Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Brian Wallace. I'm the senior commission counsel to the Cohen commission, the commission of inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River, and with me is one of our junior counsels, Lara Tessaro.
Thank you very much for inviting us here to appear today. I'd like to take this opportunity just to tell you where we are in this process.
I'm going to learn about Mr. Ladouceur's beeper, and in fact I think I may well want to get one for myself for the conduct of our hearings because of the great amount of interest and the very short time in which Justice Cohen has been asked to conduct this inquiry.
I'm sure I'm not telling anybody anything they don't already know, but just for context, the mandate of the commission is twofold; it is looking into the decline of sockeye in the Fraser, first of all, from the perspective of DFO's policies and management, and secondly, from a much broader view of the assessment of the causes of that decline, an assessment of the current state of that fishery, and a prognosis and recommendations for its future.
This is a very broad task, and what I hope to do in the next few minutes is to just explain how we hope to go about it, but at the end of the day Justice Cohen is intent that this inquiry should be conducted thoroughly and fairly, and be completed in a timely way. The time limits have been set by the order in council that appointed him, as an independent justice, to inquire into this issue, but quite apart from that we are all aware of the real-world time limits that are at play here.
We provided a short briefing paper late last week, which perhaps you may have had an opportunity to read; if not, you can if you wish. In it we start off by setting out some of the administration issues to explain how we have gone from November 6, when Justice Cohen was appointed, to today, and what we have achieved in that period of time to where we are in the process.
I'd just like to comment on a couple of the broader issues as to how we intend to engage the public in this process and how we intend to make the inquiry thorough and fair.
The first step in the public part of the process was to invite applicants who wished to be participants in the process to apply for standing. We had what we believe is a record number of people showing an interest in this inquiry, and there were 49 applications for standing. Those 49 applications already included a number of groups that had come together for the purpose of their application. At a rough assessment, there appear to be more than 60 organizations and groups, and some individuals, who have sought standing.
Over the past couple of weeks we have been engaged with these applicants to try to determine if some of them can be persuaded to cooperate even more, so that we have a smaller number of people and make this hearing process work effectively.
The standing applications process came to a conclusion, except for the decision, with a hearing last Friday in the large federal courtroom in Vancouver. We had about 30 or 35 participants there, who engaged in further discussions and made some submissions with respect to how they might work together. The outstanding issue is for Justice Cohen to make a decision on to whom he is going to grant standing.
The next piece of that puzzle is funding. Justice Cohen doesn't have a right to award funding to anybody, but he can make recommendations. Once the decision is made on standing, he will consider the issue of funding for those participants.
Also, with respect to public participation, we have our website up and running, and as of today we have opened it to receive public input on the issues before us. From the website, any member of the public can make a submission. They will be reviewed for appropriateness and relevance by commission staff, and if found to be appropriate and relevant, they will be posted on the website. Others can then comment on those submissions. We hope to get an open public dialogue on some of the issues before the commission.
Down the road we expect to have public meetings that are focused on some of the issues taken to various parts of the Fraser River watershed, and other places where the Fraser River sockeye are important, such as Vancouver Island.
With respect to the more formal part of the hearing for which participants will be engaged, we expect the first step of that to take place in June. I think we will have a short set of hearings without the hearing of evidence to hear submissions that will inform the commissioner on his interim report, which is due on August 1. The interim report is a preliminary assessment of the recommendations that DFO has received over the years from various inquiries and investigations, and on DFO's responses to those reports. As I said, there will be short hearings in June, when participants will be asked to make submissions on the interim report issues.
The process to date has also involved obtaining access to DFO documents. So far we have received some 80,000 pages of documents, and we anticipate that number will grow appreciably, just from DFO. We expect there will be documents provided by other participants as well, so we have a serious evidence gathering process under way to analyze the documents.
We also have begun to interview witnesses. You can appreciate that there are a lot of people who have strong views on this issue and who wish to meet with the commission. We're meeting with some of those people. We also will be interviewing people within DFO.
There's an interview process that will go into the beginning of our evidentiary hearings. The evidentiary hearings we expect will take place later this year. I'm not sure how long they will take. It depends on where the documents and the witnesses lead us.
So we have a public input process and a formal hearing process.
The other aspect of the mandate directs us to a scientific investigation, in a way. The commission doesn't anticipate that it will do any primary scientific research--it just doesn't have the resources or the time to do that, and I think it would be the wrong sort of body to do so--but we do have a scientific program in place. We have a fisheries research consultant who will chair a science advisory panel; that panel will contract some scientific reviews that will be subject to public exposure through the website and perhaps through some round-table public meetings where differing views will be aired, all to the result of getting evidence before the commissioner so that he can make his independent findings in a fair and thorough way.
Thank you.
