changing water temperatures and everything else, we must be careful or the fish will be gone. We want more control over our fish stocks, but we cannot get any answers from DFO. We want more from you people.
The same thing applies to the seal hunt. Right now, I think the Inuit of Nunavut, in partnership with the people of Newfoundland, are allowed up to catch up to approximately 80,000 seals a year.
Mr. Rideout: Speaking from a Newfoundland and Labrador perspective, we share the concern. In putting on my Aboriginal Affairs Minister's hat, as it relates to Nunatsiavut, we certainly share the similar concerns in terms of the resource availability, Greenland halibut, for example, and shrimp, in particular, in areas adjacent to Nunavut and some of them off the north coast of Labrador.
I know there has been a significant amount of cooperation between Nunavut and Nunatsiavut and, in fact, some of the turbot that you refer to through a mutual arrangement ends up landed and processed in Makkovik, for example. There has been a great deal of cooperation between the governments of the two territories and, in fact, before Nunatsiavut had its own self government structure. I know your Premier Paul Okalik, with whom I went to law school, has raised this matter with us and with our premier on a number of occasions, and we are supportive of our friends in Nunavut and your ability to be able to access the resource.
From a political perspective, I suppose, that is about all we can offer at the moment is support and understanding and a mutual view that we share similar concerns for our people in Nunatsiavut, and we believe that the two territories together can cooperate to our mutual benefit.
Senator Baker: Minister, over the last few days, this committee has been hearing about this business of foreigners on Newfoundland's continental shelf. Charts like this one show three Canadian vessels on a given day, 32 from the EU, 26 from Russia, Portugal at 14, Iceland at 14, Estonia at 13, and so on. On the chart, Canada is close to the bottom. Now fishing is off the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap, our continental shelf, Newfoundland's continental shelf. Then we see this from NAFO, "NAFO fisheries targets approximately 25 commercial species of which 11 species are managed by NAFO.'' That means 14 are not managed by NAFO.
Yesterday, in a private meeting with officials, we discovered this change of reducing the observers, of the observers now not being compellable in court. You are a lawyer, and you know that if you do not have the witness, you cannot prosecute the charge. An observer in Newfoundland is compellable in the court against the Newfoundland fisherman. NAFO is not compellable, and the VMS system, if it is down, they do not have to get it fixed, and there is not a framework for punishment. Now, Minister, we did not know that prior to the meeting. Nobody around this table knew that. I do not think anybody knows that. All I heard was VOCM, The Telegram, and CBC saying, boy, we have some great rules with NAFO and our problem is solved.
Minister, where does this leave us? Where does this leave us when you have a position presented to the public and the government saying, look what we are doing? You caught onto it when you said we are not going to accept, we do not agree with the reduction in the observers. We now find out that the observers are not compellable in court, and you and I know that you cannot prosecute a case unless you have someone there to swear to the evidence. We find out that the VMS systems do not have to be fixed when they are down, while our fishermen are dragged into court immediately.
Mr. Rideout: Senator, you have identified succinctly why on the one hand we acknowledge that significant progress was made in potential reform of NAFO, however, we are not prepared, as a province and as a government, to buy into a concept that the problems related to NAFO are solved. They are not; they are far from it, and we remain to be convinced. The problems with witnesses, the problems with reducing observer coverage, the problems with VMS systems being down, these are all matters that we have to have a lot more comfort with before we totally buy into the concept that the problems with NAFO are fixed. We do not believe the problems with NAFO are fixed and we remain to be convinced. However, we do acknowledge that this past round in 2006 perhaps more progress was made than has been made in recent times, but is that enough, is that the end of it; the jury is out and we are going to wait until the jury reports.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Minister. On that comment, I think we should say that is our position. We have questions and we remain to be convinced, and the reforms are there apparently, and I think the word "apparently'' is the important word, but we have to see the details and what is in the text. As I said before, hopefully we can perhaps share views with you when that text comes forward. We do want to thank you for taking time to come and visit with us today. You have been very helpful to us. We have at this point more questions than we have answers, but we have heard from witnesses and we will be hearing from more. We will reflect on that and we will be coming to some conclusions before Christmas. So thank you very much for coming to see us today. We appreciate it.
Mr. Rideout: Thank you, senators, for having me. I trust that the rest of your deliberations in our province will be beneficial and useful and we look forward to your report.
The Chairman: We would now like to welcome Dr. Arthur May who has a long and distinguished career in fisheries, trained as a marine biologist, had some experience in the navy, was Deputy Minister of Fisheries in Ottawa for some time, and then President of Memorial University. He has had a very distinguished career and he is well able to give us the views that we need.
Arthur May, President Emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, as an individual: Mr. Chairman and honourable Senators, thank you for the opportunity to appear. As you may know, last year I chaired a panel which produced a report for the Ministers of Fisheries and Oceans, and Foreign Affairs, and the major conclusion of that report was that Canada should take the lead in creating a new regional fisheries management organization to replace NAFO.
Let me give you very briefly the history of NAFO and the reasons why the advisory panel on straddling stocks made that recommendation, which was later endorsed by the government of this province and by the organizations representing fishermen and processors.
When Canada extended its fisheries jurisdiction to 200 miles on January 1, 1977, 40 years ago, expectations of a rosy future in fisheries were very high. Thousands of people returned to the industry, backed up by enormous investments, mostly private capital. The bubble burst very quickly as interest rates rose to the 20 per cent range in the early 1980s and the industry on the Atlantic coast effectively was bankrupt. Governments failed to restrain capital investment as well as movement of people into the industry, but restraining investment in common property and telling people that they cannot use common property are matters that governments are not very good at; quite the contrary, governments usually support such initiatives.
In any case, the resources began to rebuild, but the rebuilding was much slower than everybody at the time with the information available at the time realized. Canada took the view that with a new international fisheries management organization in the northwest Atlantic, NAFO, control of overfishing by foreign fleets, which had already occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, would not be difficult. We would simply use the leverage of allocations inside the Canadian zone to ensure good behaviour outside.
Until the mid 1980s this actually worked reasonably well, although it was already becoming clear that the price to be paid was escalating. With the accession of Spain and Portugal to the European Union, then the EEC, the matter came to a head. These countries were not given immediate access to EU waters and demanded higher quotas within NAFO, but higher quotas than Canadian authorities were prepared to accept. We declined to pay the price for solving a European Union internal issue, and rightly so, in my opinion. The consequence was the breakdown of the NAFO regime. Spain and Portugal, and later the EU, would not accept NAFO quotas, used the objection procedure to ignore NAFO decisions, and fished tens of thousands of tonnes more each year than could be sustained by the stock. We, too, in Canada were fishing more heavily than we should have been, but not deliberately so as a country since we were regulating within the quota regime, notwithstanding some bad practises by some participants in the fishery. I make this point because of so much finger pointing in the fisheries; one is entitled to say, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'' Everybody has something in their background that they should not have.
Meanwhile the stocks were not in as good condition as everybody thought they were at the time. Rebuilding had occurred from 1977 to the mid 1980s, but from a much lower base than was assumed at the time. Then we had a huge change in the oceanographic regime which dealt a double whammy. For several years in a row the ocean became colder. Survival of young fish was very adversely affected and many species migrated south and east along the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts outside 200 miles in quantities never before recorded. This happened at the worst possible time when those objecting to NAFO quotas saw how easy it was to catch much more outside 200 miles than NAFO would allocate, with no negative consequences for uncooperative behaviour. In short order, we are talking about the late 1980s, the stocks were decimated, and in every case where the movement outside 200 miles occurred, they remained decimated.
The breakdown of NAFO began some 20 years ago. The repair is starting only now. Better late than never. While we are waiting, Canada is spending several 10s of millions annually to provide surveillance and enforcement on the 200-mile line.
That is the background for the statement made in the report of the Advisory Panel on Sustainable Management of Straddling Fish Stocks in the North Atlantic that "NAFO has lost all credibility in Canada.'' It is why we recommended that Canada take the lead in creating a new regional fisheries management organization, taking advantage of worldwide trends plus the knowledge and experience of NAFO's weaknesses, which are glaring. We recommended that we remain in NAFO until this was accomplished. This is advice, incidentally, that was informed by analysis provided by a group of experts on maritime law drawn from the Dalhousie University Law School.
The previous government, Minister Regan, endorsed the substance of our approach, but decided to pursue these aims within the existing organization rather than try to create a new one. The present government is following the same path. There is remarkable unanimity of both purpose and method, notwithstanding a change of government in the intervening period.
As we have heard, the reform process within NAFO has begun. When an inspector now finds a vessel in serious violation of fishing regulations, the vessel can be ordered into port. For a foreign vessel, it is the home port. How often will this happen? What will be the result? We will need a year or two at least to see the impact of this regulation. It is something that a flag state which was serious about the NAFO regime could have done any time, but did not. Anyway, let us assume that we are at last making progress.
Perhaps a more important change has been a move to restrain the NAFO objection procedure; a country that objected to its allocations within NAFO could legally ignore them, with a new process whereby a country might have to appear before a panel of NAFO members to make its case. The panel would be formed if the objecting party asked for it or if a two-third majority of NAFO members decided to create it. The panel's decision would not be binding, but the next stage is the NAFO Fisheries Commission, and after that a United Nations tribunal, where ultimately a binding decision could be taken. All of this sounds a bit cumbersome, but I know that the people who pressed the issue at NAFO are satisfied that it will work. The trouble is that we have a crisis of low expectations when it comes to NAFO, so we have to wait and see.
The report of the panel on straddling stocks suggested a precautionary and sustainable management approach built into a new convention, a weighted voting procedure, removal of the objection procedure entirely and a compulsory dispute settlement mechanism. Perhaps the existence of a report that suggests replacement of NAFO, and I assume that many informed countries have read the report, has helped in the thrust for reform. I commend the minister and officials for the progress they have made because it would not have happened without some very sharp elbows in the corners, and I speak as the person who was the first chairman of NAFO in 1977 to 1981-82.
Meanwhile, within NAFO, where is the commitment to rebuilding stocks? Where is the plan to restore the Grand Banks? Where is the threat to remove repeat offenders from the fisheries once and for all? What is the timeline for restoration? All of these questions are hanging and I see no answers in place or on the horizon.
I believe that non-governmental organizations will increasingly enter this arena and force governments to move faster and further. World Wildlife Canada, Greenpeace and others, are already there. Since these organizations are not directly connected to the constituencies which depend on the fisheries, there is always the danger of going too far too fast, but they are there because of the absence of obvious and measurable progress in stock and ecosystem restoration by the responsible authorities.
Mr. Chairman, I know the difficulties of making progress in international maritime law. I spent a couple of years at the elbow of Foreign Affairs lawyers in the early 1970s when we were developing the third Law of the Sea Convention. Legal changes move in millimetres and the time frames are decades, but the case on the Grand Banks is overwhelming. I am reminded of the line from a popular song, "Freedom'' — of the seas — "is another word for nothing left to lose.'' Our offshore industry has been decimated. The large trawlers are gone, plants are closed, and people have moved away. If ever the resources rebuild, the industry will be different. Meanwhile, I do not think we have the right; we being all of those who participate in these fisheries, to knowingly carry on as we have been.
The responsibilities which should go hand and hand with rights have been notably lacking within NAFO. Let us hope that the corner has at last been turned.
The Chairman: That line was from Kris Kristofferson, who was a Rhodes Scholar.
Senator Johnson: Dr. May, you are such a distinguished and learned gentleman, I do not know where to start with questions except to say let us look to the future and this idea of the new regional fisheries management organization. How do you think that will fair if you can get it to replace NAFO, and is that a realistic thing to think about at this time?
Mr. May: I think at this time it is off the table. It was realistic to recommend it in the context of the time when we wrote the report, but the government has decided to pursue another route. Incidentally, the minister of the day did say, "We agree with everything you said, but we do not think the solution lies in the creation of another organization; it lies in fixing the organization that exists.'' That tact has been taken.
Senator Johnson: No one can seem to agree on how to fix this organization.
Mr. May: We have started down that road and now to back up and say that is not going to work, so we have to follow the advice of the panel, is going to be another two or three years, and if it does not work, that is two or three years that we have lost.
Senator Johnson: That is what is creating this vacuum. You mentioned it in your paper. Is that not a logical conclusion when that exists for organizations, environmentalists, and others, and the public at large to start saying let us do it another way, we cannot get any action in this organization especially when environment is the biggest issue in Canadian people's minds? Canadian's are concerned with all environmental issues whether it is environment of the sea, the environment of the air, or the whole world environment. It is the biggest issue facing Canadians and it affects what you have done in your whole life's work and what we are doing in terms of how we tell the public. What do we say to them? Is this why they keep asking?
I come from an area in Manitoba, Lake Winnipeg, where we are facing issues in the lakes and in the fresh water like other areas of this country. What do we tell the people?
Mr. May: I can only emphasize that our conclusion at the time was that NAFO was a tired and hardbound organization that did not seem amenable to change. If they continue the momentum that they started this time, if this is not the end, then things can improve, but I am trying to think of a line, "Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end.'' NAFO has to go a lot further than it has so far.
Senator Johnson: What about the other countries, do you in your wide experience see them cooperating? Are people going to go far enough to make the changes that we have to make? We have to save the fish, the straddling stocks and other species. As Senator Hubley mentioned earlier about this latest report coming out of Halifax, these are not hollow warnings, these are actual realities.
Mr. May: I have some doubts. I think that there will be now a sense among many NAFO members that we have done something at the last meeting, so now it is done, but it is not done. That is the beginning. There is no way that we could stop there and assume that anything very much is going to change. The big issue at the end of the day is not the VMS, or not the observers, or not the misreporting. These are technical issues. The big issue is are we going to bring the fish stocks back or are we not. It remains to be seen. There is certainly no certainty in what we have seen so far. There is no kind of ringing endorsement or commitment to restore the Grand Banks to their original glory and grandeur.
The Chairman: I think before I go to Senator Cowan, it might be worthwhile for us to reflect on that point. When you say they have not gone far enough and have recommended only technicalities and not made mention of the rebuilding of the stocks, I think that this committee should give that some thought. We have not focused on that aspect in our deliberations.
Mr. May: We seem to be content to share 10 per cent or less of what used to be there, and we now just go fighting among ourselves for the scraps that fall off the table. The Grand Banks was once a tremendously productive marine ecosystem. The early history of the settlement of North America is all about the Grand Banks, which are now a decimated semi-desert. The ports of Gloucester, Lunenburg, and Grand Bank and the regional economies that developed around those towns, owe their existence to the Grand Banks.
Senator Cowan: Dr. May, the minister was here a few minutes ago. I do not know whether you heard his presentation. He spoke strongly in favour of the concept of custodial management as a viable option. That is contrary to some of the evidence that we have heard from people like dean Saunders of Dalhousie Law School and others who feel that the concept is not one that is readily accepted anywhere, and is one that is not worth pursuing because it is simply impossible to achieve. Do you see custodial management as being the answer or part of the answer to dealing with the situation here, particularly to your last point of not just fighting over the 10 per cent, but rebuilding it from 10 per cent to some of its former glory?
Mr. May: Part of the terms of reference of the panel on straddling stocks were to research the concept of custodial management and try to reach a commonly agreed understanding of what it was, and we spent a lot of time and energy and a lot of space in our report doing just that. I think it is a wonderful concept if only we could convince other people. Canada would manage the resource. We would spend the money to do so; we would guarantee the historical shares, percentages, of whatever the rebuilt stock is of people who are participating in the fisheries. The trouble seems to be that nobody else believes that is what we would actually do. So the concept has been talked about, I think, going back to the middle 1980s because we researched the issue and read the speeches of all the Premiers of Newfoundland since Premier Wells, and cognizant of the fact that the Parliament of Canada actually passed a unanimous resolution endorsing custodial management without saying precisely what it was. We did our best to find an agreed definition and we put that in our report. We then discussed that with legal advisors it is not a concept that is recognized in international law. If you start it now, it might take decades to have it recognized in international law. If you tried to do it unilaterally, you would immediately be taken to the World Court, whose jurisdiction you would have to recognize as a signatory to the Law of the Sea Convention, and it is very clear that you would lose that case in court. At the end of the day, we concluded that we had to stay with a regional fisheries management organization, hopefully a new one, and that the concept of custodial management, as attractive as it is, simply does not exist anywhere and we cannot make it by ourselves.
Senator Baker: Custodial management is the policy, one of the policies of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and Newfoundland; of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Newfoundland; of the NDP Party of Canada, and Newfoundland; of the Green Party, or the Marxist Leninist Party, and of the Communist Party. They have all captured that concept of custodial management in their policies. You cannot find a politician who disagrees with the immediate implementation of custodial management. The Prime Minister stood in Petty Harbour during the election campaign and guaranteed custodial management. The leader of the Liberals stood in St. John's and guaranteed custodial management. Now what does custodial management mean? You looked at it. There have been three fisheries reports on it. I was Parliamentary Secretary in 1977 when the 200-mile zone was created. I was the Parliamentary Secretary to Roméo LeBlanc, and there was a reference to it at that time in some world body. As I understand it, the foreigners would still get their quotas.
Mr. May: Yes, allocated under Canadian management regime.
Senator Baker: Recognizing for all time that the foreigners had a right to fish on our continental shelf.
Mr. May: Yes.
Senator Baker: Do you know of any other jurisdiction in the entire world in which 17 foreign nations have the right to set quotas up to the high-water mark?
Mr. May: No.
Senator Baker: Of course, you do not; it does not exist.
Mr. May: Mr. Chairman is this one of those occasions where you say to the prosecutor, "Do not lead the witness.'' Mr. Chairman, let me say that Senator Baker questioned me just as closely in the late 1970s when I was an assistant deputy minister responsible for Atlantic fisheries.
Senator Baker: The federal government sent us to Europe in the 1980s to tell Portugal, Spain, and other nations, that the 5 per cent of the continental shelf outside 200 miles is where all the fish gather once a year. We had to tell those countries that if they took all of the fish from that 5 per cent, then they would destroy the fish stocks. That was our message.
Mr. May: That is essentially what happened in the late 1980s.
Senator Baker: My question to you is what is the definition of soil and subsoil? The legal experts told us that we have control now over the soil and subsoil out to the continental shelf, which includes the Nose, Tail, and the Flemish Cap. Some people have used article 76 of the UN convention as an argument to actually seize control of our soil and subsoil; that is not necessary because we presently own the soil and subsoil. In our law, if you go out there and pour a deleterious substance on the soil and subsoil around a river, you will be prosecuted under the Environment Act or the Fisheries Act.
How is this possible that we have control over the soil and subsoil and we do not have control over draggers who drag the living daylights out of it day and night?
Mr. May: It is a consequence of the way the law of the continental shelf is written. We own the continental shelf; we own the mineral and oil and gas resources buried in the continental shelf. We own the living resources that are immobile on or under the continental shelf, or are unable to move except in constant physical contact with the continental shelf. Those are the words in the Law of the Sea Convention. We do not own the fish which swim above the continental shelf, and that is the essence of the problem.
Senator Baker: We do not have to own the fish that swim over the soil and subsoil. If you own the soil and subsoil, and if you are not allowed to drag the living daylights out of the soil and subsoil, then you cannot catch the fish above the soil and subsoil because the technology does not exist to put a net down in the water that does not disturb the soil and subsoil. All of the nets touch the ocean floor and cause damage.
Mr. May: I have read the testimony of Professor Saunders on that issue, and I do not think I could add anything to what he said. He had looked at that issue very closely from the point of view of trying to use it as a lever to control what was happening in the fisheries, but he essentially gave it up as a non-productive exercise. You see, you could dream a little bit and say if you drag a trawl across our continental shelf, you are doing damage to our fishing ground and we own that ground. We do not own the fish that swim above it, but we own that ground, and we forbid you to do damage to it.
Senator Baker: Exactly.
Mr. May: Of course, we would be creating a stick to beat ourselves with because we fish there too.
Senator Baker: Where do we fish?
Mr. May: We fish outside the 200-mile limit.
Senator Baker: We do very little fishing outside of the 200-mile limit.
Mr. May: Yes, very little now.
Senator Baker: It would be a great sacrifice.
Mr. May: We aspire to fish a lot more when the stocks are rebuilt, so we have to protect our own interests as well. The legal concept seems to be pretty shaky.
Senator Baker: Russia has applied for extension over the soil and subsoil out to the furthest extent of their continental shelf. Several other nations have applied to the Law of the Sea commission. This all happened prior to us signing the Law of the Sea because we only did that a couple of years ago. Do you have any explanation why Canada was one of the last nations to hold on and to refuse to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea?
Mr. May: I know that at the time the convention was signed, which was 1982, I think, there were significant reservations about the provisions for ownership of minerals and exploitation of minerals, oil and gas as well, on the continental shelf. I was not involved in this area, so I cannot be precise, but I think we had reservations about the regime for exploiting mineral resources on the edge of the continental shelf, and because of those reservations, we held off our signature.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: In a similar vein, Mr. May, albeit not from legal standpoint, everyone knows that the seabed has more or less been destroyed.
From a scientific perspective, can you tell us anything about the regeneration of the seabed? Is it possible for the seabed to regenerate over a reasonable period of time?
[English]
Mr. May: I am not aware that there have been any very precise studies about degradation of ocean bottom and subsequent restoration of the ocean bottom, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not regenerate simply given some rest and some time to do so.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: However, should we not have some idea of how many years it would take for the seabed to regenerate, if that is at all possible? For example, could bottom trawling by all countries be banned up to a certain point?
Scientists and government advisors must be in possession of the same information. Do you think it is merely a pipe dream to believe that one day, there might be a complete ban on bottom trawling to allow the seabed to regenerate?
If we destroy the food source, the marine flora, what will happen then to the fish and marine animals?
[English]
Mr. May: The technique of bottom trawling is being debated at the moment. It certainly is disruptive of the community of animals that live on the floor of the sea. On the other hand, we have been bottom trawling for 60 or 70 years and there is no evidence that bottom trawling itself disrupts fish productivity. The fish productivity is disrupted by too much fishing. If you remove from the stock far more animals than the stock can produce, then the productivity goes down. We need more evidence of the effects of bottom trawling. I think that there are other ways to catch fish than bottom trawling, although for some species it is not very obvious. However, given the necessity of finding other techniques, I think that if enough attention were paid to the problem, solutions would be found. It is possible to put a trawl net just above the ocean bottom rather than digging into the ocean bottom. As long as there is no restriction on the use of bottom trawls, there is no incentive to do the research or do the technological investigation that would result in a better fishing technique.
That is the long answer, but the short answer is that I am not sure about the destructive tendencies of bottom trawls. Obviously, there are some, but how serious they are, we do not know. On the other side of the coin, I am relatively optimistic that better fishing techniques could be found.
Mr. Chairman: I think we should elaborate on that point because we have been wrestling with some position on it. Minister Rideout suggested that there are other methods and now you have made the same suggestion. I understand when you comment that disciplinary measures must be taken before nations move to new fishing techniques. The question for us is what disciplinary measure needs to be taken. Some people are for a total ban, some people are for a freeze, some people are for fishing in non-sensitive areas. Can you help us at all with what kind of restrictions should be imposed?
Mr. May: First, I think, that you have to set a level of fishing which is low enough to allow for stock rebuilding. You must not continue to take a stock that is 10 per cent of its historical level and continue to fish so that it will never be any more than 10 per cent of its historical level. You have to stop fishing, have a moratorium, or fish at a very low level. Another technique is to have closed seasons, do not fish during the spawning season and give the fish a chance to reproduce. Another technique is to have a closed area and not fish for the months of June, July, August, or whatever months make sense. There are other ways to go at it, but you have to give the system a little bit of a rest if you expect it to begin to restore itself. As I said earlier, the resources in NAFO were decimated in the late 1980s. That is 20 years ago. What have we been doing for the last 20 years? The answer is fishing at a level that makes sure rebuilding never occurs. The NAFO regime is lacking in a commitment to rebuild the resources, a plan to get there, and a time frame to implement the plan. This simply is not there, and this is really what needs to be done in the next step. It is one of the reasons why our panel suggested another organization to get away from all the history and hardbound traditions. NAFO seems to have an imperative to maintain an existing share for each nation even though the share might be 20 per cent of what exists. The problem is that it is 20 per cent of the 10 per cent, when it should be 20 per cent of the 100 per cent. The rebuilding is missing.
The Chairman: That is helpful because what you have done is you have tied quotas and gear together and said they are inseparable, you have to deal with both, and you have given us some specific suggestions as to how discipline might be imposed on trawling without a complete and utter total ban. Thank you very much.
Senator Adams: Dr. May, you mentioned that the water temperature is changing and that the fish have moved either down south or up north. You said that other people are now catching the fish and that the fish are not coming back. Can you explain the significance of the changing water temperature?
Mr. May: During the late 1980s, roughly 1986-90, we had four or five years of very cold water. That cold water is the Labrador Current, which comes out of Davis Strait and flows all the way around the Newfoundland coast and over the Grand Banks, a gift from Nunavut. Then, of course, there is the predominant feature of the oceanographic regime in this area. It is why we, sitting in St. John's in roughly the latitude as Marseille, do not make very much wine, at least not from grapes. The oceanographic regime, cold as it is always, became even colder.
Two things happened. We had no survival of young fish year after year. The cod stock spawning was unsuccessful in 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1989. No one knew that at the time because you do not really see these fish until they get to be about five years old and they appear in the fishery. When they are one or two years old, you do not really know how many fish are in the ocean. That was one thing, the lack of survival, the lack of replacements in the population.
The second thing was that it was so cold that the red fish, the turbot, Arctic cod, capelin, all migrated south along the Newfoundland coast and east toward the edge of the Grand Banks, where if you go outside 200 miles in depths of 200 metres, you find some warm water. There were tremendous concentrations of fish moving south and east at the worse possible time as Spain and Portugal were demanding more quota and Canada refused. Both of those countries objected to Canada's refusal and they fished and had a wonderful time because of these great concentrations of fish. This is the story of how the collapse occurred.
Senator Adams: In divisions 0A and 0B, the Baffin Island area, we have fish stocks in the form of Greenland turbot and some shrimp. If the catch is about 8,000 metric tonnes every year for the next 10 or 20 years, will the fish disappear like they did with the collapse of the cod fishery?
Mr. May: You may have the opposite problem now because global warming is having widespread effects. It looks as if the cooling of the late 1980s was a temporary phenomenon. I am not familiar with any details for the last two or three years, but to the extent that would happen it also would have a big impact on where the fish are and how many there are.
Senator Hubley: When I listened to your presentation, and you have given us a lot of the story that we are dealing with here, I wrote down three things; NAFO has to go further; it is just the beginning; and then I wrote what is the key? I do not think we have the key right now, but we do need an authority of some description, whether it is NAFO or whether it is a new fisheries regional management process.
I like the Newfoundlanders because they always have a phrase to describe it and you can do it in so few words. I guess it depends on whose ox is getting gored, and I think it is ours. I think, as Canadians, we have to have some way of being responsible for this fishery and having the ways and means to protect it. As you said, we have historical limits that each country has and each country can fish a percentage. Well, a percentage of nothing is nothing, and I think when they go away and look for another fishery, we are going to be left the country most likely to be adversely affected, our fishermen. That authority, people are not going to believe in authority unless it has scientific evidence to back it up. There has to be somebody with a definitive last word and I am wondering can you go again a little bit further to tell us what type of an organization we should be looking for to administer the fishery.
Mr. May: Well, NAFO or some other organization, and it could be NAFO if NAFO changes itself to do these things. First and foremost, we need a commitment and a plan to rebuild the fisheries in the NAFO area. These are the fisheries on the eastern edge of the Grand Bank where the stocks swim back and forth across the 200-mile line, so it has to be a Canada/NAFO jointly agreed rebuilding plan, and the fisheries of Flemish Cap, which is entirely outside 200 miles. That is step one. Step one is not if we catch a vessel fishing illegally, what will we do with that vessel, because that is out of context. What is the context? The context should be we are going to restore the Grand Bank ecosystem. What did it look like in 1950 when it was still in pretty good shape? Do we want it to look like that again, or do we want it to look slightly different from that? What resources were there? Can we rebuild them? How can we do it? This is all scientific and technical. Now you have your game plan. Now you have the target on the wall that you can shoot at. Then the next questions are who gets the allocations? How do they fish? What kind of gear do they use? What kind of seasons? What kind of areas? Are there closed areas? Are the areas closed during the spawning season? These are all measures aimed at rebuilding the stock to where it was. When you stand back and look at it from a distance, it simply does not make sense. You wonder why somebody has not long ago stood back and said, you know something, this is silly. We should all be getting 10 times the resources that we are getting if only we would restrain ourselves a little bit in order to allow the stocks to rebuild. We must have a target, a rebuilding plan, a place to go.
The other thing we pointed out in our report was that Canada and the European Union fish 85 per cent of the groundfish allocations, 85 per cent, think about it, two parties. If only those two parties could come to some agreement as to what needs to be done, the others must necessarily follow. It is just two parties. Now that is not as simple as it sounds because the EU, as one party, is a very complicated organization, but even within the EU there are only two or three countries that do most of the fishing. We can dissect and approach the problem in that way, and to me it looks more logical than sitting in a multilateral organization and trying to negotiate which offences require a vessel to return home as opposed to being given a slap on the wrist on the fishing ground.
In a sense, we are starting at the wrong end of the puzzle. You have to start somewhere. I do not take away for a moment from the progress NAFO made in the last meeting, as long as everybody involved accepts that was an interesting start.
The Chairman: The whole idea that we have been starting at the wrong end, we have been starting at the enforcement end of a dwindling and diminishing resource, whereas we should be focusing first on the resource and then the management of it. I think that last testimony for me gave me a new focus on what we are doing.
Mr. May: Let me say, Mr. Chairman, that there is no point in doing the other end unless we do the enforcement.
The Chairman: That is true; both must be done together.
Senator Campbell: I have to tell you, you are, without a doubt, the best witness I have heard since I joined this committee a short time ago. I wondered what I was going to read tonight; your report is at the top of my list.
In listening this morning, it would seem to me that, in fact, the situation we find ourselves in is a product of being Canadian, and I think that Minister Rideout expressed it well. We sit back, as Canadians, on issues such as softwood lumber, wheat, EU tariffs, the Flemish Cap, we just let ourselves be done by everybody, and then at the end of the day when it is all gone, we pay the price and then move on.
I know that we are signatories to a number of agreements. Maybe you can help me. What happens if we just take the Flemish Cap, what happens if we take all of that and say that is ours and we are not going to fish it, and nobody else is going to fish it, what are they going to do to us, and do we care?
Mr. May: I have to speculate. I presume that the countries that feel they are adversely affected would retaliate in other ways.
Senator Campbell: They retaliate now. We ask for fairness, we do not get it. They retaliate. We ask for tariffs to be lifted. They do not lift them. They will not take our seal products. I do not want to change being a Canadian, but at some point maybe it is time for us to send the gunboats out and say we are going to protect what we have here and be damned, or the people who are going to die on this issue is this province and the East Coast. You said it exactly, once it is gone, do you think Spain and Portugal give a damn, they do not give a damn, they are going to move on to some other place.
Mr. May: When you said, senator, this is the consequence of being Canadian, you are exactly right. We do not do very aggressive kinds of things in defence of our own rights. We are nice people, by and large, we try to talk it through, but the other side is not always very nice.
I assume that if we did things that people would not like, they would retaliate in the trade area because we are a big exporter, and they would retaliate with the necessity to have a visa for tourist travel, whatever irritants people could think of, and I do not think anybody wants to face it.
Senator Campbell: I do not want to face it either, but what is our option; die a slow death? I agree with you that maybe we will need a passport, maybe they will not let some of our products go. How about if those people who do not play by good rules, we do not give them oil, we do not give them water, we do not give them wheat, we give them nothing. I keep hearing people come day, after day, after day saying this is what the problem is, and I do not see any will on NAFO, except for you saying this is not working. You said in one paragraph, "These countries were not given immediate access to EU waters and demanded higher quotas within NAFO, but higher quotas than Canadian authorities were prepared to accept. We declined to pay the price for solving a European Union internal issue...'' What did they do? They came and killed our resource. So we declined to pay the price. We said, no, we are not going to allow you to do it, and they said the hell with you, we are going to fish the guts out of this. I suggest a couple of frigates staring these guys down might be the answer, because if it is not, we might as well just throw our hands up and say the hell with it. We seem to be the only ones that actually care about the fish, actually care about the resource. Everybody else mouths it; everybody else says we are on board. We cannot do anything, and Senator Baker is right, there are no rules that hurt these people.
Just as an ending, you know what; I think this whole trawling issue is a red herring. I think it is a great big red herring thrown in the middle of this issue to get our attention off the fact that we are not paying attention to our stocks. I hope you keep fighting because our stocks will disappear.
Mr. May: The point about trawling is a very interesting one, it being a bit of a red herring. I think I agree with you. What we are talking about, what that issue is about is whether anybody should fish on the high seas in the absence of scientific advice, in the absence of a management body. The issue is about fishing on the high seas. It has become an issue about trawling inside the 200-mile limit. It has suddenly shifted. It is not about trawling inside 200 miles. It is about fishing on the high seas. Now it may well be that the only way you could fish on the high seas is with a trawl, but it is not about trawling, it is about fishing on the high seas in areas where there are no management bodies and the premise is that you should not do it.
I could not agree more. We have muddied the waters terribly by talking about trawling and then everybody who has a fishery that is prosecuted by trawling is suddenly nervous.
I think you are exactly right in your comments. In the 1980s the context might have been different. People did not know what they were doing in the sense that they did not know that fishing all of those extra fish would bring the stocks to where they are today. Some people might have given a warning, but nobody really knew because we did not know the size of the stocks. We did not know that all the fish had moved outside 200 miles and nothing was left inside. These are things that came to light after the studies were completed after the damage was done. Not only were they fishing the fish outside 200 miles, the ones inside 200 moved out there and they were fishing those too. Now the resources are gone and with the wisdom of hindsight, we know what we did. Now I would put that on the table again, and again, and again at the highest levels of other governments to say this is what happened. We may have had an excuse for it at the time because we did not know, but now we know; now we know. I cannot imagine sitting across the table from a senior person in another government or in the EU and telling them the story that I just told you, and unless they thought I was making it up and was telling lies or something, but if they could be convinced that this is the story and the historical facts prove it, how could you say you are not going to do something to try to bring it back, knowing that the NGOs are out there waiting to pounce on this one. They are already pouncing, and rightly so.
Senator Campbell: Dr. May, you used Kris Kristofferson. I will use Joni Mitchell, a Canadian, and I hope we never get there, "but you do not know what you've got until it's gone,'' and I hope we never get there. Thank you very much.
Senator Baker: I say amen to Senator Campbell's comment and observation. It is going to be an interesting committee report because some members of the committee feel very strongly about it, and it might just be the first time in Canadian history that a committee may have a report that recommends something drastic and something that has not been considered before.
As I have mentioned to Senator Campbell, if Newfoundland was a nation onto itself, if we had not joined Canada, we would not have the problem. We would have extended this jurisdiction a long time ago. There would not have been a foreigner out there.
Custodial management is an improvement over what we presently have, and I think that is where a lot of support for the concept came from, it is definitely an improvement.
Dr. May, you said that the VMS, the observer's compellability, and punishment were technical issues and that there was a larger issue. What do you think of the technical issues that we discovered yesterday in private meeting? We heard that observers do not appear in court in those foreign nations, and their VMS could be down and they do not have to fix it. We heard that there is no punishment regime, for others whereas for a Newfoundlander, it is against the law and you are dragged into court if your VMS is down for two hours. We learned that all the observers go into court presenting their observer's reports for a prosecution. There definitely is punishment because you can recall when we changed the Fisheries Act to make punishment under the Fisheries Act perhaps the most extreme punishment of any Act of Parliament, the fines, the possible jail terms on summary and indictable offences.
Do you not agree that these technical issues are very important at this point and that we should address this in our committee report just as we would address the general question of what should be done about management?
Do you not agree that the technical issues that were disclosed yesterday to this committee are shocking?
Senator Campbell, later on today, we are hearing from Mr. Gus Etchegary, and he will be very interesting in the solution as far as NAFO is concerned. Perhaps his solution is more extreme than yours is.
Let me ask you then, what do you think of these technical discoveries that this committee made yesterday.
Mr. May: Well, obviously, you want to know where it is you want to go, we know that, and you want a plan to get there, which we do not have, and you need the means to implement the plan, which includes these technical issues. I did not know that if your VMS broke down, you did not have to do anything about it. Of course, it should be automatic that if it is not working, you have to get it fixed. That would result immediately in everybody having a backup system. If it broke down, you just turn on the other one, absolutely, of course.
Senator Baker: In other words, make the foreigners subjected to the same law that we are subjected to.
Mr. May: Absolutely.
Senator Cowan: I listened to you speak of the double whammy and the fact that in the late 1980s there was a period of time when the water became colder and the fish moved offshore. Now with global warming, presumably the ocean currents will become warmer; does that mean that at least what remains of the fish stock might move inside our 200- mile limit?
Mr. May: It is seasonal. It was always inside for part or most of the year and moved outside in the spring. I am going to say January to June, to be safe; the spawning areas are the deeper waters of the shelf. Some of those are inside 200 miles, but they did not use those because it was in the north and too cold. In order to find appropriate temperatures for spawning in spring, they went out to the eastern edge of the Grand Banks and that is where the overfishing occurred. As the oceanographic regime warms up and assuming it does not get too warm and go too far the other way, we would have the appropriate conditions for the stocks to rebuild, as long as they were given the opportunity to do so by relaxing the fishing.
The Chairman: I see no further questions, but I think I would like to underscore what Senator Campbell said, and say on behalf of all of us that it has been very useful testimony and it has given us, I think, a focus that we did not have before. That is something we have needed. As Senator Baker said, we will be producing a report and we have to have a focus for that and be clear about it. I think you have helped us to be clear. I agree with Senator Campbell that it has been one of the best testimonies, perhaps the best that we have had. Thank you very much for coming.
Mr. May: Mr. Chairman, my pleasure.
The Chairman: Now we are going to hear from Dr. Rose, who has had a distinguished career in the public service and has been for some time now at Memorial University in a very important chair, and we are looking forward to hearing his testimony this morning.
George Rose, Division of Degree Studies and Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, as an individual: Thank you very much, senator. I just want to hit a few key points and then I am open to any questions or discussions you might have on those points, or any others that you might want to raise.
My main concern is with the fish and the fisheries ecosystems around Newfoundland and Labrador, but also in Canada, and indeed around the world. I do not think there are many people left who do not realize the predicament that we are in around the world. In some people's view, some of the recent scientific papers are a bit exaggerated, a bit over the top. However, the basic view that marine ecosystems and marine fisheries are not doing as well as they should and the future looks rather bleak, is shared by most fisheries scientists around the world. The only difference that you will find among those scientists is in the details.
Some of us may not be quite as over the top, do not have the Armageddon philosophy that some others appear to have, but generally speaking, we are not in good shape. To me the bottom line is the fish and fisheries ecosystems and not the politics; I will leave the politics to others who are certainly more qualified and knowledgeable than I am.
We are all aware of the difficulties we have had in Newfoundland and Labrador, and indeed, in all of Canada, because you can find problems in British Columbia and in the North. Newfoundland is not the only area in Canada that has severe problems. To me, the key to this is that our marine ecosystems are not producing as much product as they used to, and that is my consideration, that is my job as a fisheries scientist. We want to use the oceans to produce human food, and other things as well, but we are concentrating on production from our fisheries and they are going down. This is of great concern around the world because while some people tend to take a dismissive attitude towards the fisheries, while fisheries are still the world's second largest employer, only after agriculture, they are also the source of protein for well over 1 billion, perhaps 2 billion people on the planet. This is not a trifling issue.
Here in Canada on the Grand Banks, not just the Grand Banks, but we tend to focus on them because they are kind of the centre of our continental shelf; we used to have one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world. Many of you know the history, how much fish was taken out and how we have chopped away at it over the last 50 years. We have chopped away at so much of it that there is very little left. There are a few stocks, shrimp and crab, in particular, that have done quite well in the last 10 years and economically they have been extremely important, as some of you know, and they have saved us from a fate that we might have suffered in the early 1990s after the collapse of the groundfish stock. Overall, I think we have to conclude that we have failed to manage our fisheries sustainably for the last 50 years, and I am not going to go into the history of all this because I am sure you have heard it over and over again.
In terms of where we are going, it does not seem to me that Canada is showing the kind of leadership that we should be showing; that we are capable of showing. Canada has always been a leader in marine fisheries science and in other matters of marine fisheries and we just do not seem to be able to get what it takes to show that kind of leadership.
We seem to be happy with the status quo, both in science and management, and so on. It is almost as if putting little band-aids on the nicks and wounds that are suffered are going to do it and my plea to you today is that it just is not going to work. The little band-aids will not do it. We need major changes in the way we manage marine fisheries, the way we look at them, our whole attitude and philosophy towards them has to change.
I look at this nationally and internationally and I really do not see much difference. People within DFO and so on have made a lot about what they consider to be recent progress in reform within NAFO, but when I look at that, I think this is just more band-aids on a severe wound.
I am not criticizing the people in DFO who are trying to do this. I only half appreciate how difficult it must be because I have never had to do that, have never had to negotiate in what I know is a brutal international environment. I am not criticizing those people at all. I am sure they are doing the best they can, but the problem from the standpoint of the fisheries and the ecosystem is that even if they are successful, even if they can get NAFO to do all the little things and all the little changes that they want, it is not going to work. It is not enough. We need major changes in the way that we manage our fisheries and the international fisheries that cross the 200-mile limit. We are not even thinking about those. It seems like when attitudes like that come up, they are just dismissed.
Let me give you an example of what happened in New Zealand. In New Zealand, industry voluntarily said it would not fish in about one third of the fishing zone. They wanted to impose those restrictions because they were interested in conservation for the future. We, in Canada, have not reached that level yet with our industry, our thinking and management. In Alaska, the industry is like mother's milk; the industry there is extremely focused on the health of its wild fishery. We like to think we feel that way here in Newfoundland, but I am beginning to doubt that we really think that way, or else we would take stronger action. In Alaska, they have banned all finfish aquaculture because they think it is harmful to the wild fish stocks. Whether they are right or not is not the issue, it is the intent, the attitude that they have towards the wild fisheries. If they think there is anything that is going to affect that industry negatively, they are going to either stop it or look at it very carefully. We do not seem to have that kind of intestinal fortitude that other jurisdictions show toward their wild fisheries.
We need a change in our attitudes. I do not know why, and as a Newfoundlander, I find it very strange at times the lack of commitment or interest in the fisheries. On the surface, it is strong, but that deep commitment to it is sometimes not all that obvious.
I work in an academic environment. Certainly, the commitment to fisheries in the academic environment is very weak here in Newfoundland. I was just talking to Senator Baker about this. We do not have a department of marine science; we do not have anything like a department of fisheries. It has never existed at Memorial. It is a symptom; it is not a cause of anything.
We need real conservation, not just paper conservation. Canada often talks a good game, but does not really carry it out. We have gone down this road in science as well. Most bench-level scientists, working scientists seem to be able to get any amount of funding and any amount of money to go to meetings. We can do workshops and we can do meetings, but we cannot do any work. Eventually you have nothing to say, and what is happening more and more at these workshops and meetings for science is it just regurgitates the same old stuff that we have all heard. There is nothing new taking place, and the new work if we talk about research here in Newfoundland and Labrador, Atlantic Canada, we are really falling behind, and it is kind of sad as a Canadian fisheries scientist to be part of this because we used to be leaders, and the world still looks to us to be leaders, they expect us to be leaders. When I go to meetings, and other Canadian scientists go to meetings, they expect us to come in with the new ideas, and when we do not, they just do not know how to respond. That is the situation we find ourselves in. As sad as it is to say, in the view of most scientists, Canada is no longer a leader in fisheries and marine science. We have just dropped the ball.
Another thing along those points is science is a dynamic process. It is constantly changing, it feeds on new ideas, and discussions, and disagreements. That is the way it works and that is the way we love it. A lot of our science that we are doing right now, in fact, may be wrong. It is not entirely right, and we need the room to reinvent new science, new ideas, and new ways of doing things. This is particularly the case because we are in a situation now with many fish stocks that we have never been in before. That is, the stocks are at such low levels, we are using old models, we are using algorithms, we are using old ideas to predict what is going to happen and they do not work. The only way we are going to gain that knowledge is to do new science, which is probably very likely going to lead to new management, we certainly have to insist that it does if we are doing our job, and that is not being done.
Another thing I would like to discuss is that here in Newfoundland and Labrador we seem to have adopted somewhat of an attitude that we can let the wild fisheries go. Certainly, they are not getting the attention that they once received. Some people think that aquaculture is the saviour and that the wild fisheries are a thing of the past. I do not particularly believe this at all, and I think this is very negative thinking, and it is not going to serve us well down the road.
Others in the world, I mentioned Alaska, feel the opposite, and their fisheries are booming. They have banned finfish aquaculture in Alaska. I am not suggesting that we follow that tact, but I am suggesting that people are wrong who are taking the political stance, or certainly, any other kind of stance, that aquaculture is going to save rural Newfoundland, and save the fisheries. That is not the way to go for the future. We cannot forget the wild fisheries.
Senator Johnson: Dr. Rose, that was an excellent presentation and I think you have spoken many truths and that you speak to a whole generation of people. As I said before, the poles and not just political poles show that the Canadian people are most concerned with their environment. Everything you are saying is dead on in terms of that and the fact that we have to develop new sciences. I want you to elaborate on that subject.
Our previous witness spoke of the ecosystem itself, suggested closed fishing seasons, and closed areas as a start. I wonder if you could comment on that in terms of the wild fishery.
Mr. Rose: The worldwide conservation movement started on land, and I think people realized about the turn of the 19th century that wild animals were going to become extinct if something radical was not done to save them. The movement to create game reserves and national parks around the world began at that time. Those places are taken for granted today, but without them, we would have lost many species of animals. I do not think anyone would argue that the parks and reserves are a great success.
We have never considered that maybe the ocean should get the same kind of concern. I believe strongly that it should. There are differences, of course, between ocean and terrestrial ecosystems, but the fundamental idea that some areas should be protected around the world, I think, is a growing ides and I support it fully.
Senator Johnson: I think one of the problems in Canada, if I may say, is the vastness of this country and the lack of understanding of the Atlantic Ocean and the issues in this area. I come from an area in Manitoba where it is all lakes and our lakes too are suffering in the same way. Lake Winnipeg has ecosystem problems, with fish management, and with having to develop new science and technology. Where should we start? Should closed fishing seasons be done here, or do you want to do more scientific research before we start? I want to know where we can start.
In our report, we want to be able to tell Canadians this issue requires action, no more talk. Enforcement is essential at one end, management at the other, and in the middle we are spending $100,000,000 on just one end of it.
Mr. Rose: Well, you know, in fisheries management we have been doing this for 150 years; this is not a new idea. We have been closing in fresh water systems, not fishing on spawning. This is status quo. The problem in the marine systems is that we are still under the influence of the Huxley debate, which took place in London in 1884, where they argued that nothing man did had any effect on the large marine fish stocks. We have lived under that shadow for 100 years. It should be completely obvious that that is not true, but protection for marine fish stocks has always been a difficult issue, even though it has never been for fresh water species or other things.
We have made some progress and we do have some closed areas here in Newfoundland and Labrador. We have had some areas like the spawning concentrations of cod in Trinity Bay and in Placentia Bay, and also in Hawke Channel off Labrador. We have a 50 by 50 nautical mile area which is closed to everything but crab fishing. It is not that this is something new. It is that it has been ad hoc, it has not been policy, it has just been something because somebody in management got a creative idea and was kind of influenced by some of us, bench level scientists. This is not a broad- sweeping policy. I would like it to become a universal policy based on science. We did not close Smith Sound, for example, until we knew that this was an important area. We knew that, okay. There are some situations out there that we just do not know, and some of the science should work parallel with this, so that where are the sensitive areas, where are the areas that should be closed, and so on. I do not see that as a reason to stop.
Many people criticized the closure of the Hawke Channel area, which is off Southern Labrador. A lot of scientists criticized it. I was one of the main proponents, of closing that area. It came under tremendous attack from industry, from other scientists, that this was not a good thing to do, but we stuck to our guns and management was supportive and it was done.
I would never argue that we had all of the science in place that said it was going to be successful. We did not know that, we could not guarantee that, or that this was exactly the right area to close, you know, maybe a little bit here and a little bit there would be better. We did not know that exactly. When people put Yellowstone National Park in place, or the Serengeti National Park in Africa, when that was put in place, people did not know exactly what the outcome of that would be either. If we wait until we know all the science, it will all be gone.
Senator Johnson: What would you like to do in terms of the science and the work you are doing? Where would you like to go with this?
Mr. Rose: I would like to be doing more marine science in Canada. It is becoming almost impossible to do it.
Senator Johnson: Why is there not a department here in St. John's? You have said that there is not a department of marine biology.
Mr. Rose: You mean at Memorial University?
Senator Johnson: Yes.
Mr. Rose: There is a department of Biology and there are several other departments that have to do with marine matters, but there is not a faculty for fisheries science or studies relating to fish and so on.
Senator Johnson: What did you mean when you said that Newfoundlanders are not caring or knowing more about their own fish stock situation? Is this in terms of being advocates or environmentalists?
Mr. Rose: All of those things. This is my own personal view, but sometimes I am disappointed by the lack of importance that people here attach to the future of our marine ecosystems and fisheries. It is as simple as that. Now, I think, that is not a universal attitude. Many people feel strongly and passionately about this subject, but it does not always come across. We sat here and allowed things to deteriorate, and nothing has been done.
Senator Campbell: Do you have any explanation, for instance, why the West Coast fishery and the regulations are so different from the East Coast? I mean, on the West Coast, we just shut her down. From one year to the next, you can catch Coho salmon but you cannot catch springs. We shut down the whole cod fishery in the Strait of Georgia and now they are back. DFO determines how many fish each person can catch. Is that because the salmon come up rivers, and can actually be counted?
Mr. Rose: Yes, I think that might be part of it. Boy, I do not know. That is a difficult question. There may be cultural differences there. People on the West Coast tend to be a little bit more environmentally sensitive, I do not know how to put that into words, but seem to be a little bit more conscious of it. Another thing is other than the Aboriginal fisheries on the West Coast, European fisheries are much more recent than they are here. The idea that people have the right to fish, which Newfoundlanders and Labradorians feel is a basic right, may not exist so much in B.C.
Senator Campbell: Our salmon come out of our rivers, go up the coast, they go past Alaska, they go out into the ocean for however many years it is, depending on the species, and they come back to Alaska. As you say, the Alaska fishery is as strong as ever. I mean, our fish, much the same as yours, cross boundaries. Our concerns are the same as yours. I am actually more concerned about what it is like beyond the 200-mile limit, but it just seems that here it was just a free-for-all; that little real consideration was given to the stock.
Mr. Rose: There is a story behind that too. It goes back in 1977 and all the events leading up to that time. In that situation the salmon won the fight because, there was so much support for the resource. Canada had what you might call an ecological approach to how fisheries should be managed in the sense that they spawned in North America, therefore, they belonged to North America and Canada and the U.S., in particular. On the other side, it would be Japan or Russia, they belonged to those countries and they would be managed accordingly no matter where they went. That was kind of the philosophy behind it, which is pretty sound, I think. On the East Coast, the cod lost that battle. Salmon won, and cod lost, and we all know what happened from the 1950s onward; the stocks here were devastated. My own personal view on this, and it is supported by most of the data that is in existence, is that up until that time we never really ever recovered from the damage that was done way back when in the 1950s and 1960s. Management mistakes were made in Canada, no question about it, in the late 1970s and 1980s. We made fundamental science and management mistakes during that time. The severe damage had already been done by that point, and if there was one mistake that Canada made and Canadian scientists made back then was not realizing the damage that had already been done, and thinking that things would come back. It was that thinking that lead us to believe that we did not have to be quite as conservation minded, as we should have been. We made that big mistake. It is easy to pardon that mistake because, in a way, how could they have known. It would have been a very insightful thing to know at the time, how much damage had really been done during the 1950s and 1960s.
Senator Campbell: What is the state of aquaculture here on the East Coast? Is there much aquaculture going on here?
Mr. Rose: There is a lot in the Maritime provinces with salmon. There is a little bit in Newfoundland, but it has never been terribly successful. I will get myself in trouble for saying that, but it does not seem like it has ever been terribly successful.
Senator Campbell: My difficulty is I start looking at trawling and I am really quite worried about the aquaculture. We do a lot of it in British Columbia. My question is how do you denote success? Do you denote success by the amount of meat you pull out of there while you are killing the bottom? Do you denote success by the amount of meat you pull out, and yet you find lice increasingly on our salmon? At what point do we enter into the fray? I think that is one of the issues that Canada has never really addressed. We go to the Scandinavian countries where they do this all the time, and they seem to be quite comfortable with it, but I do not think there is any good science out there yet that says this is okay. We could find ourselves in exactly the position that you just said, that you would have had to be very insightful in the 1970s and 1980s to recognize that we are in trouble. I do not want to find the same thing happening when it comes to aquaculture because this is an industry that is being introduced to the wild. It is not like it is up on land where you can control it. It is in the wild and there has to be some effect and we are not doing it.
Mr. Rose: I agree with you. Some regimes have taken a very cautious stance, like Alaska. Norway seems to have the attitude that they will just sacrifice their wild fisheries. I have been in Norway at rivers that almost make you cry. They are just so beautiful and pristine; you have to think there is salmon jumping over those rocks. I mean, you have just had to believe it, but here is not a fish in the river. They seem to have accepted that. I used to always shake my head during the worst days for the northern cod stock when we were down and trying to measure thousands of tonnes, or tens of thousands of tonnes, but we were still talking in tens of thousands, our basic unit was 10,000 tonnes in science. It is difficult to be more precise than that. We read reports from Scotland about Atlantic salmon, and they would be talking about three fish in the river, not three tonnes, but three fish.
Senator Campbell: We have had that on the West Coast.
My last question concerns parks and the protection of our marine habitat. People have come before this committee, more will do so, and I have to be frank when I say that I wrote some of them off as wing nuts, frankly.
Mr. Rose: Who is that?
Senator Campbell: The marine biology people. In studying this subject, I came to the same conclusion that you did; because this problem is out of sight we are not as concerned as we were when it came to land animals. We also have difficulty in counting the number of fish in these areas. We have ignored this problem up until now.
I was glad to hear you say we have to consider this as part of the overall scientific picture. We have to figure out where these species spawn, we have to protect them, and we have to make sure that there are areas where they are protected.
Do you think that we have come to that realization and that we are moving forward in this thinking?
Mr. Rose: I do not know if we are moving forward, but I firmly believe that we need to, if we are going to be successful. People will often throw back the argument that the fish move around and they are not always in that place. Yes, but I say, so what? What about the birds? The birds move around more than fish do yet we do not take that attitude toward birds. If there are important areas for geese or other birds to next we consider and protect those areas. I do not see any fundamental difference between that logic and that analogy with marine fish. There are particular spawning areas and areas where fish remain while they are juveniles. We must protect those areas in order to rebuild the stock.
I often think that national parks and game reserves have actually increased and not decreased the opportunities for human harvest of wild animals. Here in Newfoundland we have caribou reserves. These reserves protect the animals. They have not decreased the opportunities for extraction or hunting, they have increased them. Why would it not be the same in the ocean for fisheries? If we can increase the productivity of the wild fish stocks, it has to be a good thing, even though you are not allowed to fish or hunt everywhere.
Senator Cowan: Dr. Rose, I want to talk about research. I have a connection with Dalhousie University, so obviously we have an interest in university research and increasing research funding. I gather from what we have heard so far that most of the funding for marine research comes from the federal government; is that correct?
Mr. Rose: Not for me it does not.
Senator Cowan: I suppose it would come from the universities, government, private sector and foundations. Where does it come from and how do we get more?
Mr. Rose: Let me speak to it in a general sense first. You are probably quite right that most of it comes from federal sources. DFO has its own budget for research, which has been shrinking of late, but that is another issue. In the academic world, we receive most of our funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, from NSERC. There is an issue right there if you want to talk about fisheries science. As a fisheries scientist, when I apply to NSERC, which I have to do for fundamental operating grants and so on, there are categories. NSERC has categories for everything. They have categories for stuff I have never heard of; however, it does not have a category for fisheries, fisheries science, or fisheries management. There is a category for wildlife management; there is a category for almost everything else under the sun, but nothing for fisheries. Fisheries scientists are not a particularly numerous breed. We have to apply under a broad category of evolution and ecology, which means we have to compete with bird and insect biologists. What that means is our grants are likely to be small. That is the bottom line because it is a big pool. That has always annoyed me simply because it seemed like a slap in the face. Everybody else had a category, what was wrong with us.
Academics can get money from many other sources. I get funding from provincial sources, from industry, and much of it comes from international sources. I receive funding from international organizations, both within Canada, such as CEDA, and outside. I have had funding from everywhere from Alaska to New Zealand, to Japan, to Africa, to Iceland and so on, and we put together projects on that basis, but the bottom line is for Canadian academics in this field, the funding sources within Canada are not very great.
Senator Cowan: You mentioned that DFO is conducting research, although with a shrinking budget; clearly, that has to be expanded.
Mr. Rose: Yes, I would think so. I am sure DFO will survive, but as a credible science agency with an international stature, I wonder whether it will survive at all. Many people my age or older are near retirement and DFO is not replacing them. These are the most experienced scientists that we have in Canada. There are very few young people being hired and that is life within DFO science.
Senator Cowan: Would private operators such as Clearwater Seafood take up the research?
Mr. Rose: There is very little of that in Canada. There is a little bit, but it is minor compared to other countries.
Senator Cowan: It is similar to what we find in other areas of research and development in Canada. There is much less research and development being done by the private sector than there is in the U.S.
Mr. Rose: Absolutely, yes.
The Chairman: That is an important issue for us and I would remind our researchers to take particular note of that because it is something we have not focused on before, just to remind us all that NSERC operates with federal funds. It is arm's length and as a matter of fact, Dr. May chaired NSERC at one time. It operates with federal funds and we can make recommendations with regard to changes in NSERC.
Senator Adams: You mentioned that DFO is trying to do its best. Since the Nunavut land claim has been settled, we have had some difficulty in DFO giving us our quotas and then having them taken away. Our settled land claim gives a license to catch those fish, but now foreigners are catching our quotas. Quota holders must have a licence. If the foreigners do not have a license, they cannot catch the quotas. How can we resolve that issue?
Mr. Rose: That is really beyond my expertise. I know the situation you are talking about, which is the issue surrounding turbot. As a country, we have managed to give away more or less 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the quota of that stock to foreign countries and Nunavut seems to have been squeezed out. It does not seem right by the principles that we believe in of adjacency and all of that. I do not have any solution for you. I do not know how to resolve those management issues. I can only say that it just seems to be wrong.
Senator Adams: DFO scientists have said with respect to the commercial fishery that there may be nothing left to fish. Now, this summer DFO did some scientific studies in Hudson's Bay. A lot of killer whales started coming through Hudson's Bay and they killed beluga whales. DFO is trying to find out how the killer whales make a particular sound before they kill. However, sometimes the killer whales will bring the beluga whales right close to the shore, which is good for us because we do not have to go out too far to hunt. We have our quotas for the belugas and narwhals, polar bears, and other species. We go out and catch them every year. Now we have people coming to Nunavut who are licensed to catch fish and we cannot catch them.
We hear different stories from DFO and the people living our northern communities. The scientists come along and say that the polar bears are being reduced every year, and yet the hunters in our communities say that they saw more last year than any other year.
Just last week, before I came to St. John's, I phoned my son who had been out hunting caribou 10 to 5 miles from the shore, and his friend got two caribou and one polar bear on the land. The climate has changed.
There is a season for hunting deer and one for hunting geese. Why not do the same thing in the fishery? Right now, you have you need a licence. When the time for spawning is over, you could go out and catch your quotas. I think the system should work in that way.
Mr. Rose: One thing that concerns me about Nunavut and the northern parts is that we really do not have much of an idea of what is going on in the waters up there at all. The Canadian research effort in the North is minimal-to-non- existent, in terms of fish surveys. In fact, I think we rely on foreign information, which is a little bit of a difficult situation to put ourselves in as managers. We certainly have not done very well by Canadians, in terms of benefits coming to the people in Nunavut, or in Labrador, for that matter.
Senator Adams: Why could other provinces not do it, such as the people in B.C. who complain about salmon?
In addition, you mentioned New Zealand. You make the area and say, "You cannot go there because those are our stocks.'' The Europeans are controlling our fish stocks. How does Alaska do it? How does New Zealand do it?
Mr. Rose: Alaska controls its waters, and it can do what it likes. Alaska has made its choice.
Senator Hubley: I would like to come back to the science. I come from Prince Edward Island, a very small ecosystem that is not only interrelated in itself, but also certainly affected by all of the global issues that we have been taking about today.
In Prince Edward Island, we do not dig a hole unless we have an environmental study. The fishery is highly regulated; it is seasonal. We have a facility there that if we run into a problem, that facility immediately goes to work on solving that problem, whether it is a disease in the fishery or whatever might arise. We have heard this repeatedly in our discussions here in Newfoundland that there is just not the degree of scientific research going on that is going to give us that authority to make decisions that will be in our own best interest. Should there be a centre of excellence here in Newfoundland, and I really think it should be strongly represented in our report, that we are falling behind in many areas of scientific information and scientific study. We seem to be addressing things after the fact instead of being proactive. We should be looking at climate change ahead of time and supplying that information to the fisheries people. I just think it is an area that we have just neglected.
Mr. Rose: I could not agree with you more, we have, and we are paying the price for it in many ways. It is a complicated situation of how we got to where we are today and I do not want to oversimplify it, but from the science side we have not done an adequate job. I think that is clear to everybody and that is not a criticism of any of the particular agencies or certainly not of the scientists involved in this issue. It has just been the overall volume and the overall capacity that we have to do the kind of work you are talking about here is inadequate. If people are serious about rebuilding the marine ecosystems, rather than just letting them go on a long slide, if we are serious about rebuilding and revitalizing the productivity in our marine ecosystems, we are going to have to have better science. This is not an option. In my view, it is not an option. We cannot do it without better science, and right now we do not seem to be able to even maintain the levels of science that we have here. I do not know how to fix this. This needs to be input from the federal level, from the provincial level, from the academic level. It needs input from all these levels. I do agree with you strongly that something needs to be done along these lines.
Senator Gill: My question follows in the same vein as Senator Hubley. According to what you have told us, I would like to point out that several witnesses have given us numbers, statistics, but from what you have told us, we cannot give much credibility to what we see in the papers, saying that in 50 years because of pollution, or whatever, there will be no more fish left in the water.
Where can people go to get that information and formulate an opinion on this subject? If you say we cannot believe everything we are being told, where can we go to find the necessary appropriate information? You said there is very little research being done, and in some cases no research at all. So what do we do, who do we turn to?
Mr. Rose: In answer to your first question, I do not personally believe that any fisheries science or marine science prediction can be made 40 years in advance. Almost every attempt at making predictions, and there have been lots of them, have turned out to be nonsense. So on that particular issue, what is going to be in place 40 or 50 years from now is going to depend an awful lot on what we do in terms of from now to 40 to 50 years from now, and that seems to be largely unpredictable. I do not take very seriously those kinds of projections. If we look back on the science literature about projections made about northern cod and the recovery, most of them are pretty well nonsense. That is one issue. Now as far as how we get better, there is no magic to this, we know how to do it. We know how to do fisheries science. We know how to go out and measure fish, we know how to do surveys, we know how to do all of the things that are necessary in order for us to have enough information to manage fisheries. We know how to do this. We just do not have the ability or the capacity to do it, and that capacity is being eroded, and eroded, and eroded as we go along.
There was reference to the situation in the north between Nunavut and Greenland. We do not have any data from that area, no information whatsoever. The decisions are based on data that come from the Danes and Germans, who do surveys off Greenland. I do not think that is a very healthy situation for a nation to be in, having to rely on competitors and so on for information about our own resources.
My answer to you is really very simple. We know how to do it. It is just that we are not doing it.
The Chairman: So it is not just a question of money. It is a question of structures as well.
Mr. Rose: It is never just a question of money. Many of my best students are now working in New Zealand, Australia, United States, and so on where people are taking these issues more seriously and where there are better opportunities. Canada is losing out.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Rose. The information you have provided today will be very helpful to our report. You have pointed out to us a whole series of issues to which we will turn our focus.
Senators, we are going to call on Mr. Gus Etchegary now. He has had a long and illustrious career in the fishery, both in the private sector and on a number of federal, and I suspect international councils. He has certainly been vocal and a champion of the fishery, and we are very pleased to have him with us. We would ask him to give us a presentation, after which we would like to ask him questions.
Gus Etchegary, as an individual: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen. Before I get started, I might say that George Rose's presentation was fabulous and really gets the heart of why we are in the mess we are today. I am going to try to enlarge on that a bit.
I am part of a group of about 15 people, some scientists, some former federal and provincial bureaucrats, two or three fishermen, and so on. We began our occasional meetings in 1992 in response to a call from the Coalition of Churches. If you remember, Mr. Chairman, our group was formed when the moratorium was declared.
One member of our group put together a document on the evolution of fisheries science within the federal government, and he did it because he became so disillusioned with the federal government in terms of reducing the budget. He did an elaborate piece of work and I am going to see that you get a copy of it. Much of the report will confirm Mr. Rose's remarks made here today. In addition, it will spell out how the budget, after going down hill, nearly dropped off the edge in 1995. The industry has suffered terribly because of that budget cut. This report will bring valuable information to the committee's final report.
Mr. Chairman, I think the first time I appeared before this committee was about 15 years ago. At that time, I asked how the committee would feel if the Russians came over the North Pole and demolished the forests of Ontario and B.C, or the wheat fields of the Prairies before the harvest, and, of course, my question gained a bit of attention. The fact of the matter is it has happened to us, but in this case, it is with fish. Our fishery is practically destroyed, and up until about a year ago, I was hopeful that it might be rebuilt. I must say, that in recent months I have come to realize that the Canadian government has neither the commitment nor the dedication to deal with the problem. It is a tragedy.
I have prepared a document for each member of the committee. Your copy, Mr. Chairman has an addition, it contains a letter sent to the Minister of Fisheries for Newfoundland in 1991, and it was sent from an advisory committee that he had appointed to give him some direction as to where Newfoundland and Labrador was headed. That letter is with you and you can see fit to use it as you wish.
I will not go through my 11-page brief, but ask the committee to turn to the attachments that begin on page 12. I will go through these attachments briefly to give you an idea where we came from and why we are in the mess we are in today. I suggest that when you have the time you read the brief and coupled with our discussion of the attachments you will perhaps have a better understanding of this situation.
The first attachment simply stresses the 200-mile limit and the well discussed exposure of the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks. In 1971, we began to recognize the damage and effect of 1,000 deep-sea distant water vessels and 50,000 fishermen from Europe and Asia who descended on the Grand Banks and the Labrador fishery. That occurred in 1950, and the impact of that huge pressure on the groundfish stocks began to show itself in 1970. We became alarmed as did Dr. Wilfred Templeman, the Chief of Research here in Newfoundland at the time. We could see from the data that was coming in from our production and processing lines in a variety of plants that compared to the previous five years the catch per unit of cod had been reduced by 50 per cent or more from one tonne an hour catching time for a trawler to 800 pounds. Our own production people measured the fish with the help of DFO representative. We were alarmed to see that the average size had dropped to 2.2 pounds from 4 pounds. Armed with that information, Mr. Chairman, we took off, 25 of us, to Ottawa and with the assistance of a gentleman deceased, Honourable Don Jamieson; we were able to spend some time with the DFO people and others. I remember the Honourable Mitchell Sharpe being so shaken by the information that he asked us to prepare a two-hour presentation overnight for Prime Minister Trudeau and 12 of his senior cabinet members the following morning, which we did. Without going into any details, I can just say to you that at the end of that presentation, the Prime Minister and his cabinet were shaken by the information. The Honourable Jack Davis was Minister of Fisheries. By the way, The Honourable Joe Smallwood was very supportive of our efforts to try and make this presentation to the Government of Canada and let the government know that the basic economy of Newfoundland was about to go to pieces. The problems started at that time and there has been gradual decline ever since. Make no mistake about it. Nothing has been done. It has just gone downhill since then.
In any event, they were shaken. Included in your package is a fax from the Honourable Jack Davis to the Premier of Newfoundland in which he commits the Government of Canada to extend jurisdiction to the slopes of the continental shelf. That was in 1971. Of course, we came away elated, but when you look at the map, you see that those areas are still exposed and that is one of the reasons that we have the mess we have today.
I will attempt to show you why this happened and you will be asking yourself why in God's name did the Government of Canada not act on the information; it is unbelievable that the government did not do anything. It was so clear what was happening to us. In any event, it was exposed, left exposed, because six years later they announced that jurisdiction would be extended to 200 miles. We were really upset about this and tried to find out why, after having a commitment from the Prime Minister and his cabinet, a commitment that they would do this, why they backed up. The short answer is the bureaucracy ruled supreme, and the bureaucracy said to the Prime Minister and to the decision makers that there was not enough geography outside 200 miles to support a foreign fishery. That is why it was ditched. I am not saying for one second that it would have been an easy run to extend jurisdiction to the continental shelf, but the fact of the matter is that what has evolved is that the basic economy of rural Newfoundland has been destroyed. We are losing our population in droves. What is happening here is a form of genocide. We could foresee this, those of us who were involved. I was not alone; there were many others. I can name many others prominent in the fisheries in this province, who were putting this forward, but it went down the drain and here we are today.
Mr. Chairman, the second attachment illustrates the work of Dr. Templeman. It shows the growth of fish in Labrador. From this information, you will gain an idea of why it was so important to include and protect the Grand Banks of Newfoundland within the extension of jurisdiction. Dr. Templeman's information shows that the growth of fish off Labrador, as opposed to the growth of fish off the Grand Banks, is about four to one. In other words, what we have been saying over the years is that the Grand Banks of Newfoundland are one of the most prolific fishing areas in the world. This is due to the flow of the Gulf Stream and it meeting the Labrador Current. The meeting of these two currents provides the up welling of tremendous food supplies and temperature advantages. Fish on the Grand Banks grow three to four times faster than fish that grow off Labrador.
This man who was sitting here earlier was asked the question why is it that with those favourable conditions on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, why in God's name, after 15 years of practically no fishing, nothing has recovered. There is no indication of recovery of the resource, despite the fact that on one side of that imaginary 200-mile line Canadians are prohibited from fishing, whereas on the other side of the line 20 nations fish regardless of what Ministers of Fisheries maintain. Believe me, after 50 years of knowing the Spanish, the Portugese, and the rest of these people, particularly the owners who run the fishery, not the governments, I can tell you that despite what they say, it will never recover, there will never be any recovery of the fishery on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The fishery is basic to the economy of Newfoundland, because while you can have an inshore fishery, it will be very modest. You have to have that strong healthy offshore fishery, not only just cod, but flounder, red fish, turbot, and all the other species. Without that industry there is no hope whatsoever of recovery.
While that line exists at 200 miles on the Grand Banks, and while there are 20 nations fishing in an uncontrolled fashion, there are so many loopholes in NAFO that you can drive a Mac truck through sideways. Believe me, because it is the truth. We have listened the DFO information, misinformation coming out to the public day after day, after day, for the last 50 years, as far as I am concerned, on what is really happening to our fisheries.
It is unforgivable that after the foreigners were thrown out and there was a transition from ICNAF to NAFO, the fact of the matter is that the foreigners continued to fish without any controls and they continue to do so.
I do not want to refer to any specific things, but just to give you an idea, an announcement saying that the Spanish, after 50 years of being the worse pirates in the world, all of a sudden have seen the light and they are going to go home. Mr. Chairman, this is the middle of November. There is very little fish on the Grand Banks to begin with and it is also refit time, and, Mr. Chairman, in case you do not know it, the Spanish government from the European community heavily subsides the distant water fisheries. Two years ago, and it is a fact, and it can be checked in a number of ways, over 500,000,000 was used to subsidize the Spanish distant water fleet alone. Now admittedly, at times, the European community has given an indication that they would like to do something about the problem, and they have come up with financial arrangements whereby they say to Spanish, Portugese, or some of the others, reduce your fleets, go down from three to two. The only problem is that when they rebuild, they rebuild with a vessel that is two and a half to three times the capacity, the horsepower, and with the technical components to double and treble the catch of a former vessel.
As a result of what we have had to deal with over the years, I would like you to look at the attachment on northern cod catches. This is the famous northern cod and if you will look at 1962, you will see a spawning biomass of 1.6 million tonnes. Those 1,000 ships and 50,000 men, and not very good management on the part of the Canadian government in the areas where they had control, that started to go down as it did to 1977 when the extension of jurisdiction took place. We were elated with the extension even though it was not to the continental shelf.
The Chairman: Maybe you could explain more about the northern cod spawning biomass.
Mr. Etchegary: That refers to northern cod spawning stock, seven years and older. In other words, at seven years of age the cod had reached the reproductive age. So that figure of 1.6 million tonnes did not include the fish that were under seven years of age. There was a total biomass of an estimated 3.2 million tonnes. Therefore, you are looking only at the spawning biomass, but you can see how the gradual declining takes place until 1977 when we extended jurisdiction.
We had hoped that from that point on, that at least the northern cod, because the main spawning grounds for the northern cod are on Hamilton Inlet Bank, and they spawn during the months of February, March, and April. I can give you information directly from the annual reports of ICNAF meetings. During 1967-69, through our a presentations at ICNAF we asked the foreign fishing fleet to not fish the spawning grounds during those months, to go somewhere else and fish and not fish there. You can read from the documents that countries like Spain, Portugal, and many others refused, and as a matter of fact, they always claimed that that stock was beyond ever being impaired because it was well protected by heavy covering of ice. That was their excuse for not complying with our wishes to stop it because beginning again in 1970 the Labrador fishermen catches were badly affected and it continued to get worse.
Let me go on from 1977. You can see that it started to rise and that was an indication to us that there would be an improvement and the cod would recover. Lo and behold, Mr. Chairman, the Canadian government yielded to lobbyists and gave a $23,800 subsidy, and I have a copy of the letter with me if anybody doubts it, for a 13-day trip to Labrador. This was a year after we got rid of the foreigners and the accumulated damage that they had done to our resources. We objected; the Newfoundland group objected. Maybe somebody will say we were selfish, but we objected on the basis that our trawler fleets were never designed or built to deal with ice situations and the danger to crews and to the ships and so on. Number two, we knew from our own experience because we knew many of the foreigners who fished Labrador, that the fish that they were catching were small. They were spawning fish, they were a high percentage of very small fish, that we knew once it reached our processing lines and found its way into the European, and particularly the U.S. market, that the markets would be blocked solidly with small fish going into the one pack that it could find. Do you know what that was? It was the famous block pack. About 70 per cent of the fish that was caught those years found its way into that market, into that pack, and ruined the market many times. In fact, it got so bad one year that the industry was in such trouble that the Minister of Fisheries came up with a subsidy to take the production of the plants, store it in Canadian warehouses at 80 per cent of the value, and wait until it was eventually sold to get the remainder. That was the result of this successful lobbying to put a portion of the Canadian fleet into the Labrador fishery.
Mr. Chairman, just to give you an idea of why we were so insistent in trying to get the extension of jurisdiction to the continental shelf is this attachment, which illustrates the 1993 foreign fishing effort as represented by the surveillance sightings. In this map, you can see the vessels outside the 200-mile fishing grounds. That will give you an idea how intense the fishing was in 1993 and why there is not any recovery. Why there is not any recovery, Mr. Chairman, is in the next attachment, and you will see that this is European Union quotas and catches of NAFO regulated flatfish stocks, cod is the same, but this will give you an idea. They had a quota of 8,000 tonnes. They reported 107,000 tonnes. Our surveillance people noted that in fact 171,000 tonnes were caught. That is the kind of abuse that those resources are subject to outside that area. The same thing applies to other straddling stocks. We see the quotas, the estimated catches and then the actual catches and the numbers are out of proportion.
Mr. Chairman, you can see that area is the home of one of the most prolific cod fisheries in the world, as indicated by Dr. Templeman in his work. In addition, there is a very valuable flatfish fishery in the form of American plaice, yellowtail flounder, witch flounder, and other species, about 150,000 tonnes in a healthy state. Many of the flatfish nurseries are outside the 200 miles, and there is absolutely no doubt whatever that you can go into a Spanish family restaurant on any Sunday you like and you will be eating the small flatfish from the Grand Banks. That is the story.
I wonder if any member remembers a tremendous report by Dr. Leslie Harris. Dr. Harris makes the important point that the sustainable catch as defined by scientists that you could take from a healthy cod stock, for example, and sustain the resource is called a factor of FO.1, which roughly matches about 18 per cent to 20 per cent of the stock. In other words, you could take 20 per cent out of the stock and it would sustain itself and remain healthy, taking into consideration the variations in environmental conditions and so on.
Dr. Harris was able to confirm based on in-depth study that it was not 18 per cent to 20 per cent that was taken, but between 45 per cent and 50 per cent. You do not have to be a genius, Mr. Chairman, to understand that the decline that you see here was a direct result of that fishery.
The Chairman: Gus, thank you very much for the story. I think the story has been very useful, very graphic, and you have given us a lot of useful information, and I do not think we have had anybody that has had the background that you have before us. We would like to ask you some questions, and I am going to start with Senator Johnson.
Senator Johnson: Did you say that Canada is not committed to restoring our fishery? Do you believe that?
Mr. Etchegary: On the basis of the action that has been taken, the fact of the matter is we have had 15 years, senator, 15 years of a moratorium, 15 years where the most prolific fishing grounds in the world has not been able to recover, and the reason is simple; the stocks migrate back and forth over that line. When you look at the infractions that have taken place over the last 20 years, you will find these countries are, in effect, uncontrolled.
Now that is not taking away from the efforts of the surveillance people and the boarding parties and all the rest, but they are only touching a very minute part of the problem. While there is fishing outside 200 miles and you consider that there is only an estimated 3 per cent only of the stock that was there in 1974, even a low fishing effort will kill any hope of recovery. I have read, for example, Mr. Chairman, the presentations during the last three or four weeks of some of your people, some of the veteran bureaucrats, and the lawyers, and others, and it is the same music that I have heard for 50 years, it is the same song. There is not any dedicated effort; someone has to stand up and say, this is wrong; it cannot go on.
Senator Johnson: There are a lot of things being done, though. You have to give the country and the province some credit in terms of making progress on a number of fronts; the money that is spent in, as you say, surveillance and enforcement. Now we need, of course, more science, more research. Our report hopefully will clarify many of these things, and I think Dr. May's and Dr. Rose's presentations were very clear on a number of things that can be done on the positive side.
You do not think it is totally hopeless do you? I happen to know a lot about Iceland, and I bore my colleagues to death about it, but I have for years about the way they manage their fishery. I lived there. Fishing is their lifeblood; it is gold. It is their society; they respect their fishermen, half of whom have Ph.Ds.
Do you think anything has to do with pride and what is important in terms of this part of the world? I have lived here for many years, so I understand where you are coming from, but I do not think we give up hope. I think there are many things we can do to bring the fisheries back like other countries are doing. We cannot do it alone; we have to do it in cooperation with the small global universe we live in now. There are many things happening that we can draw on.
Mr. Etchegary: I appreciate what you are saying, senator. I know Iceland very well myself. I have been there very many times and Iceland, to me, is the best managed fisheries in the world, closely followed by Norway. The literacy in Iceland is 99.7 per cent. I know that from Grade 7 onward that the children in Iceland learn about fisheries, they appreciate it, and 90 per cent of them participate in fisheries when they grow up. You will find that fishermen in Iceland, for example, are just as interested in the fishery as the scientists and will cooperate to the fullest, but so are many fishermen in this province. However, we have not had anything close to the kind of fisheries management that they have in Iceland. I am well aware of how and why they function. I will send you the information on the last 10 years of Icelandic fisheries where there is not any more than a 3 per cent variation in the fishery.
Senator Johnson: Yes, I was there, and I know what you are saying. I am recommending to our committee that we speak to people in Iceland, go to Iceland. I thank you for your comments.
Just to follow up on one thing, the thing about the literacy, the thing about the pride, all that, I think that is so critical in developing the attitude you need to rebuild in this country, not just here, but also where I come from. As I said, we have to clean up Lake Winnipeg as they have done in the Great Lakes. So much has been ignored in all the waters in our country, including here in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Mr. Etchegary: I might add, as long as you asked the question, I feel very strongly that the structure of management and administration of fisheries in this country is wrong. I just think it is completely wrong; it does not suit the situation, certainly not here in this province.
You have to understand that the extension of jurisdiction to 200 miles and not to the continental shelf has practically destroyed the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, but it has not affected the fishery in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island or in Quebec. For that reason, I have felt, and we have made this presentation many times to people, particularly fisheries ministers, that here in St. John's, I am positive that had there been a senior deputy minister here in St. John's for the last 20 years confronting the situation that no other province faces, and communicating with the Minister of Fisheries, then there would have been a different face on the situation here. We just have not had the management structure. You cannot micro-manage fisheries from Ottawa.
Senator Johnson: I know.
Mr. Etchegary: It is a mistake, and it goes on and on and nobody listens and you get all kind of situations developing because of it.
Mr. Chairman, here is a policy document for Canada's commercial fisheries. It is dated 1976. It is only four or five lines and it says, "The strategies adopted reflect a fundamental redirection in government policy for fishery management and development. Although commercial fishing has long been a highly regulated activity in Canada, the object of the regulation, with rare exception, has been the protection of the renewable resource. In other words, fishing has been regulated in the interest of the fish. In the future, it will be regulated in the interest of the people who depend on the fishing industry.''
From that day on the redirection of Canada's fishing management went from that direction to that direction, and I can spell it out for you in spades, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Campbell: First of all, I am ignorant; where is Hamilton Bank?
Mr. Etchegary: Hamilton Bank is right off Cartwright in Labrador.
Senator Campbell: Thank you.
I am getting more and more depressed here as the day goes on. You know, there is something going on here, and it just came to my mind that Canada lives and dies by its resource industry; fishing, farming, logging, all these industries, and save logging, none of these industries are doing well. Farming is in trouble, fishing is in trouble, and I wonder if this is not an attitude that has spawned out of Ottawa by government.
Mr. Etchegary: By government?
Senator Campbell: By government. It is all well for us to use Iceland, but Iceland does not grow wheat, Iceland does not harvest trees. I think Iceland can focus on that one industry. In Canada, I think we can speak for Newfoundland, but do you think in Saskatchewan that they care about the fishery, and do you think that Newfoundland cares about the wheat that is being stocked, do you think they care about the tariffs from the U.S? I wonder if maybe we should not be addressing this from the point of view of the fishery.
I do not believe the fishery is dead, but I think it will be, and I do not think it will be 40 years out, I think it will be a lot sooner than that. Should we not address this issue between the Government of Newfoundland and the Government of Canada? Should we say we are not going to put up with it any more, you can do whatever the hell you want, but we are going to save our fishery and we are going to go out there and we are going to protect this resource. It seems to me again it all goes back to promising that you are going to protect this in 1971 and then doing nothing. Promises are cheap, that is true. They come out of Ottawa every single day.
I think we are at the point now where something drastic has to be done, or you know what, we will be here 10 years from now and will be trying to figure out where it all went. We know where it went. We know what is happening. My question is, if they have not listened to you for 50 years, are they going to listen to us? You are a hell of a lot smarter and know a hell of a lot more about fishing than we do.
Mr. Etchegary: Unless there is a change in the structure, unless there is a change in some of the faces in the bureaucracy, and I do not mind saying it, unless there are changes, you will not, because the people who are there at the present time are dead set. When you get people talking about, we have to do this on the international stage, well, you know, when you look at Thailand, Thailand has 60,000 fishing vessels, 40,000 deep sea trawlers and they are terrorizing the Australia and New Zealand fisheries and many other places in Asia, and you can go down the line. You know, Canada is now about twentieth on the list of harvesting fishing nations. Vietnam, by the way, is about ninth. George was saying that Canada was a leader. Maybe it was at one time. I know some of the great people that were connected with it, particularly in this field and certainly gave it a leadership role, there is no doubt about that, but a lot of those people are gone. There has to be a change in direction. There has to be a dedicated commitment on the part of the senior government to say we are going to do something about this, and stop talking about Borneo and other people's problems, we have the problem here. We know what it is and we know how to deal with it. For God sake, what are we worried about? Let other people worry about their problems. Sure, Canada can do things in some ways, but for goodness sake, let us deal with our own problems. We know what it is; it is overfishing. Sure habitat has something to do with it, but if people were really worrying about habitat, Mr. Chairman, I wish the Lord that somebody would take a damn good look at the seismic work that is happening on every corner of the continental shelf.
There was a session here last Friday, for example, on seismic activity and the compatibility between the oil and gas company and the fishery. It was a major development sponsored by DFO and an outfit called New Motion, whatever that is, and you could not get an invitation to go to it. We had a very important document to present. This is a very, very excellent Norwegian experiment that took three weeks off the Norwegian coast with the latest trawlers and the latest seismic vessels, and they came up with showing conclusively that when seismic blasting took place in an area, that haddock and cod dispersed as much as 18 to 20 miles.
The oil companies here are indiscriminately using seismic blasting all over the continental shelf and nobody knows, or they do not want the public to know, and certainly not the fishing industry to know bout the impact it is having on the fish. That is an aside, but I am saying to you that this is the kind of thing that we have to take into account.
Senator Campbell: This is what I am talking about. You are talking about a non-renewal resource killing a renewable resource. This is what I mean; governments have to decide on whether they want to be blue-eyed sheiks or sustain the fish stocks. That is the question that we have to be asking and we are not doing it. Right now, oil is the hot commodity, but will we have when it is all gone? We will have destroyed your fishery to get the oil and then it will be too late. Our governments have to take all of this into consideration.
Mr. Etchegary: One of the things that George brought up and, of course, it is something that you people hear about, and that is aquaculture. There is so much put into aquaculture in terms of replacing wild fish that it is stupefying. The fact of the matter is, about 40 per cent of the world's wild catch is going into feeds and half of it is going to aquaculture and half to agriculture. Some of the leading fisheries scientists in the world say that aquaculture has to be controlled because there will not be enough industrial fish in the water to provide the feed for it, quite apart from the sea lice and the mixture with wild fish and all the other things. This is a serious problem that nobody, Mr. Chairman, is paying any attention to.
Senator Cowan: Unless and until the same degree of control is exercised over the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks as it exercises over the rest of the Grand Banks, is there any hope that this can be fixed?
Mr. Etchegary: In my view, no. We have had 15 years to prove to us that the recovery is not taking place.
Senator Cowan: You say that is because of overfishing, amongst other places, on the Nose and Tail.
Mr. Etchegary: That is right. There is no Canadian fishing inside on these groundfish, yet it is taking place outside. Now there will be people in government who will say that is skate they are catching or some other exotic fish, but the fact of the matter is these vessels are not over here for the sunshine, they are over here to catch fish. I know these owners in Vigo and these other places, as well as I know my own family almost, and I am telling you these people come over here to catch fish and there is nothing going to stand in their way. I am going to tell you something else, if the Canadian government finds a Portugese or a Spanish vessel, make no mistake about it; their own governments will finance them.
Senator Cowan: Now that leads to the question of custodial management. We have heard a lot of testimony pro and con on that and that it really is the only way to go, and other people say it is a game that is not worth playing because we cannot win. What are your views on custodial management?
Mr. Etchegary: It does not make sense to say that you can accomplish a custodial management overnight. I think it would be good to have a group of competent people put together on the evolution of the fisheries off the East Coast of Canada, and particularly off Newfoundland and Labrador for the last 50 years. A thorough document would tell the story of foreign overfishing. Forget all the other nonsense that you hear. It comes down to uncontrolled foreign overfishing.
I suggest to you that such document put together scientists, economists, and all other experts be presented to the Prime Minister of this country by the Premier of Newfoundland with a request that they undertake to go to the United Nations, to FAO in Rome, and the World Court. Before doing that, every Canadian must understand the situation here in Newfoundland and Labrador. I have been to the UN. I have sat with some of the people who you had before you a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Chairman. I have sat in the room with them when they were negotiating and trying to get things done. It is like pulling teeth. They will never ever succeed in getting something through the United Nations. I come back again because it is a real mistake to think that we are going to lead the world into dealing with overfishing in Asia, and South America, and other places in the world. Look at Iceland, look at Norway, look at Alaska, look at Faroe Islands, look at Greenland, all flourishing fisheries. Iceland just added 3,000 Polish people to their population and integrated them into the fishing industry. Here we are sending thousands of people to Fort McMurray. Somebody has to ask the question. Why?
The Chairman: Thank you very much. That has been very helpful to us, very moving. We have learned a great deal. As I said before, Gus, I do not think anybody has the kind of depth of experience that you have had.
The committee adjourned.