Fisheries Committee on Dec. 10th, 2013

[Greg Kerr, Conservative, West Nova, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm very pleased to participate.

I want to talk about the whole regime dealing with oil spills and where you're going, but before that, I have to comment on a comment that Mr. Chisholm made.

I am glad that Mr. MacAulay has noticed that this government believes they should have sufficient funding for fuel and should no longer have to have crew bring their own jerry cans and keep the boats floating—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Greg Kerr, Conservative, West Nova, NS]

As well, I know that Mr. Chisholm is genuine in his support. I know that from his Nova Scotia involvement.

But you hear this repeated suggestion that there's not budget enough to deal with the support and programming for the whole replacement regime you have in place for the coast guard. I would like to see you expand on that just a little, on what you are going to accomplish when you're all through with the investments that are being made, because they are substantial.

I know that you refer to one as a lifeboat. Down in our neck of the woods in Nova Scotia, that lifeboat looks like a pretty able ship when the storms are out. Maybe you could fill us in a bit more on what the commitment is and what the timetable appears to be. I know there are challenges, and I think you probably started to talk about that, but if you wouldn't mind just expanding a bit....

[Marc Grégoire]

Do you mean just for ships themselves?

[Greg Kerr, Conservative, West Nova, NS]

Well, the ships were the first. You can talk about the whole thing, whatever way you want to put it.

[Marc Grégoire]

Okay. I can't resist adding a few remarks on the fuel, though, before I go further. It is not like we were running short of fuel before; it's just that the price of fuel is volatile. Our budget is based on a fuel value of about 75¢ a litre, and now we pay a dollar a litre, so—

[A voice]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Marc Grégoire]

Yes, it's cheaper than gas for cars for sure, but as you know, we can't control the fluctuation in the cost of fuel.

On the investments in fleet, when I joined the coast guard back in June 2010, the coast guard had not seen a new ship for a very long time. Some new ships, some lifeboats, for instance, five lifeboats bought through economic action plan 2008, started to be delivered in the fall of 2010.

The last new ship that the coast guard had seen before that was the Henry Larsen, an icebreaker located in St. John's, Newfoundland. It was the newest ship, and it was from 1987 or 1988, I think, by memory. That's a long time without a new ship.

Since then, we have taken delivery of five new lifeboats and a number of small science vessels.

We have taken delivery now of six midshore patrol vessels. We're expecting delivery of three more midshore patrol vessels. These are very able vessels. We have three based in the Great Lakes and one in the St. Lawrence River. Two were delivered in your area. These are ships that measure about 160 feet and can reach 26 knots, so they're a very capable ship for the coast guard. They are called the “hero class” ships.

We also took a delivery a few weeks ago of a brand new hovercraft, a large hovercraft, the Moytel, which is based at the Sea Island base.

Vancouver Shipyards were awarded the contract to build all of the future large ships. The first new ships to be built will be the science vessels—therefore answering the question you never got to ask—the science trawlers, three of those, and one offshore science vessel to replace the 50-year-old Hudson, which is based in Dartmouth.

This is all good news. Also, there's an announcement to replace 10 big ships. That will come after the polar icebreakers.

That's it in a nutshell. Again, it's investment in 21 new ships: specialty ships and 10 lifeboats, and they are speciality ships that will be either hydrographic ships or science vessels.

That's a large investment that will have benefits throughout the country, but will also bring new technology and new ships to the coast guard. It will help us recruit folks, because in this domain it's difficult to recruit people to come and work at the coast guard. Everywhere, the shipowners and the pilotage authorities have difficulties in recruiting kids to come to the marine centres. Having new ships will also help the coast guard in recruiting the best out there to come to government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Kerr, you've used up your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Go ahead, Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

When DFO officials appeared the other week, the deputy minister admitted the department will not implement recommendation 4, and I'm talking about Cohen, which was to appoint a wild salmon policy associate regional director general. I think this is very disappointing, given that a number of other recommendations rely on this position. I'm hopeful the department is correct in its belief that under its current structure it can still accomplish what's set out in the report.

I'd like to look at some other key recommendations contained in the report, for which DFO has missed deadlines. By my calculations, there are at least 13 missed deadlines to date that Cohen has outlined. This is very concerning and is causing many to believe the government has turned its back on this report and its commitment to protect Fraser River sockeye salmon.

While the government claims it's addressing the report through its day-to-day operations, Cohen's report clearly calls for more significant changes. The status quo is what actually led us to needing the commission in the first place.

Justice Cohen also commented that it was regrettable that changes to the Fisheries Act couldn't wait until the government had the opportunity to consider his report. He also noted concerns over Canada's officially withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol through Bill C-38. He writes, and I quote, “climate change and warming waters present perhaps the most daunting long-term threat to the Fraser River sockeye fishery, and leadership in addressing root causes at the national level is critical". I couldn't agree more with him on that.

Just diving into some of the specific recommendations, looking at recommendation 5, with a deadline of March 31 of this year, I'm wondering if there are some quick responses on these. Will DFO publish a detailed plan for implementation of the wild salmon policy?

[David Bevan]

I can't speak to the Kyoto protocol because that's a much broader context, beyond DFO's competency.

I can say that we have changed the way we have been looking at how we manage fisheries. In particular, we're taking a much more risk-averse approach. We're trying to reduce the stress we put on stocks through fishing mortality. We've changed our way of managing groups of fishermen by having them coordinate and cooperate in projects that involve having them share access. Instead of having multiple boats, you can reduce it by a factor of five in seines and some other fisheries.

We've changed a lot of how we've approached the fisheries. We've continued our investments in science, etc. We didn't want to go ahead with the structural change that is contained in recommendation 5. It's expensive in terms of it's an investment in senior staff and we think we can get the result without having that expenditure. We're looking at our structures, obviously, in terms of budget requirements. We're trying to keep our focus on the front lines, on our ability to deliver what's needed, and not to add more weight to our overheads at a time when we need the money where it needs to be spent, which is out on the front lines.

We don't have a list of all of the things specifically. What we are doing is changing our general approach. We are having built in, for example, into our fish plans, a factor where now if the river is warm, if the migratory conditions are poor, that reduces our harvesting accordingly. We take all those kinds of things into consideration relevant to the warmth. Yes, there are some serious things happening to the north Pacific. We're seeing changes all the time. We have to factor that into our thinking and into our management of the fisheries. We have to keep that at the forefront of our thinking when we're making decisions on the harvesting, and when we're working with the Pacific Salmon Commission on that.

Did you want to add anything?

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Bevan, just to clarify, did you say that it's beyond the mandate of DFO to address climate change issues?

[David Bevan]

It's beyond the mandate to talk about decisions regarding the Kyoto protocol, but not beyond our issue.

We are responding to it by factoring temperature into our harvest levels, by factoring in management decisions, etc. We're looking at that very much when we do our decisions on our responsibilities to manage the fisheries.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

In terms of recommendation 6—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Ms. Davidson.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thanks for being back with us once again. We should soon be getting most of our questions answered, I hope. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions on the oil spills, since my colleague didn't get enough time to do that.

It's my understanding that the coast guard is responsible for ships or oil spills. In one area it says in spills of unknown origin. I wonder if you could comment on that.

I know there was supplementary funding. Could you talk about how that's going to help in your response regime?

I'm also wondering what your success is in identifying vessels when there is a spill, if that's quite difficult to do sometimes.

Perhaps you could start with those ones.

[Marc Grégoire]

Okay, it's a good group of questions.

The first question is about the unknown sources. I'll start with the last one because if you cannot identify the vessel, then it's an unknown source.

The first one would be how do we identify the vessel? If it's a good behaviour vessel, the captain will inform the coast guard that a spill has been caused by his or her ship. That's the first thing. I would say that in most cases the vessels themselves report the spill. The trigger is the polluter must pay for its own spill. A vessel that is polluting must call the response organization. Depending on where the vessel is in Canada, it must call one of the four response organizations to come and clean up the spill. Then the coast guard goes to the site as well to monitor the response and to ensure that the response is being done as per the standards. That's the vast majority of cases.

How do we identify vessels if the vessel itself does not call? It's a matter of either somebody else reports that so and so did a spill and then left the premises, so to speak, or we have the Transport Canada surveillance program with the aircraft. They use three aircraft with very sophisticated equipment whereby they can detect a drop of oil from 20,000 feet and it's solid evidence in court. There's a Dash 8 based in Moncton, a Dash 8 based on the west coast, and a Dash 7 based in Iqaluit. They fly around the waters, evidence is taken, and then fines are given to the ship.

The others are the unknown sources. We respond to about 1,200 of those. Somebody may call the coast guard saying they have seen a little drop of oil; it could be the size of that glass here, but the fisherman will see that and call the coast guard. The coast guard responds to between 1,200 and 1,400 of those a year, from a small one like this to 10 to 20 gallons. It could be in a port, in a recreational port, whatever; we respond to those.

The money you've seen in the supplementary estimates (B) is twofold. First of all there's the money we get from the oil spill response regime. If there is an oil spill somewhere and we have responded, we go to the ship-source oil pollution administrator and we collect the money that we have spent. We provide evidence of the money we have spent to respond to the oil spill. The administrator determines what money should come back to us because we helped prevent a larger spill, and we get the reimbursement. The mechanism to do that is through the supplementary estimates.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

If there is an incident at a refuelling dock, for example, is that your responsibility?

[Marc Grégoire]

If it's in the water, yes. If gas or diesel or oil goes into the water, we have to be called.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. MacAulay.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'll try to behave better.

My question would be for Mr. Bevan.

How many people involved in science have you lost at DFO? You indicated that the delivery to clients has not been affected, and it would make me wonder how valuable these people were, or were they just not needed?

[David Bevan]

I think I qualified the latter by saying that in the last round of cuts—that's the cuts as a result of budget 2013—there were no front-line staff cut who were involved in delivery of services to Canadians directly. It was based on a combination of existing organizations, to remove duplication, to look at increasing spans of control, to deal with the management overhead, etc. While staff did get cut, obviously, most of them were located away from the front lines. The heaviest cuts came to our executive cadre as we streamlined our management. That was in 2013.

We did lose scientists in the previous budgets. We looked at where we could focus our attention. We wanted information in support of decision-making. In terms of ELA or that kind of thing, that doesn't support regulatory decision-making, and that's one place we focused. We also looked at obtaining service differently for contaminants.

Scientists were impacted in the initial rounds, but not recently, as we focused on our core. That meant we wanted to avoid cuts to anyone who was helping fisheries science and stock assessment and ecosystem evaluation, etc.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Did you lose any of the people who were involved in that over the last three years?