Fisheries Committee on Feb. 25th, 2016

[Kevin Stringer]

There are always challenges. One of the challenges with Atlantic salmon, as with Pacific salmon, is that there are hundreds of rivers, streams, and areas where these fish go. It's a question of having sufficient compliance officers, conservation and protection officers, fisheries officers. It is a constant challenge.

People were talking about partnerships before. We have good partnerships. There are watershed groups such as the Atlantic Salmon Federation and local associations. They are partners, and they actually help us on the science, the compliance, and the education. The advisory committee did similar work in bringing those groups together. Doing better in those areas really helps. But of course, science funding would absolutely help improve the situation.

[Pat Finnigan, Liberal, Miramichi—Grand Lake, NB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Now to Mr. Arnold.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank you for being here today to take questions.

In the mandate letter to the minister, it says that your deputy minister will brief you on issues that require decisions to be made quickly. Have there been any situations like that since the fall? Have there been decisions that needed to be made quickly?

[Tom Rosser]

I guess it's just the nature of our business, with DFO and the Coast Guard, that there are decisions. Some of them are on an annual cycle, I believe. I think we manage 155 separate commercial fisheries, and each has openings and closings and other decisions to be made.

On the Coast Guard side of the operation, with environmental response and marine search and rescue, things happen very quickly. I think that is what was intended by the language there.

[Kevin Stringer]

The minister was appointed in November, and we have a fishery that started at the end of November. It was going to start, so we had to get in quickly. Before we explained how this fishery works, there were a number of operational matters. That's the nature of DFO.

The groundfish fishery off Nova Scotia opened on January 1, and these were the sorts of things that we needed to make sure we could get up and running quickly.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

So those were questions at the ministerial level, but nothing of an urgent matter. It was not typical of a normal year.

[Kevin Stringer]

I think it really was, because we're an operational department. These were things we really needed to be able to do. We had to make some urgent decisions, whether they were controversial or not, because the fisheries were opening.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

The other one I have, being from British Columbia, is that we have migrational fish. My experience is that there is a lot of jurisdictional confusion over fish stocks. Steelhead is the prime example. There's also water usage and inland habitat.

Can you explain how you work around those issues, or are there other issues that we should perhaps be looking at?

[Kevin Stringer]

It is a really interesting question. It's not specific and unique to B.C., but it is different in B.C. in this instance.

The Constitution says that the minister is responsible for coastal and inland fisheries. Inland fisheries, for the most part, have devolved to the provinces. Devolved is not the right word, but there have been arrangements with the provinces that they manage inland fisheries. What about salmon? Salmon begins inland and spends a lot of its time swimming down that river and then spends time in the marine area and then comes back. How do we divide that up? The way we've done that is that DFO is responsible. DFO manages salmon, but the province has some responsibilities around habitat and those types of things. For some reason, which I hope you won't ask me, they have responsibility for steelhead, which is very salmon-like, but we have responsibility for the five species of salmon: coho, chinook, sockeye, chum, and pink. We work closely with the province on that. We try to make sure that when they're establishing an opening in an area for steelhead, it's not in the way of our opening. We do work closely with them.

With respect to the habitat side, we have a responsibility for fisheries habitat protection in inland areas, but the provinces have responsibilities around riparian areas, and they have a number of responsibilities as well. We actually have joint committees to try to work those things out. They work reasonably well, but there are always challenges. Again, there is that unique challenge around some species in B.C. that's a little bit different because anadromous fish spend their time in inland areas, in fresh water and in salt water.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Invasive species are a big concern in our area because of the value of the anadromous fish, the salmon species that spends a lot of the time in our bigger lakes in the interior.

I'm wondering if you have plans on that one moving forward. So far we've seen successful barring of the Asian carp into the Great Lakes—at least they've been able to apparently keep them out. The zebra and quagga mussels are definitely a bigger challenge, it seems.

Do you have any direction on that?

[Kevin Stringer]

They may be the emerging issues in the management of fisheries protection. You know, 25 years ago we didn't hear about this that much. Perhaps it's because of increased vessel traffic, changing waters, changing temperatures, etc. Maybe we owe it to Asian carp's jumping into people's boats having made it more of a public issue. It certainly is an emerging issue. We do have an important Asian carp program. We have a really important sea lamprey program that's been operating since 1955 that most people don't know about.

Perhaps more significantly on aquatic invasive species, we did pass a regulation last year on aquatic invasive species that basically gives our minister—but also provincial ministers because it's another shared jurisdiction area—some tools to deal with eradication when they need to. Also, it prohibits the import, transport, and sale of aquatic invasive species, whereas before it wasn't prohibited. It's becoming a more significant issue and one that we understand we need to be focusing on more and more.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Stringer.

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

Mr. Hardie, you have five minutes, please.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I appreciate your being here. This is a big country, and you have a very big mandate. It must be terrifying sometimes, especially when you have to navigate the rocks and shoals of politically charged questions. I'm going to try to avoid that for you.

Having said that, there is an issue of public confidence that rubs off on DFO where it seems that commercial interests have made science a subservient issue and where the precautionary principle of looking after the wild stocks has maybe taken a back seat because you've been tied to things like aquaculture. Like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, they've been designated as clients.

I don't expect you to comment on that because that's not your thing to fix. Having said that, though, I'll go to the Cohen commission. It's very clear that there are some outstanding issues there. I'll give you a simple one first. Justice Cohen called for the creation of an associate regional director general to implement the wild salmon policy. Is that position now in place?

[Tom Rosser]

The short answer is no, it is not.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay.

Is it in the books, online?

[Tom Rosser]

I can't really comment other than to say that I mentioned in response to earlier testimony that the minister is committed and indeed it is one of the mandated priorities to move forward on Cohen. Part of that is to assess all outstanding Cohen recommendations in consultation with interested parties and find a way forward.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The first part of the question obviously falls to somebody else, but that last one would appear to be at least your capability to do.

I want to talk about infectious salmon anemia. Clearly, there are strong suspicions but an absence of science to show whether or not that's having an impact on the fish runs, especially the sockeye fish runs on the Fraser River.

Has there been an uptick in resources to study ISA, specifically access to farmed salmon that aren't already dead in the fish market, for purposes of testing and research?

[Arran McPherson]

That's a broad question, and thank you for it.

I'll start by saying I don't know the details of how much money we spent on ISA versus other elements of our aquaculture programs. But I will say that we are just poised to launch an initiative looking at a series of different diseases and viruses on the west coast, ISA being one them, in partnership with Genome Canada and a number of other federal partners on the west coast.

I believe they're at the stage of collecting their salmon at this point. The forward-looking plan would be to undertake genetic testing and develop markers that would allow us to evaluate very rapidly and at a broad level what types of pathogens might be out there in the environment.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Good to hear.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

We have two minutes left in your questions. Did you wish to split your time?

Mr. Morrissey.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to pick up on your comment earlier about your harbour authorities. While they were very controversial when they were introduced and there was a lot of opposition, I do agree they have been an excellent management tool for small craft harbours, especially on the east coast.

You commented on a national online licensing system. One of the issues that I constantly hear from fishers is the inability to deal with personnel, one on one, when they have an issue that's confronting them on short notice.

Could you respond to that? That seems extremely frustrating when they're just referred to online. They can go to the local DFO office, and they're told, “We cannot deal with it; you have to go online.” Am I accurate on this?

[Kevin Stringer]

Yes, often that is the case.

There are a couple of things. One, we did move to an online licensing system, I think two or three years ago, so fishers can get their licence online.

I would say in the first six months we had a lot of “This doesn't work. We want to go to the office and get our licence, thanks very much.” I would not say that it is now a beautifully functioning system where nobody has any issues. But we have always had a 1-800 number where you can receive online help. We've always had people available to engage directly when we need to.

What we don't have is a licence officer sitting in the local DFO office who is actually able to write out the licence. That we generally don't do. We have some exceptions where we will do that.

It has been a transition. In terms of cost, it has worked well. I'll say one other thing, and that is, we talked about the harbour authorities being really good partners. Fisheries organizations have been enormously helpful. To be candid, they've stepped in and helped fishers to make it work in terms of the online licensing system. They've been good partners for us as well.

We're aware of challenges. We've tried to deal with some of the challenges. We try to make sure there is a live human available when we can. The excitement happens when you have an opening of a fishery, with 1,000 licence holders who all decide at the last day that they should really go and get their licence. Then the system crashes for a little while, and some of us get pretty excited. We try to keep those to a minimum.

We appreciate that you hear some of this. It's useful for us to hear it as well.

Thank you.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

It was much more fun hearing about it when I was a candidate.

Do I have a moment left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Morrissey. No, not in these here parts you don't.

Mr. Donnelly, you have three minutes.